Somebody Else’s Kids: They were problem children no one wanted … until one teacher took them to her heart

All this talk of crazy people depressed him, Joe replied. I ought to put it away at night. Why did I always insist on bringing it home? I sat by quietly when he said that to me and I was filled with sadness. It was then I knew that Joe would never be my dinosaur.

I had meant to fix supper. Joe was coming over. We had not made plans because the night before when we had discussed it, Joe had wanted to see the newest Coppola movie and I had wanted to fix something on the barbecue. Like so many other times when we ended up unable to agree on anything, Joe just said he would be over.

When I came home from school in the evening there was a letter in the mailbox from an old friend who was teaching disturbed children in another state. She related how her kids had made ice-cream one day in class. Instead of using the big, cumbersome ice-cream maker with all its messy rock salt and ice and impossible turning, she had used empty frozen-juice cans inside coffee cans. The children each had their own individual ice-cream makers. The ice-cream set up in less than ten minutes.

My mind ignited as I read the letter, ideas were coming so fast I could not catch them in order. This was just the thing for Boo and Lori and me to do. The class had been disjointed while I tried vainly to juggle them into some sort of academic program. This would make us as class. Lori would be thrilled about doing something of this nature, and what a good experience for Boo. I could make it into a reading experience, a math lesson.

When Joe found me I had my head in the deep-freeze trying to locate a second can of frozen orange juice. I already had the first can thawing on the counter.

“What are you doing?” he asked as he came into the kitchen.

“Hey, listen, would you do me a great big favor, please? Would you run over to the store and buy me another can of orange juice?” I said from the freezer.

“You have one here.”

I straightened up and shut the lid. “I need three and I only have two. Be an angel, would you please? There’s money on top of the dresser. And I’ll get dinner started.”

Joe looked at me and his brow furrowed in a way I could not interpret. He stroked the lapel of his sports coat. “I thought we might go out. I made reservations for us at Adam’s Rib for supper.”

I let out a long, slow breath while I considered things. Glancing sideways, I saw Candy’s letter lying open on the kitchen table. Back to Joe. He looked so handsome in his tweed coat. I noticed he was carrying an eight-track tape in one hand, undoubtedly a new one he had bought for his car stereo and brought in to show me.

Candy’s letter called to me like a Siren. I knew there was no way I could explain that to Joe. The scant six feet between us was measurable in light-years. Joe was not going to understand.

“Not tonight, okay?” My voice was more tentative-sounding than I had meant it to be. “I’ll fix something for us. Okay?”

His brow furrowed further giving him an inscrutable look.

I glanced at the letter again. It sang to me so loudly. “I wanted to make ice-cream. My girlfriend just sent me a new way …”

“We can buy ice-cream, Torey.”

A pause. A pause that grew to be a silence. I was watching him.

“This is different, Joe. It’s for … Well, it’s to do tomorrow with … You see, my girlfriend Candy in New York, she teaches kids like I do.”

Briefly he put a hand up to his eyes as if he were very, very tired. Pressing his fingers tightly against his eyes, he gave a slight shake of his head before dropping his hand. “Not this again.”

“Candy was telling me about doing this with her kids.” There were still big pauses between my sentences as I spoke. Mostly because I had to stop to judge his reaction after each one. Yet I kept hoping that if I explained enough he would understand why I just could not go to Adam’s Rib tonight. Some other night perhaps, but not tonight. Please. Please?

I kept watching his eyes. He had green eyes, but not like Boo’s eyes at all; kaleidoscopic eyes were what Joe had, like looking at the pebbles on the bottom of a stream. His eyes always said a great deal. But I kept trying anyway. “I was thinking maybe we could try out the ice-cream tonight. I need to try it out before I can use it with my kids, and I thought … well, I was hoping … well …” Cripes, not saying a word, and he was still cutting me short. I felt like a little girl. “Well, I was thinking that if it worked and … I could try it at school tomorrow, if it worked for us.” Another pause. “My kids would like that.”

“Your kids would like that?” His voice was painfully soft.

“It wouldn’t take much time.”

“And what about me?”

I looked down at my hands.

“Where the hell do I come in, Torey?”

“Come on, Joe, let’s not fight.”

“We’re not fighting. We’re having an adult discussion, if you can understand that. And I just want to know what it is those children have that no one else in the world seems to have for you. Why can’t you put them away? Just once? Why can’t something else matter to you besides a bunch of fucked-up kids?”

“Lots else matters.”

Another pause. Why, I wonder, are all the important things so easily strangled by small silences?

“No, not really. You never give your heart to anything else. The rest of you is here but you left your heart back at the school. And you’re perfectly glad you did.”

I did not know what to say. I did not even fully understand how I felt about it myself much less how I could explain it to Joe. We were still standing there in the dimly lit kitchen. Joe kept shifting the tape back and forth in his hands. I could hear his breathing.

Finally Joe shook his head. He looked down at the linoleum floor and shook his head again. Slowly. Wearily. Bad as I felt about him, there was an almost painful longing to try out Candy’s ice-cream recipe. He was right. My heart was there and it never would be at Adam’s Rib, no matter where my body went. Like so many times before, I ached to please both him and myself.

“Joe?”

His eyes came to me again.

“I’m sorry.”

“Just get your jacket and let’s go.”

I never did try Candy’s recipe that night. After Joe brought me home, I went to an all-night grocery store and bought another can of orange juice. With 144 ounces of juice mixed up in six jars in my refrigerator, I set out at 1:30 in the morning to make ice-cream. Then I discovered I had no ice cubes. It did not matter too much. I was far too tired to care. So I went to bed.

The next day, armed with Candy’s letter, half-a-dozen cans and the makings for vanilla ice-cream, I headed for school.

“What’s this?” Lori asked as I began setting out the materials toward the end of the afternoon.

“We’re going to do something fun,” I replied.

“Something fun,” echoed Boo behind me.

“Like what?” Lori asked. Skepticism tinged her voice. Too many people had tried to pass off work on her under the guise of fun. Lori was not falling for that ruse anymore.

“We’re going to make ice-cream.”

“Ice cream? I never seen ice-cream like this before.” She was standing very, very close, leaning against my arm, breathing on the little hairs and making them itch. She wanted a good look at what I was doing as I shook up the mix. Boo had commenced twirling on the far side of the table.

“Have you ever seen ice-cream made?” I asked Lori.

“Well … no. Not exactly. But I didn’t think it was like this.”

“Boo! Take that off!” He had the big mixing bowl on top of his head like a helmet.

“Hee-hee-hee-hee! Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!”

“Oh no,” Lori wailed and smacked her forehead with one hand. “He’s gonna take his clothes off now. You shouldn’t oughta have said that, Torey. Now he’s going to take everything off.”

“Lor, get that bowl from him. He’s going to break it. Boo, come back here. And for crying out loud, leave that shirt on. Boo? Boo!”

Both of us took off after him and oh, what fun Boo thought that was! Never before had we chased him during one of his deliriums. “Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. HOO-HOO-HOO-HOO-HOO-HOO!” The bowl on his head went sailing to the floor. It did not break but rather went careening off into a corner with Lori after it.

The bowl recovered, I let Boo run. There was no point in chasing him; it appeared only to make him wilder. I called Lori back to the table and we resumed preparations for the ice-cream. Together we washed the bowl. Boo, meantime, stripped down to total nakedness. Gleefully he rubbed his round little belly and hopped up and down. For the life of me, I could not help but think how much like a little monkey he looked – and sounded. We could have been spending a day at the zoo.

I chipped ice into a pan over the sink while Lori put the ice-cream mix into the bowl. Boo danced around us, laughing. Near me on the counter I lined up the three coffee cans and set the orange juice cans inside them. Carefully I layered salt and ice.

“Here, Tor, I’ll bring over the ice-cream stuff,” Lori called.

“No, Lori, please wait. I think that’s too heavy for you. Wait. I’ll bring the cans over to the table.”

“No sir, it ain’t too heavy. I’m strong. See?”

“Lori, wait, would you?”

She would not. Hefting the wide mixing bowl in both arms, she struggled around the table. I could not make it from the sink in time. I saw the entire disaster coming but I could not prevent it. Halfway around the table Lori dropped the bowl. It did not survive this time. The bowl nicked the table corner as it fell and glass and cream went everywhere, pouring down the front of Lori’s clothes, across the tabletop, out in a huge white puddle on the floor.

Lori froze. Indeed, I did also. Even Boo was momentarily motionless.

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered. Impending tears made her voice tiny and high-pitched.

That thawed me. I came over. It was hard not to say I had told her to leave it alone, so I took a deep breath. “Look, I know you didn’t. Those things happen.”

“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know. Lor. It would have been better if it hadn’t happened, but it did so the best thing is to clean it up.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Lori, I know you didn’t. Don’t cry about it. It isn’t that important. Come on.”

Still she did not move or even look at me. Tears rolled over her cheeks but she did not brush them away. Her eyes were fixed on the broken bowl. Boo walked around to stand near me. The crash had knocked the silliness out of him. Kneeling, I began to collect the glass shards.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” Lor said again.

I stared at her. “Lor?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Are you all right. Lor? Lor, look at me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

Concern pushed my heartbeat up. I rose, broken glass still in my hand, and looked at her carefully. “I know you didn’t mean to, Lori. I heard you. And I’m not angry. It’s okay. Now come on, snap out of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. Her voice was still the tight, high voice of a frightened child. She did not look at me yet. In fact she had not moved at all since the bowl broke.

“Lor? Lori? What’s the matter?” She was scaring me. It was becoming apparent that something more had happened to her than simply dropping the bowl. A seizure? That was my instant thought, although many of my children had had seizures before and none had ever looked like this. With one hand I touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

She refused to move from the oozing puddle at her feet. Over and over again she whispered how sorry she was, how she had not meant to do it. This unusual behavior frightened me so much that I was totally without confidence as to how to handle it. Finally I went to the sink for a bucket and sponges and began to clean up the mess myself. Lori never moved an inch. She remained paralyzed by some force of which I had no perception.

Boo seemed as scared as I was. Warily he moved around the periphery of the action. Gone was the earlier delirium but also gone was his usual rigid inwardness. He watched us with concern.

Desperate to relieve the mounting tension, I began to sing the only song Boo knew. Willingly he joined me.

“Was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name-o,” I sang in shaky a cappella.

“B-I-N-G-O!” Boo shouted, his eyes riveted on Lori. “B-I-N-G-O!”

Twelve choruses of “Bingo.” The tension was still palpable.

With a wet rag I knelt before Lori and sponged the ice-cream mix off her dress and knee socks. From where I was on the floor in front of her I could hear her raspy, fear-strained breathing. Having never been wiped away, tears had dried along her cheeks. Now she was watching me, yet her eyes were vacant. It was like looking into the eyes of a ghost.

I sat back on my heels. We were very close, she and I. In that position I was lower than she and she had to look down on me. For a long, wordless period we gazed at each other. Gently I brought my hands up to touch her cheeks, to encompass her face. “What’s wrong, Lor? Can’t you talk to me?”

“I didn’t mean to. I knowed you tole me not to.” She spoke as one in a dream.

“What happened? Tell me what happened.”

“I know you tole me not to. I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t on purpose. I’m sorry.”

“Lori?”

“You gonna wup me?”

She was not talking to me. I do not know who else she thought was there. This abrupt aberrancy in her behavior scared me so much that my hands shook as I held her face. I could feel the soft, warm skin of her cheeks beneath my fingers and the tightness of her jaw. We were so close her breathing was hot on my face. Yet she continued to stare through me to whomever else it was she saw.

“Don’t wup me, okay? Please? Please, don’t.”

Boo joined us. He came very near, his hands fluttering, making soft slapping sounds against his bare thighs. Every few moments he would reach out to touch Lori, to touch me, but never quite make contact before jerking his hand back.

“Lor, it’s just me. Just Torey. We’re here in school.”

What the hell was going on? When she still did not respond, I rose and lifted her into my arms. On the far side of the room was a small, not quite adult-size rocking chair. I sat down in it with her in my lap. At first she was stiff and I had to physically move her limbs into a reasonable position. Then unexpectedly she relaxed, melting into the form of my arms. I rocked.

Whatever had happened to her I did not know. Nor, as it turned out, would I ever know. A seizure of some bizarre kind? A psychotic episode? A stress reaction? I had no idea. Lori never gave me a clue. But it was one of the most frightening episodes of my career.

Not knowing, I simply rocked and held her close against me. Back and forth. Back and forth. She was large for the chair and for me, her long legs coming nearly to the floor. Boo watched us. Then he came over. On his heels, he rocked too, swaying back and forth to our rhythm. Yet he watched me intently. No tuning out this time; Boo was fully alert. Next, he did something he had never done since joining me. Boo touched me voluntarily. He put his hand on my cheek, explored my lips and my chin, all the time observing me with the rapt scrutiny a scientist gives his new discovery. Then he climbed into the rocker with us.

There we sat, the three of us, one on top of the other in that small rocker. Lori was pressed against my breast. Boo sat mostly on the arm of the rocker, his bare legs across Lori’s. He reached over and took my free arm and pulled it around himself. Gently he leaned forward, his head resting atop Lori’s, under my chin. With one hand he clutched his penis, with the other he tenderly stroked Lori’s cheek. “B-I-N-G-O,” he began to sing in a soft, clear angel voice, “B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o.”

I was struck by the poignant absurdity of the moment, of what someone would have thought who might have ventured in on us, crammed together as we were in that chair. Bare Boo, lost Lori and me. Unexpectedly, it made me think of Joe. I pitied him for what he would never understand.

Chapter Six

I needed the parents. I always needed the parents. To fill in all of the missing pieces. To let me know what happened the other eighteen hours of the day. To reassure me that someone else was just as perplexed about this little person as I was.

I had no children of my own. Because of that I knew I did not fully understand the life of a parent, regardless of how much I wished I did. Having four children six hours a day works out mathematically to the same as having one for twenty-four. But mathematics and emotions do not spring from the same well.

For this reason I wanted to catch Boo’s mother. I wanted to talk to her, to find out about life at home with Boo. I needed to know for Boo’s own welfare as I made plans for his program. And I simply wanted her to know I cared.

Each day she brought Boo but would not come inside. If I waited outside for her she always had an excuse to hurry off. If I called her at home, she never could talk. By mid-October it was no secret that Mrs. Franklin was avoiding me.

Parent-teacher conferences occurred the last week in October just before Halloween. The children were excused from school for the last two days. Because of all the resource students, I had a huge number of conferences. I did not worry about squeezing Lori’s father into one of the fifteen-minute conference slots; he and I communicated regularly. But with Mrs. Franklin it was a different matter. If I could get her there at all, I did not want to scare her off by giving her only fifteen minutes to tell about seven and a half years. So I slotted her in the last place on the second day, about 3:00 p.m.

She did come.

A small, delicate-boned black woman, she had wide fear-stricken eyes. I wondered, as she took the chair opposite me at the worktable that afternoon, who else had talked to her about her dream child. And what they had said.

“How’s my boy been doing?” she asked, so quietly that I had to ask her to repeat herself. “I want him to learn to talk. Like other boys. Have you been able to teach him to talk right yet?”

“I think Boothe is doing nicely in here, Mrs. Franklin.” I tried to sound reassuring. “We have a lot to do. Boo and I, but I think we’re working hard on it. I’m glad he’s in my class.”

“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”

“I think perhaps it’s a little premature for that just yet”

“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Her head dropped and she fidgeted in her chair. I feared she might leave.

“I –” I started.

“I don’t want them to take him away,” she interrupted, still looking down at her hands. “I don’t want them to put him in no insane asylum. I don’t want them to take my boy away.”

“I can’t imagine anyone will, Mrs. Franklin.”

“Charles, that’s my husband, he says so sometimes. He says if Boothe Birney don’t learn to talk straight like other boys, they’re going to lock him away in an insane asylum when he grows up and we can’t take care of him no more. Charles, he knows those things. He says Boothe Birney’s sick and they don’t let no sick boys stay with their folks.”

“Boo isn’t sick. He’s just different.”

“Charles says they’re gonna take him away. The doctors, they’ll do it. They told Charles. If Boothe don’t learn to talk straight.”

I found Mrs. Franklin difficult to reason with. She was so frightened.

“They ain’t good places, miss, them insane asylums. I seen one. My mother’s brother, they put him in one once in Arkansas. And I seen it.” She paused and the silence stabbed through me. “There was this big boy there,” she said softly. “A great big boy, ’most nearly a man. With yellow curls. Big curls, like my Boothie has. And he was standing naked in his own piss. Crying. A great big boy. ‘Most nearly a man.” She brought a hand up to stop a tear. “And that boy there, he was some mother’s son.”

Her fear was so intense and perhaps so warranted that I could not easily calm her. We talked a long time. She had come at three and now the October dusk was settling. Outside the partly open window behind me, the wind blew, startling up brown, fallen leaves and carrying them high as the roof. Autumn freshness pressed through the opening to dispel the heavy, humid weight of emotion. As twilight came, the brilliance of the fall foliage in the schoolyard muted to a rosy brown. And still we talked. Back and forth, quietly. I pushed us off into tangential conversation because it was still too scary to speak the truth. I learned of her favorite hobby, quilting, of how she had won a ribbon at an Arkansas state fair, of how her grandmother had left her a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Lone Star quilt made in a slave cabin. In turn I told her of my haunted love for far-off Wales, my homesickness for a country not my own. At last the conversation turned back to her son.

Boo had been an unplanned and initially unwanted child. His parents were not married. That Mr. Franklin was white and she black had been a major issue with their families and in the small Southern community where they had lived. She and Charles eloped and finally fled north to our community in an attempt to build a better life together. Charles’s family had ceased all communication with their son. Mrs. Franklin had never seen her mother since the day she had left eight years before; her father had since died. However, her siblings had all resumed a positive relationship with her.

During the early months of Boo’s life, he had seemed normal to the Franklins. He had been an inordinately placid baby but their pediatrician had told them not to worry. Boo was a little slow to learn to sit up and to walk but he still did so within normal limits. He never did crawl. During those first years he even learned to say a few words. Doggie. Bye-bye. Cracker. A few nursery rhymes. Yet never once did he say mama or daddy. Then at about eighteen months of age, the changes first began. He started to cry incessantly. No one could comfort him. He rocked in his crib at night and banged his head against the wall. Lights, reflections, his own fingers began to hold more fascination than the people around him. He ceased talking.

The Franklins never knew how wrong things really were until Boo was over three. Up until then they were still taking him to the same pediatrician, who continued to reassure them it was all “just a stage.” Boo was a slow developer. He would outgrow it. Then at three, prior to the birth of his sister, Boo was enrolled in nursery school. There someone recognized the earmarks of autism.

The years between the first diagnosis and Boo’s arrival in my class had been ones of heartache and financial devastation while the Franklins searched for a miracle cure. Selling their small house and possessions, they left with Boo and a newborn baby for California where they had heard of a special school for children like Boo. After nine long months of no improvement, the school gave up. Back home they came, this time armed with vitamins. Then off to Pennsylvania to a school for the brain-damaged that programmed children so that they might reexperience the womb, birth, growth. Back home again, broke. Three years had passed. Mr. Franklin had worked at twelve different jobs, often three at a time to meet family expenses and keep them together. The marriage, the emotions, the finances all were sapped. Boo still showed no improvement. Indeed, now more than ever he perplexed them. At every new school it had been a new label, a new method, a new diagnosis of why they failed. And the same old blame. For all that effort the Franklins did not know any more now about their dream child than they had known in the beginning. Exhausted and discouraged, they had come home for the last time and enrolled Boo in the public school system. That had been the year before.

Poked and prodded and racked, the marriage which had gotten started on such shaky ground still survived. Neither of the Franklins was well educated; neither knew how to cope with the problems this boy had given them. When things got bad, Mrs. Franklin said wearily, it was hard not to blame someone for this child. Especially when everyone else was willing to blame too. Yet … yet, they loved him. To be sure.