The Stone Frigate

by Kate Armstrong

  What is she trying to tell me?

  It’s simple enough to stand still, but being motionless in one position for an hour was excruciating. I started out supertight and keen in the resting position called stand at ease. Chin in, eyes straight ahead, left arm at my side with my hand in the fist for attention, right hand jutting my weapon out at the extension. I quickly understood. This was going to hurt.

  In time, I learned how to ease my lower back, how to keep my feet from falling asleep, how to make indiscernible movements to keep my circulation flowing. The art of tiny movements of toes in boots, knees bending and straightening, butt contracting and relaxing, hands soundlessly tapping, and slow, deep breathing. I learned to hide in plain view by imagining the boundaries of my physical self as a shield to conceal the squishy vulnerability I felt inside and to let my mind wander to happy thoughts in the peace of waiting our turn.

  Normally our room was last to be inspected. Mr. Morgan was almost always in a foul mood by the time he reached us. We snapped to attention when he and Mr. Kendall approached us. Mr. Kendall held a notebook at the ready to jot down our corrections.

  “Fraust,” Morgan said, holding up a minuscule scrap of lint in my line of sight.

  They made up a word for lint?

  “Take three circles, Recruit Armstrong.” He inspected me carefully, looking me up and down, front and back. He snatched my rifle from my hand, cracked the breech, and peered inside the muzzle. “Too much oil. Take three circles.”

  Morgan turned his attention to Meg and grabbed at her epaulette. “Irish pennant,” he said as he held a stray thread under her nose. “Take one circle, Miss Carter.” He peered into the open breech of her weapon. “Too dry. Take one circle.”

  The moment Morgan and Kendall entered our room, sounds of destruction echoed into the hall, reminding me of my mother in a rage. My body froze at attention and tensed in anticipation of an attack.

  After a particularly bad inspection, Mr. Morgan stormed down the length of the hallway and hollered at us more than normal. “Are we going backwards, people? Your rooms are a disgrace. I’m disappointed.”

  I was surprised to feel a pang of shame. Letting him down felt worse than being reamed out by him. Whatever was going to satisfy their standards was going to take some superhuman efforts on our part.

  “You’ve earned a round of wall sits! Look this way, recruits, for a demonstration,” said Morgan.

  Mr. Jansen grabbed Becker’s rifle, backed up to the wall, and slid into a squat with his legs bent at a ninety-degree angle while holding the weapon in both hands, straight armed at chest level.

  “Here’s how it works. You assume the position, and as soon as you can tell us the meaning of every part of the college cheer, you’ll be dismissed. Sound fair?” asked Morgan.

  “Yes, Mr. Morgan!”

  “Don’t biff your buds! Assume the position!”

  I pushed hard against the wall to keep as much weight as possible from my legs and raised my rifle parallel to the ground. My arms burned immediately. I heard Meg groan softly.

  “Let’s do this,” said Mr. Morgan.

  “GIMME A BEER!” blasted Mr. Jansen.

  We roared in sync, “BEER ESSES EMMA. TDV! WHO CAN STOP OLD RMC? SHRAPNEL. CORDITE. NCT! RMC!”

  Mr. Morgan started at the other end of the hall and asked, “Dahl, what does ‘Beer Esses Emma’ mean?”

  “It stands for the initials BSM which meant ‘battery sergeant major’ in early days of the college, Mr. Morgan!”

  Morgan’s voice moved closer. “Tate, what is ‘TDV’? Don’t fuck this up, Tate.”

  “Truth, duty, valour! The college motto, Mr. Morgan.”

  My arms quivered in an uncontrollable tremor.

  “Sloane, what is ‘Shrapnel’?”

  “Tribute to the wars fought by cadets,” she called out.

  “Holbrook, ‘Cordite’!”

  “The steel boat built by cadets and named Cordite after the smokeless propellant!”

  “Yes, Holbrook!”

  Mr. Morgan stood in front of me.

  “Armstrong, what is ‘NCT’?” he smirked at me. I was visibly shaking now, and a knot of shame caught in my throat.

  “No cunt tonight, Mr. Morgan.” I spoke directly in his face. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou.

  “What? Louder, Recruit Armstrong!” he yelled back.

  “NO CUNT TONIGHT!” I screamed.

  “Good! Did you hear that, boys? Recruit Armstrong says no cunt tonight,” he boomed. “Better luck next time. Release!”

  As we collapsed to the ground, I yelled, “Fat chance!” Everyone was laughing, except me. I was shaking and furious.

  That night, during our lights-out song, I stared up at the underside of Meg’s mattress; slats of wood and sagging wire bedsprings held it in place. As quietly as I could manage, I whispered to Meg, “What is the purpose of all this?”

  Meg leaned over the side of her bunk, and in the near-complete darkness I couldn’t discern her features. “To break us,” she said softly.

  “To what end?”

  “To build us back up again.”

  “As what?” I asked.

  “Good cadets?”

  “Does the process make sense to you?”

  “Not really.” Meg tipped back into her bed and I could no longer see her.

  “What if we do all this and end up becoming someone we don’t want to be. I don’t want to become some kind of cadet robot — a cadot.”

  A stillness hung in the air. Out on the square beyond our window the unnatural quiet was broken every so often by that strange, distant intermittent hum that continued to mystify me.

  Meg’s whisper cut the silence. “It’s amazing to me that you still believe you have any choice in the matter.”

  I heard Meg’s breathing change. She was asleep. For some reason, I lived in terror of losing myself altogether, though I had no idea who I was in the first place.

  A sense of superstition grew amongst us that we could help our chances of surviving by observing the rites and rituals and protocols. We keened our rooms and our uniforms. We studied the question of the day. We kept our weapons clean. We paid attention. We swung our arms high. We made our best effort. We didn’t volunteer or take unnecessary chances or try to stand out above our flight mates. We helped each other.

  The concept of individuality had been quashed in the opening speech and was reiterated several times a day. Do what you’re told and work as a team doing it. Eventually we mimicked our recruit staff’s way of talking and walking, even when alone with each other. The indoctrination process infested our language, our mannerisms, and our sense of humour, morphing some into unrecognizable versions of their earlier selves.

  My efforts only got me so far. I didn’t have enough hours in my day to get it all done. The hour of circle parade was the time allocated for personal keening. I was running eight circles a night.

  Recruits were not allowed in the halls after lights out except to visit the bathroom. The only loophole: sleepwalking. We were told, “Sleepwalking cadets will not be woken up, as this is medically counter-indicated, but sleepwalking cadets will do proper drill in the halls.”

  That’s when I discovered the Apache alarm clock — two large glasses of water at bedtime to wake me in the middle of the night. My childhood fear of wetting the bed was my ally now.

  Around three o’clock every morning, anyone looking into the hall would have seen me slow-march sleepwalking to the ironing room, arms straight out, iron in one hand and uniform in the other, glazed eyes staring ahead.

  The ironing “board” was a rock-hard, fabric-covered table that took up half the ironing room. It was like a waist-high mattress on huge wooden legs. The padded canvas cover was stained with watermarks where irons had tipped over and left rust-rimmed blotches. The air was close, with a smell like starched wet wool. I ironed with the light on and the door closed, all the while worried sick about the start of classes and adding homework to this routine.


  7

  ACADEMICS

  We went straight to the Old Gym for our textbooks, and when we got back, I marched down the hall at the specified quick-time pace, executed a crisp left turn, and halted in front of Mr. Kendall’s door. I knocked three times, as instructed.

  “Enter.”

  I opened the door, took one step forward into his room, and snapped to attention. This was my first time in a nonrecruit room. The decorative throw pillows and duvet cover, plants, and a collage of photo frames around his desk surprised me. The air carried a faint trace of incense. A khaki-coloured poster with the burgundy silhouette headshot of a long-haired guy in a beret with a communist star was the only wall art. Mr. Kendall was seated at his desk, flipping through a pile of papers.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Kendall, 14390, Recruit Armstrong, K.A., One Squadron,  A Flight, Three Section reporting,” I said to his back.

  “Yes, Miss Armstrong?” he said, turning halfway in his chair toward me.

  “Mr. Kendall, there’s been some kind of mistake. I’ve been given first-year engineering books but my degree program is commerce.”

  “Everyone here studies engineering in first year, Miss Armstrong. You switch to non-engineering-degree program curricula in second year,” he said.

  I was dumbstruck. I had come prepared for a different answer, feeling resolute that it was a simple mistake, but now my head swam with anxiety.

  “So, you’re the first,” he said, turning back to shuffle the papers on his desk into a stack.

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Kendall?”

  “First. First woman in history to be assigned a cadet college number at RMC.” He looked up at me. “College numbers are assigned alphabetically. Armstrong. That makes you first.”

  “Very well, Mr. Kendall,” I said uncertainly. Our eyes locked.

  “You say that now,” he replied with a grin. “Anything else?”

  My throat clenched into a burning lump. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. “No, Mr. Kendall,” I replied. “Permission to carry on?”

  “Carry on, Miss Armstrong.”

  I returned to our room parched and sweating. I had taken commerce prerequisites in high school: law, economics, statistics. I had only Physics 12, Chemistry 11, no biology, and poor math preparation. My high school didn’t even offer calculus. I went straight for the sink. The tap flowed glorious cold water. I gulped at the stream.

  “Do you know the guys piss in the sinks?” Meg said as she shelved her last textbook. I stood straight up and water splashed down my sweaty work dress shirt. “Dahl told me. They’re furthest from the men’s washroom. He said they just piss in their sink. Everyone does it.”

  “We don’t though. Right?” I looked at her.

  Meg burst out laughing. “God. No!”

  “Good,” I said, bending over the sink again.

  One night, the ironing room door flew open during my sleepwalking session and Holbrook smirked at me from the doorway. I jumped back and yelped.

  “I love how easy it is to get you,” he said. “I’m usually here earlier. I nearly slept through.” He laid his pants out on the other half of the table. I noticed my pant legs were longer than his.

  Unexpectedly, the door flew open again and banged against the wall. Mr. Kendall stood there wearing an ankle-length kaftan covered in a motif of pastel-coloured peace signs and flowers. Richie and I switched to living-dead mannerisms, staring straight ahead and continuing to iron. Kendall laughed and closed the door.

  “This place is fucking nuts,” Richie whispered.

  “No kidding. What the hell was he wearing?” I asked.

  “Have you seen the poster of Che Guevara in his room?”

  “The guy in the beret?”

  “‘The guy in the beret.’ You crack me up, Armstrong. Che’s only the most famous communist guerrilla fighter ever. He fought for Castro and got killed in Bolivia or somewhere.”

  “How the hell would I know that? I’m from Abbotsford.”

  “Oh, there’s a good defence.”

  We ironed in silence for a moment.

  “How are we going to survive if we keep getting so many circles?” I asked. Richie was holding a close second to my tally.

  “Beats me. Every day, I just keep going, getting as much done as I can. The hole keeps getting deeper,” he said.

  “I get them everywhere. Everywhere. Inspection. Meals. Even on fucking circle parade itself.” I paused. “Do you ever regret coming here?”

  “Every two minutes.”

  “I feel sick just thinking about the start of engineering classes.”

  I secured the iron cord around the handle in exact loops with the plug trapped in a specific fashion, held out the hot iron at ninety degrees, and slow-marched back to the recruit hallway. I slid down the hall ruminating on the ridiculousness of my situation. My problem was quitting. No matter how insane or hard things got, I had never quit anything. Besides, if I quit, it wasn’t just me quitting. It was a woman who couldn’t cut it. The translation: women can’t cut it.

  On Labour Day weekend, the entire cadet wing returned from summer training and triggered the start of college life in earnest. On Sunday night as I was heading out for circle parade, I stepped into the hall and saw two second-year cadets standing there with a coffee urn and a tray full of food. Mr. Kendall walked up to them and pointed toward our tiny utility room next to the fire escape doors.

  “A Flight, kye has arrived,” he announced. “As the cadet wing returns, so doth the cadet wing traditions. All those with circles, fall in outside. The rest of you, come on down to the utility room for kye!”

  After circle parade, I asked Meg, “What’s kye?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” Meg replied. She told me that each night at 10:00 p.m., an evening snack called kye was served. Milk, hot chocolate, toast, peanut butter, and jam, and apparently pastries and cookies were sometimes included on special occasions.

  My stomach rumbled.

  With the start of classes, squadron duties were activated and rotation between English week and French week commenced, alternating languages for all announcements and college business.

  Alphabetical order put me on squadron runner duty first of all the recruits. The job turned out to be easy enough: run across the square four times a day to pick up mail for the squadron, deliver the mail, ring the Frigate bell at precisely noon every day, call out announcements at 22:00 hours in the language of the week on each hallway, update the days-to-grad count for the fourth-year class, spend the evening in the orderly room answering the phone, and make sure the squadron first-aid box was stocked with condoms — free condoms for male cadets to use during trips to town.

  On Monday, September 1, I stood at the head of the hall on the third floor, terrified, and made the first set of announcements for the year from the script:

  Attention! Attention! Attention! All personnel on board, let it be known that: tomorrow evening at 18:30 hours there will be a sports fair for recruits and cadets to sign up for varsity teams. There are 257 days until graduation. Thank you.

  Six hallways. Six repetitions. Five hallways full of curious male cadet faces leaning out their doorways to check out the new female recruit. The humiliation was worth the silver lining payoff of being excused circle parade and having my first chance to get some kye.

  At breakfast the next morning, the dining hall was crowded with a sea of staring eyes.  A quiet fell over the room as our recruit flight lined up for food. Some of the cadets put down their utensils or held them slackly; their audible comments trailed in our wake.

  “Oh, look. That one’s a hottie.”

  “I’d like to get myself a piece of that.”

  “Heellllo, sweetheart.”

  “She’s gonna need a permanent mattress on her back for the amount of action she’s gonna get around here.”

  “You can have the short redhead. I want the tall one with the brown hair.”

  “Who said admitting girls
was a bad idea? One look at her rack and I’m warming up to it.”

  My head trembled with the effort of not turning to see the faces attached to these voices. I fought the urge to fold my arms across my chest and hide my breasts as shame swept through me. The act of eating while being watched felt surprisingly vulnerable, and being forced to eat square meals embarrassed me.

  A class curriculum was posted on our door — the first-year cadets had all the same classes together — next to our individual disposition indicators, which we were to use to indicate where we were. The choices were in class, at sports, at library, across the wing, at the mess. A paperclip slid up and down the list. Most of those choices were not available to the first years until after recruit term, but the list gave a glimpse of hope for the promise of another life starting soon.

  On the first morning of classes, I grabbed my notebook in my left hand and slid my marker to “in class.” Meg and I clipped down the stairs together, and as her left foot hit the main-floor landing, her right arm flew up to shoulder height. She marched out to the white line on the parade square and I was right behind, in sync with her.

  “Recruits, halt!” blared an unfamiliar voice from behind us. We halted side by side. A second-year cadet swooped around in front of us, much too close for comfort.

  “I’m Second Year Arsenault. Do you know why I have stopped you?” He addressed the question to me. He had pretty-boy prep looks and a slight French Canadian accent.

  “No, Mr. Arsenault,” we answered as our flight mates streamed past us.

  “Do you think you’re fucking cheerleaders? Carry your books at your side, not squeezed to your chest like some schoolgirls! I’m reporting you to Mr. Morgan for two circles each. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. Arsenault,” we said. We dropped our left arms to our sides and squeezed the books tight to our hips.

  “Carry on, recruits!” he spat out and marched away.

  We executed the required about-turns and marched in a semicircle back toward the white line marking the edge of the parade square. In perfect synchronicity, we halted, looked right, looked forward, looked left, looked forward, and then raised our books to our bodies for running and crooked our right arms at a ninety-degree angle. This was proper running-the-square protocol.