The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  “You’re like a log in a river, trying to float downstream,” the Toastmaster tells me. “But you’re stuck behind a pile of rocks.”

  After that, I wear an elastic band around my wrist during speech practice, and I snap it at every verbal tic. “Ummm.” Snap. “I think.” Snap. “Uhhh.” Snap. The elastic leaves matching dents in my skin. I leave it on by mistake one night when I’m out to dinner with a friend, and catch myself snapping it out of habit. I take it off, but when I reach for my wine glass there are red lines marking my wrist. By week five, the lines have become welts. Eventually, the skin breaks. I put on some Polysporin and move the elastic a centimetre lower.

  There are always open slots in the prepared speech schedule, due to four or five members who show up every week but make polite excuses when the Toastmaster encourages them to volunteer. Instead, they are spectators, leaning back in their chairs, eating their free oatmeal cookies. I suppose they’re there to make friends. How do I protest this unfairness? “Find a Meetup group,” I’d like to tell them.

  I sign up for one of the empty slots almost every meeting, so eight weeks in I’m already preparing for Speech 6 (Objective: Vocal Variety), though I don’t seem to be getting any better. According to the Toastmasters newsletter, audiences and Evaluators will let go of minor mistakes if the overall speech is engaging. But I can’t help it. Practising for Speech 6, I get so angry at myself that I smack the right side of my head hard with my palm, sending my head flying sideways. It’s like a giant has picked me up and shaken me. I google Can you injure your brain hitting yourself in the head, and I’m relieved to learn you’d have to hit yourself damn hard to injure your brain. Brains are cushioned with skulls and membranes and cerebrospinal fluid. Perhaps hitting myself in the head could be a safe method of managing self-loathing. Because it isn’t just the ums and ahs. I could quit Toastmasters tomorrow and it would still be there—the lizard swimming through my cerebrospinal fluid and taking small bites of self-esteem. Perfection, he urges, in the language of snakes.

  * * *

  The Shy Woman comes to every session of Toastmasters. On my way into that week’s meeting, I find her hovering at the doorway, hands holding the sides of the door frame that seems to carry her whole weight. Her knuckles are tight. Evening light from the hallway’s courtyard-facing windows turns her into a seraph. I stand behind her at a distance, waiting, telepathically urging her forward. Go inside, I think. Today, her hair is two side French braids wound around her head and into a bun at the back. It’s a hairstyle I’ve attempted and failed at before. How much time did that take her? Did she, too, follow a Pinterest tutorial? She’s still in the doorway. Go inside, I think again.

  One of the men who never participates approaches. “Excuse me,” he says, tapping her shoulder. She lets go of the door frame, startled, and steps back. Then she walks, face down but unhurried, away towards the study area.

  Table Topics whooshes by. My leg jitters through the whole thing, while Speech 6 plays like an anthem in my head. Vocal Variety is the toughest speech so far, because you have to pay attention to the Four Ps: Pitch, Pace, Power, and Pauses. On my notes I’ve used red pen to signal intonation, and highlighter to mark pauses. The Toastmasters newsletter suggested exaggerating syllables. My delivery sounds as though I’m reading a book aloud to a child, turning the pages and exclaiming, “Where’s the caterpillar? There he is!”

  Perhaps this is okay, because my speech is about a children’s book—my own childhood favourite, The Monster at the End of This Book. On the cover, Grover waves a furry-armed hello, posed like a salsa dancer while standing next to a green lamppost and a trash can. His eyes are inscrutable—two eggs sunny side up with black yolks. “Please do not turn the page,” says Grover, in some variation, on every page. “There is a Monster at the end of this book.” The word Monster is capitalized, its letters hand-drawn in bold magenta. Has there ever been a reader who followed Grover’s instructions and simply closed the book?

  My dad used to read it aloud to me when I was five or six years old. “Oh, I am so scared of Monsters,” he would say, in a pitiable, frightened voice that smoothed out his Indian accent. He feigned physical effort with each page turn, as Grover used rope and wood planks and nails and brick to build barriers that were invariably destroyed.

  “But Grover, you are the monster!” I would announce. By then, I knew the story’s ending. I lost the book some time later, when we moved houses.

  I had planned to conclude my speech by telling the group about how my dad had bought me a new copy for Christmas once. It was the year after I’d dropped out of graduate school and moved back home. He’d left it, unwrapped, for me on my nightstand while I was still asleep. On the inside cover, in the space for an inscription under This Little Golden Book belongs to, he’d written: Dearest Nina—Just to remember those good old days. I don’t know if he’d intended the gift as a symbolic gesture or if it was just something he’d come across at the bookstore, but I’d taken it as my dad trying to convince me that there were no monsters. That I could still be a reader, even if I wasn’t anything else.

  When the Toastmaster reads my name off the sign-up sheet, I look down at my colour-coded notes. And it dawns on me that the speech I’ve written is too intimate to share. There is something awful about the idea of performing it in a scripted, stagey voice, then serving it up for evaluation. I don’t want to tell this story to these people, whom after eight weeks I still barely know.

  “Pass,” I say.

  The Toastmaster raises his eyebrow in a question. “Are you sure? We have lots of time.”

  “Umm…I’m sure.” I snap the elastic out of habit.

  At the end of the meeting, Dave makes an announcement. “Annie and I are having some people over for her thirty-fifth birthday this weekend. You’re all invited to join us.” It has somehow escaped me that these two are together, though they sit next to each other every week. Nobody else seems surprised.

  In search of a birthday card, I visit every greeting card store at the Halifax Shopping Centre. But the cards are too froufrou or sentimental or not funny enough or cost eight dollars. And Annie is a graphic designer, so the card should be well designed. I visit a letterpress studio downtown but the cards, with embossed phrases in vintage fonts, seem too irreverent, too hip, saying Sorry you’re so old.

  The party is a snack potluck, so I decide to bring homemade chocolate chip cookies. Mrs. Fields was a Toastmaster. She was a housewife and then her cookie business began to flourish. Her company grew from one store in Palo Alto to hundreds of stores in over thirty countries. Because she kept getting invited to give talks, she joined Toastmasters. Now she’s a master of both cookies and toasts. Her motto: Good enough never is.

  When I google recipes, I always use the word best, as in best chocolate chip cookies, or best chicken pot pie. Then I read all the recipe reviews and make notes on the suggested adaptations. I chill the dough for thirty-six hours as per advice from the New York Times. The recipe requires both bread and cake flours, chocolate that’s at least 60 per cent cocoa, and sea salt. It takes five batches until my cookies look like the photos. On the third batch, I forget my oven mitts and burn the pads of my fingers when I grab the pan with my bare hands.

  On the way to the party, out of time, I stop at Shoppers and spend fifteen minutes reading through birthday cards I’ve already read. I choose one, but by then it doesn’t even matter which.

  * * *

  Dave and Annie live in a low-rise building on South Street. It’s spacious and has thin-plank oak floors with an ancient, pleasing creak. The furnishings are sparse IKEA. This new IKEA store only just opened, and already the area is descending rapidly into fibreboard. A mix of Toastmasters folks and Dave’s work friends cram together on a sinking sofa and a couple of floor poufs; the rest stand around a dining table, picking at the assortment of mismatched potluck snacks—translucent salad rolls with slivers of red peppe
r, a tray of cured meats, a plump loaf of banana bread with a burned crust. I add my tin of cookies to the table and stand there, observing the room, figuring out who to talk to. There’s a pashmina draped above the window as decor. Dave’s weights are stacked on the floor in a corner. A wall shelf holds assorted self-help books: Awaken the Giant Within; Eat This, Not That! A silver picture frame holds a photo of Annie and Dave, his arm around her shoulders like a yoke.

  “So you guys meet every week and listen to each other give speeches?” asks one of Dave’s friends, a smaller version of Dave. He’s sunburned and wearing shorts and a polo shirt, revealing thick blond hair on his arms and legs. He’s the kind of man who wears summer clothing throughout the fall, even in Nova Scotia.

  “Why would you sign up for that?” asks Dave #3, who has kept his shoes on despite the pile of footwear by the door. This Dave is the tallest one. It turns out he’s Dave’s actual brother.

  “The best part about Toastmasters is that it works,” says the Toastmaster. He sips wine he brought himself, from a glass with the name of a bank on it. He sits between the two Dave clones, legs extending from deep within the sofa. He balances the base of the wine glass on his protruding knee.

  “Toastmasters is about more than public speaking,” adds an older gentleman named Hasim, who has deep-set eyes and is rumoured to have lost a child. He’s been attending the meetings for three years. I’ve only heard him speak of fastidious hobbies, like cultivating roses and making origami frogs.

  “You guys should join,” Dave tells his fellow Daves. “You might learn some new skills.”

  The Toastmaster looks worried at the prospect of them joining.

  “I’ve got all the skills I need,” says Summer Dave.

  “Dave joined to meet women,” says Brother Dave.

  “Another reason you should join,” says Original Dave. “How long have you been single now?”

  “Oh, so did you guys meet each other through Toastmasters?” I ask, turning to Annie, who is adding a stack of balloon-dotted napkins to the table.

  “No, we met on—” she begins, but Dave interrupts her.

  “I’m the one who convinced Annie to join,” he says. “To improve her English. I’d already been giving speeches for ages at that point.”

  “Dave has no game at all,” Brother Dave tells us, “despite having read all those pickup artist books. Memorized them—haven’t you, Dave?” He bites into a thin slice of meat, then puts the rest of it into his mouth and licks his fingers.

  The doorbell chimes and Annie goes to answer it.

  “Oh man,” says Summer Dave, “in high school he had a crush on a teacher for four years and at graduation he asked her out.” He pauses. “She turned him down.”

  “And she was old, too,” says Brother Dave, guffawing.

  Dave is standing next to the window, drinking a beer. “Not true. None of that is true.” He waves his free hand, pretends dismissiveness. “Liars.”

  “But then he went to Toastmasters,” says Brother Dave.

  “And everything changed,” adds Summer Dave.

  “Too bad you don’t give the speeches while on treadmills,” says Brother Dave, stretching out to pat Dave’s stomach.

  “Or while getting personality transplants,” says Summer Dave.

  I wait to see if they’ll high-five. Something has shifted in Original Dave. His eyes have narrowed. He’s sucking in his stomach.

  “Cookies?” I offer, passing around the tin I brought. Nobody takes one.

  “What was the name of that girl Dave dated…”

  “Wait, Dave dated a girl?” The Dave clones laugh together.

  The Toastmaster shifts his legs and finishes his wine. I wait for him to defuse the situation, to tell us some anecdote about the time he took a trip to Boston and fell in love with a venture capitalist, guiding us effortlessly into a new subject, but he doesn’t.

  Original Dave is twitching. “Well, obviously I dated a girl. I married Annie, didn’t I?”

  “Oh yeah, what site was that you met her on again, Dave?” says Brother Dave. “Thaibrides.com?”

  Annie is standing by the entryway, holding a plate of banana bread with the burnt parts cut off. Her eyebrows lift as she registers the words. Then her face crumples. She puts down the plate, turns, and leaves the room. She passes by the Shy Woman, who has just arrived and is kneeling by the pile of shoes, untying her shoelaces. She’s watching everything, her eyes black.

  “Assholes!” the Shy Woman says loudly, standing, laces still tied. Her whole body is trembling. She glares directly at Dave. “Are you going to let them talk about her like that?” The Toastmasters are silent. The other Daves look at each other and then around the room at the rest of us, wide-eyed and smiling close-lipped in fake contrition.

  “Assholes,” echoes Dave, but he’s waited too long. His vulnerabilities are showing. The words bounce off the other Daves like they’re rubber; stick to Dave like he’s glue.

  * * *

  The Shy Woman has dressed up for the party, in a black silk blouse and a tea-length skirt the colour of frost-covered leaves.

  “Hi,” I say quietly, forgetting we don’t know each other. We’ve taken the Daves’ seats on the couch while they’ve claimed the space by the table. Some of the guests have left, and the Daves fill their plates, except for Original Dave, who has gone to see if Annie will come back to the party. There’s an ice cream cake in a sweating box on the counter.

  “So you know, she’s not actually a mail-order bride or whatever,” the Shy Woman informs me.

  “Oh, I know that,” I say, though I’d wondered for a second if it was true.

  “She has a degree from NSCAD. And she might be from Thailand, but her English is way better than Dave’s—she’s just not a braggadocious fuck about it like he is. I’ve known Dave since grade school. I literally once heard him say, ‘She and I’s.’ He thinks I’m Thai, too, but I’m Chinese. And by Chinese, I mean I grew up in Sackville, Nova Scotia. Those two met on a dating site like everybody else.”

  “I thought you were…shy,” I say, foolishly. “Why don’t you ever come join the meetings?”

  “That’s me, a Shy Asian,” says the Shy Woman, whose name is Jules. When she sees my face, she gives an easy laugh. “Don’t worry, just messing with you. I have awful glossophobia. That’s fear of public speaking. See?” She holds out her hands and they are still trembling. “One word to these assholes, and this happens. I’m glad the word was assholes this time. But seriously, I get panic attacks. I get stuck there in the doorway. It’s like this force field I can’t walk through.”

  I usually avoid touching people, but impulsively I reach out and take both her hands in mine, holding them firmly, willing them to stop shaking. “Have you ever heard of Zeno’s paradoxes?” I ask. I tell her about the one called the dichotomy paradox. “Imagine you want to walk from Point A to Point B, at the other end of a field. To get there, you first must reach the halfway point. But to get to the halfway point, you must get halfway to the halfway point. And before that, halfway to the halfway point of the halfway point. Halfway and halfway and halfway. But if this is true, you have infinite distances to cross.” When I let go of her hands, they’re not shaking anymore. “Aristotle said, ‘That which is in locomotion must arrive at the halfway stage before it arrives at the goal.’ How will you ever get there? It’s theoretically impossible,” I say to Jules. “But we do it every single day.”

  * * *

  A few days later, Jules crosses the threshold into the meeting. She and I arrive early, as we planned, because I thought it might make it easier. “Yet another boring classroom,” I say, entering first and flicking on the light switch.

  “Zap.” Jules shoots starburst motions with her hands towards the doorway, like she’s casting a spell. Her hands imitate falling debris. “That was the force field,” she explains to m
e. I can tell she’ll do well on Speech 5: Your Body Speaks. After several minutes of working up her nerve, Jules takes a deliberate step through the doorway as though there’s a crack in the floor she might fall into.

  “Table Topics is first, right?” she asks, sitting next to me at the end of the horseshoe closest to the door. She’s been reading the newsletters, too.

  The Toastmaster is absent, vacationing in Maine. Dave, the next to arrive, has volunteered for the role. When he enters, he sees Jules sitting there and scowls, but says nothing. He sits on the opposite end of the horseshoe, right across from us. Annie comes in just as the meeting is about to begin, then sits in the middle of the horseshoe, a few seats away from Dave.

  From the start of the meeting, Dave has an angry energy, pacing at the front of the room, clapping his hands together to punctuate his statements. He has ideas for how to liven up the session, opening with vocal warm-ups. We sing in monotone, “The lips the teeth the tip of the tongue the lips the teeth the tip of the tongue…” Dave’s voice is like a loudspeaker, and he sings between gritted teeth, clutching every word with his mouth. Next, he leads a massage train, insisting we all stand up and then steering us to the centre of the room to form a circle. We turn clockwise to place our hands on the shoulders of the person in front of us. My hands are on a stranger’s shoulders, bony and tense. I massage half-heartedly while Dave buries his hot thumbs too deep into my spine. He corrects my posture with his hands, adjusting, pressing my upper back. “Stand up straight, that’s right,” he says. “No slouching.”

  We’re back in our seats for Table Topics. With no preamble, Dave points at Jules with one finger. “Why don’t you start?”

  I’m about to protest. I’m sitting at the very end of the horseshoe—I should be the one going first. But Jules stands. She clasps her hands together in front of her and waits. There’s a sympathetic whirring in my gut. At the end of the party, I offered to give Jules a ride home. Before we left, we stood by the dwindling shoe pile and said goodbye to Annie, who had washed her face and returned with a bright, fixed grin to serve her own birthday cake. Dave lingered in the kitchen. He didn’t say goodbye to either of us. Wouldn’t even look Jules in the eye.