by Kyp Harness
It was a week after that that I woke up one morning before school and went down the hall to see if my dad was in bed. When he was there, I always tried to figure out if my parents had an argument the night before. I figured if I found them both sleeping turned away from each other they must’ve had a fight just before going to sleep, or if my mom was turned away from my father, yet he was turned towards her, it meant she had been mad at him, but he had been imploring her to reconsider when they went to sleep. Or if my dad was turned away, and my mom faced him, they had gone to sleep with her begging his forgiveness. But of course, if I found them both turned towards the other then there was nothing to worry about.
This morning the bed was empty, and I walked out to the kitchen where my mom was making me and my brother sandwiches for our school lunch, and I asked where Dad was and she said he was in the hospital. He had a bad pain last night, so Howard his partner at the barbershop came over to pick him up and take him to the hospital, and there they told him that he’d had a heart attack. Then they said he’d had another heart attack once they got to the hospital, and I asked when he was coming home and she said they couldn’t say, and as she put the sandwiches together her bottom lip was shaking like it did when it looked like she was about to cry, and then she bit the inside of her lip at the side of her mouth which she did at times like this, I guess, to stop from crying, and that made me not want to ask her any more questions. I walked back down the hall to look at my parents’ unmade bed, to look particularly at my dad’s side of it. Then my brother got up and I told him what happened, and my mom told him, and then we got ready and went to school. For show and tell, I got up and told the class my dad had two heart attacks last night.
The Simpsons’ older daughter was there to look after me and my brother when we got home after school so that Mom could go visit Dad in the hospital after she finished work. Jason and I weren’t allowed to see him because kids couldn’t go, and for a while they didn’t know how long he’d be in there, then they said it would be three months, and as the days went by I would go into my parents’ room and look at their wedding pictures, and remind myself of the way his face looked, and try to think of how his voice sounded as I looked at his younger face in the pictures.
The older Simpson girl sometimes stayed overnight as she helped look after Jason and me, but I didn’t like her, the way she told us what to do as though she was taking over for both Mom and Dad. I didn’t like or trust the food she made for us, or the way she barked like a seal in her laughter at The Brady Bunch or other shows that weren’t funny, and especially at shows Dad didn’t think were funny. I kept asking my mom for the Simpson girl to leave but she said she couldn’t leave, and she told me to behave and stop making trouble, but still my brother and I would get into these terrible fights, and one night after school my mom said she would take us to the new McDonald’s that had just opened up and even on that night, in the car ride over, my brother and I got into a kicking fight in the back seat so that my mother, just as she was turning the car into the parking lot, backed up, turned around and headed home, giving us a clear lesson that she wasn’t going to tolerate the acting up we did when our dad was away, even at the very threshold of McDonald’s.
Mom kept saying Dad might be moving into a different room where my brother and I could visit him. Sometimes Dad would send home little slips of paper that had the meal ingredients for his new diet with no salt and no butter, or he’d send home the little Styrofoam suction cups they used on the machine to test his heart, and we’d play with them. But as the weeks went by and I kept going into the bedroom to look at the pictures of him, his voice grew fainter in my mind, and the features of what he looked like now were harder to grasp and make out. One night Mom took us and the Simpson girl up to the hospital, and my brother and I stood on the lawn waving up to my dad’s window, where we could see his tiny figure, almost impossible to make out, wave down at us from above.
Don Regnier and his wife and their three children came to stay with us for a week to help Mom as she was going back and forth to visit Dad, and I didn’t like the way they invaded the house, and the way the oldest girl got peanut butter on my Snoopy plush doll, and the way Don Regnier’s wife told me what to do, and I didn’t like the way Don Regnier sat at the head of the table during suppertime. But Don Regnier helped out by completing some of the work Dad had started on the renovation, and he even installed a light fixture in my parents’ bedroom that they had picked out: a fixture of two globes hanging on chains suspended from the ceiling over their bed, the chains looping through rings on the ceiling then draping back to connect to a medallion on the wall above the centre of their headboard.
Mom took advantage of their being there to go back and forth from the hospital more and I’d have to watch different shows with the Regnier kids who like the Simpson girl laughed at different and stupid things, and on the Sunday before they were leaving we were all having a big meal in the kitchen, and that was the day a phone was installed in Dad’s room for the first time, and he made his first call during supper, and Mom passed the phone to Don Regnier and my brother and then to me and his voice came with all the familiarity I had forgotten existed until I heard it, the feeling of something fitting into a space which conformed to its every dimension and shape: “How y’doin’ partner?”
And the strange shock of his voice down the line mixed somehow with my anger at the Regniers and the Simpson girl so that my throat suddenly ached, and I couldn’t talk right away.
“Partner? How y’doin’?”
Finally I said, “Good,” my voice catching and my eyes smarting, but I wanted to tell him I wasn’t good at all, that Don Regnier was here sitting at the head of the table where he shouldn’t have been, eating off our dishes and shoving our forks into his mouth, and his whiny mean kids were here, and his wife was telling me what to do in a voice you don’t use on a friend’s kid but the one you use for your own kid when you’re really mad at him, and all of a sudden there were hot tears in my eyes, and I turned from all the people in the kitchen though I couldn’t leave the room because the phone was mounted on the kitchen wall. I hunched up my shoulders to try to hide my crying, and I tried to control my voice to answer when he said, “Try and help your mother out now—just another month, the doctors say.”
I ached with rage as I wanted to tell him that Don Regnier hung the light fixture over his and Mom’s bed, and I wanted to tell him that Don Regnier shouldn’t have been there, it wasn’t right, he was in a place he shouldn’t have been, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, but also conscious of having to hide my tears I felt even further away from him than when I couldn’t hear his voice or talk to him, or hear him talk to me as his voice came down the line, saying: “Alright, partner, you be good now,” and he clicked off.
3. Mrs. Hell
Mrs. Winchell at the new school we went to after the other one got shut down had black hair that was like a helmet on her head, and her black-framed glasses came out from the helmet like goggles on a Halloween mask of a race car driver, and her mouth had wrinkles around it, not the wrinkles you got from smoking like my mom said you get, going straight up and down over your upper lip like the folds in a curtain, but wrinkles at the side of your mouth that say you’re not smiling even if you are smiling, or the wrinkles that grow and get deeper when you’re frowning and show a mood of angry disapproval even deeper than that which you’re feeling.
She never laughed except without amusement, with a skeptical small suspiciousness. To her the only realities were the unanswerable laws of mathematics and science—all else was suspect, to be approached as if it were shameful and wrong, and potentially leading to the ultimate ruination of everything. I found this out early in the year when she was giving a talk on what to expect and I was listening while drawing an elaborate picture on the inside of my Hillier notebook. When she concluded her talk she marched straight down the aisle to my desk, leaned over, and using a ruler as a guide, tore the back cover neatly fro
m my notebook. “There’ll be no drawing while I’m talking to the class,” she said as she marched off, though I didn’t know what was wrong since I’d listened to everything she’d said.
I had to tell Mom and Dad about it and Dad was mad, saying she had no right to ruin the notebook, and he’d be damned if he was going to buy another one, but Mom just got out some construction paper and scissors and made a new cover. Mrs. Winchell would become furious with my disinterest in math and science, and when I was confused I knew not to ask her, for her face said to me that she disliked me in a basic and powerful way that there was nothing I could do to change or alter, the same way I felt some other kids at school didn’t like me. When we did math I just got more confused, for when one bit goes by and you’re afraid to ask questions, and then another bit comes it makes it that much the worse, because it was built on the bit before, until you fear ever being able to understand the figures and symbols that are grasped so easily by others. Every minute your confusion deepens until the entirety of life seems hopeless and you are completely set apart from it as one who doesn’t understand, who can’t understand, and tears pour from your eyes as you stare down at the book on your desk, so that a classmate puts up her hand and says, “Mrs. Winchell—Tim’s crying because he doesn’t understand the math,” so that you’re exposed to the whole class as one who doesn’t understand, can’t understand, will never understand, even though your classmate calls out with real empathy and the desire to help—it then doesn’t make it any better when Mrs. Winchell says, “Tim shouldn’t be here if he doesn’t understand it. He should be going to a special school.”
My ability to draw didn’t help me as Mrs. Winchell had no time for art. Although she had to teach it as part of the curriculum, she did it only in the most grudging way. When I made my science fair project about the technology used to make animated films and how the persistence of vision was used to create the illusion of movement, using my drawings to show how scenes from Walt Disney films were animated, she let her gaze fall over my presentation and asked, “You like that sort of thing, do you?”
Something that was strange was that her husband was the head of the Gideon society that brought little bibles to us with red leather covers and a place at the front to write our names and addresses, and also there was a picture of a Canadian flag and also the words to the national anthem. As he stood before us, Mr. Winchell, who looked a lot older than Mrs. Winchell, told us about Gideon from the Bible, and why his society left bibles in hotel rooms and gave them to kids in schools, telling us that in these books was all the wisdom of the ages, and the answer to all our questions, and that in our times of need and sadness, all we had to do was consult these books and be strengthened by God’s word, so that these bibles could be our life’s greatest companions.
I looked over at Mrs. Winchell watching him as he made his long speech and she looked a bit nervous and shy but also proud in that she believed in all of what her husband was saying, though it was sometimes hard to tell because in addition to the wrinkles by her mouth which always made her seem frowning and disapproving, the flesh of her face seemed frozen, like a mask placed over her real face, and the muscles were supposed to match up to the expressions she wore under her mask, but they were never entirely synchronized. When we lined up at the door to go out for recess, for the benefit of my classmates I’d put my hand over the first four letters of her name on the nameplate on her door so that it read Mrs. Hell.
Dad was let out of the hospital after three months. We went down to pick him up, and Jason and I hugged him in the hospital lobby where there was a statue of an angel. He wasn’t supposed to work so he laid down on the couch for some time, and then he started going to a night class at the local college for interior decorating to learn how to decorate our house when we got finished renovating it. He also applied to be a member of the Masons and that required him to study a little black book that he said nobody else was allowed to look at, though I did look and couldn’t make any sense out of it or see anything that was so secret. A couple of men had to come to our house to inspect it and see if he was suitable to be a member of the Masons, and Mom and Jason and me all had to stay in the kitchen with the door closed all night and we couldn’t watch TV as he was entertaining the men in the living room, and we were only brought out to them one time to be introduced to the two men as they drank their beer, and then we had to go back in the kitchen and stay there until it was time to go to bed.
When my dad became a Mason he’d get regular newsletters in the mail which he said I also couldn’t read, and which I did anyway, and he started going to meetings every week. He also got an apron decorated with flashy jewels that he wore to the meetings, which he kept in a leather case that I wasn’t supposed to fool with, and when he started working again he’d take the case with the apron in it to work so he could leave for the meeting right after. One night we were at the barbershop after he’d turned the closed sign over and was getting ready to go, and Mom jokingly held up the apron to Howard, my dad’s partner in the barbershop, saying maybe he’d look nice in one of them. After Howard left, my dad got really mad at her, saying non-Masons were never to be allowed to wear those aprons, even in fun, and she had no business holding it up to Howard like that. I wondered whether they wore the aprons over their clothes at the meetings or whether they just wore the aprons and nothing else.
Meanwhile at school, if Mrs. Winchell wasn’t impressed with my drawings the other kids were, as each day I made drawings of jokes and gags on the backs of exercise sheets that would get passed around the class. Carl Plympton, who came with me from the other school, drew too, and he liked the Disney characters as I did but was unable to draw them unless they were smiling. This didn’t really work for most of the gags he depicted, especially when the gags themselves were so lame—he would draw Goofy pulling the trigger of a gun aimed at his own face, smiling all the while, and often the gags he used were stolen from my own drawings to such a degree that I referred to him behind his back as Xerox. I was glad, though, that for the most part the kids in the class could figure out that my drawings of the Disney characters were better, not to mention had more expressions, while I always couldn’t help but regret that some others couldn’t tell the difference between Carl’s drawings and my own and happily enjoyed both as if they were equal.
A boy named Garry Lewis began championing me and my drawings and would get mad on my behalf at anyone who claimed Carl Plympton was my equal. With his encouragement I started a weekly newspaper called The Homely Gazette, which featured such stories as a soccer player missing the ball when going for a big kick and getting his foot wedged in his own mouth, and a man falling out of a window into a pile of rotten Kentucky Fried Chicken. I put the paper together at home, giving my brother Jason the credit for being “chief pencil sharpener,” for he did race back and forth to my room, providing me with freshly sharpened pencils, and I gave it to my mom to Xerox some copies at her secretary job. I took the copies to school and sold them for fifteen cents apiece and Garry Lewis promoted them and strong-armed kids into buying copies.
At the same time it was Garry Lewis who, without meaning to, was the cause of the end of The Homely Gazette. In his class down the hall he was reading the paper as his teacher was trying to teach a lesson, so she grabbed it from him and marched off with it, as Garry told me one recess. “She didn’t seem too happy looking at it,” Garry said. “Sorry—I hope you don’t get in trouble.” That afternoon our principal Mr. Gosland arrived at the door of our class and asked, “May I borrow Tim for a moment please?” Anyone’s first impression of Mr. Gosland would have been overwhelmed entirely by the sight of his large bald head which was ringed by a fringe of red curly hair, earning him the nickname of “Miner, miner, forty-niner” because the light that bounced off his shiny dome was so bright it made it seem as though he was wearing a miner’s hat with a light on the front of it.
He took great joy in his job, and when teaching about the moon he would enter the cla
ssroom in a space suit that he made himself, and in teaching about Vikings, he would gather the kids in the gym and sit them on benches as if on a Viking ship while he stood before them dressed as a Viking captain and serving them cut-up hot dog as the meat of the dragon they’d killed, and in teaching about First Nations he would enter the classroom in a headdress. He also kept a chipmunk in his office in a glass box. He now stood in the hall waiting for me with The Homely Gazette in his hand.
I looked up at his serious features, usually so mild and amiable but now stern and disapproving, his eyes seeming insect-like the way people’s eyes always do behind glasses. I could see the pores in his nose, and a slight white rash around the strands of his red moustache. “One thing I really respect is talent,” he was saying, his tenor voice sounding as earnest and reasonable as ever, broadcasting, it seemed, from his sober, industrious heart that desired nothing more than to meet another like itself, whose tone rang with unanswerable logic, making it even more unsettling that this same voice was expressing disappointed dismay, though I could not figure out why, for to my mind there was nothing bad about my paper. “But one thing I hate to see is a misuse of talent,” he said, indicating The Homely Gazette. “And this is a misuse of talent,” he said.
I didn’t see why, since Garry Lewis and all the other kids liked it. Was it because Garry Lewis was reading it when the teacher was talking? Did that make it a misuse of talent, and if that was so, didn’t that apply to anything anyone was reading during class?
“So I’m going to ask you to stop doing this. Instead, we’d like you to do the drawings for the school newsletter each month it comes out,” he said, finishing with a slight smile. I knew he wanted me to be pleased, so I acted pleased, and I was, but at the same time I’d liked making The Homely Gazette and would miss making it.
