Things As They Are?

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Then he spoke to me. “Now you’re one, too,” he said.

  “One what?” I whispered angrily. “One what?”

  15.

  Everyone was aware that Health was teacher’s favourite subject, perhaps because as it was taught then, it was made up of entirely practical knowledge. We learned Canada’s Food Rules, the circulation of the blood, and tips on personal grooming. Wayne was a useful example when it came to grooming, which was a popular topic with Mrs. Dollen. If you used too much Brylcreem and didn’t wash your hair regularly you could expect to go bald by the time you were twenty-five, which was what Wayne was going to be by the looks of him already.

  She would also order Leszinski to hold up his big, cracked, chilblained paws as evidence of what you could expect if you dressed with an eye on fashion rather than weather conditions.

  “And you’ve all seen Mr. Leszinski’s ears,” she would add, while Wayne swept the room with a challenging grin.

  We had all seen his ears. Wayne was famous for ignoring the cold. All winter he slithered about in ordinary leather street shoes, in a light nylon windbreaker, without gloves, without a tuque. His frostbitten ears were tattered with peeling skin, curled like birch bark. Brylcreem froze in his hair on his way to school and dripped down his neck when it thawed in the muggy warmth of the classroom. What teacher did not grasp was the pleasure that Wayne Leszinski took in being singled out in Health class. It gave him status.

  16.

  The back of the room was not my place. Everything seemed to be happening too far away. There were times I could almost believe I had caught some sort of infection from Leszinski, just from sitting near him. I could no longer concentrate, or remember what had just been said, or even do things I had always known how to do. One day I was overcome with a chilling panic when I discovered that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not recall how to multiply and divide fractions.

  My grades began to drop. If this could have been attributed to Mrs. Dollen’s prejudice in marking, I would have been less shaken and anxious. But even in subjects such as Arithmetic, where an answer was either right or wrong, I went from an A the previous year to a B and then to a C.

  The only things that I could seem to learn were the things that Wayne was teaching me, the things I did not want to learn. I did not want to know that girls bled once a month from between their legs. I found it horrible to imagine them all sore and sticky, bleeding the way Wayne said. Even though I dismissed him as a moron, he could make me feel even dumber than Mrs. Dollen could. When Wayne said he’d like to share a French safe with Sharon Stottlemyre, I took this to mean that Wayne wished to share some fabulous treasure with the equally fabulous Sharon, a treasure so valuable that it had to be lodged in a very secure safe, a special kind only obtainable in France. When later I learned that the treasure this French safe was meant to hold was what Leszinski called “Wayne’s wiener,” that thick, coarsely-veined stump he liked to flaunt and waggle in the bathroom to over-awe the rest of us who as yet only had what he disparagingly referred to as “winkles,” I felt slightly ill.

  17.

  Before my relegation to the back of the room I used to look forward to examinations, but now the little excited butterfly of anticipation which used to flutter eagerly sank like a cold, heavy lump of lead in the pit of my stomach.

  God knew what was in the pit of Leszinski’s stomach when he wrote a test. First he printed his full name, Wayne Martin Leszinski, at the top of the test paper, taking great pains with each of the letters, a different coloured pencil employed for each. Once his name was a rainbow, he didn’t even bother to glance at the questions but laid his head down on his desk to wait out the remainder of the hour just like he was stoically waiting out the remainder of his sentence in Mrs. Dollen’s room. I wished I could renounce the desire to recover my old self, and do likewise.

  Was it the struggle between my old self and my new self that caused my confusion of speech, my stutter? Now whenever teacher asked questions in class I would stare at my hands and beg God, someone, I didn’t know who, not to let her call on me with my dry tongue and thick spit, not to let the words which used to come so easily and naturally and confidently, jerk and stumble their way from between my lips, my thoughts whirling and my eyes furiously blinking. There were giggles and heads began to slyly turn to greet the show whenever my name was called.

  I suffered stomach cramps and diarrhoea, my palms were always clammy.

  18.

  Why didn’t I involve my father in my troubles at school? Because I had arrived at the age that a child convinces himself his father is a fool. Mostly this had to do with the way he looked. He did not dress like other fathers who were farmers, mechanics, carpenters. He did not dress like fathers who were lawyers, businessmen, doctors. The cheap, short-sleeved white shirts and clip-on bow-ties he wore to the barbershop made him resemble the mild, kind hosts of children’s programs. What use was Mr. Dressup to someone in my predicament?

  19.

  I was luckier than Wayne because teacher didn’t lay hands on me. Leszinski she hit. Most often it was a flurry of open-handed slaps, although once, when he ducked down and hid his face in his arms, she pounded on his back with doubled-up fists.

  What always drove her to let fly was Wayne’s sudden barks of laughter when she was speaking. Teacher always assumed his outbursts were calculated displays of disrespect for her authority. It might have been much worse if she had detected the real reason for his amusement. Wayne couldn’t help snorting and braying whenever he heard her say anything into which a reference to sex could be read. Mrs. Dollen had only to say: “Make sure you have a period at the end of your sentences” and Wayne would be helplessly doubled-up with laughter, hopelessly convulsed.

  After a hammering, Wayne would dismiss her with contempt. “Her?” he’d say. “That old cunt can’t hit for nothing.” His old man, he liked to brag, now he could hit. Nevertheless, on the heels of a beating a look crept over Wayne’s face, a suggestion that what was at issue was not the strength of blows but something more inexpressible, more difficult to calculate.

  20.

  An article in Reader’s Digest outlined how to escape from a submerged automobile. I put Mrs. Dollen in her ugly maroon Ford and ran it off the bridge. Standing at the smashed guardrail I watched the car slowly sink while she beat her hands on the windshield, her mouth forming soundless cries for help.

  Too bad she hadn’t read the article I had. Maybe people who read got more practical knowledge which carried them further in the world than you’d think. Especially under forty feet of water.

  21.

  November brought more distress. By then, Wayne had come to assume that our enforced association was the same thing as friendship, that we were best buddies. To my horror, he insisted on walking home with me each day after school. Didn’t he know how ridiculous we looked together? He a full head taller than me, shambling along, hunched up in his shirt against the bite of the wind, his hands clamped in his armpits. And I, encased in parka, fleece-lined boots, visored hat with ear lugs, pelted along at a furiously indignant pace intended to get me to my front door as soon as possible and separate me from my mortifying companion and his mortifying suggestions – that we go to his house and play with his tabletop hockey game, that we watch Yogi Bear and Boo Boo cartoons, or look at the hot rod and skin magazines he had five-finger discounted from the drugstore.

  His mother worked at the dry-cleaner’s until six. “Nobody’s home,” he would confide, seeing this as an irresistible attraction. “Nobody’ll bother us. We can just give’r.”

  He did not understand I did not want to give’r with him.

  22.

  Christmas that year meant an escape. An escape from Mrs. Dollen and an escape from Wayne. It meant two weeks without stomach cramps or sweating hands, two weeks free of being hounded by one or the other.

  You have all seen the movie. The one in which the long-term con is keeping his nose clean while he serves the last
days of his sentence. Hours before he is granted parole there is a prison riot, destroying his hope for release. From that point on you know it is inevitable that when the cell block is stormed by state troopers, he will be killed.

  All December I sniffed the air for riots.

  23.

  On the afternoon of December 23, the last day of school, we had our class Christmas party, a tobogganing outing. Shortly after one o’clock Mrs. Dollen trooped us out of R.J. Hewitt Elementary and marched us across a mile of dazzling snow to the golf course where the ninth hole provided a perfect run. From the elevated tee we could go whizzing down three hundred yards of steeply sloping coulee. Three-quarters of the way down, where maximum speeds would be reached, a ramp of packed snow had been shovelled up by older boys from the junior high school and provided, by the generous contributions of their bladders, with an incredibly slippery glaze of yellow ice. The grade-eight boys had named it Piss-Ice Death Jump and only the most crazed kamikaze tobogganers, legendary nutters like Ernie Kunkel and Morris Fellows, ever took it at full speed, putting eight feet of air between them and the earth when they shot off it with blood-curdling screams of “Banzai!” Teacher needed only one glance at old Piss-Ice to declare it out of bounds and expropriate it as an elevated traffic island from which she could supervise our fun. No sooner had she unsteadily clambered up on it than she began to wave her arms, blare warnings and threats.

  “What did I say, Donald? What? Down coming keeps to the right side of the hill. People pulling toboggans up the hill stay to the left. I don’t want to speak to you again. Is that clear?” From where I stood on the tee box, at a distance of two hundred yards, her jerky gestures, her thin screechy voice made her seem like a cranky puppet. “No walking up the hill abreast! How many times do I have to tell you? Get in single file before one of you gets hit and killed! That’s my last warning. If you people don’t decide to start listening, I’ll pack us up right this minute and we can go back to school and get started on next term’s work right this minute. Am I making myself clear? Am I?”

  Everybody but me went flying down the hill with abandon, red-faced and whooping. The sun burned with the intensity of a camera flash. Scars on the white bark of the naked poplars in the coulee were black as ink. The glare of the snow stunned aching eyes and made the landscape bobble. Skidding, tumbling bodies chipped sparks of snow from the slope, and runaway sleighs ran smooth and empty to the bottom of the hill.

  I tried to negotiate this bedlam as inconspicuously as possible. By now creeping and slinking had become second nature to me. I eased down the slope with all due care, stuttering the toes of my boots in the snow to brake my descent. I cautiously and conscientiously ascended the left side of the hill, as per teacher’s instructions.

  24.

  Wayne didn’t own a toboggan. All he had to scoot down the hill on was a piece of cardboard, but teacher wouldn’t let him use it.

  “What if you were to hit a rock riding on that?” I heard her demand, as I plodded past Piss-Ice. “You’d be killed and who’d get blamed? Me. Not on your life, Mr. Leszinski.”

  I avoided Wayne like the plague, knowing he would expect to be invited to ride with me. With only a couple of hours more to get through, I had no intention of doing anything to draw the awful wrath of Dollen, and that included carrying freight with a talent for attracting her lightning.

  25.

  One of the saddest sights is the sight of someone lingering hopefully. Leszinski stood at the top of the hill, shivering in the thin nylon jacket, trying to catch my eye, but I kept my eyes elsewhere.

  Neglected, Wayne began to make a nuisance of himself, turning vaguely menacing as he strutted aggressively up and down the cowed line of “winkles” waiting their turn for a run down the hill. “Anybody looking for the ride of their life? Let Waynie steer. Waynie’ll give you little chicken poops a thrill. Who wants a thrill? How about it?” He halted in front of me. “Let’s us do it,” he said quietly. “You ain’t scared.”

  But I was.

  There was something genuinely humble and patient about the way he waited for his answer.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why?” Wayne wanted to know. “You got a nice big one. You could easy ride two. Why?”

  I turned away from him and squinted at the low winter sun scraping through a tangle of leafless poplar branches. Because you’re bad luck, I wanted to say. Because just sitting at the back of the room with you has made me stupid. But I only shrugged.

  “Why?” persisted Wayne. “You got a real nice one, a tin one. We could go real fast on a tin one.”

  “Aluminum,” I said.

  “Them tin ones fly,” he continued doggedly. “You and me could really fly.”

  “Take it,” I said. “You want to really fly – just take it.”

  “Why, Myles? Why don’t you want to ride with me?”

  I threw the tow rope at his feet. “You want to fly, go ahead. Take it. Just leave me alone.”

  “I got one year to my driver licence,” said Wayne, sliding his eyes away from me and down the hill where Mrs. Dollen stood with her back turned to us, haranguing a miscreant from the vantage of Piss-Ice Death. “One year and I could drive you anywhere you want to go, Myles.”

  He waited.

  “All right,” he said at last, stooping down and savagely snatching the toboggan to his chest. “Fuck you, Myles.” For several yards he ran furiously down the slope, lurching blindly from side to side, the toboggan held up in front of him like a glittering shield. Then he flung himself upon it and shot off down the slope.

  26.

  We were both turned in the same direction, Mrs. Dollen and I, both facing the rule-breaker who stood yards beyond Piss-Ice Death where the slope of the coulee began to level. There was no time for a warning. At the last possible moment Wayne slung his weight violently to one side and the toboggan veered sharply left. It ran up the ramp, struck Mrs. Dollen with terrible force in the back of her ankles, popped her up into the air, shot underneath her, and flashed over the lip, disappearing before she came twisting awkwardly down in a heap, a game bird dropped on the wing.

  27.

  Pressing in around the body, staring at her legs poked out of rucked-up coat skirts at stomach-turning angles, we wanted the noises she was making to stop. We didn’t like it that an adult whimpered, panted, groaned open-mouthed, face down in the snow. We gave her pinched-face encouragement to try and be herself.

  “Teacher, are you okay?”

  “Teacher, are you hurt?” Eileen Kerning had found Mrs. Dollen’s glasses lying several feet from their owner in the snow. She dangled them above the prostrate figure and said, “Here’s your glasses, teacher. They aren’t broken.”

  “My back,” said Mrs. Dollen in a scary, smothered voice. “My back, my back.”

  We looked uncertainly at one another. “My back, my back, my back,” teacher shrilled at us.

  Something had to be done. Suddenly the sky and snow grew dull, as if one were the pewter image of the other. Perhaps it was this draining away of the light which quickened us, bringing home the lateness of the hour. A toboggan was pulled up alongside her and Harvey Whiteside, who was a patrol leader in Boy Scouts and had a First Aid badge, issued directions for rolling her onto it. Mrs. Dollen did not submit to this manoeuvre calmly. At the critical moment she shrieked once again, “My back, my back, my back!” Her face was a match for the tired grey of sky and snow.

  28.

  There was something thoughtful, almost meditative in the quiet, subdued fashion with which we drew our burden back to school. Without discussion we had all decided that dumb silence ought to surround this incident. Everybody that is except Wayne. Clearly pleased with himself, he fell into step beside me and began to sing “The old grey mare, she ain’t what she used to be,” giving knowing winks and grins to anybody who looked his way. Nobody appreciated this. People began to drift further and further away from us, until we were quite alone.

  “If I were
you,” I said to him, shaking with anger, “if I were you, I wouldn’t act so smart.”

  He laughed.

  “It was my toboggan,” I reminded him. “You used my toboggan. You had no business acting smart with my toboggan.

  29.

  We returned from Christmas vacation to a surprise. Instead of Mrs. Dollen we found a substitute teacher, Miss Clark, an elderly lady familiar to some of us as the ineffectual conductor of the United Church Junior Choir. In a faint, tremulous voice she reported on teacher’s medical condition to the class. At first, the doctors had thought that Mrs. Dollen had ruptured a disc and would require an operation, but now this was ruled out. What she had done was strain a group of large muscles in her back. After another week of bed-rest it was believed she would be able to resume her duties in the classroom.

  Miss Clark exhorted us to try and be on our very best behaviour when teacher came back to us because, as we could all imagine, Mrs. Dollen hadn’t spent a very happy Christmas laid up in hospital. It was up to us to try and make it up to her by being especially kind and good and considerate for the rest of the year, so that every single day would feel like Christmas for our dear teacher.

  Last of all, Miss Clark said that although she knew many boys and girls would have sent Mrs. Dollen Christmas and Get Well cards (puzzled glances were exchanged at this bizarre notion) it might be encouraging to teacher if we all took a little time now to write her a short note telling her how much we missed her. Miss Clark held up a packet of envelopes and happily announced: “I have an envelope for each member of the class so that our communications with Mrs. Dollen remain private and personal. I shall pass these out now.”