The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  ‘Oh Dad,’ he said. ‘Oh Dad!’

  He was still clinging to my leg and sobbing when you walked into the dining alcove.

  You took a look at the shredded photograph and broken glass on the floor. You walked over to Maria’s high chair, examined her cereal, and fished out a shard of glass three inches long. You gave me a prize look.

  While I got out the broom, you made a big show of calming the children down. You, who had done nothing at home for weeks except lounge in bed. You, who had gone God only knew where the night before with all five diaphragms. Suddenly you were playing the martyr again. Suddenly you were the one whose patience was again being tested by a man with a missing chromosome.

  The last straw was when you said, ‘Let me show you the right way to make a ponytail.’

  You show me the right way to make a ponytail? ME, who had worn a ponytail for five fucking years of my life? When you turned to me with that supercilious smile and said, ‘Next time try and sweep the hair up from underneath, like this,’ well, naturally I was going to flip.

  I don’t remember exactly what I said, but whatever it was, it couldn’t have been bad enough to warrant the malice in your response. ‘OK,’ you said, ‘you think you’re so smart. You think you can take over my job and do it better than me without my advice. Go right ahead. But don’t expect to cry on my shoulder when you run into trouble.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  29

  It was with this threat in mind that I set off for school. The children were still shaking from our argument. Just outside the Creative Learning Centre, I sat them down on the low garden wall.

  I told them that, no matter what happened, I would always be their father, and that meant I would take care of them, and protect them from all that was bad in the world, and help them grow strong. We were a team. I remember how they looked at me, with never-to-be-duplicated respect.

  I remember how soft Maria’s features were under her uplifted ponytail. I remember the pink cardigan and the gold locket. I remember that Jesse was wearing a red jacket, that it was only zipped half-way up. I remember also just how the curls in his hair fell over his forehead and his ears. I remember pressing both children against my chest and looking through the front window of the Creative Learning Centre, at the bright little chairs and table, and the clever little partitions, and the charts, and the bookcases, and the mobiles of geometric shapes in primary colours. And the children, now milling around, now allowing themselves to be herded into a circle by the young woman I would come to refer to as Fatso. I remember she was dressed that morning in a baby-blue tracksuit.

  I watched her while I patted my sobbing children on their backs. I did not attach much importance to what I saw, but I do remember being impressed, in a distant, idle sort of way, by the smoothness of her operation. Now she was leaning over, talking to a few of her charges. Now she was standing up and issuing them an instruction. One sentence, that was all it took for her to get all thirty, forty children to arrange themselves on the floor in a circle. Now she raised her hand, and it was like clockwork. She had the children singing. She had the children return to silence with a single clap and now she was pointing to them one at a time and getting them to recite something. Now she was standing up. She was pointing at a large calendar and asking a question and getting a flurry of answers. She was reprimanding the overeager children. She was getting one of them to answer her question correctly. She was writing something on the board I couldn’t see, and pulling down a picture from a roller.

  It was, as I discovered when we approached the door, an illustration of an aviary. The word she had written on the board was ‘SEPTEMBER’. The book she was holding up for the children was called Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones. Lying on the table next to her was an assortment of eggs of various sizes and colours, and a brown plastic apparatus I would later find out was an incubator.

  ‘Can anyone tell me why chickens have to sit on eggs?’ This was the question she was asking as I took our children’s jackets off. She did not get an answer because all of the children had turned to stare at us.

  It was, according to the big red clock on the wall, 8.48. I was three minutes late.

  Not such a good way to start the school year, perhaps, but not such a bad one either. And anyway, they were late because I hadn’t wanted to send them into school crying. Now they were calm. So I had done the right thing, although you wouldn’t have known it from the look Fatso gave me.

  It was the kind of look you’d expect to get if you ran into a one night stand months after the event and said, Don’t I know you from somewhere? Except that no, it was even worse than that. It was the kind of look you’d expect if you knocked someone up, ran off to join the Navy, and came back four years later expecting dinner on the table. Reproachful does not even come close to describing it, and because I had never, to my knowledge, set eyes on her before, it both confused me and put me on the defensive, so that at the same time as I was thinking: What did I do wrong, I was also sure I had indeed done something wrong, which sin I had then compounded by forgetting all about it.

  Now. I know you are going to say that I was reading things into the situation that were not there. She was simply trying to do her job, I can hear you saying, and this is a school that take promptness seriously.

  But all Fatso had to say was, ‘Go into the cloakroom so that Vampyra can do the check list. These kids are not allowed into my Circle until Vampyra gives me the OK.’

  Did she? No. First she had to get even with me for belonging to the same sex as all the dates who had made her feel worthless for being fat. She kept me standing there with my arms flapping while she (a) greeted Jesse with controlled effusion, and then (b) asked him to introduce Maria, and then (c) asked him, with controlled sternness, if he had forgotten some important things, and then, when he couldn’t remember, (d) opened the discussion to the floor. Could the other children tell Jesse what they had done before joining Circle? Slowly, painfully, the story emerged: they had had to go into the cloakroom one by one to be processed. ‘Otherwise, what would this room look like? It would be covered with coats and shoes and lunchboxes and all sorts of other personal effects, wouldn’t it? And then we couldn’t play, could we? How could we teach our new friend Maria how to play sleeping lions then?’

  ‘We couldn’t,’ said one little horror with a piping voice. ‘We would have to scrunch up like underprivileged children.’

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say,’ said Fatso. ‘Does anybody know why?’

  A flock of hands shot up. The last thing I heard as Jesse led me out of the room was, ‘So, Donner. Why aren’t we supposed to say bad things about kids whose moms and dads don’t have as much money as our moms and dads have?’

  Vampyra was waiting for us in the cloakroom. The moment I saw her I thought: Oh my God. I’ve walked into a Kafka novel. Because again, I had the strong impression that I had done something wrong and that I was never going to be able to make up for it because she was never going to tell me what it was.

  Now I know you all think Vampyra is a really nice woman. Well, not to men she isn’t. Despite her standard-issue nursery-school-teacher appearance, there was something about the way she flinched at extraneous noise, and something about the wild fear that would flick in her eyes that made me wonder if she hadn’t spent the previous night on a stretcher South of Market being whipped.

  In the beginning, she, too, refused to look me in the eyes, although in this case there was more nervousness in her behaviour than disapproval. It was as if she were afraid of being recognized. Every time she turned to Jesse to ask him a question, she would take a big breath first, as if it were a tremendous effort to do her day job properly after whatever it was she had been up to during the night.

  I don’t know what was more horrifying – her interrogation or the fact that Jesse understood it. When she asked him if I was his primary caretaker th
is year, he didn’t blink an eye. He just said yes, his mother had become the breadwinner. Breadwinner. How old was I when I started using that word? Eighteen? Twenty-five? I was also alarmed by how comfortable he was with a term I had always found clinical – namely, sibling. His sibling’s name was Maria, he told Vampyra. She was three years old, the same as Ken’s sibling. When I asked him, ‘Why can’t you just say sister?’ he said, ‘Because it’s sexist.’

  He then went on to tell me – with Vampyra’s prompting – that from now on I would have to be punctual. Tardy children were only allowed in ‘at half-hour increments’. He actually knew that word – increment. I could hardly have been less shocked than if he had turned around and said to me, By the way, Dad. While you were in the shower last night I joined the Freemasons. Because that’s what this school was beginning to look like to me – a secret society in which I was branded as an outsider because I didn’t have the right handshake.

  Or the right number of chromosomes.

  This first intimation that my son belonged to a world I knew nothing about – it was like getting an electric shock. But I had no time to think what it really meant, and again, this set the pattern for the rest of the week.

  Because now, after having ignored me completely, she turned to me and said, ‘So. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Could you please provide me with two crib sheets plus the two changes of clothing which you have clearly marked in a plastic bag and the two passport-size photographs of the children for their Personal Effects Boxes?’

  ‘Come again?’ I said.

  She came again.

  ‘Could you please provide me with two crib sheets plus the two changes of clothing which you have clearly marked in a plastic bag plus two passport-size photographs of the children for their Personal Effects Boxes?’

  I told her I didn’t know I was supposed to bring in any of those things. She stared at me as if I had told her I had a mistress and two illegitimate children in rural Thailand.

  ‘But if you had read the fine print in the contract,’ she said, ‘you would have known about these requirements.’

  ‘I think my wife must have signed the contract because I never saw it.’

  Now she looked at me as if I had just admitted to buying a Guatemalan baby on the black market.

  ‘But that’s terrible!’ she yelped. ‘Because if you are the primary caretaker from now on, there are all sorts of things in there you should have at your fingertips! For one thing, it makes it extremely clear that in order to successfully process your child on the first day of school you must provide all the items I mentioned. I honestly don’t know if I can let your children in today, as distressing as that would be for all of us.’

  ‘How about if I go home now and bring back all the things you need by lunchtime?’

  She looked at me as if I had said, Why don’t you throw off all your clothes and do the cancan on the table?

  ‘I’ll have to check with Eva on that,’ she said dubiously, ‘i.e., our directress. But first let me check the lunchboxes because we want to make sure we’re all clear on the other requirements before we disturb her. As you can imagine, we’re up to here today.’ She gave me the kind of crazed smile you’d expect from a Baptist spinster who had just accepted a thimble glass of low-alcohol sherry.

  Then she opened Jesse’s lunchbox.

  She gasped, with the mixture of surprise, pleasure and dismay you would have expected if I had crawled under the table when she wasn’t looking and put my tongue into her cunt.

  ‘OOOOOOH,’ she said, ‘OOOOOOH. You have some fruit rollups in here! That is a no-no! As is white bread, I’m afraid!’ Again, her tone of voice was inappropriate. It was as if she were saying, Under normal circumstances I would love to, but I’m afraid I can’t because you’re not wearing a condom.

  And then, when I said, ‘It may be white bread, but it’s good, it’s from a French bakery,’ her eyes bulged as if I had assured her not only was I wearing a condom, but it was ribbed.

  ‘This has never happened before!’ she exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what to say. I simply cannot admit them myself if they are carrying inappropriate lunches. I’ll have to talk it over with Eva.’

  She knocked on the door marked ‘Directress’. A pert little voice that seemed horrifyingly familiar to me asked her to enter. She entered. She shut the door behind her. A muffled conversation ensued. It was punctuated by the slamming of a filing cabinet. The door opened. Out staggered Vampyra. She was pale and out of breath.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ she said. ‘But there has been a serious oversight. We can’t find Maria’s contract.’

  ‘Maybe my wife forgot to send it in,’ I said.

  ‘That may be so, but it puts us all into an impossible position, because no child can be admitted without a signed contract.’

  ‘How about if I sign a new one now?’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take that up with Eva yourself.’

  I headed for the door with Jesse and Maria, but she held me back. ‘No. The children had better stay with me.’ She shepherded them back to the far end of the cloakroom. Giving me a significant look, she said, ‘Don’t forget to knock.’

  As I followed her instructions, I asked myself, where have I heard that before? Don’t forget to knock. Then, as I heard the crisp command to enter, I remembered. I had heard that voice every day of my long and miserable childhood.

  I opened the door and there she was, a nightmare vision of my sister Jane. The pointed chin, the electrified hair, the glinting eyes, the taunting smile, the way she pushed out her breasts, daring you to look at them so that she could say in front of all her smirking friends, ‘Why are you staring at my underwear, you little twerp?’

  All Eva had to say to me was, ‘Come sit down,’ and I was five years old again. Five years old and afraid for my life because Mom was out shopping and Jane and her friends had decided to play house. For which read torture chamber, with me as sacrificial victim. Ball-shrivelling memories, many of them buried for thirty years, began to spin about my head as I watched this woman shuffle papers.

  I told myself to calm down. This was not my big sister. She was not about to strap me to a table and singe my toenails, or blindfold me or prick the soles of my feet, or make me put on women’s underwear and force me to parade in front of all her taunting friends. No. This was the director of my children’s nursery school. All she wanted was to get me to sign some papers.

  Only to discover that she was like Jane. She was playing house. I was her victim. But she had given up singeing toes and pricking feet. She had learned how to torture her victims with red tape.

  She let me watch her shuffle papers for two or three minutes. Then she looked up. ‘I’ve processed Jesse,’ she informed me. ‘He can join his peers as soon as you correct his lunch. Maria is another question. I’m afraid we don’t have anything here for her except the initial deposit.’

  She passed me a mimeographed form. ‘This is a warning. The warning system is explained in the contract which I’ll give you in a moment. Basically, the warning states that you are tardy with your monthly payment. As the contract explains, you have two days to settle. After that, you will receive another warning. This second warning will state that you have incurred a penalty for late payment. This will give you another two working days to comply. If you do not comply, the child in question is suspended.’ She smirked at me. ‘So far so good?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Money is not the issue here. If you didn’t receive payment this was an oversight on the part of my wife. I don’t think my daughter should suffer because my wife forgot to do something. Especially since I have my chequebook right here and can pay you whatever we owe you right now. Maria’s been so excited about coming here. I don’t want to have to take her home like this on her first day of school.’

  ‘You say you have your chequebook with you,’ she said.

  Assuming a cheque would make it possible for Maria to stay for the day, I wrote
one out and gave it to this woman.

  She wrote me out a receipt.

  Then she collected a pile of forms. ‘I would advise you to read everything I’m giving you carefully,’ she said. ‘Most of our problems here stem from parents overlooking the fine print. You’ll find, if you do read it, that it spells everything out. Our childcare philosophy. Our nutritional policy. Our parent education and participation programme. And so on. You may find you have questions. I would be happy to answer them for you when you come in with the completed forms tomorrow.’

  ‘But I can leave Maria here today, can’t I?’

  ‘I think there might be some chance of letting your daughter join her peers tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not today?’ I asked. She ignored the question.

  ‘I can see you to process your signed forms at 8.15 tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said to her. ‘Let me fill out the forms right now.’

  ‘I can probably squeeze you in at 7.55 if 8.15 is no good for you,’ was her response.

  ‘Listen. I want to get her in now. I can’t wait until 8.15 tomorrow.’

  ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at 7.55.’

  ‘How about if I can get all the paperwork done this morning? Can she stay this afternoon?’

  She shut her diary. ‘As you’ll discover when you’ve had a chance to read our contract, we do not permit admission after half-past ten.’

  ‘But that’s like Nazi Germany!’ I protested.

  She smiled to herself, proudly, as if I had said, But you’ve managed to keep a spotless house even though you have a full-time job!

  ‘We’ll discuss that tomorrow,’ she said.

  30

  What I wanted to do was to take the lunchboxes, shove them up Vampyra’s arse, take both kids and get them out of there. Go to the bank, cancel the cheque I had just written out to that New Age Nazi, take out all the money, and run.