A month later, Elly has another doll-house game. ‘Walk to A & P, get a bo’ll wine, drink all up!’ She picks up a tiny bottle from the doll kitchen and, making as if to uncork it, produces with her curved tongue a perfect pop. We both laugh, I with surprise, she with pride. She has been praised for popping with her tongue, but this is the first time the trick has had meaning. She begins to offer wine to the dolls. In a cheery chirp she anticipates their reaction. ‘Baby “no thank you!” Grandma drink all up! Teacher drink all up! Boy “no thank you!.’ I ask, ‘Elly, do you want some wine?’ ‘Elly “no thank you!” ’
Elly’s dolls go to the hospital, they sit on the pot, they have parties. They do these things repetitively and in patterns, but still it is a pleasure to watch them. There are other ways of playing, equally cheerful for Elly but less so for the observer.
It is Saturday. ‘Nice day,’ says Elly. ‘Vacation day.’ With a gaiety that seems particularly relaxed and spontaneous she begins to play: she is arranging objects on a tray — a doll, a puppet, some National Wildlife stamps, a plastic Indian, a hairbrush, a catalogue, two books, six assorted doll-garments. Happily she lays them side by side, patting each. ‘And shoe-and cloth’ — she covers them with a red handkerchief. ‘Pretty.’
The arrangement is without meaning. The objects have no relationship in actuality. Fantasy would be hard put to it to provide one, and there is no sign of fantasy here. These are a set, in the mathematical sense, and Elly is pleased with it — the set of objects on this tray. At other times a rudimentary fantasy will give an arrangement an eerie social meaning, as when Elly sets out the letters on the scrabble board and informs us they are having a dinner party. Other games are even more discouraging. These we do not share. Daily Elly empties her toy-basket, pulls her books on to the floor, systematically dumps out every jigsaw puzzle in the house to sift the pieces through her fingers, as she sifts marbles, peanuts, even dolls. If I could always be playing with her, feeding her imagination and sustaining her attention, perhaps she would not play like that. But I cannot. Her play covers the whole range from utter sterility to the amusing surprises of the two incidents I described first. But such incidents, though increasingly frequent, are not typical. They exhibit the extreme of inventiveness and flexibility that Elly can as yet reach.
Play has its surprises, and (so far have we come) conversation has them too.
Elly says, ‘Elly three hundred!’
I say, ‘Three hundred is too old, Elly will die.’ (This is a concept that will bear some work, since it is so far based exclusively on squashed mosquitoes. )
Elly says cheerfully, ‘Too old, die,’ and mimes it. ‘Great big dead, too old! Carry me? Elly too tired? Elly three hundred, yes!’
Elly has been talking a good deal about dirt recently — dog dirt, doll dirt, our dirt. It means faeces. We have accepted this, particularly since her fuzzy pronunciation does much to denaturize the word in company. But her speech is improving and she is, after all, in school. I want her to learn, even if she cannot understand, that dirt is not an all-purpose conversational gambit. So I say, ‘I don’t want to talk about dirt.’ Yesterday at dinner I had said the same thing. Elly remembers — not only what I said but where and when. She makes a supreme effort to imagine what not wanting to talk about dirt might entail. We are not at dinner now, but for her the words are still embedded in their first context and it is in that context that she must envisage what I might regard as suitable conversation. She says triumphantly, ‘I [equals, of course, “you, mother”] want to talk about corn muffin!’
So slowly understanding grows, and even concern for others. ‘Becky eye pink. Need ointment.’ I recognize my own voice in the conventionalized tones of her concern. ‘Becky eye all better, Becky ha’ pink eye, yes! Don’t touch-uh-eye, make-uh-itch! Leave eye alone, Becky. Feel better, yes. Becky eye all better, yes. She hurt. Ow! Ointment in it. See? All better. Sore eye. Becky get sad. See, Becky eye itch. Look. Becky cry? No!
Becky be happy! Becky sad? No! Becky put-uh-ointment in it.’
And gradually the forms of social interaction are refined. Coming in from my day at the college I greet her.
‘Hi, bird.’
‘Hi, bird,’ she echoes.
‘Say “hi, Mama.” ’ (On second thought) ‘Am I your bird?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all right, then you can say “bird” too.’
‘Hi, bird too.’
This is Elly in her own home, occasionally frustrated and anxious (if she has decided that the number of those dolls is significant, there will be hell to pay if she loses one), but in the main gay, active, full of cheerful noises and cheerful words. But if you were to watch her outside it you would see something very different. Outside, children play, familiar children who have lived long in the neighbourhood. No such conversations take place with them. They play in ways Elly does not share. They pull wagons, ride tricycles, run in and out of houses for toys and equipment, organize tea-parties, snow fights, and hide-and-seek. Elly swings and swings, or eats snow, or plays with sand as of old, dribbling it from a spoon. I can get her to make cakes, but why should another child make the effort, or accommodate itself to her rigidities? ‘You want to put icing on it, Elly?’ Anxiously Elly replies ‘No?’
The children have learned not to talk to Elly unless I am there to act as interpreter — an interpreter not even of speech, but of behaviour. It is simply too hard for them. Sometimes there is a brief contact, as in taking turns on a swing. But where, either because of inability or shyness, neither party will take the initiative, there can be no real interaction. I am trying to encourage Elly to answer when a child says ‘Hi, Elly’. So far, I am encouraged — but the child is bewildered — if she echoes ‘Hi, Elly’, back.
But here too there are mysteries. Elly can be contrary, and she knows how to tease. She will rarely greet someone she knows well, but on occasion she will rush up to some college boy she has never seen before and embrace him on the street. He, of course, is as embarrassed as I am, and Elly looks at us with mischief in her eyes. Or she makes — not often — a clumsy overture to another child, an overture that would have been reciprocated had she made it when she was two, to another two-year-old, but that normal children now find bizarre and frightening. It is hard to build sociality on these fitful and easily discouraged advances.
Elly is now in the class for the educable retarded at our local public school. After three years with normal children, the private school considered it impossible to move her into even their extremely small first grade. Ironically, it was because she had made so much progress that they could not keep her. She was no more strange than she had always been, but as she has improved her strangeness has acquired a much higher visibility. Now that she can ‘act out’, she is no longer the silent child who took directions and caused no trouble, but a spring-tight, hyperactive little girl who uses her voice and her whole body to express the emotions, positive and negative, that are at length available to her. Newly at large in the world of feeling, she must learn to control it, and that without converting control into repression.
It is not easy. Her first weeks in the public school required manifold adjustments and imposed severe tensions on teacher, pupils, and administration — tensions that were absorbed with a flexibility, imagination, and good will that quite literally pass belief. That I do not describe them here at length only illustrates that there is never space for all the important things. Elly’s new teacher knows that Elly’s very difficulties show that she is now ready to profit from what no home care and no one- to-one relationship, however devoted, can give her; the opportunity to be led, step by step, with imagination and understanding, into minimal interaction, not with a sympathetic adult, but with her peers.