"Not really."

"What's the family like?"

A shrug. "Pretty average. There's Mom, Dad, two younger girls. Traditional setup. Mom stays home with the kids. Dad has a job doing something with agricultural machinery. Socioeconomically, they're definitely in the lower bracket, but they're by no means poor."

"What about the psychological makeup of the family?"

A pause. Arkie considered her fingernails. "I don't think Mom's too bright. Sort of a go-alonger. You know the type. Anything you tell her, she goes along with. But she's easy to get on with. Dad's a bit quirky. Into health food in a big way. Got really het up because we served pork and beans in school lunches. I think he thinks Jadie's problems are coming from eating too much sugar or additives or something."

"Elective mutism as an allergy," I murmured and smiled. "That's a new one on me."

"Yeah, a bit silly. But basically, both of them are easy to get along with. I've had much worse parents to deal with in my time."

"Tell me something else," I said, changing the subject. "Has anyone investigated her posture? Does she have scoliosis?"

"No," Arkie replied bluntly. "I think it's just part of her emotional problems. We've had the school nurse look at her, and of course her own pediatrician has seen her, but no one's found anything to explain it. I think she's just a closed-up kid in all senses of the word."

The majority of the time, Jadie walked nearly doubled over. She kept her arms up under her, tucked against her chest, her hands dangling limply unless she carried something. While she kept her head up sufficiently to see, she would have to keep it at an awkward angle to see much, so most of the time she peered through her eyebrows and the tangled dark hair hanging over her forehead. This made looking Jadie in the eye an almost impossible task. The bent-over posture took its toll on her gait, too, and she moved about the classroom in a mincing hobble.

This physical behavior perplexed me. While it was not uncommon for the children in my elective mutism research to exhibit a tendency to keep their limbs close in and otherwise take on an inhibited posture, none had even faintly approached Jadie's florid display. Despite Arkie's assurance that Jadie had been properly examined by doctors and the problem seemed to be purely psychological, I remained skeptical, because, plain and simple, Jadie looked deformed.

One morning not long after Arkie and I had talked, I found myself watching Jadie as she went about her work. "Jadie?" I called. "Come over here, please."

Turning from the bookshelf, Jadie hobbled over.

I turned her around to face away from me and asked her to bend over and touch her ankles. This she cautiously did and, lifting her shirt, I studied the outline of her shoulders to reassure myself there was no evidence of scoliosis. Then I asked her to stand and turn around to face me. Doing so, she tilted her head to one side to see me better.

Very gently, I put one hand on her collar bone and the other in the middle of her back. "Let's see you stand up a little straighter." Carefully, I urged her upright.

I felt very unsure of myself in doing this and the uncertainty must have come through my hands, because I quickly met resistance. Reluctant to push harder in case I might do damage, I stopped and lowered my hands. "These muscles here," I said, indicating her lower back, "can you relax them?" Gently, I massaged along her spine with my fingertips, but it was like touching clothed stone. The more I touched her, the tenser she became. At last I dropped my hand.

"Does it hurt you when I push like that?"

"I don't want to."

"But does it hurt?"

"No."

"So, will you show me that you can stand up straight?"

She shook her head.

"If I take my hands right away and don't touch you, can you straighten up?"

"No."

"Why? Does it hurt?"

"No."

"Well, why then?"

"Because I need to bend over."

"Why?"

"Because I need to."

"But why?"

"To keep my insides from falling out."

Chapter Four.

The following week, I made an appointment to see Jadie's parents, and since they lived so near the school, I offered to come over to their house to see them. They readily accepted, as their youngest daughter, Sapphire, was only a few months old.

The house was small and in the style of those built between the wars. Everything about it was ramshackle. Paint peeled from the window frames. The latticework around the front porch was broken. Large patches of grass in the front yard were worn away, leaving a battered tricycle mired in the mud. But when Mr. Ekdahl opened the door to greet me, I was led into a large room, warm and neat.

They were a wholly undistinguished-looking couple. Jadie's mother was small and drab, with mousy hair and badly chapped hands. She'd made a clear effort to appear attractive, apparent in the eye makeup and styled hair, but they had an aging effect. I knew she was probably near my age, but she had the aura of an older generation. Jadie's father had pale Scandinavian features. Thin almost to the point of gauntness, he looked worn out, like the winter-beaten buffalo grass slowly disintegrating in the prairie wind.

Jadie's five-year-old sister, Amber, was there, too, and I was struck by the fact that this was one of those odd cases where the children were much more attractive than one would have been led to believe, seeing the parents. Amber was quite unlike Jadie in some ways. Her hair was fair and much less curly than Jadie's, making her look more rumpled than ratty. Although her eyes were blue, they were a cloudy gray-blue, not the pure color Jadie's were, but Amber, too, had the long, dark lashes, giving her the same look of infant sensuality. She remained in the room with us, a naked doll in her arms, and watched me guardedly. Jadie, however, made herself scarce. I heard the familiar sound of her shuffle in an adjacent room, and Mrs. Ekdahl said something about her minding the baby. Whatever, Jadie never even appeared to say hi.

Jadie's parents were clearly ill at ease with me. They got me seated in a big chair, a cup of coffee in my hand, and then they just stared. I explained a bit about who I was and talked about my own background and my work with children like Jadie, in hopes this would break the ice some. I said how glad I was to have her in my class, how gentle and cooperative she was, and what good academic work she was doing. They sat together on a long brown vinyl couch, which had decorative stitching in the shape of a horse's head on the back, and said nothing.

After ten minutes of this, it occurred to me that whatever else might be contributing to Jadie's problems, a certain amount might simply be a familial trait. I endeavored to make conversation and ended up talking to myself, as no one else ever spoke. Mother, father, and daughter all sat motionless and mute, managing not even so much as a nod in my direction. Finally, I gave up and fell silent myself. Nothing happened. For three or four minutes, we all just sat.

"You can make that chair go back," Mrs. Ekdahl finally said.

"Pardon?" I asked.

"That chair, that one you're sitting in. It's a recliner. If you want to get yourself more comfortable, you just lean back some more and it lays out real nice."

"Oh. Thank you. I'm quite comfortable now, though."

"Do you want some more coffee?"

"No, thank you. I'm fine."

"You sure? No trouble. We got the pot on and it makes ten cups. We only just been drinking it, so there's plenty more."

There was pathos in all of this, and it left me feeling more uncomfortable and out of place than ever. "I'm fine," I said, "but thanks. What I want to talk about ... Jadie ..."

They looked at me.

"What do you think about Jadie's problems with speaking at school?"

"Nothing," the mother replied, her voice soft.

"Nothing?"

"Don't see it's a problem. Leastways, it isn't one for us. She talks fine at home. Sometimes she won't shut up."

"Oh? Can you tell me about such times?"

"She gets silly," the father offered.

"In what way?"

He shrugged. "Just silly. Jumping around. Her and Amber." He smiled at the younger girl, who ducked her head.

"Does Jadie talk then?"

"Yeah, all the time. Shouts. Says silly things."

"What do you do then?" I asked.

"Tell her to stop. Tell her you don't go jumping on the couch, 'cause she's going to rip it. She's already ripped it here, see?" He pointed to a place patched with what looked like duct tape.

"And tell her to stop talking dirty," Mrs. Ekdahl added. "She does, sometimes. Shouts these filthy words and then Amber hears them."

From my experience with Jadie in the classroom, I was finding all this very difficult to imagine.

"She picks them words up at school. From the big boys on the playground. And then, if she really wants to get you mad, she says 'em, 'cause she knows we don't talk like that in this house," Mrs. Ekdahl said.

"And does she usually stop when you tell her to?" I asked.

"Sometimes," Mr. Ekdahl said. "Sometimes not."

"What do you do then? Do you spank her?"

"No," he replied indignantly. "I don't think it's right for a parent to hit their little children. We don't spank our girls. We just take away privileges. Mostly, when she does those things, I send her outside. Tell her to go yell out there."

"I see."

Silence followed. I regarded the parents; they regarded their hands. "So, you feel Jadie's problems with speech aren't anything serious?"

Mrs. Ekdahl looked over. "It's just shyness. Jadie don't get on real good with outsiders, that's all. She's always been that way. Both girls have. Just like their family best, that's all."

"Well, the other thing ... the way Jadie walks. What are your thoughts on her posture?"

"Oh, that, she can't help that. She was born that way," Mrs. Ekdahl said. "See, I had this real hard time getting her out when she was born. She was stuck in the wrong way, had her face like this." She gestured along the front of her abdomen. "So she came wrong. I had to have forty-two stitches in me afterwards, and the doctor said things might not be just right, because she didn't get enough air. That's because she was stuck in such a long time."

"Oh," I said in surprise. "I hadn't realized that. Nobody's mentioned birth trauma to me."

"We just got to be patient with Jadie," Mrs. Ekdahl said. "I don't think there's anything wrong with her. She's little and she's shy, but that don't mean there's anything really the matter with her. She's good at her work. She always has good report cards, so I think we just got to be patient."

I went home from the meeting in a state of confusion. This new bit of information fogged over my previous conclusions. Jadie did speak now. She had responded classically to the intervention method I'd developed to treat elective mutism, which lent weight to the evidence that hers was psychological, and surely someone, somewhere, would have noted the likelihood of brain damage in her files if it was felt to be contributory. On the other hand, while she spoke in class now, she still did not speak much spontaneously but rather only when spoken to. Also, there was her bizarre posture to consider. And goodness knows, I'd been victim before of critical information being omitted from files. On thinking the matter through, it seemed reasonable to keep an open mind to the possibility that Jadie was aphasic, unable to speak because of brain damage.

At the beginning of March, we had a two-day break. I used the time to go up to the city and visit all my old colleagues at the clinic. Of course, I was curious about how everyone had gotten on since I'd left, and I wanted to know about the children I'd been working with, who were all now in therapy with one of my partners; however, there was an ulterior motive as well. I wanted to borrow a video recorder.

I had long been accustomed to using video machines in my classroom. Back in the early seventies when I'd first started teaching, I'd been fortunate enough to be in a school with its own video equipment-a rarity in those days-and even more fortunate in the fact that most of the staff hadn't learned how to use it, so it sat idle much of the time. Subsequently, I appropriated it bit by bit and made it an integral part of my classroom routine. I found such a recording device invaluable. When I taught, I often became so absorbed in the process that I missed vital clues to a child's behavior. Now, for the cost of a few reels of videotape, I could go back at the end of the day and observe and evaluate both the children and myself in a way never possible before.

We didn't have a video camera or even a recorder in Pecking. Gracious and generous as Mr. Tinbergen was, he admitted that school finances did not stretch that far. He wished they did, he said, but it was rather too much of a luxury for a school that size. So back I went to the city over the two-day break to see if I could charm my old director, Dr. Rosenthal, into lending me one of the clinic's for a couple of weeks. And so I did, returning to Pecking with an elderly reel-to-reel machine and its accompanying camera rattling around on the back seat of my car.

"I know what that is," Jadie said, when she arrived in the classroom Monday morning.

"You do?" This surprised me, as cassette recorders were rapidly replacing these bulky older machines and even VCRs were still uncommon.

"Yeah. It makes TV pictures." She hobbled up to the recording deck. "Are you going to put us on TV?"

"Just on this little one here. It's called a monitor."

"Will my mom and dad see it?"

"No. It's just for us. When everybody is here, we'll turn it on so that everyone can see themselves. And maybe at the end of the week, we can act out a little play and record it. That'd be nice, wouldn't it? Maybe one of those plays from your reading book."

"Is that what you got it for? Us?"

"Well, mostly it's for me. So I can see what I'm doing when I'm teaching."

"What d'you mean?"

"See, what I do is turn it on and let it run and don't pay any attention to it. Then, at the end of the day, I can sit down and look at it and see what we're doing. I can look at each person carefully and decide if I'm doing the right things to help. This makes me a better teacher."

"Just you? You look at it all by yourself? Nobody else sees it?"

"Just me, usually."

Jadie peered into the camera lens and then went back to the deck. "This is how you turn it on, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"And here's how you stop it. You press this button, don't you?" She bent nearer to the machine. "Rec-ord," she read.

"Re-cord. That's the button you press when you want the picture to go onto the tape."

"Yeah, I know what it means."

I looked at her. "Have you seen one of these before?"