The County of Birches (23 page)

I tensed at the sound of Mr. Gibbs's voice heartily booming down the corridor as he shook hands with the consultant. Something about the way he filled his sandy-shaded lightweight suits made me nervous, and so did the dark pipe clenched inside strong teeth. He was the only one in the school who smoked outside the staffroom. If you were sent at lunchtime to take a note to the teachers' lounge, the cigarette haze burned your eyes. My mother walked home for her lunch because she couldn't stand the smoke, but she said, too, that watching Mr. Gibbs flirt with the young teachers put her off her food. He pestered them but they felt obliged to laugh and smile.

Sometimes a teacher was a Miss although she looked like a Mrs. This was uncommon. Mrs. Dunbar, the secretary, had no husband because he was dead. Mrs. Grace, the librarian, was older too and came to staff parties unaccompanied. But to be a Miss with lines on her face, there was only Miss Armstrong like that, and Mr. Gibbs disliked her. He dropped in on her classes after he had lurked around until he heard the highest level of noise. Then he barged in and, in the din of desks and chairs being pushed back abruptly, he roared, “This class can be heard
all the way down the hall!
” Sure, said my mother, you mean heard from right behind the door. She thought Miss Armstrong was a good teacher and hoped she'd still be around when I reached grade five.

I wasn't sure why Mr. Gibbs didn't like Miss Armstrong, but it had something to do with her being a Miss and having thick ankles and wearing pleated tartan the colour of dried blood. My mother said you needed to be slim to wear pleats. I found Miss Armstrong somewhat formidable and didn't share my mother's enthusiasm for having her as my teacher, but I doubted Mr. Gibbs objected to her on account of us children.

*   *   *

My mother and Mr. Gibbs had an unsteady relationship. No one was totally secure with him, but my mother felt reasonably confident. She had supporters at the school board. She managed to restrain the multiplying, squirming bodies whose little bottoms polished more of the kindergarten floor each September. She was married-untouchable, and seasoned enough to elude the bloom of his interest. But, unlike Mrs. Chandler, for instance, or Mrs. Butler, or Mrs. Harrington, who were all middle-aged and Anglo, my mother was an immigrant, and this sometimes shifted her ground.

“Mrs. Weisz.” He pronounced our name as Wise. Others on staff had learned a decent rendition that sounded like the word “Vice,” but he avoided it. “Wise” was more ironic. “Mrs. Wise,” he smirkingly inflected, “I believe the correct usage is ‘tamper.' We say, ‘Don't tamper with the light switch,' not ‘Don't temper with it.' It is I who have a temper.” At which cue my mother's colleagues were expected to join in with snickers. I was amazed that my mother risked expanding her vocabulary when these pitfalls were certain. But she was, said Mrs. Chandler sympathetically, a tough cookie. “You're a tough cookie, Mrs. Weisz, you can take it, don't worry.” Tough cookie though she may have been, my mother burned with indignation.

At home one afternoon the pots were clanged and banged to the stovetop. There were vicious expletives against cupboard doors that thwarted her, a garbage can that didn't shut.

“It's up to me, always me,” she vented in Hungarian. “I have to put the garbage out too—only I see that it's stinking, overflowing. I have to take care of everything.”

It was prudent to lie low. No one else was at home. My father and sister would arrive in time for dinner. There were only me and the garbage can to catch the brunt of her wrath. Something must have happened with a parent, maybe, and the principal. Perhaps he hadn't backed her up as she'd expected. After supper I overheard her in the bedroom with my father.

“He has gone too far now. This is unbearable. In my classroom. Anyone could walk in and see them. What if a parent? Just me this time. But next time who? One of the children? He won't let me forget this!”

My mother was afraid of what she had seen. What she had witnessed was dangerous knowledge.

“To me. On purpose. No coincidence. A slap to me in the face.”

I wanted to go in to her. I wanted to assure her that we were safe here. Nothing could happen. This was a free world, a new world. Here it was safe to be Jewish, to have an accent, and to speak your mind. That's what it said in the law. My sister at the university told me these things. But my mother would have shaken me off. She mistrusted all authorities.

I was more afraid of my mother's anguish than of any threat from Mr. Gibbs. It brought us too close to what she had escaped. Suddenly the past was beside us, brushing us with terror. It was after dinner, but I felt starved. My hunger was gnawing and frightful. Her fear crazed me.

There was often noise in our family. We didn't always realize why. A trap door would trigger open, the atmosphere become charged. We yelled at each other a lot before it was over.

I seemed to be shouting now. “There are no more socks! I have no socks for tomorrow! Brown socks! Who needs brown socks? I can't wear brown socks with my tunic!”

I was infuriated by her fear, so misplaced. Was she blind? Was she stupid? There were no Nazis here, just a blustering principal. How could she not know this? I believed it like a faith: the badness was over. It lay behind us with the past.

The next day in the corridor I regarded Mr. Gibbs with contempt. He left his trace of pipe odour behind him in the halls to remind us of his presence. He filled his pressed suits tightly to show off his strength. He flashed his teeth in his smile, framed each request as an order. He was the first man I had met who presented his maleness before his intellect. There was something pathetic in this, like Billy Tait the class bully, a meanness that begged to be punished.

My mother saw in the petty tyrant an evil it was her duty to suppress. We heard at supper one evening how she had gone in to see the principal, closing the door behind her.

“Mr. Gibbs,” she began. She looked at him across his desk. She said that because he was sitting they could see eye to eye. “Mr. Gibbs,” she repeated, “you are the principal. You are in charge. This is a school, Mr. Gibbs. I have only a classroom, but it is my classroom.
My
classroom, Mr. Gibbs. You are the principal. You have an
office.
Next time, Mr. Gibbs, use your office.”

I imagined her turning on her flats, daring to expose her back.

My mother had mustered all her resources for this sally, leaving her shaken. When I arrived home after school, she was already in the La-Z-Boy with a compress on her forehead. She didn't feel she had fought back, although that was how it struck me. She didn't feel powerful. For my mother, each day, each tussle was a struggle of equal bearing to keep herself upright.

*   *   *

Mr. Gibbs didn't live in our suburb, but somewhere in the city. It was a shock, therefore, to see him on the weekend, in one of those tweed caps that snapped together in the front. I was swinging a drawstring bag that held my ballet slippers. I loved this bag. It was encrusted with clear, multicoloured beads. As I swung it open-armed, the beads caught the light.

The recent snow had frozen over, making the sidewalks treacherous for grown-ups. We children loved it. You could shave five minutes off your walk-home time if you slid. Slide over two sidewalk squares. Running start, slide over three sidewalk squares. Swing your bag, running start,
gli-s-s-ade
—I liked the French word for it better. It was like ballet.

Mr. Gibbs had just closed the door of a honey brick duplex and was descending its stairs carefully, holding onto the black railing. He reached the last step before I registered who he was. A reflex, I felt as though I'd done something wrong.

No running in the halls!

And where do you think
you're
going?

I wanted to turn around and pretend I hadn't seen him, but it was Saturday, I remembered. It was Saturday, I was allowed where I pleased. What was
he
doing here? He was the one out of place. This wasn't fair, we had a right to our free days, our school-less days, our Mr. Gibbs-not-hanging-over-our-heads days. He caught sight of me as he glanced up from the bottom step. My bag, still swinging from the last slide, bounced ice-light from its surface like a toy mace. I stood my ground while he advanced.

“Hello, Mr. Gibbs.”

He hesitated briefly, then touched the brim of his hat. “Dana. You're looking jolly.”

Jolly?!

We sized each other up. He was wearing a short leather coat belted at the waist. It made him look thick in the middle.

“Where're you off to then?” he asked.

And a lizard sprang unbidden from my mouth, its forked tongue vibrating. “None of your business!”

Aghast, I turned rigid with fear, rooted to the spot. I felt I'd turned into one of those sooty, icy stands of snow that lined the street all winter.

“I beg your pardon?” he questioned, doubting his ears.

But the lizard darted a second time. My tongue had turned reptilian and volatile. “Where do you think
you're
going? Kissing Miss Casey again?”

The ice broke the spell by tripping me forward. Run, run, run. My shoebag swung in giant arcs as I raced, stumbled and slid. A joyous crash of light-striking colour radiated around me. Breathless, sobbing, hysterically jubilant, this time I'd done it.

*   *   *

Daily the waited summons to the office failed to materialize. Whenever there was a knock at the classroom door and I heard my teacher murmur with someone in the hall, my stomach clenched. This was it. I would be expected to present myself with my mother—yes, my mother, because I had incriminated her even more than myself. We would be called for sentencing.

Despite my sense of doom, I felt unrepentant. The thought of my offence buoyed me. The jolt of blue under Mr. Gibbs's arching brows. My wild skidding dance along the runway of our street.

It was my mother I feared. Her rage was electric. Once trapped in its current you fried. She woke the next morning still charged. No, I'd no wish to trip the switch on my mother, but expected she'd find out anyway.

The week went by without a call to the office. I avoided Mr. Gibbs. This wasn't hard since his loud voice and strong cologne proclaimed his approach. I steered clear of him.

As winter warmed into the first crystal slushes of spring, I started to feel easier. Mr. Gibbs had sought no revenge. It appeared he no more wished to draw attention to our encounter than I did. I had done him a favour perhaps, by supplying my own reason to keep quiet.

I emerged from hiding, took to meeting my mother in the kindergarten after school. He was often in front of the office. “Hello, Mr. Gibbs,” I said boldly, trying to hold his eye. I acted as though nothing had happened, as if I knew nothing about him I shouldn't. I let him know there was nothing to conceal. At first he shifted his weight uneasily, remembering a task elsewhere. But my performance was so convincing he finally relaxed. Eventually he could tolerate my standing quietly by my mother's side as they discussed school matters. I thought he might actually come to question I had ever known anything I shouldn't, decide that my outburst had been a wild fabrication by an imaginative child that had chanced to land on target.

Spring in the suburb was for children. The pavement dried quickly and you could bring out the bikes when the first strong sunny afternoon made pools of the yards. Jump ropes were pulled from the bottom of toy chests. Ball-o-bats appeared instantly on store shelves, and we doffed our coats at lunchtime to walk back to school in pullovers, under the wide blue sky. Snow melted off driveways that sloped towards the street. After school we tied a rope end to the garage door handle and skipped our first jumps of the season. The world in a suburban spring was spacious and full of promise.

The town smelled like running water. Melting snow cascaded in the gutters. We heard it spill down the sewers. The drugstore store displayed spring candy: sponges like honeycomb that welded to our teeth, wax lips we sucked for their red sap then chewed into candle wax we spit into the street, candy necklaces of pastel O's we wore around our bare necks and mouthed the whole afternoon. We showed off, wearing Brownie uniforms for all the world to admire. The town matched us in age, grew with us, drew from us its inspiration. The six doors on my family's duplex were each a different primary colour. The Royal Bank in the shopping centre repainted its sedate interior a bright orange. The town was ours. Our spinning bicycle wheels possessed its streets, skimmed through puddles and left snakelike trails.

My mother said she noticed a change in the way Mr. Gibbs talked to her. He seemed to have lost his appetite for baiting. Scanning the kindergarten one day, its raucous display of colour and the children on the floor calmly playing, he conceded, “I don't know how you do it, Mrs. Weisz. We couldn't get along without you.”

“He said ‘Vice.' He pronounced it properly!” she observed with mixed pleasure, piqued with herself to have been caught off guard.

E
ICHMANN'S
M
ONOGRAM

Mummy said not to be silly. She happened to know that the teacher I'd be getting at the new school was the best of the grade two teachers. The teacher was good, and one grade two class was the same as another. I'd have no problem switching. She couldn't understand what the difficulty was anyway. We'd be in our new house. A brand-new house—ours—and finally I'd have my own bedroom. “Really, Dana,” she summed up, “I have no time for your nonsense.”

I had no argument with the new house. A new house was wonderful, but why couldn't I start the new school in September, like her, instead of waiting a month until we moved in? By then everyone in the class would know each other, and I'd be the only one left out.

Mummy was pleased to have gotten a job teaching in the new neighbourhood's school. We'd be in the same school and she'd be able to watch out for me and give me lunch at home. I was smart enough to appreciate a practical situation.