month after month, it seemed as if —
Much later, when we began to know enough about our own situation to look beyond it, I found the exhaustive book we had needed so long. It hadn’t been written when our trouble came upon us. The field is as new as that. Elly was six when Bernard Rimland’s
Those who pay homage to an ideal of total self-sufficiency have never seen the thing itself. That secret smile may be the Buddha’s, but it is monstrous seen on a baby’s face. To conquer craving is indeed to conquer pain, but humanity goes with it. That Elly wanted nothing was worst of all. That was where we started.
It was bad, too, when she began — rarely at first, then more often — to want something, and to take your arm and throw it towards the object of desire. But it was better.
As weeks passed, the peremptory grab gave place to a touch of feather delicacy, a pressure exquisitely adjusted to attain no more and no less than the required response. This was easier to take. We could interpret this new gentleness as an emergent consciousness of people and their feelings. That was an encouraging way to look at it. But it was equally explainable as an application of a principle of which Elly had an intuitive grasp, the Principle of Least Effort. A mere touch, now, was enough to bring Elly what she wished. But that we were attuned to Elly did not necessarily mean that she was attuned to us. The rude touch and the gentle one were equally detached.
Another mother, writing of another such little girl,[2] has called her ‘the child in the glass ball’. What is the task of those who try to touch the untouchable, to reach those who have found reasons to keep themselves separate? How is one to render the world desirable to those who do not desire it? One holds out a flower, a soft doll, an orange candy. One points at a bird. All are ignored, this time and the next and the next. How does one convey that touch and sight and sound promise pleasure, that the world rewards those who interest themselves in its varied faces? How — most lacerating question of all — does one reach that walled entelechy with news that people exist, that they are warm and loving and have need of each other?
One is mounting an invasion. Invasion is not easy. There are scruples, especially for those who themselves appreciate the mechanisms of reserve, control, and self-defence. There are risks that one will press too hard and injure the creature one is trying to help, or that one will find oneself insufficiently armoured against the steady unresponsiveness which it is so natural to interpret as rejection. It is not easy to push one’s way in where there is every reason to believe one is neither needed nor wanted, or to remain confident that what one is offering is worth having.
It is fortunate, then, that the actuality of what one is doing is so very simple, simple enough so that one passes through the strictures of one’s hesitations to remind oneself that there is no point in getting so elaborate about it, because all one is doing is playing with a baby.
All one is doing is lying down on the floor beside her as she sits absorbed in one of her inconsequential activities, so that one’s eyes will be on her level when she looks up, one’s hand ready to make some small change in the pattern, to which she may respond but probably will not. Or one is standing by her crib, that symbol of her withdrawal, at once a certain refuge and a delightful toy. Into the crib she can retreat. Once there it becomes an extension of her body; she can bounce in it, leap, sometimes a foot into the air, and as she tires, rock and rock and rock until she falls asleep. Inside the crib her guard relaxes; she is at home. The crib is a model of her citadel. The crib is a good place to play games, the simple games the other babies liked. One makes an animal of one’s hand, for instance. Thumb and three fingers walk along the crib side; the middle finger, extended in front, quivers, sniffing its way. Safe behind her fence, Elly looks on with interest. The animal runs, stops, runs again. As Elly’s attention fades it scampers, along a bridge made by one’s other arm, right to Elly’s shoulder to tickle her neck, and Elly laughs. She likes that game, which is her father’s speciality. Soon she is extending her own arm for the animal to walk up. She puts out her foot for ‘this little piggy’) her hands for ‘round and round the garden’. Each game ends with a tickle and a laughing squeal. Now walled Elly sounds like any other baby. But with any other baby the games grow, change, lead somewhere. These are good games and we enjoy them. While we play them, Elly seems to be in contact. But when we stop she moves into herself again. She accepts the stimulation, but when it is withdrawn she does not miss it. Where do we go from here? One cannot tickle all day long.
Elly is prone on the floor, legs frogged out on either side of her. She is under a blanket and so invisible, but I know the position and the steady rhythm that goes with it. She is rapt, removed, she needs me not at all. I crouch beside her, ready to enter her world in a way she can appreciate if she will and ignore if she wants to. My finger goes under the blanket, then my hand. No response. My head follows. Elly knows I am there. There are two of us now, withdrawn from the world but near each other. It is very inward, warm, and dark - a physical expression for undemanding intimacy. There is nothing difficult here - nothing to do, nothing to say. The only thing you need is time and the willingness to spend a lot of it with your head under a blanket.
It became possible to make a game out of raising the edge of the blanket. By the time she was two we could get her to play the peekaboo game whose absence we had noticed at ten months, and she even made a little ‘here-she-is’ noise to go with it. As time went on we moved forward, but not far. She began to welcome me into her enclosures. At three and a half she even developed on her own a new discovery game — herself closed in a closet, I to open the door. Better yet, both of us sit quiet in the dark closet, door pulled to, she and I, close together, everything else shut out. We still do that sometimes, even today.
One curious fact helped us as we worked. We saw it happen more than once; something of it has been described in the previous chapter, with Joann. But it had happened before; some big, loud, friendly daddy of a man, passing through town, would visit us, take a look at our pretty baby, and knowing nothing about her to make him wary, would sweep her off the floor, hug and tickle and toss her while she squealed and chuckled with the most ordinary baby delight. During one such visit I watched, incredulous, as Elly - impervious Elly - got up off the floor, went over to the stranger, and crawled on to his lap. A year and a half later, at the time of her second hospital examination, we remembered his magic and took Elly to visit. But he had lost it. He knew now that something was wrong with her and he treated her as any intelligent and sensitive person would - delicately, tentatively, cautiously. Elly never even saw him.
What could we make of this fact - that Elly could be reached by exactly the sort of crude initiative that one would think would most repel her? Invasions are mounted on faith. We have not been people to whom faith came naturally, and there was little here for faith to work on. It helped us, then, in our continual assaults upon Elly’s sheer walls to remember that we had seen her welcome invasion. It sustained us to think that though she could not take the initiative she was glad when initiative was taken. Every time we forced ourselves to force her privacy, taking her hand (as she took ours), lifting it, manipulating her fingers so stubbornly left limp, it helped to think that there was perhaps a friend in the citadel, a fifth column unable to assist us yet hoping for our victory.
There could be no more important help. Of course we had learned for ourselves already that Elly liked to be touched, stimulated, occupied — that she was bored inside her serenity. But what one has learned for oneself is a frail reed if no one strengthens it from outside. Watching the rare people who succeeded with Elly, however temporary all such successes were, we were strengthened in our knowledge of what was necessary if we were to succeed.
What we learned is what actors know — actors and good teachers: that if there is a distance between you and another, whether an audience or a single child, it is you who must make the effort to reach out. You must throw a bridge over the distance, and the only material for that bridge is the force of your personality, such force as you can give it. You must project. You must project in ways that may seem exaggerated or unnatural or artificial to you if you are not an actor already, but you cannot mind that. You must become an actor, if an actor is a person who knows more ways of projecting than most people. You will learn to use loudness and softness, sound and silence, emphasis, change of pace, gesture. And since the distance you are trying to bridge is not, like the actor’s, physical, you can learn to project in ways he cannot. You can surprise by approach, you can fix attention by a dynamics of touch as varied as that of voice. There are many ways; you find them when you look for them. But somehow you send your personality out beyond yourself,into the waiting vacuum. You will be making a fool of yourself. But you cannot mind that either. Sooner than you think, you will get used to looking up at a visitor from the inside of a cardboard carton.
It is seduction, make no mistake about it. You are setting out, with every charm you own, unasked and
