The sun finally sank, like a stone. The sky framed in the picture window was a soft, mindless grey.
Again he followed his mother, watched her hands darting, pointing, her voice urging him to appreciation. She’ll this, she’ll that, he heard his mother say. After all these months, this trouble, who did it belong to?
The room had gone dark and a little scary. Sammy fumbled in his pockets for the matches he carried to light his mother’s stove. A match blazed in the cup of his hands and he held it, staring at the flame, seeing his mother walk the hard-packed road that day the sun had burned in the ribs of the houses, back then before all they could think of was houses, houses, houses.
The match scorched his fingers and he dropped it. He struck another and began to nuzzle a solitary wood shaving that lay beside the pile with its flame, watched the shaving catch and writhe under the caressing blue tongue. He rubbed out the last poor sparks with the toe of his running shoe, examined the smear of black ash on the floor.
He lit the last match, let it drop, went out into the street.
For long moments the fire rustled in its dry nest of shavings like a mouse, scurried aimlessly up and down the frayed borders of the canvas, floated a few fat drowsy sparks about the room. Then the turpentine popped and a blue quaking light which resembled the glow of a television ran flickering up the walls. The dull thumps of rupturing paint cans could be heard.
An unexpected breeze sighed the length of the dark deserted street. The front door which he had neglected to pull firmly closed behind him swung slowly and invitingly open.
The house drew a long breath, exploded.
He saw it once again, the burning sun, a picture in a picture window.
Teacher
1.
Never before, and never since have I hated anyone as I did then, with a ten year old’s insulted and seething heart.
2.
Her name was Mrs. Dollen and she taught grade six at R.J. Hewitt Elementary. I would place her in early middle age in 1961. Dark complexioned, monumental, she was easily the most physically imposing teacher in the school, two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Alley Oop, our principal, who liked to give expression to his power by cracking and shelling walnuts with his fingers as he strolled the school corridors at recess. Of course, poor Alley Oop’s hands paled in comparison with Mrs. Dollen’s, which were emphatically more prodigious and mannish.
Mrs. Dollen favoured lace, frills, and chiffon blouses, perhaps to counteract the impression created by the size of her shoulders and hands. Like all teachers, she had a distinctive, identifying odour. Hers was feminine enough, a mingling of eau de cologne and dry-cleaning. There was nothing specifically eccentric about her appearance, no flamboyant costume jewellery, no laddered and sagging nylon stockings, no radical and abrupt changes of hair colour like Miss MacDonald, the grade-one teacher. Nevertheless, there was something unnerving about the way she looked. Now I see what it was. If Chief Sitting Bull had been permed at our local beauty parlour he would have borne a strong resemblance to teacher.
3.
What was it that people in our small town said about Mrs. Dollen? The chairman of the local school board liked to note that the life span of a set of textbooks was five times longer in Mrs. Dollen’s classroom than in any other. Put plainly, they lasted. Nobody dared rip a page, or draw a picture in one of her books.
Exasperated mothers used to threaten their kids: “Just you wait until you’re old enough for grade six. Mrs. Dollen will put an end to your smart alec lip!”
In the janitor’s opinion there wasn’t another teacher like her in the whole school. Her pupils lined their shoes up at the back of the room and sat in their stockinged feet. No black scuff marks on the floor, ever. No mud. You didn’t even have to buff the tile after a waxing, students did it for you with the soles of their socks.
What did my father say? He said the reason Mrs. Dollen got the job teaching was the condition of her husband, because of the shape he came back in after the war. Mr. Dollen didn’t work, scarcely put his nose outside the door, and was reported to suffer from an undefined ailment. Contracted, my father liked to add, from germs found only inside certain bottles.
My father was known to be a character, and the owner of a maliciously sharp tongue. As he cut their hair at the barber shop, his customers encouraged him to pass his famous opinions on acquaintances and neighbours. The louder they roared, the more bloody-minded and funny he became. What he never realized was that walking home after, the laughter forgotten, they all turned sour pondering what he might have to say about them when they went out the door. My father was never as popular as he assumed himself to be.
One of his most celebrated comic turns involved the Dollens. Holding his scissors aloft, the blades nervously snicking back and forth, he would propose the theory that the reason Ernie Dollen was never seen outside the house was that he was kept chained up inside, garbed in silk pyjamas, Mrs. Dollen’s “personal love slave.”
4.
Entering Mrs. Dollen’s class I was aware of her reputation. It was just that I saw no reason to personally worry. Since beginning school I had always been the pet, the darling, more the ally of the teachers than their pupil. They knew that when the school superintendent came sniffing around on his inspections I could be depended upon to politely volunteer answers to his questions, drawing fire away from more unreliable and erratic scholars.
Both Mrs. Dollen and I had reputations, although mine was minor and hers major. The seed of mine was that I arrived in school able to read, something highly unusual for that time and that town. After my mother died when I was three, my father took me with him to the barber shop. In one corner of the shop he erected a barricade out of a scrap of old snow fence which he put me behind when he was busy (to keep me out of the hair on the floor) but when things were slow the two of us sat in the big nickel-trimmed barber’s chair and looked at the ragged magazines stocked for the amusement of his patrons. I learned to read from The Police Gazette. My father liked to call attention to this, in a manner he imagined self-deprecating, but wasn’t in the least. “He never got his brains from me,” he used to declare. “I’ve still got mine!”
Then, when I was six, my grade-one teacher discovered me in the school library reading a grade-twelve history text. Actually I was only looking at gory illustrations representing the Battle of Marathon but the incident contributed to a growing suspicion I might be “academically gifted.” When the Department of Education appointed an innovative superintendent and Alley Oop saw it might be wise to portray himself as a progressive principal, I was the one selected to be “accelerated” through several grades. All this relentless promotion meant that, already undersized for my age, I started grade six a full two years younger than the rest of my classmates.
5.
A description of a school photograph of me taken at the age of ten:
Glasses and freckles, a rigid smile, western shirt and western bola tie. (My father loved Zane Grey.)
A very good haircut.
6.
On my first day in grade six I claimed a seat where I always had, directly in front of the teacher’s desk in the first row. Unspoken rules guided me there. It was the place for someone like me, just like the back of the room was the place for retards like Wayne Leszinski. The world ordered itself that way in those days.
So it came to be that two legends, myself and Mrs. Dollen, were separated by less than four feet when she opened the register and proceeded to call the roll.
“Deborah Atkins.”
“Here.”
Without lifting her eyes from the register, Mrs. Dollen said: “People in my room answer properly when I call the roll. In my room ‘here’ is not acceptable. The proper response is, ‘Present, Mrs. Dollen’ or ‘Present, teacher.’ Is that understood?”
“Yes, teacher.”
“Deborah Atkins.”
“Present, teacher.”
“Robert Bing.”
“Present, teacher.”
And so it continued until she came to me.
“Myles Rampton.”
“Present, Mrs. Dollen.”
For the first time that morning, Mrs. Dollen directed her attention away from the register and towards one of her students. She stared at me with eyes so expressionless and dry that mine began to itch in sympathy. “So,” she said at last, “here I am, face to face with the Boy Wonder.”
I beamed a smile back at her, never imagining that this was anything but a compliment. I was accustomed to being complimented by teachers.
“I wouldn’t smile if I were you until I had something to smile about,” she said, meaning it. Laughter burst at my back.
7.
I was in the right place, at the front of the room, but nothing else was right. If Mrs. Dollen asked a question and I put my hand up, she never called on me. If it didn’t go up, she did. On the first Friday afternoon that it was too rainy to go outside for phys. ed. we had a spelling bee and teacher kept me standing uncomfortably at the blackboard while she thumbed through the dictionary searching for my word. She settled on “anaclisis.” I was the first one knocked out of competition.
Mrs. Dollen made a discovery. The first three pages of my Social Studies notes were written in ballpoint pen. Only fountain pens were permitted in her classes. Surely we were all big enough to use a proper pen at our age. I was set recopying these notes using a proper pen. And then recopying them once again because I had used peacock-blue ink and Mrs. Dollen would countenance only blue or black. Neither of these rules had ever been announced.
8.
I could not understand this passage from privilege to persecution. Possible reasons for it were:
The weakness evident in my face. I neglected to mention this when describing my school photograph. The face is humble, it asks only to please.
A woman like Mrs. Dollen was bound to resent other teachers’ enthusiasms being thrust upon her. She would pick and choose her own favourites, thank you very much.
My father.
Certainly this list does not exhaust possibilities, lists never do. It is only a beginning. At the time, however, I did not even have a beginning. I sought very hard for a reason that Mrs. Dollen should dislike me and could not find one. It was a useful lesson teacher taught me, that to demand misfortune make sense is futile.
9.
What this seemed to be was what my father referred to as a “misunderstanding.” He used the word frequently since his life was rife with them because of his satiric urges. I took it upon myself to clear my misunderstanding up, to prove to Mrs. Dollen that she was wrong and that I really was a model student. Throughout every lesson, throughout every hour of the day, I wore an alert and interested face. I was modest, unassuming, diligent, and cooperative. I volunteered to wipe blackboards, pound chalk dust out of erasers, and run messages to Alley Oop’s office. All of which only seemed to stimulate her disdain.
10.
Behind my meek demeanour I fantasized revenge.
What if I telephoned her, claimed to be a former student, and threatened to break into her house with a butcher knife, seeking revenge for the wrong she had done me years ago?
Two or three times I made a dry run, dialling Mrs. Dollen’s number with the receiver resting in the cradle so that her telephone couldn’t possibly ring. But I lost my nerve and dropped even that mild, pale rebellion. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew the game I was playing and would answer despite my precautions, could and would answer a phone that hadn’t rung.
11.
October was devoted to Noxious Weeds. Mrs. Dollen turned our classroom into a rogues’ gallery of the weeds named in the province’s Noxious Weeds Act, hanging illustrations of twenty of the most noxious on the bulletin board. We had orders to find specimens of each, press them, label them, and mount them in a scrapbook. For three weeks I spent every spare moment combing ditches, fields, and my father’s neglected garden patch for Russian thistle, fox tail, creeping Charlie, leafy spurge, chickweed, wild oats. Teacher had made it perfectly clear that seventeen or eighteen, even nineteen weeds would not be good enough. It was all twenty or nothing. We sweated in pursuit of the rare, uncommon ones. Mrs. Dollen’s students bartered weed specimens the way other, happier children traded baseball cards.
“I’ll swap you a wild oats for a wild mustard.”
The weekend before the Monday we were supposed to hand in our scrapbooks I was still short a plantain and so overwrought that my father gave up his only day off, Sunday, to help me on my weed hunt. This was a considerable sacrifice since he looked forward to spending his day of rest ridiculing everything offered on CBC television. He had been born in Duluth and although he had moved to Canada at the age of two, he thought of himself as an American and liked to disparage everything north of the forty-ninth as pitifully second rate. He always made a great show of scowling and grumbling when forced to his feet for the singing of “God Save the Queen.”
All afternoon I tramped worried circles over the countryside while he ambled along behind, complaining of the varicose veins which, along with haemorrhoids, were what he called the “barber’s curse.” Every now and then he would pluck a bit of vegetation and present it to me for inspection, hoping that at long last he had found his ticket of release and could get home in time to mock the sanctimonious performers in “Hymn Sing.”
“Do you think?” he’d ask.
And I would roll my eyes in wild despair and cry: “No, no, no. Plantain!” And my father, growing cold because he never bought himself a proper jacket (since the only weather he ever got was stepping from his car into the barbershop) muttered: “Well, how the christ am I supposed to know? They didn’t make farmers out of us when I went to school. We studied the three R’S, we got an education!”
12.
Nineteen noxious weeds lovingly mounted, protected under Saran Wrap, their names painstakingly stencilled in coloured pencils, a beautiful job, did not cut any ice with teacher. She wanted to know where plantain was.
“I looked and looked,” I said, “but I couldn’t find any. Honest I couldn’t.”
“I can just guess how hard you looked,” said Mrs. Dollen in a manner meant to make it clear that she believed I was a liar. “You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself I don’t doubt, skipping those grades. But if I was you I wouldn’t be so quick to turn up my nose at practical knowledge. Not everything is learned out of a book. There are plenty that go lots further than the likes of you because they don’t think themselves too good to learn everyday useful things. Like weeds.”
13.
I noted this about teacher. She liked to be asked questions. Not the sort of questions a boy like Wayne Leszinski asked, who was dumb as a post, but the sort of questions asked by girls who got solid B’S and wrote in their exercise books with concentrated, lip-chewing exactitude. Girls who, in Social Studies class, fretted over how provincial capitals should be marked on their study maps, with stars or dots. Please, teacher, which?
Salvation might lie in questions of this ilk. “Mrs. Dollen, how do you spell Charlottetown?”
Teacher wondered aloud to the class how a boy who had managed to take two grades in one year didn’t know how to spell a simple, ordinary place like Charlottetown.
“I know how to spell Charlotte,” I said with emphasis, “and I know how to spell town. What I don’t know is whether it’s one word or two.”
Unfortunately, the sands of patience had run out for both of us at the same time. Mrs. Dollen leaned across her desk and waved a forefinger the size and colour of an uncooked sausage in my face. “Don’t adopt a tone with me, young man. You might have got away with blue murder in other places and other times but this is here and now. I’ve had my eye on you for weeks and I don’t like your superior airs and your habit of carrying your nose aloft. You seem to think I’ve got nothing to teach you. Since that’s the case you better pick up your desk and cart it off to the back of the room where I
won’t be in your hair. Set it down beside Mr. Wayne Leszinski. Like you, he seems to know all he’ll ever need to know. The two of you are welcome to each other.”
14.
A description of Wayne Leszinski as he appears in the school photo he gave me at the end of the year which he signed, “Your friend, Waynie”:
A stocky, moon-faced boy of fifteen with wavy blond hair, already showing signs of premature thinning, and a long upper lip that appeared slightly swollen because it was pulled down to hide bad front teeth. No proper shirt, just a white T-shirt, despite the fact that the itinerant school photographer always arrived to take pictures at R.J. Hewitt Elementary in January.
When I set my desk down beside Wayne’s, he had already been parked on that spot for two years and was beginning his third. No other teacher had ever held Wayne back in any grade for more than two years, but Mrs. Dollen was a woman of principles. If you couldn’t pass her exams you didn’t leave. So Wayne was stalled in grade six until he gave Mrs. Dollen a stroke, or had his sixteenth birthday and the law said he could quit – whichever came first.
I was righteously indignant at being bracketed, yoked, paired with the likes of Wayne Leszinski. I could feel him watching me in the way embarrassing and stupid people did, without disguising their curiosity. I could hear him breathing in an embarrassing and stupid way also.
Things As They Are? Page 12
