“School glue, Mrs. Shaw.”
“Well. I know a young lady who should go down to the girls’ washroom and wash her hands lickety-split so she doesn’t lose today’s check mark and the whole week’s treat for having dirty hands. Do you know who that would be? I think it’s the same young lady who knows better than to play with glue.”
“Yes, Mrs. Shaw.”
School soap from the silver dispenser mounted on the wall in the girls’ washroom makes lots of bubbles, but stings and smells like the janitor’s sink where you pour leftover paint. Jane runs home at lunch and after school rather than use the girls’ washroom at school, hard black toilet seats and bad soap. But Jane needs the soap to keep today’s checkmark, her perfect row of checkmarks. When Jane brings home the mimeograph sheet of one hundred addition questions, one hundred miniature equation boxes at perfectly spaced intervals, ten across and ten rows, she has red pencil [Note: Laurentian #3 Poppy Red, or possibly Dixon Ticonderoga Teacher’s Marker # 425T Carmine Red, because, No, Mrs. Shaw would not use, would not even know how to access Communist Red, perish the thought.] checkmarks against ninety-six of the boxes, and a “96” standing on a horizontal line above “100,” an unreduced fraction written at the top of the page.
“Where are the four you missed?” Dad asks.
“I got ninety-six right. I just didn’t get four of them,” Jane says.
“Yes I know. If you work hard the next time, you won’t miss those four. If you work hard, you will do well.”
“You mean everything will be right?”
“I mean nothing will be wrong,” Dad says.
Jane scours her amber brown hands and palms with the tops of her fingernails, and as the smell of bad soap scrapes its way around the bowls of Jane’s nostrils, the few strands of white angel hair spinning down from her fingers dissolve under running water.
Although not in these words, Mumma believes that the worst form of self-debasement is afternoon television soap opera. Soaps are worse than garbage. However, one of the local stations runs a movie, every weekday right after lunch, during a program slot called Siesta Cinema, and every once in a while, on Tuesdays and every other Thursday, Mumma sets the ironing board up in front of the television and turns it on for background noise. So, it comes as no surprise that every time Mumma sits in the passenger seat going down the driveway, on her mental screen, there’s a close-up of Leslie Howard, or Cary Grant, or Michael Caine, saying to her, “Don’t look back Mumma,” but darn if she always does anyway.
She can’t help it. Everything about home makes sense: home gets dirty, clean it up; home gets empty, fill it up; home get wobbly, straighten it up. But every step away from home deepens the pool of the acid low down in Mumma’s throat. The world has infinite bodies that orbit around home, and every orbit farther away from home is steeped in What If/Oh No, then: Get a grip/No Way.
Communist, “Oooah,” kick.
Communist? “Mmmmmh,” kick.
Red Communist, “Uhhhhh,” kick.
Tom tries to smooth the wrinkles out of the fabric of his world when he kicks the tetherball on the school playground. At morning and afternoon recess, coming back early after lunch, and for hours after school, Tom Lee kicks the tetherball. The ball flies into the air, the curve prescribed by the force of Tom’s leg muscles and the length of the tether, then mid-air, the ball is pulled up short, jerked back. The ball convulses, then moves in quickly for a closer look at gravity. Closer, come closer, Gravity whispers. Before anything more meaningful gets going between Motion and Gravity, the tetherball is sent flying by the next kick, perfectly timed and landed, Tom Lee, the physical physicist.
Mumma, “Uhfffff,” kick.
Couldn’t be, “Puhhhh,” kick.
Born in Calgary, “Mhmmm,” kick.
Shops too much, “Haaaaaa,” kick.
Dad, “Huwhhhh,” kick.
Too busy, “Huwhhhhh,” kick.
Too small, “Yuhhhhh,” kick.
Red ink, “Hauhhhh,” kick.
Still, “Yhaaaaaa,” kick.
Lemon juice, “Uhaaaa,” kick.
Candle heat, “Wuhhh,” kick.
Invisible ink, “Puhhh,” kick.
Wish, “Ahhh,” kick, “Ahhh,” kick, “Ahhh,” kick.
[Note: In only a few years from now, Bruce Lee and kung-fu and martial arts flow into mainstream North American culture, and when they do, the kids who go to school with Tom Lee will remember him as that oriental kid, whose dad taught him karate and all the martial arts at home in their basement and he was always practising in the schoolyard and, they’ll say, he was trained and super talented; scared the shit out of them because he could really send that tetherball flying with just his feet, and that could have been somebody’s head. In fact, the Lee family’s basement overflows with Dad’s African Violets, there is no room for kung-fu mats and costume wardrobes, or a secret chamber for throwing stars, death sticks and other martial arts paraphernalia, no room except for yet one more African Violet, from time to time. Dad will not teach Tom how to kill a man with two fingers, but how to dip his soup spoon at the edge of the bowl for manners, and because soup is cooler there than right in the middle, Don’t get burned Son, Dad will say. When Tom first goes to see Bruce Lee in Fists of Fury, he’s grateful that he passed through his grades in a charmed time capsule, never challenged by someone’s big brother, or a new kid from Onoway or Saskatoon or some such exotic location, to see “just how tough he really was” because Tom knew how tough he really wasn’t. But because they left him alone, he lived only in dread of someone stopping him, the mythic kung-fu boy-master, from hogging the tetherball.] [Note to the previous note: The other specific thing Dad will teach only Tom is how to urinate standing up. Mumma will say, “I can do everything else, I’ve taught these kids Everything, but I don’t have, you know, I do not have, well, I don’t have — The Time, the time to teach him that.”
“Son,” Dad will say to Tom, who will stand in front of the toilet on a low wooden step that Dad builds for this purpose, “You’re not eating soup. Don’t aim for the edge of the bowl, you’ll make a mess. A gentleman aims right in the middle.”
“Like this, Dad?”
“Watch what you’re doing!”
Dad will shake his head, and use his right hand to turn the top of Tom’s head like a spigot, back to what he’s doing so Tom will learn to aim like a gentleman.
And Dad will teach Tom how to make a kite out of a pink dry cleaning bag and bamboo plant stakes that goes higher than any of the fuhcockta rainbow, mylar streamer-ed, polka-freckled pretenders that Tom buys for his own son years later, because Tom really doesn’t know how to make a kite out of a dry cleaning bag and bamboo plant stakes, wasn’t really paying attention when Dad was teaching him, didn’t actually hear Dad saying, as he lay the bamboo kite frame on top of the pink dry cleaning bag, “Father Brady says, ‘Waste not want not’,” was red-cheek mortified going out to the park with his homemade Paramount Cleaners dry cleaning bag kite, until every kid wanted one of Mr. Lee’s high-flying pink dry cleaning bag kites.]
It’s a noisy crowd in the stands at Northlands racetrack. Mumma likes Fairy well enough, sitting beside her in the grandstand seating, with Wing and Freddy sitting together in the row right in front of the ladies. Mumma can’t picture them going grocery shopping together, or having coffee in the afternoon. But, to her credit, Fairy is charming and quiet, and doesn’t give Mumma that vibe that many women from China give her: so you were born here, that makes everything easier for you in this country, but I am still superior to you in every single way that matters.
Cigarette smoke rings Fairy and Mumma, the Daily Double being both an option for bettors, and the addictive personality pairing of racetrack gambling and smoking. Wing and Freddy both smoke, indeed, very few people at the track do not smoke, other than Mumma and Fairy.
Mumma doesn’t mind the smell as much as the baffling notion of so many people in one place who don’t mind having little sticks
of fire so close to their eyeballs and brains. No, don’t think about that Mumma, she says to herself, as she sends a neural memo down to her pelvic floor to behave — so far, so good. She and Fairy share a Racing Form, and they agree that they don’t need to spend one cent of their household allowances to have fun at the track.
Pen funnels smoke from her lower lip upward, a funnel cloud starting at lip level and spiralling up, as she slouches against the loading dock wall behind the school. Pen’s one open eye on the smoke cloud sends a message along her optic nerve that tells her brain how cool she looks. That’s what they do after drama club, hang out at The Crate, so named for the abandoned palettes stacked on the west end of the metre-high loading dock to create a rough wooden divan and a palette ottoman.
For Pen, drama club has become her detested salvation, as it has for every member of the club. United by a passionate desire for Voice and Connection, club members are also joined by their antipathy to expose and palpate Neediness, bear witness to Vulnerability, all of it so highly visible in the mirrors of each other. The Crate makes a natural stage for drama club members, and the current governance model is a democracy, everyone in drama club having an opportunity to take a turn holding Court from the stage of the Crate, while the encouraging audience stands on the asphalt pad below.
Pen stubs her cigarette on the loading dock wall and flicks the butt stage left, right off the edge of the loading dock onto the asphalt pad. Pen has always been the Supreme Ruler of Improv, most recently, improvising for herself a fold along the length of her eyelid where one does not exist, so she can apply Mary Quant eye shadow and jet-black pencil liner, exactly as the photos in Seventeen and Glamour and Miss Chatelaine magazines instruct, the eyelid fold being forefront in all the Make Up Tips for Beautiful (read, the Good) Eyes. The requisite creativity and imagination for improv comes naturally to Pen, pinching her nose in front of the bathroom mirror at home to imagine what elongated nostrils would look like, draining as much sauce and garlic and onion from Chinese food to blend herself molecularly with her contemporaries.
Pen walks to the front of the stage, thrusts her arms out, a victorious Eva Peron from the palace balcony, and waits until she has drawn every speck of attention from the audience. The palette chair and ottoman of The Crate have never looked more like a throne. Then she waits just one beat longer, her victorious, mesmerizing eyes bearing down on them, her smile replicating itself in each mirror she sees standing on the asphalt. “Catch me,” she shouts.
Lizzie hurries south in the direction of Chinatown, first time in her life in this part of the city not on a Sunday, walking back from the McTeague Co-op. The Co-op houses a collaboration of social workers, psychologists, law students, retired nurses, and volunteers who help the last and the least in East downtown Edmonton, patching the patches on leaks in the inner tube of humanness. Not old enough to legally drink, but old enough to think she knows what she wants, Lizzie, the fresh-faced new volunteer, now, is not so sure social work is what she thought it was, Lizzie, the first year Arts student.
Dad makes it look so easy, helping people. “On the paper slip, I write what the product is and a description of the picture on the label, in Chinese, and also the English name. Then I wrap the paper around the can, and keep it in place with an elastic band, most of the company label still shows, corn starch, baking powder, Ajax cleanser. I write directly on boxes, use a black pencil for food, and a red one for warning, for soaps and cleaning products. When something runs out, people can take the can labels or those paper slips with them to the store, or cut out the boxes if they’re not sure, and either put the paper slips I’ve made back on the new cans, or write the words on the new boxes themselves. One or two times, then they just throw out the slips, or show someone else how to use them, doesn’t take long for people to figure out what’s what. Most canned food has a picture of the food on the label, people pick that up fast, no need to tag. And fresh is what it looks like too. Makes a big difference for someone who can’t read English, and not much work at all, just a bag of elastic bands, red and black grease pencils and slips cut from brown paper. Easy.
“Sometimes,” Dad says, “simple as giving someone an alarm clock so their kids get up in time for school, gets the whole family on a daytime schedule, not the whole family on one person’s graveyard schedule. Or you take someone shopping, for clothing, or a bed, they have money but don’t know how the store works. Sometimes you just make sure people are treated right, no one should have to overpay just because they don’t understand, or think they have to buy something where they’re being treated badly. Or you just listen so they know someone hears them.
“Basically Lizzie,” Dad concludes, “you only know you’ve really grown up when you know whether, when, and how to take care of other people and you follow through, like tennis. Helping people, like tennis, takes practice. Ball only goes where you want it to go effectively and without injuring yourself when you follow through on the shot. And you only get better, like tennis, the more you practice with people who can improve your game.”
She loves the stories Dad tells, in which common sense and ingenuity seem to easily and quickly fix people’s problems. But the man she met for an intake interview this afternoon who came to talk about a problem with his roommate wasn’t just talking about the roommate at all. Listening to all the twists and rips in his life story, where a car accident which was not his fault, led to chronic back pain, nothing compared with his even now more depressed mother and her amputated feet, a girlfriend who was killed, a stillborn baby, being conned and totally set up by a prodigal brother he located for his mother, a stint in Bowden that came with a Hep B infection, if he hadn’t got so sick, he would never have gone back to that apartment block and taken on an unstable roommate who isn’t paying his share of the rent but is dealing drugs out of their unit, and he’d just walk away if he had the funds from a big lawsuit settlement that was stolen from his mother, one misfortune after another linked back into all the prior ones, for Lizzie, the afternoon was like a crying magician pulling an endless handkerchief out of his mouth, a long thin cloth that gets rustier, grittier, and more bloody with each yank until you finally realize that he is pulling out his entire viscera. So you want to tell him stop, you don’t know how to fix that, you didn’t even know that could happen.
“I’ve taken very detailed notes, and my supervisor will review your case, and if you fit within the guidelines, you will be assigned a caseworker to help you,” Lizzie says, diligently following her volunteer training, “Someone will be in touch within two to five business days.”
As she put on her coat to leave, she heard the volunteer coordinator and one of the counselors talk about how they were going to approach the local drugstore owner who still sells men’s aftershave to some of their clients, men who are not buying a bottle a day to keep their newly shaved faces feeling fresh and rash free.
“What do they buy it for?” Lizzie asked.
Madge, the volunteer coordinator, said, “It’s almost pure alcohol, Hon, makes people very, very sick.”
“Oh.”
“We seeing you again, next week, Lizzie?”
Madge wished she had a nickel for every time one of these younger and younger students says to her, “We’ll see.” If she did, she’d have three paid caseworkers for every one of their clients and a storefront open 24 hours a day. Still and all, you have to keep trying with these kids, you never know when one of them will stick.
Beautiful Dancer, Come to Papa, Prattlin’ Madeline, Blue Hawaii, Mumma loves the names they give these thoroughbred race horses, names like pithy songs that are over and done in the time it takes to say them. She and Fairy are up two dollars and sixteen cents in pretend betting over three races. Their heads leaning close to each other over the racing form, they make exceedingly conservative wagers, not wanting to be foolhardy with even pretend money, and keep track of their fake winnings on the racing form. Makes the tote board after each race slightly more interesting than
round light bulbs just putting up numbers, and they have decided that they will each spend the full amount of whatever they pretend win on weekend treats for their children.
Mumma roots in her purse for the couple of sticks of spearmint gum she slid into her purse, because a whole package of gum was too bulky. The announcer calls out Post Time for the fourth race on the PA system, catching Mumma’s ear. Nine races on the card Wednesdays, so we’re not even half the way through the afternoon. As Mumma checks the post time for the fifth race on the racing form, the capital C, Curse math flows through her mind: wonder if I’ll make it until after the fifth race before I have to change my pad. Mumma looks at her Kleenex-wrapped Kotex, inhales deeply and slowly breathes out. Where is that gum?
“Are you having fun?” Freddy turns his head around and smiles at Mumma. Dad turns around too.
“Oh yes, thank you, Freddy, and Fairy,” she says, turning to her seatmate. “And thank you again for the hot dog,” Mumma says, suppressing a small smoky burp. “Are you men having a winning day?” she asks.
“Mhmmm,” says Dad, thinking how can Mumma not know you never ask how someone’s doing until after the last race on the card, if even then.
Oh, he must be losing, Mumma thinks — he works so hard, she knows that, but she does too, and the kids do too, so why should he spend any time and money on horse racing, gambling, he, the father of four, well, Oh wow. Oh wow is what Mumma says when something has to be said, but words won’t do the job. A familiar refrain bubbles up in Mumma’s head, kids are fine, their lives so uncomplicated, it’s Dad who complicates their lives, and here I am, Wednesday afternoon at the track with this damn capital C, Curse.
With two hands, Jane holds the little index card that Mrs. Shaw has put on her desk, there’s one on each child’s desk when she comes back from the girls’ washroom. It has her name typed on it, and Mrs. Shaw says that each child must fill in the correct letter for them on the line beside their name. There are two choices, C or P, and you must fill in which initial represents your Religion. Mrs. Shaw slowly and loudly informs her pupils that she cannot tell them what the initials stand for, that the children ought to know, based on the house of worship that they attend, that they know the alphabet and they know where they go to Worship, so please fill in the card and put up your hand when you have finished, and then one child will take them to the office. [Note: If this seems unbelievable to you, ask a retired public school teacher if they think this could have happened in the 1960s, the 1970s, last Tuesday. Ask them, then please take them out for dinner.]
Paper Teeth Page 8
