The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

There was the specialist in “theraplay,” Miss Amber, who wore a tiered flowing skirt and Birkenstocks. She had a degree fromBuff State and looked like an editorial cartoon of a disarmament activist.

“All the gals at Buff State have flowers in their hair and hair under their arms,” Jane’s mother said. She must have overheardthis somewhere, and every time she said it, it was with a smug surprise, like she had just thought it up on the spot.

In the patchouli-and-jasmine-scented parlor room of Miss Amber’s Queen Anne house on Elmwood Avenue, Mirela sat cross-leggedon a mat amid a pile of toys: play-kitchen utensils, dolls, trucks, blocks.

“Does is?” Mirela asked, slapping at a truck. She didn’t yet pick things up: she slapped at them, scrabbled and pawed at them,before trying to grab hold. In her unrehearsed and tactile way, she was sizing them up. “Does is?”

“That means What is this?” said Jane, sitting off to one side of the mat.

Miss Amber, in the lotus position, held up a hand. “Here, words can mean whatever Mirela wants them to mean,” she said.

Mirela picked up the truck and smiled expectantly at Miss Amber.

“Now you’ve decided to pick that up,” Miss Amber said. “What is that?”

“Does is?” Mirela asked.

“It’s a truck, Mirela,” Jane said, to a disapproving look from Miss Amber.

“What do you think it is, Mirela?” Miss Amber asked. “It can be anything that Mirela wants it to be.”

“Tuck,” Mirela said, smiling harder. She scrabbled at a baby doll. “Doe-ie,” she said.

“A doll,” Miss Amber said. “You wanted a doll, and now you found a doll.”

Forty-five minutes and $150 later, Jane said to Miss Amber, “I’m sorry, but with all due respect, what is this meant to accomplish?”

“We’re putting the child in the driver’s seat,” Miss Amber said, flipping her wavy auburn hair over both shoulders. “The childis empowered to make her own decisions. We are simply there to facilitate those decision-making processes. The goal is forthe child to develop self-efficacy at the somatic level.”

“I’m not sure that Mirela wants to be empowered to make decisions,” Jane said. “I think Mirela just wants control.”

“What is the difference?” Miss Amber asked. Mirela smiled over Miss Amber’s shoulder.

“I mean that she wants control, but—control of what?” Jane shook her head, frustrated that she couldn’t articulate herself.If she was presented with a pad of oversized white construction paper, Mirela would grab a crayon and scrawl upon every singlepage. Scribble-scribble-scribble rip scribble-scribble-scribble rip, through ten pages, twenty pages. She did this with seething focus, aimed not so much at claiming what was hers but rather at ensuring no one else could claim it. It was spite, Jane thought—a chip on Mirela’s skinny shoulder. Yet Lauren used to do similar things as a toddler, and Jane had interpreted those acts as the opposite of destructive: a proof of self-assurance, manual dexterity, an announcement of the self.

“Once she had control, what would she do with it?” Jane asked. “She’s practically still a toddler.”

“Well, so many of these words are labels,” Miss Amber was saying. “Toddler, controlling—when we over-rely on labels, rather than experiencing and observing a uniquely beautiful set of gifts and challenges, we’recommunicating to the child, and to ourselves, that there is something wrong with the child.”

“There is something wrong,” Jane said.

“Wrong is a word,” Miss Amber said.

“. . . Yes,” Jane said.

“Think of a cup.” Miss Amber held up her mug of tea. “What if instead of saying, ‘This is a cup,’ we said, ‘This holds liquid’?Try the same substitution with Mirela. What if instead of asking, ‘What is this child?’ we ask instead, ‘What does this childdo? What does this child hold inside her?’”

“Does is?” Mirela asked, reaching for the mug.

“We can absolutely ask those questions,” Jane said, “while also trying to find a diagnosis.”

“Well, if we must use labels, then choose different ones,” replied Miss Amber, holding the mug over her head. “What if wedecided to label Mirela as an empowered child?”

“What do you think of that, Mirela?” Jane asked as she helped the girl with her coat. Mirela punched her in the stomach, andJane did not react, except to ponder, for a split second, her lack of reaction. A breath-sucking impact to the gut was nolonger, in the present scheme of things, a sufficiently novel impetus to merit recognition from Jane’s psychological or physiologicalpathways.

“Sometimes a mismatch of temperaments simply calls for a change in communication styles,” Miss Amber said, saluting Jane andMirela with her mug of tea. “Until next week!”

The following week at Miss Amber’s, Mirela stood up, and Miss Amber said, “Now you’ve decided to stand up!” She sat down and Miss Amber said, “Now you’ve decided to sit down!” Mirela stood up and sat down, stood up and sat down, for the remainder of the allotted time, with Miss Amber narrating, their smiling faces locked in a feedback loop. Miss Amber wore a tiara of wildflowers.

“The same and the same and the same,” Mirela admonished Miss Amber at the beginning of their third session. Then she smasheda green dump truck into the rug over and over until it splintered and flew into pieces, shards of plastic whirligigging inthe air. As Miss Amber tried to intervene, Mirela screamed, “I DE-SY-ID! I DE-SY-ID!” She was about to crash a Fisher-Price barn through an oriel window when Jane caught her from behind and pulled her close,wrapping both arms around her as they both sat down on the parquet. Jane waited for the girl to wear herself out against hergrip.

“Oddly enough,” Jane gasped from the floor, pressing her chin against Mirela’s collarbone to keep the girl from smacking herhead against Jane’s nose, “this eventually calms her down. Keeps her from hurting herself, too.” Mirela arched her back andtipped them both backward.

Mirela was the child who touched the top of the hot stove once, and then again, and then turned up the heat on all the burnersand climbed into the oven, and there was no pain or shock that could override the