In a Glass House (7 page)

It was not until the first frost, into October, that the tomato season ended and I began school. Tsia Teresa set out clothes for me, packed sandwiches in my father’s lunchbox, sent me out to the end of the drive to wait for the bus. The trees had begun to lose their leaves by then, all around the landscape preparing for its alien winter; and always there were the few moments then as I waited in the October cold when I seemed to belong to no one, the life going on in the house, my aunt in her morning clothes, the sleeping baby, seeming tiny and strange as through the wrong end of a telescope, and I myself, alone there at the roadside, like an aberration in a picture, the thing when all else was accounted for that didn’t fit. There was a smell in the air once, a crispness like the sun-cleared chill of mountains, that stirred something so deep and well-known in me, so forgotten, that I felt my body would burst with the pressure of remembering; and for an instant then the past seemed a kind of permanence I might wake into suddenly as into another country, all the present merely a shadow against it, this country road, this farm, this house.

St. Michael’s Separate School, and the church attached to it, sat on Highway 3 at the eastern edge of town, just across from the old folks’ home. The school itself was a plain, two-storey rectangular building with walls of white stucco, long rows of metal-framed windows looking into the classrooms, like the ones that lined the walls of the Sun Parlour Canning Factory, and a glassed-in passageway at one side connecting it to the side steps of the church. The church was in white stucco as well, with a squat, arch-windowed bell tower, a slate roof, and a façade whose only ornament was a small circle of stained glass near the peak of its gable. In the patch of lawn in front of the rectory, on a three-stepped pedestal, stood a stone statue of the archangel Michael, his body clad in the short, girded tunic of a Roman soldier and his hands holding a rusting metal cross-staff whose tip was plunged into a strange winged serpent at his feet.

From the back of our farm the stark white walls of the church and school were partly visible across the mile or so of flat field that separated us from Highway 3. But the bus that carried me
there and then home again took over an hour in each direction, winding me each way through nearly the whole of its erratic journey, up countless concessions and sideroads in a jagged circle that stretched as far as Goldsmith to the north and Port Thomas to the east. In winter the sun would just be rising when the bus pulled up in the morning and setting when it dropped me off in the afternoon; and on overcast days it seemed that the world the bus passed through was one where the sun never rose at all, where grey-limbed trees were forever shifting in the wind like ghosts, and the fields were always puddled over or covered with dirty patches of snow. Through this landscape the bus moved like a cabin ship, cut off and separate, sealed tight; but it was pleasant then, at the beginning or end of the bus’s run, when the bus was nearly empty, to be sitting safely inside, the heater sending a warm shaft of air under the seats while outside the rain poured or the ground was rimed with frost.

After I got on in the morning the bus continued up to the 12 & 13 Sideroad and then doubled back along the 4th Concession to the highway again, following it for a stretch and stopping at some of the new yellow brick houses there. But finally it swung back into the concessions and lost itself in their maze-like grid, and it would seem then as if we had suddenly entered a new country, with its own different unknown customs and average citizens. The land here stretched flat and clean, the horizon broken only by the occasional dark island of pines or maples sitting strangely in the middle of a field, by the red or silver curves of silos, by the tall, steep gables of wooden farmhouses that stood, far from their neighbours, like lonely watchmen, their narrow windows gazing out over the endless fields that surrounded them. Toward Port Thomas the landscape changed again – we came out onto another highway and then entered at
once into the town, smaller and meaner than Mersea, with only a few false-fronted stores at the four corners and then the houses growing gradually more weather-beaten and ramshackle until we came finally to the port, where dozens of fishing boats would be moored against the dock, some small and white and new, others with their paint peeling and strange names etched in red or black on their hulls,
Silver Dollar
,
Mayflower
,
The Betty Blue
. From Port Thomas we would follow the lake down into the black farmland of Point Chippewa, where the houses were more ramshackle still, their windows covered sometimes only with gritty plastic, and old farm machinery rusting outside barns and storage sheds like the remains of rotting animals.

Our driver was a man named Schultz, a big grey-eyed German with the rough swollen hands of a peasant and the large round face of a child. In the curved mirror that gave him a view to the back of the bus we could watch his movements as he drove, the way his face screwed into a grimace each time he ground up to a higher gear, the way his tongue strained against the side of his mouth when he turned a corner or rounded a curve. The older boys did imitations of him: sometimes, on cue, six or seven of them would begin squeezing imaginary clutches and shifting imaginary gears in tandem, their voices imitating the whine of the engine. At the noise, Schultz would raise his eyes to his mirror, his face darkening.

“Hey-you-boys,” he’d say, in his thick, slow monotone, and one of the grade-eight boys would call out, “Sorry about that, Schultz.”

Otherwise Schultz usually didn’t take much notice of what went on on the bus; though sometimes, if a girl shrieked or if someone threw something out a window, he’d pull up to the side of the road suddenly and jam his emergency brake up
hard, crossing his arms and leaning them into his steering wheel with an air of finality and intention. For a moment the bus would go silent; and then the boys at the back would begin their entreaties.

“Aw, we didn’t mean anything by it, Schultz.”

“Yeah, Schultzy, give us a break, we promise we’ll knock it off.”

And finally Schultz would purse his lips and shake his head slowly, and we’d set off again.

When I first began riding the bus I made the mistake once of sitting in the back seat, not knowing then that only the older boys sat there. A tall, lean, black-haired boy who got on at one of the brick houses along the highway sat beside me, flashing me an odd, exaggerated grin and whipping his head back with a practised swivel to bring a long lock of hair up out of his eyes. When he’d settled into the seat he made some comment to me that I couldn’t follow, that I hoped had simply been some sort of greeting. But when I didn’t respond he spoke again, his face twisted now, mocking or angry. Then suddenly he seemed to understand.

“Deutschman?”
he said.
“Auf Wiedersehen? Nederlander? Italiano?”

“Italiano,”
I said, clutching at the familiar word.

“Ah, Italiano!”
He thumped a hand on his chest.
“Me speak Italiano mucho mucho
.
Me paesano.”

When other boys got on the bus and came to the back, the black-haired boy said they were
paesani
as well, and each in turn smiled broadly at me and shook my hand. They tried to talk to me using their hands and their strange half-language. One of them pointed to the big silver lunchbox Tsia Teresa had packed my lunch in.

“
Mucho mucho
,” he said, holding his hands wide in front of him. Then he pointed to me and brought his hands closer together. “
No mucho mucho
.” The other boys laughed.

The black-haired boy took the lunchbox from me and held it before him as if to admire it. Then finally he opened it and unwrapped one of the sandwiches inside, split it open, brought it to his nose to sniff it. He screwed up his face.

“
Mu-cho, mu-cho
,” he said, thrusting the sandwich away to one of the other boys and pinching his nose.

The sandwich began to pass from hand to hand. The other boys sniffed it as well, clutching at their throats, pretending to swoon into the aisle. Finally one of them glanced quickly up to the front of the bus, then slipped the sandwich out through an open window. From where I sat I saw it flutter briefly through the air and then fly apart as it struck the road.

They began to pass the second sandwich around. I tried to leap up to pull it away, but the black-haired boy’s arm shot out suddenly in front of me and pinned me to the seat, and then his fist caught the side of my head hard three times in quick succession, my head pounding against the glass of the window beside me.

“
No, no, paesano
.”

I avoided the older boys after that, but I carried my humiliation with me like an open sore, always aware of it; and that awareness, more than the humiliation itself, seemed to be what gave the persecutions by the boys on the bus their meaning, what marked me. I thought there could be a way in which what they did to me, then and after, could stay outside me, have nothing to do with the kind of person I was, that I had only to find the right way to act. But each time it was the same, I’d fill with the same anger and hate, and my humiliation seemed then
no longer simply a thing they did to me but something I always carried inside. The boys who picked on me had found the right way to act – they were perfectly detached, indifferent, didn’t pick on me because they hated me or were angry but only because they could see the humiliation already inside me, as if I were made of glass, and if I’d been different they’d have left me alone or been friendly.

After school the boys would stake out seats for themselves and choose who they’d let sit beside them, and often then I’d have to sit with one of the girls or with George. George lived out near Goldsmith, in a rambling, broken-down farmhouse where in the fall and spring chickens and sometimes even pigs could be seen scavenging on the front lawn and in the laneway, roaming without restraint, as if they’d taken over the farm; and he had the unkempt, wild-eyed look of an idiot, his teeth gapped and protruding and his hair always awkwardly crew-cut, some patches longer than the others, some shaved too close to the skin. From up close I could see he was strangely large and robust, his hands almost the size of a man’s and the muscles of his arms bulging against his sleeves; but the way he hunched himself made him seem shrivelled and deformed. When he boarded the bus in the morning he’d lurch up the aisle and fling himself into one of the centre seats with a kind of satisfied violence, then huddle up tight against the window and stare out it the whole trip like someone seeing a landscape for the first time, his head turtled down into the collar of his coat.

“Hey Georgie,” the older boys would say, “tell us about the time your face caught on fire and your father beat it out with a crowbar.”

Sometimes then he’d glance furtively toward the back of the bus. But his face would be screwed up in what seemed like a
grin, as if he were shyly pleased that the boys were paying attention to him, or as if he hadn’t understood them at all, had only turned at the sound of his name. The girls and the younger boys made fun of him as well, crossing their fingers and drawing away from the aisle when he got on the bus and passing on Georgie-germs if he should brush against them. Usually George seemed not to notice them; but once when a girl drew away as he was coming up the aisle he lunged toward her suddenly and made a face, and afterwards he seemed strangely pleased at what he’d done, settling into his seat with an air of impish self-satisfaction.

My own feeling about George was simply that I didn’t want to be like him, didn’t want other people to think I was like him; but whenever I was forced to sit beside him I’d feel a kind of rage build in me at his stupidity and strangeness. When other kids had to sit with him they’d call attention to themselves by making fun of him or by touching other people in the seats around them to pass on his germs. But I couldn’t do these things, didn’t have the right feeling inside to do them, and I knew my failure made me seem more like George to the others, even made me, in a way, more despicable than he was, because George was protected at least by the severity of his strangeness, had no one beneath him whom the others expected him to make fun of. I’d cross my legs under the seat sometimes the way the others crossed their fingers, furtively though, so that not even George would know I’d done it. But this useless concession made me feel worse than if I’d done nothing at all, made me think that it was only fear that kept me from making fun of George, fear that George too was stronger than I was, because of the way he flung himself into his seat each morning with a force that wasn’t angry or bitter but almost carefree and gay, or
the way he hummed quietly to himself sometimes as he stared out the window as if even he guarded some secret place inside him, a place that was his alone and could not be touched.

At school we went from the bus to the church, a sudden shift from the bus’s strange containment into the wider containment of St. Michael’s, the little world it formed with its huddled white buildings, its chain-link fence, its special logic and rules. Sister Jackson, the vice-principal, presided over our arrival from the bottom of the church steps; two other sisters stood at the fonts at the foot of the aisle. The girls sat in the left-hand pews, the boys in the right, in order of class, our heads rising in a gradual slope toward the back of the church. During the service the sisters on duty hovered in the side aisles like sentries; some of them, the older ones, carried long wooden pointers, and reached out quick and silent to rap you on the back of the neck if you whispered to your neighbour or fell asleep.

The church rose up to a high, arched roof that gave it the sense of an emptiness that couldn’t be filled, that hung over us during the service as if we’d made no impression in it. In the church in Valle del Sole the pews had stood so close to the altar you could see the beads of sweat on Father Nicola’s upper lip as he preached; but here the chancel was raised up four steps from the nave, separated from it by the low marble rail where people knelt for communion and by the wide expanse of the transept. The altar, of green and brown marble, was flanked by two ceiling-high mosaics of sworded angels, one clad in purple and the other in blue, staring out at us each morning like stony sentinels; for a long time I thought that the purple one, his feet wrapped in the coils of a serpent, was not Michael but Lucifer, so stern did he seem, so defiant, that he was challenging Michael
across from him as in the primal battle of the angels in heaven.