Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her. Torey Hayden
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ran her hands through her hair, pushing the braids back. She was a rather pretty woman in a tired sort of way.
“Could I talk with you a moment about Venus?”
“Why? What’s she done?”
“She hasn’t done anything. I was just wondering … could we chat a moment? I was hoping you could fill me in a little on her background.”
The woman rubbed her face in a weary fashion and backed aside. “Yeah, come on in, if you want.”
I stepped gingerly by the man, still sitting in the doorway. Julie, who was wearing a skirt, pressed it to her legs as she edged by. The man grinned up at us.
Inside there were two teenage girls and a boy sprawled over the furniture in front of the TV. Beyond, there was a built-in table with bench seats on either side. Wanda sat on one. She was doing nothing but staring at her hands.
“Get out of here, you guys,” the woman said. “Turn off that fucking box. I told you half an hour ago to turn that off.”
“Shut up, bitch,” the boy said. He must have been about twelve or thirteen.
The woman raised her foot and kicked his leg none too gently. “Get moving.”
He muttered crossly, got up, and went outside.
“Teri?” the man called from the doorway. “Get me another beer while you’re at it.”
“Get it yourself,” she replied.
“Frenchie? Hey, Frenchie, get me a beer.”
I didn’t know which one was Frenchie, as there was no response from any of the people in the room.
“Wanda?” he called. “Wanda, get me a beer.”
Lumbering out of her seat, Wanda plodded to the refrigerator. She yanked the door open so hard that cans of beer tumbled out and went rolling across the floor. Teri swore at her. So did the man.
Heaving a discouraged sigh, Teri flopped down on the couch. She gestured for Julie and me to sit. “Just don’t tell me you come about problems,” she said wearily, “’cause there’s nothing I can do. I got too many problems to deal with already. You can see that just looking around. So please don’t say you’re here about problems.”
I could sense she was telling the truth there, that she really didn’t have the resources to cope with much more. I felt sympathy for her then.
“Is Venus here?” I asked.
“Dunno,” Teri said. She was obviously tired. She rubbed her hand over her face again.
“Do you suppose we could find out?” I asked. “I’d like to see Venus.”
Teri lifted her head and scanned around the trailer, as if perhaps she’d overlooked the child. Then she turned her head and looked back at Wanda. “Wanda? Where’s Venus?”
Wanda ambled out of her seat. She wandered down the narrow corridor and into one of the rooms at the end of the trailer. Several moments passed in expectant silence. Julie and I had our necks craned to see where Wanda had gone. Teri leaned forward and removed a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. She lit it and took a long, slow drag, giving a relieved-sounding sigh at the end.
Wanda meandered out of the back room carrying something. As she came up to us, I could see it was the plastic doll, wrapped in a receiving blanket. It had been dressed in old baby clothes. Wanda smiled shyly at me and cuddled the doll. “Beautiful child,” she said and smiled again.
“Wanda,” Teri cried in exasperation when she saw the doll.“Venus, you asshole. I said go get Venus, not your fucking doll.”
But Wanda never did get Venus. Indeed, we never managed to see Venus at all. Instead, Wanda wandered off with her doll into another part of the trailer and never returned, while I was distracted by the realization that Wanda needed intervention every bit as much as Venus.
Venus returned the next day as if nothing had ever happened, so I decided to pick up where I left off. During the time before school, I’d rearranged the classroom furniture to give me a small, cubiclelike space screened off from the rest of the room. This way I could work alone with Venus without constant interference from the boys.
That afternoon, after getting the boys settled with their folders and leaving Julie in charge, I took Venus around the corner of the file cabinet and into my little cubicle. I’d added a small table and two chairs. I sat her in one chair and positioned the other on the opposite side of the table. I sat down.
I got the feeling of a faint sense of alarm from Venus when I took her into this private area, but it was just a sense. Nothing about her facial expression changed much, and she sat without a lot of encouragement, but there was a slight glance around the small area and a springy lightness to her shoulders that I was coming to recognize as the precursor to movement. She didn’t move, however. Within a minute or two, she’d settled down to stonelike stillness.
Opening the package of M&Ms, I took out a small handful and held them out. “Remember these? We had these day before yesterday. Remember?”
To look down at the candies in my hand, she only moved her eyes.
I let the M&Ms spill onto the table between us with a satisfying clatter. Bright and colorful, they lay scattered across the tabletop. I left them like that for several moments and did nothing, hoping Venus might be tempted enough to take one of her own volition or at least register an interest in them.
Not so.
“Candy,” I said. “Do you like candy? Most children do.”
She stared at me, her face immobile as wood.
“We eat them,” I said. I put one in my mouth. “Mmmm. Really sweet. Chocolate-y.”
She kept staring and I got the feeling that she thought I’d gone stark raving mad. This made me smile and eventually laugh.
“Here, you have one,” I said. I picked up a red M&M and put it between her lips. It hung there, so I took a finger and pushed it the rest of the way into her mouth.
Nothing.
“Can you taste it?”
Nothing.
“Try chewing it.”
Venus just sat.
“Chew.” I reached over and moved her chin with my hand while making exaggerated chewing movements myself. I was reminded, as I did this, of a scene from a Star Trek program where a member of the starship crew was trying to teach the fine art of eating to a woman who had spent most of her life as a sort of living machine. Not so unlike Venus.
This didn’t seem to have an effect, so we both just sat. The chocolate would melt in her mouth eventually and she would taste it whether she wanted to or not. I watched her, waiting to see her swallow.
Eventually she did.
“Nice?” I asked. “Do you want another?” I reached over and shoved a green M&M between her lips.
Venus and I spent forty minutes doing that. During this time I pushed a total of twenty-two M&Ms into her mouth. Nothing changed over the course of that whole time. She just stared at me as I pushed the candy into her mouth, waited for it to melt, waited for her to swallow, and pushed the next one in. She never looked down at the candies, never appeared to chew them, never tried to get them more quickly, never even acknowledged they were there at all.
All this time I kept up a quiet patter, largely about the taste of the candy and the sensation of eating them, but Venus responded to my words no more than she did to the M&Ms.
When the bell rang to signal the end of the school day, I got up, put the candy away, and brought Venus around the corner of the cubicle to join the other children.
Wanda was at the door to take Venus home.