Alone in the Classroom (4 page)

This was the future, these advanced thickets for later grades, these complicated burning bushes so tangled and uncongenial. The writers must have enjoyed their cleverness as they laid on alliteration and fancy vocabulary, but peace of mind was the price you paid - pleasure. Loss of pleasure. Loss of a clear view. Why didn’t they realize that a sentence, like a person, can take only so much? But this was school. Lessons carried you from simple to complex, from the everyday to the abstract, as if this were progress.

Connie had her own ideas about that. For years her father had promised her mother that one day they would leave their eastern Ontario farm and move to Toronto, where she would be able to attend concerts and be close to her sister, who also played piano and had a fine voice. Instead, one winter’s night there came a knock on the door and a man wrapped in furs stepped into their lives, her mother’s youngest brother (my great-uncle Jimmy, who died a long, slow death from Parkinson’s disease), full of stories about the West so enchanting that in the spring her father went with him out to Saskatchewan. At the age of sixty, her susceptible dad fell in love with the prairie and persuaded her mother, twenty years younger, to leave the Ottawa Valley and take up a wide expanse of grassy land near Weyburn. Her mother lasted ten months. Inflammation of the bowel. Dead at forty-one. As she lay dying, she had Connie spread bolts of corduroy and denim on the floor beside her bed, and from her pillow she instructed her on how to cut out trousers for her father and two young brothers.

What gnawed at Connie most was her role in her mother’s fate, the chronic asthma and bronchitis her father had used as bait. “Connie will be cured in no time. The air out there is clear as a bell.” That’s what happened, too. All her breathing troubles vanished as soon as they got to the prairies. So nothing was simple. But did that mean everything had to be wilfully complicated? She flipped back to:

Her grades were four, five, and six. Five rows of seven desks. And what a difference there was between sitting behind a small, hard desk and being at the front, chalk at the ready, on view. Various freckled faces and the big boys in the back. To her mild astonishment, she liked seeing each member of her small audience - Molly of the chapped and bitten lips, olive-skinned Tula, black-eyed Stefan, Michael who didn’t take his eyes off her face.

She wanted to dress well for them, since they had to look at her all day, and so she alternated her three necklaces, the silver locket from her mother, the entwined gold chain from her great-aunt Charlotte in Aberdeen, and the long strand of coral beads from her mother’s sister in Ontario. These last had a gold clasp on which initials were engraved in an old and flourishing script.
AKD
. Her mother’s mother. Agnes Kerr Douglas.

A generous gift, the coral beads, as Aunt Evelyn had so little. She, too, had been a schoolteacher before marrying a struggling would-be farmer who had given her an engagement ring with the smallest diamond in the world. The story was a legend in our family. How one summer, after picking strawberries all afternoon, Evelyn was doing the supper dishes and noticed with a sick jolt the tiny void
in her ring: the diamond had fallen into the strawberry field. They went back outside, she and her husband, and she tried to remember exactly where she had picked, and they patted the ground under the same leaves and between the same rows, searching until it was dark, but they could not find the diamond. Nothing to be done. Evelyn canned the fruit and stored the jars on shelves; she wore her ring without the diamond. In the winter they began to eat their way through the preserves. One day towards Christmas, her husband was eating the usual dish of berries for dessert when he bit down on something hard. A filling come loose, for Pete’s sake; what next? He fished it out of his mouth. It was the diamond.

Restoration is even more miraculous than discovery. The Bible was right about that. A prodigal diamond outweighs a fat ruby.

Connie first heard the story from her mother, then coaxed it out of her aunt when Evelyn came by train to see her ailing sister and arrived in time for the funeral. The day after the funeral, Evelyn gave the coral beads to fifteen-year-old Connie, who would give them to me years later on the day I was married.

Evelyn stayed for a month, helping to finish the clothes for the men, as she called the widower and his pair of small sons. They sewed and talked, plump aunt and skinny niece, and Evelyn confessed that the loneliest two years of her life were the first two years of marriage. The farm was isolated, the work was hard, and her husband refused to have a child until they were on their feet.

Connie said, “What happened after two years?”

“I began a correspondence course. And that gave me something else to think about.”

What a sad, soft, passive woman her aunt was. What a sweet and boneless woman.

“How did the two of you meet, anyway?”

In a boarding house in Toronto, when she was going to normal school to become a teacher and he was working as a clerk at Eaton’s - this was before a bachelor uncle did him the dubious favour of leaving him the small farm southwest of Toronto. Their rooms were side by side, separated by the bathroom they shared, and he heard her throwing up every morning before another day of practice teaching. “He asked me to marry him because he was lonely.”

“Not sympathetic?” Connie said. She was holding out for a little romance.

“No.” Her aunt did not back away from the implications that rippled over her marriage. “Just lonely.”

Late Friday afternoon. A flurry of movement behind her as she wrote on the blackboard. She wheeled around.

Unaccountably, Michael had darted away from his desk. In the scramble, Parley reached the boy before the boy reached his goal. He grabbed him and cuffed him back into his seat, then took the long wooden pointer from the sill below the blackboard and stood poised.

A girl let out a gasp as the snake slid past her feet on the varnished wooden floor, and Parley stepped forward and brought the pointer down.

His dark, grisly excitement, high cheekbones, contorted mouth,
arousal -
Connie had seen it before, at an Orange Day parade in Toronto when the drum and fife band came around the corner in full regalia to find their way blocked by a car: the drum major upped with his orb and smashed it through the windshield.

Parley bared his cold teeth. “Dispose of your viper,” he told Michael. “Then find me in my office.”

Afterwards, when school was over, Connie erased the blackboard from top to bottom. Bits and nubs of chalk lay beside the pointer on the grooved wooden sill, fitted grooves for laying the varying lengths down. The dusky light on the blackboard, the felt eraser in her hand. How drying it was, though Parley’s fingers never looked dry, his perfect hands, if you liked that kind of hand, square and shapely with soft black hair on the backs and fingers, hands that had the life of the body in them - he seemed of one violent piece - and they weren’t the hands of a man who had ever worked outside, despite his claims, the nails too long and carefully trimmed.

She stood at the board, feeling revolted, and in that moment he came through the door.

To be caught like that is to be caught forever, tied to the person in a new and endless way, for you’ve worn your hatred on your face. After that, he began his extra, inexplicable attentions to her.

We let these people into our lives. They enter, and because we let them stay to work on our minds and hearts and imaginations, it’s as if we have invited them in.

“It was a garter snake,” she said to Michael the following Monday, shortly after four o’clock. She had asked him to stay behind.

He nodded. He had found it curled up on a rock, soaking up the last dregs of autumn sun. Harmless.

She wrote on the blackboard:
He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake
. Common sense told her to have movement towards something he cared about.

Michael copied the words slowly and accurately. She erased them from the board, had him place a ruler over what he had written, then write the words from memory.
He wakt past the fol and pickt up the ded grtre snake
.

She already knew that some children can’t help making things hard. They expect to be stumped, expect to be confounded. They see assignments, tests, examinations
not as neutral entities with obvious and expected answers, but as hedges in which their untidy brains get lost, and inwardly they seize up and panic. “Don’t make it hard for yourself,” she would tell her youngest brother (my father, for whom she had sewed trousers). “All the teacher wants to see is that you understand what you’ve been taught.” But something additional and mysterious was going on with Michael. He couldn’t remember the same word from one line to the next. He couldn’t even recognize it.

There were things he would never forget. Her strong hand was one. How she leaned all her weight on the knuckles, a red pencil sticking out from between her chalky fingers. And the effect on him of her long, warm body right there beside him. How incredibly alive that was.

She asked him to describe how a snake sheds its skin. He felt his hot forehead get hotter. On the edge of his vision was the stack of black workbooks on her desk. Close to the bottom was his, full of red circles around his misspelled words. And everybody knew. He spelled everything wrong.

“What happens to the skin?” Her voice was patient, her perfume nice-smelling, warm, close.

“It splits.”

“All the way down?”

“Around the corners of its mouth.”

“Its
mouth?”

He had her interest and he leaned forward. “The eyes get milky and hazy and the skin peels at the corners of its mouth. I see them around woodpiles. They curve
themselves left and right and left and right, looking for something to hook onto, a stone or a forked stick. Then it tugs and leaves its skin behind,” and he paused, choosing his words for accuracy and effect, “like a woman’s stocking.”

He knew things, not things that were of any value at school. But he knew a lot, enough to impress someone if he wanted to impress her.

He watches his pretty mother, she thought. And what a feeling it must be to shed your skin and be nude in the open air.

“What does the new skin look like?”

“Nude,” he said, and her face yielded a smile. “Fresh,” he said. “Flexible.”

“Not wet?”

“Not wet. Haven’t you seen them?”

“I’ve seen them. I’ve seen old snakeskins too. I’m getting you to give me the words.”

She wrote them on the board and he copied them. They were going to lick this, she said, they were going to have him reading and writing well by Christmas.

Her face was like a sudden silver dollar in a dark corner. Wanting to give her more, everything she wanted, he said, “The snake hooks on and pulls itself through its mouth and then the skin drops in a ring on the floor.”

“On the ground.”

“I’ll bring you one if you like.” And now his voice was the confident, outdoorsy voice she knew at recess.

“All right.” She smiled and gave him one of her winks. She could wink either eye with equal ease, a rare and enviable talent.

He said, “You’ll be able to see the pattern the scales make on the skin.”

And again she wrote his words on the blackboard, impressed by his turn of phrase, which brought to mind a passage in one of the
Royal Readers
about lowly earthworms - Darwin’s last book was about his future companions of the grave. She located the passage for Michael (flipping past another favourite part, the destruction of Pompeii with its haunting picture of the casts of bodies discovered in the ruins - a girl of fifteen lying on her side, legs drawn up convulsively, her hand clenched around the torn fabric of her dress, embroidered sandals on her feet, dressed exactly as she was on the twenty-fourth of August,
A.D
. 79, when the sky went dark and the sea rolled back, and ash poured down and buried her for seventeen hundred years). The great naturalist, she explained to Michael, had kept his worms in earth-filled pots in his study with the intention of seeing how much mental power they displayed. He concluded that although worms are deaf, have no sense of smell, and can just distinguish between light and darkness, their sense of touch is a form of intelligence in itself, for they line their burrows with their castings, or excrement, and with leaves, seizing the stalks either by their pointed ends or by their broader ends, depending on which will do the best job of plugging the mouths of their burrows.

” ‘It is a marvellous reflection,’ ” she read aloud, ” ‘that the whole of the superficial mould over any wide, turf-covered expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms.’ “