She left the food on the floor, exactly as it was, put a shawl on, and stepped outside. When she reached the end of their lane she stood on the corner, hesitating. While she stared down the long block she imagined herself continuing on, imagined wandering through the grid of streets, beside the rows of flimsy poplars and planked fences, in the thick air of freshly cut grass, walking until her feet were tired. But she found she could not. Instead, she returned to the house and started cleaning, bleaching the sinks and cupboards, scrubbing the stove, putting the chairs on the table to mop the kitchen linoleum, the bathroom mirror, the bathtub, noisily cleaning everything she could think of, except the mess on the floor in his room.
Eventually, late in the evening, she heard him mumble her name. Agnes pushed the door open and leaned casually against the frame, the slat of light she was standing in crawling up the side of his bed. With his hands gathered into a knot on the blankets in front of him, he fumbled through an apology. “I . . . I . . . You . . .” He sighed. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Okay.”
From that evening on, almost consistent with the deterioration of his body, he became increasingly gentle and, for the first time in their married life, somewhat affectionate. At times he would abruptly grip on to her hand in his gruff way and then spend a quarter of an hour staring out the window, blinking, unable to let go of it, both of them settling in the silence, in the warm light that bled through the edges of the orange curtains, listening to the hum of the cars passing by, to the unseen sparrows chirping from the neighbour’s hedge.
At his funeral, sitting on a frigid pew at the church, staring into his coffin, she realized something that disturbed her: that she was going to miss, not the person she married, but the frail being who was lying on the rumpled satin, the man he’d become when he was most decrepit. Looking at him then, she was forced to admit to herself that the best months of her marriage were the months when her husband was suffering the most. What kind of person, she wondered, did that make her?
When she returned to work, some of her colleagues at the school made a point of inviting her for their weekly Saturday afternoon of bridge, but she’d hated every minute of it. They’d sat outside, around a table on the patio that was much too large, a dish of Nuts and Bolts and a bowl of Jell-O salad jiggling in the middle of it. They adjusted and readjusted themselves on the lawn chairs, the straps of webbing cutting into their thighs, all the while talking about the same conventional things Agnes had always imagined herself talking about but had somehow never gotten around to. The buying of appliances on “the instalment plan,” the automated washers, barbecues, vacuum cleaners, motorized lawnmowers. Then on to neighbourhood rumours and hearsay: “You know what I heard?” one of them leaning in and folding over her bridge hand as if it were the incriminating evidence itself.
She became taciturn, looking around at the other women. She felt old, boring, especially watching two of the newer teachers who could have been teenagers for all Agnes could discern. They were girlish, stylish, confident, using words they must have learned from their newly purchased televisions or those radio shows that she now switched off. Gee whiz. Neato. Swell. “This salad is just ideal, Erla.” They raised their hands every now and then to pat their hair into place, beehives and bouffant flips, providing glances down the short sleeves of their blouses, confirming that they took to shaving their armpits, wore bullet bras. Agnes noticed that even the older women looked more fresh and vernal than she remembered them being, every one of them disciples of Chatelaine Magazine no doubt, embracing its tips and secrets with devotion, with faith. Lipstick, bubble bath, blow dryers, Clairol, Noxzema, all of it, ensuring they resembled Marilyn Monroe as close as was womanly possible.
The following week, she turned down their invitation, as she did every week afterwards, until they stopped asking. No, she had decided, the only place she felt at ease anymore was in her house and when she was alone. And she was fine with that. She would resolve herself to a life of domestic solitude, to rituals that avoided people, to mornings spent sitting on windowsills before class, thinking.
And really, it was surprising the wonders that one could find while alone. Only last week Agnes had had an experience that could only be described as extraordinary. She’d been on her way back from some grocery shopping, and had decided, for the first time, to take a shortcut that skirted a marsh on the border of her neighbourhood. Along the way, she’d noticed some cattails jutting out of the marsh’s edge, most of them having gone to seed, their brown velvet splitting along a seam that seemed to bleed out with a type of downy cotton. She decided she wanted to touch one of them, or maybe even pick it, but as soon as she put down her grocery bags and walked into the reeds she found herself stepping onto a ground that was veiled and unnaturally soft, which had her rethinking the idea. She stopped, looked around. A few remnants of fall colours were standing out against the browns and greys of early winter, a yellow leaf caught in the sepia culms, a brush-dab of maroon, a fist of rust. There were also birds, she realized, twittering and chirring in the rushes in front of her, hidden. On a whim, she clapped, just once, never for a moment imagining that it would have the effect that it did.
The entire marsh seemed to erupt, and the sky darkened with hundreds, maybe thousands, of small black birds. They formed a bleary cloud that spread and thinned itself one moment, then condensed and folded in on itself the next; but it was always whorled and synchronous, always acting as one. There was a point when the flock passed low over her head, and she was sure she felt the wind of their countless wings, and flinched beneath its tremolo, ducking low into the sedges. Then the flock collected and spiralled above the marsh that was farthest away from her and, rather abruptly, sunk into the reeds again, leaving the autumn air empty but for their sounds, now remote and muted.
When she stepped out of the rushes several minutes later, stooping to collect her grocery bags, she was struck with a strange sensation, a thought. It occurred to her that there might be someone else, maybe even somewhere out there in Canada, who’d experienced exactly what she just had, who had stood in some rushes mesmerized and half-frightened by a swirling flock of blackbirds. And for some reason—she couldn’t even begin to say why—it was important that this person existed, that they were out there. She continued on, thinking of who they might be, imagining a younger woman, an older man, crouched in another marsh, another time.
She hoped to spend many a morning thinking about this experience, sitting on her windowsill before class. It would be so much better than the petty way she sometimes found herself counting down the years (and even the months and weeks) before she could retire. And even better than spending this time, as she had been lately, infuriated and thinking of Lyle.
Lyle was a fated pupil of hers, whom, she knew, no one would ever be able to reach. He came from one of “those families” living in the river bottom, where houses, which were unwisely strewn along the floodplain of the Oldman River, were the very cheapest to come by. She’d once had the misfortune of meeting his parents at the supermarket, which provided a glimpse as to how he most likely spent his evenings, breaking the bottles his father threw into the backyard—a child testing the weight of a stone in his hand while scouring the ground for others, distractedly circling the patchwork of lawn with its spots of yellow grass where the dogs squatted to urinate, the bottles lined up like pickets, poking above the neighbour’s side of the fence. She imagined this as a fairly accurate depiction because Lyle seemed to deal with people in the same way he dealt with the objects of his playground vandalism, as a constant experiment to inflict the greatest amount of damage with the least amount of effort. He’d found the most effective ways to terrorize his classmates almost systematically and had even stumbled upon a way to browbeat Agnes.
He had discovered it innocently enough, asking her one lunch hour, likely out of simple curiosity, if she had any children. She made the mistake of reacting, of being affected, beginning with stammering the fact that it was none of his busines
s and ending with walking away from him abruptly.
In the weeks that followed, Lyle was cautious with what he said, slowly testing the waters, choosing the timing of his questions to coincide with as many witnesses as possible. Agnes O’Donnell recognized it as simple manipulation, as a classic power struggle similar to others she’d dealt with in the past, only this time it felt like she was losing the skirmish. With each calculated question he asked, she could feel her authority slipping, her respect, her judgment.
“Mrs. O’Donnell? You said I could keep my jar of worms for fishing in my desk, right?”
“No, Lyle.”
“Yes, you did. Jeremy was there. Didn’t she, Jeremy?”
“It doesn’t . . . I’m saying no now. It doesn’t matter what I said yesterday.”
“Oh. It doesn’t? Never?”
And for the first time in her scholastic career, she wasn’t sure if she could deal with the problem in a calm or composed way. It incensed her, and she wanted nothing more than to put him back in his place, to shut him up before any of the other teachers or administration started whispering about it—even if it was already a little late for that. Recently, she’d taken to stalling in her resource room until well after the bell had rung, the teachers of the adjoining classes hearing the bedlam of her students escalate to the point where they were probably on the verge of walking into the room and restoring order themselves.
Agnes heard two sets of small feet shuffle into the classroom and sit down at their desks. She reached over and picked up the morning paper, holding it in front of her face in case either of the children decided to lean out of their seats and peek around the corner. Inadvertently, she found herself focusing on one of the headlines. It was about Sputnik, a satellite that had been launched by the Soviet Union in October, and the expected response of the United States to outshine it with a far superior craft. Somehow, this information did nothing but add to the instability she already felt that day, and this, before the class had even begun. She was barely clinging to the authority she’d once held in her third grade classroom, and meanwhile, somewhere above the veil of blue sky over the school, astronauts were peering out of their windows and watching the Earth shrink like a playground ball that had been kicked impossibly hard into the air. She flopped the newspaper onto her lap and turned to look down at the schoolyard again, where students were arriving in ever-increasing numbers, fanning out across the snow like ants whose colony has been disturbed, funnelling through the small opening of the front door and into the network of corridors, filling what was serene and wooden and quiet with their collective bustling. She breathed a tired sigh.
As the children made their way into the classroom and hung up their coats, she leaned farther away from the gap where she could see the main room, hoping to avoid acknowledging any of them prematurely—which was the gesture that finally signalled how far she had let herself slip. This couldn’t go on. She had to do something, had to take a stand. She was an experienced teacher who had somehow allowed herself to be strong-armed by a child, who had succumbed to the same juvenile tactics she had spent years effectively suppressing. Yes, she thought, reluctantly standing from the windowsill, yes, she had no choice but to end this Lyle business, and today, definitively, in a way that was severe enough that it would never come up again.
She tossed the newspaper onto the table and walked out of the resource room, standing beside her desk and giving a slow nod to the students. “Good morning, class.”
The children droned in unison, “Good morning, Mrs. O’Donnell.”
“Let us stand and say the Lord’s Prayer.”
The class rose and stood facing the cross, hands clasped in front of their chests, and proceeded to mutter the syllables in a perfect monotone. She joined them as she always did, hitting a slightly higher note in an attempt to give the words weight and meaning, but doubted it worked. While she recited the prayer, she eyed a few of her students: Julie, already staring out the window, something she would continue doing for most of the day, mouth ajar, her gaze remote and unfocused; Carol, rocking back and forth on her feet, whom, once sitting, would not stop fidgeting for a consecutive thirty seconds throughout the morning; and then there was Lyle, watching his feet as if he were already bored, no doubt wishing he could be out in the playground where he was lord of all he surveyed. He was wearing two poppy pins today, probably in response to the lesson she’d given the day before. She had told them that the pins were made in “Vetcraft” workshops in Montreal and Toronto, by ex-servicemen who’d fought in the wars, then went on to explain the poppy’s symbolism, that the red was for the blood shed in battle, the green for the hope of a better future, and the bent pin for the broken bones and suffering endured. It seemed the kind of thing that Lyle wouldn’t be able to undermine, but he’d somehow found a way. He’d asked why the poppies were made of plastic and not of flowers—did the plastic mean anything? He wanted to know. She’d answered, quite simply, that it was owing to there being no real poppies in Alberta. They didn’t grow here. At which point every student paused to look down at his or her pin doubtfully, at this emblem that had no connection to their immediate world, or even to their landscape entire. It had suddenly become something disassociated, outlandish. She could have sworn she saw Lyle fighting back a smirk.
When the children finished the Lord’s Prayer they hurriedly crossed themselves and broke into the singing of God Save the King, which they finished off-time and off-key, sat down, and waited for her to begin. She asked them to take out one of their workbooks, and there was a collective creak as they all hinged open their desks and took them out, closing the lids with many a raucous bang and ruffling their pages to where they had left off. The unit was about professions, about the correct naming of vocations and common careers.
The lesson began and continued unremarkably, until twenty-three minutes later, when her eyes happened to fall upon Cedric Johnson. There was something about him that struck her as odd in that moment. He had always been an inconspicuous student, unexceptional, one of those children who made up a rather plain colour in the mosaic, who made it easier for others to stand out. He was, now that she thought of it, the kind of child a teacher could spend an entire year with and, within a month after he left, forget that he’d ever existed, forever requiring the prompting of a photo to put a face to the name. Yet right now, this normally indifferent boy looked decidedly awake, his eyes shifting around with a kind of distraction, if not wonder, from one corner of the room to the next, focusing on the most commonplace objects as if they had just miraculously appeared out of thin air. He was particularly focused on the snowflakes Scotch-taped to the windows, the shapes of paper the students had folded, snipped, unfolded, and held up to the light before sticking there. Well, she thought to herself, something must be going on at home—fighting parents, nightmares, a dead relative—something out of the ordinary. She looked away, back down at her book.
A few seconds later, Lyle raised his hand to ask a question about careers, his other hand reaching across to brace the one in the air, as if it were unbearably heavy. Mrs. O’Donnell tilted her head to the side impatiently, half-wondering who had ever come up with the phrase “There is no such thing as a stupid question,” because whoever it was had clearly never spent time in a third grade classroom, where the days were saturated with them.
She did little to mask her irritation. “What, Lyle?”
“Um . . . Mrs. O’Donnell? Um . . . did you always wanna be a teacher?”
She had almost answered him before recognizing what his question really was. He was prodding into her private past, into her life. It was an attempt to rattle her. Yes. This was it, this was the moment she had promised herself, twenty-four minutes earlier, that she would not, could not, shrink from.
She noticed her arms trembling. Then she looked down into her hand and saw that there was a piece of chalk in it, and, as if it were some kind of bloated insect larva that had wriggled between her fingers without her knowing, she g
ave it a quick, disgusted look and hurled it at the ground. It broke into several pieces, the fragments scattering under the students’ desks, bouncing between their feet and under the heating registers. The children all seemed to press their backs against their seats in perfectly choreographed unison, eyes opening wide.
“I have had”—she pointed her finger at Lyle’s face like a pistol—“enough of you!”
Then she let herself go. She began with yelling the age-old disciplinary spiel about how Lyle had a problem with authority, and that he had better learn to toe the line or else. But somewhere along the way she lost herself. She started ranting about how far he was going to get in life. “If—if, do you hear me?—you can learn to listen, and respect others, and quell your aggressiveness, you might get to the end of grade nine. After which, I have no doubt, whatsoever, that you will go on to be a gas attendant, or have some such menial job. You, Lyle, will be bringing the change to the windows of your former classmates until you are old and grey.”
When she finished, she seemed to come back to herself, seemed to realize that she was standing in front of a roomful of children. She straightened up, smoothed the sides of her dress down, hearing, in the sudden silence, the clack of shoes in the hallway, walking slowly past her door. She could imagine the gossip: “The old woman’s finally coming undone,” they would be saying later in the staff room, murmuring in a volume just loud enough for everyone to hear. “I mean, we all know she’s been losing her grip for a while now . . . ever since Frank died really. Poor thing. She can’t even bring herself to come to our bridge games.”
But Mrs. O’Donnell didn’t care. What was important was that it was over. It was clear that Lyle wasn’t going to be causing problems any time soon. He was slumped over in his seat, trying hard to hold back tears. True, she wasn’t proud of her outburst, nor of the cruel bite of some of the things she’d said, but it had been necessary. That much she knew. And now it was over, and time to move on, time to release the class from the tension she had created and return to the lesson. She cleared her throat and was getting ready to turn around when a noise came from Cedric, a noise that didn’t fully register at first.
Believing Cedric Page 2