by Lynn Coady
(I always seem to be telling stories about chain-link fences, it occurs to me now. Maybe because they’re a thing belonging to the implicit troublemakers of this world: children and prisoners trying to get out; would-be criminals trying to get in.)
I’d landed a single shot to David’s stomach that I instantly felt awful about when someone pulled me backwards by the arms — and next thing I knew Michael Elleman was in front of me, mashing his face against mine.
I cried all the way to the school office, and it was Mr. Hope who was waiting there to comfort me.
“Calm down, Greta,” he told me in the low horn of his voice.
I was calming down already. The school office was secret and official, a sanctuary of grown-up rules and swift justice. It smelled like typewriter ribbon and coffee that had been boiled to a tarry stain at the bottom of the pot.
Can I break the rules a moment here? I mean even more than I already have? Because I want to say that now, remembering the school office, I concurrently remember something ten years in the future from that day: I come back to this school at the age of twenty to teach a sexual abuse prevention workshop. It’s hard because I still don’t quite consider myself a legitimate adult, fit to mix with other grown-ups. On my first day of work, I present myself at the office — this same office, with its very same carpet and hunting-lodge colour scheme — take a big breath before announcing to the secretary: “Hi. I’m Shelly? I’m here to teach sexual abuse.” But once I’m with the children in the classroom — my old classroom, the classroom where I gawked at a boy with his eyeball hanging out — I relax again. I am back in my element. I could almost slip into my old desk and wait for the cafeteria worker to deliver our milk. I remove the puppet from my sexual abuse prevention kit — a parrot named “Good-Touch Gordie” — and the children flock to me, enchanted. Awk! I squawk in my parrot voice. Good touch! Awk! Awk! Bad touch! And I point at the relevant places on the body chart. The body on the chart has no sex, is neither boy nor girl.
“I didn’t want him to kiss me,” I hiccuped at Mr. Hope. “I didn’t ask him to. Bernie pinned my arms.”
Mr. Hope was sitting beside me on the black leather couch in the main office. The couch frightened and comforted me all at the same time, because that was where you had to sit when you were called to the office for breaking the rules. But it was also where you sat if you were sick and waiting for your mother to come and take you home. And it was where I was sitting now, beside Mr. Hope, who grunted: “Michael and Bernie will be punished.”
I think about that now — that grunting pronouncement takes my breath away still. Not: I’ll speak to Michael and Bernie, or: Michael and Bernie will be getting a good talking-to, don’t you worry. No euphemisms. Just the stark invocation of justice.
Were Mr. Hope and I friends? Suddenly I thought of something weird that had happened in Grade Three. It seemed like decades ago, but it was just the year before, back when I still loved everybody. Something strange had happened that day — something was off. Our grandma-teacher had some kind of crisis, needed to leave for the second half of the morning. Mr. Hope came in looking distracted. We were in the middle of making Easter baskets, cutting out countless pieces of coloured paper into egg shapes — we easily could have been kept busy until lunch. But Mr. Hope made us put our baskets aside, gave us to understand that he had come to class not merely to babysit until the bell, but to impart a very special lesson.
He glared at us until we settled, just as he had done in Grade One, and once all the noise and motion had been driven from the room he blinked and scowled and asked us: What is love, people?
Hands shot up. We could play this game — easy. We were children. We knew all about love.
Mr. Hope called on a few of us. He didn’t know anybody’s names, so he gave us nicknames.
“You: ponytail.”
“Love is when you love your mommy.”
“No. That’s not what love is, that’s something you do with it. Try again. You: eyebrows.”
“Love is when you feel your heart —”
“I’m not asking for examples of love. When you say ‘love is when this, love is when that,’ you people are just giving me examples. Do you know what examples are? Do you understand the difference? If I ask you what is a rock, you don’t say: ‘A rock is when you throw a rock and hurt somebody.’”
Teddy’s face materialized in my mind; his mutilated face. And I remember thinking: But that’s exactly what a rock is. In that particular case. And next thing I knew the rock was in my chest — in it and on it, making it difficult to breathe because it was becoming clear that there was something in me that was always rising in opposition to Mr. Hope — that I was doomed to disagree with him no matter how much I wanted to appease.
Around the room, children’s hands began to droop like unwatered flowers. If we weren’t allowed to give examples of love, we were at a loss for how to explain it.
One dim-witted girl in the back of the class had not absorbed the point. She kept her arm erect in the air, straight and certain.
“You: gap-tooth.”
“Love is when you hold a puppy.”
Mr. Hope slammed his fist against our sweet-faced grandma-teacher’s desk.
“LOVE IS NOT,” he bellowed, “WHEN YOU HOLD A PUPPY.”
Behind me, I could hear someone’s breath hitching rapidly in and out and I tried to shush whoever it was as quietly as I could.
“Where is it?” Mr. Hope demanded to know. “What is it? Think about that, people. You’re all so sure about this thing and you can’t even answer the question. I’m not asking you when is it. A rock is a small round hard thing. Okay, that’s not great, but at least it’s a start. So what kind of thing is love? Big or little? Hard or soft? Black or white? Or coloured?”
“Red,” whispered someone.
“Why?” demanded Mr. Hope, whirling on the child who whispered. “Because hearts are red? Because you colour hearts red on Valentine’s Day? Those are hearts, people. Paper hearts. That’s all. Representing what? Representing what exactly?”
It was dawning on me that this was the second instance of Mr. Hope doing something to us — something deliberate; deliberately improper.
My hand went up. He hooked me with his eyes and said: “Greta.”
“It’s big,” I told him, knowing it was important to hold his eye.
He loomed closer, moving imperceptibly like a cloud. “It’s big? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because,” I said. “You feel it big.”
Mr. Hope backed up a couple of steps and rested his non-existent buttocks against the same desk he’d just hammered with his fist.
“You feel it big,” said Mr. Hope. “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. So if you feel it big — like Greta says, people — doesn’t it follow that we can start by defining love, supposing it exists, as ‘something you feel’?”
He turned, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the board:
1. Big
2. Something you feel
Waves of relief. Like the group of us children made up a single muscle, a bundle of tendons releasing all at once.
It went on, the strange lesson, until lunchtime. The specifics of the memory get hazy for me after that moment — the moment of tension released — but I do remember working and thinking very hard the whole time. Mr. Hope kept looking to me for answers, like I was his only ally in the room, his teammate. But that’s not what I felt like, exactly. There was a fairy tale I’d heard recently — something about a sultan and a storyteller, and the storyteller had to feed the sultan stories to keep him happy and from cutting off heads.
At one point Mr. Hope showed us his white, awful palms and appealed to the class: “What about me? What about me, people? Who in this world is going to love me?”
It froze us. It was a serious question, because we couldn’t imagine the answer. I ran to the front of the classroom
and wrapped my arms around his D.
Greta, I heard him say from deep inside his stomach.
Now here sat Mr. Hope and me together, side by side on the leather couch. And were we friends? I had hugged his D, but that seemed like centuries ago. Did he remember? Did he remember how I gave him the right answer? That I was the one who calmed him down just when we were starting to seem like a bunch of hopeless kids who wouldn’t ever learn?
The bell rang, signalling the end of lunch. “Go back to your class, now, Greta,” said Mr. Hope.
I looked up into his eyes. I was getting used to looking into his eyes. Every time I did it, I understood it was the right thing to do, even as it terrified me. It was like rolling up your sleeve to get a needle, or climbing to a great height — courageous. A feat. There were adults who looked you in the eyes and didn’t see you. Mr. Hope was not one of those people.
“Go back to your class, now, Greta,” he said again.
I went back to my class. Ten minutes into the first period, the low horn sounded over the intercom.
Will Michael Ellemen and Bernie Heany please come to the office.
I looked around. Some of my fellow children were smiling to themselves bloodthirstily.
I waited. I couldn’t concentrate on my reading. I turned one page after another and they may as well have been blank.
About thirty minutes later the horn sounded again.
Would Shelly McInnis please come to the office.
Notice: he always knew my name. He knew it perfectly well.
In the office, Michael and Bernie stood before me red-faced, slack-mouthed, puffy-eyed.
“Do you boys have something to say to Shelly?”
In a soul-shattered monotone, and in unison, they recited: “We’re sorry, Shelly.”
I regarded them. I cocked my head, considering.
“Greta?” prompted Mr. Hope.
Bernie couldn’t stand it. Bernie wasn’t hamstrung by his passion for me the way Michael was; my arrogance infuriated him. “But she was beating up David!” he wailed.
“Bernie!” said Mr. Hope. Michael dropped his gaze abruptly to the ground as if willing himself unconscious.
“She was punching David Culligan!”
I don’t remember the motion of what happened next, the actual activity. I just remember blinking and then absorbing the new tableau: Bernie had been spun around and Mr. Hope was squatting in order to stick his white face into Bernie’s red one. Michael and I glanced at each other — allies in panic.
“You are a puke,” said Mr. Hope directly into Bernie’s face. “Did she hit somebody? Did the little girl hit somebody? Oh no. Ohhhh noooooo!”
Bernie winced — Mr. Hope was shrieking this.
“You chase a girl around, you little puke, you little worm — and you hold her down — you HOLD DOWN a LITTLE GIRL —” (and we knew, by the way he said this, that it was the worst thing of all in his mind, so sickening that it had transformed a hitherto innocent nine-year-old boy into something vile, a thing entirely corrupt — a worm, a puke). “And you have the gall” (this was the first time I’d ever hear the word gall) “the sheer gall to try and tell me…”
Mr. Hope could only flail his hands for a moment. Looking back, embroidering the tale from my adult perspective as I have been all along, I’m tempted to say that he was doing everything within his power to keep from uttering the word fuck.
“To TATTLE ON HER!” Mr. Hope finished in a baritone eruption.
Bernie’s ducts were all open, flowing freely. Tears, snot, spittle. Michael wasn’t looking at me anymore. He would never really look at me again.
ONCE YOU GOT the kids talking about their private parts, there was no shutting them up. Miss McInnis? This one time? I was in the park? With my friend? And this man? He came up to us? And he touched my private part.
All the stories ended with that sentence — it almost started sounding to me like They lived happily ever after. My supervisor had told me not to worry about this kind of yarn unless the kids were actually talking about their family members. The “stranger in the park” was just your garden-variety boogeyman. Once you lay the good touch/bad touch stuff on them, she explained, the kids kind of get into it. They hear it like a fairy tale, like a story they have to learn by heart, and pretty soon they figure out what the most important part of the story is. It’s like the car chase in a movie, or the shootout, or the big kiss at the end.
They need to practise it, my supervisor explained. It’s a kind of compulsion. Just let them tell it to the parrot.
So I’d lean down and extend my hand, upon which Gordie perched.
Would you like to tell Gordie about the bad touch? I would ask.
And the kids would all nod eagerly, repeating everything verbatim.
Awk! Gordie would exclaim in response. Was that a bad touch? Or a good touch?
It was a bad touch, Gordie!
Awk! But how did you know? How could you tell?
Because I just knew! Because I could feel it! Because I … trusted my feelings!
This was the real trick to sexual abuse prevention. It wasn’t the actual sexual abuse thing — that was easy. If someone puts his hand here, or here, kiddies, it is sex, which you are not supposed to be having. They got that in the first five minutes. What they didn’t get was how they were supposed to feel about it. What you had to teach them was that when something seems weird, when you’re a kid, you can reject it. You can turn away; you can say no.
I was supposed to lead the kids in a call-and-response at the end of every session to help entrench this idea into their pink, undeveloped psyches: You have the power! I have the power! You have the power! I have the power!
Here’s the problem with that for me, though — the idea that you can turn away from anything that feels obliquely wrong or unsettling — say No, thank you to the weird and walk home. If my memory is at all accurate, that is.
(And I’ll tell you something about my memory. It isn’t like memory at all. I don’t have to reach back. It’s all just there. Everything just settles in behind my eyes, accumulating into a giant clot.)
So here is the five-year-old me, obedient in her desk, absorbing the vibrations of the future, the admonitions being shouted in her classroom fifteen years later by her parrot-brandishing self.
The problem for her is that everything seems weird; everything seems wrong. And everything just keeps on seeming weird, and wrong. A little bit at first, and then more, and still more. Starting from day one. Starting with Mr. Hope.
BY GRADE FIVE, Bernie Heany was no longer taller than everyone and neither was I. I was girl-sized, he was boy-sized. We were all starting to balance out, become average. Bernie, I noticed, was now an inexplicable target for teachers — a natural magnet for their anger. It was not that he was “bad,” from what I could see. It wasn’t that he acted up any more than the other boys. He’d just taken on a sort of invisible status somehow — a mark of Cain.
Around Grade Five is about the time when children begin to intuit each other’s status, based mostly on the cues they get from teachers. No one talks about it — some kids just start getting laughed at, while others get followed around. Bernie seemed to be getting laughed at a lot. The other boys had noticed how teachers yearned to yell at Bernie, so they provoked him in class, whispering insults until he turned and shouted at them to fuck off. “Fuck off” was still a dangerous, novel expression in Grade Five — it didn’t get unholstered very often. It became a game to get Bernie to yell “Fuck off” and watch what happened to him next.
Just the fact that Bernie was so willing to yell “Fuck off,” I realize now, was indicative of his status. He was always alone at recess. He and Michael didn’t hang out together anymore. Michael himself had become excellent at some point; was getting 100s on all his tests and winning first place ribbons at track and field. Eventually, I had to admit to myself how badly I wanted his attention. The next thing I had to admit was I had nowhere near the status to get it.
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In Grade Seven, we moved from the school near the water to the one by the highway and Mr. Hope moved with us. I remember the shock of seeing him standing wide-legged and cross-armed in the hall of the new school. Shock because at some critical point during the summer I had managed to convince myself that all of childhood was a dream. The dream had started out pretty good until an occasional ogre appeared and then things just got progressively darker and angrier until, finally, I woke up: a real person in the actual world. Now I just had to get on with it, which I was willing to do. But nobody said anything about Mr. Hope following me out of my dreams.
By Grade Seven, I hardly loved anybody — certainly not teachers. Mr. Hope struck me as more physically hideous than ever. There was no way I was hugging his D again. It was not exactly that so much had changed, but that the bad-dream side of childhood had entrenched itself, had calcified. For example, my brother and I were now simply enemies, a relationship that mirrored that of our parents exactly. It wasn’t interesting anymore; it wasn’t a battle. We couldn’t be bothered to physically fight. We just stuck to our own sides of the house and wished each other ill.
Over the summer, I had been obsessed with the possibility of changing my status, of getting what I wanted. What I wanted was Michael Elleman to be in love with me again, but properly, wakefully, now that the stupid dream of childhood was over.
A girl I met on the beach that summer told me what to do. She was, in many ways, a terrible girl. She told me stories. “I saw this movie once,” she would begin. “And there was this man. And he started going out at night and looking into people’s windows. And there were these girls, having a sleepover together …” Or, “I was watching TV really, really late one night. Like I got up in the middle of the night and turned it on after everyone was asleep. And there were these two people alone in a room, a boy and a girl. And they were naked!” Or sometimes she had read the story, she told me, in a book that she’d come upon deep in the middle of the woods. Or in a lonely magazine she’d somehow rescued from “the bottom of a dried-up well.” As if there were wells in the real world, along with fairies and gingerbread houses.