Egg steps off the bus into the dazzle of light. First day of school and everything is new like a stack of birthday quarters. She taps her feet together. The blue whale has a heart the size of a car, and the speed of light is the fastest ever. These are facts. Irrefutable. Egg holds the word on her tongue as she steps towards the playground. The grit of the dirt crunches beneath her feet; she likes the shuffle-scratch sound. She takes a deep breath. The freshly mown scent of the football field tickles her nose and the white gravel of the baseball diamond actually seems to sparkle. A part of her, that twisty tight part of her deep in her chest, loosens ever so slightly as the warm brush of light glows against her skin. School is books too, the best Dictionary of all and Evangeline Granger in the library. A once upon a time and a happily ever after.
It’s a new year and everything can be different.
There is a sting at her fingers, a jarring tug, and the handle of her lunch box is yanked away. The flash of her shiny tin — Martin Fisken grins his fox grin, teeth bared, his laughter high and mocking. The sun glints on his flaxen hair. He smiles, his freckles seem to dance in delight across the bridge of his nose. Egg stands, stunned. There is no time, not even for surprise, as Martin kicks her brand new Six Million Dollar Man lunch box over the curb and into the gutter.
…
Egg thinks bumblebee bats. Bats the size of bumblebees. She knows they are the smallest mammal ever.
…
Egg straggles to the end of the line outside her classroom. She slouches, her shoulder slides against the wall, as if willing herself to blend into the painted cinder blocks. The screeches in the elementary school hallway careen off the concrete and granite. Cacophony, Egg thinks, like black crows against a barren field. She sticks her fingers into her ear sockets but she doesn’t like the squeeze. She thinks of the world under water, of unbearable pressures, or copper-burnished diving helmets in the murky depths. If only she could be invisible! There are magic words — abracadabra, presto magico — she wills it — shazam!
“Come along.” Egg feels Mrs. Syms’s fingers claw into her shoulder, pushing her forward. “Idle hands do the Devil’s work.”
Mrs. Syms is Egg’s grade two teacher. Mrs. Syms pinches.
Mrs. Malverna Syms, with frosty hair tied back in a bun, has taught elementary for as long as anyone can remember. Egg has heard her voice ringing out from the teacher’s lounge: how she is soon to retire but how she loves the children. Mrs. Syms is a fairy tale grandmother, as if in a storybook, pictured with a gingerbread house behind her. As she walks the hallway with Vice Principal Geary by her side, Mrs. Syms talks of God’s watchful care and how she is always vigilant for the sparrow’s fall.
To Egg, Mrs. Syms towers, all jiggly jowls and flaring nostrils. Her fingers are curled like a raven’s, and her eyes are a bloodless blue. Her hair, lashed back, is a bleak winter’s grey.
The line trudges to the classroom before the bell, before the doors slam open and the older years rush through the corridor. In the hallways, Mrs. Syms uses her singsong voice but in the classroom it sounds very different.
“Children.” Mrs. Syms’s voice is flat as a ruler. “Silence.” She slaps her pointer against the wall. Egg notes the strap hanging behind Mrs. Syms’s desk — a dark brown leather cut from a worn crupper. She shudders.
Mrs. Syms continues, “I will now call out your last name and you will take your desk.” She looks down at the attendance sheet. “Allen, Brennan, Brown.” Her pointer, like some darting insect, hovers, then slashes to the front row.
Egg holds her breath.
“Collins, Cochran, Easton.”
She grips the handle of her lunch box.
“Fisken.”
The letters ring the room, above the chalkboard, beginning with A is for Apple. A is always for Apple. Egg knows this. It is never Apes or Apricots. Kathy says Ahpricots but Egg puts the apes in Apepricots. Egg knows that if enough people say Apepricots it will be real. Language is like that.
“Johnson, McClure, Murakami.”
Her desk is right behind Martin. Martin Fisken: her nemesis.
She slides into her chair ever so quietly, quelling her fear.
“Simpson, Taylor, Williams.”
As Paulie Williams takes his seat behind Egg, she whips around and whispers, “Trade seats for two dollars?”
Paulie’s eyebrows pop, like a jack-in-the-box weasel. He takes a moment to pull at his cowlick as he leans forward; he’s a dead ringer for Dennis the Menace. “Two bucks every week,” he says, as his eyes dart to the pursed lips of Mrs. Syms who peruses her attendance sheet.
Egg squints. “One buck one week, a Tootsie Roll the next.” She knows that he favours the sticky caramels and taffies that he can pull into strings. He has lost two fillings already, rattling them in his daddy’s tobacco tin that he keeps in his back pocket.
“Sponge toffee,” he counters.
She gives a curt nod, “Deal,” and slips sideways out of her seat. Luck is with her, for at that moment Mrs. Syms turns to the blackboard, writing her name with great sweeping letters against the pristine slate. Egg nods to Paulie — she is halfway to his seat, her arms already on his desk. Beside them, little Jimmy Simpson raises his eyebrows but he does not say a word. It’s a smooth swap all around.
At least now she is closer to the back of the class and she has something between her and Martin Fisken. A dollar is worth it. That and sponge toffee. She holds her breath when Mrs. Syms looks over her classroom but no, her teacher does not suspect a thing.
Egg rocks back in relief.
Last December Martin Fisken chased Egg down the hall, shouting that she killed Pearl Harbour. Egg always gets chased at Pearl Harbour — that was when the Japs were evil. But for now, December is an eternity away, just as August is long past. For Egg, December and August are the hardest months. In August, Martin and his gang caught her by Gustafsson’s store with the worst game of all, something he called Atomic Bomb — the knees and elbows hurt the most. Grown-ups tell you to turn the other cheek, but that doesn’t help if the blows keep coming. In the Greek myths, Nemesis is the Goddess of Retributive Justice but Egg knows that nemesis in the Dictionary means something different. Egg had to look up the word retributive. Sometimes the Dictionary is like a puzzle, going from word to word, like the thread in the Minotaur’s labyrinth. If you don’t know one word, you have to look up another, until the meaning is all unravelled.
For Egg, it is all very complicated. The Greeks were scientists but without the science. They knew about atoms but they couldn’t see them. That’s what Democritus said; Egg read it in her Young Reader’s Guide to Science. So the atoms were like stories you made up and now we know that atoms are real.
The Greeks didn’t have Jesus. Science or no science, Mrs. MacDonnell in Sunday School says the Greeks are going to Hell.
Egg looks up. The pointer is out. Everyone knows about Mrs. Syms and the pointer. But Mrs. Syms stands by her desk and places her hand on a stack of books. Her fingers drum, a cascade of clicks as her nails skitter off the cover.
“Now children,” Mrs. Syms holds up a book, “this year we will be reading Charlotte’s Web.” Every front row desk gets a pile. “Take one and pass them back.”
Her heart jumps when Martin slaps the books on Paulie’s desk but he quickly turns back; he has taken no notice of the switch. Even Paulie just slides the book behind him without a second glance.
Relieved, Egg picks up the slender volume, strokes the cover: a girl, staring dreamily into the distance, a spider’s web, a pig.
Egg knows the story for Kathy has read it to her already. Kathy goes for the stories where children fly and wise animals talk, magical and miraculous, but Egg reads the Dictionary, her favourite book. She likes the brevity and precision. The Dictionary makes sense of the world, the A to Z of it, defined and ordered. Everything else is so muddled. Egg stares at the flap of skin beneath Mrs. Syms’s chin and she thinks of the turkey’s waddle and gobble. She sits straight up
in her chair, palms on the desk, alert and ready. Not that she is browner, no. As Mrs. Syms speaks to the class, enunciating her d’s, t’s, and i-n-g’s, Egg looks over her fellow students: Martin Fisken, Chuckie Buford, Glenda, and all the same gang from last year. She spreads her fingers, feels the desk, solid, the chair. She knows that wood has grains but not like sand. Egg sits. She thinks of the word diaphanous. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom says that animals can smell fear, like blood in the water; they can sense it from miles away.
Paulie raises his hand and he is off to the washroom.
Egg gazes at Martin’s head, his slender neck and wispy blond hair. The fuzz on the back of his head is like the softest down on the head of an ostrich chick. She starts at that unexpected fragility, at the curve of the skull that seems so much like a shell. She thinks of the ear’s spiral, how ears and noses are the strangest things and even if you leave them out of your drawings, your faces won’t turn out creepy. Martin’s little dog ears make him look smaller. A curl of his lips brings out a snarl. Egg wonders what makes the mean come out in people, if it is there all the time, like the appendix, or is it something you catch, like the cooties? Can we cut it out, the badness in ourselves, if we turn the other cheek?
Martin Fisken twists around in his chair. His freckles, sprinkled across the bridge of his nose, remind her of sparkles on the Christmas cupcakes, the faded red on shortbread cookies. With his smile and golden hair, he could be on a Weetabix box. The thought vanishes when he leans towards Egg and whispers, “This year, Jap, this year, you are going to die.”
…
At the first clang of the lunch bell, Egg bolts out of the classroom. Run run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man. That’s how the story goes. She skulks behind the monkey bars, close to the bushes. By the bushes, at least, she can blend in with the runts, she is small enough. She knows the art of camouflage; she’s seen it on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the fawns in the tall grasses, the nestlings in the trees. Stillness is the key.
In the schoolyard she can hear the chant:
my mother and your mother
were hanging up the clothes
my mother punched your mother
right in the nose
what colour was the blood?
r - e - d spells red
so out you must go
with your mother’s
big fat toe
not because you’re dirty
not because you’re clean
just because you kissed a boy
She scans the yard. At first all seems chaotic, the rush and swirl of bodies at rest and in motion, but she can pick out the patterns. Hopscotch is for girls, along with skipping and the clap clap clap of Miss Mary Mack. With the boys it’s all tag and spud and the monkey in the middle. Each grade has its own territory, within their elementary, middle, and high school sections. In the high school grounds, the divisions are clearer — how the hand-me-down shirts vie with the store-bought denim, how the princess girls flirt with the Popular jocks. The brainers hover by the glass doors of the library, far away from the shouts and squeals of the playground. In the playground the runts climb over the tangle of the jungle gym, where it is the survival of the fittest.
I’m the king of the castle
you’re the dirty rascal
Here, behind the bushes, Egg is safe and sound. She squats and places her lunch box in front of her. Her hand strokes the scratches on the Six Million Dollar Man’s face. She will not cry. Steve Austin never cried. She will stop being stupid. She will stop being weak.
She opens her lunch box to the neat rice balls, folded within the black nori squares. Her mother’s onigiri. Only you can’t have onigiri in the lunchroom. Or anything smelly, or sticky, or easy-peasy japa-nesy. That is the kiss of death.
Mutual of Omaha says that the predators cull the herd, that they only take the weak. This is the law of the jungle. Across the yard, Kathy stands with all her friends. Debbie Duncan squeals and rushes forward; she is all bubbling excitement, bobbed blond curls and Bonne Bell lips. Raymond is there, with a shirt that is too city; he is thin and fine in a way that gets him into trouble. Egg’s word for Raymond is debonair — a dash of French to make it all interesting. Jillian Henderson, the constable’s daughter, saunters up with a “Hey, Kathy! Last year, senior. We’ll rule the roost.”
Kathy is not a princess girl, but she is still Popular, even after things went bad with Albert and everything. Kathy is still the captain of the basketball team, even if it is just for girls, Kathy standing on the green when everyone knows that the grass is for the jocks, Kathy, who smokes in the coulee, down by the splinter-dry cottonwoods and sage, Kathy, who breaks all the rules anyway.
There is a shout from the rough-and-tumble shinny in the yard. Doug Fisken, his stick in the air, runs by a cheering Pet Stinton. Townies. The big bullies. Kathy and her friends draw closer.
Kathy isn’t careful. Even Superman has his kryptonite. Egg has the comics to prove it. And Albert, the star of the baseball team, a no-hitter pitcher at the regional championships and that was two seasons running. Egg blinks against the glare and squats behind the stunted bushes.
They say accidents are nobody’s fault. Albert’s accident. His fall from the railway trestle over the fast-flowing river.
Was he trying to fly?
liar liar pants on fire
hang your clothes on a telephone wire
Egg gazes down the street to the intersection of Maple and Main Streets. She can barely make out the corner of the old stockyard. She runs across the playground, to the field, dashing under the bleachers beside the track. Up she goes, her feet a tap tap tap on the stairs. From the top bench she can see the spread of the entire town.
Queen Street, Logan, Victoria Drive. The churches, the hardware store, the scratch of dirt roads against prairie fields. Egg scans the indifferent horizon; the sky has no face.
Albert, Albert, where are you?
She turns back to the school.
In the yard, the princess girls flutter from circle to circle. They have bright coloured blouses with frills and lace and sometimes dresses of organdy and chiffon. Egg wears her dungarees. She loves her dungarees. Kathy wears her blue jeans and her summer shirt with snap buttons. Egg wants snap buttons when she gets older. She looks across the grey crackled concrete and feels the itch in the palm of her hands. It is the first day and she needs some answers. First day and you don’t want to be the goat. First day, and whatever happens now, happens forever.
Egg bites her lip.
Kathy doesn’t fit in. But she gets along all right, even without the dresses. How does she do that?
Egg rubs the worn patches on her knees, and stares at her white shirt and running shoes with the blue laces. She doesn’t look too different. But she knows. She walks down the bleachers, her steps heavy, and shuffles to the garbage. She throws her onigiri into the bin. She has to make some sacrifices. She stares down at the white rice balls, the black nori even as her stomach twists with hunger. Sacrifices. Like Steve Austin.
The Japanese part has got to go.
…
There is peace in the library. Egg likes the quiet. She likes the books arranged in alphabetical order, the corridor of shelves, the soft tread of the carpet. There are secret places that no one goes, the corner of Philosophy and Ancient History, the aisle from Afghanistan to Upper Volta. Upper Volta has a capital called Ouagadougou. Egg likes all the vowels. In the library, the shelves are cluttered, the aisles narrow, but to Egg this is a comfort. The light is dim, a dance of dust motes, the windows high on the wall above the dark panelled wood. The library is small but as she steps inside, the space blooms out and deepens. For Egg, the library is like magic. It is like going into the swimming pool from the shallow end, stepping deeper and deeper until the water is over her head but without all the scariness and without all the wet. Egg does not like the wet. In summertime, she had her swimming lessons and the sound bounced
off the walls. Martin Fisken pushed her into the pool and she coughed when she swallowed the water. Sometimes the water burned her eyes but then she could say she was not really crying. Here, Egg can tuck herself behind the book cart and slip into the lowest shelf, she is so small, but there is no need, not today. At the beginning of the year, the library is empty. There is only Miss Granger, stamping and re-stamping the cards, filing the books away.
Egg has read the Andersen, the Aesop, and the Grimm, and knows the forest, deep and dark, the path of wolves and thorns, but it is the myths she likes the best: the boy who flew too close to the sun, the monster in the labyrinth. Enchantments, the trials and tests and fabulous beasts! And the names! Athena, Artemis, and Aphrodite! Galatea and Persephone! A goddess of wisdom and a goddess of beauty and each Muse with her own wonderful gift. The Gods, who were not so wise, nor just, not even particularly good but merely powerful and at the same time pitifully weak. And Pandora’s box — Egg wonders — what does it mean when hope is the one thing left inside?
The library has all the answers.
And yet, as Egg searches through the shelves, she can find no books on her Japanese. A history of Japan and the Second World War, but no Japanese, here, in Canada. No Japanese like herself.
“Egg?”
She turns to Miss Granger who stands in the aisle. Miss Granger, who has the most beautiful name: Evangeline. Her dark hair is swept back and her dress is a washed-out brown. She is young, barely twenty, or something like twenty; Egg can’t gauge the age of grown-ups. Yet there is something about Evangeline that suggests a sepia-toned past, as if she has stepped out of an old-time photograph. Egg remembers that last year, Evangeline was all in asters, a blossom of violets and forget-me-nots — when Albert was still alive. In this moment, Egg wishes she had brought something for Evangeline. There is a sweetness to her that gives Egg the shivers and Egg so much wants to make her smile.
Prairie Ostrich Page 2
