the breakdown—as if we hadn't lived them ourselves.
And even though having four young kids was part of what had crushed her ability to cope, it was just on the other side of her depression that she became pregnant with Janet, who was born about six months before I turned nine. We all think getting pregnant again helped bring her back. She was totally excited. We moved to a bigger and nicer apartment just up the street, where there'd be more room for the baby. And when Janet arrived, we were all overjoyed. A new sister. Mom was happy again, finally. Dad smiled because Mom was smiling. We didn't know it was a brief interlude, and that not too long after Janet was born, Steve would begin his long descent into insanity.
· · ·
When we moved to Brattleboro, I started going to Green Street School. It was just down the hill from the rented apartment where we lived. Despite my being a good student, school was sometimes an anxiety-provoking proposition. Like so many kids, I never felt I was smart enough, and I worried about it all the time. I fretted about the possibility of bad grades, but more than that I worried about looking stupid. Fourth grade arithmetic with Miss Larkin (although my friend Judy insists it was Miss Lawrence not Miss Larkin) was especially torturous. When it came to memorizing the multiplication tables, I was bound in knots of misery. We'd work on them in class, study them at home, and work on them more in class.
Miss Larkin's favored technique was to randomly call on students to stand up and recite whichever table she dictated: “Wally, recite the 7s table for us.” Or “Joyce, the 9s table.” The lucky ones got the 2s or 3s. She'd stand at the front of the class, stout and gray-haired, peering at her victims through steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
Most would try to avoid her eyes, hoping she'd call on someone else. Sooner or later Miss Larkin would get to everyone, and you'd be the one standing up—a deer in the headlights of her piercing eyes. How I hated that part of class with its potential for public humiliation. Not surprisingly at all, I hate math. However, I do remember my times tables.
Miss Larkin made a lasting mark on me and looms large in my psyche. To this day there are times when I'm asked a direct question and I go into deer-in-the-headlights mode and blank out. Most recently, this happened when I was part of a small editing team working on an annual landmine report with my husband, Steve Goose, who created the report and, for its first six years, served as its editor in chief.
Once I'd finish editing a chapter, he'd go over it, peppering me with questions: “How do you know this is correct?” “What's the source of this fact?” “This paragraph actually makes sense to you as it's written? You left it like this?”
At first frustrated and then angry as the questions kept coming, I could sometimes answer them and sometimes not. After all, I wasn't the researcher; I was just helping edit. But Goose's machinelike dissection of the issues and command of the information produced an endless barrage that would send me over the edge. My face would flush and I'd start to sweat.
Suddenly, in the midst of one such editorial inquisition, a vision of Miss Larkin popped into my head. And I started to laugh. Goose wasn't particularly amused when I first explained the comparison. Now when I feel like I'm being harangued with questions on any topic, I give him my fish-eye look of disdain and call him “Miss Larkin.” He doesn't miss the point.
· · ·
During the year of Miss Larkin, a new kid moved to town. Michael was an especially pathetic specimen of gawky grade-school youth. His ears stuck straight out from his head like those of Dumbo the flying elephant, or like Mary Beth's when she was young. The poor kid was also so pale he was nearly translucent, was incredibly skinny, and had no redeeming athletic abilities whatsoever. No one ever wanted to get stuck on a team with Michael during recess. He was the kind of kid who always got picked last.
David, on the other hand, was the blond, blue-eyed stud of Green Street School. He was the biggest, most athletic, smartest boy there. It's likely that every girl in grade school had a crush on him, and maybe even I did too, but that's not why I remember him.
He lorded it over everyone on the playground. Self-appointed king of recess, David was always team captain no matter what the game, and he chose the best players for his own team. He played to win. Not a gracious winner, he was likely an even worse loser. But who'd know? David never lost at anything.
One day, our class was making a large circle in order to play kick ball. As Michael shuffled his way into line, David, with a dash of machismo tinged with nasty, jumped in front of him. He chortled as his chest bump sent Michael out of the circle, arms swinging wildly as he tried to keep his balance. Michael's head was already hanging in shame, and he seemed to get even smaller as he backed farther away without a word.
I wasn't a friend of geeky Michael, but I couldn't stand to watch David humiliate him so brazenly. I wanted Michael to defend himself. He could talk! But he wouldn't. And why did we let David get away with it, sheep in the presence of the big guy's power, which we conceded to him by doing nothing?
That we all stood mute and watched his obnoxious behavior said as much about us as it did about him, and it made me sick. Suddenly I knew if I did nothing, I'd feel like less of a human being, even if I couldn't put it that way at the time. All those catechism lessons—do for others what you would want them to do for you—must have taken root.
Quivering with anger and fear, in unequal proportion, I stepped in front of David. Struggling to control my voice, I asked why he bullied people who couldn't stand up to him. I expected a barbed-tongue response, but David surprised us all when he backed down without protest. He opened up the circle and waved Michael back in.
My insides trembled for the rest of recess, but David seemed to take it in stride. He never harassed me for defending Michael, and he didn't treat him unfairly again. I began to wonder how many others could be helped as easily if people had the courage to stand up to their own fear and take action when they knew it was the right thing to do. It took a long, long time but eventually I recognized that each time I did it, it was easier the next time. (Just for the record, David peaked in grade school.)
· · ·
Not long after I'd conquered my times tables, Steve started to complain about school. The other kids were mean, or they were stupid, or they pushed him during basketball—pretty much the normal complaints of many kids in school. But my brother began losing his unique sense of humor that had developed after the boarding school fiasco. As humor retreated, anger filled its space.
Much of his rising fury was focused on Mom. After all, he thought, it was clearly her fault that he was deaf. “Why me?” he'd sign while yelling at her. “Why can all the rest of your kids hear and talk and not me"? As his anger and complaints increased, he began trying to avoid school.
Steve would come into the kitchen as Mom was rushing to fix us breakfast and make sure we were ready for school. Knowing she was too busy to pay close attention, he'd start signing that he didn't feel well. She fell for it a few times before realizing it was his get-out-of-going-to-school strategy. When Mom began to ignore his complaints and make him go to school, he got more dramatic. He'd come into the kitchen, feign a swoon, and drop to the floor.
Mom would continue whatever she was doing, walking around him or stepping over him without acknowledging him on the floor. The first couple of times he did it, the rest of us thought it was funny and laughed at him. But when she continued to ignore him, he'd jump up and gesticulate furiously, using our family's homemade signing, “Didn't you see what just happened? Didn't you see me faint? Can't you see that I'm sick?” Then we'd sit at the table, trying to be invisible while eating breakfast and hoping his bomb wouldn't go off.
It sounds kind of amusing now, but then there was nothing funny
