I did the prescribed checks and bolted toward the blue doors of the Frigate. The guys were waiting in the hall foyer. “Two minutes!” they exclaimed simultaneously.
I signed in at 22:58 hours. We high-fived and headed upstairs.
“What’s with that guy?” asked Richie.
“He hates me?”
“Bad luck,” said Grant. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing. I’ve never even talked to him. He wanted to know if I thought it was safe to drink and run the square.”
“Yeah, right,” Richie said. “How did he know we went to town for drinks?”
“Creepy. Maybe he spies on you,” Grant said.
The next day, right after breakfast, Meg and I had run just ten steps onto the square after leaving the Yeo Hall dining room when Helstone bawled at me from right behind us. Meg kept going, as usual.
“Miss Armstrong, do you know why I have stopped you today?” he asked.
“Please don’t make me late for class, Mr. Helstone.”
“Oh, all right, since you said please. I’m in a good mood today. Dismissed.”
In the Sawyer Building hallway, Meg was walking ahead of me, passing a group of fourth years loitering outside their classroom. A hail of catcalls and whistles broke out. Meg’s shoulders tensed and she kept walking without turning her head. One of the fourth years drawled, “I’d like to break a sweat with her!”
Meg stopped in her tracks, turned, and said, “Why don’t you go fuck yourselves?” Then she continued walking.
They yelled at her: “Halt!” “Come back!” “Get back here!”
She ignored them. I’d never seen her disobey a command before.
I still had to clear them. My stomach was riding tight against my spine. I kept my eyes front and clung to the far wall as I marched past. An argument had broken out and they were focused on each other.
“That was not appropriate behaviour toward her superiors.”
“She failed to show proper respect to a more senior cadet.”
“It looked like proper respect to me, you jerks,” our cadet squadron training officer, Mr. Jamieson, said. “You were offside.”
I sat down next to Meg in class. “Are you okay?” I asked. She looked pale and shaken and didn’t answer. “Why don’t you tell on them?”
“Are you nuts?” she asked angrily. “Who is going to stand up for me? They’re all buddies. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get charged.”
She wasn’t charged and never reported it. And of course no one apologized to her.
Early November, I formed up for circle parade amongst a handful of classmates left from other squadrons. As we rounded the homestretch turn, the second-year duty cadet was standing alone in the dark. “All those with two circles, fall out,” he said.
I fell out. Tears welled up in my eyes.
Recruit term finally ended for me in that moment. I had run over five hundred circles in total, more than 125 kilometres. Meg had run less than 150 circles. In Eight Squadron, Penny Miller hadn’t even come close to a hundred.
I ran home across the square as it started to snow. Simple star-shaped snowflakes streaked through the spotlights beaming up from the moat. Winter was coming. This snow planned to stick around. Just like me.
As my head hit the pillow that night, I felt relief that my recruit-term atonements were over and that life would be more manageable from now on. I could join my peers on the hamster wheel, trying to get good grades, to become bilingual, to earn crossed clubs for fitness — if I could ever do more than two chin-ups. This was the most hopeful I’d felt since I got here, when I had been so happy to escape my mother.
I was still happy about that. Even getting circles, brutal as they were, had been more or less predictable; my mother’s temper was wild and mercurial, and her punishments often painful and humiliating. I hid my bruises and pretended to the rest of the family and to my friends that nothing was wrong. My mother was a beautiful woman and my friends admired her. I liked it that way. I never dreamt of telling anyone the truth.
One night, I went into the kitchen while my mother was alone making dinner and forced myself to tell her what my brother Robert had been doing to me. I was only nine years old, but I knew well enough that the help I needed could come only from her.
I didn’t know how to tell her, so I just blurted it out. “Robert puts his thing in me,” I said.
“What thing?” she said.
“His thing.” I pointed to my crotch.
Her face darkened. “You’re not making any sense.”
“It’s true. I swear.” I knew she understood.
She rushed toward me and gripped a fingertip full of soft skin under my arm through my shirt. The pain shot like electricity up into the back of my eye. “Your brother would never do something like that,” she said giving my flesh a twist.
“He does.” I pulled my arm away.
She grabbed my bicep in her fist and snapped me closer, her face contorted with contempt. “Have you told anyone else?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell that story again. Go to your room and don’t come out until you’re ready to behave.” She released me, and I stumbled away.
I ran to my room and threw myself onto my bed. I crawled to the far corner against the wall and huddled into a ball. I rocked to calm myself and watched the tears soak into my pant legs. “I’ll be good. I’ll be good,” I whispered over and over. I never told another person and my mother did nothing to help me. I was on my own.
Now I had gotten away from her for good.
First thing the next morning, I jumped up and peeked out the Frigate window. Large stellar flakes were still floating down, hazing the view across the square. Several inches had accumulated overnight, forming a thick covering of blinding white. This meant tonight would be the wing snowball fight, all seven squadrons across the square against the Frigate. They would attack us and try to breach our walls and steal our kye.
They would fail. We would be prepared.
16
GREET THE MEAT
“Are you going to greet the meat?” Richie asked me over lunch.
The RMC–Queen’s meet-and-greet was an annual date drive advertised in all the women’s university dorms as a free party and drinks night hosted by RMC. It was mandatory for every cadet to bring a date to the RMC Christmas ball, held every year on the last Saturday of November before exam routine. The ball was a Kingston social calendar event. The meet-and-greet, or “greet the meat,” as the cadets called it, was timed as a serving platter for cadets without a date to find one.
“I don’t see the point,” I replied. “Do you?”
“You need a date.”
“Yeah. So, how does greet the meat help me with that? Queen’s guys are forbidden to attend,” I said.
“Come on. You don’t really expect us to host a party with free drinks and food so that Queen’s guys can hook up with Queen’s girls?”
“But how the hell am I supposed to get a date?”
“Go with a cadet,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
“Who? Like you?”
“Ha!”
“I wonder if Queen’s girls know that you call them meat?” I said angrily.
Colbert was sitting on the other side of Holbrook. He leaned forward. “I wonder if you know that guys who date female cadets are too lazy to masturbate?”
I’d heard this “joke” before but couldn’t believe he had just said it to my face. I leaned back and looked at the other guys at the table. Everyone was abruptly engrossed in eating, except Colbert, who was staring me down, a smug expression on his face. I grabbed my plate and left the table.
I snuck up to Luka’s room that night during study hours and threw myself onto his bed. “This place is fucked up,” I ranted. “I’m expected to get a date for the Christmas ball, and the guys talk like I’m a pariah. And I am probably going to fail out of engineering when it has nothing to do with my future life!”
“W
hoa. One thing at a time,” Luka said. He got up from his desk and stood over me.
“I haven’t done anything. I’ve been trying hard.”
“You’re a girl. That’s crime enough for some of these guys.”
“What’s it to them? If I can make it, why shouldn’t I have the same chances in life?”
“You’re cheeky? You don’t adore them? They love you? You won’t date them? How do I know? I don’t have the answers. Just watch out. I’ll do what I can to help you. First, you need a date for the ball?”
“Yes.”
“How about the president of the McMaster student union?”
“Be serious.”
“He’s my best friend from high school. We’re in Ukrainian Scouts together. I can ask him. I’ll call him tonight. My date’s coming from Stoney Creek and they could drive up together,” he said.
“You’re a Ukrainian Scout?”
“Yes.”
“Now? You’re still a scout?”
He nodded. I started laughing.
“Take it easy there!” he said.
“Sorry. It’s funny. So, I may have a date for the ball,” I said, letting out a big breath.
“Okay. Second,” Luka said, “I’ll lend you my first-year engineering notes if you promise to return them at the end of the year.”
“You have them here?”
“I picked them up for you last weekend when I went home.” He pulled a three-inch black binder from under his desk and handed it to me.
I jumped up, kissed his cheek, and hugged the binder to my chest. It was my most optimistic academic moment since I had arrived at RMC. Brad Boulter was still helping me with calculus and I was passing. With Luka’s notes, I felt like I had a real chance to make it all the way through the year.
Remembrance Day. We marched out to the Memorial Arch for the 11:00 a.m. service to honour fallen cadets. It was freezing cold and a light snow dusted us. We had a class-free day after the service, and I was looking forward to a nap and doing homework. Downstairs in Yeo Hall, next to the Hudson Squadron hat shelves, Fourth Year Jankovic made fun of my snow cover.
“You were shaking like a leaf out there,” he said. “I’m surprised you have any snow left on you.”
I laughed, leaned on the shelf to support myself, and shook the tiny snowdrifts off me. Then we walked into the dining room together.
After lunch, Mr. Kendall came to our room holding a piece of paper, looking grim. He asked Meg to give us privacy and she slipped out.
“Read this,” he said. It was a typewritten form, filled in with three different styles of handwriting.
Significant Performance Observation
11 Nov 80
Officer Cadet Armstrong KA
One Squadron
Where did it happen and what were the circumstances?
I Armstrong was seen in an overly casual conversation with IV Jankovic at 12:13hrs in the lower stairwell in Yeo Hall (where 1 Sqn usually put their caps). She was leaning, with elbow resting on the shelves, and both were laughing.
Why was Officer Cadet particularly effective / non-effective?
I-IV overfamiliarity
Recognition given/Coaching action taken on the spot?
No action taken on the spot. This SPO is for your info and action.
Name of Observer: G. Helstone CWTO
2. CFL ‘A’: Pass it on, then Duncan will keep it in his file in case of similar incidents. C. Favreau CSL 1 Sqn
3. CSC #3: Miss Armstrong must be a little more careful about this sort of thing. D. Morgan CFL ‘A’
I looked up at Mr. Kendall, who stood there smiling tensely.
“Is this for real?” I asked. “It hasn’t even been two hours since lunch.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Mr. Kendall.
“Has anyone noticed that Mr. Helstone is terrorizing me?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Isn’t anyone going to help me?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Not even you?” I asked. “You’re my section commander. You’re the one to help me.”
“Let me tell you a story,” he said. He gestured for me to sit down on the bed and took a seat at my desk. He told me that when he was a recruit, he got circles from his recruit flight section commander for being ugly. He had tried to redress the circles to his cadet flight leader, who concurred that he was ugly and would not retract them. He pushed the redress all the way to the cadet squadron leader. In the end, he ran three circles for being ugly.
“So, sometimes we have to choose. You can try to fight the system, but you won’t win,” he said. “You’re going to have to serve a correctional squadron runner duty.”
“Aye aye, Mr. Kendall. Permission to speak freely?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Are you a fan of Che Guevara? I looked him up in the library. He’s a Marxist revolutionary, a communist.”
“That’s right.”
“But don’t we hate communists?”
“How so?”
“Well,” I said, “for example, we use them as the enemy soldier targets on the firing range, complete with fur hats and a communist-star cap badge. Sorta like, um, Che Guevara?”
He slapped his knees and stood up. “You’re smart, Kate. You’ll need to find your own way to survive this place.”
An announcement was made about the weekend winter survival course in January. It would be a four-day cross-country ski expedition; we’d carry equipment packs and our own food and sleep in snow caves built as nightly shelter. I signed up.
“Are you nuts?” Meg asked.
“Mr. Kendall told me to find a way to survive in this place.”
“Don’t be so literal. He didn’t mean going on winter survival training. You couldn’t pay me to sleep in an igloo and chase after a bunch of mountaineering guys on cross-country skis through the Algonquin Park outback.”
“I like that kind of stuff. I’m not a very good cross-country skier, but I want to learn.”
“Jeez, Kate. That would be the last place I’d choose to go learn. It sounds horrible.”
A few days later, a sealed note arrived for me in the wing mail. Red block letters were written across the front of it: RETURN TO SENDER — IMPROPER ADDRESS!! My name, also in red pen, was underlined.
The typewritten note began “Dear John” and was addressed to the winter survival organizer and supposedly signed by me. The note was one long paragraph detailing reasons why I had doubts about attending the winter survival course, giving reasons like “Girls don’t have the intelligence to climb rocks” and “I don’t have the right clothes or makeup, and what if my nails got chipped?” It ended with “We girls just don’t have what it takes to hack the tough life.… I guess it’s right that we just stay at home and have kids while you men run the world properly. I’m sure you can find any spaz who would more easily fill my high heels! Thanks for giving girls a chance!”
I showed the note to Meg. “You see now that it’s imperative for me to go on the winter survival training course.”
“That’s one perspective,” she said. “Who do you think wrote it?”
“No idea. I’m going on that winter survival course, even if it kills me.”
“It just might.”
For the Christmas ball, I wore my scarlet tunic over the long blue skirt with red piping. It was my first formal ball, but I felt a lot more like the prince than Cinderella. I dreaded mixing in with civilian girls in long, flowing gowns. Female cadets could wear makeup, but only if it was impossible to notice that we were wearing makeup.
The New Gym was unrecognizable, strung with red and green streamers and bunches of white balloons, with chiffon gauze wrapped around the balcony railings and support poles. A sea of scarlet intermingled with dresses of every possible shade, from lavender to peach to gold metal. Young women were flirting with cadets in every corner of the room.
Luka had secured a table along one wall and waved me over. “Kate, I’d like to intr
oduce you to Olek Zelenko,” he said, “and my date, the beautiful Miss Diane.” They both smiled warmly at me.
Olek was tall, ruggedly handsome in his tuxedo, and, as I soon found out, charming. I had a real date. I wanted Colbert to see me with him, to show him that I had landed a respectable date, after his disgusting comment about masturbating cadets. While we danced our first waltz together, I asked Olek about McMaster, and he told me about the student union’s pro-choice fight. When he asked about life at RMC, I told him that college policy said pregnancy was grounds for expulsion from cadet life until “the matter resolved itself.”
The discussion triggered an evening-long comparison of McMaster’s forward-thinking political activism with RMC policies. Olek was shocked to learn that being gay or using drugs was grounds for being kicked out of the military altogether. And politically, that communists and Greenpeace activists were considered nearly the lowest forms of life, second only to feminists. Eventually, back at the table, Olek asked, “Why do you stay?”
“I can’t give up on my dream of becoming a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot.”
He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. “Why do you really stay?”
“I can’t seem to quit. It’s worse than I imagined, and yet somehow I don’t want to let them drive me out. If I quit, it will be when I’m winning, not when they’re winning.”
He smiled at me. “I’ve been telling Luka for years that this place is crazy and he needs to come to McMaster,” he said, slapping Luka’s back tenderly, “but he won’t quit either.”
Although I would rather have worn a dress, I was proud of my uniform, despite it being thick, hot, and unflattering — it made me recognizable as a cadet. Luka’s date, Diane, was gorgeous in her perfect makeup and teal satin ball gown. I saw the eyes of my fellow cadets follow many beautiful, well-coiffed women onto the dance floor — those same eyes that followed me around the college grounds — and I felt happy to have them on someone else for an evening.
December came fast. The cold made the landscape look fine and sharp. The first Sunday of exam routine fell on December 7, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At noon, the handful of Asian and Asian-looking cadets in the cadet wing walked into the dining hall together wearing kamikaze headbands and were promptly “laked” in the last explosion of noise before the silence of exam routine shrouded the grounds.
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