The County of Birches (22 page)

Alan gazed at the floor, as was still his wont. He had taken a Hebrew name in order to marry my sister—Abraham, the name of the first Jew, also in a manner of speaking a convert.

A P
ROPERTY OF
C
HILDHOOD

My mother's kindergarten was the showcase of our school. It was palatial, the size of three regular classrooms. The longest wall was window and light. Below the windows, a two-tiered shelf ran its length, offering toys that were clean, unbroken and not missing any parts. A standard-sized door in the far wall led outside. Dwarfed by the room, it admitted a single parent at a time, who my mother made sure was quickly evicted. The kindergarten was her domain. It had a piano, and enough instruments in a capacious leather-lined case to supply an army band. At the annual teachers' convention, she skipped all the workshops but visited each display in the convention hall, order book in hand. My mother's kindergarten was a gallery. Two of the walls were papered floor to ceiling with her children's art. It spilled into the hallway outside, filled the display cabinets in the school's foyer. The consultant from the school board selected the finest pieces to decorate the halls in the board building downtown.

My mother couldn't help gloating as she told my father, “Gibbs he just sniffs. Mrs. Lenahan the consultant says—right in front of me—‘Mrs. Weisz is a gem, Mr. Gibbs. She makes all of us shine.' That's why he sniffs. If I wasn't there, he would show off that he found me. Of course that isn't true. I asked for a school in our neighbourhood.”

My mother was quick to feel slights. “That Pratt woman thinks she can frighten me because I am a foreigner? I told her my words are broken yes, but my eyes are good. I saw her boy smack the other, not just one time. And Gibbs he is standing there smiling in his moustache. He says, ‘Mrs. Weisz runs a tight ship in the kindergarten.' But why is he smiling? He makes me look like a fool.”

When the principal came into our classroom and we scraped briskly and obsequiously to our feet, I knew something the others didn't. I knew he couldn't be trusted.

*   *   *

“Good morning, boys and girls.” Heat melted the back of my neck. Thirty wooden chairs scraped over linoleum. My mother had entered my classroom. Sly grins and sideways glances at me. Was I to lilt with the rest, “Good morning, Mrs. Weisz”? Mortifying to stand up for your own mother, but then it would be worse if you were the only one sitting down.

“The big snow today makes your teacher late. But we can sing some songs—yes?—to keep us warm, then we will do a little work. What do we sing first?”

Heads swerved around to see if my hand was up. My raised hand was a fixture in the classroom. My mother sang pleasantly. She played the piano in her kindergarten and she could be heard when you took a note to the office. Kids standing in front of the office for a minor offence grinned at me and mouthed the nursery song “
A-B-C-D-E-F-G
.”

My mother's accent was painful because it made her appear vulnerable. When the other kids said, “You got all those Es on your report because your mother's a teacher,” it wasn't about me; they were pointing at her difference. My mother prided herself on not interfering with my schooling. She was indignant about slurs. “You should have seen that Gibbs. Second year in a row the Jewish child gets the Excellents, and he can do nothing. But you think he would say to me even a little ‘Congratulations'? He says to the Polish one, you know, Borkowski with the big house on Boisvert Street, how his Mandy was good.” What pained me was that others might see in her a handicap where there was none. The principal made me nervous. I felt he was waiting for us to slip up.

“Hey, Mrs. Weisz, Dana wants to sing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb'.”

“You are being rude, no?” My mother bristled. In these classroom encounters our eyes didn't meet. It wasn't clear to whom we were first accountable.

*   *   *

My mother tried to teach me to draw, but I couldn't form a stick figure. I didn't know how to wield a paintbrush. The paint ran, smeared, made a mess. As a last resort she gave me a colouring book, but my crayon went over the lines.

“Look,” my mother said in exasperation, pulling the crayon from my hand, “the sun is yellow, not blue. Otherwise what colour would you make the sky?”

Giving up, she bought me shoes instead, red, shiny and smooth. There wasn't a crease or a crack in them. The buckle on the strap was brassy bright, neither chipped nor scratched. They were beautiful. Against white knee socks, and worn with the navy box-pleat tunic and white cotton school blouse, they were the clarion call of child-splendour. My mother said, in Hungarian, that colour was a property of childhood. My perfect, splendid new shoes, with the buffed black slab of heel that clicked down the school hallway—the rich, new-leather smell of them—when I looked in the mirror they leapt at the eye from under my white socks. How could something be so lovely as this red beside white?

At school the other girls wore the same T-strapped footwear, or loafers, but all navy or black. The boys wore brown oxfords. My red shoes were magnificent. At home I took the shoe brush and stroked them back to perfection. My shoes were undoubtedly glorious, but I knew they weren't right. Why was something not right when it was evidently best?

My friends were all girls. We sat at the front and in the middle of the class. Only the worst-behaved boys sat near us, placed under the teacher's eye. Our desks were ranged in five rows, six and seven seats deep. They were solid wood with rounded edges, smooth from the rub of books and hands, and scored by the lead of wayward pencils. We didn't use the inkwell for what it was intended. Our pens had narrow, see-through cartridges that were punctured when the casing was screwed onto the nib. Cartridges were supposed to be neater than ink bottles, but ink sometimes squirted onto the fresh white page if we weren't careful. Some girls put their recess apples into the inkwell. The boys fiddled with crumpled-up paper they stuffed down the hole and stabbed with their pencils. When the teacher left the room they stretched their arms through the desk drawer underneath and popped the wads of paper up through the holes. We pitied them.

My girlfriends were Carol, Gail, Mary, Kathy and Frances. Their last names were Dunn, Connelly, McGuire, Jones, Conway. A girl in the other grade three class was called Katzakis.

“Never heard of ‘Dana',” they said when I joined the class.

They'd never heard of Hungary, either, but I pointed it out on a map.

Our teacher was a small woman who was what we called Oriental because none of us could tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese and we didn't know there are any other kinds. We could tell the ages of most of the teachers. The young ones wore their long hair piled high on their heads; the older ones wore their hair short and crimped and had thicker waists and legs. We couldn't gauge the vintage of our teacher because she looked different, but her name tipped us off; she was a “Miss.”

School was the place I could show I was best. The right answers were easy. “Where did Sally take Spot? Who went to the store with Dick? Where did Jane put the eraser?” Spelling every night for homework—use these words in sentences: correct, courtesy, gallant, reward.

Some kids didn't seem to know the obvious. How could Ronnie Everett not remember that Sally took Spot to the park? We had just finished reading about it. There was a picture of Sally kneeling beside her dog to unclasp his leash. We knew it was Sally by her blonde curly bob. Jane was taller, with brown, page-boyed hair. Ronnie Everett stood up to answer but swayed sheepishly. We spent a lot of time in class waiting for Ronnie to remember.

My mother's staffroom gossip was a door to the world of adults. I knew the new kindergarten teacher hired to assist my mother wasn't in favour. She wasn't pretty, but that couldn't be helped, said my mother. The new teacher coughed nervously whenever the principal spoke to her. My mother said the new teacher only looked awkward; she was more capable than he thought, but Gibbs would find a way to get rid of her at the end of the year. It was a shame, said my mother. The new teacher had a bad boyfriend who also made her unhappy. It wasn't easy being plain. When I went into the kindergarten to meet my mother after school, I saw the new teacher zipping the jackets of thirty little kids lined up in hats and boots. I felt a secret power knowing what was in store for her.

I knew also that Miss Osborne was getting married in the spring, but I wasn't allowed to divulge this because of Mr. Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs liked to share jokes with Miss Osborne while she stood at her classroom door watching the grade twos file in from recess. It was hard to keep my mouth shut. Miss Osborne was popular in the schoolyard too. Sometimes she was an ender for our jump ropes. In the winter, an entourage of little girls circled around her as she perambulated the schoolyard. My information was valuable currency, but I had nowhere to spend it. “If you dare breathe a word!” my mother threatened.

My mother was afraid of a number of things. She was afraid someone would complain that her language was not good enough for the job. She was afraid Mr. Gibbs would find out from a secondary source what her opinion was of him, and it would cost her dearly. She was afraid of appearing too different from the other parents, and thus being considered unfit to teach their children. At home we were admonished not to raise our voices—not against each other, but lest the neighbours overheard. What might they think—that we were uncivilized? She was afraid, in this new world, of losing what she had gained. Although I had never done so, I worried that might inadvertently shame her, tarnish her reputation and jeopardize our safety. Sometimes, in exciting exchanges between friends, I felt welling up some piece of juicy staffroom gossip. It bubbled. I actually felt it in the flow of saliva in my mouth, and the quickened pulse of my chest. I had something very compelling to say. It was physical, this desire to disclose and entertain. I was afraid one day I would let slip the forbidden.

*   *   *

My friend Frances tugged her striped stocking cap lower on her forehead. The wind whipped snow into our faces. We twirled around to cheat its lash. “Miss Taylor has a coat like Mrs. Atkinson.” She sniffed from the cold.

“No she doesn't,” argued precise Carol. “Miss Taylor's coat is grey; Mrs. Atkinson's is white.”

“So, they're still the same coat.”

“Mrs. Atkinson went to Bermuda at Christmas with her sister,” Kathy contributed, “and they went snorkelling underwater.”

“Who says?”

“She did. She told her class, and my sister Wendy has her.”

“So,” said Mary, “I've seen Mrs. Atkinson's sister in the parking lot. You wouldn't think she's her sister. She looks so pretty.”

I swerved to put the wind at my back, and the pom-pom at the end of my windsock of a hat batted me in the mouth. As I walked backwards facing my friends my heart raced expectantly. What I knew about Mrs. Atkinson's sister would trump any parking lot sighting. My mother had said Mrs. Atkinson took her sister to Bermuda to help her feel better after she'd lost her baby.
Lost her baby!
No, my mother said, not that kind of lost, the baby wasn't real yet.

My wind-smacked cheeks didn't show the flush I knew was on them. I swallowed hard to contain my information but my voice jumped ahead of me.

“Why would Mrs. Atkinson go to Bermuda with a sister? That's weird,” I challenged the panel marching me back.

Kathy shrugged. “Sisters do stuff together.”

“Yeah, but what if they have husbands?” said Carol.

I thought my heart would burst, I was that close to telling. The temptation was unbearable. I swung around so I was walking abreast of my friends. Snow pelted my eyelids. “Mrs. Atkinson's sister is a Miss. She's Miss Carlisle.”

I could feel sweat under my acrylic hat brim despite the windy wet. My heart slowed in relief. There, I'd said it. I'd managed to say it without crossing the line.

I knew the limits of what I was allowed. I was allowed to enter the kindergarten at the end of the day if I wanted to. This meant I might finger the toys as long as I didn't rearrange them. I might chat with the other teacher, or draw on the blackboard behind my mother's chair. These were privileges, I knew, for having a mother in the school. But I couldn't count on her to bail me out of a predicament. She'd made that clear. I had to watch my step just like the rest.

I watched myself a lot. In the mirror, I saw the perfect red leather that housed each of my careful steps. I had matched it with a red sweater that had round plastic buttons. The collar of my white blouse sat overtop. Watching what I said was as carefully pieced together. Daily I honed my self-censor, balancing between what I wanted to say and what I could not.

*   *   *

Mr. Gibbs was one of the few men in the school. He was big, handsome, with short thick hair of no colour. His heavy moustache matched. Way up from his height we felt the sting of his blue eyes always watchful and suspicious, as though just because we were kids we were bound to be up to something. He barked his instructions. When he smiled we thought of the slick-haired villain in a silent movie, tying the heroine to the track. My mother said, how this man had come to run a school for little children was beyond her. He had been a sergeant in the army once upon a time. I was sensitive to once-upon-a-times and had no trouble grasping metamorphosis. The other men were Mr. Wainright, the gym teacher, and Mr. James, who unaccountably taught grade four. Mr. Burgess headed up the grade sevens because they were the oldest and needed a firm hand. Otherwise there was only Mr. Beaudry, the custodian. There were three classes at each grade except kindergarten, making Mr. Gibbs's staff of women around twenty.

We were used to women. Men were a shadowy presence. We met our friends' fathers on weekends as they sat behind the wheel of a car to drop us off at Brownies or swimming. We weren't expected to speak to them while we giggled with our friends in the back seat. My piano teacher was Mr. Hansen. He had a quiet voice and a soft accent my mother said was Dutch. Mr. Hansen came to our house. He smelled of shaving cream and wore rumpled shiny grey suits. He leaned over me from behind and covered my hands on the keys to show me what I was doing wrong. Mr. Hansen's touch was as neutral as water.