by Alice Pung
The girls whooped and applauded, and some even stamped their feet. In church! I sat there, my hands clenched tight beneath my kilt. You had to hand it to Brodie: she knew how to play it both ways. Just when you thought that her speech was going to become so toadying that you would have to chuck a cushion onstage for her genuflecting knees, she compared the school to a dick and a fanny, a move so unexpected that a ripple of orgiastic hilarity flowed through the crowd. The applause was deafening.
Brodie had pulled such a swift one that even the teachers were applauding her ability to imbue four hundred girls with the Laurinda spirit. Some—the weaker ones—were chuckling, even though they found the joke distasteful, to show that they had a sense of humor. Others laughed outright, convinced it was just another example of student high jinks.
Mr. Sinclair had a grimace on his face, the look you’d have if you were watching someone embarrass themselves by telling a very unfunny fart joke. Mrs. Grey’s expression was one of carefully contrived neutrality, giving nothing away. The person who was least impressed was Reverend Mathes, standing there in his robes.
We did not see Ms. Vanderwerp in Term Two. “Maybe she’s offed herself!” Gina suggested, with no small amount of vicious glee.
Although the staff never spoke about it, we knew Ms. Vanderwerp had gone away on stress leave. Mr. Abraham took her place, a towering man with an Easter Island face and gray hair in his ears. He walked into the classroom and gave us a look as if to say, go on, try the tampon trick on me.
But we would never have done it to a male teacher, Linh. There would have been shame in pulling something like that on a man—but not a shame about hurting him, because men aren’t hurt that way. They are the ones who bond over poop- and piss-themed road trip movies, after all. It was the stigma of being female. We’d have been too embarrassed to hear a man rail about how disgusting our bodies were.
I also found out why the girls called Mrs. Grey the Growler. Back at Christ Our Savior, although we had a bulging arsenal of multilingual profanities, we didn’t know Aussie colloquialisms so well. Once I discovered what this nickname meant, I understood all its associations in a different way: the Hairy Growler, the Red Gaping Jaws of Growler. And all the while I had thought that they were just describing her demeanor! I also worked out that Ms. Vanderwerp was called Ms. V not just as a shortening of her long surname…the V stood for something else.
I was learning a new language here, the language of Laurinda’s snarky and disgruntled majority. A language that was peppered with sexual innuendo, because proper Laurinda girls simply did not do sex. It was too visceral. No one except Gina acknowledged that we might have crushes or want boyfriends just as badly as the girls from Christ Our Savior. No one faced up to the reality that maybe some girls were already having sex, and a lot of it. We were meant to be above all that.
Yet the teachers who called us “young ladies” treated us as anything but. And the more repressed the students felt, the more colorful their hidden hateful language became. It was a thousand times more obscene than anything a Stanley druggie might blurt out in an angry haze, because it was so calculated and deliberate. What a dichotomy—these nice girls and their foul language!
And here you were either being told off or being backed by the school, depending on your standing. If any other girl had made the joke that Brodie had in chapel, she would have been suspended. But Brodie had diplomatic immunity. It was ages until I figured out why, but when I did, a heavy weight dropped inside of me, a weight I could not dislodge.
The Cabinet had weeded out one of the weaker teachers. The collective belief among the other girls was that Ms. Vanderwerp had been unfit to teach. “My father said that they shouldn’t let teachers like her into the class anyway, if she couldn’t control the students,” I overheard a girl named Tiffany tell her friend Cynthia. That was when I understood why the school didn’t have a student representative council. The Cabinet would always be around to make sure things were kept in order.
—
“Mrs. Leslie, I can’t concentrate,” I blurted out the next time we had a tutorial. “Something really bad has happened.”
I needed to tell another adult, someone responsible, and someone who seemed to care about things other than the Laurinda spirit. I sensed that, of the teachers, only Mrs. Leslie might understand. A woman who cried over my essay about selling eggs with my grandma might not even know that her daughter was part of the Cabinet. After all, my parents had only a vague idea what I did at school.
“What is it, dear?” she asked, concerned. “Bad things at home?”
“No,” I said. “At this school.”
There was a long pause. “Oh? That’s interesting,” she finally said, although she didn’t seem that interested. “What sort of thing, Lucy?”
How could I tell her that her virtuous daughter had contributed to a teacher’s nervous breakdown?
“Well, I, umm…I think something bad has happened to Ms. Vanderwerp.”
“What do you mean, dear?”
“We screwed her over massively” was how you’d put it, Linh, but I’d learned that unless you put things in a palatable way here, no one was ever going to listen to you. “I think we caused Ms. Vanderwerp to quit.”
She laughed, indulgently. “Surely you must be mistaken, Lucy?”
“What?”
“We don’t say ‘what,’ we say ‘pardon,’ ” she corrected. “How do you mean you caused her to ‘quit’?” She said it as if we’d helped Ms. Vanderwerp stop smoking.
“Well, what we did in class…”
“Oh, Lucy! Sweetie, you have been worried about this? Ms. Vanderwerp has just gone on long-service leave. Family-related matters. I thought there was an announcement at assembly?”
I didn’t even know Ms. Vanderwerp had a family. I’d always imagined her living alone with a cat and a box of tea bags. “But the last day of Term One—”
She cut me off. “Students will always play pranks, Lucy. It’s part of being young. Mind you, not all students are as mature and well behaved as you, and not all pranks are acceptable, but growing up sometimes means testing your boundaries.”
“But, Mrs. Leslie, it wasn’t—”
I couldn’t continue, because Mrs. Leslie had decided she wanted to tell me a story. “Lucy, when I was a student here we had a teacher—mean as anything—named Mrs. May. She taught home economics. Back then, we all had to learn to cook, believe it or not. And if Mrs. May was displeased with your pie or your stew, she would tip it on the floor—right there on the floor!—and make you clean it up.
“So one day we all hid our oven timers around the classroom. She was an older lady, so we climbed on top of the kitchen benches and hid them in the fan vents where she couldn’t reach. We timed them to go off every two minutes. Thirty girls, thirty timers! Can you imagine?”
Mrs. Leslie’s eyes grew distant and unfocused even as she laughed. She was back at Laurinda and a student again, with a draconian teacher like Mrs. May, who was their version of Mrs. Grey, I suppose. Amber’s mum was fourteen again. There was no getting through to her now.
—
After two weeks, I was surprised that no one had so much as mentioned Ms. Vanderwerp. She was gone, like an embarrassing passing of wind in a perfumed sitting room. Yet something had fundamentally changed about this school. Beneath the sandstone, tectonic plates were shifting and new formations were about to rise to the surface.
The first of these changes came to light in Mrs. Grey’s office. By now I refused to call her the Growler. I did not like or respect her any more than I had at the start of the year—it was more that I respected myself. I had learned from Harshan’s example that you did not need to kowtow to the Cabinet. So at least in my mind, she would revert to her surname, that nebulous hue between black and white.
“Come in, Miss Lam.”
I entered her office and closed the door. Her nose whistled like a kettle sometimes, the only sign that something unsettling was going on
inside. Otherwise, she always seemed as calm as a stainless steel urn. Her nose was whistling now.
She wasted no time on small talk. “Miss Lam, where do you see yourself in the scheme of things?”
“Pardon, Mrs. Grey?”
“Where is your place at Laurinda?”
“Here,” I replied, confused, and then rushed to explain. “I mean, not in this room, of course, because this is your office.”
She looked at me for a long while before speaking, and as I watched I could hear waves crashing in my eardrums. “Tell me, Miss Lam, where did you learn this very frustrating method of making irrelevant distinctions and not answering what you are asked?”
She’d asked me questions about my life, things I was sure she would never ask any other student—how much my parents made, and whether my mother collected welfare. Now I had no idea what she was talking about or what she wanted from me.
“Miss Lam, it seems to me that you have been remedied, so to speak.”
“Pardon, Mrs. Grey?”
“Mrs. Leslie tells me that you’ve shown marked improvement. As a result, you will move back to your ordinary English classes. No more remedial English. Do you feel ready, Miss Lam?”
“No.”
She had not expected this answer.
“Mrs. Leslie feels you are ready. Why do you believe that you aren’t?”
“I’m not.” I spent almost every other class with the Cabinet and Katie. My time with Mrs. Leslie was a refuge from the madness.
“Why do you insist on lying, Miss Lam? Did your Catholic school not teach you the eighth commandment?”
“But I’m not lying, miss,” I replied. “I still don’t know whether…”
She stared so hard and long at me that I stopped talking and looked away.
“Let me tell you something, Miss Lam.” She leaned in close. “From the very beginning I sensed that you were displeased to be doing remedial English. We organized that for your benefit, so you would be able to catch up. You have been resentful, and now not only have you progressed to wasting Mrs. Leslie’s valuable time by talking about things other than the texts, you have also presumed a familiarity with staff that is disrespectful.”
“That’s not true. I really like Mrs. Leslie.”
“I have known Mrs. Leslie for decades. I know she has a tendency to be soft on students. That woman will make a girl feel she is her greatest champion and confidante.” She paused. “She will be very upset with me about this, but I am not gentle like her, so let me tell you, Miss Lam, that she is not there to gossip with you about the goings-on of your teachers.”
I suddenly wanted to be out of there, away from the searing eyes of Mrs. Grey. I knew now that Mrs. Leslie had mentioned—most likely in passing, most likely innocuously—my concerns about Ms. Vanderwerp.
“Here is what will happen this term,” she told me. “You will move to the regular English class. You will no longer have lessons with Mrs. Leslie.”
This was not how it was supposed to happen. Mrs. Grey had let me win a Pyrrhic victory: I was in the regular English class not as an acknowledgment of how good I was, but as a punishment.
—
At lunchtime I would go to the library before anyone could find me. Some days the world seemed too full of people, and I would tuck myself away in the back corner where the larger-folio books were, the books about art and architecture that didn’t fit on the ordinary shelves, and I would pull one off the shelf and look through it. I saw from the date stamps that the last time some of them had been borrowed was before I was born.
One day I discovered a stack of Laurinda yearbooks. I’d seen the long row of navy blue spines every time I went there, but they didn’t have any writing so I had assumed they were useless old journals. They dated back to 1902 in that format; there were also older ones, which were smaller and had black cloth covers.
I spent quite a few lunchtimes leafing through those yearbooks. I would usually get through about ten—a decade’s worth—in the hour, before I got hungry and had to go to my locker to get my sandwich. They were mostly dreary, identical images of grinning girls in sports uniforms, the same cute pictures of kindergarten students painting, the same reports on the Red Cross appeal. Yet after looking through so many of them, I noticed that certain faces seemed to repeat: a freckle-faced girl named Claire from 1971 would reappear in a plumper form as Cecilia in 1979, but they would not share the same last name.
Each decade had its own look—the long, straight hair and the part down the middle in the seventies, the poufy underskirts in the school plays of the fifties, the feathered haircuts in the eighties. The most fascinating period for me was the early 1900s. Even then, more than a hundred years ago, if you looked carefully, you could detect the differences between the girls. All fourteen girls in the 1903 photograph were wearing white gloves, but while most girls had just plain ones, some had gloves with three or four pearl buttons down the sides. Those girls also had the best seats—in the front, on either side of the teacher in her long, dark dress—while most of the group were left standing.
One afternoon, when Mrs. Leslie was returning some books to the library, she spotted me getting a yearbook from the shelves. I quickly shoved it back and pretended to look at the spine of a book about Caravaggio.
“Lucy!” she called out, sauntering over. “It’s so wonderful to see you!”
I smiled.
“You’re in Amber’s English class now! How are you doing there?”
“Good.”
“I’ve missed your insights,” she said. “You must be studying Emma now. How I love that book! How far into it are you, Lucy?”
“The very beginning.”
She asked if I was enjoying it, and I lied. This was what I was learning at Laurinda, Linh: in order to be nice or polite, you had to lie. Back at Christ Our Savior, you could tell a teacher straight-out that you did not like a book, so long as you didn’t use swear words. But here I felt I was constantly tiptoeing around egos like they were eggs, and one clumsy step could mean someone’s self-esteem would come leaking out.
“I have the BBC collection of Emma and Pride and Prejudice,” Mrs. Leslie told me. “Amber just adores Mr. Darcy. Perhaps you could come over after school one day and watch it with us?”
I marveled at the naïveté of Mrs. Leslie, Linh, a grown-up who thought she could put her daughter and me together to watch a few videos and we would become best friends while she brought us milk and cookies.
“Sure, Mrs. Leslie,” I said. “That sounds like fun.”
As you know, my mother never did anything slowly. She gulped down her coffee. She slurped up her food, even laying down sheets of newspaper on the table when she was eating so that the splatters could just be scrunched up and tossed in the bin. She’d eat grapes from a bowl next to her sewing machine with a wet towel folded beside her to wipe her fingers on, so that they wouldn’t stain the denim or polar fleece pieces.
When she was pregnant with the Lamb, she had bad morning sickness; once she ate a bowl of pho and vomited it back out again within half an hour. I had to clean it up, and in the sick were long white tendrils of noodles, and beef slices that were still disk-shaped. My mother barely even chewed her food. If her sewing machine were a car, she’d constantly be driving way past the speed limit, her foot jammed down flat on the accelerator pedal.
Mrs. Leslie did everything as if she had all the time in the world. She waited for me patiently after school in her dark blue BMW, just as she said she would. The seats were warm, as if the car had been sitting in the sun on a ninety-degree day, except that it was sixty degrees outside. She saw me touch the leather. “Oh, they’re heated,” she explained. When I gave her a blank look, she told me that if I pressed a button to my left, I could turn it off.
She was taking me to her house for a cup of tea and a catch-up. When I had told my father about it last week, he had just about been ready to take the day off work and drive me there himself. That was how excited he was, Lin
h. “Make sure you ask her lots of questions about things you are stuck on,” he advised me.
As Mrs. Leslie pulled out of the parking lot, I asked, “Where’s Amber?”
“She has band rehearsal. She’ll catch the school bus back at five.” The school had four buses to ferry students to and from their after-school activities, although they never went as far as Stanley.
I felt relieved that it was just me and Mrs. Leslie. I felt more comfortable with her than with her daughter. While she was driving, she asked me the usual questions about school and whether I felt I had now adapted. “It’s never easy, is it?” she sighed. “You’re very brave, Lucy. Amber’s been at Laurinda since kindergarten. Sometimes I wonder whether we did the right thing by her.”
She paused, and I knew she wanted me to say something affirming, but I had no idea what that might be. “Amber’s nice,” I reassured her.
Linh, what has become of me? I lied to fill in a moment of silent awkwardness, becoming a simpering people pleaser, when I could have stayed quiet.
“But she’s so insular. I wish the two of you could be friends, Lucy. You’d open up her world—I dare say even open her eyes to her self-centered ways.”
Where was this heading, Linh? I thought only Asian mothers did this kind of thing.
“I worry about her,” Mrs. Leslie confided. “She’s always been so sensitive, but never that sensible. She’s been friends with Brodie for so long that sometimes I feel the friendship has held Amber back from becoming her own person.” She paused. “Now, I do think Brodie is a very talented young woman, but she is so brilliant that Amber seems to get lost in her shadow. I think she doesn’t try very hard because she feels there’s no way she could ever measure up to Brodie.”
It felt strange, being privy to this. It was a bit like when Mrs. Cho started running down Tully to me. Yet this time I wasn’t sure that Mrs. Leslie was aware she was speaking aloud—she almost seemed to be talking to herself.