by Alice Pung
But even more incredible than Trisha’s talent was the applause: I was the only one clapping like a grinning monkey-and-cymbal toy. Embarrassed, realising that everyone else was offering only a polite palm patting, I toned it down.
When assembly ended, none of the girls mentioned Trisha’s playing as we moved off to our first class. It was only after I’d been to a couple of assemblies that I realised every musical offering would be just as intense as the first, and every reaction would be just as tepid.
*
Ms Vanderwerp taught my first class of the week, History. Wearing a long aquamarine dress that ended in wavy lines halfway down her calves, she looked like a Pac-Man ghost. She had enormous convex glasses, so thick that her eyes seemed to swim around in each lens.
Ms Vanderwerp explained that we would be studying twentieth-century history, from the causes of World War One to the Vietnam War. She had a trembly voice, the sort an old woman who served Iced VoVos might have, but she wasn’t even that old. When she wrote on the whiteboard, her hand was shaky too. On her desk sat a cylinder of wipes. Sometimes she would emit a nervous laugh, but most of the time her mouth drooped as if she’d had a stroke.
I was seated next to a girl named Amber Leslie. Ms Vanderwerp had arranged us in alphabetical last-name order around the room. “Easier for me to remember you in the first few weeks,” she told us.
When she called out my name, she got my first name, middle name and surname mixed up. She apologised when her watery-bowl eyes found me in the room.
“Just call me Lucy,” I said.
She smiled. “Thank you, Lucy,” she said, as if I had just invented some kind of life-changing super-mop to free her from many hours of housekeeping.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Amber Leslie smile. I turned towards her, and the first thing I noticed was that she had very unusual lips. Her top lip was puffier than her bottom lip and jutted forward a little – not because buckteeth were giving it a nudge, for Amber had small, perfect white teeth, but almost as if her chin was shyly pushing her bottom lip behind her top one She had the endearing jaw of a baby, springbok-brown eyes and a fringe that was trimmed so that two-thirds of her forehead lay bare.
I’m not doing a very good job of description, Linh, because those features and haircut sound as if they belong to a drooling asylum inmate, but on Amber Leslie they were mesmerising. Because each one of her features was individually so striking, it took me a moment to realise that her face as a whole was stammeringly beautiful, a rare combination of beauty, innocence and experience that would surely provoke asthmatic lust in boys and mute envy in girls. She also smelled like the Body Shop’s Fuzzy Peach Perfume Oil.
Distracted by Amber, I didn’t notice that Ms Vanderwerp was handing out term outlines, until one of the girls piped up: “Ms V, hey, Ms V, this term outline is for the Year Eights.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, taking a closer look, “I’m afraid it is. Oh dear. My apologies, girls.” At least she didn’t call us young ladies. “I must have left the others by the photocopier. Won’t be long!”
After she left the room, some of the students looked at each other. It was a look that made me realise Ms Vanderwerp was prone to such mistakes. At Christ Our Saviour, whenever teachers left the class, girls would start calling out to each other across the room: “Hey, Melissa, lift up your fringe and give us a look! Aww, come on, they’re not that bad. They’ll grow back!” Or: “Quick, Tully, give us the answer!” But quietness at Laurinda didn’t necessarily mean good behaviour, I saw, or even indifference. Many things were going on in that quiet – a raised eyebrow, a rolling eyeball, a deliberate sniff. The room was soon reeking with the odourless stench of collective contempt.
When Ms Vanderwerp returned, she passed around the correct handouts. She had been gone for less than three minutes, but I could feel something had shifted. “Thank you,” I said automatically when she came around to my desk, but Amber Leslie didn’t.
There was another girl I noticed on that first day, Linh, and that was because she was so rude. “Typical,” she muttered when Ms Vanderwerp had called the roll and made us all move seats. “Typical,” she groaned when Ms Vanderwerp told us that we would be studying twentieth-century history. When I heard her sigh her third “typical” as Ms Vanderwerp left the room, I realised that here was a sagacious reincarnate who could predict the turn of events with pinpoint accuracy, which is probably why life bored her so much.
Her name was Chelsea White. Unlike Amber’s Winona Ryder appeal, she was more the Nicole Kidman kind of pretty, the kind that only other girls made a fuss about. She had curly doll hair and pink cheeks, as if someone had slapped her twice. She looked like one of those imitation Franklin Mint porcelain dolls, with the features painted a couple of millimetres above the grooves – the ones that would turn on you when you went to sleep at night.
When Ms Vanderwerp handed her the correct document and requested the Year Eight outline back, Chelsea showed Ms Vanderwerp that she had torn it into four pieces.
How had she managed that, I wondered, when I hadn’t heard the sound of paper ripping?
“Chelsea White!” scolded Ms Vanderwerp. “Now, tell me, why on earth did you do that?”
“You gave us the wrong class outline, Ms V,” Chelsea replied innocently. “I didn’t think you needed this anymore.”
“Well, I did need it!” protested Ms Vanderwerp. Next to me, Amber Leslie was calmly peeling her cuticles. Ms Vanderwerp had been the careless one, and Chelsea was making her pay.
That was when I learned a very important early lesson: here at Laurinda, mistakes meant annihilation.
At recess, I was called to Mrs Grey’s office. I had not spoken to her since our “interview” almost a month before. Her office was as bare as when I had first seen it, and when I sat down, I had the curious feeling that I should have asked her for permission.
“So, Miss Lam. How are you finding your first day?”
“Fine,” I replied.
“You know, you are our inaugural Equal Access student,” she said. “That means you are the first one we have ever had.”
“Yes, Mrs Grey,” I answered.
“You are aware that Laurinda is making a big investment in you? In committing to fund your education for the next three years, we are gambling on an unknown quantity.”
“Yes, Mrs Grey.” And then, “Thank you, Mrs Grey.”
“What does your father do?” she asked me point-blank.
I was appalled by the directness of her question – and by how much adults thought they could get away with when they were dealing with minors and there was no one else in the room.
“Dad works.”
“Where?”
“At Victory.”
“What’s that?”
“A carpet factory.”
“What about your mother? Home duties?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to tell her about the sewing.
“Do you speak English at home?”
“No,” I answered.
She gave me that smile again. “Now, Miss Lam, tell me what books you studied last year.”
“So Much to Tell You.”
She looked at me blankly.
“By John Marsden.”
Her brow furrowed. She’d clearly not heard of it and was not interested. “What else?”
“Romeo and Juliet.”
“What else?”
“Stand by Me. But that wasn’t a book.” I wasn’t sure why I added this. “It was a film.”
“Ah, yes, based on a Stephen King novel,” remarked Mrs Grey, in the same way a person might say, Ah, yes, that ingrown toenail, part of my foot. “You are aware that at Laurinda we don’t study movies?”
“Yes.”
“And we don’t study any books considered young adult literature. For instance, your John Marsden.”
So she had heard of him.
“Romeo and Juliet is a play we study in our first year of high school. We consider it a good in
troduction to Shakespeare at the elementary level.” She paused. “Now, I don’t blame you for your school’s choice of reading, but here at Laurinda we are a serious academic college, as evidenced by our English curriculum. We study the classics – Dickens, Austen, the poetry of Donne, Keats – as well as contemporary classics – Brecht, Graham Greene, Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald, Miles Franklin, Patrick White.”
I nodded mutely. Aside from Dickens and Austen, I had no idea who these writers were.
“We think it is wise for you to participate in a bridging course.”
I wanted to protest, did you not read the reference that Mr Shipp gave me? Lucy Lam is one of our strongest English students. Her dramatic monologue from the perspective of Marina from So Much to Tell You was one of the most creative pieces of extended fiction in the class.
“Now, you realise that we are not picking on you,” she explained, in the way a doctor tells you that an anaesthetic is not going to hurt before the amputation. “In fact, Lucy, it was your English essay that gained you this scholarship in the first instance. It was outstanding. Many of the students who sat the exam, who appeared to have crammed for mathematics, neglected their writing. Many pieces were, I’m afraid to say, very poor. There was even an essay where the candidate thought he was some kind of hoodlum from the Bronx whose brother was in prison. Although we commend great imaginative feats, that one was the unfortunate result of a mind subjected to too much American television.” I didn’t say anything, while she cast her eyes heavenward in silent lamentation. “Naturally, that student did not make it into Auburn Academy.”
“Weren’t there some other good essays, though?” I asked, and immediately realised my mistake – that I was implying most of the essays were crap and mine was outstanding. Back at our old school, Linh, this would have been taken as a simple question, a display of polite humility. Here it was a judgement, one I was not entitled to make.
“Fishing for compliments, are we, Miss Lam?” Mrs Grey asked, one eyebrow raised. Once more I realised that at Laurinda, you had to think very, very carefully every time you considered opening your mouth. “Of course there were. In fact, there was one other outstanding piece, the runner-up essay, about the founder of Amnesty International.”
“How come you didn’t pick her?” I asked. It was yet another mistake, turning me transparent like the curtain-less window of our house, where outsiders could peer in on a place where there was nothing worth stealing. How could I have known it was a her? “Or him,” I added.
“We found her piece – yes, it was a she, and she was close competition for you, you may be interested to know – we found her piece too stilted. Her grammar was perfect, her writing was fluent and sophisticated, but there was just something off-kilter about it. Almost as if she’d memorised a speech.”
Here, you could not be mediocre, but you had to be well-balanced. Not too real, yet not too fake. Tully tried to be someone she was not, Ivy was exactly who she was, and both were unacceptable at this school. That was probably what made me the ideal scholarship recipient. I was smart enough, but had no particular sense of ownership over my thoughts. It was you who gave me a sense of belonging, Linh, with your magnetic ways and madcap schemes. Without you, I felt like a cipher.
“This is what will happen,” Mrs Grey continued. “You will take some remedial lessons to get you up to scratch, and then you will be transferred back to ordinary English.”
If you’d been with me, you would have thrown a fit. How dare the school think I was not ready for Green and Fitzsimmons and whoever else when they’d given me a scholarship based on my essay writing? You would have prodded me to defend myself. But you weren’t there, and I didn’t want to make ripples.
“You should feel very lucky,” instructed Mrs Grey. “I have arranged for you to have a one-on-one tutor twice a week. Mrs Leslie is a Laurindan herself, and also the President of the Laurinda Book Club. She knows the English syllabus inside out.”
The last time I had one-on-one lessons with anyone was in Grade One with the school speech pathologist because I pronounced all my r’s as w’s. That was to fix a flaw that, although “weally endeawing” as a little kid, would have otherwise screwed me up big-time as a teenager. I wondered whether there was something about me that only Mrs Grey could see, something that, without intervention, would doom me to failure.
Gina was another girl who stood out from that first day’s blur of faces, because she had dyed hair the hue of a Redskin lolly wrapper, cut in a bob that ended beneath her chin. You could easily locate her in any classroom – she was like a round sale sticker on a plain carton of eggs. We weren’t allowed to have any earrings except small studs, but Gina had tiny diamonds which she hoped no teacher would notice. Also, while the rest of us had blank nails, hers were white-tipped and glossy with clear paint.
Gina had the hots for Mr Sinclair, badly. He was a new teacher, I learned, and when we first entered the room we could only see the back of his suit because he was at the blackboard. It seemed that all male staff were required to wear suits to work; the women had to be dressed in the female equivalent, which was usually an elegantly sculpted work dress, a cashmere twinset, or slacks and a blouse.
When Mr Sinclair finished, he stepped back, and we saw what he had written: POLITICS: From the Greek – “poly” meaning many, and “ticks” meaning blood-sucking creatures. All the girls except Gina made a kind of “huh” noise, as if they were too clever for such a bad pun.
When Mr Sinclair turned around, the girls expected to see some sort of “hangin’ wid ma homies in da hood” teacher. You know the type, Linh, forty years old, dad-like but still thinking he’s funny as hell. Instead, they saw how young Mr Sinclair was, and how attractive. Take a bunch of girls and separate them from the boys from kindergarten on, and that is the kind of thing they will notice.
Gina was noticing it more than anyone. I swear, Linh, you could see the impure thoughts forming on her features. Secretly, I liked this about her, that she didn’t seem to have a filter between her thoughts and her face.
We expected Mr Sinclair to point to the board and read out what he had written, after which all the girls would laugh, just because he was so cute and they wanted to make a good impression. But he didn’t. Instead he introduced himself and started the lesson. Politics, Mr Sinclair told us, was about governments. “But if you want to break it down further, it is essentially the study of people and power.”
Glancing around the room, I could already see how this was playing out in our class. The desks were arranged in a U-shape around Mr Sinclair’s front table. “Socratic learning”, he called it, but Chelsea pointed out that Socrates had never included any women in his teachings. She wasn’t a bimbo after all, I saw, but was just prone to say snide things every seven minutes or so, as if she had bitch Tourette’s. She, Amber and a girl named Brodie Newberry were seated at the bottom end of the U, as far away from the teacher as possible, but also with the best view of the whole show.
Brodie was a tall, dark-haired girl who didn’t say much, but it was an unsettling silence. She had dark eyes that were neither green nor grey; they seemed to absorb rather than reflect your image if you looked into them. I had the feeling that there were things beneath the surface waiting to float up when they stopped swimming. I realised then that I had seen Brodie before: she was the prefect who had marched into the auditorium bearing the school banner.
At the other end of the U, directly opposite me, was Gina. It turned out, Linh, that she would not budge from that position all term. She told us she was so close she could smell Mr Sinclair’s aftershave, and it smelled like Calvin Klein One for Men.
A pattern was set that first day: Chelsea or Brodie would offer their views, or shoot questions at Mr Sinclair, and sometimes Amber would back up her friends. Because the three girls were hogging Mr Sinclair’s attention so regally, often for twenty minutes at a stretch, the rest of us felt like we were watching a trial on a television set we could not switch off. At t
imes it seemed the trio were judges and Mr Sinclair was a defence barrister, and we the bored jury listening to some white-collar crime we did not understand.
“Why do people think the Whitlam dismissal was such a bad thing if the government was in such a shambles that no bills were being passed?” demanded Chelsea, as if her life depended on it.
Mr Sinclair was the ever-patient explainer, but his Socratic method wasn’t working. I wasn’t understanding very much at all. How did these girls know so much about the world, enough to be able to form opinions about it? I still didn’t know who Whitlam was, and these conversations in class didn’t offer me any firm foothold.
Sometimes I detected an answer that was not quite right, and I waited patiently for an opening, a small gap of silence in which I could say something or ask a question. But the moment I opened my mouth to say, “Amber, I think your definition of a constitutional monarchy . . .” the gap would close again. Already they were talking about a referendum for a republic, and my half-sentence would be left dangling. Often I felt ridiculous, like a choir member still singing the chorus when everyone else had moved on to the next verse.
Pretty quickly I learned the nicknames of all the teachers. Mrs Grey was known as the Growler, probably because if you were stuck in her office with the door closed for longer than fifteen minutes, you usually came out in tears. Ms Vanderwerp was Ms V and Mr Sinclair was simply H.O., standing for “Hot One”, even after Gina found out that he was married and had an infant son.
I saw his wife picking him up one day after school in a car that had a baby-seat in the back; as he approached, she wound down her window and stuck out her tongue at him. It is hard to explain why, but I found that charming, Linh. Probably it had something to do with how ordinary she was. Even from a distance I could tell that she was not as attractive as he was, though I would never agree with Gina, who muttered, “Why is he with that fugly cow?”
