Somebody Else’s Kids, page 8
He badly disrupted the class by his arrival. The first week he refused to do any work. He would float around the periphery of the action and watch us, but I could not coerce him into sitting down and working. Unlike the years when I had taught in a self-contained classroom, I was not equipped to handle severe aggressive behavior. There was no tune-out or quiet space in the room because Boo and Lori never needed such measures. And in all practicality, I could not establish one for Tomaso because any interaction when he was angry quickly degenerated into a physical confrontation. With no aide, and the other children to take care of, I simply did not have the wherewithal to force Tomaso to remain in a timeout space. There were few other courses available. I refused to consider sending him to the principal for whacks. Beating him would hardly show him how to be less violent. Similarly, sending him home or to juvenile hall was not what I felt was dealing effectively with the problem. If ever a kid needed to be in school, it was Tomaso.
I settled on two approaches the first week. First, I let him float around the room uninvolved. Unlike Boo, he was not tuned out. He watched us; he occasionally joined us physically by sitting near us or talking to us. If he needed time to adjust, this was going to be it. I decided just to wait him out on the work issue. Second, I chose to control his violent outbursts in a physical manner. When Tomaso exploded and went off to destroy things or hurt people, I caught him in a tight, improvised bear-hug, his back to my chest, his arms pinned to his sides, and I hung on. Not an ideal solution, I suppose. That thought went through my mind every time I had to do it, and I cursed my inadequate facilities. But trial and error had brought me to the conclusion that a physical hold was what Tomaso needed to regain control. Forcing him to sit in a chair only escalated his anger. Ignored he would go from bad to worse. However, if I was quick and got a tight hold on him around the chest, he would calm down again. There would always be a moment of fighting, which I dreaded because he had not yet learned to fight fair, and if I was not careful, he would bite me or mash my toes or elbow me in the breasts. But the struggling against my arms would always cease; then slowly I would feel the tension trickle out of him and I could let go.
The help I had not counted on came from Lori. It was unintentional, I suspect, because Lori was bent out of shape for several days after Tomaso’s arrival. She, too, went through a few days of refusing to work. I think she did not want to expose any weaknesses to Tomaso. Yet, there was an attraction between them. It was subtle and mostly from Tomaso’s side, but I could feel it. From the first day when Tomaso repaired Lori’s work folder after destroying it, he continued to show her a low-keyed deference. Perhaps it was because she refused to be frightened of him and all his bluster. Perhaps it was because they had shared some similar experiences and Lori, in her characteristic manner, was willing to tell him about hers. Or maybe it was no more than that Lori, with her long, dark hair, really did look a little Spanish. I never knew. Lori, for her part, could not remain angry long. When it became apparent that Tomaso was not going to go away, she accepted him. This seemed to calm Tomaso. A pecking order was established in which I had no part. In small ways he tried to initiate friendship with her – sitting near her at the table, listening raptly when she talked, helping her with her work without too many provocative comments. I was thankful to see that people still mattered to this angry boy.
While Tomaso’s constant testing of the limits and deep rage were difficult to contend with, I found those nothing compared with some of his other behavior. The kid figured out quickly that destructiveness and violence were not going to make me lose my composure. But they were not the only tricks up his sleeve. I finally decided he must have researched a book somewhere along the line on how to drive teachers crazy. He knew every angle.
One of his most effective weapons was his ability to pass wind. To me it seemed he could do it at any time he chose and at any decibel level. Up on one buttock he would rise and aim so that his victim received full benefit of the smell and sound. “It must have been the beans I ate,” he would always say sweetly. My gosh, this kid had to be eating beans morning, noon and night to accomplish what he was capable of. I am sure that if sheet music were available, he could have farted “The Star Spangled Banner.” The crowning touch involved pulling his pants out in back and sticking a hand down to feel. God only knows what he was checking. I never asked. In fact I tried my best to ignore the entire business: For that kind of behavior, inattention seemed the soundest recourse. However, with Tomaso it was not that simple. If the first or second or twelfth fart did not get a rise out of me, he would jump up from his seat and wave a hand in front of his face. “Whew, boy! That smelled baaaaad! I really cut the cheese that time, huh? Whew. I can’t sit here anymore. I need a new chair.” Then he would turn around to get out of his chair and fart right in my face. And of course, there was Lori. While I did my best to ignore Tomaso, Lori could not always do so. If he persisted long enough, he always found an audience.
Farting, unfortunately, was not Tomaso’s only Driving-Teacher-Nuts tactic. He had plenty more. The most devastating for me personally was his mouthwash campaign.
“Whewie,” he cried one day when I sat down next to him at the table. He fanned the air in front of his face with one hand. “You got stinky breath!” Mortally embarrassed, I immediately thought over what I had had for lunch. At recess I sneaked off for a quick chew of gum in the teachers’ lounge.
Next day. A revolted look. “Boy, lady, don’t you ever use a mouthwash? Dios mio! You stink.”
This went on for better than a week and I became positively paranoid. I brought a toothbrush to school and brushed after lunch. Next came a bottle of Scope. Not strong enough. A bottle of Listerine took up residence in the coat closet with my lunch box, comb, adhesive bandages and aspirin. Every day I would breathe into a cupped hand before class to see how my breath smelled. I even considered making an appointment with my dentist. And of course this all had vast effect on the remainder of my life. I began talking to people with my hand to my mouth because I figured if I was offending a brash boy like Tomaso, I was bothering everyone and they were just too polite to tell me. Joe and I got into one of the worst arguments we ever had when I refused to make the garlicky aïoli for a dinner party.
Not until much later did I get wise. Dan Marshall had come into the room one day and was strolling among the kids. He leaned over Tomaso to see what he was doing.
“Hoo-ee, you got halitosis,” Tomaso said.
Dan straightened up abruptly, his face turning red.
“You know what that is, mister? That’s bad breath.”
From then on I was suspicious. Tomaso, however, did not give up easily. Once he’d figured out that I no longer fell for the bad-breath trick, he had to become more creative.
We were all together at the worktable making Thanksgiving decorations one afternoon. Tomaso was sitting next to me. He sat back and put his scissors down. Slowly he took several deep, evaluative snorts of air. Then he turned to me. “You know what you need, Torey?”
“What’s that?”
“Feminine hygiene spray.”
Never a dull moment with Tomaso. If it was a gross or outrageous act, he had thought it up along with twelve variations. A favorite involved sticking his finger down his throat. Although he never actually made himself vomit, it always produced this horrific retching sound. By instinct I would jump. Every damn time. And then there was the nose-picking. Tomaso never had much to pick from his own nose. Boo, however, turned out to be a gold mine for this activity. I would turn around and there he would be, bent over with one hand on top of Boo’s head, the other drilling up Boo’s nose. “Boy, Torey, look at this!” he would holler and stretch a long booger out. “Sure is a good thing I’m cleaning Boo’s nose out for him, huh?” And when I would come screaming, Tomaso always would look at me innocently. “Sure lucky you got me, huh?”
Yeah. Sure lucky all right.
The funny thing was that as November wore on, I did begin to think I was lucky. I grew to love the kid. Love him with that potent, irrational sort of love that some kids brought out in me, a love with no clear reason, yet so strong. I loved Tomaso’s scandalous approach to life, his outrageous ability to hang on in a world that had been anything but kind to him, and indeed even to extract a few laughs from it. I would sit in class and watch him some days, watch his scrawny body hunched up under the vinyl jacket he refused to remove, his dark, dancing eyes so full of fear. In the beginning I had thought only anger lived there, but I had grown to know fear was really the master and anger only the slave. Perhaps because of that most of all, I loved him. He was such a scrappy little fellow. Even fear could not dominate him completely. For all his problems, Tomaso was not a quitter.
Chapter Nine
December came. A rowdy month full of snowstorms and Christmas carols and all our undisguised dreams. Lori, I think, still believed in Santa Claus. Or at least she wanted to. Tomaso, in an uncharacteristic show of sensitivity, did not fall into hysterics at the thought. And Boo, of course, gave us no clue at all as to his thought. Or as to whether he even had any.
“I went to see Santa Claus last night,” Lori told us as we sat around the table making paper chains to decorate the room. “My dad took me and Libby up to the shopping center and I seen Santa Claus there and my dad let me go talk to him.”
I saw Tomaso look over at her without raising his head from his work. Then his eyes came to me. There was a silent question shared between us.
“Did Libby go talk to him too?” I asked.
“No.” Lori was not watching me. She was struggling mightily to get her chains to stick together with our dried-out library paste. She paused a moment and sat back, surveying the mess on the worktable. “I asked him to bring me this here doll I seen on TV once. You know what it does, Torey?”
“No, what?”
“Do you, Tomaso?”
“How the hell should I know? Do you think I play with dolls or something?”
“Well, anyway,” she leaned back over her chain and took another strip of construction paper to add to it, “this doll drinks and wets, but that’s not the good part. Guess what is?”
“Madre Maria, Lori, would you get to the point of your story?” Tomaso snapped. “You always go on and on and on.”
Lori ruffled her chain indignantly. “Well, anyhow, she eats. She really does; I’ve seen it. You get this special food that comes in packages and the baby eats it all by herself. Just like real. And she chews it and everything. No kidding. So I asked Santa to bring me one. And if I get it. I’ll bring and show you guys.”
Tomaso was watching her. Boo sitting next to him began to spin scissors on the tabletop. Reaching over to stop the noise, Tomaso still did not take his eyes from Lori. “Lor, do you believe in Santa Claus?” he asked. His voice was quiet and without emotion, yet there was a crusty tenderness about it which kept the question from coming out derisively.
Lori looked up. “Yeah.” A note of challenge in her reply.
No answer.
“Well, there really is a Santa Claus,” Lori said. Still the defensive edge to her voice. “I even seen him last night, so there, Tomaso.”
Tomaso nodded and looked down at his work. I loved the kid. All that armor plating and yet he never did come off quite as hardboiled as I think he wished in his heart he were.
“Santa Claus is real, isn’t he, Torey?” Lori asked.
I dreaded getting drawn into the conversation. This was one of those topics I had not really come to terms with myself. I had a harder time talking about Santa Claus than I ever did about sex. There were no facts to fall back on with Santa Claus. Just so very many meanings. Especially, it seemed, for my kids. A good man who brought you anything you wanted was a dream to be cherished, no matter how impractical. Yet every situation was different. One child needed to believe in the reality of Santa Claus because he also shared reality with a mother who beat him with a board and burned all his toys. Another needed to believe in the spirit of Santa Claus because all her life things had only been taken from her, never given. And a third needed no part in any sort of fantasy because for her as yet, there was no reality whatsoever. Thus Santa Claus brought me only worry. Such a complicated issue.
Lori, I think, needed a Santa Claus. She was stripped daily of all the millions of little dignities that failure alone can grab away. She needed to know that there were those who did not judge a person’s value by the direction her letters faced. She needed the bigger-than-life splendor of the Christmas dream. Nothing less would compensate for Lori’s deficiencies.
Tomaso too must have felt as I did. He rescued me from my floundering silence. “I believe in Santa Claus too. Lor,” he said.
“You do?” she said in surprise.
“Yeah, I do.”
“My sister don’t. She laughs at me. But I tell her he’s real. I know he is.”
Tomaso nodded. He was involved in his work again, not looking at either of us. “A lot of things are real but we just don’t know it.”
“Libby says if there’s a Santa Claus, where’s he at? She says the one in the shopping center, he isn’t real. He’s just some man dressed up in a red suit. And so’s the Santa downtown at the Bon Marché. He’s just dressed up too.” Lori shoved away the chains in front of her with an angry push. “I know that. Why does she keep telling me? Like I’m some baby. I know they’re just dumb old men.” Her eyes to me now, huge and resentful. “But there is too a Santa Claus, just the same.”
I nodded.
“But Libby, she says, well, if there’s a real Santa Claus, how come you never see him? She says nobody even lives up at the North Pole. There’s just a bunch of ice up there. And Eskimos. And none of them are Santa Claus. Our folks, that’s who gets us the presents. And Santa Claus is just for babies to believe in. Libby says.”
“But there’s lot of things you can’t see and people believe in them just the same,” Tomaso said. “I never seen Jesus but I believe in him. And Mary. Every night when I say my prayers, I know Jesus and Mary are listening to me, but I ain’t never seen either one of them. And I don’t know where Heaven is, I never seen that.” Tomaso leaned an elbow on the table and thoughtfully braced his chin while he watched Lori working. “But I know Mary and Jesus and Heaven are real. Even grown-ups know that. I think maybe Santa Claus is the same sort of thing. You know, a kind of spirit.”
Lori looked at me. “Is he right?”
“I guess that might be a way of looking at it,” I said.
“And,” Tomaso continued, “I think he gives people good feelings inside and makes them love other people and want to get them presents. He doesn’t really come down and do it himself, he makes us do it for him. Sort of like Frankenstein and his monster.”
“Then how come all of them men dress up in the stores?” Lori asked. “How come they want to trick you?”
“I don’t think they want to trick you, Lor,” I said. “I think they do it because it usually makes people feel good. It makes them happy to see a Santa Claus.”
“Libby doesn’t believe in him at all.”
“Libby’s stupid,” Tomaso said flatly.
“She doesn’t quite understand yet, Lor,” I added. “Sometimes when we find out that things are not just the way we wished they were, we get upset and then we won’t have anything to do with them for a while. But feelings change if we give them a chance. I imagine it’ll be that way with Libby. She doesn’t want to believe in Santa Claus because he isn’t really a nice old man in a red suit, but pretty soon when she’s older, she’ll see the real Santa Claus is much nicer. She’ll believe then.”
Lori paused. “Is it okay to believe in that guy at the shopping center? I mean, is it okay to go tell him what you want, even if he isn’t for real?”
I smiled. “Yeah, I imagine it’s all right. Don’t you, Tom?”
He nodded. “Yes, I think it’s okay too. The real Santa, he won’t mind.”
And then there were those who knew very little about Santa Claus.
During the second week of December I had the kids outside for recess. It was a sunny day that Wednesday, brilliant in a way only winter days seem to be. Perhaps I should not have let them go out. It was still cold and a thin glaze of ice from the last thaw polished the concrete playground, the swings and the monkey bars. I told the kids to stay on the grass and off the slippery equipment, and because the day was such a jewel among the winter’s damp, dark weeks, I let them run.
Lori and Boo were galloping around while Tomaso and I leaned against the wall of the building in the sunshine and talked. Tomaso was telling me about a television show he especially liked, about the actor who starred in it, how he was considering writing that actor a letter to see if he would write back. I was engrossed enough in the conversation not to be watching Boo and Lori as closely as I should have. They managed to get over onto the playground equipment without my noticing.
A piercing scream cut the air.
Boo. I looked up in time to see him fall from the monkey bars in that stop-frame clarity of accidents. The scream had been Lori’s. Boo made no sound at all.
“Boo!” I shrieked as I ran. Tomaso ran behind me. “Boo! Boo!” I touched his face. He lay crumpled in an awkward lump. Very, very cautiously I moved his head back. Blood oozed out the right side of his mouth.
Lori was crying. Tomaso hovered nervously behind me. “Why isn’t he moving? Is he dead?” At this Lori howled even louder.
“For pity’s sake, Tomaso, of course he isn’t dead. How can you say that?”
“Maybe we ought to pray,” Tomaso suggested and sank to his knees beside me.
