Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her

Julie’s efforts to calm down the boys, who’d clearly been distressed by the brouhaha, had been largely unsuccessful, so I returned to the classroom to find them running around chaotically. Feeling frustrated at having lost Venus in the manner I did and annoyed with Julie for her part in it, I was too irritable to deal calmly with them myself. So, in the end I decided we might as well do something to release all this pent-up emotion everyone was feeling.

“Let’s have music,” I said and went to lift down the box with cymbals, triangles, and tambourines in it, as I, for one, felt like bashing something.

The rest of the day passed effortlessly, although it had that walking-on-eggshells feel to it. The boys were remarkably well behaved for them, not even becoming overly boisterous when I gave them the chance to clash along to the music. Instead, they sat listening intently for the right places to play their instruments and so performed the song – an inane ditty about an amorous Mexican tomcat named Señor Gatos – with the seriousness of a Bach mass.

After the bell rang and the boys were seen off, I returned to the classroom, where Julie had remained to clean up. She was reshelving books when I came in.

“Look, I’m really, really sorry,” she said before I could speak.

“Yes, we had a bit of a problem, didn’t we?”

“I just found it really hard to hold Venus like that, Torey. She was so upset.”

“I know it looked alarming,” I said. “I know it looked like I was being too forceful with her, but I wasn’t. She was seriously out of control. As the adults around her, our job is to bring order out of chaos. And that was chaos.”

Julie regarded me.

I didn’t want to get defensive over this, but I could see it wouldn’t be hard. The problem with what I was doing with Venus was that it was gut-level stuff. I’d felt secure in my actions while I was doing them. Despite how it appeared, my sense was that this was a power issue. Venus appeared out of control, and on a cognitive level, she probably was. I doubt she had been knowingly thinking, “I want to impose my will on this woman and take control of this situation.” However, on a deeper level, I sensed Venus was using her unresponsiveness and violent behavior to control her environment. For whatever reasons they might be occurring, the fact remained that they were inappropriate, inefficient ways to cope, and my responsibility was to help her change them into something more beneficial. Unfortunately, to do that, I had to begin by imposing my will over hers.

But it looked awful. And unaccountable. Because how did I explain “Well, this is what I sense about the situation,” when “sense” could in no way be proven?

Julie lowered her head. “I’m really sorry, Torey. I know I let you down. But I was so scared we were hurting her. She was struggling so hard.”

“It was forceful, but we weren’t hurting her. It was physical, but we – you and I – were in control of what we were doing, so we weren’t going to hurt her. That’s the difference between what we were doing and what Venus was doing. At no time was I going to cross the line and hurt her, but she didn’t have the same controls. That’s why I needed you to hold her legs. Because I didn’t want her to hurt herself. Or one of us.”

Julie didn’t respond immediately. She kept her head down, but I could see a frown playing itself out across her features.

“I know you’re not going to want me to say this,” she said when she finally did look up, “but I don’t think what you’re doing is right. I’m still really uncomfortable with this, because I just don’t agree it’s the way to do it.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know. Just not that. We’re scaring her so much,” Julie said. “It’s hard for me to see that’s right.”

“Yes, I think we are scaring her. To be honest, it scares me. But … sometimes we need to get in and do hard things. I have to have control in here, Julie. I have to be the one who sets the boundaries, not any of the children. Up until now Venus has been using these behaviors to control her world, and they haven’t led to a happy life for her. It’s my task to help her find other ways of doing things. But I can’t do that until I’ve gained control of the situation. And to do that, I’m going to have to get down and dirty.”

“Why can’t you just wait? Just give her time to adjust to being in your class? Golly, we’re only in the second week of school here, Torey. Can’t you give her time? I mean, most of these kids come out of violent homes already. How can you justify using violence against them in the classroom?”

“I don’t think it was violence. I was restraining her. It was controlled. I was simply setting the limits.”

Julie nodded in a faint, unconvinced way.

A pause.

Julie let out a long, heavy sigh. “Okay, yeah. You’re the one who’s trained in all this. You’ve got the experience. I’m nobody really. Just an aide…” Another sigh. “But I still feel really uncomfortable with this ‘means justifying the ends’ kind of approach. Know what I mean?” She looked up at me. “I’m not kidding, Torey. This girl comes out of a nightmare home situation. I know, because I’ve been at this school for a while and I’ve seen what she and her siblings live like. I can’t believe it’s right for us to be horrible to her too. Ever.”

“I don’t think it did fall under being ‘horrible to her,’” I said, “but I take your point.” There was a pause. “I guess the only thing left to say is that in the future, it’d probably be better if you told me ahead of time when you don’t want to do something rather than give up halfway through it. That way I’d cope better.”

“Yeah, I’m just really sorry, Torey. It’s a principles issue. I hope you understand.”

The awful thing was that I did understand. And in my heart of hearts I agreed with Julie. In an ideal world people in my position should never have to force their will on children like Venus. But then in an ideal world there would be no children like Venus. In this pathetic, ignoble, real world we were stuck in, however, I could see no other way to bring order out of chaos. Before anything could be done to help Venus – or the boys either, for that matter – limits had to be set to achieve the secure environment necessary for growth. These were unhappy, out-of-control children, which was why they’d been placed in this room to begin with. They had to be certain I was more powerful than any of their worst urges or most horrible feelings, that I would not cave in, give up, or in any other way abandon them to those things in themselves they could not control. Only with that security could they then risk change.

The academic necessity of doing this, however, and the gritty reality of putting it into action were quite different things. Moreover, there was always the agonizingly fine line between the right amount of force and too much. And the fact that each child was different. And each circumstance. There was never a formula.

In my heart of hearts I dearly wanted to be the kind of person Julie believed in, the kind who could change the world simply by being loving enough. I felt it was crucial to keep such ideals alive, to keep believing that good would triumph over evil, that love could conquer anything, that no one was hopeless, because while the world might, in reality, not be that way, its only chance of changing was if we believed it could.

Consequently, I ended the day on a low note, going home more bothered by my encounter with Julie than by my encounter with Venus. This was such a hard position for me to defend. The truth was, I was on Julie’s side, not mine.

Chapter Seven (#ulink_599485a9-fd4b-5652-8138-479fa4c35acf)

The next morning Venus did not come to school.

At recess time I went down to the main office to phone her house.

“Hullo?” answered a thick, sleepy sounding voice.

I said who I was and why I was phoning. Was Venus there?

“Huh? What? Dunno,” the voice at the other end replied. Then the line went dead.

I dialed again. Again, the same sluggish, sleepy voice. I couldn’t actually tell if it was male or female. Female, I guessed, but not Wanda.

Once more I explained I was Venus’s teacher and I was concerned because Venus was not at school. I said we’d had a disagreement the previous day and I was worried that Venus might still be upset. “Is this Venus’s mother?” I asked.

The person at the other end was incoherent. Drunk possibly. Whatever, I couldn’t make sense of the call.

As a consequence, I decided to visit Venus’s house after school. Normally I didn’t do this without giving the parents ample warning, but I was more than a little concerned about having allowed her to leave the school premises the day before in the state she was, and I wanted to see for myself that Venus was all right. Moreover, I wanted to make it perfectly plain to whomever was in charge at her house that unless she was ill, Venus had to attend school. This wasn’t a choice Venus or Wanda could make. It was the law.

Julie came with me. Venus and her family lived about five blocks from the school down one of the seedy side streets between the railroad and the meat-packing plant. Although it was now known as an area of crime and drugs, a century earlier when the town had been founded, it had been laid out with broad sidewalks and boulevards planted with elm and cottonwood trees. The elms had long since succumbed to disease and been cut down, but the cottonwoods had thrived, heaving up the decaying sidewalks and casting the whole area into dense shade. Most of the houses had been built between the two world wars. None of them were large houses, but most had porches and broad lawns. Now, however, the porches were broken-down and unpainted. Many houses had boarded-up windows, and the lawns, unwatered and too shaded by the big trees, were worn largely to dirt.

Venus’s home was not a house but a trailer set back on an empty lot. It was old and fitted permanently to a concrete foundation. The screen door was hanging open, and a man sat on the doorstep. I parked the car and got out.

He was a skinny, small-built man, probably two or three inches shorter than I was. His hair was that nondescript color somewhere between dark blond and light brown and it was rather wavy, rumpled almost, as if he hadn’t bothered to brush it when he got up. He had a thick growth of stubble and a very hairy chest showing through his unbuttoned shirt. He sat, smoking a cigarette and watching us come up the path to the front door.

“Hello, I’m Venus’s teacher from school.”

“Well, hi,” he said in a distinctly lascivious manner that made me very grateful for having Julie along.

“Is Venus here?”

He considered this a moment, as if it were a difficult question, then smiled. “Could be. You want a seat?”

“Is she?”

A slow, rather insolent shrug. “I reckon.”

“Venus didn’t come to school today. I’m concerned about her. It’s very important that Venus come every day, unless she’s ill. So, is she here?”

“Why? You want to see her?” he asked, but before I could respond, he leaned back and called over his shoulder, “Teri? Someone here about Venus. Teri?”