by Brian Doyle
The first day of school was very short and by noon we were finished and I met Fleurette outside.
We decided to show each other our new schools. Fleurette’s school and my school were attached. They didn’t look attached though. They looked like one huge building. I showed Fleurette the big wide steps and the wide cement railings that were big enough to put statues on. I told her what had happened about the hand-stand and how the vice-principal pushed me down the stairs.
“Why did he do that?” she said. She had her eyes open wide and they were turning black.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He shouldn’t have done that,” she said, with a tight look on her face. I was sorry I told her about it because it seemed to scare her so much.
“Did he hurt you?” she said, searching my face with her eyes.
“No, it was nothing,” I said. “How could he hurt me? Nobody can hurt me.” Then I showed her the shield and the torch and the words carved underneath and then we went in one of the six heavy doors tall enough to fit giants, and inside the doors the smooth, wide marble steps and the gold railings going up to the huge lobby outside the assembly hall, with the curved ceilings carved and coming down like cement cloth to the tall fat pillars.
“Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?” Fleurette said. She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what I was showing her.
Leaning against one of the pillars was a tall boy by himself who was watching us.
I showed Fleurette the two shields carved in iron on the wall with the names of all the students from Glebe Collegiate Institute who were dead because of the First World War and the Second World War. I looked back at the pillar and the boy was gone. I showed Fleurette the oak case with the glass top with the holy-looking book open in there, with the wide purple ribbon bookmark in it and the fancy lists of the names of the dead with the capital letters drawn with gargoyles and animals and vines and flowers and cherubs and angels peeking out. I wondered what it would be like to have your name in that book for everybody to see.
“Wouldn’t you have to be dead first?” Fleurette said.
I felt like somebody was watching us. I looked over and the tall boy was behind another one of the pillars, peeking around. He was very skinny and had flat black hair with grease on it. His ears stuck out quite a bit and his face was long and pointed like a fox.
“Wouldn’t you have to be dead first?” Fleurette said again.
“Let’s go over to your school,” I said.
“Why?” she said, “there’s nothing to see there.”
“I want to. Come on,” I said.
We walked up the long block to the entrance of the High School of Commerce. It had ordinary doors, ordinary steps, small cement railings that maybe one person could sit on. Inside, there was a little sign carved in the wall saying when the school opened.
While we were reading the wall the guy with a face like a fox came up behind us and pretended to read it too. He had skinny arms with black hair on them and bony hands with long fingernails. His eyebrows were black and really thick and they joined in the middle over his nose.
Then we left and walked down to Ottawa South to get the Uplands bus. Denny Dingle was there.
Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell was telling Denny and me about how nice it was at the High School of Commerce and how everybody was excited about meeting everybody and about how pleasant and kind all the teachers were.
I told her how rotten I felt when they made us get out of line and sign a special paper before we got our books. Denny just laughed and pulled fifty cents out of his pocket.
“If they want to pay for us, let them pay,” he said. Then he asked us if we wanted to get off at Kelly’s Inn near the sandpits and he’d treat us. The way he talked he didn’t seem to care about what they thought about him at the school.
We got off the bus and went into Kelly’s Inn on the highway and Denny bought us a bottle of Kik and some chips with ketchup and vinegar and lots of salt.
While Denny was lashing more salt on his chips he asked us if we wanted to go over to his place down the road. We could meet his whole family, especially his sister. His sister was twenty years old and was married to a guy and had a baby who was not even one year old. Denny was saying he was trying to teach the baby to say “Uncle Denny.” It was hard to believe that Denny was somebody’s uncle.
How could somebody who was so skinny and who had so many pimples be somebody’s uncle?
His house was in some trees in a gully and looked like it would fall down if you touched it. “We’re not rich enough to live in Uplands Emergency Shelter,” he said, laughing.
When we went in they were all sitting around the room sipping lemonade. Out the window you could see the sandpits in the distance.
Denny introduced me first to the baby who was asleep in a basket. “This is the baby,” he said. “She is no year’s old and her name is Doris.” The baby had almost no hair and one of her little fists was stuck up in the air.
“And this is the baby’s mother,” said Denny. “She’s twenty years old and her name is Doris.” Doris looked just like Denny only she wasn’t skinny and she didn’t have any pimples and she was beautiful.
“And this is the baby’s grandmother. She’s forty years old and her name is Doris.” This Doris looked just like the last Doris except her face was a little fatter and her hair was starting to go gray. She looked pretty proud of her son Denny—of how smooth an introducer he was.
“And this is the baby’s great-grandmother. She’s sixty years old and guess what? Her name is Doris.” Doris had gray hair and was knitting. She made a sweet smile.
“And this is the baby’s great-great-grandmother. She is eighty years old and her name is, of course, Doris!” Doris was rocking and sipping lemonade. Her hair was snow white. She laughed. She was enjoying the introductions.
“And this is the baby’s great-great-great-grandmother. She is one hundred years old and she’s the greatest Doris of them all!”
The oldest Doris was humped over in a little chair in the corner with a blanket around her, sipping her lemonade through a straw. She nodded at me. She had hardly any hair at all. She stuck her hard little fist in the air as if she had just won a big boxing match.
We all had some lemonade and then the baby woke up and Denny tried to make little Doris say “Uncle Denny” a few times but she wouldn’t. She just smiled and blew some bubbles at him, and then we left.
We left all the Dorises and their lemonade and walked home past the Golf Club and the airplane run-ways to Building Number Eight, where we were richer than Denny and all the Dorises. Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell and I talked and laughed about how funny Denny and all the Dorises were, but Fleurette didn’t know I was doing two things at once. I was laughing, but inside I felt sad and scared.
Sad and scared because of what I did to Mrs. O’Driscoll near my locker that day.
Outside Fleurette’s door I said goodbye to her and sort of hung around to see if she’d invite me in.
She always seemed different when she was around her door. She opened it and slipped in so that I couldn’t see anything. But for just a second I saw her mother at the kitchen table with her head down on her arms.
7 Job!
IN SCIENCE, the guy sitting beside me at my table was the skinny guy with the black flat hair and the one eyebrow who was spying on Fleurette and me the day before. He told me that he was getting some special grade nine guys to join a club called the Junior Boys’ Hi-Y. He said it was a very special club. He said that his older brother was the president of the Senior Boys’ Hi-Y and that someday he would take his brother’s place and be the president. His name was Doug. Then he asked me who the girl was I was hanging around with. What was her name? Was she my girlfriend? Then he showed me some other guys around the room who he might get into the special club.
“It’s a very special club,” he said. “And it’s hard to get into. People who get into it become successes in later
life,” he said. “I could maybe get you in if you wanted.” I was trying to figure out why he was being so nice to me.
In fact, I was trying to figure out almost everything about school.
It all seemed pretty confusing. In history we were studying our book, Building the Canadian Nation. Our history teacher read out how Henry Hudson was put in a little boat with his son and how the mutineers pushed the little rowboat out into the icy water and how they sailed away, and how Henry Hudson and his son were never seen again.
And all the way home on the Uplands bus I kept thinking about what Henry Hudson and his son talked about as they rowed and floated along looking for shore and hoping they’d maybe find a way to live somehow in the cold in Canada.
Denny Dingle told me to quit worrying about it.
Fleurette said she thought it was nice that I would worry about something like that.
And I kept thinking about how awful it would have been if they didn’t say anything to each other. But that couldn’t be. They must have said stuff to each other. They must have given up rowing after a while and the father must have asked the son if he was cold and if he wanted a drink of water and the son must have come up to the middle seat in the boat and sat inside the father’s coat to keep warm. There was a picture of them in the book.
And they must have gone to sleep that way.
Saying things to each other.
Denny kept getting A’s on his tests. I was getting D’s and F’s.
“All you have to do is remember the dates,” Denny said, “never mind that other stuff.”
And in history the teacher made us read about Canada and its native peoples.
He told us that the native Canadians had no animals except dogs. There were no horses, cows, pigs or sheep. The white man brought all those animals over with him and gave them to the Indians.
“They had animals,” Denny said, “but they were all wild. It’s common sense.”
We read in the book how the Canadian Indians lived from hand to mouth and from place to place. And how some other Indians lived in a “longhouse” the book said. The longhouse was made of a wood frame covered with bark, and was divided on each side into several cubicles, each occupied by a family, while down the center ran a common passageway in which the fires were built.
It was sort of like where I lived except for the bark and the fires.
Another A for Denny and an F for me.
And the Hi-Y guys all laughed when the teacher made us read in the book how the Indians never invented the wheel. Everybody else had the wheel. Everybody except the caveman. And he was pretty well just a monkey.
And then we tried to have a discussion.
“And now we’ll have a discussion about that,” the teacher said.
And a Hi-Y guy got up and said that he thought that because the Indians didn’t invent the wheel they were the stupidest people on the planet Earth. They were very unsuccessful.
“And what do you have to say about that, Lawrence?” the teacher said to Broken Arrow, an Indian kid who sat at the back who was from Maniwaki with his big dark face.
“They had water and canoes. They didn’t need wheels,” said Broken Arrow.
And all the Hi-Y guys and the Welfare Club girls laughed and giggled and whispered things about Broken Arrow and the teacher stamped his foot and said that will be enough of that.
And the discussion was over.
That’s the way all the history discussions wound up.
“That will be enough of that!”
And I kept wondering how these guys got to be Hi-Y guys so fast. They were new at the school, just like I was.
And Denny Dingle just laughed and told me to quit worrying about it.
We weren’t allowed to go over to the Commerce side of the school between classes or at lunchtime so at noon I’d eat my lunch fast just standing around my locker and around the Tuck Shop and then I’d go down to the corner of Bronson and Carling and meet Fleurette and we’d walk around the block together a few times until the bell rang.
And in guidance we had a guidance book where there were a whole lot of questions and answers with little drawings beside them. One question was about applying for a job. It asked if you would apply for a job this way(a) or this way (b). Under (a) there was a picture of a guy applying for a job sitting in a chair in front of some big shot’s desk. The big shot was there with his two phones and his pen set and his photograph of his family and his face, very interested, looking at the younger guy in the chair. The younger guy who was applying for the job was sitting up very straight with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap and his pants all pressed just like knives and his shoes shining with little windows of shininess in each one and his tie up nice and neat and straight and his suit jacket buttoned and his hair all slicked back and a big smile on him, but somebody had inked in his teeth and crossed his eyes. He looked like the guy who ran the Tuck Shop except for the inked-in part.
Under (b) it showed the same big shot at the same desk but this time with a really disgusted look on his face like he had just swallowed a piece of rotten fish or something. The younger guy who was applying for the job wasn’t in the other chair, he was sitting on the big shot’s desk. He had pushed over the pen set and the family picture to make room for himself and he was leaning over breathing in the big shot’s face. His hair was all knotted and ratty and his face was dirty-looking and there was spray coming out between his scummy-looking teeth. He had on a tight T-shirt and you could see the hair sticking out from under his arms. His pants were filthy and the bottoms were in rags and his shoes were turned up at the toes and scuffed and untied. There were mud marks on the floor where he had walked in mud or something worse. There were little squiggly lines coming up from each footprint.
Was the answer (a) or (b)?
These were the kind of questions we got to answer in our guidance book.
You were supposed to pick which was the best way to apply for a job. Very confusing. Did this have something to do with why I didn’t get all those jobs I applied for?
And most days after school I’d meet Fleurette and Denny and we’d walk down to the Uplands bus and talk and laugh about school. And Fleurette would try to help me figure out some of these confusing things about school and some of the subjects we took.
The thing I didn’t tell them was this: that there was one thing I had figured out perfectly about school, and that was how not to see, ever to see, Mrs. O’Driscoll. I knew exactly where she’d be every minute of the day, and I was always somewhere else.
And in science we always seemed to be taking the grasshopper.
The Hi-Y guys had more fun there than anywhere.
One day they had a bushel basket of leaves tied out the window. Every time Mr. Tool, our science teacher, turned around to draw another tibia or a mandible on the grasshopper one of the Hi-Y guys closest to the window jumped up and grabbed a handful of leaves out of the basket and fired them up in the air over the class and then sat down and buried his head in his grasshopper drawing. Mr. Tool turned around again just in time to see the last few leaves falling.
“Where are those leaves coming from?” Mr. Tool asked.
“Probably blew in the window,” the Hi-Y guys said.
“How can they blow in the third floor window, boys? Leaves don’t fly around at this altitude.”
“Must have been a hurricane or something,” the Hi-Y guys said.
While all this was going on I had a little chat with Doug, the big shot in the Junior Hi-Y, who shared my table with me. His hand on my arm was cold and clammy and his eyebrow was moving up and down like a window blind.
“Why don’t you put your name in to join the Junior Hi-Y?” said Doug.
“What is the Hi-Y, anyway?” I said. I wanted to hear him explain it some more.
“It’s a very special club. We have meetings every Thursday night at the downtown YMCA and we organize a big dance once a year and executives get to sit on the stage sometimes to
welcome important visitors to the school during assemblies. We also get trips. Last year the Senior Hi-Y went to New York City to the United Nations to encourage peace among all nations in this world of ours. The president and the vice-president get their pictures in the paper every year. Many former Hi-Y members are now big successes in the world. You have to be all-round to join. Are you all-round?”
“All-round what?” I said.
“All-round. You know. Be on a team and also get pretty good marks. And fool around a bit. Not be a goody-goody.”
More leaves were floating down and Mr. Tool was looking at the ceiling to see where they were coming from.
“Here’s an application form. Fill it out and I’ll hand it in,” said Doug. Then he said, “How’s your girlfriend?”
I looked at the application form while leaves floated down to the floor.
NAME:
ADDRESS:
PHONE NUMBER:
AMBITION:
EXP ERIENCE IN CLUBS:
AWARDS:
TEAMS:
FATHER’S OCCUPATION:
MAKE AND YEAR OF FATHER’S CAR:
RELIGION:
While I was looking at the application I noticed somebody at the classroom door. It was Chubby, the principal of Glebe Collegiate. He leaned in and asked Mr. Tool if there was an O’Driscoll boy in the class.
I went to the door and out into the hall and Chubby, who was puffing deep and hard, told me about a job that I could have. I wondered how he would even know my name. Chubby was a fat man with a wrinkly suit that seemed too small for him and he leaned hard on a cane. So hard that his knuckles were white.
“I have a part-time job for you O’Driscoll, if you want it. Two nights a week. You stay overnight at an elderly lady’s house so she won’t be alone. That’s the two nights her nurse takes a holiday. Tuesday and Thursday. Every Tuesday and Thursday you go over after school and sleep over. She’s old and sick. She needs somebody with her. She gets scared by herself.”
“Why do I get to get the job?” I said to Chubby, hoping he’d get his breath.