A Safe Place for Joey

With our combined efforts on phonics, word attack skills, and sight vocabulary, Joey’s reading was improving steadily. One of the things that helped most was that the Stones took turns reading to Joey every night. After Joey was washed and brushed and in bed, either Mr. or Mrs. Stone read to him for a half hour. To their joy, not only was he enjoying reading more, he was also sleeping better.

But only one thing was important to Joey. “Do you think she’ll let me be a Red Sox now?”

Not a Red Sox and not till April.

“Da-de-ah-da-dah!” Joey blew an imaginary trumpet in the doorway of my office. “The good news is, I’m a goddamn Oriole!”

“Joe – cool it. No swearing.”

“Well, I am. I got moved up yesterday. I’m in a group!”

A cause for celebration. Joey was no longer alone, isolated, different. Now he, like the others in his class, belonged.

In June Joey graduated from second grade and was promoted to third. On my testing he had moved up to the 54th percentile in silent reading vocabulary and to the 69th percentile in comprehension. His math was on grade level, spelling slightly below.

On the school tests, Joey was on grade level in all areas, and Mrs. Madden wrote on his report card, “Marked improvement in behavior and academic skills.” High praise indeed from Mrs. Madden.

One unexpected piece of news was that Mrs. Madden was retiring. I couldn’t imagine her classroom without her – or the other way around. She had believed in Joey and given him a safe, structured place where he could learn. Mr. Templar assured me that it was her choice. She’d always wanted to travel and was looking forward to retirement. Maybe. But it would take an awful lot of lakes and mountains to make up for Joey.

If it was sad to hear that Mrs. Madden was retiring, it was good to hear that Mrs. Stone had decided to freelance and use her computer skills at home rather than in an office.

“It’s funny,” she told me on the phone. “I actually like being home now; I don’t know whether it’s because Joey’s better or because I don’t feel so guilty anymore. Even though I never even realized that I felt guilty. All I know is that now I want to be around the kids as much as I can. I never would’ve believed I’d ever say that. I’m taking the summer off and then come fall I’m going to start working at home.

“Al feels the same. He hardly ever works weekends anymore. In fact, he’s the one who bought me the home computer.”

I was happy for them and for Joey. But I was also glad that Joey remained himself. I loved the slightly lopsided, ebullient, dramatic part of him as much as or more than the part that had made it into the Orioles.

He came for one last visit before summer vacation and we picked out some books and workbooks that would review the skills he’d learned in second grade. He promised to keep the study sheet I gave him that would show how he spent his twenty minutes of work each day while he was at the lake.

“How does it feel, Joey?” I asked. “Do you feel good about this year?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. I guess so. I mean, I know I’m pretty good at reading now, and I can add and even subtract pretty good. I don’t fall out of my chair or get in as much trouble. But multiplication’s hard and you got to be able to do two digits in third. I’ll never get that.”

He shook his head and stood up. “See, Mary. It’s like this with me. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

I laughed. “You’ll get it in the fall, Joey,” I said.

Joey’s taxi was late, but Joey was my last appointment for the day and I was glad to have a few extra minutes with him before he left for vacation. We munched on nuts and raisins and the popcorn I always kept in the office as we chatted and waited for the taxi.

A horn beeped and Joey picked up his books, workbooks, and papers. He grabbed an extra handful of popcorn and ran through the door and down the steps.

Halfway to the cab he turned back to wave, and as he did, his feet somehow slid out from under him and he fell flat, face down in the driveway, surrounded by books, papers, and popcorn.

“Oh, Joey …” I started toward him, but before I was down the steps, Joey was back on his feet, shrugging his shoulders in my direction, grinning, waving one last time.

By the next day the squirrels had eaten the popcorn, and I’ll never be quite sure whether Joey’s fall was an accident or his idea of a perfect exit.

Second grade had gone so well that Joey and I both took the whole summer off. Joey was at his cottage at Lake Champlain; I was at our summer house in Connecticut. We were also both late getting back in gear, so Joey had been in school for over a week before I saw him for the first time.

Obviously, something had happened since I’d last seen Joey, and whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Joey was a wreck. He sat behind my office desk opening drawers, shuffling papers, bending paper clips. His nails were bitten down to the quick. His old-time nervous restlessness was running high, but there was also a new listless quality that bothered me even more.

“What’s wrong, Joey?”

He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Do you like your teacher?”

“Not much. She’s new.”

“It’s okay to be new. Everybody’s new sometime. What don’t you like?”

“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. She gets me all mixed up.”

I didn’t press further. If Joey was forced to continue to struggle, trying to put emotions he didn’t understand into words, it would only make him more anxious.

I switched to something more concrete. “Did you bring your notebook?”

Joey dragged his book bag onto the desk. One look confirmed that things were not going well. Already, covers were coming off books and scraps of papers and pencils mingled with gum wrappers and an odd sock in the bottom of the bag.

I lifted out the notebook. There was no assignment pad in the front; in fact, there was nothing at all in the notebook except blank paper.

“Do you have homework for tomorrow?” I asked.

Again Joey shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Joe …” I began.

But Joey interrupted. “I mean it,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on. She reads out the homework so fast I can’t even hear it, and I sure can’t write it down. She never puts it on the board. It doesn’t matter anyway, because even if I do it she never collects it.

“Then like in spelling, she hands out these purple dittos with the spelling words all scrambled up. She says it’s a game to help us learn our spelling words, but I never even know what the spelling words are ’cause I can’t get them unscrambled. Everything’s like that – English, math, social studies – everything’s all mixed up.”

Poor Joey. The last thing he needed was a disorganized classroom and an inexperienced teacher. He had to work hard enough to keep things straight inside his own head without having outside confusion heaped on top of it. What was Mr. Templar thinking of? He knew the kind of classroom Joey needed. But the way it was now, Joey was going to have to muster up his own skills in order to survive.

“Listen, Joey. I hear you, but I don’t want to see all you’ve learned go down the tube just because you have a new teacher. You have to get your assignments down – and you have to clean up your act. If you don’t hear what your teacher says, then you have to go up after school and ask her again.”

“Sure. And by the time I get out all the other guys will be gone.”

“Then go in early and get it before school starts. I’ll talk to her, Joe, but you’ve got to do your part.”

We talked about this and Joey softened a little. “Yeah – okay. Anyway, what’s expanded notation? See, I did write my math homework here on my book cover, but I don’t get it.”

We discussed expanded notation for the rest of his time, and Joey was doing it easily by the end of the hour. But somehow this didn’t make me feel much better, and I watched uneasily from my office window as Joey unlocked his bike from a tree. Before he got on he took a pair of headphones from the pocket of his jacket and clamped them on his head, as if to seal off the rest of the world.

I called Joey’s mother at home the next day. No answer. On impulse, I called her old office number; she picked up on the first ring. “I know you can’t talk now,” I said, “but I was wondering if we could get together sometime. Your husband, too. I’m worried about Joey.”

“I was going to call you,” Mrs. Stone replied. “He’s been terrible at home. One thing Joey always had was a sense of humor. Not anymore. Everything anybody does is wrong. Listen, I know Al wants to talk to you too – but he got this new promotion and he’s working late every night. Actually, I’m back at work too, as you can see,” she giggled nervously. “Or hear.” There was a slight pause. “I guess we both changed our minds. Anyway, I hate to ask it, but do you think you could come over on Saturday afternoon? Rich has early football practice, and Joey and Bill always go and hang around to watch him, so we’ll be able to talk.”

I hesitated. I tried to save the weekends for my own family. But I was worried about Joey. I had the feeling that he was getting in deeper every day.