Finding a Voice

by Kim Hood

  ‘Mom, you’ve been saying for ages that I need a passion. I think I’ve found one!’

  I thought back to my last week in the special education wing and with Chris. Mr Jenkins had arranged for me to switch my art class to Chris’s art class so I could help him there. It hadn’t been that difficult; Mr Jenkins would teach me science in the block my art used to be in. I couldn’t believe it could be this easy to escape my life!

  The knot that was always in my stomach from the moment I walked in the metal school door was beginning to loosen. I found myself almost looking forward to my time in the special education wing.

  It hadn’t taken much more than a few minutes for me to figure out that school was entirely different in the special education wing. For one, the bells didn’t sound in this wing, so the teachers didn’t necessarily know that the class was supposed to start – and they didn’t seem to care. I’d waited more than ten minutes in the classroom Mr Jenkins had told me to go to for science before he finally showed up. I had almost thought I was in the wrong room. When he finally did arrive, it was to sit down in front of me, no plan, and ask, ‘So where are you at in science anyway?’

  ‘Um – well. We just dissected an eye?’ That was pretty much what I remembered.

  ‘Ok. Biology. We can cover that pretty quickly. I’ll look at it for next class. We can afford to skip this one. There’s a class going on that could use your help.’

  I had never met a teacher like this. He didn’t have that invisible line of authority that all teachers took everywhere.

  So instead of learning science that period, I had helped Lilly measure out her ingredients for chocolate brownies. According to Mr Jenkins it was a math class – measurement.

  The first thing she had said to me was, ‘I like you, Jo. I won’t pinch you, ok?’

  Maybe it wasn’t the most normal thing for someone to say, but the message behind it made me feel good. None of us was exactly normal, but it didn’t matter. There was no one I had to impress here, no worries of saying something that would reveal me as odd or uncool. Just this freedom to … be.

  I thought Mom would like to hear about this hidden part of school. She would like Mr Jenkins, I just knew it. She would like that he didn’t seem to follow any rules – just like her. One of her favourite topics was about how teachers were so caught up in teaching rules, conformity Mom called it, that they didn’t have time to teach anything interesting or important.

  But my heart sank when her only response to my excitement was, ‘Passion. That’s what they’re killing now!’

  The channel on the television had been changed – to the same murder mystery show that Mom and I had watched last week. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to settle her at all.

  ‘Higher fees again! Jo, you won’t be able to go to university at this rate!’ At least she had finally acknowledged my existence.

  ‘But do you see anyone taking to the streets? No passion for it. I need to be out there stirring up the passion.’ Mom’s arms were in motion now – big arcs to emphasise just how ‘out there’ she already was.

  I suddenly felt utterly alone. I walked over and sat in one of the green chairs, leaving her to her audience-less performance. So much for sharing things with her. I actually missed Chris now. Chris, the out of the ordinary boy who I’d now spent two lunch hours and an art class with.

  At least he smiled every time I met him. And I could talk to him. I didn’t know what he understood yet, but at least he seemed more interested in me than my own mother.

  By our second lunch hour together we had settled into a bit of a routine. Chris smiled his huge, trademark smile when I came in, and for the first few minutes his excited limbs filled the small room. I’d learned to wait until he settled again before we started to eat.

  Then I had to concentrate a bit to make sure that I actually got some food into Chris without impaling him with the spoon and with keeping the place reasonably food free. Then I’d take all of the dishes and laundry to the little kitchen where the special meals were heated up and the special dishes and laundry washed.

  That usually left us with ten or fifteen minutes before the end of lunch. For some reason I couldn’t help myself from rambling on and on. It wasn’t even like I was filling uncomfortable silence anymore either. I’d learned that being quiet while Chris ate helped him to stay still. I was okay with that quiet.

  It was more that he looked at me expectantly when we had that time left at the end of lunch, and it made me just talk.

  ‘Well, you know how I told you about the thing with Lisa and Sarah?’ Chris had given me a bit of a grin at that. I didn’t know if it was just the sound of my voice that he liked or what. The way Florence talked to Chris, it seemed he couldn’t understand much. But he seemed happy, so I just kept talking.

  ‘I still have to take the bus with Lisa, but it’s like the other day never, ever happened. She doesn’t even look in my direction when I get on the bus. I don’t know what that means. Do you?’ I had looked at Chris, hoping that he magically had some insight into the intricacies of social interaction that I lacked. He’d raised his eyebrows, but I couldn’t be sure that was a movement he meant to make.

  ‘I’m more afraid to run into Sarah. I thought she was interested in being my friend, not just curious about my mom …’

  It felt strangely good to talk to Chris. These were thoughts that I usually pushed to the back of my brain and here they were tumbling out of my mouth.

  I sat in the hospital chair and tried to blink back my tears of disappointment. One of the nurses behind the glassed in counter came out and pulled another chair beside me. She took my hand and gave it a squeeze.

  ‘It can be a bit frightening when your mom isn’t well, can’t it?’

  I opened my mouth to dispute this. I wasn’t scared. I was sad. Nothing to do with Mom being unwell, just sadness about Mom being the way she was all the time, and wishing that she was different somehow. I wished that she could, just once in a while, look at me like Chris did when I started to talk. I wished that she wanted to know how I felt and what I thought. I closed my mouth without voicing this though. What was the point? It was never going to change.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘So, I went to see my mom yesterday, Chris.’ We were halfway through his bowl of diced up pasta, and it was a good eating day. It wasn’t taking too much of my concentration to make the target, so I could talk at the same time as feeding him.

  ‘It didn’t go well. I love her and all, but sometimes I just wish I could wake up one day and she’d be normal, all better.’ I felt a little guilty for this emerging pattern of long monologues at lunch. Maybe I was more similar to Mom than I thought. Chris didn’t seem to mind though. At least he was stiller when I talked on and on.

  ‘It isn’t even like she has this real mental illness. If she was schizophrenic or bipolar I could at least say that to people. I got this pamphlet once about teaching people not to be afraid of mental illness. Basically it said if people took their medication they were like everyone else.’ Chris was watching me intently.

  ‘It made me laugh. That’s not my mom. She’s so screwed up she’s had all the labels for a time and none of them stuck. Now it’s just “non specific psychiatric illness”,’ I continued. ‘And do you know what that means, Chris? It means ‘we haven’t got a clue and we don’t know how to fix it’.’

  Chris flashed me his trademark lopsided grin and one leg spasmed in an enthusiastic kick. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I could swear he had a sense of humour and found my description quite funny.

  I finally asked Mr Jenkins how much Chris understood. I caught him in the hallway as I headed to see Dr Sharon after helping Chris with his lunch.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ I was feeling less and less shy with the adults in the SE, as everyone here seemed to abbreviate the wing.

  ‘Fire away.’ He was carrying an armful of dirty bibs and towels. The SE even had its own washing machine. So much of this part of the
school was about everything other than learning.

  ‘What does Chris understand? Is he, like, retarded?’ I knew this probably wasn’t the politically correct term. Just like ‘crazy’ was never supposed to be used; it was ‘psychiatric illness’, as if using different words wiped the craziness clean away.

  ‘His label, Jo? Everyone has one here, and reams of reports dating all the way back to when they were born.’ Mr Jenkins tried to move on but I stood still, waiting for the answer.

  ‘Chris’s label is Cerebral Palsy. He didn’t get enough oxygen when he was being born. It affected every part of him profoundly, including his brain.’

  ‘Does that mean he can’t understand anything I say?’

  ‘Does it matter? He’s happy with you, Jo. You just keep doing what you’re doing, and Chris’s sweet personality will keep shining through. We don’t value people on the basis of their IQ around here.’

  I wasn’t sure if it mattered or not. It wasn’t that I thought less of him if he wasn’t able to understand much, and Mr Jenkins had as much as said he couldn’t. It was just that I found myself telling Chris things that I never told anyone. Mostly it was because I didn’t think Chris understood much that I felt that I could talk to him. But there was a small part of me that longed for him to be the friend that finally understood me.

  It seemed that Mondays were going to be Dr Sharon days. Only the time was different from the last week.

  I arrived into Dr Sharon’s empty little room fresh from lunch with Chris, happy to be missing P.E., but not sure what I was going to talk about.

  ‘So?’ Dr Sharon asked, her stillness so starkly opposite to Chris’s movement, yet almost equally silent. Why was it so much easier to fill the silence with words when I was with Chris now, and yet not have a single word to speak to this counsellor, when the whole point was to talk?

  ‘Well,’ I started tentatively, ‘thanks for making that lunch time thing happen.’

  Dr Sharon smiled.

  ‘It sounds as if it were you that made that happen.’

  I couldn’t disagree. In this one area of my life I felt in control of something for the first time ever. I could make Chris smile. I was guiding his hand to create abstract paintings. I had conquered my fears of something new and that was leading to this new feeling of belonging, or at least the beginning of it.

  ‘I guess so,’ I agreed. ‘The funny thing is, I think I’d want to help Chris even if I wasn’t there just because…’

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk to Dr Sharon about my trouble with practically everything. I had to admit that she had taken me seriously and she had been able to help me. I felt I probably could trust her, and she just may help me in more ways. Still, it wasn’t easy for me to share how I felt about anything in my life. I just wasn’t used to talking to people about anything that was real, or important or true.

  So I used the forty-five minutes to talk about how much I was enjoying working with Chris. But then, I suppose that this was real, and important, and true.

  The next morning Grandma and I had our first ever fight. It was over the clothes of course.

  On Monday I had dutifully worn the corduroy pants and blouse she had given me. The last two yet-to-be-worn outfits included skirts, and I just couldn’t make myself put on either. I had always felt so awkward wearing any kind of dress or skirt, and Mom of course had never made me wear one.

  Instead, I slipped on my most comfortable pair of jeans and the cool t-shirt I had excitedly purchased in the summer, knowing it was exactly in style.

  I noticed the usual bowl of porridge and a cup of tea when I walked into the kitchen. Grandma was already sitting down drinking her own cup of tea. I sighed.

  ‘To do good to the ungrateful is to throw rose-water into the sea, I notice,’ Grandma quoted.

  ‘It’s just, I don’t even eat breakfast before school.’

  ‘That’s when your mother is here. We eat breakfast together.’ Every bit of life with Grandma had to be her way. No negotiation.

  ‘Oh.’ I could never find the courage to disagree with my solid, stoic grandmother.

  ‘I mean the clothes of course, Jo. I thought you’d appreciate some new things. God knows your mother never finds it in herself to buy any.’

  ‘Can’t you EVER say anything nice about her?!’ I exploded. Anger shot through me and I couldn’t help but let it erupt.

  She looked shocked for a second and then regained her usual neutral expression. I had never raised my voice to her before.

  ‘Well! It is certainly not a good morning.’ She stood up, taking my untouched bowl of porridge to the sink.

  As quickly as I had felt infuriated, my anger turned to guilt. After all, Grandma was only doing her best and didn’t mean to buy me clothes that were horrible. She had left the room quickly though, and I was afraid to follow her to apologise. I was afraid the anger I had felt was too close to the surface still to trust that I could contain it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Three days a week Chris and I went to Art together. We were on our own in a completely different culture when we left the safety of the SE wing.

  It was tricky to push Chris’s chair through the hallways and to manoeuvre through doorways that seemed too narrow for his big chair. I was afraid that I might tip the chair over and then what would I do?

  Plus, I felt that people were staring at us, or trying hard not to look at us. While I had never felt like I fit in, at least the sight of me didn’t scare kids off like Chris in his big blue contraption did. I wondered if he noticed how almost everyone avoided coming too near him. Or was he used to it because he had never known any different? I wished I could ask him how he felt.

  I was learning a lot about Chris in art. He was so different as soon as I wheeled him into the art room. He didn’t smile, keeping his eyes on the paints that I put on the high table. He didn’t look at me at all either. His whole focus was on the task at hand.

  His limbs became less stiff when I put a paintbrush in his hand. I tried to release any of my own thoughts when I supported him to paint. It was freeing, because all of me disappeared and I was just facilitating his creativity, at least I thought I might be. It was still me that led his hand to the red or the blue. But I was learning that in subtle ways he did make his own decisions. If I paid attention to the tension in his arm I would know what colour he might be choosing. Go toward the green, resistance. Go toward the yellow, his arm moved easily that way. But it was guessing, and I found that as soon as I started questioning myself I was less certain that Chris was telling me anything.

  We worked in the corner of the art room, where there was a table that could be adjusted to fit over Chris’s wheelchair. Everyone else sat at two long tables. Mr Jenkins had said that this was an ‘integrated’ class for Chris, and with me assisting him it might mean that kids would interact more with him than if Florence was with him. It didn’t seem like I was going to make any difference though.

  The kids in this class were in the grade above me and even though I’d gone to elementary school with many of them, not one of them had ever said hello to me this year. And they didn’t now. In fact they didn’t even look at me or Chris. It was as if we were invisible. And yet I just knew by the way they whispered to each other that we definitely weren’t. I glanced at Chris to see if he felt as out of place as I did, but if he did he didn’t show it.

  At least the rest of the class was painting too, but that’s where the similarities ended. Everyone else was working on copying a print of a famous artist of their choosing. Chris didn’t have a print to copy.

  The teacher didn’t come around to him either. The week before he had pointed out Chris’s cupboard. No one else had a cupboard.

  ‘This is where Chris’s art materials are kept. You can ask me for more if you run out.’ This had been directed at me, with no interaction with him. While Florence might be too babying with him, I thought it was probably better than ignoring him completely. I didn’t see how this was
teaching, or how I was going to get credit for what I was doing.

  I talked quietly to Chris; imaging that he had a plan for his painting.

  ‘Ok. Blue is good. It looks quite calming so far. Should we go with a bit of complimentary colour?’ I guided his hand toward the green paint on the pallet, but felt his arm stiffen, before a spasm gripped it, resulting in a wide strip of blue paint down my cheek. If I had been in the SE, I probably would have laughed, but two boys at the nearest table chuckled instead. I wiped the paint away, without looking at them and without even smiling. It wasn’t funny anymore.

  ‘Okay. You show me then. Which colour?’ I moved his arm slowly, feeling for where he might want it to stop. Orange. He gripped the paint brush tightly and moved his arm himself to deliver a thick circle of paint to the corner of his paper. This was another difference. All of the other kids were painting on canvas. Not Chris. He got primary school paper.

  I supposed the two paintings I had helped him to paint didn’t look like much. They certainly could be primary school paintings. Still, they didn’t seem to just be random swipes of paint. Each was quite different from the other. Different colours, different brush strokes. And I had learned straight away that Chris was not happy to have a paper taken before it was fully covered in paint.

  During our first class I had taken away the paper after it was covered with a few strokes, thinking that it was getting a bit messy, and I could just keep giving him new papers to do a few brush strokes on. He had flailed wildly and I had not been able to guide his hand to any paint. After a few minutes of attempting, I had taken the brush from him, thinking he was tired of painting. He had then swept the second paper off the table with his better arm.

  The first painting was just out of his reach on the table, but while I had washed out brushes at the sink, Chris had jerked and rocked toward it until he could trap a corner of the paper under his hand. When I returned, he was sitting as still as he could, the corner firmly under his knuckles. I had sat down, unsure of how to fill the rest of the time if he didn’t seem to want to paint.