The Stone Frigate

by Kate Armstrong

  In and out. We did the drill so many times that I didn’t know if we were coming or going. I started to feel like one of Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches. Mr. Morgan was our Sylvester McMonkey McBean sending us around and around and around in a mass of confusion.

  You can’t teach a Sneetch.

  Eventually, we were standing in the hall in our PT gear, pouring sweat and panting. My arms shook involuntarily from adrenaline and round after round of push-ups.

  “Would you like to sit down, recruits?”

  “YES, Mr. Morgan!” This yes had oomph.

  “Sit.”

  Before the word was out of his mouth, a general collapse happened down the hall. We literally threw ourselves to the ground.

  “On your feet. Up!” We bounded back into place. “Too slow!” he said. This was another game we had learned at basic. The game was to spring to your feet fast enough not to hear too slow. We went through several rounds that left us gasping on our feet.

  “Good panicking, recruits,” Mr. Morgan said. I hated him and, in the same instant, I was pleased to be praised. I wanted to do whatever it took to get more, to earn his respect. “Enough fun for tonight. Fall in outside for circle parade.”

  We rushed outside onto the parade square ready to run off our first circles. An unknown fourth-year cadet waited for us dressed in the cadet No. 5 uniform and a red sash like Mr. Morgan’s.

  “A Flight!” he bellowed. We all braced at attention. He stood with his arms across his chest and feet wide apart in a stance that seemed to invite a fight.

  “My name is CSTO Davis Jamieson. I am your cadet squadron training officer. My job is implementation and maintenance of all things military. I am the watcher from the shadows. I see all. I’m gonna be your worst nightmare.”

  He lectured us on proper circle protocol. Circles, he kept saying, weren’t a punishment but a correction. I hated all this running, especially in my “cripplers” — the nickname for military-issue canvas high-top running shoes with flat rubber soles.

  “Take three, Armstrong,” said Mr. Jamieson, as he looked me up and down on inspection. “You have creases on the front of your sleeves and shorts, and there is a twist in the loop of your left shoelace.”

  No one else had been given circles. The creases in my clothes were from being alive in them through panic drills. I had no idea what he saw wrong with my shoelace but didn’t dare move to look. How can he even see me in this light? I rolled my eyes at the unfairness of it all.

  “Armstrong, you will cease all inappropriate facial contortions. You are a military machine. You are not paid to feel. What is your problem?”

  My lips trembled. I pressed them together and swallowed. “No excuse, Mr. Jamieson.”

  “Drop down and give me twenty!”

  I plunged to the ground and assumed the high plank of push-up position. I pumped off the first five easy ones, yelling out the count at the peak. My pace slowed as I did another one, trying hard not to sag. My arms were so tired from panic drills that I could barely go down at all. I definitely wasn’t going all the way to the bottom. At fifteen, Mr. Jamieson placed his foot on the middle of my back to resist my upward return.

  “Louder, Recruit Armstrong. I can’t hear you!”

  I pushed up against the pressure of his foot like my life depended on it.

  “Yes, Armstrong! Yes!”

  I was a one-woman show being humiliated in front of my classmates, and I hated him for it. My mind flashed back to when I was twelve years old and my mother had humiliated me in front of my friends in Williams Lake. She had screamed at me from across the playground, storming toward me with a switch in her hand and eyes on fire with hatred. I sat frozen on my swing and braced for impact. She grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet and whipped at my bare legs. I rallied into action to get away from her. My friends sat immobile on their swings and stared at their feet. The shame of it fired anew in me. I hauled in a lungful of air, compacted it into a burning coal of rage, and exploded off the last four push-ups.

  Mr. Jamieson nonchalantly removed his foot and stepped back. “On your feet, Armstrong. Your miserable cheating carcass is making us late for circle parade.”

  From that moment on, I became the object of Mr. Jamieson’s special attention. His voice would haunt my steps from great distances whenever he saw me marching outside between buildings. He would yell, “Armmstroooong! Get your aaaarms up!”

  As we approached the gravel oval track, recruits from other squadrons, clad in white shirts and green shorts, were making their way to the form-up area. It would be our first chance to join in with classmates from across the square. We halted shy of the track and waited. Now I have another three kilometres to run.

  “Class of 1984!” a voice roared from the hazy dark. The track was not lit. We relied on the weak light from nearby dorm buildings. “I am the cadet wing training officer. My name is CWTO Helstone. All those with eight circles, fall in!” He said the letters of his bar position as “C-dub-T-O.”

  Three Section was well represented: Fitzroy, Maxwell, Holbrook, and I made crisp right turns, raised our forearms parallel to the ground with closed fists, ran over to the track, and formed up in three ranks with the eight-circle runners from other squadrons.

  Mr. Helstone stood right in front of me. His epaulettes had a four-bar pin next to the epaulette patches for Wing Headquarters — a square formed by two triangles, one red and one white. A strand of white spittle danced at the corner of his mouth. I lowered my eyes. Within moments, two hundred recruits had formed up into one big mass, three bodies wide, with the eight-circle runners leading the pack and one-circle runners at the end.

  “Circle parade, right turn! By the left, DOUBLE TIME!”

  On the furthest curve of the track, away from our guards, whispers of greeting buzzed through the ranks and then quieted as we rounded the homestretch of the first circle.

  Mr. Helstone yelled out, “All those with one circle fall out. The rest of you little pukes, shut the fuck up! One more sound and you’re all taking home eight fresh ones.”

  No one spoke again. After all eight rounds were done, Mr. Jamieson marched us back to the Frigate, repeatedly yelling at us, “A Flight, get your arms up!”

  When we got back to our hallway, the recruit flight staff were waiting for us, and they were smiling. I instantly felt uncomfortable.

  “Welcome back, recruits. Fifteen minutes until lights out, people! Change into your housecoats and flip-flops for shower parade. You have two minutes.”

  I followed Meg into our room. She stopped short just inside the door and I banged into her back.

  “Oh my god.”

  “Oh my god.” I echoed her when I looked up and saw what she’d seen.

  Our room had been tossed. Everything we had spent the entire day preparing with such care was destroyed. The contents of our closet were balled up in the bay window, piles of clothes and bedding were a jumbled heap on my bunk, and everything from the drawers was strewn on Meg’s mattress, my panties and socks mixed in with hers. Even the pillows had been pulled from their cases. Our footwear was a tangled mess under my desk. Our toiletries were strewn in the sink. I was gobsmacked — putting everything right was going to take more energy and more patience than I had the power to muster.

  I came out of the shock first. “Come on, let’s go! You find the housecoats. I’m on the flip-flops,” I cried.

  Meg moved into action. She frantically sifted through our things. I burrowed under my desk for the flip-flops and pulled out our precious boots at the same time. The toes of all four boots and our newly polished laces were gashed.

  “Fuckers!”

  Back from showers, I took the uniforms and drawers. Meg took the beds. By the time lights out was called, everything was back in its place. Our boots were a mess, our uniforms were wrinkled, and the spacing between items and the measurements of our folded clothing were approximate. Our entire day’s work was lost.

  I sat on my bunk feeling strange and h
ollow, unable to cry. I had never been so exhausted in my life. I swayed between confusion and exhilaration and astonishment that my life had been so wholly, instantly redirected. I was far from everything that I knew in the world — my boyfriend, Gary; my friends; my family; my dog, Trixie; the smell of cedar trees; the mountains; even recognizable food and my own clothes.

  I slow-marched straight across to the women’s bathroom, toes pointed and the balls of my feet skimming the floor without touching, like a zombie bride floating up the aisle.

  The moment the door closed behind me, I felt calmer. There were two stalls in the first room and a second door on the back wall. After I peed, I pushed through the other door into the shower room, where there were two curtained stalls and a large, deep soaker bathtub next to the bay window. I sat on the edge of the tub, ran my hand along the cool surface of the ceramic, and smiled.

  “One minute to da light out!” yelled Theroux.

  I slow-marched back to the room, slid into bed, and let out a sigh. I whispered to Meg in the bunk above me, “Don’t you have to pee?”

  “I went. Where were you?”

  “Checking out the tub.”

  We kept our doors open at night. The fourth years yelled, “Good night, A Flight!” one at a time.

  We responded like kids on The Waltons. “Good night, Mr. Morgan; Jansen; Theroux; Kendall.”

  The hall lights went out. In the moment of quiet, I could hear a strange noise coming from across the parade square, infrequent bursts of a long hum that sounded like the transporter charging on Star Trek.

  The hiss of a speaker, the sound of the needle catching on record vinyl down the hall, and an achingly beautiful French ballad ended our day. The words made no sense, but that didn’t stop my tears. I imagined the lyrics telling the tale of a mother who loved her daughter and was lamenting her fate, feeling sorry that she hadn’t rescued her.

  As I lay on my bunk, I was totally wiped out, yes — but also, I realized, relieved to be away from home. I was terrified with the alienation from all things familiar but, oddly, the fear was coupled with exhilaration. Here, the violence was implied; no one could actually touch me. Here, I didn’t have to pretend that what was happening wasn’t really happening. My mother couldn’t open my door without knocking, come into my room uninvited, call me names and blame me for her unhappiness, punish me for what he had done to me. I was out of her reach. She couldn’t even phone me.

  5

  PICKLES

  As a child, I was always a bit of a daredevil. If I felt unhappy or scared, I raced toward whatever I thought would make me feel better. Most often, I thought getting attention would be the thing to do it. I had a history of jumping — leaping headfirst — into the next thing without thinking of the consequences, so long as wherever I went someone would see what I was doing and approve, or disapprove, or whatever. But see me. “Kodak courage,” we had called it.

  When I was five, in 1967, our family lived in Kelowna. A November storm dumped several feet of snow. My youngest brother, Craig, who was eight, and I dragged the toboggan to a small hill behind our house. We fought over who would sit in the front and steer. He won, and at the bottom of the first run our sled struck a snow-covered combine blade that sliced open the right side of his face. My parents rushed him to Children’s Hospital in Vancouver. They expected to bring home a dead boy, but he lived. My sister, Ellen, was nineteen and had moved away to attend secretarial school in Calgary. So, off and on over the next six months while Craig was in Vancouver, I was left in the care of my fifteen- and thirteen-year-old brothers, Robert and Peter.

  In the fallout of the crash, I tried to be a good girl and not cause any trouble. No one asked me if I was okay or talked to me about the accident. Since I hadn’t been physically hurt, it was like I wasn’t even there. It became Craig’s accident.

  During their first trip to Vancouver, my parents were gone for weeks and I was sent to stay with friends of the family, which scared me, but I didn’t let anyone know. Craig had brain surgery and skull reconstruction. My parents sat at his bedside night and day. At home, my fifteen-year-old brother, Robert, was in charge of the house, and eventually I moved back home with him and Peter. The neighbourhood ladies and friends of the family took turns bringing us meals and helped clean up before my mom came home. Mostly, she stayed in Vancouver while my dad returned to work at Eaton’s and travelled back and forth frequently to the hospital. Robert paid lots of attention to me and played games with me and read to me before bed and cuddled me when I cried. I missed my mom and dad. I wanted so much to be loved and held and stroked. I ached for it. Even though I used to fight almost constantly with Craig before the accident, I missed him, too, and didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. We used to bathe together, but now Robert sat on the floor beside the tub watching over me while I had my bath alone before bed. I was scared to go to sleep and every night had to look under my bed and in my closet and sleep with the door open and the light on in the hall. I had bad dreams about the hole in Craig’s face with his eyeball hanging out, just like on the day of the accident. Whenever I woke up screaming, Robert would come, rub my back, and rock me to sleep, lying beside me on top of the covers.

  In January, Robert turned sixteen. One night during my bath, a few months into our new family reality, he quietly asked, “Do you want to play a secret game?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “No one can know. It will be our secret game.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you good at secrets?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you promise to keep it secret?”

  “Yes! I promise.”

  He laid out a fresh towel beside the tub and told me to lie on it. I got out of the bath and lay down on it and he told me to spread out like a starfish. He told me to close my eyes and when he lay on me to close my legs together as tight as I could. I closed my eyes and heard him unzip his pants and then I heard the sucking sound of lotion. I wanted to look but I didn’t. When he floated down on top of me, I felt his shirt on my bare skin but hardly any weight on me. I felt his swollen thing pressing on me between my legs, hot and slippery.

  “Close your legs now,” he whispered. “Don’t make any noise.”

  My hands clenched the towel and I closed my legs on his penis with all my might. He rubbed it up and down against me between my thighs. I heard his breathing get raspy and he grunted. Hastily, he jumped up and I opened my eyes. His pants were down and he had a hand towel covering him.

  “Back in the tub,” he said gently. I was confused and a bit scared.

  I got back in the tub. He took my hand and leaned close to me. “That’s our secret game. It shows you that I’m the one who really loves you. That you’re special to me.”

  From then on, whenever Robert whispered, “Let’s do it,” I knew what he wanted. By the time my parents finally brought my youngest brother home, I had started wetting the bed almost every night.

  “You know this is making a lot of extra work for me,” Mom would say when I woke her up to help me change my nightie and my sheets. “I have my hands full taking care of your brother. I need you to be a big girl now.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I don’t mean to do it.”

  “It must be the pickles you ate tonight before bedtime. No more pickles for you. I think you’re allergic,” she muttered as she spread a clean sheet across my bed.

  I stopped eating pickles at night, but I kept wetting the bed until I was twelve years old.

  6

  MADNESS

  Recruit term was another kind of living hell. We never had a moment alone. We marched everywhere. We did daily drill, which was marching for the sake of improving our marching. We were startled awake each morning at 05:30 hours by the first hiss of the speakers, to commence seventeen and a half hours of insanity followed by a bedtime song. Our wake-up song,  Vivaldi’s Concerto in G Major, played for two minutes and fifty-three seconds — the time allotted to do ablu
tions, make beds, get dressed in PT gear, and be in the hall ready for a five-kilometre run. Post-run we had a seven-minute shower parade.

  07:00 hours: March to breakfast.

  08:00 hours: Room inspection. Military skills training.

  12:00 hours: March to lunch. Drill practice (more marching). Emily Post–style etiquette training. College history training (memorize the recruit bible).

  18:00 hours: March to dinner.

  19:00 hours: Section commander time.

  22:00 hours: Circle parade or time for personal keening — pressing, polishing, and cleaning for inspections — for those without circles.

  23:00 hours: Lights-out song, in French; to this day I don’t know the name of it. Repeat the cycle daily until the start of classes in September.

  Every moment was packed with the frenzied energy of being assessed, which, for me, inevitably ended in earning more circles. If by some miracle I managed to find some spare time, I’d use it to catch up on other duties I had been assigned. The big challenge was keeping pace. Economy of effort and optimization of time infected all decisions of the day. During shower times, I’d be frantically practising my chin-ups on the overhead bar of the shower stall. Even mealtimes became strategic. Never take the last glass of milk from the jug. Eat calorie-dense, square-meal-friendly foods: sausages, savoury meatloaf, scallop potatoes, and most disgusting, Hawaiian ham, a thick slab of ham garnished with a pineapple ring and a maraschino cherry that left a disconcerting green spot on the meat beneath it.

  Morning inspection included our uniforms, rifles, kit layout, closets, drawers, beds, and even our cleaning materials. Every square surface of the room had to be immaculate. There could be no signs of dust or hair or dirt even in obscure places.

  During endless hours standing outside our room awaiting inspection, I stared ahead at the stylized woman on the bathroom door, her head floating above her body. When I closed my eyes, her afterimage glowed on my eyelids.