by Miriam Toews
Normal school. Do you remember that time of life in the autumn of one’s adolescence when a thousand hopes and dreams seem to clash with the realities of the world? That’s what I think of when I remember normal school. Before I started normal school, I had big plans for my future classroom. When I finished normal school I still had big plans, but I realized how difficult it would be to see them through. It seems, as I think about it, that every step along the way of my career I had to beg and fight and pay to teach the way I wanted to. I would begin lessons from the texts provided, but as my students expressed interest in various topics or issues, we would veer off the beaten track and create an entirely new and innovative course of study. In my classroom this type of activity was officially known as trailblazing, and it was, by far, the students’ favourite time of the day. They would lead discussions and come up with questions they thought were relevant, we would write many letters to members of the federal and provincial governments asking them to tell us about their jobs and how they hoped to help Canadians, we would run mock elections, we would work together on group projects (my favourite teaching activity), we’d build replica trading posts and reading lofts with big cushions and publish a class newspaper to let the entire community know what we were up to. We’d be kind to each other. We’d build birdhouses in the spring. We’d write and produce plays and memorize poetry and play a lot of baseball in the month of June!
I would prepare my students for the world outside, beyond our little town, and I would teach them to express themselves. In this way I could stay put and remain silent, in self-defence. There’s no secret here, not really. Any psychiatrist worth his or her salt could tell you: my students’ accomplishments would be mine. They would take my dreams and make them real.
In normal school, the emphasis was on discipline, how to control a group of thirty or more students, and structure, how to teach a varied group of individuals with little or no deviation from the standard textbooks provided. Basically the focus was getting them in, keeping them in, and getting them out. There was no emphasis on the joy of learning or the flexibility required to teach young children or the art of bringing a textbook to life. There were no discussions having to do with self-expression, or world-readiness, or group projects, or the necessity of sometimes having to veer from the text or write one’s own, which I eventually did, or of the social relevance of all-day baseball tournaments in the month of June. There was no fun quotient, as they say, in normal school, and I hated it.
My write-up, however, in the 1954 Mirror, the normal school yearbook, reads as follows: “Melvin is interested in Sunday school work … enjoys most sports … a conscientious fellow working hard to do his duty.” I was very pleased with this assessment.
I’ve thought of something. I will write my way out of this mess! I will fool myself. If I can continue to remember right up to the present, then I will know why I’m here. Slowly, I will creep towards the present, step by step, memory by memory, and my mind will then be eased, gradually, into a place of understanding. It will be very natural. Am very excited with new strategy. Pens, paper, must have, and to begin, now.
After graduating from normal school, I moved back home to Steinbach and began my teaching career at the little two-room school in Bristol. I was nineteen years old, six foot two, one hundred and forty pounds, terrified, and proud. Elvis Presley, also nineteen, was about to change the course of history, but Elvira and I had never heard of him, and wouldn’t for years to come. Our lives consisted of church, school, nurses’ training, and planning our future, which had nothing to do with rock and roll.
My parents, particularly my mother, were not entirely pleased with my choice of girlfriend. Elvira came from the wealthiest family in town, and one with a colourful reputation. They were the first family in town to own a piano, for example (frowned on by conservative Mennonites at the time), and Elvira’s father, C.T. (his brothers were J.T., P.T., I.T., and A.T.; the T. stands for Toews, their mother’s maiden name), encouraged his sons to sow their wild oats before settling down into the family lumber business, which would eventually turn them all into millionaires. Elvira and I are second cousins, a typical occurrence in Mennonite couples. Her dad’s mother was a sister to my dad’s father, and it’s a common Mennonite practice to give a child his mother’s maiden name as a middle name. My daughters’ surnames, if we hadn’t nipped that interesting practice in the bud, would have been Toews Loewen Loewen Toews.
Elvira accompanied her father on many business trips and working lunches at fancy restaurants (places I had delivered eggs to) in the city, regularly coming into contact with important businessmen and generally enjoying a worldly outlook on life. Once, when she was fourteen years old, she and her father drove to B.C. for a holiday visit with relatives. C.T. let Elvira do the driving, even through the Rocky Mountains with their treacherous hairpin curves. She adored her father and he loved her very much and very well. That is, he encouraged her to be herself and told her nothing was impossible. He expected her to be brave and honest and adventurous like he was. The fact that he had buried six of his thirteen children seemed not to have crushed his spirit. I remember an occasion when a rival lumberman was angry with him for some reason and making nasty threats, and C.T. casually telling me on his front porch, “He can kill me but he can’t scare me.”
But my mother was not altogether pleased with my association with the Loewens, of whom I was becoming increasingly more fond as the months went by, especially of Elvira, of course. I think my mother’s reason for not liking the Loewens had to do with money, although I’m not entirely sure. The Reimer clan, of which my mother was a member, had been the wealthiest family in town until the Loewens came along and raised the stakes. It’s assumed by many that Mennonites care little of money and material goods, but the very opposite is true. Anyway, my grandparents’ general store gradually went broke because of the youthful carousing of my mother’s brother, who was supposed to be in charge, while C.T.’s business flourished to become the largest and most lucrative in all of southeastern Manitoba. C.T. was also establishing a reputation as a fair and compassionate employer who took the complaints and advice of his workers to heart.
My mother, rather than placing the blame on her brother’s shoulders for the failure of their family business, begrudged the Loewens for the success of theirs.
But my mother was not the only one to disapprove of our relationship. Elvira’s mother, had she been alive, would surely have found it troublesome that Elvira was planning to marry the son of the cousin of her husband’s first love, the woman who, as I have mentioned, was forbidden by her brothers to marry Elvira’s father because of his rogue tendencies and worldliness. Little did her brothers know that C.T. would go on to become a very wealthy and respected man both in and out of the church and, unfortunately, that their sister, C.T.’s first love, would suffer a terrible accident with some permanent damage and remain a spinster for life.
It seems odd that Helena, Elvira’s mother, such a gentle, pious woman normally, would harbour such a resentment of the Reimer clan, and that my extremely tenuous connection to her rival would have made me an undesirable son-in-law, but we must remember that she had been stood up at the altar by C.T. the first time they tried to get married, all because of this Reimer girl. Elvira’s oldest brother married a girl from the Reimer clan and she and her mother-in-law had, at best, a strained relationship. Why Helena didn’t direct her wrath at her husband, the more deserving target if ever there was one, is anybody’s guess. Although the traditionally submissive role of Mennonite wives may have had a lot to do with it.
Nevertheless, our love blossomed and we were very happy with each other. My home life was troublesome still, but I knew I’d soon be leaving it behind. As soon as Elvira had completed her nurses’ training we would be married and on our own. On the day of our wedding, December 28, 1956, Elvira would receive her inheritance with which to build our home at 229 First Street, and a new bedroom suite as a gift. By then I would be t
eaching grade six at Elmdale School in Steinbach, a seven-minute walk from home down First Street, up William, and across Main, a journey I’d make at least twice a day for forty years.
A friendly male nurse has entered my room to tell me that I am not what I said I was, that I am being too hard on myself. Now, I cannot remember what I said I was. What did I say I was? I asked him. You said, Mel es en schinde, and that is not true. But of course it is, I say, schinde is a Low German expression meaning “lower than low,” originally, I believe, one who tortures horses, a taskmaster, a tyrant. I am personally responsible for Elvira’s demise, I intone rather formally. I drove her to despair. No, says the nurse, you did not. You are ill, that’s not your fault. How naive and kind of him, I think as he pats me on the shoulder. I notice our watches are similar and point this out to him. He is excessively pleased. He is the same chap who informed me that there are unusually high numbers of Mennonites who suffer from depression but nobody knows why. I said, Well, thank you for that! As cheerfully as if I was accepting a plate of homemade Christmas cookies from one of my students.
During this time, I was fairly optimistic. I had met my goal of becoming a schoolteacher and I was in love with a wonderful girl. Two years later we were married, and I have mentioned already the somewhat chaotic circumstances of our wedding ceremony re the candelabra, the burning veil, Wilma’s race to fetch another.
Several months before the wedding I had gone to Elvira’s brothers with a proposition. I knew that a woman of her background could expect to receive, usually from her parents, a wedding gift of fine silverware. But Elvira’s mother had died years before and her father in the meantime had become bedridden after a stroke. With all of my expenses at home and my meagre teacher’s salary I couldn’t even begin to dream of purchasing the silverware myself. I asked the brothers, who were generous but busy with their own lives, if the three of them could pay for fifty percent of the cost of the silverware; I would pay the other half. They agreed on the spot, and Elvira was thrilled and surprised when I told her how I had financed the gift, a beautiful red-velvet-lined mahogany box of sparkling silverware. She has taken excellent care of the silverware ever since, using it only on special occasions, avoiding the dishwasher and washing it by hand, and, before it became one of the cleaning lady’s pet projects, polishing it to the point of nearly blinding our dinner guests.
Have just received a visitor who tells me I’m looking good. Oh, I don’t think so, I said. Secretly was very happy to be told that I look good. Daughters tell me I’m handsome every day in my new Tommy Hilfiger shirt. Wish I could remember his name, assume he’s a church elder because of the nature of our one-sided conversation. Offered him my dessert. Declined. Hope it wasn’t tube food. I sat in silence, nodding at various intervals and smiling. Hope I thanked him for the visit. Should consider investing in a guest book. Would have names written down, comments. Would give me a clue.
sixteen
Sometime before we were married I found the courage to tell Elvira that I had been diagnosed as a manic depressive and that I would likely be on medication for the rest of my life. She told me that she already knew this because she had found my pills in my pocket and had recognized what they were. She told me that she loved me and that everything would be fine. This statement proved to be half right: she loved me very much, though to this day I wonder how. My psychiatrist had, when I informed him that I was planning to get married, expressed no small amount of shock and dismay. He told me that those who suffer from manic depression have a lot of difficulty making marriages or any long-term relationship work, and when I told him that I was also planning on becoming a schoolteacher, he almost hit the roof. The responsibility, Mel, the consistency, the patience, the endurance … all these things are extremely difficult to maintain with an illness like yours … won’t you reconsider? But of course I wouldn’t. If anything at all, it was those two things, my marriage and my career, that kept me tethered to the ground, that made my life bearable and kept me from becoming unhinged.
The other worry of mine in those days, the possibility that Elvira would become an airline stewardess, was doused the day we married. So too was the possibility of her continuing her job as a nurse in the local hospital. There was only one married woman working in the hospital at that time and only because her husband had been injured and couldn’t work.
In those days, in the early fifties, I was making $170 a month. We paid fifty dollars a month to rent the small motel room, next to my aunt Molly’s Laundromat, that we lived in for a portion of the time that our house was being built. Another fifty dollars a month went towards the payment of our house lot, and thirty dollars was our average monthly grocery bill. That left us with forty extra dollars a month. Had times been different, Elvira would have kept her job, which paid more than mine, and we would have enjoyed a much higher standard of living, not to mention the sense of fulfillment she would have had working in her chosen career. But in that respect, we were no different than any other couple of that era.
Those early years were good, bearable. No lengthy, inexplicable silences, no blackouts. We had two gardens, one each for flowers and vegetables, numerous flowerbeds all over the yard that got bigger every spring as I tilled the grass to plant more rows of red and white petunias. We had chokecherry trees and saskatoonberry trees and crabapple trees and later two willow trees that I planted in honour of the births of our daughters. In the front of the house, running almost its entire length, was a brick planter full of red and white petunias, and at the foot of the narrow paving-stone path that led from our front door to the street stood a huge and ancient elm tree. When Marjorie was a little girl, she would stand under this elm and wait for me to come home for lunch. Right outside our bedroom window was a wonderful-smelling evergreen that grew to an enormous height and width. I have a photograph of Marjorie standing beside the tree. They are the same height and she is seven years old. Elvira and I would often stand on the front porch and watch the sun set behind its boughs. Our house was made of red brick and I had painted the wooden part of it a dusty rose, my favourite colour, though the girls maintained we lived in a pink house.
Later, because of the amount of time I spent in bed, I became good at identifying sounds, in particular the individual noises of each family member. Marjorie played the piano from sunup to sundown, and my youngest, Miriam, slammed the front door countless times a day as she ran in and out of the house with friends. And Elvira talked on the phone or in the yard to friends, neighbours, and anybody else that came along. I couldn’t decipher exactly what she was saying from my bed but I could hear a quiet steady rumbling punctuated with whoops of laughter and screams of No! or Not really! And Oba yo! (Oh, but yes!) and Oba nay! (Oh, but no!) Elvira could spend hours on the telephone and Miriam would sometimes, to get her attention, tie Elvira to the kitchen chair with her pink skipping rope. Or she would write notes to her mother such as: “I’m having difficulty breathing. My vision is blurry. Please tell your friend you’ll call her back after you’ve performed CPR on me.”
In the evening, if Elvira and the girls were out or watching TV together in the den, I would wander around the house picking up scraps of paper that had writing on them. Silly notes written by my daughters, grocery lists, receipts, and odd things doodled on the edges of newspapers and flyers, phone messages to the girls, pages ripped out of school notebooks that had been used to work out answers to math questions and discarded. I put all these papers into my filing cabinet in a folder marked “Family.”
Our friends and neighbours on the block included the Steingarts, the Shilstras, the Schellenbergs, and the Schroeders, as well as the Bergers, the Barkmans, the Bubberts, and the Broeskys.
Mrs. Steingart, a well-meaning widow, lived directly across the street and knew as much as she needed to know about every aspect of life on our block. Often she would come into our house — our doors were never locked — and wash the dishes and tidy up. She never quite understood, but always accepted, Elvira’s int
ense hatred of housework, and she was always happy to pitch in.
Miss Shilstra was a hermit who lived in a haunted house, according to the children on the block. In truth, she was a kind, eccentric, independent woman, the unmarried daughter of two medical doctors, who lived alone in an ancient weather-beaten house amidst piles and piles of yellowing newspapers. At Christmas and Easter, Elvira would insist that one of the girls take Miss Shilstra a plate of baked goods that she’d prepared for the holiday. On these occasions Miss Shilstra would invite whoever had been given the task in for a cup of tea. The girls, I noticed, seemed oddly exhilarated each time they’d had a visit with old Miss Shilstra, perhaps because they felt they had narrowly survived the situation.
Between Miss Shilstra and Mrs. Steingart lived the Schroeders, a friendly family and home to the ever-adventurous Debbie, Miriam’s best friend throughout elementary school. As a child Debbie stayed up until one every morning to watch Merv Griffin on TV and every morning was raring to go before any other kid on the block. Every day, after school, she headed off to the Five to a Dollar store on Main Street, where her mother worked, and ate a bag of chips, a chocolate bar, and a soft drink, remaining as skinny as a garden hose. Once, her brother shot her out of a tree with a slingshot and she tried to strangle him with a garter snake. We were all in awe of Debbie.
On one end of our block lived the Harrisons with seven spunky daughters and no sons, and across from them the Bubberts, who kept to themselves; and at the other end of the block lived the Barkmans, he a Court of Queen’s Bench judge, and across from them lived John Henry and his family. John Henry had a sign-painting business and in the summer he would work in his driveway, creating beautiful signs of all types while the neighbourhood children stood around him in a circle and watched, fascinated. The entire block was used by the children to play games like kick the can, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and arrows, for which I provided the fresh chalk. At six o’clock the siren would go off at the firehall, reminding children all over town to go home for supper, and at nine o’clock it was set off again, reminding them to go home to bed. Saturday nights, the girls had their baths and the next morning we’d all put on our Sunday best and go to church. Sunday dinner was always a beef roast, potatoes, and carrots.