Things as They Are (18 page)

Behind my meek demeanour I fantasized revenge.

What if I telephoned her, claimed to be a former student, and threatened to break into her house with a butcher knife, seeking revenge for the wrong she had done me years ago?

Two or three times I made a dry run, dialling Mrs. Dollen’s number with the receiver resting in the cradle so that her telephone couldn’t possibly ring. But I lost my nerve and dropped even that mild, pale rebellion. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew the game I was playing and would answer despite my precautions,
could
and
would
answer a phone that hadn’t rung.

October was devoted to Noxious Weeds. Mrs. Dollen turned our classroom into a rogues’ gallery of the weeds named in the province’s Noxious Weeds Act, hanging illustrations of twenty of the most noxious on the bulletin board. We had orders to find specimens of each, press them, label them, and mount them in a scrapbook. For three weeks I spent every spare moment combing ditches, fields, and my father’s neglected garden patch for Russian thistle, fox tail, creeping Charlie, leafy spurge, chickweed, wild oats. Teacher had made it perfectly clear that seventeen or eighteen, even nineteen weeds would not be good enough. It was all twenty or nothing. We sweated in pursuit of the rare, uncommon ones. Mrs. Dollen’s students bartered weed specimens the way other, happier children traded baseball cards.

“I’ll swap you a wild oats for a wild mustard.”

The weekend before the Monday we were supposed to hand in our scrapbooks I was still short a plantain and so overwrought that my father gave up his only day off, Sunday, to help me on my weed hunt. This was a considerable sacrifice since he looked forward to spending his day of rest ridiculing
everything offered on
CBC
television. He had been born in Duluth and although he had moved to Canada at the age of two, he thought of himself as an American and liked to disparage everything north of the forty-ninth as pitifully second rate. He always made a great show of scowling and grumbling when forced to his feet for the singing of “God Save the Queen.”

All afternoon I tramped worried circles over the countryside while he ambled along behind, complaining of the varicose veins which, along with haemorrhoids, were what he called the “barber’s curse.” Every now and then he would pluck a bit of vegetation and present it to me for inspection, hoping that at long last he had found his ticket of release and could get home in time to mock the sanctimonious performers in “Hymn Sing.”

“Do you think?” he’d ask.

And I would roll my eyes in wild despair and cry: “No, no, no.
Plantain!”
And my father, growing cold because he never bought himself a proper jacket (since the only weather he ever got was stepping from his car into the barbershop) muttered: “Well, how the christ am I supposed to know? They didn’t make farmers out of us when I went to school. We studied the three
R’S
, we got an
education!”

Nineteen noxious weeds lovingly mounted, protected under Saran Wrap, their names painstakingly stencilled in coloured pencils, a beautiful job, did not cut any ice with teacher. She wanted to know where plantain was.

“I looked and looked,” I said, “but I couldn’t find any. Honest I couldn’t.”

“I can just guess how hard you looked,” said Mrs. Dollen in a manner meant to make it clear that she believed I was a liar. “You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself I don’t doubt, skipping those grades. But if I was you I wouldn’t be so
quick to turn up my nose at practical knowledge. Not everything is learned out of a book. There are plenty that go lots further than the likes of you because they don’t think themselves too good to learn everyday useful things. Like weeds.”

I noted this about teacher. She liked to be asked questions. Not the sort of questions a boy like Wayne Leszinski asked, who was dumb as a post, but the sort of questions asked by girls who got solid
B’S
and wrote in their exercise books with concentrated, lip-chewing exactitude. Girls who, in Social Studies class, fretted over how provincial capitals should be marked on their study maps, with stars or dots. Please, teacher, which?

Salvation might lie in questions of this ilk. “Mrs. Dollen, how do you spell Charlottetown?”

Teacher wondered aloud to the class how a boy who had managed to take two grades in one year didn’t know how to spell a simple, ordinary place like Charlottetown.

“I know how to spell
Charlotte,”
I said with emphasis, “and I know how to spell
town
. What I don’t know is whether it’s one word or two.”

Unfortunately, the sands of patience had run out for both of us at the same time. Mrs. Dollen leaned across her desk and waved a forefinger the size and colour of an uncooked sausage in my face. “Don’t adopt a tone with me, young man. You might have got away with blue murder in other places and other times but this is here and now. I’ve had my eye on you for weeks and I don’t like your superior airs and your habit of carrying your nose aloft. You seem to think I’ve got nothing to teach you. Since that’s the case you better pick up your desk and cart it off to the back of the room where I won’t be in your hair. Set it down beside Mr. Wayne Leszinski. Like you, he seems to know all he’ll ever need to know. The two of you are welcome to each other.”

A description of Wayne Leszinski as he appears in the school photo he gave me at the end of the year which he signed, “Your friend, Waynie”:

A stocky, moon-faced boy of fifteen with wavy blond hair, already showing signs of premature thinning, and a long upper lip that appeared slightly swollen because it was pulled down to hide bad front teeth. No proper shirt, just a white
T
-shirt, despite the fact that the itinerant school photographer always arrived to take pictures at R.J. Hewitt Elementary in January.

When I set my desk down beside Wayne’s, he had already been parked on that spot for two years and was beginning his third. No other teacher had ever held Wayne back in any grade for more than two years, but Mrs. Dollen was a woman of principles. If you couldn’t pass her exams you didn’t leave. So Wayne was stalled in grade six until he gave Mrs. Dollen a stroke, or had his sixteenth birthday and the law said he could quit – whichever came first.

I was righteously indignant at being bracketed, yoked, paired with the likes of Wayne Leszinski. I could feel him watching me in the way embarrassing and stupid people did, without disguising their curiosity. I could hear him breathing in an embarrassing and stupid way also.

Then he spoke to me. “Now you’re one, too,” he said.

“One what?” I whispered angrily. “One what?”

Everyone was aware that Health was teacher’s favourite subject, perhaps because as it was taught then, it was made up of entirely practical knowledge. We learned Canada’s Food Rules, the circulation of the blood, and tips on personal grooming. Wayne was a useful example when it came to
grooming, which was a popular topic with Mrs. Dollen. If you used too much Brylcreem and didn’t wash your hair regularly you could expect to go bald by the time you were twenty-five, which was what Wayne was going to be by the looks of him already.

She would also order Leszinski to hold up his big, cracked, chilblained paws as evidence of what you could expect if you dressed with an eye on fashion rather than weather conditions.

“And you’ve all seen Mr. Leszinski’s ears,” she would add, while Wayne swept the room with a challenging grin.

We had all seen his ears. Wayne was famous for ignoring the cold. All winter he slithered about in ordinary leather street shoes, in a light nylon windbreaker, without gloves, without a tuque. His frostbitten ears were tattered with peeling skin, curled like birch bark. Brylcreem froze in his hair on his way to school and dripped down his neck when it thawed in the muggy warmth of the classroom. What teacher did not grasp was the pleasure that Wayne Leszinski took in being singled out in Health class. It gave him status.

The back of the room was not my place. Everything seemed to be happening too far away. There were times I could almost believe I had caught some sort of infection from Leszinski, just from sitting near him. I could no longer concentrate, or remember what had just been said, or even do things I had always known how to do. One day I was overcome with a chilling panic when I discovered that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not recall how to multiply and divide fractions.

My grades began to drop. If this could have been attributed to Mrs. Dollen’s prejudice in marking, I would have been less shaken and anxious. But even in subjects such as Arithmetic, where an answer was either right or wrong, I went from an
A
the previous year to a
B
and then to a
C
.

The only things that I could seem to learn were the things
that Wayne was teaching me, the things I did not want to learn. I did not want to know that girls bled once a month from between their legs. I found it horrible to imagine them all sore and sticky, bleeding the way Wayne said. Even though I dismissed him as a moron, he could make me feel even dumber than Mrs. Dollen could. When Wayne said he’d like to share a French safe with Sharon Stottlemyre, I took this to mean that Wayne wished to share some fabulous treasure with the equally fabulous Sharon, a treasure so valuable that it had to be lodged in a very secure safe, a special kind only obtainable in France. When later I learned that the treasure this French safe was meant to hold was what Leszinski called “Wayne’s wiener,” that thick, coarsely-veined stump he liked to flaunt and waggle in the bathroom to over-awe the rest of us who as yet only had what he disparagingly referred to as “winkles,” I felt slightly ill.

Before my relegation to the back of the room I used to look forward to examinations, but now the little excited butterfly of anticipation which used to flutter eagerly sank like a cold, heavy lump of lead in the pit of my stomach.

God knew what was in the pit of Leszinski’s stomach when he wrote a test. First he printed his full name, Wayne Martin Leszinski, at the top of the test paper, taking great pains with each of the letters, a different coloured pencil employed for each. Once his name was a rainbow, he didn’t even bother to glance at the questions but laid his head down on his desk to wait out the remainder of the hour just like he was stoically waiting out the remainder of his sentence in Mrs. Dollen’s room. I wished I could renounce the desire to recover my old self, and do likewise.

Was it the struggle between my old self and my new self that caused my confusion of speech, my stutter? Now whenever teacher asked questions in class I would stare at my hands
and beg God, someone, I didn’t know who, not to let her call on me with my dry tongue and thick spit, not to let the words which used to come so easily and naturally and confidently, jerk and stumble their way from between my lips, my thoughts whirling and my eyes furiously blinking. There were giggles and heads began to slyly turn to greet the show whenever my name was called.

I suffered stomach cramps and diarrhoea, my palms were always clammy.

Why didn’t I involve my father in my troubles at school? Because I had arrived at the age that a child convinces himself his father is a fool. Mostly this had to do with the way he looked. He did not dress like other fathers who were farmers, mechanics, carpenters. He did not dress like fathers who were lawyers, businessmen, doctors. The cheap, short-sleeved white shirts and clip-on bow-ties he wore to the barbershop made him resemble the mild, kind hosts of children’s programs. What use was Mr. Dressup to someone in my predicament?

I was luckier than Wayne because teacher didn’t lay hands on me. Leszinski she hit. Most often it was a flurry of open-handed slaps, although once, when he ducked down and hid his face in his arms, she pounded on his back with doubled-up fists.

What always drove her to let fly was Wayne’s sudden barks of laughter when she was speaking. Teacher always assumed his outbursts were calculated displays of disrespect for her authority. It might have been much worse if she had detected the real reason for his amusement. Wayne couldn’t help
snorting and braying whenever he heard her say anything into which a reference to sex could be read. Mrs. Dollen had only to say: “Make sure you have a period at the end of your sentences” and Wayne would be helplessly doubled-up with laughter, hopelessly convulsed.

After a hammering, Wayne would dismiss her with contempt. “Her?” he’d say. “That old cunt can’t hit for nothing.” His old man, he liked to brag, now
he
could hit. Nevertheless, on the heels of a beating a look crept over Wayne’s face, a suggestion that what was at issue was not the strength of blows but something more inexpressible, more difficult to calculate.

An article in
Reader’s Digest
outlined how to escape from a submerged automobile. I put Mrs. Dollen in her ugly maroon Ford and ran it off the bridge. Standing at the smashed guardrail I watched the car slowly sink while she beat her hands on the windshield, her mouth forming soundless cries for help.

Too bad she hadn’t read the article I had. Maybe people who read got more practical knowledge which carried them further in the world than you’d think. Especially under forty feet of water.

November brought more distress. By then, Wayne had come to assume that our enforced association was the same thing as friendship, that we were best buddies. To my horror, he insisted on walking home with me each day after school. Didn’t he know how ridiculous we looked together? He a full head taller than me, shambling along, hunched up in his shirt against the bite of the wind, his hands clamped in his armpits. And I, encased in parka, fleece-lined boots, visored hat with ear lugs, pelted along at a furiously indignant pace intended to get me to my front door as soon as possible and separate me
from my mortifying companion and his mortifying suggestions – that we go to his house and play with his tabletop hockey game, that we watch Yogi Bear and Boo Boo cartoons, or look at the hot rod and skin magazines he had five-finger discounted from the drugstore.