The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her

“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. “I kept stealing them and stealing them and you never got angry with me.”

In the hurly-burly of that class, truth was, I probably hadn’t even noticed she was doing it.

“That’s what seems so weird to me about this book, Torey. You make out like we’re always fighting. Like, in it you seem to be getting mad at me about every other page. I don’t remember you ever doing that.”

I looked at her in surprise.

Then she wrinkled her nose and grinned conspiratorially. “Are you just spicing it up, like? So they’ll want to publish it?”

My jaw dropped.

“I mean, I don’t mind at all. It’s a terribly good story. And, like, it’s brilliant, thinking of myself as a character in a book.”

“But, Sheila, we did fight. We fought all the time. When you came into my class, you—”

Again she turned to look out of the window. Silence ensued and it lasted several moments.

“What exactly do you recall?” I asked at last.

“Like I said …” And then she didn’t say. She was still gazing out of the window and the words just seemed to fade away. A minute or more passed.

“We did fight,” I said softly. “Everybody fights, whatever the relationship, however good it might be. It wouldn’t be a relationship otherwise, because two separate people are coming together. Friction is a natural part of that.”

No response.

“Besides,” I said and grinned, “I was a teacher. What would you expect?”

“Yeah, well,” she said, “I don’t really remember.”

I couldn’t come to terms with the fact Sheila had forgotten so much. Driving home on the freeway that evening, I turned it over and over in my mind. How could she forget Anton and Whitney? How could the whole experience be reduced to nothing more than a fond recollection of colorful plastic toys? This hurt me. It had been such a significant experience for me that I had assumed it had been at least as significant for her. In fact, I had assumed it was probably more significant. Without me, that class, those five months, Sheila most likely would now be on the back ward of some state hospital. I had made a difference. At least that’s what I’d been telling myself. My cheeks began to burn hot, even in the privacy of my car, as I realized the gross arrogance of my assumption. I was further humbled by the insight that those five months might well now mean more to me than to her.

She had been only a very young child. Was I being unrealistic in expecting her to remember much? At the time she had been so exquisitely articulate that it had given her the gloss of a maturity even then I knew she didn’t really have, but I had been accustomed to associating verbal ability with good memory.

As I sped through the darkness, I tried to recollect being six myself. I could bring to mind the names of some of the children in my first-grade class, but mostly it was incidents I could recall. There were a lot of small snippets: a moment lining up for recess, a classmate vomiting into the trash can, a fight over the swings, a feeling of pride because I drew good trees. They weren’t very complete recollections, but if I tried, I could identify the locations and the names and appearance of the individuals involved. Still, they were nothing akin to the clarity of my memories as an adult. I was probably being unrealistic in expecting her to remember more.

Yet, it nagged at me. Sheila wasn’t just any child, but a highly gifted girl who had blown the top right off almost every IQ test the school psychologist had given her that year. Sheila’s prodigious memory had been among the most notable of many outstanding characteristics. She had used it like a crystal ball for gazing in, as she spoke to us all so poignantly, so eloquently of love and hate and rejection.

Love and hate and rejection. It couldn’t be all arrogance on my part to expect that she should be remembering more. Her amnesia seemed so uncharacteristic, but still, it was not hard to imagine what might be causing it. Although I didn’t know any specifics about what had happened since Sheila had left my room, I knew these hadn’t been easy years in between. She had been in and out of foster homes, had moved to different schools and coped with her father’s instability. If these years only half mirrored the nightmare she had been living when she’d come into my class, they would have given her ample reason for forgetting. She’d been such a brave little fighter that I didn’t like to think she had finally buckled under the strain, but in the back of my mind, that’s what I was beginning to accept. Yet … why had she so thoroughly forgotten our class? The one bright spot, the one haven where she had been loved and regarded so well? Why had she forgotten us?

Chapter 10

At home, I rummaged through the things I had accumulated from the class, which I had used to write the book, looking for things to take with me on my next visit to see Sheila. The vast majority of the materials were just school papers and anecdotal records, neither very useful for the purpose. What I really wanted to share were the videotapes, but this was in the era of the old reel-to-reel videotapes and the only machine I had for playing them on was at the clinic; so those would have to wait for the time when Sheila came in to visit me. In the end, I resorted to going through my picture album.

I had surprisingly few photographs of that year. There was the class picture, all of us lined up against the blue curtain on the school stage, looking like felons in a group mug shot. The camera had caught Sheila full on, washing out her pale features. She wouldn’t smile on demand in those days, so she had just a blank stare. Unfortunately, several others in the class had been equally uncooperative and many of them were consequently rendered unrecognizable.

In total, I had only three other photographs of Sheila and these included the individual school picture, taken at the same time as the group photo. I had kept this one, as her father had declined to buy it. It was the only one I’d ever had of her smiling. Normally, she’d simply refused to smile for cameras, but on this occasion, the photographer had tricked her into it while trying to get her to grab his pen. Taken only a short time after she had arrived in our classroom, it caught her full grubby glory and I adored it.

The other two photographs I had taken myself. One was to commemorate the first time I’d really gotten her cleaned up and she sat in deep solemnity on the school steps, hands clasped upon her knees. Her hair was combed smooth and put into pigtails; her clothes were washed; her face was cleaned; and the truth was, it didn’t look like Sheila at all. She was not nearly so engaging as the filthy character in the school photograph. The other picture I had taken on the last day of school when the class had gone down to the park for our end-of-school picnic. I had taken several photographs that day, but unfortunately, Sheila was in only one of them. She was standing beside the duck pond with two of the other little girls in the class. Both of them were neat and clean and beaming cheerfully, but Sheila, in the middle, stared back at the camera with a guarded, almost suspicious gaze. Despite the new orange sunsuit her father had bought for the occasion, she had come to school very scruffy that day, her long hair uncombed, her face unwashed, and she stood in stark contrast to her two classmates. There was a compelling aspect to the photograph, however. It was the wariness of her expression, which made her seem fierce and yet surprisingly vulnerable.

I decided in the end to take that photograph, as well as the others taken on that day, which showed the other children, Anton and Whitney.

The following Saturday, Sheila and I went to watch her father’s baseball team play. They were an inauspicious-looking group, those boys. Grubby ten- and eleven-year-olds dressed in mismatched uniforms, they were almost all minority kids from a mixture of backgrounds, united, I suspect, only by their poverty. But they were noisy and cheerful in the way of all children, and they greeted Sheila’s father like a returning champion when he ran out onto the baseball diamond.

From all I could gather, Mr. Renstad appeared to be doing well. He was enormously proud of the small duplex where they lived. It wasn’t large; it wasn’t in a particularly good part of town, and he didn’t own it, of course; but he had chosen it himself, rather than have it foisted upon him by Social Services. Moreover, he was paying the rent himself out of the steady salary he now earned as a laborer for the parks department. He had taken me right through the duplex, showing me each and every thing he had managed to buy—the beds, the sofa, the television, the kitchen table. He certainly remembered the circumstances in which we had last met, and he was enthusiastic to show me how far he had come in the interim. These things were his and I could tell acquiring them meant a lot to him.

His real love, however, was the baseball team—“his boys.” Again and again, he told me how it was they who had made him go straight for good. They depended on him, he said. The team had nearly been disbanded for lack of a coach until he took over. More to the point, he admitted, he would lose them if he messed with drugs again. He was still under the watchful eye of the parole officer.

I enjoyed that baseball game. They didn’t win, but they played well and it was apparent that winning wasn’t so important to them. They were a team, in the true sense of the word, and I identified immediately with that. Whatever his past, Mr. Renstad’s present was going well.

I’d made plans to take Sheila out after the game. On the other two occasions I’d come to her house, so I thought it would be pleasant to go somewhere with her. Sheila, however, was unable to decide where she wanted to go.

I suggested we go for a pizza. I thought I might take her up to the city, partly to give her a change of scenery, and partly because there were nicer places to eat up there. So after the game, we got into the car and headed north.

Somewhere within the first five miles, I took a wrong turn. As I was still learning my way around this new area, this wasn’t unusual; however, I didn’t realize I’d done it until the thinning houses made me suspicious that I was not going toward the city. Normally I have an excellent sense of direction, and while I do take wrong turns, even then I can usually discern if I’m going in the right general direction. On this occasion, I managed to get myself completely turned around, because while I still felt that I was going toward the city, evidence outside my window said otherwise. I voiced my concern to Sheila.

“No, you’re all right. I know exactly where you’re at. Just keep driving this way,” she said confidently. So I did.

Another fifteen minutes and I hit open country. I knew I was irredeemably lost and knew I wasn’t going to right myself without taking drastic action, probably in the form of stopping and digging out the road map. I pulled the car over into a gateway to a field.

“What are you doing?” Sheila asked in surprise.

Reaching my arm over the backseat, I groped for my road atlas.

“Looking for the map. I’m lost.”

“No, you’re not.”

“We’re lost.”

“No, we’re not. I’ve been out here millions of times.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, I have,” she said. “I used to be in a children’s home near here. Just down that road over there. I know exactly where we are.”

“So, where are we then?” I asked.

“Well, here, of course.”

“But where’s here?”

Sheila looked out the window.

“Tell me. Where are we?”

“Don’t get so bitchy.”

“You don’t know either, do you?” I said. “We are lost.”

Unexpectedly, Sheila smiled. It was a beguiling smile. “I’m always lost,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve gotten used to it.”

I tugged the atlas over into the front seat and opened it. Locating us on the map, I discovered where I had turned wrong and figured out what I would need to do when eventually we headed back to Broadview. “Okay. I’m happy now,” I said, closing the book. I started the engine.

“You’re really a control freak, aren’t you?” Sheila said. “I never realized that about you before.”

“Not really. It’s just I feel uncomfortable when I’m disoriented.”

“Ah, not only a control freak, a defensive control freak.”

If she wanted to go in this direction, I thought, well and good, we’d go. So we took off down a minor highway in a direction I’d never been before. The better part of an hour raced past, along with the scenery.

It was a pleasant drive. Sheila talked, launching into a most amazing conversation about Julius Caesar. She had read his account of the Gallic wars in Latin class and this caught her fancy, particularly his descriptions of the native Celts in Gaul. I had done Caesar myself when I had taken Latin in high school, but in those days I had been more interested to see if I could get good grades without having to read the assignments, rather than find out what the books actually said. Consequently, I had emerged from school clever but culturally illiterate and had spent most of my adult life catching up. I hadn’t managed to work myself around to Caesar yet in Latin or English, so for most of the conversation I just listened, which was probably no bad thing.

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