you’ve got to tell me all about it,” she said, her tone zesty. “All about what you did with Jade. Did Glen tell you that I’d tried with her? Two blessed years, almost. I was coming in here every Thursday, trying to get that kid to talk. So, precisely now, what did you do?”
The affinity between us was instant. Talking with Arkie was like picking up a long-forgotten friendship, and before I realized it, we had whiled away the better part of an hour discussing our mutual interests in psychology, education, and disturbed children.
Arkie had been down all the usual routes with Jadie’s mutism. She’d first encountered Jadie just past her fifth birthday, when it was picked up during a prekindergarten screening program. “I just wanted to gain her confidence,” Arkie said. “Here was this little, wee mite of a thing under all that hair. She looked so scared and vulnerable when I came that first day. I took her down to the nurse’s office, where I usually work when I’m here, and I said to her, ‘Honey, we’re going to be friends. We’re going to come in here and do things together and have a real good time. And it doesn’t matter if you can’t manage talking right away, because we’ll be friends anyhow.’ And I just assumed once she got to know me, once she felt secure enough to trust me, she’d begin talking. I thought she’d want to talk to me. But she didn’t. We played all these shitty little games Thursday after Thursday, ’til I wanted to brain the child.”
From there, Arkie’s relationship with Jadie had deteriorated into the same sort of power struggle June Harriman had experienced later. Indeed, it was Arkie’s frustration that led to Jadie’s placement in this class. “I still don’t know if it was the right move,” she said. “I mean, she’s always done all right academically. She’s a bright enough kid. I think her IQ scores have always been one twelve, one sixteen, somewhere in there, and she’s functioning about there in her schoolwork. So was this the right move? If the mutism was not interfering with her learning, should she get stuck in a special class?”
I gave a faint shrug. “Good question. And hard to answer. Certainly she merited intervention, which lots of times these kids don’t get simply because they don’t cause adults much trouble. However, any kind of voluntary mutism, if it persists over months or years, shows a disturbing need to control.” I looked over. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, of course, is control what? Any ideas?”
“Not really.”
“What’s the family like?”
A shrug. “Pretty average. There’s Mom, Dad, two younger girls. Traditional setup. Mom stays home with the kids. Dad has a job doing something with agricultural machinery. Socioeconomically, they’re definitely in the lower bracket, but they’re by no means poor.”
“What about the psychological makeup of the family?”
A pause. Arkie considered her fingernails. “I don’t think Mom’s too bright. Sort of a go-alonger. You know the type. Anything you tell her, she goes along with. But she’s easy to get on with. Dad’s a bit quirky. Into health food in a big way. Got really het up because we served pork and beans in school lunches. I think he thinks Jadie’s problems are coming from eating too much sugar or additives or something.”
“Elective mutism as an allergy,” I murmured and smiled. “That’s a new one on me.”
“Yeah, a bit silly. But basically, both of them are easy to get along with. I’ve had much worse parents to deal with in my time.”
“Tell me something else,” I said, changing the subject. “Has anyone investigated her posture? Does she have scoliosis?”
“No,” Arkie replied bluntly. “I think it’s just part of her emotional problems. We’ve had the school nurse look at her, and of course her own pediatrician has seen her, but no one’s found anything to explain it. I think she’s just a closed-up kid in all senses of the word.”
The majority of the time, Jadie walked nearly doubled over. She kept her arms up under her, tucked against her chest, her hands dangling limply unless she carried something. While she kept her head up sufficiently to see, she would have to keep it at an awkward angle to see much, so most of the time she peered through her eyebrows and the tangled dark hair hanging over her forehead. This made looking Jadie in the eye an almost impossible task. The bent-over posture took its toll on her gait, too, and she moved about the classroom in a mincing hobble.
This physical behavior perplexed me. While it was not uncommon for the children in my elective mutism research to exhibit a tendency to keep their limbs close in and otherwise take on an inhibited posture, none had even faintly approached Jadie’s florid display. Despite Arkie’s assurance that Jadie had been properly examined by doctors and the problem seemed to be purely psychological, I remained skeptical, because, plain and simple, Jadie looked deformed.
One morning not long after Arkie and I had talked, I found myself watching Jadie as she went about her work. “Jadie?” I called. “Come over here, please.”
Turning from the bookshelf, Jadie hobbled over.
I turned her around to face away from me and asked her to bend over and touch her ankles. This she cautiously did and, lifting her shirt, I studied the outline of her shoulders to reassure myself there was no evidence of scoliosis. Then I asked her to stand and turn around to face me. Doing so, she tilted her head to one side to see me better.
Very gently, I put one hand on her collar bone and the other in the middle of her back. “Let’s see you stand up a little straighter.” Carefully, I urged her upright.
I felt very unsure of myself in doing this and the uncertainty must have come through my hands, because I quickly met resistance. Reluctant to push harder in case I might do damage, I stopped and lowered my hands. “These muscles here,” I said, indicating her lower back, “can you relax them?” Gently, I massaged along her spine with my fingertips, but it was like touching clothed stone. The more I touched her, the tenser she became. At last I dropped my hand.
“Does it hurt you when I push like that?”
“I don’t want to.”
“But does it hurt?”
“No.”
“So, will you show me that you can stand up straight?”
She shook her head.
“If I take my hands right away and don’t touch you, can you straighten up?”
“No.”
“Why? Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Well, why then?”
“Because I need to bend over.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to.”
“But why?”
“To keep my insides from falling out.”
The following week, I made an appointment to see Jadie’s parents, and since they lived
