The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her

It proved a powerful, if somewhat unusual, education. In particular, it fostered my abilities to be objective and to empathize, which in turn allowed me a greater general acceptance of differences; and, of course, it made me a keen observer.

I was in the final year of a doctorate I hadn’t meant to find myself doing. I had weathered the mainstreaming law that had so disconcerted me the year I’d had Sheila. Although still not happy with all aspects of its implementation, I’d returned to the classroom a couple of years later and taken up teaching again as a “centered” resource teacher, which meant I stayed in the same room but the children came and went. It wasn’t quite as fulfilling as having my own class, but at least I saw the same boys and girls on a regular basis.

Then the administration in Washington changed and with it, the general attitude of the country. Issues I’d fought heart and soul to see achieved a decade earlier were swept away with a single signature. Lower taxes and cuts in public spending became the bywords of the day. Because treating handicapped children in the public schools is labor intensive, and thus expensive, ours were among the first programs to be targeted. Further emphasis was put on placing special education children in the regular classroom as the cheaper alternative. We were being forced to respond to children in ways that were not necessarily the most beneficial to the child—or the teacher, either, for that matter, as many regular education teachers had little grounding in dealing with handicapped children. These philosophies, however, were the only ones that allowed us to process children through the system at the cost demanded of us by the government. The market economy was now being applied to education.

Angry at this change and all too aware that if I continued in the classroom, I too would soon find myself unemployed, I’d decided to work on a doctorate in special education. This was a stupid decision. The degree would overqualify me for the only part of the special education hierarchy I genuinely loved: teaching. Worse, it threw me into the hotbed of those creating the theories that I was trying to escape. Consequently, my heart was never in it.

I coped by finding other outlets. In this case, it was the continuation of my long-standing research into psychological language problems. This work was of little interest to my colleagues in special education; however, I soon found a niche across campus in the university hospital complex. There, in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, among others, I discovered willing partners among the psychiatrists and other professionals. Despite my hybrid credentials, my ideas were accepted and encouraged and my research flourished.

As always, I continued to fill my spare time with writing. Indeed, I was writing more then than at any previous time; in part, I suspect, because I wasn’t fully engaged in my work.

The desire to write about my experiences with Sheila had been with me for some time. I had saved a lot of material from that class, not with the intention of using it to back up writing at a later date, but just because I was a bit of a hoarder and a sentimental one at that. Although I hadn’t kept a daily diary while working in the class, I had kept copious anecdotal records; moreover, I had had liberal use of a video camera, and as a consequence, had quite a lot of Sheila on tape. I went through these things periodically, and all the while I could hear Sheila in my head: the inflections in her voice, the strange lilting grammatical constructions. I had to write it down. I had to liberate those five months from the onward rush of time.

Then, driving home on the freeway from work one dark January evening, the beginning came to me: I should have known. I went home and started writing. Eight days and 225 pages later, I was finished.

It was only in the aftermath that I realized what had happened. At 225 pages, this wasn’t a little something done for my own amusement, it was a book. I knew then that I had to find Sheila and let her read it before the matter went any further.

Chapter 7

The job advertisement that caught my eye was for a small private psychiatric clinic in a major city about four hours’ drive west of Marysville. In all my years back east, I had missed the Midwest. Admittedly, Sheila also crossed my mind. Broadview, where she had last been living, was a satellite community of the city. Six months had elapsed since I had written the book and I was no closer to finding Sheila. The idea of living near her, of perhaps reestablishing contact and renewing our relationship was appealing.

I was accepted at the Sandry Clinic as a research psychologist to coordinate and oversee the various research projects among the staff, as well as to continue my own research work with elective mutism. There were seven staff. Five, including the director, Dr. Rosenthal, were established child psychiatrists. They had founded the clinic together several years before and overseen the conversion of the elegant old building into a series of quality offices and therapy rooms.

I liked the Sandry Clinic very much. My colleagues were creative people, all lively and articulate, who worked well together as a team. The pinnacle among us in more ways than one was our director. Dr. Rosenthal was a giant of a man physically, standing over six and a half feet tall, with a giant-sized intellect to match. He had about him that charisma powerful men seem to have, which make them handsome whatever their actual physical characteristics. I was in awe of him much of my first year there. Although born and bred in America, he had a European formality about him. For instance, he never called any of us by our first names. “Doctor” was his usual method of catching someone’s attention, but as I didn’t merit that, I remained steadfastly Miss Hayden. This gave him a certain aura of unapproachability, which, combined with his formidable intellectual reputation, kept me shy around him. Nonetheless, I came to know him as a gentle man, firm but kind with his staff in much the same way he was with the children he worked with, and always, always fair.

Life at the clinic was luxurious compared to what I had become accustomed to while teaching in the state school system. We had wonderful facilities, including a large, sunny therapy room full of things I would have killed for when in special education, such as a five-foot-tall doll’s house, complete with extended doll family, a pony-sized wooden rocking horse, an indoor sandbox and a water tray.

Similar luxury applied to my workload. Children were parceled out to me for therapy mostly by virtue of their language or lack of it, but I was also allowed a generous amount of time to work on the research projects or to consult with colleagues. Not completely comfortable with the fifty-minute “psychiatric hour,” I was given the freedom of seeing my own clients two or three times a week, if I preferred that to the more traditional one session or of seeing them in their own settings, rather than at the clinic.

The only fly in the ointment from my point of view was that the majority of my colleagues were committed Freudians, which boxed in their views as tightly as behaviorism had with my education colleagues. And there I was, the atheist admitted to the monastery. To me, there is no single framework upon which we can hang all interpretations of human behavior. We create theories as a way of ordering the chaos sufficiently to have a chance of effecting change, but it is we, the practitioners, who have created this order, because it is we who need it. Any given theory, to my way of thinking, simply provides one route to interpretation and, like climbing the proverbial mountain, there are many other paths one could take.

I could cope with this disparity most of the time, as the general ethos of the clinic did not demand I practice as my colleagues did, and given that I was not qualified in psychiatry, they didn’t expect me to. Indeed, it was my varied point of view, I suspect, that had attracted Dr. Rosenthal. Nonetheless, I found myself having to do a lot of tongue-biting.

Not being a full-fledged psychiatrist, I didn’t merit one of the offices up front. Instead, I shared an oversized closet in the back of the building with Jeff Tomlinson.

Jeff, already a doctor, was in his last year of training as a child psychologist. He was one of those individuals so intellectually gifted that it is taken for granted. No modesty with him. He was brilliant and he knew he was brilliant, and he knew everyone else knew. “Does Superman fly?” he would say casually whenever I evidenced amazement at some mental feat, but he was so ingenuous when he said it that one never minded. Too much.

Unfortunately, Jeff might as well have been Freud’s grandson. Indeed, he might as well have been Freud himself, for all his ability to quote what the old master said. With a near photographic memory, Jeff could bludgeon me into silence with word-for-word regurgitation of endless cases the old boy had worked on. It became a game with us after a while, to see who could outdebate the other.

Truth was, I loved Jeff. We were the youngest members of staff by quite some years, if not decades, and ours was like a sibling relationship there among the grown-ups. The other psychiatrists all had magnificent offices up front with cornices and fireplaces, carpets and leather couches. In the back of the building Jeff and I shared a windowless closet of an office, which had once housed another psychologist’s research animals and still smelled. Here we had festooned the walls with posters, cartoons and matching Pink Panther nameplates. And here we worked, fought and shared our problems.

What saved Jeff from certain annihilation for his Freudian idiocy was an extraordinary sense of humor. He had a particular gift for funny voices and mimicry, which he displayed with the aplomb of a stand-up comic. As a consequence, the inanimate objects in our office—the filing cabinet, the desks, the radiator—were all inclined to join unexpectedly into conversations, each with its own weird little Robin Williams-type voice. The kids, of course, adored this when they heard it, but it even worked on me. It was difficult to get angry with a guy who had the furniture on his side.

All in all, I was pleased with this career move away from special education. It still felt funny to dress for work in wool skirts and dangly jewelry, to know that I could leave my long hair unbound because no one was likely to try and pull it out of my head; and, indeed, I found I missed my jeans and track shoes too much and was back in them after the first few months. But I fully enjoyed the ample resources and stimulating colleagues and felt that for the moment, at least, this had been the right move.

Chapter 8

Sheila was three months short of her fourteenth birthday when I finally located her. I hadn’t seen her in seven years—half her lifetime past—and other than the poem I’d received through the mail two years earlier, I hadn’t heard from her in five. I found her back with her father, living in an outlying suburb of Broadview. After a telephone conversation with her father, I asked if I could visit.

They were living in a duplex, a brown-colored building with peeling paint, in a run-down area where the yards were littered with car bodies and rusting appliances; however, compared to Sheila’s home in the migrant camp, this was luxurious.

I knocked at the door. A long moment passed with no sound beyond the door and I found to my surprise that my knees were shaky. All the ghosts of long ago came crowding in around me as I waited on the doorstep and I could hear them so clearly. A child’s laughter echoed, shouting, squealing, the sounds of a classroom, and then the dark, blowy silence I remembered experiencing as I had stood on the doorstep of Sheila’s tar-paper shack in the migrant camp. Then, back to the present. Footsteps came toward the door and it opened.

I don’t think I would have recognized Sheila’s father if I hadn’t assumed it would be he opening the door. He had changed dramatically in seven years. The dumpy, overweight boozer I recollected was not there. Instead, the man opening the door was slim and athletic-looking and, most startling to me, young. I had been in my early twenties when I had last seen him and I had always regarded him as being in my parents’ generation. Now, with shock, I realized he was, in fact, not much older than I was.

“Mr. Renstad?” I asked tentatively.

He nodded.

“I’m Torey Hayden.”

He smiled in a genuinely welcoming fashion and held the door open. “Come in. Sheila’s not here at the moment. She’s just run over to the store for some milk, but she’ll be back in a few minutes.” He opened the door to let me into the living room. It was small, with a television, a well-worn brown sofa and two old-fashioned armchairs. Indeed, the whole room had a sort of brownish quality to it, but it was comfortable.

Sudden shyness struck us both. All these years I had pondered this moment and now that it was here, I didn’t know quite what to say. He obviously felt just as uncertain.

After a moment, he snatched a photograph from the top of the television. “Here, you want to see this? These are my boys.”

It was the photo of a baseball team, the boys appearing to be about ten or eleven. They were posed in two rows, the first kneeling, the others behind. Mr. Renstad was on the left of the back row.

“I been coaching a year now,” he said, moving beside me to look at the picture. “See that kid? His name is Juma Washington and you listen out for that name, because he’s going to be great someday. Like Hank Aaron, that kid. And it was me that taught him to hit. Wouldn’t do nothing for us when he first came. Was a wild, jazzy kid. And now he’s gonna make the major leagues. You watch and see. I know he’s gonna make it big.”

“That’s super.”

He looked at me. “I’m clean now, you know. Sheila tell you that? No more booze or stuff. I been clean eighteen months now and now it’s me helping them.”

“I’m pleased,” I said.

“I mean it. I’m not having no trouble at all anymore, and now I got these boys. We won four games already this season. Didn’t win no games at all before I took ’em over. Were wild kids, crazy as monkeys. But we’re making it big now. Got Juma. Got a couple of other good ones too. Here, let me show you.” He took the photograph. “Him, that’s Salim. And him, Luis. You ought to see ’em play. Can you come down some Saturday?”

Just then the door banged and there stood Sheila.

Sheila?

Who stood there was a gangly adolescent with—honest to God—orange hair. Not strawberry blond, not red. Orange, like a road cone. It was longish, and permed into frizzy ringlets, a Cubs baseball cap pulled down over the top of it.

Would I have known this was Sheila if I had encountered her on the street? She’d grown taller than I’d expected. She’d been such a tiny, malnourished thing when I’d had her, that I had always kept her small in my mind, but here she was, a good five feet four or so and only thirteen. Adolescence hadn’t worked its full magic with her yet, however. She was gangly and still had the undeveloped figure of a child.

No question about whether or not she recognized me. On seeing me, she stopped abruptly, as if seeing a most unexpected sight. Her cheeks colored. “Hi,” she said and smiled shyly. That smile did it. Her features grew familiar instantaneously.

“Hi.”

All three of us were uncomfortably self-conscious. After anticipating this reunion for so long, I hadn’t expected to find myself at a loss for words, but that’s what happened. Sheila, equally thunderstruck, clung on to her half gallon of milk and stared at me. Only Mr. Renstad seemed able to find his voice. He went back to talking about his baseball team; however, he never asked me to sit down, so we all continued standing there in the middle of the living room.

Sheila’s father just kept chattering. Several times he reassured me that he had given up drugs and alcohol and put his past behind him. This embarrassed me, making me feel as if he were interpreting my visit as checking up on him. He appeared to think Sheila and I had had much more contact with each other over the years than we’d had and so alluded to events that I knew nothing of. I felt it would be indelicate of me to inquire further at this point and thus said nothing, but from what I could make out, Sheila had been in foster care between the ages of eight and ten and then again for a while when she was eleven. They had been living together since his last parole, about eighteen months earlier.

Sheila said absolutely nothing. Like her father and me, she still stood in the middle of the living room, but she made no effort to join in the conversation. I stole glances at her, particularly at her dyed hair, because it was such an unusual color. Then at her clothes. When in my classroom, she had had one single outfit—a brown-striped boy’s T-shirt and a pair of denim overalls—which she had worn day in, day out until her father had finally accepted the dress Chad had bought for Sheila after the March hearing. Sheila didn’t look as if she was faring much better these days. She wore an enormously oversized white T-shirt with a ragged jeans jacket minus the arms layered over the top. Underneath the T-shirt I assumed there was something besides underwear, as I could see what might be the fringed edge of cut-off jeans, but I wasn’t sure. Contemplating the outfit, I assumed this was fashion and not poverty showing.

Finally, when her father paused, I turned to her. “I passed a Dairy Queen coming over. Would you like to go get a sundae with me?”

Alone in the car with me, Sheila remained silent. It was by no means a hostile silence, but it was uncomfortable enough. I found myself wandering back to the very first day I had met Sheila. She had been silent then too, fiercely silent, breaking it only to announce with tigerish vehemence that I couldn’t make her talk. I kept calling back to mind that charismatic little girl I had known and trying to find her in this nervous adolescent. I was only too aware that I didn’t know this strangely clad, deerlike thing at all.

Pulling into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen, I looked over. “Remember when I used to take everybody over to the Dairy Queen and buy those boxes of Dilly bars? And how Peter always wanted something different? Never mattered what it was, he never wanted what everyone else was having.”

“Who’s Peter?”

“You remember. In our class. He used to always tell those awful jokes. The real groaners. Remember him?”

A pause. “Yeah … I think. He was Mexican, wasn’t he?”

“Well, actually, he was black.”

We chose our sundaes and then went out to sit at a picnic table in front. Sheila hunched over her ice cream in a manner that evoked memories of her early days in the class, when she would clutch her lunch tray up close to her, wary, like an animal, in case someone tried to take it away from her before she finished. She began to stir her sundae. The ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipping cream all went together in a gooey mess.

“So how’s school?” I asked.

“All right, I guess.”

“What courses are you taking?”

“Just the usual stuff.”

“Anything good?” I asked.

“No, not really.”

“Anything hard?”

“Not really,” she said and stirred more energetically. “Boring, most of it.”

Looking for some angle to get a conversation started, I resorted to an old trick I’d used in the classroom to stimulate a child to talk. “So what do you hate most about it?”

“Being youngest,” she said without hesitation. “I hate that.”

An accusation? She knew I had been responsible for moving her forward a grade. Was there a second meaning here? “What do you hate so much about it?”

She shrugged. “Just being youngest, that’s all. Littlest. I was always so much shorter than everyone else, right up until just this last year. And always the baby of the class. Everyone picked on me.”

“Yes, I can see where that might cause problems,” I said, “but it was hard for us to know what was best for you.”

Another shrug. “I’m not complaining or anything. It’s just you asked.”

Then silence. I wondered whether to draw her out on this issue and chance getting into something heavy, which I didn’t feel would be appropriate just at the moment, or whether to soldier on searching for new topics of conversation. I felt amazingly uncomfortable. This wasn’t the Sheila I had expected at all.

More silence. Taking small bites of my sundae, I concentrated on the flavors.

Suddenly, Sheila expelled a noisy breath and shook her head. “This is so weird,” she said. “Like, I always think of you as someone I know well.” She looked over. “But really, we’re no more than strangers.”

That broke the ice, that admission. Truth was, we were strangers and neither of us had anticipated that. Once it was acknowledged, talking became far easier than it had been when we were pretending that the previous seven years hadn’t intervened.

Spontaneously, Sheila began to talk about her school. She didn’t like it. She was just finishing ninth grade and apparently doing well academically, but in listening to her I could tell virtually none of it had touched her. The authorities were getting after her about her hair and her clothes and her general attitude, and the way she related it, I suspected she was dealing with it by playing truant.

Perversely, the only subject that appeared to be engaging her was Latin, a language I didn’t realize was still being taught in schools. The teacher, an elderly man, was unfashionably strict and held unenlightened views about girls’ academic abilities, but this combination had somehow goaded Sheila into working hard enough to “show him.” As a consequence, she talked animatedly about the class and the curriculum, even though she professed to hate it.

In turn, I told her what I had been up to over the interceding years, about my other classes of children since leaving the one we had shared, about my stints at graduate school, and about the change to the clinic in the city. And about writing the book.

“I have it in my car,” I said. “I want you to read it.”

“A book?” she said incredulously. “You wrote a book? I didn’t know you could write.”

I shrugged.

“It’s got me in it? Our class? God. Weird.” Then a slight smile. “That’s, like, mega-weird, you know?”

“You need to be prepared for the fact that it’s going to sound a little different to what really happened. Everybody’s gone on from there, so it wouldn’t really be right to invade people’s privacy. Consequently, I’ve had to change the names and things and put some events out of order, but still, I think you’ll recognize everything.”

“This is so weird. A book? About me?”

“Anyway, I want your thoughts on it,” I said. “It is your story, well, yours and mine, but you’re the big part in it. I wouldn’t want to include anything you didn’t think was right.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t matter much. I hardly remember a thing about it.”

“Oh, you will,” I said and grinned back.

She shrugged, her expression still benevolent. “You got to keep in mind, Torey, that I was nothing but a little kid then. That all happened more than half my life ago. Like, I’m going to love to read this, but if you want to know the truth, you could write anything you want. Honest, I remember nothing.”

Chapter 9

“God, did it really happen like this?” Sheila asked, a curiously amazed tone to her voice. It was the following Saturday. We were in her bedroom and she was curled up, the pages of the manuscript fanned out around her.

Smiling, I nodded.

“Wow, you were pretty brave to take me on, if I was like this.”

“A lot of people thought that at the time. I did a bit myself, sort of.”

“It wasn’t your choice, was it? They just said you got to take … me.” She looked back down at the sheaf of papers. “I think I might remember Anton now. I didn’t when you first mentioned him the other day, when we were at the Dairy Queen, but reading this kind of brings him back to mind.”