The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her. Torey Hayden
been up to over the interceding years, about my other classes of children since leaving the one we had shared, about my stints at graduate school, and about the change to the clinic in the city. And about writing the book.
“I have it in my car,” I said. “I want you to read it.”
“A book?” she said incredulously. “You wrote a book? I didn’t know you could write.”
I shrugged.
“It’s got me in it? Our class? God. Weird.” Then a slight smile. “That’s, like, mega-weird, you know?”
“You need to be prepared for the fact that it’s going to sound a little different to what really happened. Everybody’s gone on from there, so it wouldn’t really be right to invade people’s privacy. Consequently, I’ve had to change the names and things and put some events out of order, but still, I think you’ll recognize everything.”
“This is so weird. A book? About me?”
“Anyway, I want your thoughts on it,” I said. “It is your story, well, yours and mine, but you’re the big part in it. I wouldn’t want to include anything you didn’t think was right.”
She smiled. “It doesn’t matter much. I hardly remember a thing about it.”
“Oh, you will,” I said and grinned back.
She shrugged, her expression still benevolent. “You got to keep in mind, Torey, that I was nothing but a little kid then. That all happened more than half my life ago. Like, I’m going to love to read this, but if you want to know the truth, you could write anything you want. Honest, I remember nothing.”
“God, did it really happen like this?” Sheila asked, a curiously amazed tone to her voice. It was the following Saturday. We were in her bedroom and she was curled up, the pages of the manuscript fanned out around her.
Smiling, I nodded.
“Wow, you were pretty brave to take me on, if I was like this.”
“A lot of people thought that at the time. I did a bit myself, sort of.”
“It wasn’t your choice, was it? They just said you got to take … me.” She looked back down at the sheaf of papers. “I think I might remember Anton now. I didn’t when you first mentioned him the other day, when we were at the Dairy Queen, but reading this kind of brings him back to mind.”
“You know what he’s doing now?” I asked. “He’s working on his master’s degree in special education. He works with mentally handicapped children and has had his own classroom for three years now.”
Sheila looked up. “God, you’re really proud of him, aren’t you? I can tell by your voice.”
“I think it’s amazing, what he’s achieved. That’s taken hard work. He’s had a young family to support through all of this and his whole history had been with the migrant workers.”
Regarding the typewritten pages, Sheila didn’t speak for a few moments. “All I can recall is this really tall Mexican guy. He seemed like about seven feet tall to me then, but I don’t remember a thing about what he did.”
“Do you remember Whitney?” I asked.
“No. But I do recall that time with the rabbit poop. I remember painting all those little balls. God, it’d disgust me now. Imagine. I was actually picking up shit with my bare hands.” She laughed. “What a disgusting kid.”
I laughed too.
“The weird thing is, you never think you are when it’s happening to you,” Sheila added. “I remember being really serious about painting those things.”
“What about Chad?” I asked. “My boyfriend, the one who defended you at the hearing? Remember him?” I asked, but before she could answer I grinned. “Guess what? He’s married now and he has three kids. And guess what he’s named his oldest girl?”
A blank look. “No idea.”
“Sheila.”
“After me?” she asked in amazement.
“Yes, after you. I mean, he thought the world of you. We had such a marvelous time that night after the hearing.”
A pause followed. Sheila glanced down again at the pages in her hand and appeared to be reading the top one for a moment. “Shit. Shit. This is just so weird. I can’t get over it.”
“Weird in what way?”
“I dunno. Seeing my name here. It’s somebody else here, really, but it’s me, too.”
“You don’t think I’ve done it right?” I asked.
“Well, no, not that … Maybe it’s just seeing myself as a character in a book … I mean, mega-weird.” Another pause. “You seem real enough. This is just like I remember you. Reading this makes me feel like I’ve been sitting down and having a nice chat with you, but … Was that class really this way?”
“How do you remember it?” I asked.
“Mostly, I don’t. Like I said last week …”
Silence again.
What entered my mind as I listened into the silence was the horrible nature of some of the things that had happened to Sheila over the course of the time she was in my room. In bringing the book here for her approval, I hadn’t given serious consideration to the possibility that she might have dealt with her past by forcing it from memory. Such a reaction seemed un-Sheila-like to me and I hadn’t anticipated it from her. Now, suddenly, I feared for what I had done. It was an upbeat story, but that was from my point of view.
Turning her head, Sheila gazed out the window beside her bed. It was an insignificant view—the side of the neighboring house, its gray-green paint peeling, the neighbor’s window, a venetian blind hanging crookedly across it. She seemed to study it.
I, in turn, studied her with her long, straggly orange hair, her thin, undeveloped body clad in torn jeans and a rather strange, clingy gray top that looked like a piece of my grandpa’s underwear. This gangly punk fashion plate wasn’t quite what I had expected to find and I was having to fight the disappointment.
“What I remember are the colors,” she said very softly, her tone introspective. “As if my whole life had been in black and white, and then I went in that classroom … Bright colors.” She made a little sound. “I always think of them as Fisher-Price colors, you know? The toys? Fisher-Price red and blue and white. All those primary colors. Remember that riding horse you could sit on and move around by pushing with your feet? That’s what I remember. Every single color of him. Of sitting at the table when I was supposed to be working and looking at his colors. And where it said ‘Fisher-Price’ on him. God, I wanted that horse so bad. I used to dream about that horse, about how it was mine, that you let me take it home and keep it.”
I probably would have, had she ever said it meant that much to her, but she never did.
“And that parking garage,” she said. “Remember that? With all those little cars that’d go down the ramps and those little people who didn’t even look like people. They were just plastic pegs with faces, really. Remember how I used to steal them? I was so desperate to have them. I used to line them up on the floor beside where I slept, this whole line of them—the guy in the black top hat, the guy in the cowboy hat, the Indian chief—do you remember me taking them?”
Over the years there had been so many toys in so many classrooms. I remembered garage sets and riding horses, but they could have been any of a dozen such I had had.
“You never got mad at me for it,” she said, turning to look at me. She smiled.