Chapter 46: Off-Center
“This is our schedule,” Ivy told me pointing to the painter’s stick hot glued to the far wall. “It tells us what we’re gonna do an-”
“I know, Ivy,” I interrupted. “I know.” Ten painter’s sticks were glued to the wall. A strip of fuzzy Velcro going from top to bottom. At the top of each stick was a given Little’s picture. Beneath the picture from top to bottom were laminated card symbols stuck to the Velcro. Unlike the Amazon grade tapes holding my diaper on, even a Little could pull the laminated shape off.
I ripped the upper most symbol above my pouting face. It took me a second to realize where the photo had come from. It was close cropped, laminated and the background was cut out, but from the look on my mug, I guessed it was from my first morning in Janet’s bathtub.
Lovely. Just lovely. Typical.
“So this is a red circle,” I continued. “That means I’m supposed to go to the table or work station with a red circle, right?”
Ivy grabbed her own red circle, beneath her smiling portrait. The card stock was thick enough and laminated enough that even a Little who’d lost most of their fine motor skills could manage to peel the shape off without doing too much damage. “That’s right!” she beamed. “How’d you know? Do you got sidekick powers or something?”
I didn’t know whether the malapropism was a weird language barrier leftover from her time in Yamatoa, or whether her vocabulary had been that far regressed to the point where she couldn’t say ‘psychic’.
“No,” I told her. “I just already know.”
A visual schedule is a great tool for young children. The student doesn’t need to be able to read since they’re just matching up an emblem from the paint stick to the emblem at a table, workstation or play area. They don’t have to be time or number literate either or have great tracking skills. Just take the top emblem off first, and when it’s time for the second activity, it’s the new top emblem. And because of that, a teacher had the ability to move children around in differentiated groups depending on the activity, and once trust was ensured, students could work independently and in small groups.
“Who told you?” Ivy asked. “It’s my job to help you out today. Mommy said so! Was it Chaz? I bet it was Chaz!”
I frowned. “Mrs. Beouf taught me,” I said. “Years ago. Back when I was…”
Damn. I’d just made myself sad.
Speaking of which, “Ivy! Clark!” I looked past Ivy and saw a too friendly Beouf waving us over to her kidney table.
Great.
Awful.
I walked from the schedule wall over that was adjacent to where the circle time area had been and over to the kidney table. A plastic mesh basket waited for us, and I threw my card inside, grabbed a chair and sat down.
So weird. Unsettling even. Different and similar.
Her room was nearly identical to mine in how it was set up. She had her table to work with ‘students’. Zoge had hers. Between them and off to the side was an unmanned table with some kind of independent activity to work with. To Beouf’s left was a built in toy shelf with painters tape marking the boundaries of a play area. To Zoge’s right was a nook filled with bean bags, stuffed animals and well worn books for quiet reading.
Up on the board where circle time was held, was a timer: A red circle that gradually wound down before beeping. To know how much time was left was just a matter of glancing at the slowly expiring circle.
Speaking of time, the room had a kind of clockwork precision. Billy and Jesse dumped out some collection of puzzle pieces at the independent workstation. Mrs. Zoge was doling out clay to who I would learn was Shauna and Mandy. Tommy and Sandra Lynn made themselves comfy over by the books and beanbags, preferring to cuddle and snooze than actually read. Chaz and Annie crawled and played with dolls, blocks and toy trucks to my right.
People talked, but it was that organized non-disruptive talk that you only get in a well structured setting. It was only the second week, too. If I could have gotten my own children to be this disciplined by the end of October, I’d have called it a miracle.
But oh yeah, many in Beouf’s caseload had been here for several years; more than long enough to internalize routines and expectations. Oh yeah, and we weren’t actually children. Oh. And my students were actually learning, not being forced to pantomime the steps so that insane Mommies and Daddies could play house with us forever.
My so-called mentor only had to pretend to do what I actually did for a living. That made me angry. Good. Angry felt stronger than sad.
Angry or not, sitting down at the teacher table was weird. I felt weird and out of place, and for once it had nothing to do with the diaper…though just thinking that made me scoot in more. I’d lost count of how many times I’d sat in one of these chairs, almost directly across from where Beouf was now sitting. But the things we talked about wasn’t colors and alphabet sounds or whatever she was about to shove down my throat…
“Here you, go.” Ivy slid a plastic bottle over to me. “For you.”
I looked at it. True enough, it had my name written on it in permanent marker. Might’ve been the bottle that had been shoved in my mouth last week. “Thanks? But I just had some milk at breakfast?”
“You carry it with you,” Ivy giggled. “Our bottles are at our first tables every morning. We carry them with us. It’s so we can have a drink whenever we get thirsty since we can’t reach the sink.”
I looked to Beouf. She was busy sorting cardboard squares into even rows. A memory game of some kind. She nodded without looking up.
That was something different. I didn’t have that equivalent in my room. I shifted and heard soft plastic rustling beneath my bottom. I wasn’t trying to get my kids to pee themselves on the regular, either.
Ivy took a sip. So did I. I wasn’t getting pants put back on me until my diaper was changed again. And I had the lingering suspicion that it was possible to be wet but not ‘wet enough’. How awful would it be, being marched back out in public with a drooping diaper swinging between my thighs with every step?
Might as well load up. That and some part of my own muscle memory associated having something in my hand when sitting at this table. It was no coffee cup, but…
“Ready to play connection?” Beouf asked.
Ivy bounced in her seat and clapped her hands. “Yes yes yes yes! I love this game!”
I took another sip from the bottle and swallowed my disgust. I had the distinct feeling that Ivy would love everything we did today.
“Is it like memory?” I asked.
The Amazon nodded. “Yes. A lot like memory. You flip over a card and look at it. Then you flip over another. If you find a picture that goes with the first, you get a point.”
I spared Ivy a glance. She was still in her own world, excited to find a game to play. “So…like a postal worker and an envelope?” I asked. I’d done similar games when teaching basic community social studies. Fireman went with a hydrant. Police officer went with a squad car. An EMT went with a hospital.
“That’s one example.”
“Or a choo-choo train and a bird!” Ivy said. “Or a rocketship and a trombone! Or a dog and the color green!” Ivy was proof that you don’t have to be good at something to like it.
“Clark? Would you like to go first?”
Nothing left to it but to do it. “Sure.” I reached out and flipped over the first cardboard tile. My skin started burning. “A safety pin…” It didn’t matter that babying technology had well advanced beyond the old pin and folded cloth, the association was still there. I hadn’t seen what the other tiles were, but I had the sinking feeling that I’d be forced to sort through rattles, and cribs, and cartoon babies whose ages were counted in decades…
I grumbled to myself and flipped another tile over. A bright yellow wedge of cheese greeted me. How about that? Satisfaction at losing. “Nope. No match.” I flipped them back over and shrugged at Beouf.
My former friend seemed bemused. Leave it to an Amazon to think that random chance meant lack of skill. How typical.
“Awww,” Ivy said. She gave me a pat on the back that almost hurt. “That’s okay Clark. You’ll do better next time.”
She reached for the same tiles that I’d just flipped over. “Safety-pin! Cheese!” It was a common mistake that my three year olds made the first time they played memory match games. They’d just copy whatever one of my four year olds did instead of experimenting with new options. This was going to be a long game. “I got one!”
I did a literal double take as Ivy took the pair of tiles and stacked them together as if they were a match. “Good job, Ivy!” Beouf said. She took a chalky tablet from a nearby candy dish and popped it right into Ivy’s mouth. “You’re so clever!” Ivy practically purred and chomped down on the pill. She grabbed her bottle of water with both hands and took some gulps.
Like the Vye-king god Thore, she practically slammed down the bottle back on the table. She might as well have been spiking a football and doing a touchdown dance. I raised my hand slightly above my head, but didn’t wait to be called on. “How is cheese and a safety pin connected?”
Bouef looked over to the mindfucked Little doll. “Ivy?”
Ivy picked up the tiles and practically shoved them in my face. “See the holes in the cheese?”
I jerked back. “Yeeeah?”
“See the pointy end of the diaper pin?”
“Yeah…”
“The pointy part poked the holes in the cheese!”
“That’s right!” Beouf beamed.
“But why didn’t I get to keep those?” I asked.
Beouf explained to me. “You didn’t make the connection.”
A new dawn of understanding came to me: Bullshit. This game was utterly bullshit. It was a game of bullshit that encouraged you to make bullshit up and bullshit with the utmost confidence. Which in a weird way made sense to me. Why teach Littles facts and object permanency and memorization exercises when they’d never get to use those facts.
“Can I try again?” I asked Beouf. “Or is this a make it take it situation?”
“It’s your turn,” she said. “If it was make it take it, Ivy would never stop and get allllll the candies.”
“Oh…” I said. “Yeah.” Duh. Shame. Would’ve been nice not to play. Not an option though. Janet would get a report at the end of the day.
I flipped over two tiles. It didn’t matter which two. “A sponge and a vacuum cleaner…”
Ivy’s hand shot up. “Oh I know, I know!”
“Wait your turn, baby girl.”
The sponge and a vacuum cleaner. Something that I might’ve wished for during the first round. Easy enough. Both were household cleaning implements. But now that I knew the rules…I wondered.