room after a game, regardless of how clever I or Dana or anyone else might be about changing his behavior. Ordinary people just aren’t that accepting.
Kevin never would set the world on fire in the looks department. He was sort of your basic model ugly kid. But if his hair hadn’t looked like someone had tested their lawn mower on it and his clothes fit and he washed, he had the potential to be a whole lot closer to average.
Unfortunately, I quickly learned that many of Kevin’s problems were beyond my control. His hair, for instance. It was the old buzz job up the back and around the sides, leaving one long lock hanging over his forehead. It looked like a grown-out Mohican. Unfortunately, all the boys at Garson Gayer looked like that. Zoe, the cook, brought in her clippers once a month and gave all the fellows a workover. But there wasn’t much to be done about it. She was free and she was there. I didn’t know any barbers at all, particularly ones who made house calls. And I couldn’t cut hair myself. I had tried once when I was a teacher at a state hospital, and one of my boys complained about looking like a girl. So I took the school shears from my desk and gave him a trim and, while he no longer would be mistaken for a girl, it ended any ideas I might have had about a potential future in hairdressing.
Kevin’s clothes were about as bad as his haircut. They were obviously thirdhand and at least ten years out of style. This wouldn’t have mattered much if it weren’t that they were so small for him. One shirt’s sleeves couldn’t be buttoned because they came so far up on his wrists that the cuffs wouldn’t fit around that part of his arm. He owned no pants that covered the tops of his socks. Worse, the pants were all too tight in the crotch. In the beginning, I had thought he was constantly masturbating. As it turned out, he was simply trying to pull the pants down a little to allow himself to sit comfortably. This daily torture was almost more than I could bear to watch.
Perhaps worst of all was Kevin’s skin. It could have kept a dermatologist in business for life. He had acne everywhere, undoubtedly aggravated by the fact that he did not wash. There were pimples on his cheeks, on his nose, on his chin, on his forehead, even on his ears. In the bad places, his pimples seemed to have pimples. It was gruesome to have to sit really near him, forced to view such devastation at close range, and I could only imagine, if it repulsed me, what it would do to strangers.
Clearly Kevin’s appearance and hygiene were areas for some definite overhauling, and as we grew more comfortable with one another, I mulled over methods of approaching it. However, before embarking on any wild schemes of improvement, I wanted to enlist the cooperation of Dana and the Garson Gayer staff who supervised the rest of Kevin’s day.
We were in a team meeting when I brought it up. I pointed out my reasoning on the matter, that it would make him more pleasant to be with, that it would reduce people’s negative image of him, that it would eliminate some of the prejudices surrounding this boy because he looked so retarded and disturbed when, indeed, I would not be surprised to find his IQ quite close to average, and that undoubtedly it would improve Kevin’s own self-esteem, since no one likes to think of himself as ugly.
These were reasonable objectives, I said, if we all worked together. Certainly, there must be a physician affiliated with Garson Gayer who could prescribe treatment for his skin. There had to be state money coming in for a clothing allowance. When had his eyes been tested last? And his hair … well, I inquired politely, could we give Zoe a vacation from that task for just a little while?
Here was an area where I met unexpected opposition. Or rather, apathy. Dana said forthrightly that she had been looking at Kevin for so long that she’d gotten used to him. Not too much under there anyway. He never would be Mr America. No, I agreed, and I didn’t expect a Mr America. But there was no reason for him to look like something off the back ward at the state hospital either. Someone at the table shrugged when I said that. He shrugged again when I looked at him. Why bother? he said. That time would come soon enough.
Dana had another counter, one which I couldn’t so easily dismiss. Why get him new clothes when he refused to wash or even change without a struggle? They’d be ruined in a few weeks. How would you get him to a dermatologist or an opthalmologist when he wouldn’t leave the building? Why put him through all that hassle when he didn’t care?
How did we know he didn’t care? I bet he did, I said, and my voice sounded weak in my own ears. We didn’t know. Kevin seemed quite happy in his filthy, unkempt state. He certainly never remarked on it to me. Maybe it didn’t matter. So, for the time being at least, I gave up that effort. Maybe I just realized what everyone else there had known, even though it wasn’t said. What did it matter to a kid like Zoo-boy? Where was he going anyway?
The other issue was less easily dismissed. Fear.
Fear lived with us like a third party. It had a life of its own. It ruled us; it tyrannized us. I came after a while to think of it not as a part of Kevin but as a separate entity. It bullied him and it bullied me. And try as we would to overcome it, if we ventured too far – whap! – it drew us up sharp like misbehaving puppies on leashes. Kevin would immediately be reduced to a shivering, quivering, teary mass and the next time he would be terrified to try whatever had frightened him the time before.
The fears were funny things – funny-odd. I never knew from one day to the next what things might evoke fear in him. Like the spirals on the notebooks that he’d imagined were lurking in that box. Or door hinges. He could go berserk with terror over a squeaky door hinge. Or squeaky chairs. I became a master at improvising squeak-stoppers. I used everything from pencil lead, ground fine between my fingers, to lipstick. And smells were terrifying. Sharp, pungent odors frightened Kevin and odors are an almost impossible thing to get away from. More than once I resorted to carefully stuffing bits of cotton up his nostrils so that he would not be able to smell some infinitesimally faint odor in the room.
After a point I felt like a squirrel on a treadmill. Yet, how ever bad it might have been for me, no doubt it was much worse for Kevin.
‘Sometimes, I lay in bed at night,’ he said to me one day. ‘You know how it is when you’re in bed and it’s dark. They leave a light on in the hallway but we can’t have them in our rooms after ten o’clock. And it makes shadows. That light in the hallway does, and regular things, they stretch all out. I lay there and I look at them and I think, you know, these are just regular things. That’s just my desk. Or that’s just a chair. But they don’t look that way then. They look like something else.’
He turned to glance briefly at me. His voice, as always, was very soft. When Kevin spoke, it sounded more as if he were talking only to himself, half aloud, and not to me at all. It was always in such a quiet, almost dreamy manner – the way my thoughts sounded when I heard them inside my head.
‘They look the way people look,’ he said. ‘You know, people you thought liked you who suddenly you know don’t really. The chairs and desk and stuff, they change in the darkness. Like people change. And I lay in my bed and I think, you know, this is the way the chair really is. The way it looks in daytime, that’s just a foolie. It looks that way to make me think it’s all right. But it’s an ugly thing, a chair at night is. And I know even in the day that it’s ugly underneath. It will be ugly again, when I’m alone with it. When it’s dark. The chair’ll be ugly.’
A small silence came between us. Morning sun bathed over me and I was warm.
‘I’m scared of chairs,’ Kevin said. When I said nothing, he glanced at me. Then down at the floor where he fiddled with some unseen thing in the carpet. ‘I try not to be scared of things. I try to fight it. But I’m not good at it. It’s everywhere at once. It’s like fighting the night.’
November came. Without the holidays to mark the passing of time as they did in school, the days and weeks got away from me and the months could pass
