The Tiger's Child (11 page)

T
he following Monday morning, I was playing “empty chair” with David, Tamara and Violet. A variation of the therapeutic technique developed by the renowned psychiatrist Fritz Perls, it involved setting an empty chair in the middle of the group and talking to it, as if a person were sitting in it. We were discussing angry feelings and sad feelings and how the two sometimes got mixed up. I had asked the children in turn to think of an occasion when someone had made them each feel that way, then to imagine that that person was sitting in the empty chair and to talk to him or her, telling that person about their feelings. It took us a while to get going. I gave an example, placing in the chair a neighbor of mine who disliked my cat, and then telling the empty chair how angry it made me feel when I saw him abusing my pet. Then the children had turns. It
wasn’t until we were on our second round that everyone began to pick up the right mood.

Tamara’s second turn came. “I’m going to put my mom in that chair,” she said.

“Okay,” I replied. “And what do you want to tell your mom?”

“I’m fed up with the baby.”

“Okay.”

Tamara looked over at me. “I want to tell her I don’t want to take care of the baby anymore. Why did she have so many kids that she can’t take care of them all herself?”

“Can you tell her that?” I asked. “Imagine she’s sitting just there and you tell her how you feel.”

“I don’t want to take care of the baby anymore,” Tamara said. “I’m sick of the baby. He’s not mine. It’s not fair, just because I’m oldest. Why do I have to take care of him?”

Tears came to her eyes and she stopped. Looking over at me, she said, “I’m too little to take care of him.”

I pointed to the chair. “Why don’t you tell her you feel like that? That you feel too small for such a big responsibility?”

Tamara nodded tearfully. “I’m just little, Mama. I need you to take care of
me.
”

She sat down, and for a long moment everyone was absorbed in a pensive silence.

“Okay, Violet?” I said gently. “How about you?”

Violet lumbered to her feet. She approached the chair, walked around it, all the while regarding the seat. During the first round, she had seated a girl
from school in the chair. Violet told me that she wanted to ask the girl why she always treated her in such a mean way, but when redirected to imagine the girl sitting in the chair and to address her comments there, Violet had degenerated into silly chatter about ghosts. I wasn’t holding out much hope for this new attempt. Violet’s problems were so all-pervasive that she didn’t appear able to cope with such a direct approach.

“I’m going to put Alejo in the chair,” Violet said, much to my surprise.

Alejo wasn’t far away. We were in a circle only feet away from where Sheila had been lying prone on the floor and talking to him; however, over the course of the empty-chair exercise, Sheila had gotten caught up listening to us and was now sitting cross-legged on the edge of the circle. She ducked her head slightly to see Alejo under his tangle of furniture when his name was mentioned.

“All right,” I said. “What do you want to say to Alejo?”

“Why don’t you come with us, Alejo?” Violet said, approaching the chair. She cocked her head and regarded it closely, as if really seeing the boy. “Why do you keep hiding from us? It isn’t scary here and I miss you. I wish you would come out.”

She circled the chair and then came to stand on the left side of it. “I feel angry with you when you go hide, because I think you don’t like me. I feel sad, because I want to be your friend. Why don’t you come out? I want you to be with us.”

“All right.”

Stunned, we all jerked our heads over to see Alejo standing beside the stacked table.

“He’s come out!” David shrieked with such loudness that I fully expected Alejo to bolt back under, but he didn’t.

“Do you want to join us?” I asked. I snagged a chair from an adjacent table and pulled it into our circle.

Alejo remained right where he was.

“Would you like to play too? Do you want to talk to someone in the empty chair?” I asked.

He shook his head.

Sheila, still sitting cross-legged on the floor, reached her hand out. “Come here, Alejo. Sit down beside me.”

Without hesitation, he went over to her and sat down.

“Let’s change things. You’ve had a chance to talk to the empty chair. Now, let’s pretend the empty chair can talk back,” I said. “Tamara, you just talked to your mom, sitting in the empty chair. Now you go sit in the empty chair.”

Hesitantly, she rose from her place, walked across the circle and sat down in the empty chair in the center.

“Now you’re your mom. You just heard what Tamara said. You answer her back.”

Tamara sat silent a long moment. “I don’t mean to make you work so hard,” she started quietly. “I just got too many children.” She paused. “Don’t get married, Tamara. Don’t have babies.” Then she stood up and walked back to her place.

“My turn now. I get to be Alejo,” Violet said and beamed at him. She went over to the empty chair and sat down. “I’m glad you asked me to come out, Violet. I was tired of being under there. You acted good to me. Now I’m going to be your friend.”

I smiled at Violet and then looked over at Alejo. “Can you share with us how it made you feel, when Violet said how much she wanted you to come join us again?”

“Good,” he said.

Sheila and I didn’t join Jeff and Miriam for lunch as we usually did. I had a client meeting very near the school in the early afternoon, so I’d brought my lunch with the idea of eating it over in the park across the street. Deprived of her usual ride down to Fenton Boulevard, Sheila needed to make the rather complicated set of connections from the main road two blocks over. She left immediately after the program ended that morning and I assumed she was headed for the bus stop; however, she returned, a McDonald’s bag in hand, and joined me on my picnic bench in the park.

“I don’t have to go home right away,” she said, “It’s just an empty house anyway.”

“I’m always glad for company,” I said, as I unwrapped my sandwiches.

We spent a moment with our food.

“What do you usually do in the afternoons when you get home?” I asked.

Sheila shrugged. “Depends.”

“Do you get together with friends?”

She hesitated over her food, then shrugged again. “Not usually.”

“I don’t hear you mention friends very often,” I said.

“Doesn’t mean I don’t have any, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said a bit testily. “Just I don’t do much with them, that’s all.” She took a bite of her hamburger. “It’s a dorky school I go to. There’s not really anyone there I’d want to be friends with, if you want the truth.”

“What do you do?”

“Like I said, depends. I always got the housework, you know. My dad sure wouldn’t do it. If it’s left to my dad, we’d live in a pigsty. And the shopping. And the cooking. Who do you think does our cooking?”

I nodded.

“He’s very lucky he’s got a daughter, you know. Somebody to do all this for him. He’d have been stuck, if I was a boy.”

“How’s it work out? Does he give you the shopping money and you make the decisions about what the meals will be?”

“I got to get it off him.” She finished her hamburger in two big bites. “I learned that, like, ages ago. I got to get the money off him within minutes or it’s not there to get.”

I regarded her.

“Mostly he gives it to me when I ask. He’s getting used to me doing it now, but if he doesn’t, I’m still pretty good at getting it. I tell him I’m going
over to the Laundromat and I got to have the pants he’s wearing right away, so would he change? Then he takes his wallet out. Or sometimes I just wait till he’s asleep.”

“I thought he was done with the alcohol and stuff. I thought all that was in the past.”

She snorted derisively. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“He’s still drinking?” I said in dismay. “I thought the baseball team …”

“People don’t change. Didn’t you know that? Circumstances change, but people never do.”

Now that Alejo had come out from his hideaway of his own volition, Jeff and I decided to take definitive measures to prevent him from returning there; so we arrived early the next morning and humped the extra tables and chairs down the hall to a room we were not using. This had the added advantage of leaving us with a much larger working space.

When the taxi arrived, Alejo again showed reluctance to get out, but Sheila climbed in and sat with him a moment before finally coaxing him out with her. For the first time in three weeks he did not have to be dragged into the room, but instead walked in, holding Sheila’s hand.

“Can I just take him and work with him on my own?” Sheila asked.

“If you’d like. Do you have something planned?” I replied.

She shrugged. “All that time I was with him on the floor I was thinking of different things. And I
thought maybe he would find it easier than being in a big group.”

They went to the far end of the room near a small, low bookcase and sat down on the floor. I saw Sheila tip out the canister of Lego bricks in the middle between them and then both bent forward to begin building.

It was my day to take Joshua and Jessie, our two autistic children, and between them, they were a full load, so I did not get much of a chance to oversee what Sheila and Alejo were doing together. They remained absorbed in the Lego bricks all the way to snack time and the break.

While they were outside, I took the opportunity to walk over and see what they had been building. It didn’t appear to be much. There were several rectangular forms, looking like half-started houses or the like, and a few long strings of bricks clicked together.

“Should we let them continue?”

Startled, I jumped at the unexpected voice and turned to see Jeff. He crossed over to where I was standing. Bending down, he picked up one of the rectangular structures. “I think they’ll go back to this after the break. Do you think we should leave them to it?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I was eavesdropping. It was quite an interesting conversation. They seemed to be building jails with the Lego and putting the little Lego people in it. From the sounds of it, Alejo was putting his mother in jail. He said, ‘She says No! No! No! You
do that again and I will lock you in your room. I won’t talk to you for two days. You are a wicked boy to do that and you can’t watch TV.’ And Sheila says, ‘Lock her in the jail. This is the bad moms’ jail. Put her in there and we’ll give her punishment. What shall we do to her?’ And Alejo says, ‘Cut her throat. Make her bleed. Drop bombs on her till she’s dead.’ So that’s what they were doing, dropping hunks of Lego.” Jeff looked over. “It was a little difficult to tell who was leading whom.”

“So it sounds,” I replied.

“I think we should let them go on, if they want,” Jeff said. “He’s talking more than I’ve heard yet, but … I want to keep an ear tuned.”

I felt unnerved by the content of the conversation. As much as I wanted to give Sheila a positive experience here with us, she was an untrained teenager and not a therapist; moreover, she still carried plenty of her own emotional baggage. Was she encouraging Alejo’s play in an effort to imitate Jeff’s and my therapeutic activities? Or was she fulfilling her own needs? Or both?

We didn’t get a chance to find out. When Miriam and Sheila came back in with the children after break, Alejo quite happily joined the others at the painting table and Sheila retreated to the back to clean up the things from snack time and to polish off the remaining cookies.

When the morning was over, Sheila came over to me as I was putting things away. “Let’s not go to lunch with them,” she said, as she handed me the materials to put up on the shelf.

“You don’t feel like it?”

“Let’s do what we did yesterday and eat in the park. I liked that. It’s so nice and sunny out and then we spend it sitting around in that dingy restaurant,” she replied.

“The problem is,” I said, “I haven’t brought my lunch today, so I don’t have anything to eat. Moreover, I have an appointment back at the clinic at two, so if I don’t eat promptly, I won’t be able to take you down to Fenton Boulevard before I have to be back.”

“I don’t care. I can take the bus from here.” She bent down and unlaced one boot. Lifting the boot up, she tipped it and out spilled a five-dollar bill. “If you don’t eat too much, I could buy you something from McDonald’s.”

“All right. McDonald’s it is, but I’ll buy,” I said. “You can provide the delivery service and go get it when we’re done here.”

We’d had a messy morning, using finger paints at the table, soft colored chalk on the blackboard and water in the sand tray. In addition, there was the usual debris. Jeff was at the back sink washing out paint pots, while Miriam was sorting through books and putting them back into the bookshelf.

“Have you told them?” Sheila asked, coming over to where I was wiping down a table.

“Told them what?” I asked.

“Well, that we’re not going out to lunch with them,” she replied, a little exasperated.