Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey HaydenЧитать онлайн книгу.
gave a little half-shrug.
“I can see you’re finding it hard to talk, but don’t let it upset you. It isn’t bothering me.”
This renewed the tears.
I leaned back, attempting to look relaxed in my rather unrelaxing wooden chair.
Dr. Taylor took tissues from the box on the table and wiped her face. Several minutes passed in silence as she recomposed herself. Laying the tissues on the table, she leaned forward and took off her coat. That was perhaps the most positive sign yet.
“Do you find you usually have trouble talking with people you don’t know very well?”
She nodded.
“Just nerves?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t let it worry you in here, okay? It’s not something that’s going to bother me any. I’ve spent a lot of my career working with people who don’t talk easily. There’s a special problem called elective mutism that interests me very much. It happens to kids, mostly; they can talk but won’t. Anyway, working with them has made me very comfortable with silence.”
A few minutes passed, and she didn’t say anything. Then she tipped her head and grimaced. “It bothers my husband,” she said quietly.
“What does? Your not talking easily?”
She nodded.
“Yes, he seems the kind to like a good chat.”
“I just can’t talk like that with anybody. You know, make small talk.”
“Does it make him angry?”
She nodded. “He used to give these parties. He was famous for them. But he’s stopped now, because of me.”
I remained silent.
“His first wife was very good with his parties. You know, what’s the word? A hostess. And I think Tom just assumed I’d be the same. You know, put on a great dress and …”
“And you weren’t?”
She shook her head. “No, I wasn’t. I hid in the bedroom sometimes. I’d shut the door and lock it and stay in there until everybody went home. It made Tom furious.
“Other times I just drank,” she said. “That was the other way to get through those parties. To get too drunk to care. I could take them then, mostly because I never remembered what happened.”
Silence.
“Have you had a drinking problem for long?”
She shrugged.
“Have you gotten help specifically for it at any time?”
“No.”
I regarded her. She looked over then, and our eyes met briefly.
“I’m not really into that sort of thing, into those kinds of programs like AA. I went once to an AA meeting and I had to have a drink afterwards to get over it.”
There was something about the way she said that which made me think she was pulling my leg a bit, so I smiled.
“It isn’t funny. They aren’t for me, those kinds of things. I think I’d rather be an alcoholic.”
“There are a lot of alternatives,” I said.
“I can stop if I want to.”
“I see.”
“I can. I mean, sure, I get drunk occasionally, but when I’ve done it, I’ve meant to. It didn’t happen because I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t really out of control.”
“Oh.”
“Everybody gets drunk sometimes.”
I looked at her.
She looked down at her hands in her lap. The tears reappeared.
I realized I needed to back off. She wasn’t kidding anybody and she knew it. But I could tell that if I pressed the issue, she’d only grow more defensive and most likely simply get up and leave.
“Do you have any family out here? Any of your own family?”
“I’ve only got one brother. But he lives back in Pennsylvania.”
Our conversation continued in much the same way, and it was bloody hard work the whole time. Dr. Taylor wasn’t exaggerating her difficulty in making conversation. Even when she relaxed, it didn’t come any easier for her. Indeed, she was one of the most inarticulate adults I had ever encountered. If I asked a question and it could be answered with a gesture, it was. If that wouldn’t work and a single-word response would suffice, she opted for that. Had I not known ahead of time that she had had an education, nothing in her conversational abilities would have clued me in. I never in a million years would have guessed she had a doctorate in anything.
However, our conversation did progress. With excruciating slowness, I was given bleak insight into the workings of the Considyne household. Gilded by the ostentatious trappings of wealth, the whole family sounded emotionally bankrupt. They lived like a group of threatened hermit crabs, each person entrenched, isolated, untrusting of the others. Interestingly, the only one apparently to prosper in this setup was Leslie.
I was getting an extremely different picture of Leslie than I’d had initially. At the beginning of the year, I’d perceived her as the stereotype of a neglected child. She was so sweet and docile, so withdrawn, that I had endeavored to give her every spare moment of warmth and attention I could afford, occasionally even at the expense of the other children, in an effort to bring her back to life, as if she were some emotional Sleeping Beauty. However, during the conference with her father, I’d had my first inklings that things were different than they seemed. Now, talking with her mother, I realized Leslie was not suffering from lack of attention. Far from it!
Indeed, Leslie was the hub of the Considyne household. It ran to her specifications and hers alone. She ate when and where she pleased; she slept when and where she pleased; she even eliminated when and where she pleased. She indulged in her “self-expression,” as Tom Considyne put it, getting into everything at any hour of the day or night and leaving behind her messes that could take literally days to clear up. No one endeavored to stop Leslie in any of these activities. When required to conform to more conventional behavior, Leslie sharply reprimanded those around her by withdrawing and giving nothing.
The clock on the wall worked its way around past six, then 6:30 and finally seven. My stomach was growling, and I had to lean against the edge of the table to make it unaudible, but the conversation was winding down too, more from fatigue than anything else. About 7:20, a weary silence came at last and lay down between us. I didn’t have the energy to shoo it away.
Dr. Taylor looked over at me. Her anxiety had gone completely over the course of the two hours, and she now regarded me in that peculiarly thorough way she had. It was a very searching look, as if she expected to locate something and absorb it from me. To be examined like that was disconcerting.
Dr. Taylor finally looked away. She had a tissue in her lap and she fiddled with it. “You know what I want?” she asked quietly.
“What’s that?”
“I want to be a better mother. I don’t want Leslie to wind me up like she does.” She paused and glanced over. “I want to be like you are with her.”
I smiled slightly.
“I watch you on the playground. You’re happy with her. Can you teach me to be like that?”
“Well, I expect it’s a little easier for me. She isn’t mine.”
She ducked her head, looking down into her lap for a few moments, then a quick glance across to me again. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ve