Things as They Are (17 page)

Sammy sat down on the floor. This house was all but finished and now he could feel it waiting for one of the American ladies to come and claim it. He knew nothing at all about such ladies. They were scarcely real to him, scarcely to be believed in. He struggled to see them clearly. He strained to catch their voices. Nothing came to him except a picture of his mother, drifting through these rooms. What he heard over and over was his mother talking.
She’ll this, she’ll that. She’ll this, she’ll that
, his mother repeated in his ear.

The sun finally sank, like a stone. The sky framed in the picture window was a soft, mindless grey.

Again he followed his mother, watched her hands darting, pointing, her voice urging him to appreciation.
She’ll this, she’ll that
, he heard his mother say. After all these months, this trouble, who did it belong to?

The room had gone dark and a little scary. Sammy fumbled in his pockets for the matches he carried to light his mother’s stove. A match blazed in the cup of his hands and he held it, staring at the flame, seeing his mother walk the hard-packed road that day the sun had burned in the ribs of the houses, back then before all they could think of was houses, houses, houses.

The match scorched his fingers and he dropped it. He struck another and began to nuzzle a solitary wood shaving that lay beside the pile with its flame, watched the shaving catch and writhe under the caressing blue tongue. He rubbed out the last poor sparks with the toe of his running shoe, examined the smear of black ash on the floor.

He lit the last match, let it drop, went out into the street.

For long moments the fire rustled in its dry nest of shavings like a mouse, scurried aimlessly up and down the frayed borders of the canvas, floated a few fat drowsy sparks about the
room. Then the turpentine popped and a blue quaking light which resembled the glow of a television ran flickering up the walls. The dull thumps of rupturing paint cans could be heard.

An unexpected breeze sighed the length of the dark deserted street. The front door which he had neglected to pull firmly closed behind him swung slowly and invitingly open.

The house drew a long breath, exploded.

He saw it once again, the burning sun, a picture in a picture window.

Never before, and never since have I hated anyone as I did then, with a ten year old’s insulted and seething heart.

Her name was Mrs. Dollen and she taught grade six at R.J. Hewitt Elementary. I would place her in early middle age in 1961. Dark complexioned, monumental, she was easily the most physically imposing teacher in the school, two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Alley Oop, our principal, who liked to give expression to his power by cracking and shelling walnuts with his fingers as he strolled the school corridors at recess. Of course, poor Alley Oop’s hands paled in comparison with Mrs. Dollen’s, which were emphatically more prodigious and mannish.

Mrs. Dollen favoured lace, frills, and chiffon blouses, perhaps to counteract the impression created by the size of her shoulders and hands. Like all teachers, she had a distinctive, identifying odour. Hers was feminine enough, a mingling of eau de cologne and dry-cleaning. There was nothing specifically eccentric about her appearance, no flamboyant costume jewellery, no laddered and sagging nylon stockings, no radical
and abrupt changes of hair colour like Miss MacDonald, the grade-one teacher. Nevertheless, there was something unnerving about the way she looked. Now I see what it was. If Chief Sitting Bull had been permed at our local beauty parlour he would have borne a strong resemblance to teacher.

What was it that people in our small town said about Mrs. Dollen? The chairman of the local school board liked to note that the life span of a set of textbooks was five times longer in Mrs. Dollen’s classroom than in any other. Put plainly, they lasted. Nobody dared rip a page, or draw a picture in one of
her
books.

Exasperated mothers used to threaten their kids: “Just you wait until you’re old enough for grade six. Mrs. Dollen will put an end to your smart alec lip!”

In the janitor’s opinion there wasn’t another teacher like her in the whole school. Her pupils lined their shoes up at the back of the room and sat in their stockinged feet. No black scuff marks on the floor, ever. No mud. You didn’t even have to buff the tile after a waxing, students did it for you with the soles of their socks.

What did my father say? He said the reason Mrs. Dollen got the job teaching was the condition of her husband, because of the shape he came back in after the war. Mr. Dollen didn’t work, scarcely put his nose outside the door, and was reported to suffer from an undefined ailment. Contracted, my father liked to add, from germs found only inside certain bottles.

My father was known to be a character, and the owner of a maliciously sharp tongue. As he cut their hair at the barber shop, his customers encouraged him to pass his famous opinions on acquaintances and neighbours. The louder they roared, the more bloody-minded and funny he became. What he never realized was that walking home after, the laughter forgotten, they all turned sour pondering what he might have
to say about them when they went out the door. My father was never as popular as he assumed himself to be.

One of his most celebrated comic turns involved the Dollens. Holding his scissors aloft, the blades nervously snicking back and forth, he would propose the theory that the reason Ernie Dollen was never seen outside the house was that he was kept chained up inside, garbed in silk pyjamas, Mrs. Dollen’s “personal love slave.”

Entering Mrs. Dollen’s class I was aware of her reputation. It was just that I saw no reason to personally worry. Since beginning school I had always been the pet, the darling, more the ally of the teachers than their pupil. They knew that when the school superintendent came sniffing around on his inspections I could be depended upon to politely volunteer answers to his questions, drawing fire away from more unreliable and erratic scholars.

Both Mrs. Dollen and I had reputations, although mine was minor and hers major. The seed of mine was that I arrived in school able to read, something highly unusual for that time and that town. After my mother died when I was three, my father took me with him to the barber shop. In one corner of the shop he erected a barricade out of a scrap of old snow fence which he put me behind when he was busy (to keep me out of the hair on the floor) but when things were slow the two of us sat in the big nickel-trimmed barber’s chair and looked at the ragged magazines stocked for the amusement of his patrons. I learned to read from
The Police Gazette
. My father liked to call attention to this, in a manner he imagined self-deprecating, but wasn’t in the least. “He never got his brains from me,” he used to declare. “I’ve still got mine!”

Then, when I was six, my grade-one teacher discovered me in the school library reading a grade-twelve history text. Actually I was only looking at gory illustrations representing the Battle of Marathon but the incident contributed to a growing
suspicion I might be “academically gifted.” When the Department of Education appointed an innovative superintendent and Alley Oop saw it might be wise to portray himself as a progressive principal, I was the one selected to be “accelerated” through several grades. All this relentless promotion meant that, already undersized for my age, I started grade six a full two years younger than the rest of my classmates.

A description of a school photograph of me taken at the age of ten:

On my first day in grade six I claimed a seat where I always had, directly in front of the teacher’s desk in the first row. Unspoken rules guided me there. It was the place for someone like me, just like the back of the room was the place for retards like Wayne Leszinski. The world ordered itself that way in those days.

So it came to be that two legends, myself and Mrs. Dollen, were separated by less than four feet when she opened the register and proceeded to call the roll.

“Deborah Atkins.”

“Here.”

Without lifting her eyes from the register, Mrs. Dollen said: “People in my room answer properly when I call the roll. In my room ‘here’ is not acceptable. The proper response is, ‘Present, Mrs. Dollen’ or ‘Present, teacher.’ Is that understood?”

“Yes, teacher.”

“Deborah Atkins.”

“Present, teacher.”

“Robert Bing.”

“Present, teacher.”

And so it continued until she came to me.

“Myles Rampton.”

“Present, Mrs. Dollen.”

For the first time that morning, Mrs. Dollen directed her attention away from the register and towards one of her students. She stared at me with eyes so expressionless and dry that mine began to itch in sympathy. “So,” she said at last, “here I am, face to face with the Boy Wonder.”

I beamed a smile back at her, never imagining that this was anything but a compliment. I was accustomed to being complimented by teachers.

“I wouldn’t smile if I were you until I had something to smile about,” she said, meaning it. Laughter burst at my back.

I was in the right place, at the front of the room, but nothing else was right. If Mrs. Dollen asked a question and I put my hand up, she never called on me. If it didn’t go up, she did. On the first Friday afternoon that it was too rainy to go outside for phys. ed. we had a spelling bee and teacher kept me standing uncomfortably at the blackboard while she thumbed through the dictionary searching for my word. She settled on “anaclisis.” I was the first one knocked out of competition.

Mrs. Dollen made a discovery. The first three pages of my Social Studies notes were written in ballpoint pen. Only fountain pens were permitted in her classes. Surely we were all big enough to use a proper pen at our age. I was set recopying these notes using a proper pen. And then recopying them once again because I had used peacock-blue ink and Mrs. Dollen would countenance only blue or black. Neither of these rules had ever been announced.

I could not understand this passage from privilege to persecution. Possible reasons for it were:

1. The weakness evident in my face. I neglected to mention this when describing my school photograph. The face is humble, it asks only to please.
   
2. A woman like Mrs. Dollen was bound to resent other teachers’ enthusiasms being thrust upon her. She would pick and choose her own favourites, thank you very much.
   
3. My father.
   

Certainly this list does not exhaust possibilities, lists never do. It is only a beginning. At the time, however, I did not even have a beginning. I sought very hard for a reason that Mrs. Dollen should dislike me and could not find one. It was a useful lesson teacher taught me, that to demand misfortune make sense is futile.

What this seemed to be was what my father referred to as a “misunderstanding.” He used the word frequently since his life was rife with them because of his satiric urges. I took it upon myself to clear my misunderstanding up, to prove to Mrs. Dollen that she was wrong and that I really was a model student. Throughout every lesson, throughout every hour of the day, I wore an alert and interested face. I was modest, unassuming, diligent, and cooperative. I volunteered to wipe blackboards, pound chalk dust out of erasers, and run messages to Alley Oop’s office. All of which only seemed to stimulate her disdain.