THE TODDLER PIT, by A. R. Morlan

Originally published in The Ultimate Zombie (1993).

“Children have to go through a period of going crazy. I mean, of course, you don’t want it to end in death. That’s kind of the limit, death. You don’t want it to go that far.”

—Mick Jagger

The Toddler Pit’s been gone from the Fine Arts Center of my alma mater for many years now; the last time I returned to the college, that particular wing of the campus had been invaded by the art department. The cloying odor of near-stale peanut butter and damp bib overalls had been replaced with the reek of slow-drying oils and whatever mysterious chemicals the photography majors use to develop their latest roll of snapshots in the darkroom. And the occasional crayoned scrawl on the painted cement block walls had been refined, enlarged, to life-size black silhouettes of artists—O’Keefe, Renoir, DaVinci—each adorned with a flesh-tone life mask painted across their flat black heads.

Whoever created the mural was talented, more so than the usual art majors I’d known during my years at this college. The row of flesh-faced flat black bodies are uncannily lifelike, yet abstract, at once. A little like those foot-high dolls based on whatever television show is currently occupying the minds—and draining the allowances—of the preteen set; a realistic, almost death-mask perfect face, surmounting a completely inhuman, impossibly proportioned doll body.

Or the type of scrawled drawing a small child will produce, once he or she gets the essentials of human anatomy fixed in his or her still-growing mind; a huge head, dotted Mr. Potato-Head style with mismatched eyes, nose and mouth (ears optional), then a ruler-straight body bisected with arms that form perfect right angles to the torso, perched on inverted “V” legs. The body is easily dismissed, but sometimes, the face can be telling…no, not just the smile, or lack of it, or even the way the child usually matches the eye color correctly to his or her own.

It’s never so much what you can see in a child’s first attempt at self-portraiture, it’s more like what the child is trying to say through the actual effort.…

When I worked in the toddler pit, during those seemed-like-they’d-never-end six weeks required by my Introduction to Education class, I saw a lot of drawings, and built a lot of bristle-block towers, and helped a lot of little kids, who were barely old enough to perch themselves up on the toilet bowl unaided, get their elastic-waist pants pulled back up all the way before letting them venture out into the hallway beyond the women’s room, where we customarily herded the toddlers before and after naptime. I wasn’t even an Early Childhood Education major, or into Elementary Ed—but the number of student-teacher slots at the town junior high school were limited, so I wound up doing my Intro to Ed hands-on practice teaching stint in the little day care housed in two large adjoining rooms (and one small one, where they kept cribs for the sniffy or slightly-retarded kids in the Fire Arts Center, a.k.a. the Toddler Pit, close cousin to Olivia de Havilland’s 1948 cinematic home away from home, The Snake Pit.

It wasn’t hard to sense the connection; when you’re only five feet four, yet loom over dozens of arm-flapping, block-throwing, runny-nosed, vaguely ammonia-smelling, shrieking children all under the age of give, the instinct to curl up in a protective ball and just wait it out until all those Mommies and Daddies show up to claim their baby demons is almost too strong to resist.

And what the kids thought of me, and the other women (some paid, some draftees from Intro to Ed, like me), was difficult to tell; some would wake up from their naps crying, while others would hug and slobbily kiss any adult human in sight. (I actually worried more about the latter; these were the days of the endless McMartin Pre-School case, after all.) And then…there were the unreachable ones. Nearly blind Jennifer, whose mother had lived on chocolates and ulcer medicine while carrying her, or her seemingly normal sister Darcy, whose back was dotted with keloid scars in a lineless connect-the-dots pattern. Sarah, who cried silently after naptime, while I coaxed on her socks and shoes. And happy, mindless, cooing Stephen, and his sister, Nancy, she of the strange, strange crayoned pictures drawn for an audience of no one….

Pictures I eventually plucked from the Toddler Pit garbage pails prior to the college janitor hauling the pails out to the big chained dumpster located alongside the FAC parking lot.

All these years later, I still have the pictures…and in many ways, they are no less lifelike/surreal than the flat black shadows masquerading as long-dead artists which now grace the halls of the former Toddler Pit—even if they portray things none of those esteemed artists would dared have painted; things more suited to Goy or Bosch, perhaps, if those men had been literally immersed in their art….

Yet, I have to remind myself that they were the efforts of a child, only a mere child.

That…that is the important thing to remember. Nancy was a child….

* * * *

“Stephen…shut up,” the little girl mumbled as I rubbed her back during naptime, while her brother—dark blonde-brown hair neatly combed, plump face almost split in two with an infectious, brainless smile, fat clean hands and feet waving spasmodically while the rocker-seated teacher’s aide tried to calm him down with a nearly hissed lullaby—happily resisted all efforts to calm him down enough to make him sleep. Stephen’s sister as stretched out stiffly on one of the low webbing-slung cots scattered in the darkened half of the toddler pit, in a random configuration akin to the arrangement of buried bodies under John Wayne Gacy’s crawlspace down in Chicago.

All around us, the rest of the day-care kids were either asleep or successfully faking it; they were attended by my fellow teacher’s aides, each rubbing the tiny back of a prone, shoes-and-socks-off toddler until the child became drowsy enough to sink into sleep—and give the old woman who ran the day care a few precious minutes of undeserved peace.

I loathed this part of the day; I didn’t think it was right to touch the children that much, my back felt like someone was tattooing it with a darning needle after I’d bent over a couple of kids, and the gentle blapping sound most of the kids made when they snored lightly was maddening. From her expression and demeanor—as much a constant with her as the always-perfect matched clothing she and her brother wore—I sensed that Nancy wasn’t actually into naptimes either. Perhaps that was why I tried to make sure I rubbed her back come the afternoon break time; she knew and I knew that her brother was a massive pain, even though the day care manager and the other women professed to “just adore” Stephen. Not that I held his retardation against him; don’t get me wrong on that account. It wasn’t his fault, any more than it was his mother’s fault, or his father’s, or anyone’s fault—least of all Nancy’s.

And true, at the time Stephen was adorable-looking; that nicely-cut and styled soft hair, those huge blueberries-in-cream eyes set in that soft-skinned pale face, the pursed doll-pink mouth, the chubby fingers and toes. Just like a boy-doll from Sears…and that was the problem, the just part.

Aside from some gurgling coos and sharp, happy-seeming shouts, Stephen couldn’t talk. Couldn’t think much, either; he seldom played meaningfully with even the most basic of toys, nor could he follow any sort of verbal or visual directions. Not potty-trained, either. But his clothes were exquisite, not unlike the doll fashions shown in the Wish Book come Christmas. Little sailor suits, tiny rugby tops, jackets with buttons along the minuscule arms. Always clean, never stained, worn, or frayed, like the togs worn by many of the other inmates of the Pit. And his sister’s clothes were just as perfect, just as unreal.

(“Their mother cares so much about them,” Mrs. Day Care would gush. “She keeps them so clean—” even as Nancy would be sitting off near the corner of the noisy, peanut-butter-scented kitchen/play area, glowering at her oblivious brother.)

I bent down and whispered to Nancy, “It’s okay, hon, he doesn’t know…he’ll settle down soon,” all the while wondering how the poor kid could stand living with Stephen once she got home.

Just turning her head toward me, letting the rest of her body remain in place, the dark-haired little girl said so softly I almost couldn’t hear her, “Stephen never stops…he never sleeps.”

Rubbing her back harder ( could make out the chicken-bone tracery of scapula and spinal column under her jersey rugby shirt), I leaned over as far as my aching back would allow and assured her, “Oh, it just seems that way….Stephen probably just falls asleep after you do at night,” all the while wishing that I could scoop the little girl up and carry her off somewhere far, far from her doomed-to-be-an-infant brother. Anywhere away from him, cute and cuddly and almost-comical as Stephen was.

How cute is he going to look in five year? Or ten? Will a cooing teenager in diapers be so “clean” and adorable? I asked myself—but my mind wasn’t actually looking for any answers.

“Never,” she firmly reiterated, then, moving her right arm up to the level of her face, she slowly crooked one tiny-nailed finger. Getting off the child-size chair I’d been sitting on, I hunkered down next to Nancy’s cot. Once my face was sufficiently close to hers, the small girl with the ruler-straight Buster Brown bangs and perfectly-combed page-boy haircut whispered, “Stephen’s dead in his head.”

“No, Nancy,” I said a little more firmly, but just as softly. “That can’t be. If he were, he wouldn’t be able to see, or make sounds, or wave his arms. He’s just…not like you and me, okay? But he’s okay for himself,” I lied brightly, hoping Mrs. Day Care wouldn’t notice me talking to Nancy, and bitch about it to my Intro to Ed professor.

On the low cot Nancy resolutely shook her head, barely making a ripple in her dark, fine hair. “Dead in the head,” she said with that heartbreaking finality that told me not to try to convince her otherwise. As I got back on the little blond wood and enameled metal school chair, I delicately kept rubbing my hand along her knobby spine, telling myself, Don’t push the kid so hard. C’mon, what is she, three or four at the most? What the hell does she know about retardation or arrested development? Probably heard one of her folks say it—or some friend of theirs.

The truth was, I hadn’t even seen Nancy and Stephen’s parents yet, so I had no idea what sort of people they were. Profoundly disappointed perhaps. Embarrassed? I doubted it; the children were both too well-turned-out to be the products of a family who didn’t want to show them off in at least the most basic way. Overcompensating? That sounded more like it; I could imagine a fussy, PTA-aholic Jaycette type of mother ironing their tiny underwear and probing their every orifice with a Q-Tip, just to make sure that no one would accuse her of not being an on-top-of-things parent. Clean kids, good home. And never mind that Stephen would never so much as say his own name, let alone do his duty on his own.

Once naptime ws over that afternoon (true to Nancy’s word, her brother never did drift off to sleep, but only turned the volume and the jerking down a couple of notches—but then again, Nancy’s dark eyes never closed for very long either), and Mrs. Day Care incarnate bustled her polyester-painted bottom out of the building, two lines of hands-locked kiddies in tow behind her, one of the other inmates and I were supposed to clean up the nap area. Our job was to put away the now-folded cots and straighten up the litter of kiddie books and battered nap animals while the toddlers played for half an hour in the bright early-spring sunshine.

I’d never been all that close to Ruth, one of my fellow Intro to Ed classmates—she was an Early Childhood major, I was into Secondary Ed—but she was about ten years older than me, and her husband was a professor at the college, so, still vaguely disturbed by Nancy’s naptime statements, I decided to force myself to become just a little friendlier with the woman. After all, there was a good possibility that she might know something about Stephen and Nancy’s situation, or maybe even their parents.

“Oh Stevie—you mean our little angel? It’s sad, really,” Ruth said in that chicken-laying-an-extra-egg crackle-cackle voice of hers as she quickly folded a metal-frame-and webbing cot into a neat square bundle. “His parents are the DeGrootens, you know, Dr. De Grooten, in the ethics department—”

“Oh yeah, I had him last semester…gave me an A even though I never said more than five words at a time in class. Aid I understood what he was talking about during his lectures,” I found myself babbling, now suddenly anxious to leave the subject of Stephen—and Nancy—far behind us. But I was a little too late; Ruth’s tongue was now firmly locked in the On position:

“Terrible thing, what happened with Stephen. He would’ve been fine, if only Marta’s doctors had listened to her and taken him that same week he was due to be born. What are you, a sophomore? Oh, a freshman. I was going to say, if you’d have been around here four years back, you would’ve remembered—it was all over the school. Well, anyhow”—Ruth deftly manipulated another cot into a tight tubular bundle—“Marta was a couple of weeks past her due date, and she wanted the baby out, but her doctors said, ‘Wait, there’s no rush, you could’ve miscounted.’ But she was already thirty-five or six by then, so I don’t know what the doctors were waiting for, Hitler to rise from the dead or something, so anyhow, they didn’t induce labor, even though Marta kept insisting that she wasn’t feeling well, that the baby wasn’t moving as much. But you know how doctors are, they just slap that stethoscope on your belly and if they hear a heartbeat, it’s alive and they don’t give it a second thought. This was around Christmas. I remember how huge she was in that woolen cape of hers when I met her in the Penney’s store. The baby was already three weeks overdue, and I don’t know if her doctors had her chart mixed up with some elephant or what, but they wouldn’t take it. Marta told me she was worried sick about the baby, and her color was just off, almost the same shade as her cape, and that was sort of a Prussian blue—”

Figuring that Ruth wasn’t about to get to any really important details for a few minutes (after all, she was going on about what the unfortunate Mrs. DeGrooten was wearing in the J.C. Penney’s store), I found myself muttering “Uh-huh” after every overemphasized word while I looked through the blinds-bisected windows, which faced the tiny playground now swarming with shrieking toddlers. Only, since the windows were airtight, I couldn’t hear any of them, just see their mouths snap open and shut quickly, like hungry baby birds who’d tumbled en masse out of the nest. Mrs. Day Care was off to one side of the play area—a four-foot-high geodesic-style jungle gym, three bucket-seats-with-leg-holes-type swings, a short sloping slide, and a sandbox—animated wrinkled face bright, pink-nailed hands gaily clapping in time to some rhythm none of the toddlers were following. It was tragic, how that woman had missed her true vocation—trained seal at the water park.

Stephen had been dumped into one of those bucket-seated swings, his wiggling plump legs thrusting through the leg openings, his hands up and vaguely wiggling. As usual, his mouth was wide open, pale tongue lolling almost sweetly to one side, his huge eyes vacant and glistening. While Ruth was yammering “—and so I told her, ‘Just go find another doctor, then.’ I mean, honestly, it wasn’t like—” I searched the play area for Nancy. I finally saw her squatting down close to the curved retaining wall built around the swing-set, pawing intently at the asphalt and dirt ground, as if slowly grubbing for bugs. Her pinched face, ever-framed by that new-doll immaculate soft brown hair, was distant, yet oddly intent.

Behind me, Ruth’s rambling story suddenly took on a more definite—and chilling—direction:

“—days before Christmas, Dr. DeGrooten demanded that the doctors do something, so they did an emergency Caesarian after breaking her water didn’t work…and it was awful. One of my friends, she’s an obstetrics nurse, and she was there that afternoon, so she saw everything. You see, when they broke Marta’s water, it came out all…foul, not clear or just bloody even, but with all this greenish-black…yuck in it. And the smell…well, the doctors suddenly knew then that something was wrong after all—” Under her head of permanent curls, Ruth’s freckled face grew queasy—pale, like curdled cottage cheese. “And when they opened her up—well, my friend said it was lucky Marta didn’t develop a septic infection from what was inside her coming in contact with the incision. The baby he’d been much too long in the womb, he should’ve been taken at least two or three weeks sooner, because—” here Ruth’s crackly voice lowered to a rusty rumble. “—the baby…went all over himself in there. Did a number two. Only with unborn babies, there’s a name for it—my friend told me, but you know how it is with those medical terms. Anyhow, it was all green-black and sticky, and it had gotten into the baby’s brain via his ears and eyes, and it infected his mucous membranes and even his brain. That’s why the baby was retarded—and almost blind and deaf, too, even though he makes all that noise. Just horrible. When they pulled him out of Marta, she saw a little bit of him, even though she was pretty much sedated. He was all ooze-covered and black…‘like he was rotted,’ she told me.

“Anyhow,” she went on, brightening as if she’d put the worst of her story behind her, “his parents are in the process of suing the hospital, all the doctors involved, and even the parent clinic this hospital in town belongs to. Considering that Stephen could’ve—should’ve—been normal. I don’t blame them, even if them winning will jerk up the cost of care out at the hospital.”

Out in the play are, Mrs. Day Care Goddess was clapping her hands furiously, and mouthing something. I barely made out the silent “come in!” before Ruth added, “Of course, Mara and Etan won’t even talk about the whole incident anymore, just dress Stephen and his sister up like nothing’s wrong—”

As the children slowly massed into entering-the-building formation, I turned around, a stuffed elephant still in one white-knuckled hand, and asked quickly, “How old is Nancy?” The little brown-banged girl didn’t seem to be much older than Stephen, nor was she obviously younger. But even though I’d only been half-listening at times to Ruth’s story, I knew that she’d only mentioned Stephen’s sister that one time—

“Nancy? Y’ know…I’m really not sure. After what…happened to Stephen happened, they took off a year or so, went to stay with his folks…or was it hers?” Ruth paused to scratch one of her eyes under her glasses, making the rose-brown plastic frames do a jig on her plain face. “Well, whatever, once they came back, they were toting around both kids, and they were at an age where it’s hard to tell, really. Stephen always was a big baby, I mean literally big, and Nancy was already toddling even then—I just didn’t know them all that well to be able to really say how old Nancy is. Come to think of it, though…I don’t remember them ever talking about Nancy, but I didn’t know them all that well, just faculty mixers, occasional dinners at the Dean’s house. They could’ve had her at home with a sitter, for all I know. My husband, he wasn’t—isn’t—that close to Etan either. He and Marta had only to the college a year before Stephen was born.”

I could hear the toddlers running down the hallway outside, and took that as my cue to hurry back into the kitchen/play area, to greet the first of the arriving children, “—and we don’t put things like that in our mouths, do you hear me?” while Stephen cooed and hooted merrily. Apparently the day-care head was holding onto the boy, as she usually did, but when she finally walked into the room, I saw that she had Stephen’s sister held firmly by one dirt-grimed hand. The girl was trying not to cry.

Ruth hurried over to take Stephen, and lead him off to a quiet corner where he could play with his plastic bristle blocks, while Mrs. Day Care Witch continued to reprimand Nancy. “Shame on you! Your mommy will be so angry at you! Now you go let Anya wash off those dirty hands—” Motioning to me with her free hand, Mrs. Day Care sputtered, “Anya, this bad little girl was doing things she shouldn’t have been doing—and she wouldn’t even go potty before play time. Take her down to the washroom and make sure she goes and washes up before she comes back!” The air in front of me reeked from the odor of the woman’s dentures; she’d been spitting her words out so forcefully. Without waiting for my response, she bustled off, fat bottom wiggling under her slacks, in the direction of the sink.

As I placed both my hands on Nancy’s shoulders and gently began to guide her out of the room, I heard the explosive splat of the water faucet turned on full force behind me. Glancing back at Mrs. Day Care, I saw her frantically scrubbing her hands, while Ruth and the children watched her in numb amazement.

Once we were out in the hallway, I bent over Nancy and whispered, “What happened, honey? Doesn’t she want you playing in the dirt? Some of the jocks on the college track team were ambling around in the FAC—the gym was located there—and Nancy ducked her head shyly when she saw them coming. The guys mumbled a greeting to me, which I returned quickly, before herding the girl into the women’s room located about ten fee from the gym doors.

Once I’d pushed open the pink-enameled door, Nancy walked away from me and let herself into one of the stalls. It took her a while to reach and secure the latch, but I didn’t insist on going n the stall and helping her. One of the part-time day-care workers, a dour, bespectacled woman with hippie-long black hair and a down-turned mouth, always made it a point to join at least one child a day in the stall, lingering in there for minutes on end. I never said anything about it to Mrs. Day Care (I was on both work-study and an academic scholarship, and Mrs. D.C. could blow both of them with one negative report to my professor), but I still hated to think about what might be going on in those stalls. Instead, I hoisted myself onto one of the dingy sinks jutting from the wall and asked the girl casually, “Was the teacher mad at you for something you did…or was she just in a bad mood?”

Nancy said something unintelligible over the sound of something splashing in the water in the bowl. She was so tiny, I couldn’t even see her feet, so I had to assume she was doing “number one,” as the day-care women like to euphemistically dub taking a piss.

“What, hon?”

Somewhat louder, Nancy said—presumably again—“I was digging for worms.”

“Oh…okay,” I said uneasily, wondering why a girl would be into something like that. I remembered my male first-grade classmates digging worms out of the sandbox and then eating them, just to scare the rest of us girls, but I mentally and physically shrugged it off, as I said, “Well, don’t do it in front of the teacher, okay? It freaks her out. And then she yells, and that’s not fun, is it?”

“—my friends,” Nancy was saying, but she’d just flushed, so some of her words were swept away in the gurgle of water. I was about to ask her to come again when she unlatched the pale pink door and emerged from the stall, her pants and underpants pulled up in one huge, doughnut-like roll around her tiny waist. Nancy looked funny, but her face was still so serious. In the sputtering white-green fluorescent lights, she looked exceptionally pasty, as if formed from white Play-Doh. I simply bit my lips to suppress my smile and gingerly unrolled the tube of fabric from around her waist, making sure that I didn’t let my fingers come in contact with her flesh. That was around the time of the McMartin case, after all. And with her folks being professors—even her mom occasionally taught summer courses in biology—I sure as shit didn’t need them coming down on me for touching their little girl in the wrong place.

I did notice that the swirling waters behind her didn’t quite whisk away the lingering odor. I don’t know what it was about babies and little kids, but they sure do have a bad smell. I noticed it again when I lifted her up so that she’d be level with the sink; hanging onto her with one hand, I worked the soap dispense for Nancy, letting a greenish-yellow stream of strong-smelling soap dribble onto her damp outspread hands. But when she caught sight of me in the above-the-sink mirror, she smiled shyly at me—the first time I’d seen her do so. Wondering, Would Stephen have been like her? I helped Nancy dry her hands—again, avoiding contact with her—and then led her back to the Toddler Pit, guiding her slightly by the rugby-shirted shoulders.

Even fifteen feet away from the door, she and I could both hear Stephen hooting and whooping—and under that immaculate, tiny shirt, I felt Nancy’s shoulders stiffen, then droop in resignation….

* * * *

During the walk home that afternoon, after my last class of the day, I found myself remembering my first class-session with Dr. DeGrooten, during my core-requirement ethics class.

Etan DeGrooten was a tall drink of water (as my folks used to call tall, thin people), with a mostly salt-and-cinnamon beard and not too much hair on top of his head. He jerked when he walked or gestured like one of those wooden puppets with the string dangling under them—jumping jacks, I believe they’re called.

He sputtered when he spoke, stuttering and stalling and leaving great significant pauses between paragraphs. I can’t remember if he even wore a wedding ring; I do recall he wore either a bolo set with some polished flat caramel-colored stone or a withered red-print bow tie for every class-session. And those awful tweedy no-color sports coats with the leather oblongs on the elbows. He seldom referred to our textbooks, but instead would go off on bizarre tangents—the most memorable one was in regard to a discussion of situational ethics:

“Talk about…about sit-sit-situational ethics. My mother, she was faced with the all-time…I was seven, and I’d just written ‘I Love You Mommy’ on the wall, in my own excrement, and…course, after she saw what I’d written, what I’d written it in, she didn’t…I mean what does one do in such a sit-situation? Hug or hit? So…she gave me a whack on the bottom and then she hugged me.” At the time, my view of situational ethics was affected by the thought, If you were old enough to write, you shouldn’t have been writing with that, and from that day on, I’d dismissed DeGrooten as a kook. A fifty-plus-year-old man with an infant’s mentality. That he wound up giving me one of the few A’s of the semester came as something of a surprise; I’d never spoken to him outside of class—or in class, either. Not that I saw much of him when not supposedly learning about ethics; only infrequently would I see him hurky-jerking down the winding hallways outside the classroom. And I’d never seen his wife; she was only a name—M. DeGrooten—beside a list of summer biology classes in the stapled, photocopied schedule that appeared prior to each summer session.

But now that I knew about Stephen, and his terrible, messy, unethical birth, I almost understood the man’s frantic desire to appear as loose and unconcerned as possible. He probably prayed that someday Stephen would be able to write anything, even “Dad sucks the big one” on the wall with his own excrement. Yet, even as I neared my house, I kept wondering, What did all of this do to Nancy? Wouldn’t it be fairer to her to ship Stephen off to a children’s home? Talk about ethics…what kind of situation is that for a child to endure? She can’t even go to sleep without hearing him hoot his life away in the next bed…no wonder she calls his brain “dead”…as far as the whole family’s concerned, it might as well be.

“And the rest of him along with it,” I couldn’t help but say aloud, just to savor the wonderful—yet sad—rightness of the thought.

* * * *

Whatever Nancy had been doing with the worms that early afternoon recess periods, Mrs. Day Care deemed it cause for the little girl to stay indoors while the other children played outside—Stephen included. My stomach did a flip-flop every time the old bat made a show of picking up the adorable, nearly uncomprehending boy and baby-talked, “Stevie’s sure a good little boy, isn’t him? What a perfect little dumpling,” while Nancy just took it; no tears, no pouting, just that resigned, defeated manner. She didn’t even bother whispering, “Shut up, Stephen” during naptime anymore, which was perhaps the worst sign of all, as if she’d at long-last discovered that protests, wishes and prayers were ultimately useless. I was the one who was nearly in tears every day in the Toddler Pit; it’s bad enough to reach your late teens or early twenties and realize that life usually is nothing more than a bowl of crap, but to be four or so and have that truth rubbed in your face…God, that sucked.

Since Ruth had little time for Nancy before Mrs. Day Care’s ultimatum that the girl remain indoors (some future day-care teacher she was going to be!). I was elected to baby-sit the girl during playtime. Ruth had cot-folding down to an art form anyhow.

I quickly learned that the little girl had little patience with bristle blocks, or Play-Doh, or even those lift-out wooden tray puzzles her erstwhile playmates enjoyed so much. She’d merely mimic whatever it was I did with the toys, all the while staring up at me with those clear dark eyes set in that milky-fine skin. If she had only cried, it would’ve been easier; while I wasn’t actually much for cuddling, I could have understood her need to vent her undeniable rage at the whole crazy situation she was enduring—pre-worm incident and after. But to simply accept it….

Putting away the much-kneaded lumps of Play-Doh in their respective containers, I asked the little girl sitting across from me, “Are you looking forward to school? It’ll be fun there…you’ll learn how to read and write, and lots of other neat stuff—”

“Not with Stephen there,” she mumbled, tracing the pattern of a flower on the worn plastic stick-on covering adhering to the battered tabletop. Unsure whether or not Stephen ever would be place in any formal school—I doubted that even kindergarten was an option, not with him being in diapers—I decided to let that remark go by. I wasn’t sure exactly how much she knew about his condition, aside from that “dead brain” remark. And besides, I had no idea whether I might have to take another course with her father. Or her heretofore unseen mother.

Nancy kept on tracing the various flowers on the table before her, oblivious to me. Glancing up at the counter near the sink, I saw some squares of roughly rectangular butcher paper—the toss-away “place mats” used for early morning snack-time. I never knew—and never asked—why Mrs. Day Care banned crayons from the day care (probably would’ve caused her a little honest work), but I did carry a pouch of colored markers in my purse, for underline and accenting work on my notes come exam time. Not bothering to break the child’s concentration, I got up, got my purse out of the tiny crib room off to the back of the Toddler Pit and hurried back to the kitchen section before Ruth noticed that I’d left Nancy sitting alone. The girl didn’t look up when I wiggled back into my chair and whispered, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

No response. Still putting on a cheerful front, I ceremoniously lifted the flap on my purse, then slowly unzipped the hidden closure inside. Nothing. Just doodling on the plastic table covering. I pulled the yellow pouch of pens out of my purse, and slid them across the table, until they were within reach of her tracing forefinger. Nancy paused in mid-arc of her finger across a huge orange blossom, then looked up at me, head tilted and eyes blank.

Oh c’mon, kid, don’t you know what crayons are? Are your folks too cheap to buy ’em…or too loopy? Maybe they expect you to use your—

It wasn’t until I got down a couple of sheets of paper that Nancy seemed to put two and two together; with one hand she reached for the top sheet of paper, and with the other she selected a black felt-tip pen. Biting down on one pale pink lip with her front baby teeth, she began to draw something on the paper—not merely scribble, like I’d half-expected her to do. Leaning back in my chair, I watched her create some sort of elaborate drawing full of lopsided figures and out-of-kilter structures, fairly typical work for a girl her age, maybe even a little more advanced than usual, since she was including all the limbs and facial features on the (as I saw them) upside-down people. I wasn’t an art major, but I had to take art history, and the professor (a young bearded guy whose own artistic output included white plaster cartoonlike penises with propellers and wheels attached to them—at least he gave decent lectures) once told the class about the various stages of artistic development in children. According to the little I remembered of Professor Hupple’s lectures (he’d lost me after I’d seen his sculptures at a faculty art show), Nancy’s work was probably typical of a five- to six-year-old, which wasn’t too strange, given how old her father and mother were. I didn’t think they could communicate with Stephen on any significant level, so Nancy probably was a little more mature…even if she did have some sort of understanding with worms.

“That’s really pretty, Nancy,” I offered, trying to get a response from her, but here reaction threw me. Putting down her pen (a red one, now) she asked me flatly, “You think so?”

“Why sure, hon,” I continued to lie, as I bent over the table to look at her masterpiece in progress—albeit still upside down. There were obviously four figures in the picture now, two big (and one sporting an unmistakable beard), and two small—and identical, in a reversed manner. One tiny stick person was all black head, with no features, no hair, no discernible identity…save for the unmistakable striped rugby shirt, while the other smaller figure was black-bodied, and as bloated as a runny gingerbread man, but topped with a recognizable face consisting of dot eyes, slash nose, and a perfectly horizontal mouth. And all the features were black, even the mouth. And surrounding these four figures were sharply-angled rectangles and squares, each containing wild squiggles—although contained within the lines—of green, black and blue. There were no triangles topping the boxy shapes, so they probably weren’t houses…but the three “structures” were so uniform in their contents that they had to have some purpose in Nancy’s eyes.

Pointing casually at the nearest shape, I asked, “What’s that?” not fully expecting an answer, but the child replied, “Where the stuff goes for them,” and pointed at the figures in the picture.

“Oh…‘stuff’ for the people here?”

“Uh-huh.” Nancy picked up the blue pen and added some more wavy lines to the smallest of the black-bordered boxes, before going on. “It has to be held in the boxes, so light don’t hit it. Then it’s no good for them. It’s gotta be kept mushy and dark.”

“‘Mushy and dark’…otherwise the people can’t use it?”

“Not ‘use’…I mean, they don’t do nothing with it. It’s just…there for the people,” Nancy said with great difficulty, and greater maturity, leaving me unable to reply. I think I looked at my watch; somehow, it’s in my memory that I didn’t have too much more time before Mrs. Daffy Day Care returned with the other children, yet there was so much Nancy seemed to want to say.

Turning the picture around so I could see it, Nancy leaned over the table, almost stretching across it until her sweater rode up above the waistband of her pants, exposing a patch of pale back.

“See? Here’s the little one, for this one—” she pointed first to the box at the left of the picture, then at the black-headed small figure, “—and here’s the bigger one, for this one.” Now she matched the black-bodied, small-headed figure with the medium-sized box. “—and the big one’s for them,” finishing her explanation with a linking-up of the largest rectangle and the two adult figures.

Peering down at her creation, Nancy suddenly frowned, then slid back across the table to her seat, where she then picked up the black pen and neatly bisected each of the boxes with a single vertical slash down the middle. Then she drew the dots, parallel to the central line and centered in the middle of each box, as she said, Almost forgot…they use these to get inside.”

“Inside,” I echoed softly; Nancy nodded her head emphatically, and as she did so, I noticed something…grotesque. Even as her head moved, her hair didn’t. The bangs instead rode up and down her forehead, or, rather, they stayed in place while her scalp moved underneath. Not wanting to stare at her, I glanced down at the silhouette-bodied small figure on the butcher paper. It was hairless.

Oh shit, I remember thinking, the poor kid’s sick…probably went through chemo or something. Ye gods, what did her folks do to deserve this? One kid’s damaged, and the other’s—

“Here,” Nancy was saying softly yet urgently, as she pushed the pens—all replaced in their pouch—across the table to me. As I reached out to take them, I heard what had caused her visible state of alarm. Stephen’s unmistakable “wwwwhoooop!” as Mrs. Day Care escorted him into the building….

* * * *

Luckily, I’d hidden Nancy’s drawing in a pile of flat wooden puzzles before Mrs. Day Care had a chance to pounce on it. For the next five days, while the other children played outdoors, and Ruth hummed tunelessly to herself as she straightened up the nap area, I’d ceremoniously hand Nancy my pens (I’d bought a fresh set at the campus bookstore, just so none of them would run out on her)and a few sheets of butcher paper…and then let her make me distinctly uneasy for the next half hour.

In all of her drawings, there were two constants. The yin and yang pair of small figures. Black-face and Black-body, always close to each other on the page. As for what surrounded them…hell, even after I don’t know how many centuries, nobody can really understand the canvases Bosch or Dali created, can they? And those men were trained artists, with consummate knowledge of anatomy, or line, of perspective….

But Nancy was there, and she explained some of the images, those she felt compelled to share with me, while others remained unexplained, unguessable. I didn’t ask her anything; the ethics of leading a child were all too plain to me. I didn’t want anyone coming back at me, accusing me of some wild perversion, some lewd suggestion. I never asked Nancy to do a single thing—not after I saw the first picture, that first afternoon.

“That’s nice, Nancy—”

“This is the place where the mushy stuff starts out…it’s got to be real low, under other stuff so that it’s good—”

The little girl was pointing to a vague semicircle, obviously under a floor comprised of several parallel lines slanting toward me. Inside the circle….the mass of writhing red, black, green, and brown blobs, squiggles and almost-defined shapes was enigmatic, even if its purpose was almost clear from the child’s cryptic explanation:

“First all this is other stuff, from all over—mostly that one’s clear house—” she pointed to a representation of a larger beardless figure, of indeterminate gender, “—plus some squishy stuff I don’t like, and then that one mixes it all up, and lets it set for a long, long time, until the bubbles come up and pop…and they smell,” Nancy confided in a lower, almost giggling voice, before adding, “and then it’s all ready for the boxes. Then it’s good. For all of them.”

Then there would be a lull, always that short time while Nancy drew quickly, and my mind slowed to a deliberate near-stop, as if to delay comprehension of what she’d just told me, and then Nancy would stop her frantic scribbling and we’d start the ritual once again:

“That’s real pretty—”

“This is what’s inside the boxes, when the doors are down. It’s real quiet…they just gloat and when they close their eyes, the stuff trickles inside, like crying only from outside, not in. And it…goes in and in them, and then the doors open and it’s time to get up. That’s when it’s time to dress,” and she points at a couple of red- and blue-striped blobs near the bottom of the page, which I now recognized as crumpled little shirts, a detail almost lost in the looping, dark-smeared haze of blue, green, and black surrounding the ubiquitous black-headed/black-bodied figures.

I found myself looking at the other pictures she’d done over the past week; the “stuff” was becoming a stock element in her drawings, be it in the boxes, around the tiny figures, or (worst of all) seeping out of various orifices on their bodies.

Why in the world did you people have to tell her about what happened to Stephen…what the hell kind of ethical behavior is that? You dress them alike, so the poor kid thinks she has to go through what he did—

“—go potty,” Nancy was whispering in my ear, as she leaned over the table, trying to capture my wandering attention. From the pained look on her face, I realized she’d been repeating the comment for a few seconds.

“Uh-huh, kiddo,” I mumbled, before yelling to Ruth, “I’ll be right back with her, okay?” The curly-headed woman cheerfully nodded, and I took off with Nancy, gently steering her by the shoulders.

When we reached the women’s room, Nancy broke free of my guiding touch and burst through the door on her own, and ran into one of the open stalls, barely shutting the door before quite loudly beginning to do her “duty” behind the closed pink door. I wondered if whatever made her lose her hair was affecting her bowels; the smell was terrible. I hoped no one else would come into the room; even the plastic air freshener cone perched on top of the tampon machines was no help. I did find myself backing away from her, until I was almost a the door, before I heard Nancy’s plaintive, “Teacher…it won’t flush….”

“You jiggle the handle?” Come on, kid, just push the handle—

A few seconds of metallic fiddling sounds, then: “Yeah…it don’t go.”

“Oh…shit,” I mumbled, before telling Nancy, “Well…pull up your clothes and come on out of there—”

“My Momma says not to do that…I gotta—”

“Come on, Nancy,” I said, a little to forcefully for my own liking; whatever she heard in my tone of voice made the girl quickly open the door and scoot out of the stall, her head bowed, her eyes almost hidden under her thick lashes. I patted her on the head as she passed me, giving her a quick smile even as I felt her wig shift on her head slightly under my fingertips, and then hurried over—my eyes averted, my breath held—to the vacated stall.

I jiggled the handle while keeping an eye on Nancy, who stood with her own hands folded before her, mumbling, “Mommy’ll be mad.” But the damn toilet wouldn’t flush. “Oh shit!” Louder this time.

I’d have to get the janitor….but I don’t know if it was just the look in Nancy’s eyes that stopped me, or an inner voice spurred on by the memory of what Nancy had been telling me those past few afternoons. No matter what it was that made me pause, and then take a real look at that bowl, I never called for anyone to help me that day. No one would have…understood.

Not that I even really understood.

Nancy hadn’t had a loose bowel movement, or any kind of movement associated with digestion or elimination. She’d just…seeped. And after seeing page after page of her handiwork the last few afternoons, I knew—at least vaguely, in that not-fully-explained way—what had happened…what had been happening….

It was the “stuff” Nancy kept speaking of, and patiently drawing for me. Organic, mostly, or it had been at some long ago time, before spending God-knew-how-long in that pit or vat or whatever her mother kept it in, before infusing it into her children—or into Nancy, at least. The “stuff” that was good for her…that probably kept her going—

Standing there in that foul-smelling stall, it all became clear and not clear for me. Marta DeGrooten taught biology…living matter, and the study of it. Her “clear house” was probably a greenhouse…and the boxes were probably immersion tanks, like they used in those sensory deprivation experiments—

“Mommy’ll be real mad,” Nancy’s voice was starting to choke with tears. Suddenly afraid of what might come out of her sad little eyes, I hurried over to her and murmured, “No, no, hon, we’ll fix it so nobody will know. Your secret, my secret. Okay?”

Thank God, if there ever was one, the girl began to smile. Maybe the word “secret” did it. I picked her up and sat her in one of the sink bowls, telling her to stay there and not jump down, while I went and did something. Once I left the women’s room, I took some flack from a few of my jock classmates when they saw me filing the janitor’s galvanized steel bucket—the ten-gallon “jobbie”—with water. “Hey, Anya, you got new work-study here?” but I forced myself to laugh it off before wheeling the heavy bucket into the women’s room. I strained a muscle in my arm hefting the bucket, and my shirt and jeans were soaked, but I managed to flush the “stuff” down the toilet. The janitor just stared at me when I wheeled his bucket back to his “office” near the men’s room, but grunted in agreement when I told him I didn’t want him to have to bother with a clogged toilet when he was busy elsewhere. I didn’t leave his sight until he started making an “Out of Order” sign for that door, though.

Nancy stayed in place until I lifted her out of the sink. When I did so, my hand slid under her sweater, where it came in contact with almost gelid, squish-soft skin beneath…and when I bent down to take one of Nancy’s small hands, it felt much the same. Not quite rotted…but getting there. She had to be awfully sick….

As we walked down the hallway, toward the Toddler P:it, I now understood Mrs. Day Care’s frantic desire to wash—and wash—her hands under that stream of hot water….

* * * *

I may have saved Nancy from one kind of disaster that afternoon, but I didn’t have the same kind of luck myself. During my absence, Ruth—ever helpful, ever nosy—had come upon Nancy’s handiwork resting on the table, plus my collection of coloring pens. And by the time I was finished in that women’s room, Mrs. Day Care and the other children had returned to the Pit—where Ruth felt compelled to show the teacher both Nancy’s drawings and my felt-tipped pens.

They were deep in discussion when I came back with Nancy; I don’t know what made my heart palpitate more—the sight of my pens in Mrs. Day Care’s shapely pink-nailed claws, or those butcher-paper drawings from hell in Ruth’s lightly-freckled hands. Nancy sensed my panic, and did what any child long accustomed to keeping deep, dark secrets would do—she ran and grabbed the pictures out of Ruth’s fingers, and tossed them into the big trash can near the kitchenette. Then she went and pretended to busy herself with a picture book in the corner of the room.

I don’t remember exactly how I bullshitted my way out of that mess; I do recall something to do with keeping a bored child happy, a bored professor’s child. I might have even tossed in situational ethics. I don’t know. It would’ve been appropriate.

All I do know is that the ban on Nancy participating in outdoor playtime was lifted. During my last couple of weeks in the Toddler Pit, I alone folded the cots after naptime, and I was even released from my duties as back-rubber.

To her credit, Nancy never mentioned our mutual secret; I saw so little of her—just a sad, dark-wigged little figure sitting obediently behind a jumble of bristle-blocks—that it was almost as if we’d never met. And Stephen continued to whoop, coo, and burble happily, forever safe from the spilling of secrets, or the revelation of his second nurturing womb. I did make it a point to touch him, just once, before leaving the Toddler Pit for good. His skin was soft, pliant, and firm—good, clean, healthy baby skin. If he was lucky, he’d keep it for life. And he smelled good, too. Like soft powder and baby lotion. I never changed his diapers, the long-haired secretive aide was in charge of that, but I never once doubted that the sight of something like the “stuff” would have shocked her into sudden loud-mouthed ranting to Mrs. Day Care, her usual tight-lipped reserve shattered. So I had to assume that Stephen merely did his “duty” like any other person.

But the near-revelation of Nancy’s little secret did enable me to add one more jagged piece to the frameless, many-pieces-missing puzzle of her life. Instead of rubbing backs before naptime, I was assigned to do dishes after snack-time (which occurred about an hour or so before I showed up in the Pit each day), and put them away in the cupboards that lined the kitchenette. Taped to one of the doors was a ruler-lined sheet of paper, with all the names of the children who attended the day care—along with a list of dietary “No-No’s” (as they were so dubbed on the sheet)l. Always-crying Sarah was a diabetic, so no sugary foods for her. Jennifer needed to take a pill for lactose intolerance, from a bottle issued by the hospital pharmacy. Plus, there were a couple of notations for the DeGrooten youngsters:

“Stephen—jars of baby food in refrig., Nancy—withhold all solids, can give water (bottled only, see refrig.)”

I only needed to read that once…for Nancy had explained the rest, in her own fashion.

Aside from that printed revelation inside the cupboard door, my being barred from the nap area—and Nancy—had one other advantage. I was able to fish the child’s drawings out of the trash, long before the janitor came to take away a week’s worth of garbage, and stuff the folded sheets into my purse.

Not that I expected anyone to scrutinize the scribbled sheets, or even understand them…but secrets are secrets.

* * * *

As it turned out, I never saw Nancy or Stephen again after I finally did the last of my time in the Toddler Pit. A week after I finished my student-teacher stint there, the pending court case against the hospital—as filed by the DeGrooten’s lawyers—went into session, and after an astonishingly brief six hours of actual court time, the hospital decided to settle out of court…for an undisclosed, but supposedly very high sum.

(Or so Ruth told once she and I got over a decidedly frosty period….Her friend the obstetrics nurse’s favorite doctor ended up leaving the hospital, while every other doctor named in the suit had significant jumps in their malpractice insurance premiums.)

And after they received the settlement, the DrGrootens also began to get hate mail and hang-up phone calls from a lot of the former patients of the doctor who was forced to leave, stethoscope trailing between his legs like a tail, until they up and left town. They quit teaching in mid-semester, pulled the kids out of day care, the whole shebang. Not that I blamed them, weird as they were. I think—if what Nancy had been visually hinting to me with her black-head/black-body depictions of her brother and herself was true—that the DeGrootens would have had to leave town in a rather short while anyhow.

For when their house went up for sale, listed by address only in one of the local realtor’s advertisements, two items in the blurb caught my attention. The obvious one was “Complete greenhouse, with many flowering plants.” The one no one else would have noticed was, “Newly-cemented and finished basement.”

* * * *

That’s where Nancy’s story—or my understanding of it—should have ended, and there it would have ended, if I hadn’t gone back to my alma mater just recently, to do some research at the extensive library for my latest novel. A couple of years after the Toddler Pit incident, I gave up on teaching, for reasons having nothing to do with Nancy or her too-detailed pictures, and became a liberal arts/English major, and then a published writer…of horror, almost naturally. But I had never thought of sharing Nancy’s secrets, out of both fear and respect—fear of her parents’ wrath, and respect for a sick little girl—and, perhaps if I had stayed away from my old school, I never would have shared those secrets. But in the library, I ran into my old Introduction to Education professor, a cheerful man of Thai extraction who had now been bumped upstairs into administration.

Dr. Sarasin had never been much of a teacher when I had him, so I could only hope he was more efficient as an administrator, but I still made out as if I as happy to see him. We chatted between the stacks for a few minutes, until I asked if he’d been the only teacher from the college who’d been promoted to administration.

“Ah no, no, Dr. DeGrooten—you ’member him, no?—he’s now chairman of board.”

Assuming he meant the board governing the administration of the entire college, and not caring enough for a clarification, I blurted out, “Didn’t he leave here ten years ago?”

“Yes, yes, he leave—but he return two, three years ago. You had him, no?”

Nodding, I told him about the ethics class, and was about to mention how I’d met his children in the Toddler Pit, when Dr. Sarasin cut in, “You hear, no, ’bout their little boy?”

“Stephen?”

“Yes, he in school now, special school,” Sarasin gently touched his graying head of black hair, making soft noises of what I assumed to be sympathy. Without thinking, I found myself saying, “Stephen was a cute little boy…but I felt so sorry for his sister; all the attention paid to him was a drain on her—”

“No, no, he was no problem to his sister. She born long after he put in special school.”

“Nancy? She was about the same age—”

“No-no-no,” he sputtered quickly, and waved both hands furiously—as if to wave away any misconception—before adding, “He lost sister before he born, sister Nancy was sick one, two year before he born. Cancer. After a time, her parents not talk ’bout her, and no one ask…my wife, me, we know DeGrootens long ’fore they come here, to this college. Daughter sick back then. After she sick, my wife, me, we didn’t socialize much with them. But now they are back here, and they have new little girl. Maybe three, four…same age as Stephen when you knew him. She pretty girl, goes to day care out on other side of town. It moved since you left here, not in FAC anymore—not since old teacher there, she die.”

Hugging my book to my chest, I nodded dumbly as my old professor spoke to me, jabbering on in his imperfect English about the restorations to the former day care after it was moved to an abandoned school on the other side of town, remembering how spaced-out he used to be when I had him for a teacher, how he was usually five years behind the times when it came to just about everything—and especially what was going on with his fellow teachers. Including the DeGrootens, and including Ruth and her professor husband…none of whom moved in the same social circles, either n or out of the college. And spaced-out enough not to know how many children his former friend and his biologist wife were sending to day care, even while some of his own students were taking care of both of the DeGrooten youngsters.

* * * *

Thus, the old Toddler Pit of my memories is no more, even as it still remains, albeit somewhat changed, in a different location, with no doubt the same smells in the air, the same folding cots arranged higgledy-piggledy across the floor, and with perhaps the same or very similar hands rubbing the tiny prone backs come naptime. Only…Stephen’s joyous coos and whoops are missing, but I am sure that they are still remembered in that new Toddler Pit, by the one who had to hear them for perhaps the longest time of all.

And even though the mask of flesh above that black silhouette body (as Nancy—or whatever she is called now—no doubt still pictures herself) may be the same, still childlike, still small and dark-wigged and bright-eyed, I wonder if the Nancy I knew is still a child—even if I don’t ever really want to know the answer to that question.

For…for if she is only a child without, how could I ever let my eyes meet hers, with both of us remembering how I was able to crawl out of the Toddler Pit she can never leave?

So, I’ve kept her scribbled drawings, and her secret…up to now. For I can only believe that as ethical as her parents have no doubt tried to be, they would never allow her to ever be able to read….