Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  Before high school Michelle had been a top student and a candidate for valedictorian herself. What she’d thought was teen angst had derailed her academic prowess and popularity with boys, whom she grew to fear when she learned about AIDS. Mostly boys weren’t all that interesting anyway, and she didn’t have time for them. She had to wash morning, afternoon and after midnight when her family succumbed to deep slumber. It was then she became the prurient somnambulist. She removed the accumulated bacterial junk dumped on her by the hordes of humanity that traipsed through a large public high school. Only at night could she find peace, and morning always came too early.

  Only the severe rhythmic pounding of our stepfather’s fists on Michelle’s door roused her to face another humiliating day. Her telltale hands, bloody and raw, became the butt of many jokes in the halls of a teenaged academy and publicly funded babysitting service. Michelle’s former friends took juvenile delight in taunting the bedraggled freak in their midst.

  So, she took pride in being alone and independent and sneered at the pack-dog mentality of her more vicious male peers and the sheepish girls who followed them around in giggly fits. She had one close friend, Estelle, who had uneven legs and enormous thick glasses and who was magical with her ability to make my sister laugh.

  As an adult in Portland, Michelle couldn’t guess what she might have been without OCD. Maybe something respectable, something people depend on, like a meteorologist. Everyone wants to know the weather.

  She remembered that Oprah had said that two million Americans suffered from OCD. Two million! That’s as many Americans as there are in jail. And as many as there are homeless. Were they the same people?

  Maybe there was something special about the number two million. But numbers weren’t Michelle’s particular obsession. For her the number two million was too abstract to matter much. She couldn’t visualize two million people, not even two million very tiny people living inside one of her old city models. But regardless, it was a lot of people. She’d always thought she was alone, but all those people suffered just like she did. For a social animal the pack had turned against, this Oprahtoid was a monumental relief.

  Standing on the roadside before a mile-long stretch of impatient automobiles with her stop sign held loosely in hand, Michelle wondered about all those undiagnosed geniuses in prisons, on streets or trapped in lonely nightmares throughout the world. She wondered if they had their own version of Oprah to diagnose them. She doubted it. She wondered how the world would look if they did.

  As my sister wondered these things, on her fortieth day on the job, her loosely held stop sign flipped around in her hand. The driver of the first stopped car in a long line couldn’t tell which side was he was meant to see. He shrugged his shoulders at Michelle in a silent request for clarification. Michelle, lost in thought and oblivious to the traffic and its operators, did not respond except to scratch her head with her free hand. The driver at the front of the line took this to be a ‘go’ and tramped his foot on the gas pedal. Thirty-eight other drivers followed behind him with no thought or attention to Michelle and no idea that they were headed directly toward another stream of forty-six vehicles headed in the opposite direction.

  It took Michelle’s wandering mind the better part of a minute to register that her lane had jumped the signal and that her loosely hanging sign was the culprit. On this realization she immediately corrected the position of her sign and frantically waved her arms until the line of traffic came to a confused and irritated halt, at which point Michelle radioed an SOS to her foreman.

  A fast-moving jeep was dispatched through the slow-zone and its two occupants managed to stave off disaster. It took several hours to get traffic sorted because the lane without traffic was covered in fresh asphalt, scattered steamrollers and dump trucks.

  Michelle gratefully accepted being ‘laid off due to insufficient funds’ but she didn’t have enough hours in to get the pogey. Her layoff didn’t last long. After several days of careful consideration and library research she was unable to conceive of how to find let alone free the millions of lost geniuses imprisoned by poverty or illness. She found ample evidence that she was not alone in this ignorance, and several examples of what not to do courtesy of the Canadian government. She was on a park bench reading one such example, a late 1800s document called ‘The Chinese Immigration Act of Canada,’ when a pre-school East Asian girl tugged at her sleeve.

  When she looked down at the source of the tug the girl said, “Please read to me English.” Her hair was in pigtails, she had on a plain pink dress and held firmly to the gnarled hand of an old lady, maybe her grandmother.

  Michelle closed her eyes and shook her head as if trying to get Kafka out of there. When she opened her eyes the little girl still stared at her as the old lady looked ahead at some faraway thing.

  Michelle read aloud, “No vessel carrying Chinese immigrants to any port in Canada shall carry more than one such immigrant for every fifty tons of its tonnage.”

  “Not that!” shouted the girl. She handed Michelle a Disneyfied Winnie-the-Pooh book. “That.”

  Relieved, Michelle invited the girl and her grandmother to sit on the bench with her. The girl rested her head on Michelle’s elbow. Michelle delighted the girl with Pooh’s hapless search for hunny.

  The girl giggled in all the right places as if she had been there before. When Michelle finished the story, the girl collected her book, thanked Michelle and led her grandmother further down the path.

  Michelle sat alone with her Chinese Immigration Act wondering what could have led her to believe that she hated children. The next day she applied for a six-week course in teaching English as a second language to children.

  WE MET TONI, DREW, KIA AND ESTHER AT A PUB WITH HUGE Jack Daniels posters on the walls, a jukebox, pool table and no menu. They were already two pitchers in on a Tuesday night. With every pour we clinked glasses and shouted, “Tuesday!”

  They all taught English as a second language together at the same school, and they were all immigrants themselves, Kia from Japan, Esther from Ghana and Drew from northern British Columbia.

  Toni came from Halifax. Her ancestors had followed Harriet Tubman up the Underground Railroad to the freedom of living as highly visible ex-slaves surrounded by stoic white fishermen. She spoke both of Canada’s official languages and taught herself Hausa after tracing her family history roughly to Niger, where she planned to make a pilgrimage of sorts during Ramadan. She was intense and serious, the way I remembered Michelle.

  But as Toni explained her ideas for documentaries on world history through the eyes of the minority, Michelle entertained us with anecdotes of English butchered by her students. She kept her favourite tunes flowing from the jukebox and made sure everybody’s glasses were always full. As Bowie failed to change time Michelle chugged beer and rolled a joint on the table with a cigarette bobbing from her lips as she told a story. She looked suspiciously like our stepfather sharing a supposition on the ethics of good bookkeeping over homemade brew on poker night.

  Michelle was a lot funnier though. “I had them do a skit about their families and Kim did one about his dad’s store. Guess what he called it. ‘Thank you for your coming.’ Apparently his dad has a sign above his store that says that. Kim had no idea why I thought that was so funny, and I had no idea how to explain it to him. I gave him an A.”

  From Michelle’s tongue rolled malapropism after mispronunciation and we clutched our bellies and spit up our beer. Every story ended with her giving an A to ease the guilt of the pleasure she took in these kids’ struggles, and our cruel laughter bore a portion of the guilt for her.

  What astounded me wasn’t Michelle’s cruelty or humour, but her charm. In that non-descript drinking hole I watched her work a crowd. She did most of the talking. She showed off like a playground clown and we loved it.

  Toni was content to impress early w
ith prophetic ideas, then gaze at Michelle and blanket us with gentle laughter. Together, surrounded by their friends, they glowed with the wilful naiveté of new lovers. Only they had been together exactly a month longer than Sarah and me.

  AFTER TWO DAYS OF MAPPING THE COFFEE SHOPS OF PORTLAND, reading up on OCD by day and hanging out with Michelle and her friends at night, I became suspicious of the luminous fly-girl who had replaced the sister I had once known, feared and loved. The OCD literature all warned of the tremendous acting ability of the victims of the doubter’s disease. They share an uncanny ability to hide from outsiders any sign of the obsessions and compulsions that torture them daily.

  Even when Michelle and I had lived under the same roof she enacted most of her rituals in the deep cover of night. I knew something was wrong, but I never knew what it was. I’d never even heard of OCD, and she hid the specifics of it too well. It’s the hiding of it that isolates OCD sufferers.

  In Portland I wondered if the new and supposedly improved Michelle was just a more polished act than the one I’d known before. Maybe the performance was more effective because of the physical and emotional distance that had grown between us.

  The most obvious signs, red hands, gallons of hand cream and little plastic baggies, were absent, but so was Michelle most of the time. Either Michelle’s Portland schedule was jammed even more full than my Toronto one, or she was avoiding me.

  I was relieved when she invited me to be an honoured visiting social worker at her school. Perhaps seeing my sister at work would illuminate what lay behind her new surfacing.

  A slim woman greeted me in the school foyer and introduced herself as June Chow. She gave me a ten-minute tour of the facilities. The building resembled a small-town public school. June said that hers was a for-profit venture made stable with a steady state contract. She dropped me at Michelle’s classroom and excused herself with a handshake, smile and a word of appreciation for the opportunity to meet the distinguished brother of one of her best teachers.

  I shuffled timidly into Michelle’s classroom, where the squeaky voices of six- to thirteen-year-olds sang ‘Love Me Do’ in several keys. Michelle stood at the front of the class and waved her arms with a pencil in one hand. Her long shaggy hair jumped rhythmically to the beat of her arms. She barely suppressed her laughter and I smiled too at the earnest faces of youth.

  The kids saw me from the corners of their eyes. A tide of giggles washed over them and interfered with their song. The giggle caught hold of Michelle and me, escalating amusement into outright hilarity. Michelle yanked her pencil across her throat and the kids burst into hardy laughter.

  “Class,” Michelle said. “This is my brother, Mark.”

  “Hi Mark!” they shouted. Many of them waved frantic hands in a spontaneous bid for my attention.

  “He looks just like you Ms. M!” one little girl shouted.

  “He must be very pretty then,” Michelle said, inspiring more laughter in her students. “Mark is going to teach us a song, class,” she added. She pronounced the words slowly.

  “I am?”

  “Of course he is,” Michelle said to the class. “He is a very good singer who knows many songs. Right Mark?”

  It was true that after my mother lost control of Michelle I was forced to join the choir as penance. My voice is my only instrument. I still use it daily in the shower and I have a knack for remembering lyrics.

  “Teach us Britney!” a little girl shouted from the back.

  “No Britney,” Michelle said.

  “Write out some simple lyrics on the board,” she told me. “And sing them slowly so they can sing along. It’s easy. I’ll conduct.”

  And so it was that I taught a chunk of America’s future how to sing ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.’ Their singing remained boisterous, off-key and joyous, and they got all the words easily.

  On the third time around Michelle had two boys act out the words and their mimed kiss goodbye had everyone pointing, laughing and gesticulating. To end the class Michelle rehashed the vocabulary from ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ and challenged the kids to find two synonyms for each word. As a laughing, waving, thanking, teasing, bubbling unit they left us to our weekend.

  I looked at Michelle in awe. She had a way with people that no amount of social work theory or practice could ever equip me with. She was better than the teachers I remembered growing up in small-town Nova Scotia.

  MY FANTASIES OF REBUILDING A QUASHED SIBLING BOND OVER lattes, art galleries and books on beaches were dashed by reality’s usual smack upside the head. Michelle’s days were filled with kids and lesson plans. Her nights were filled with Toni and other friends, and on weekends her side gig flourished. She tutored six kids in two-hour slots for forty-five dollars an hour.

  “I was fortunate to make some lucrative connections with some of what you call the entrepreneurial business class immigrants,” she said as she readjusted her scarf in search of the proper hanging length.

  My only chance to see her alone was when she was getting ready to go somewhere else.

  “I’m thinking of quitting the school and going into business on my own. The kids love me and they learn much faster if it’s one on one. I could make a fortune.” She finished with the scarf, frowned and undid it again.

  “Wouldn’t you miss the school?” I asked. “You seem to really enjoy it.”

  “Yeah, I would. Shit.” The scarf wasn’t co-operating. “But if I did tutoring full-time I could maybe start my own school in a few years. Fucking scarf. I don’t know why men bother with ties. I can’t even stand scarves; couldn’t imagine having to wear a tie. Why did our stepfather put up with it?”

  “Survival,” I said. “You know, food on our plates.”

  “Mm,” Michelle said.

  A FEW HOURS AFTER MY SISTER LEFT FOR TUTORING, TONI FOUND me standing amidst the ruins of Michelle’s pure white apartment. Old audio cassettes, pornographic magazines and small empty whisky bottles lay strewn across the floor. “What the hell,” Toni said.

  “I’m just looking,” I said. “I was just hoping to find something. Some letters I wrote to her. I wondered if she kept them.”

  I had no idea what I was really looking for, specifically. Generally I was hoping to find some proof of the sister I used to have, the surly bitch whom I had never once heard talk about money. The one who spent three months of allowances on my sixth birthday present. Instead all I found was proof of age.

  Toni and I put everything back into the drawers and closets without speaking a word. She squished up her face at the porn, shoved it into a drawer roughly.

  She had come by to use Michelle’s DVD player, also without permission, to test her latest release: a twenty-five-minute piece for kids about the Bannock, Chinook, Klamath and other native peoples of Oregon. It wasn’t a standard historical piece but a series of video testimonials by people on modern reserves. It was far better than any of the educational videos of bell-bottomed teens pledging a smoke-free America that I had seen as a child, and I told her so.

  She laughed and said, “Weren’t those terrible?”

  “Will schools actually show these?” I asked. “We never saw anything that might make the government look bad.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Haven’t sold this one yet, and it’s still a sensitive topic. But things have changed. When I was a kid the only black person I ever saw in a textbook was a big bare-chested African chief. Now they have a whole month for black history, which still isn’t enough, but it’s progress.”

  Looking Toni in the eye was difficult, partly because of beauty that was linked to my enigmatic sister and partly, more so, because Toni was one of those uncompromising people, the kind brazen enough to make a documentary about people she had no common experience with, other than historical oppression by a dominant group, and try to sell it to
a school board comprised mostly of that same dominant group.

  To escape her hard inquisitive stare I went to the kitchen to put on some coffee. Michelle bought the cheap stuff but it got me away from the source of a re-emerging feeling of inferiority, the same one I felt around Lily. My reprieve was short-lived because Toni followed me to the kitchen to help me find sugar and milk. She asked me about my work and I told her it was a boring subject.

  “Boring? I always thought it would be a thrill to do frontline social work,” she said. “Maybe I’m romanticizing.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m actually more of a paper-pusher.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Michelle said you did counselling.”

  This was the kind of shame I’d come to Portland to forget. “Not much anymore,” I said.

  Perhaps sensing my discomfort she changed the subject, asked me if I liked Toronto. I told her that its spell on me was fading but that I liked the people, their diversity and spunk. She nodded, smiled slightly and suppressed a yawn.

  I offered up a synopsis of Bumi’s story as an example of one of the five million uniquenesses that tickled my brain in Toronto. She nodded slowly throughout the story and I wondered if she knew about Michelle’s OCD. When I talked about Bumi’s habits and therapy she just nodded.

  “I think mental illness is so common,” she said. “More than we tend to realize or acknowledge. And we just throw drugs at them en masse and hope they go away.”

  “Sometimes the drugs help,” I said.

  “True,” she said. “And sometimes they make things worse.”

  ON SUNDAY MORNINGS MICHELLE MET WITH HER GROUP AND Toni came by to await her return. “We like to have Lord’s Day afternoon sex,” Toni told me.

  Maybe I should have made myself scarce, hit another coffee shop, but I figured Toni had ample time with Michelle, stretched out ahead as long as necessary. I had only a month of etched out moments between Toni, friends, work, tutorials and Michelle’s Sunday group.