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Show Patty will feel "sorry" for being "bad . These are a teacher's informal objectives, the ones never written down or kept for later reference. Milk splatters the walls. Cold, rubbery cereal oozes off the dining room walls in globs. And the green, plastic dishes lie topsy turvy on a once gold carpet. With my body over hers, like the shell of a turtle, we pick up each item hand over hand, place them on the plate, and head for the kitchen. At the precise moment we cross the door frame, dishes, forks, knifes, spoons, cups, fly out in various directions, hitting one aide across the cheek and chasing the other one into the safety of the kitchen. Anger builds up the tempo as we head for a final round. Her elephant roar echoes throughout the cottage. I am reminded of a scene from the play Marat Sade, a college production, where silly pretensions of insanity made us almost laugh. But for a moment, and only for a moment, the air is the same. Thick with body odor and the intense pain of undirected anger- Finally, she goes against the wall; time-out. I remember a psychologist I once knew who gave the perfect definition of timing a child out: 'Time-out is like saying to the child, "I don't care about you at all," It is throwing the child to his own wolves. Wolves of his own out-of-control energy. The very demons who torture him when he is alone. It is a safeguard to one's own anger; he can only injure himself and not you. Cut the anger in half by a wall and both parties can control it. Patty needed no walls. Fear is her wall. No one has ever taught her to "see" with her hands and feet and body. Two feet out from the farthest point she can reach is fear and dark and nothing. I timed her out. She beats a hole in the wall with her head. She stands quietly against it and bangs twice before I can stop her. In my memory I have been standing by that same wall, the dent coming to about my shoulder, and it is the size of a softball. I have felt it with one hand and wondered if at the moment I touched that dent if Patty had thought of me in her soft sofa of the Ward's dayroom sunshine. She had been off her medication for about a month with no hysterical crying or giggling spells. But we had seen no real -11- |
