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Winter Coats
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From: Jack Corn
To: School Distribution Group
Folks,
I think you know how I feel about this place. I probably shouldn't say anything, but could we please be alerted whenever there is going to be publicity about our school. It affects everyone. It is frustrating to be blindsided by unanticipated controversies.
Jack
Date: January 1st, 9:46pm
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They had just returned from the Christmas Holiday and it was Monday morning. In fifteen minutes, or five, they would begin the first lesson of the new year to the handful of students who would have arrived on time, some accidentally, one or two with smiles already spread like their notebooks, unless they did not teach the first period and so had a choice to make during that first hour before the unintentioned hive resumed its dance: whether or not to pause and contemplate the origins of the cryptic post. What was Jack talking about? Who was he talking about? Who knew about what and about whom? There it pulsed, with all the dubious significance of carnage reported on the news. The automatic and directionless instincts for speculation were aroused in some, knowing that this moment (and others like it) was all there would be for them, the conjecture, the delicious irresponsibility of rumour, the freedom from laborious verification. There were communities of indifference and of probity. Still others were as always ignorant of all that transpired in the commons.
But if Jack was not ignorant (how could he be?) or indifferent then it was something that would at least be a part of that living memory like one of millions of polished stones at the bottom of a river whose ripples appear stilled from a certain distance overhead. Jack, about whom rumours would spread that he would retire since he could afford to and especially deserved to and was conscientious in considering the anxieties of young teachers who would be presented in the coming months with their ambiguous seniority-based terminations and who, Jack, retiring now could also capitalize on the benefits that governments everywhere were abusing as passé. And there were other circumstances favouring retirement that would come from the lips of veterans and friends, most of whom were the same people. He had had knee surgery this year. His wife was not well. She originated on some island in the Aegean and there was property in the family with a veranda. Their children were almost independent and had reliable financial prospects. But Jack said nothing either way about his reasoning, acknowledging only that this might be his time. He was a patriarch, voluble yet tightlipped, testamental in the decisive spareness of his pronouncements, which even in this his possibly final year would not waver with the new semester in February or the March retirement filing deadline or in late June while cleaning classrooms and organizing resources and at meetings where the celebrations of true retirees were celebrated enviously.
It was early January, but Jack's years had no rhythm to them, no flagging of energy or responsibility, would have none this year, no different from any other of the last thirty or forty in the steadfast solemnity of his that stuck to the walls, whose condition he vigilantly guarded and which displayed an assemblage of artifacts—memorials, faculty and class pictures, donated landscapes—that would gradually disappear after the curriculum leader of Canadian and World Studies did because no one else knew enough about their history to invest them with the vigour he did when he spoke. And though only one or two teachers—seeing that ultimately (could he last one, two, five more years?) the day would come when Jack would not only convene meetings of the alumni association, but would be one himself—enlisted to breathe at least a semblance of life into the building's dusty tradition, virtually everyone, consciously or not, owed much of their proud identification with the school and whatever fierce loyalty that could take root in their mostly flat souls to one man, who would not retire this year. His superficial wrinkles were terraced into the ruddy earth of his cheeks, the surgically repaired knee made it no more likely he would sit. He was as difficult to find as ever and if he was in his classroom it was erect among his bookcases where his advice could be had. Jack could be known among the bookcases; not reading, though he read, but sorting, thumbing spines, checking copyright, interrogating ancient penmarks. Not reading, but what reading meant. Textbooks overflowing in secret cabinets could neither be read, nor donated, nor disposed of, great tyrannical bonfires blazing in his irises at the reasonable suggestion that The Modern Era, first published in 1928 and then updated six times, the last the year of Jack's graduation from the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto, the faded austere hardcovers all the dearer because of copies whose covers had been boyedited at a time when American girls were unshackling their breasts and inspiring rebellions of defacement in Canadian classrooms, be replaced by something more current. Etching one's name into a desk in 2010 was disrespect, but The Modern Bra was history.
The heart of an antiquarian, the acumen of a general, and the soul of a teacher had crafted the enigmatic post that on the Monday after New Years delivered a fully-developed personality, a coherent philosophy, to the desktop of each teacher who at some point in her career, not five minutes before class, might consider acting on an impulse or a mature belief that education should be conducted in just such a manner and that the conduct should be broadcast by the CBC. Rachel Farmer knew exactly what Jack was talking about, and her peremptory and counteroffensive and yes vocalized (she was, though not aware of it in the moment, alone) response was not to care what people like him had to say about what she knew in her heart was a just and anyway imperative (for her) thing to do.
Of this I am proud, Rachel thought.
On Christmas Day, Jack thought.
He heard about it at what he would characterize as an infuriating moment, surrounded by his wife who was ill and their children who had learned to expect emotional reactions from their father and his wife's brother (the sister-in-law was not at the table) who had acquired a pardonable viciousness towards authorities after their son was maimed in combat in Afghanistan and the one colleague who had inherited the most from him because though she was young her church had given her a lively sense of eternity, and her fiance. It was the Christmas dinner table.
The fiance knew Jack only in an abstract sense, but more importantly was eager to impress his future wife's mentor, who could have been no more eager had he been the prospective father-in-law, which he was more than by virtue of not technically being so. Patrick was nervous and running through progressions of dialogue in his head and because he was not looking opened his mouth to introduce the intriguing report just as Jack had put his fingers to the carving utensils. He was rattled that it was news to Katherine's mentor. There they were, the eight of them—the hosts at the heads, the children on one length in order of their evenly-intervaled ages, on the other length the protege alongside her mentor and also, uncannily, the oldest of her generation by the same interval that separated the true offspring, joined by her fiance and Joan's brother Phil—and the table was silent while Jack questioned Patrick in presumably much the same manner of a private, anachronistic examination of the pastor's intentions towards one of his daughters. It was not what they were saying. It was where they were saying it: the room. It was like eating dinner in a cemetery haunted by the sincere ghosts of one's own sincere ancestors. Patrick was fighting to justify his presence at the table, but what everyone heard was the 16-candle chandelier, the claustrophobic oils of industrious Autumn, simple Winter, and humble Spring, the magisterial scrollwork of the mahogany furniture, and the enumerated heirlooms of the table setting, altogether enough to furnish Antiques Roadshow with a week's worth of episodes, and uninheritable.
As the dimensions of the story protruded as if out of one of those flat abstractions before a crosseyed observer, Jack's fury sniper-like found any number of targets. Immediately he was irked that it was the soul at the table who obviously knew the least about the only school he had ever taught at who had known about the controversy hours before he who should have known days before the other did. He was a pastor, his colleague's fiance, who should have known at the very least the familial sanctity of the occasion if not the bequeathed proprieties on possible topics of conversation, even though he later learned as a result of the embarrassment that he was really a youth pastor and therefore professionally heterodox in approach. He could not be angry with his colleague who he loved, but this would be the first suspicious note to invade their symphony of faith. And then there was his brother-in-law who had lived in hell for the past seventeen months. The hell had drained the soil that nourished his wife of water, leaving behind a dry husk that had nothing but dead structure keeping it upright. To the father it seemed to add rather than subtract, but it was a virus of angry scabs that in their gross patching memorialized his earlier beauties. Only the beauty of Christmas could by negative correspondence make Jack for the first time identify the man with the ugliness, with the satisfaction he demonstrably took at the dinner table in the humiliating report about the conduct of those students, and of the teacher herself. Yet Jack's fury seemed to cleanse rather than besmirch, like a victorious sermon that frontally assaults and obliterates evil.
“Just FYI, Pat. As soon as you give them that journalist's name, Alex and probably Katherine are going to go dutifully upstairs and get the computer so we can listen on this holy occasion to the goddamn broadcast ourselves,” Phil said.
Joan reminded everyone of the blessed plenty on the table. But the children were quiet. Not sullen, just quiet, cold even, deflated, like toys whose batteries had suddenly died. Among her generation only Katherine (for it seemed to the would-be daughter too that Jack was her father, who displayed proudly on her mantle the photoshopped image on the pier at the Corn family cottage of this six of them, presented to her by the other five on that same pier on the morning of her thirtieth birthday after twenty fictitious years, this being obviously Jack's and Joan's idea) felt enlivened by the grip of the code that was sanctified by Christmas and sanctified it. If Phil was wrong it was only because it would be Katherine and possibly Alex who would go into the latter's old room, undo and sort the mess of cables, carry the dinosaur in no less than three trips down the twenty-two stairs, and hook it up again on the dining room sideboard beside the generous platters and the crystal punch bowl of eggnog inscribed thirty-eight years earlier for the parents' nuptials. No one would object to Jack, to Katherine, even to Joan. Not Phil, who saw an opportunity for mischief, and not the actual children, arrows in the Corn quiver that had missed their mark and hit the bullseye of another target.
When Alex reached Katherine at the bottom of the stairs, the excitement of her haste collided with her father's “daughter's” earnestness and she thought once again without heat that it wasn't blood which transmitted connection, since Katherine was so incredibly boring to her but not to her father. She knew her sister and even William, who had the same ruddy purity of aspect and premature white as their father, felt the same. At least they were free of resentment, if also of real gratitude, and they had their parents to thank for that. Here she was, on her knees, straining to disentangle the involved cables, breathing in the accumulation of dust, and avoiding contact with the ubiquitous mouse poison of her childhood in that enormous but disjointed house, and she was not the least impatient. But it was not until she and Katherine finally rebooted the machine on the sideboard and Alex had retaken her seat at the table and felt her appetite reignited by the labour and looked up chewing a mouthful of stuffing to see that only Lia and William had finished their plates that she realized (and now for the first time) she was also bored by Christmas, whose parents considered this meal somehow fundamental to their lives. No, to Canada and civilization! She was cold to the obvious juxtaposition of the turkey and the desktop. They together belonged to somebody else—to Katherine, to her father and mother, even to Phil and Nancy—as though she had momentously stepped back into her fifth grade class excursion to the Royal Ontario Museum and its depictions of historical interiors, one of which now was being peopled by her family, it did not matter which. For the first time in her life she took the cell phone from the pocket of her shirt and under the Christmas table went onto Facebook to check if Pedro had posted on her Wall in the last couple of hours about coming out for her birthday on Friday, and no one noticed though it took her a minute to scroll through all the funny posts of her friends, stealing their own timestamped half-minutes from their families too, to register disappointment that he hadn't. He had recently changed his relationship status from Single to It's Complicated, who of course would know she would notice and wonder who else knew, who else's eyes it was intended for, who else wondering whether self-expression or communication, who else obsessing over the etiquette of asking after two weeks and three dates, for she hadn't yet slept with him though they had done most of the other standard things, and suddenly she felt something melt inside of her as she put another bite of turkey covered in gravy into her mouth and chewed, even now more separate from the scene around her, focussing entirely inside herself now, not even thinking of Pedro. William came up behind her and dug all his knuckles into both sides of her ribs and she spun around and punched him square in the chest. He laughed and pulled in his father's chair at the head of the table to within an inch of hers. Then Lia returned from the washroom and touched Alex's chair from the other side, while at the table's opposite head Phil, Jack, Joan, and Katherine congregated standing, Patrick behind them like an apple stem pointing towards the youthful company, the familiar ephemera, the contours of weightless conversation of endless variation, involuntarily activating his clerical training, the novel terms of its ambitious methodology, but along with that the self-secret anxieties of his own vacillating soul, and his eyes as sure as any mechanical reflex jerked towards Katherine who stared where Jack stared where Phil stared where Joan stared at the downloading home page of the CBC.
“I thought they liked Christmas,” Lia said, whose, bright eyes detached from mother. “They're so funny sometimes.”
“God forbid we check Facebook at the dinner table,” Alex said. “It's a double standard, right?”
“So, sisters, how fare your romantic pursuits?” the youngest William said and fake bowed the few inches to the armrest of the headchair.
Alex laughed loud enough that Patrick and Joan both looked over, and Joan said: “All together on Christmas. Having a good time, sweethearts?”
“Mom, I need to talk to you later,” Lia said.
“Mommy dearest, I too need your sympathetic ear,” William pantomimed again.
“Shut up, loser,” Lia said loudly, and Jack and Katherine both heard this time.
“Yes—” Joan said.
“Which one is it?” Phil said. He turned around. “Patrick, get in here.” He pointed at a series of links on the screen.
“What's up with your lonely life?” Alex asked William. “Your white hair get you any dates lately?”
“Ignorant girl. This,” William said, pointing at the white swoop on his peak, “is a mark of status. It's a sign of potency. Alexander the Great went white by the time he was twelve. Not just part—all white! And, to correct your naive understanding, chicks dig it.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, “because they feel sorry for you. They want a defect to make them feel better about themselves.”
“That may be true. But what do you bet I'm the one who gets and stays married? In fact, I'll give you odds. Double or nothing one of you is going to be a spinster,” William said and removed his wallet. He leaned in and said, “Lia broke up with Cal again, poor guy.” He paused. “You didn't even tell her, Lia!”
Lia looked towards the computer, but Will had been discrete. She leaned in too, the three chairs, the three heads, almost touching, under their parents' roof again not as seldom as their peers, the instant easiness of their repartee, except that they whispered what should have been howled, the charactered mahogany what should have been the stainless imitation oak of a bar.
“This time it's really over,” Lia whispered. “Dad's going to die. I can't even tell him. Mom's going to have to do it. I swear I took Cal back because Dad was in love with him. A post-doc in comparative literature! Dad never says anything, you know? But it's the whole lack of enthusiasm thing for what I want. I fake it to make him happy. He deserves it. He tries, you know? He fakes it too. But now I realize we're just different people. Something wrong, Will? Fine, you want to bet? A thousand dollars says I have a longer and happier marriage than you do!”
They shook, with Alex as their witness, and they raised their eyes to meet Katherine's and Patrick's and their parents' returning to them, regathering, known to each other and mostly unbothered by the unincorporateness of their bonds, in the solemn concentration of half a family sitting, undrinking and uneating their Christmas dinner, attending to a report on the CBC about a bunch of refugees buying boots and cosmetics and jewelry and name-brand shirts at the Dufferin Mall, paid for with $1700 donated by teachers at the heartwarming solicitation of one of their colleagues for the express purpose of purchasing winter coats which the students could not afford, and because directing them to local services that distributed used clothing for free would stigmatize them and alienate them even further and would not work anyway and regardless of everything was unworthy of what Canada did or should represent.
* * *
Rachel Farmer had arranged to meet the students on the Thursday before Winter Vacation, at eight o'clock in the morning, school not starting for another half hour and everyone on time, half of whom had never, not one day, opened the door of their first class before eight forty-five, on the days they actually came, the other half punctual as always. She arrived at seven fifteen with two thousand dollars cash in one large and one small envelope in her purse. The cramped, illlit, and dingy office she shared with a dozen other teachers was empty. She sat down at a chair as old as she was in front of a new computer, logged onto her email and wrote a few overly prompt messages, and steadied the beats of her nervous heart in a few racing minutes of solitude. At seven forty, she descended to the front lobby: deserted, portentous, suffused with the pallid, stale airlight of inattention to unbeauty, oppressive in the absence of the exuberance of youthful possibilities. The first students to arrive, before eight, the ordinarily punctual ones, at once exhausted their limited supply of English and stood dumbly next to Rachel as though sleeping fully awake, satellites to her sun, facing the six front doors of the school. Each subsequent arrival, however, orbited less and less about the teacher, their own gravitational pulls increasingly overwhelming hers, who had taught herself at night only slightly more Hungarian than they knew English, in other words an amount symbolically dubious but practically useless, who was to compound this a teacher (and in Hungary they learned everything there was to know about them), meaning they didn't understand her, a couple did not like her, a few feared her, and the several open to the idea had not yet discovered any manner of language for befriending her. The last handful of students to arrive did not even look at her. They located their friends, dove among the quilted covers of their mother language, and exulted in the authorized freedom of a field trip to a destination they frequented by choice. The foyer was full of noise and “shopping.” Not spree, not that, not for most, not intentional and conscious from the first (though who knew how many even understood what understanding the people who gave the money had for its use, or even that there were seventeen of them, or even that a few of them were their teachers, and especially not that the anonymity of Rachel's gratitude did not satisfy all of them, because no one spoke Hungarian), what was anything but that, what it was being birthed now in the unaware and contingent material of a new nebula. Everyone was there, and Rachel stood alone now, benefactress, who had celebrated anonymity on behalf of others, who now contemplated and disliked not anonymity but its opposite, who had privately wanted to be known, acknowledged for her humble, private offerings. She did not admit to herself that she was truly mortified by her marginalization behind the teeming foreign adolescence, who had all the money, that was not hers. She was relieved that for the moment the halls were relatively empty, no donors in sight. She turned back to the students and without any warning the responsibility of her stewardship coalesced in a heavy mass beside the middle of her spine and she tensed bravely and in excruciating pain that she not collapse to the floor.
One of the students noticed. She wore tightwrapped acid wash jeans, red Puma sneakers, and a black sleeveless Playboy tee that didn't quite reach her studded belt. Her plastic hoop earrings touched her shoulders if she tilted her head either way, and she had one redglass stud sparkling in the regrown dark of her moustache. Her black eyes, enticing as a stereotype, blackened by two beaches of mascara, blinked.
“Miss hurt?” Laura B. said, and Vanessza turned also to inquire, who was always inseparable from Laura B. and Viktoria and had a learning disability to go along with status in Canada, what she called “citizen” and went uncorrected for she would not consider attempting to vote once in her life and would die happily at seventy-two in Edmonton never understanding what prevented her from exercising what her children exercised infrequently, who, the mother or the children, did not understand why they did that much.
Laura B.'s interest also attracted Laura V., accused of stealing B.'s boyfriend Miklos, and Miklos truly had some good qualities to fight over, who came and almost strangled Laura B. with his charismatic elbows and then smacked her in the head after she elbowed him in the ribs and before she kicked him in the ass, the real loser in this being obviously Laura V.
“Laura! Miklos! What kind of behaviour is that?” Rachel said.
“Sick Miss? Beteg?” Laura V. said, selecting a new object for her infallible competitiveness, exhibiting the kind of joyless expertise of a child athlete, perversely virtuosic in the insertion of the easiest of Hungarian vocabulary.
“Beteg? Yes. Egan. Kicsit. Köszönöm szépen,” Rachel answered, unaccented and earnest, anticipating and hopeful of the next moment, dangerous and tempting, never able not to stake at every instant the entire measure of her self-confidence and effective decision-making.
“When go shopping?” Miklos asked.
“I don't know. Nem tudom. Nem tudom, Miklos,” Rachel paused, searching. “Are you going to continue to be inappropriate with girls?”
“I dzseki Miss,” Miklos said because he did not understand what Miss said and lacked the experience of shame (which was also why Laura B. was “bolond” to him and why he was not stolen by V.).
All seventeen of the students in the lobby—even Richard Olah of the misconstrued papers, not a day over ten that hung at the elementary school, but officially fifteen because the nine on his registration form had been read as a four and he was not present when his mother came into the school for the only time to register him—would have called Rachel “bolond” had they known she was childless by choice. At forty and married for five years to a musician who was frequently out of town, she was only in her second year of teaching. It engrossed her and occasionally almost destroyed her. She inclined to other teachers who felt to a less degree the same (which meant she was also frequently though comfortably alone), differing from the others because they used words like “babies” or “children” or at least “kids.” Rachel said, my students. She did not assume they needed developmental guidance. They rebelled when mistreated, infantilized, and persecuted, rigidly imprisoned by the homogenizing system, hated for their love of freedom and their different needs, as any adult would. There was nothing maternal about her methods, which was easy to mistake. She cared and told herself and others that she cared and was perceived to care, if anything too much. She invested the time a parent would, the money a parent would (she had $300 of her own money in a separate envelope in case the jackets' cost went a bit in excess of the $1700, $100 of which was also hers, all $400 of hers coming from her teacher's salary, backstopped by the industrial wealth of her husband's Hungarian family, which she said had been made on the backs of these people), and the total sum of self-worth a parent would. She figured that if she reflected back the fear and hopelessness and dejection in her Roma students' eyes as understanding and respect and yes even genuine liking, and met every unconscious low expectation her students had of themselves with innovative, demanding, and conceptually liberating activities that challenged the status quo, her students would transform expeditiously. She was intent on transformation, intent on students susceptible to it, students who had been judged beyond help. She told stories about “reaching” just these students. All the while she did not have children of her own.
It was not because she had married too late, nor because she had any knowledge of her own or Peter's infertility. She was open about her lifestyle in a certain way. Some of the teachers in her office knew because they listened and it could come up in conversation, or even in passing exchange, or it could not. Knowing Rachel was not necessarily a function of earning her trust or of gradually solidifying an intimate bond, but could also be simply of being within earshot and following her accountings of her dilemmas and delights and quite often sufferings. Her Hungarian students did not know it was her choice: not because they were students, but because they knew so little English that even Rachel felt she could be misunderstood and judged. Even so, it might (have) come up, though it had not. They (especially the girls) knew she had no children, and so they were inclined to report she was “bolond” anyway, that something else besides not wanting children was wrong with her, which meant that whoever needed any excuse for their own bad behaviour could dismiss her, because almost no one would risk sticking up for someone alien. Had they known she had a potent, sneering aversion to the way children and especially babies shackled and enslaved other beings, they could not have thought worse of her had she been a homosexual or a pedophile. They were confused why she was always using images of skiing, hang gliding, surfing, or flying to teach them new words and grammar even though she didn't do any of these except flying in commercial aircraft, which now even they had done. After Rachel received her termination notice in April, and even after in June she learned of her transfer to a school with a vibrant music program where she would teach an impossibly full timetable of music classes (she played flute and she was always giving speeches in English and German about unknown composers), and then still after she was transferred back to West Toronto one week before the start of school, she was not positive that she would not apply for a leave of absence and move to Vancouver or even to Australia where her husband was from and where it was her dream to live. She put her principal on notice.
Her freedom and her self-imposed commitments coexisted. It should be so for everyone was how she taught. That was what surprised her: that it wasn't. That she had students and enough of them (and there were plenty of other teachers' students who quickly learned where Rachel's classrooms were each period) who shunned making commitments to her and laughed at self-impositions she suggested to transform the freedoms all humans should enjoy into a sort of bacchanalian chaos on bad days was an insult to fairness and always freshly depressing. The music class she taught the Roma was the worst. The girls would not touch an instrument except on the days when not a single boy (Zsolt excluded) came to class, and too many boys seemed interested only in pounding out the same monotonous piano riff month after month. The riff did something quite offensive and damaging to Rachel because in the very humane act of embracing their culture which had been ignored and demeaned and celebrated in narrowly grotesque ways she was being assaulted by the very mean tyrannical stubbornness and closed indifference which she had been consciously attempting to undermine. The few boys who acted this way taught others to avert their eyes from any sheet music she tried to get them to look at as though she were some irrepressible beggar panhandling spiritual nonsense she knew had no value. There were days when, no joke, she felt that she was losing her mind (to accompany the permanent hearing loss she lived with since her first year when a student ruptured her tympanic membrane with a gym teacher's whistle). I am going to have a nervous breakdown, she thought. But then after an hour of consoling with the one teacher she could always go to she would drive the hour home and sit at her computer and commit once again the best of herself, the sympathy, the endurance, and the challenging complexity, to the design of tomorrow's lesson or next week's excursion beyond the bells, the unnaturally sequestering classroom walls, the empowered authorities, liberating her students into authenticity, and what would, should, just had to follow, justice. Each day tomorrow became today before it became yesterday, which was so unfortunate. How many days or weeks she could exist contentedly in the peaceful boredom of tomorrows and yesterdays. July and August were her favourite months for this reason. The beginning of summer, lost to the world somewhere in the Aussie hinterland in a car stocked with promise, transfigured the glaring, deserted signposts of the past academic year in the simplifying frame of a glowing rearview sunset; while not the end of summer, but by the eighth or ninth or at the latest the tenth of August, she was to be found daily at Hub, two blocks from school, a commute from home, ingesting the kindness of an organic muffin, exercising the decadigit liberty of broadband wifi, each Macbook Pro key a slice of prelapsarian bounty of curriculum design.
Today she had gotten fifteen, not seventeen, students onto the Dufferin bus headed North. Two students she had had to leave behind when the nondonor teacher the principal insisted had to accompany her refused to go along if they came because on the last trip to go ice skating they had refused to return to school with the rest of the group and he feared the law would not protect him if anything happened to them or they did anything to anyone else. Rachel gave each $100 to get jackets on their own on the weekend, a compromise negotiated by a third teacher who had donated but did not want the stress of supervising. Even losing these two students had exasperated her at the time. But now, on the bus, as they got closer and closer to their destination, Rachel felt optimistic, prideful, combative on behalf of these students, perhaps because she always felt better when she wasn't propagating the neglect of their justifiable needs, perhaps because the adventure was going on in spite of the closeminded and complacent risk aversion, the not even bordering on racist overstructuring of the lives of refugee, black, native, and poor students which the system somehow managed to sell to its employees like in the movie The Matrix. And not even the needless transfers a few students were holding, reminder of the inhuman secretarial hoarding of reams and reams of free TTC tickets, which she had seen with her own eyes and now finally on this last trip had been denied, could diminish her enthusiasm and hopefulness in achieving bettered lives for a few of the millions of oppressed people in their world.
Rachel texted with the journalist who suggested meeting in front of the Winners, while outside scraps of snow like disintegrating burning pieces of paper floated circling, like the bus was a firepit and its passengers in the rear ambiguously kindled lumps of smoking coal. I am protecting them and bringing warmth to their lives, she thought.
Nothing about the swirling ninety minutes of entitled liberation inside the Dufferin Mall would alert her to what would happen to her a week later, nor materially was there anything to be alerted about. She might have been happier if there had been. If only there were some legislation or regulation that could have served to discipline her disposal of the $1600 others donated, for at least then she would be faced frontally with the basic incongruence that existed between fairness and reality. She would have some critical choices she could never seem to make made for her, and they would sell their house in the GTA suburb which they just bought a year ago and move (she wasn't sure where) and she would study (she didn't know what) or start a business (selling she would figure out what) and her husband would play music as he could do anywhere. No, what Rachel needed alerting to, what she never seemed capable of cautiously avoiding, was the psychic trauma and sleeplessness that she could be caused to experience by a return to acute consciousness of the grinding stagnant festering indifference to suffering consolidated in a three line post (a code that would be easily deciphered by disgruntled donors and soon enough by most of the remaining teachers who were paying any attention) she would read at 10:45pm, at that last wakeful hour of her Winter Holiday still labouring to contribute to the greater social good, emailing with her friend Sandor about what time he would arrive tomorrow to translate into Hungarian the sympathetic and humane CBC radio report for the students. It would be well into the night before her perseverance would overcome the hurt, and she and Peter could have two or three hours of sleep. It is not long into Monday morning before her shame and her pride reignite their lifelong stalemate over her spirit.
* * *
Molnar Vanessza now sits at her desk, in the middle aisle, in the front row, the only one who has so far arrived to Mr. Corn's first period ESL Geography class on the Monday after New Years. In second period she has Ms. Farmer's ESL A. It is 8:25am and her binder is already open as she withdraws pencil, pen, and eraser from a plastic, Hungarian pencil bag. She sits attentively waiting for the instruction to begin, watching Mister hang about a dozen pictures of what seems to be the same building from hooks screwed into the top of the chalkboard's moulding. Vanessza has on plenty of eyeshadow, but no lipstick. Her jeans are tight but her shirt reaches the tops of her front and rear pockets. She has on the fall jacket and the flat sneakers she chose from Winners. She has $11.50 in her pocket. In the folder she keeps in her binder for important documents is an envelope with the capital letters M I S on the triangular flap. Both have sat for the last two weeks on the eleventh floor of her apartment building in the lone drawer of the family desk in the living room that her father took one day from the lawn of a house next door to a house he was painting. Nobody told her that on the Friday before Christmas Holiday there was an assembly and no period two (or three or four), and she couldn't find Miss and didn't trust leaving the card let alone the cash on her teacher's desk as instructed by another teacher Miss shared the office with. Her father had insisted on the money. The card was her mother's idea. The pair stowed over Christmas, four times visited in the otherwise empty drawer and counted, in the triple-folded yellow No Frills shopping bag, as though she had never matured past the child's instinctive belief in the arbitrary disruptions of stability and permanence. Vanessza had been very careful that her choices came in under the hundred dollars, but she had forgotten about the tax because the experience was so unfamiliar to her that she was no less surprised by the enlarged total that rattled in her brain than she would have been had the store not charged Miss tax because she was Canadian or a teacher or because she was spending so much money or for one of a thousand other causes concealed from her about the rules of this country, not to mention that she initially assumed she simply didn't understand what the cashier said. The overpayment upset her even though Miss assured her that there was enough money to pay for it. It was still on her mind when she got home that afternoon. She told her mother about it factually, but was relieved by her mother's concern. Ms. Farmer would accept repayment of the excess.
When the voice of the girl who does the announcements begins to emit from the speaker in the wall, Vanessza stands promptly and glances at the angle of Mr. Corn's profile for direction. They are alone and her teacher walks to the door and stands just outside the threshold. She feels comfortable doing so too. She leans against the opposite doorjamb, across from the roped-off memorials to the dead students from the world wars. She had not known Canada fought in them because she had not known Canada existed before two years ago when a classmate in the Gypsy high school in Miskolc had cried to her that her parents told her their family was moving to Canada two nights before they laughed together because they would both be moving there, and a month before they stared stupidly at each other and at a downloaded map of Canada that showed Edmonton and Toronto a few inches apart, resolving to take the bus to see each other on weekends. Mister taught them a lot about Canada in the same way they had learned a lot about Hungary (she learned the day after arriving in Toronto that Edmonton was 3000 kilometres away). He barks at two students to stop removing the materials they need for their period one classes from their lockers. She looks the other way where down at the end of the hall outside Miss's classroom Viktoria laughs at her and Laura B. makes faces. Then O Canada comes on and Vanessza looks at nothing at all. Mister was the first teacher who taught her what the words meant, but she forgets half of them. Her favourite phrase is “True Patriot Love,” what makes her think of her parents and her house in Miskolc, next to the river where her father and brother fished, even when it rained. She stayed inside and helped her mother cook or clean when it rained. There was nothing else to do. When it rained she waited until it stopped raining.
When the song ends she returns to her seat and looks again at her teacher. During the first fifteen minutes of class Mister always glances darkly and humourlessly at the classroom door. Students come late, but only for fifteen minutes, and that is good. Vanessza never once gives a thought to the names on the pink attendance paper who never appear because after fifteen minutes neither the educational nor the social benefits of entering are worth Mister's eyes. After 8:45am, Mister's classroom is orderly and smooth. Vanessza does not know it is actually more so than any other class in the entire school, Mister's other classes included. Vanessza touches her right hand to her right front jeans pocket as her teacher begins the lesson. She is still the only one there. The words come out of his strong mouth with the pinkgray skin and full set of white teeth. They are like raindrops, like the rain in Miskolc: outside of her, numberless, pooling. She sits calmly and listens. She does not understand, so she waits. Mister points to the maps on the wall and she watches. He asks questions that get answers from other students who use words she cannot identify, and still she sits and watches and listens, and she bides her time until she can ask her question when Mister is free: “What picture Mister?” If there is a worksheet, she writes her name and the date right away at the top, and asks when it is her turn: “What I do Mister?” Today there is no worksheet. There is no individual work time. She cannot ask her question, even though she waits and watches and listens and sits still. But she does not mind. She is almost always able to do what Mister wants her to do by the end of class because she almost always finds a way to get Mister to show her how to do it, and then she understands. When she understands she no longer watches and listens and waits. She sits calmly and does until she is finished.
She is always the first out of the door whenever Mister says “Let's go,” but nobody notices that today she is the last. She checks her folder and closes it and closes her binder and cinches the velcro and touches her right hand to the right pocket of her jeans and then walks out of the classroom. She does not understand where they are going. She walks past the other students to be close to Mister. They walk down the hall and she hears students' voices and sees Mister going alone and does not wait any longer and asks her question: “Why walk Mister?” She sees the countless raindrops around her head swirl. She waits to have another question and meanwhile she walks. From time to time Mister stops and she stops and it begins to rain again. Sometimes it rains for a long time and sometimes for a short time. Mister asks questions and the Gulyas siblings and Margit give answers and she listens. Mister touches the walls when he rains the words, and where he touches the walls the colours or the textures change. Each time the walls are the same in being different where he touches them while he rains a lot or a little. The school is big and it has different walls. Some look new and a lot look old, but some new paint covers old walls. The pictures in the classroom are different colours and different ages too. The buildings in the pictures are the school. Mister taught them the school is old. In two years it will be 100 years old. There is something else different in the pictures. They look different. They walk. There is no rain. The buildings look different. Some are further away. Somebody pokes her in the back. Some are smaller and bigger. There are different angles. The walls are different. Some are flat and some are bumpy. Mister touched them both. The pictures are in the classrooms and they are on the walk. She feels a finger in her back. She stops. She hears a window in her mind open, and another. A soft breeze fills her skull. Her school is old. It started small. Then they built more and more. Now it is big. Each time they built, they did it with different material and different paint. You know this from pictures and walls. Her father and his brothers built her house on the edge of town in Miskolc. It also has an addition. Her grandmother lives in the addition with one uncle and his family while Vanessza is in Canada with her family. She is a citizen, but she goes back to Hungary in the summers.
They walk back to the classroom and she sits back down calmly in her seat. Mister is in front of the classroom, but he is not raining. He was raining before and now he is saying the same things but he is not raining. She hears and sees. She still sits. She still waits. The bell rings. The students leave. She closes her binder again. Mister is taking down the pictures from the chalkboard. Vanessza goes close to him. He looks at her and she asks her question: “Why Mister? Test?” He downpours. She does not know there will not be a test but Mister never gives them tests she does not know about. She says: “Bye Mister.” She leaves the room, clutching her binder with the envelope and the missing letter on the flap inside the special folder, and she touches the lump in her pocket. She walks directly to her period two class.
Laura B. and Viktoria are on the computer in the class when she gets there. Vanessza's boyfriend Istvan is also there but he does not try to kiss her because his buddies Laszlo and Janos are there. A half dozen girls including Laura V. (who isn't showing yet) are either sitting on the backs of chairs or leaning out windows and talking with the students smoking below. Outside the classroom door are another eight or ten students against the walls. More of the students outside than inside are Miss's students. She is standing in front of her laptop bent over. The projector shows a website on the screen in front of the class. The bell rings. None of the students react. Miss does not react. Her friend George sits next to her. He sits and rains with Atilla. They are having such a nice conversation. Istvan comes up and puts his elbow around her neck. She looks at Atilla. She instructs: “Megy az osztályban.” He argues: “Te megy az osztályban.” She answers: “Ez az énem osztály.” Atilla knows how to have a conversation. He is very smart. She walks out of Istvan's elbow and stands next to Laura B. and Viktoria. They are chatting with their friend in Miskolc. She looks up at Miss. She touches the $11.50 in her pocket. More students enter the room and exit.
She stands uneasily. Atilla is sitting on her desk. Istvan lurks. Laura and Viktoria are very late for class with Mister. Miss is occupied. Luara V. is wearing the knee-high boots she got at H&M. So are her friends Katalin and Beatrix who goes by Bianca. Most of the girls got knee-highs and to top up to $100 makeup or earrings. Half of the girls wear the boots with miniskirts in January, but Miss said boots were okay because they are warm. The boots have heels the girls said grip in the snow. The boys from the villages got denim jackets and the boys from Miskolc got crew-neck sweaters. A lot of them topped up with money clips. Zsolt was the only student who chose a winter coat from Winners. Some of the students went over $100 even before the tax, but most were like Vanessza. She wonders if everybody went overboard, who paid all that money? Everyone is wearing the clothes they got at Dufferin Mall, except for five or six students in the class who did not go on the trip. Atilla did not go on the trip. George is still talking so nicely with him. George is there when something important needs translation. He does not have a job or a family.
Rain jumps out of Miss's speakers and then jumps back in. Miss stands and says: “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Atilla sits in her seat. Vanessza sits in the back. No one else who is standing sits. Some students who are sitting stand. George stands. The classroom is a downpour. George says: “Fiúk és lányok.” Miss and George rain, but they don't require that everyone else stops raining when they do. Atilla speaks with Miss and George in between, and she tries to hear. She understands Miss. She listens and she hears. She watches and she sees. She doesn't wait always with questions. Miss speaks Hungarian. Her husband is Hungarian, but he doesn't speak. George is Hungarian, but he speaks. Miss doesn't have any children like George, but she has a job and is a woman. Vanessza has one brother. She wants to have children, but not until she is older. She will not have Istvan's children; she will have someone's children like Atilla. She wants to speak English. George speaks English and Hungarian. Atilla is very smart. He is only in Canada three months, and Miss said he will go to ESL B in February. She doesn't know if she will go to ESL B in February. Miss did not say. She is fifteen. When she is eighteen she will finish high school and then she will speak English with Miss and Mister and George and Atilla. They will all be citizens and friends. She will get married (to someone as nice and smart as Atilla). She will wait two years and have children. She will run a nursery. Or she will do cleaning. Her husband will do painting and building. They will speak Hungarian with each other and English with their children. They will not live in an apartment building. They will buy a house. Toronto is expensive. Maybe they will move to Edmonton. There are Gypsy people there. They are building and there are jobs. Alexandra lives there. They will help take care of each other's children. She will try to convince Alexandra to start a nursery together. Their husbands will work together. They will all speak Hungarian and English. They will make additions on their houses as their families grow and for their parents when they are old. This life will start three years from now after she finishes school. Who she will marry she doesn't know. Somebody who speaks English and is smart and can have a nice conversation with somebody like George and is Gypsy.
The porter from the Dufferin Mall is raining in the speakers. George is translating. Miss stops the raining from time to time and asks for quiet. She rains about the porter. She rains about the See Be See. She rains about Roma people. She rains about Canada and immigration. She doesn't rain on normal days like this, she rains on special days. On normal days she rains about respect. George translates. Atilla shares nice words with Miss and George. Istvan tells George to stop translating. The voices of the students are in the speakers from the website. The students want to hear themselves. Some students laugh and shout at the speakers and some students laugh and shout at the students and some smile. George says it is important that Roma people are on the See Be See. He rains at Miss. She stops the speakers and rains more about human rights, about Gypsies and Roma, about respect, about $2000, about new clothes, about teachers. George translates, but it sounds just like rain even though it is Hungarian rain. Miss makes the porter finish in the speakers. Miss says: “So what do you think?” Richard Olah says he thinks the porter was hot. Miss yells: “Get out!” He does not go and then George tells him that it is disgusting after listening about the Roma on the See Be See. Richard Olah marches out and kicks the door and slams it. Miss is sad. Every week Miss gets sad. She and George give everyone a worksheet with questions about the Dufferin Mall. A lot of students say: “O!” The students who are not Miss's students push the worksheets onto the floor. They crumple the worksheets and push them onto the floor. They graffiti their names on the sides of the worksheet. They write things in Hungarian. They do not answer the questions. Miss comes and picks up the worksheets off the floor. She rains. Laura V. speaks with Katalin and doesn't look at Miss. Bianca says: “Hagyjon ma!” Katalin laughs so loud. Miss rains. Atilla is writing. So is Zsolt. Viktoria and Laura B. have pencils but they are not writing. Janos gets up and goes to the door. Somebody is at the door. He stays there. Istvan goes to the door. Zoltan's head is in the doorway. Zoltan smokes a lot of weed. He says to Laura V. and Bianca: “Mit akar világítani?” They run out after the boys. Katalin stays and laughs. Istvan looks at Vanessza and goes. The door is wide open. The classroom is quiet. Miss rains. Atilla gives nice words to George. No one else talks. Miss closes the door. Viktoria and Laura B. come and sit at desks. Miss picks up more worksheets off the floor. She uncrumples them. She looks at them. Vanessza writes. Atilla writes. Viktoria writes. Laura B. writes. Zsolt writes. Katalin sits. Laszlo sits. Bianca sits. Vanessza writes in Hungarian. The questions are in English and Hungarian. She does not look at the English. She wonders if Atilla is writing in English. She wonders what he writes. Most of the questions are rain. She wants to write good answers but she doesn't know how. Atilla writes and writes. She doesn't know what Miss wants. Miss is nice, but she is sad. She doesn't say anything. She sits in front of her computer and types. Vanessza wants to ask: “What write Miss?” She doesn't. She writes the answers she knows will not make Miss happy. There is no test. Atilla still writes. She is finished. She sits calmly. She waits. Some of the students who are finished talk quietly. She opens the velcro of her binder. She smells weed. Katalin laughs. Miss goes to the phone and calls rain. Istvan does not smoke weed, but his friends do. Atilla is not friends with anybody in their classes. He is friends with George and Miss. He is not friends with Mister because Mister is friends with teachers. She is friends with Viktoria and Laura B. She will be friends with George and Miss when she speaks English and finishes school. She wonders if Atilla will become a citizen like her. He is smart and the judge will see that because he will speak English with the judge. Her judge was nice. Maybe Atilla will get the same judge. She wonders if Atilla likes girls. He is smart and has nice conversations and a nice face. She doesn't know any gay people. Atilla wears a cross. He doesn't talk to girls in class except for Miss. She wonders if he wants to get married and have children and a house with an addition after he finishes school and he speaks perfect English. There are Gypsy people in Edmonton and it is cheaper there.
The bell rings. She touches her pocket. It is lunch. She says to Laura and Viktoria: “Én Jövök.” They go and stand by the door. She opens the special folder in her binder and removes the sealed envelope and puts her right hand in her right pocket and removes the bill and three coins. Atilla finishes writing. The students give their worksheets to Miss or George. Laszlo leaves his on his desk without his name on it. Vanessza waits. George and Atilla are raining. Everyone else is gone. Miss is sad behind her computer. Vanessza approaches and holds out the money. She says: “Too much pay money Dufferin Mall.” Miss stares at her eyes. Miss is nice but sad. Vanessza extends the card. She says: “This card for you from my family.” Miss stares. Atilla and George are looking. Miss says: “O Vanessza. Thank you! Köszönöm szépen. Nagyon szép!” Atilla says: “Speak English Miss.” Vanessza looks at Atilla not looking at her. They are the only students in the room. She says: “You are good teacher Miss.” Miss stares holding the envelope and the money. She does not rain words.
Vanessza walks home with Laura B. and Viktoria and dozens of other students, leaving Atilla and George raining nicely and Miss with $11.50 and a card. The forsaken envelope with the three letters on the triangular flap points like an arrow to nowhere in particular.
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From: Jack Corn
To: School Distribution Group
Folks,
I think you know how I feel about this place. I probably shouldn't say anything, but could we please be alerted whenever there is going to be publicity about our school. It affects everyone. It is frustrating to be blindsided by unanticipated controversies.
Jack
Date: January 1st, 9:46pm
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They had just returned from the Christmas Holiday and it was Monday morning. In fifteen minutes, or five, they would begin the first lesson of the new year to the handful of students who would have arrived on time, some accidentally, one or two with smiles already spread like their notebooks, unless they did not teach the first period and so had a choice to make during that first hour before the unintentioned hive resumed its dance: whether or not to pause and contemplate the origins of the cryptic post. What was Jack talking about? Who was he talking about? Who knew about what and about whom? There it pulsed, with all the dubious significance of carnage reported on the news. The automatic and directionless instincts for speculation were aroused in some, knowing that this moment (and others like it) was all there would be for them, the conjecture, the delicious irresponsibility of rumour, the freedom from laborious verification. There were communities of indifference and of probity. Still others were as always ignorant of all that transpired in the commons.
But if Jack was not ignorant (how could he be?) or indifferent then it was something that would at least be a part of that living memory like one of millions of polished stones at the bottom of a river whose ripples appear stilled from a certain distance overhead. Jack, about whom rumours would spread that he would retire since he could afford to and especially deserved to and was conscientious in considering the anxieties of young teachers who would be presented in the coming months with their ambiguous seniority-based terminations and who, Jack, retiring now could also capitalize on the benefits that governments everywhere were abusing as passé. And there were other circumstances favouring retirement that would come from the lips of veterans and friends, most of whom were the same people. He had had knee surgery this year. His wife was not well. She originated on some island in the Aegean and there was property in the family with a veranda. Their children were almost independent and had reliable financial prospects. But Jack said nothing either way about his reasoning, acknowledging only that this might be his time. He was a patriarch, voluble yet tightlipped, testamental in the decisive spareness of his pronouncements, which even in this his possibly final year would not waver with the new semester in February or the March retirement filing deadline or in late June while cleaning classrooms and organizing resources and at meetings where the celebrations of true retirees were celebrated enviously.
It was early January, but Jack's years had no rhythm to them, no flagging of energy or responsibility, would have none this year, no different from any other of the last thirty or forty in the steadfast solemnity of his that stuck to the walls, whose condition he vigilantly guarded and which displayed an assemblage of artifacts—memorials, faculty and class pictures, donated landscapes—that would gradually disappear after the curriculum leader of Canadian and World Studies did because no one else knew enough about their history to invest them with the vigour he did when he spoke. And though only one or two teachers—seeing that ultimately (could he last one, two, five more years?) the day would come when Jack would not only convene meetings of the alumni association, but would be one himself—enlisted to breathe at least a semblance of life into the building's dusty tradition, virtually everyone, consciously or not, owed much of their proud identification with the school and whatever fierce loyalty that could take root in their mostly flat souls to one man, who would not retire this year. His superficial wrinkles were terraced into the ruddy earth of his cheeks, the surgically repaired knee made it no more likely he would sit. He was as difficult to find as ever and if he was in his classroom it was erect among his bookcases where his advice could be had. Jack could be known among the bookcases; not reading, though he read, but sorting, thumbing spines, checking copyright, interrogating ancient penmarks. Not reading, but what reading meant. Textbooks overflowing in secret cabinets could neither be read, nor donated, nor disposed of, great tyrannical bonfires blazing in his irises at the reasonable suggestion that The Modern Era, first published in 1928 and then updated six times, the last the year of Jack's graduation from the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto, the faded austere hardcovers all the dearer because of copies whose covers had been boyedited at a time when American girls were unshackling their breasts and inspiring rebellions of defacement in Canadian classrooms, be replaced by something more current. Etching one's name into a desk in 2010 was disrespect, but The Modern Bra was history.
The heart of an antiquarian, the acumen of a general, and the soul of a teacher had crafted the enigmatic post that on the Monday after New Years delivered a fully-developed personality, a coherent philosophy, to the desktop of each teacher who at some point in her career, not five minutes before class, might consider acting on an impulse or a mature belief that education should be conducted in just such a manner and that the conduct should be broadcast by the CBC. Rachel Farmer knew exactly what Jack was talking about, and her peremptory and counteroffensive and yes vocalized (she was, though not aware of it in the moment, alone) response was not to care what people like him had to say about what she knew in her heart was a just and anyway imperative (for her) thing to do.
Of this I am proud, Rachel thought.
On Christmas Day, Jack thought.
He heard about it at what he would characterize as an infuriating moment, surrounded by his wife who was ill and their children who had learned to expect emotional reactions from their father and his wife's brother (the sister-in-law was not at the table) who had acquired a pardonable viciousness towards authorities after their son was maimed in combat in Afghanistan and the one colleague who had inherited the most from him because though she was young her church had given her a lively sense of eternity, and her fiance. It was the Christmas dinner table.
The fiance knew Jack only in an abstract sense, but more importantly was eager to impress his future wife's mentor, who could have been no more eager had he been the prospective father-in-law, which he was more than by virtue of not technically being so. Patrick was nervous and running through progressions of dialogue in his head and because he was not looking opened his mouth to introduce the intriguing report just as Jack had put his fingers to the carving utensils. He was rattled that it was news to Katherine's mentor. There they were, the eight of them—the hosts at the heads, the children on one length in order of their evenly-intervaled ages, on the other length the protege alongside her mentor and also, uncannily, the oldest of her generation by the same interval that separated the true offspring, joined by her fiance and Joan's brother Phil—and the table was silent while Jack questioned Patrick in presumably much the same manner of a private, anachronistic examination of the pastor's intentions towards one of his daughters. It was not what they were saying. It was where they were saying it: the room. It was like eating dinner in a cemetery haunted by the sincere ghosts of one's own sincere ancestors. Patrick was fighting to justify his presence at the table, but what everyone heard was the 16-candle chandelier, the claustrophobic oils of industrious Autumn, simple Winter, and humble Spring, the magisterial scrollwork of the mahogany furniture, and the enumerated heirlooms of the table setting, altogether enough to furnish Antiques Roadshow with a week's worth of episodes, and uninheritable.
As the dimensions of the story protruded as if out of one of those flat abstractions before a crosseyed observer, Jack's fury sniper-like found any number of targets. Immediately he was irked that it was the soul at the table who obviously knew the least about the only school he had ever taught at who had known about the controversy hours before he who should have known days before the other did. He was a pastor, his colleague's fiance, who should have known at the very least the familial sanctity of the occasion if not the bequeathed proprieties on possible topics of conversation, even though he later learned as a result of the embarrassment that he was really a youth pastor and therefore professionally heterodox in approach. He could not be angry with his colleague who he loved, but this would be the first suspicious note to invade their symphony of faith. And then there was his brother-in-law who had lived in hell for the past seventeen months. The hell had drained the soil that nourished his wife of water, leaving behind a dry husk that had nothing but dead structure keeping it upright. To the father it seemed to add rather than subtract, but it was a virus of angry scabs that in their gross patching memorialized his earlier beauties. Only the beauty of Christmas could by negative correspondence make Jack for the first time identify the man with the ugliness, with the satisfaction he demonstrably took at the dinner table in the humiliating report about the conduct of those students, and of the teacher herself. Yet Jack's fury seemed to cleanse rather than besmirch, like a victorious sermon that frontally assaults and obliterates evil.
“Just FYI, Pat. As soon as you give them that journalist's name, Alex and probably Katherine are going to go dutifully upstairs and get the computer so we can listen on this holy occasion to the goddamn broadcast ourselves,” Phil said.
Joan reminded everyone of the blessed plenty on the table. But the children were quiet. Not sullen, just quiet, cold even, deflated, like toys whose batteries had suddenly died. Among her generation only Katherine (for it seemed to the would-be daughter too that Jack was her father, who displayed proudly on her mantle the photoshopped image on the pier at the Corn family cottage of this six of them, presented to her by the other five on that same pier on the morning of her thirtieth birthday after twenty fictitious years, this being obviously Jack's and Joan's idea) felt enlivened by the grip of the code that was sanctified by Christmas and sanctified it. If Phil was wrong it was only because it would be Katherine and possibly Alex who would go into the latter's old room, undo and sort the mess of cables, carry the dinosaur in no less than three trips down the twenty-two stairs, and hook it up again on the dining room sideboard beside the generous platters and the crystal punch bowl of eggnog inscribed thirty-eight years earlier for the parents' nuptials. No one would object to Jack, to Katherine, even to Joan. Not Phil, who saw an opportunity for mischief, and not the actual children, arrows in the Corn quiver that had missed their mark and hit the bullseye of another target.
When Alex reached Katherine at the bottom of the stairs, the excitement of her haste collided with her father's “daughter's” earnestness and she thought once again without heat that it wasn't blood which transmitted connection, since Katherine was so incredibly boring to her but not to her father. She knew her sister and even William, who had the same ruddy purity of aspect and premature white as their father, felt the same. At least they were free of resentment, if also of real gratitude, and they had their parents to thank for that. Here she was, on her knees, straining to disentangle the involved cables, breathing in the accumulation of dust, and avoiding contact with the ubiquitous mouse poison of her childhood in that enormous but disjointed house, and she was not the least impatient. But it was not until she and Katherine finally rebooted the machine on the sideboard and Alex had retaken her seat at the table and felt her appetite reignited by the labour and looked up chewing a mouthful of stuffing to see that only Lia and William had finished their plates that she realized (and now for the first time) she was also bored by Christmas, whose parents considered this meal somehow fundamental to their lives. No, to Canada and civilization! She was cold to the obvious juxtaposition of the turkey and the desktop. They together belonged to somebody else—to Katherine, to her father and mother, even to Phil and Nancy—as though she had momentously stepped back into her fifth grade class excursion to the Royal Ontario Museum and its depictions of historical interiors, one of which now was being peopled by her family, it did not matter which. For the first time in her life she took the cell phone from the pocket of her shirt and under the Christmas table went onto Facebook to check if Pedro had posted on her Wall in the last couple of hours about coming out for her birthday on Friday, and no one noticed though it took her a minute to scroll through all the funny posts of her friends, stealing their own timestamped half-minutes from their families too, to register disappointment that he hadn't. He had recently changed his relationship status from Single to It's Complicated, who of course would know she would notice and wonder who else knew, who else's eyes it was intended for, who else wondering whether self-expression or communication, who else obsessing over the etiquette of asking after two weeks and three dates, for she hadn't yet slept with him though they had done most of the other standard things, and suddenly she felt something melt inside of her as she put another bite of turkey covered in gravy into her mouth and chewed, even now more separate from the scene around her, focussing entirely inside herself now, not even thinking of Pedro. William came up behind her and dug all his knuckles into both sides of her ribs and she spun around and punched him square in the chest. He laughed and pulled in his father's chair at the head of the table to within an inch of hers. Then Lia returned from the washroom and touched Alex's chair from the other side, while at the table's opposite head Phil, Jack, Joan, and Katherine congregated standing, Patrick behind them like an apple stem pointing towards the youthful company, the familiar ephemera, the contours of weightless conversation of endless variation, involuntarily activating his clerical training, the novel terms of its ambitious methodology, but along with that the self-secret anxieties of his own vacillating soul, and his eyes as sure as any mechanical reflex jerked towards Katherine who stared where Jack stared where Phil stared where Joan stared at the downloading home page of the CBC.
“I thought they liked Christmas,” Lia said, whose, bright eyes detached from mother. “They're so funny sometimes.”
“God forbid we check Facebook at the dinner table,” Alex said. “It's a double standard, right?”
“So, sisters, how fare your romantic pursuits?” the youngest William said and fake bowed the few inches to the armrest of the headchair.
Alex laughed loud enough that Patrick and Joan both looked over, and Joan said: “All together on Christmas. Having a good time, sweethearts?”
“Mom, I need to talk to you later,” Lia said.
“Mommy dearest, I too need your sympathetic ear,” William pantomimed again.
“Shut up, loser,” Lia said loudly, and Jack and Katherine both heard this time.
“Yes—” Joan said.
“Which one is it?” Phil said. He turned around. “Patrick, get in here.” He pointed at a series of links on the screen.
“What's up with your lonely life?” Alex asked William. “Your white hair get you any dates lately?”
“Ignorant girl. This,” William said, pointing at the white swoop on his peak, “is a mark of status. It's a sign of potency. Alexander the Great went white by the time he was twelve. Not just part—all white! And, to correct your naive understanding, chicks dig it.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, “because they feel sorry for you. They want a defect to make them feel better about themselves.”
“That may be true. But what do you bet I'm the one who gets and stays married? In fact, I'll give you odds. Double or nothing one of you is going to be a spinster,” William said and removed his wallet. He leaned in and said, “Lia broke up with Cal again, poor guy.” He paused. “You didn't even tell her, Lia!”
Lia looked towards the computer, but Will had been discrete. She leaned in too, the three chairs, the three heads, almost touching, under their parents' roof again not as seldom as their peers, the instant easiness of their repartee, except that they whispered what should have been howled, the charactered mahogany what should have been the stainless imitation oak of a bar.
“This time it's really over,” Lia whispered. “Dad's going to die. I can't even tell him. Mom's going to have to do it. I swear I took Cal back because Dad was in love with him. A post-doc in comparative literature! Dad never says anything, you know? But it's the whole lack of enthusiasm thing for what I want. I fake it to make him happy. He deserves it. He tries, you know? He fakes it too. But now I realize we're just different people. Something wrong, Will? Fine, you want to bet? A thousand dollars says I have a longer and happier marriage than you do!”
They shook, with Alex as their witness, and they raised their eyes to meet Katherine's and Patrick's and their parents' returning to them, regathering, known to each other and mostly unbothered by the unincorporateness of their bonds, in the solemn concentration of half a family sitting, undrinking and uneating their Christmas dinner, attending to a report on the CBC about a bunch of refugees buying boots and cosmetics and jewelry and name-brand shirts at the Dufferin Mall, paid for with $1700 donated by teachers at the heartwarming solicitation of one of their colleagues for the express purpose of purchasing winter coats which the students could not afford, and because directing them to local services that distributed used clothing for free would stigmatize them and alienate them even further and would not work anyway and regardless of everything was unworthy of what Canada did or should represent.
* * *
Rachel Farmer had arranged to meet the students on the Thursday before Winter Vacation, at eight o'clock in the morning, school not starting for another half hour and everyone on time, half of whom had never, not one day, opened the door of their first class before eight forty-five, on the days they actually came, the other half punctual as always. She arrived at seven fifteen with two thousand dollars cash in one large and one small envelope in her purse. The cramped, illlit, and dingy office she shared with a dozen other teachers was empty. She sat down at a chair as old as she was in front of a new computer, logged onto her email and wrote a few overly prompt messages, and steadied the beats of her nervous heart in a few racing minutes of solitude. At seven forty, she descended to the front lobby: deserted, portentous, suffused with the pallid, stale airlight of inattention to unbeauty, oppressive in the absence of the exuberance of youthful possibilities. The first students to arrive, before eight, the ordinarily punctual ones, at once exhausted their limited supply of English and stood dumbly next to Rachel as though sleeping fully awake, satellites to her sun, facing the six front doors of the school. Each subsequent arrival, however, orbited less and less about the teacher, their own gravitational pulls increasingly overwhelming hers, who had taught herself at night only slightly more Hungarian than they knew English, in other words an amount symbolically dubious but practically useless, who was to compound this a teacher (and in Hungary they learned everything there was to know about them), meaning they didn't understand her, a couple did not like her, a few feared her, and the several open to the idea had not yet discovered any manner of language for befriending her. The last handful of students to arrive did not even look at her. They located their friends, dove among the quilted covers of their mother language, and exulted in the authorized freedom of a field trip to a destination they frequented by choice. The foyer was full of noise and “shopping.” Not spree, not that, not for most, not intentional and conscious from the first (though who knew how many even understood what understanding the people who gave the money had for its use, or even that there were seventeen of them, or even that a few of them were their teachers, and especially not that the anonymity of Rachel's gratitude did not satisfy all of them, because no one spoke Hungarian), what was anything but that, what it was being birthed now in the unaware and contingent material of a new nebula. Everyone was there, and Rachel stood alone now, benefactress, who had celebrated anonymity on behalf of others, who now contemplated and disliked not anonymity but its opposite, who had privately wanted to be known, acknowledged for her humble, private offerings. She did not admit to herself that she was truly mortified by her marginalization behind the teeming foreign adolescence, who had all the money, that was not hers. She was relieved that for the moment the halls were relatively empty, no donors in sight. She turned back to the students and without any warning the responsibility of her stewardship coalesced in a heavy mass beside the middle of her spine and she tensed bravely and in excruciating pain that she not collapse to the floor.
One of the students noticed. She wore tightwrapped acid wash jeans, red Puma sneakers, and a black sleeveless Playboy tee that didn't quite reach her studded belt. Her plastic hoop earrings touched her shoulders if she tilted her head either way, and she had one redglass stud sparkling in the regrown dark of her moustache. Her black eyes, enticing as a stereotype, blackened by two beaches of mascara, blinked.
“Miss hurt?” Laura B. said, and Vanessza turned also to inquire, who was always inseparable from Laura B. and Viktoria and had a learning disability to go along with status in Canada, what she called “citizen” and went uncorrected for she would not consider attempting to vote once in her life and would die happily at seventy-two in Edmonton never understanding what prevented her from exercising what her children exercised infrequently, who, the mother or the children, did not understand why they did that much.
Laura B.'s interest also attracted Laura V., accused of stealing B.'s boyfriend Miklos, and Miklos truly had some good qualities to fight over, who came and almost strangled Laura B. with his charismatic elbows and then smacked her in the head after she elbowed him in the ribs and before she kicked him in the ass, the real loser in this being obviously Laura V.
“Laura! Miklos! What kind of behaviour is that?” Rachel said.
“Sick Miss? Beteg?” Laura V. said, selecting a new object for her infallible competitiveness, exhibiting the kind of joyless expertise of a child athlete, perversely virtuosic in the insertion of the easiest of Hungarian vocabulary.
“Beteg? Yes. Egan. Kicsit. Köszönöm szépen,” Rachel answered, unaccented and earnest, anticipating and hopeful of the next moment, dangerous and tempting, never able not to stake at every instant the entire measure of her self-confidence and effective decision-making.
“When go shopping?” Miklos asked.
“I don't know. Nem tudom. Nem tudom, Miklos,” Rachel paused, searching. “Are you going to continue to be inappropriate with girls?”
“I dzseki Miss,” Miklos said because he did not understand what Miss said and lacked the experience of shame (which was also why Laura B. was “bolond” to him and why he was not stolen by V.).
All seventeen of the students in the lobby—even Richard Olah of the misconstrued papers, not a day over ten that hung at the elementary school, but officially fifteen because the nine on his registration form had been read as a four and he was not present when his mother came into the school for the only time to register him—would have called Rachel “bolond” had they known she was childless by choice. At forty and married for five years to a musician who was frequently out of town, she was only in her second year of teaching. It engrossed her and occasionally almost destroyed her. She inclined to other teachers who felt to a less degree the same (which meant she was also frequently though comfortably alone), differing from the others because they used words like “babies” or “children” or at least “kids.” Rachel said, my students. She did not assume they needed developmental guidance. They rebelled when mistreated, infantilized, and persecuted, rigidly imprisoned by the homogenizing system, hated for their love of freedom and their different needs, as any adult would. There was nothing maternal about her methods, which was easy to mistake. She cared and told herself and others that she cared and was perceived to care, if anything too much. She invested the time a parent would, the money a parent would (she had $300 of her own money in a separate envelope in case the jackets' cost went a bit in excess of the $1700, $100 of which was also hers, all $400 of hers coming from her teacher's salary, backstopped by the industrial wealth of her husband's Hungarian family, which she said had been made on the backs of these people), and the total sum of self-worth a parent would. She figured that if she reflected back the fear and hopelessness and dejection in her Roma students' eyes as understanding and respect and yes even genuine liking, and met every unconscious low expectation her students had of themselves with innovative, demanding, and conceptually liberating activities that challenged the status quo, her students would transform expeditiously. She was intent on transformation, intent on students susceptible to it, students who had been judged beyond help. She told stories about “reaching” just these students. All the while she did not have children of her own.
It was not because she had married too late, nor because she had any knowledge of her own or Peter's infertility. She was open about her lifestyle in a certain way. Some of the teachers in her office knew because they listened and it could come up in conversation, or even in passing exchange, or it could not. Knowing Rachel was not necessarily a function of earning her trust or of gradually solidifying an intimate bond, but could also be simply of being within earshot and following her accountings of her dilemmas and delights and quite often sufferings. Her Hungarian students did not know it was her choice: not because they were students, but because they knew so little English that even Rachel felt she could be misunderstood and judged. Even so, it might (have) come up, though it had not. They (especially the girls) knew she had no children, and so they were inclined to report she was “bolond” anyway, that something else besides not wanting children was wrong with her, which meant that whoever needed any excuse for their own bad behaviour could dismiss her, because almost no one would risk sticking up for someone alien. Had they known she had a potent, sneering aversion to the way children and especially babies shackled and enslaved other beings, they could not have thought worse of her had she been a homosexual or a pedophile. They were confused why she was always using images of skiing, hang gliding, surfing, or flying to teach them new words and grammar even though she didn't do any of these except flying in commercial aircraft, which now even they had done. After Rachel received her termination notice in April, and even after in June she learned of her transfer to a school with a vibrant music program where she would teach an impossibly full timetable of music classes (she played flute and she was always giving speeches in English and German about unknown composers), and then still after she was transferred back to West Toronto one week before the start of school, she was not positive that she would not apply for a leave of absence and move to Vancouver or even to Australia where her husband was from and where it was her dream to live. She put her principal on notice.
Her freedom and her self-imposed commitments coexisted. It should be so for everyone was how she taught. That was what surprised her: that it wasn't. That she had students and enough of them (and there were plenty of other teachers' students who quickly learned where Rachel's classrooms were each period) who shunned making commitments to her and laughed at self-impositions she suggested to transform the freedoms all humans should enjoy into a sort of bacchanalian chaos on bad days was an insult to fairness and always freshly depressing. The music class she taught the Roma was the worst. The girls would not touch an instrument except on the days when not a single boy (Zsolt excluded) came to class, and too many boys seemed interested only in pounding out the same monotonous piano riff month after month. The riff did something quite offensive and damaging to Rachel because in the very humane act of embracing their culture which had been ignored and demeaned and celebrated in narrowly grotesque ways she was being assaulted by the very mean tyrannical stubbornness and closed indifference which she had been consciously attempting to undermine. The few boys who acted this way taught others to avert their eyes from any sheet music she tried to get them to look at as though she were some irrepressible beggar panhandling spiritual nonsense she knew had no value. There were days when, no joke, she felt that she was losing her mind (to accompany the permanent hearing loss she lived with since her first year when a student ruptured her tympanic membrane with a gym teacher's whistle). I am going to have a nervous breakdown, she thought. But then after an hour of consoling with the one teacher she could always go to she would drive the hour home and sit at her computer and commit once again the best of herself, the sympathy, the endurance, and the challenging complexity, to the design of tomorrow's lesson or next week's excursion beyond the bells, the unnaturally sequestering classroom walls, the empowered authorities, liberating her students into authenticity, and what would, should, just had to follow, justice. Each day tomorrow became today before it became yesterday, which was so unfortunate. How many days or weeks she could exist contentedly in the peaceful boredom of tomorrows and yesterdays. July and August were her favourite months for this reason. The beginning of summer, lost to the world somewhere in the Aussie hinterland in a car stocked with promise, transfigured the glaring, deserted signposts of the past academic year in the simplifying frame of a glowing rearview sunset; while not the end of summer, but by the eighth or ninth or at the latest the tenth of August, she was to be found daily at Hub, two blocks from school, a commute from home, ingesting the kindness of an organic muffin, exercising the decadigit liberty of broadband wifi, each Macbook Pro key a slice of prelapsarian bounty of curriculum design.
Today she had gotten fifteen, not seventeen, students onto the Dufferin bus headed North. Two students she had had to leave behind when the nondonor teacher the principal insisted had to accompany her refused to go along if they came because on the last trip to go ice skating they had refused to return to school with the rest of the group and he feared the law would not protect him if anything happened to them or they did anything to anyone else. Rachel gave each $100 to get jackets on their own on the weekend, a compromise negotiated by a third teacher who had donated but did not want the stress of supervising. Even losing these two students had exasperated her at the time. But now, on the bus, as they got closer and closer to their destination, Rachel felt optimistic, prideful, combative on behalf of these students, perhaps because she always felt better when she wasn't propagating the neglect of their justifiable needs, perhaps because the adventure was going on in spite of the closeminded and complacent risk aversion, the not even bordering on racist overstructuring of the lives of refugee, black, native, and poor students which the system somehow managed to sell to its employees like in the movie The Matrix. And not even the needless transfers a few students were holding, reminder of the inhuman secretarial hoarding of reams and reams of free TTC tickets, which she had seen with her own eyes and now finally on this last trip had been denied, could diminish her enthusiasm and hopefulness in achieving bettered lives for a few of the millions of oppressed people in their world.
Rachel texted with the journalist who suggested meeting in front of the Winners, while outside scraps of snow like disintegrating burning pieces of paper floated circling, like the bus was a firepit and its passengers in the rear ambiguously kindled lumps of smoking coal. I am protecting them and bringing warmth to their lives, she thought.
Nothing about the swirling ninety minutes of entitled liberation inside the Dufferin Mall would alert her to what would happen to her a week later, nor materially was there anything to be alerted about. She might have been happier if there had been. If only there were some legislation or regulation that could have served to discipline her disposal of the $1600 others donated, for at least then she would be faced frontally with the basic incongruence that existed between fairness and reality. She would have some critical choices she could never seem to make made for her, and they would sell their house in the GTA suburb which they just bought a year ago and move (she wasn't sure where) and she would study (she didn't know what) or start a business (selling she would figure out what) and her husband would play music as he could do anywhere. No, what Rachel needed alerting to, what she never seemed capable of cautiously avoiding, was the psychic trauma and sleeplessness that she could be caused to experience by a return to acute consciousness of the grinding stagnant festering indifference to suffering consolidated in a three line post (a code that would be easily deciphered by disgruntled donors and soon enough by most of the remaining teachers who were paying any attention) she would read at 10:45pm, at that last wakeful hour of her Winter Holiday still labouring to contribute to the greater social good, emailing with her friend Sandor about what time he would arrive tomorrow to translate into Hungarian the sympathetic and humane CBC radio report for the students. It would be well into the night before her perseverance would overcome the hurt, and she and Peter could have two or three hours of sleep. It is not long into Monday morning before her shame and her pride reignite their lifelong stalemate over her spirit.
* * *
Molnar Vanessza now sits at her desk, in the middle aisle, in the front row, the only one who has so far arrived to Mr. Corn's first period ESL Geography class on the Monday after New Years. In second period she has Ms. Farmer's ESL A. It is 8:25am and her binder is already open as she withdraws pencil, pen, and eraser from a plastic, Hungarian pencil bag. She sits attentively waiting for the instruction to begin, watching Mister hang about a dozen pictures of what seems to be the same building from hooks screwed into the top of the chalkboard's moulding. Vanessza has on plenty of eyeshadow, but no lipstick. Her jeans are tight but her shirt reaches the tops of her front and rear pockets. She has on the fall jacket and the flat sneakers she chose from Winners. She has $11.50 in her pocket. In the folder she keeps in her binder for important documents is an envelope with the capital letters M I S on the triangular flap. Both have sat for the last two weeks on the eleventh floor of her apartment building in the lone drawer of the family desk in the living room that her father took one day from the lawn of a house next door to a house he was painting. Nobody told her that on the Friday before Christmas Holiday there was an assembly and no period two (or three or four), and she couldn't find Miss and didn't trust leaving the card let alone the cash on her teacher's desk as instructed by another teacher Miss shared the office with. Her father had insisted on the money. The card was her mother's idea. The pair stowed over Christmas, four times visited in the otherwise empty drawer and counted, in the triple-folded yellow No Frills shopping bag, as though she had never matured past the child's instinctive belief in the arbitrary disruptions of stability and permanence. Vanessza had been very careful that her choices came in under the hundred dollars, but she had forgotten about the tax because the experience was so unfamiliar to her that she was no less surprised by the enlarged total that rattled in her brain than she would have been had the store not charged Miss tax because she was Canadian or a teacher or because she was spending so much money or for one of a thousand other causes concealed from her about the rules of this country, not to mention that she initially assumed she simply didn't understand what the cashier said. The overpayment upset her even though Miss assured her that there was enough money to pay for it. It was still on her mind when she got home that afternoon. She told her mother about it factually, but was relieved by her mother's concern. Ms. Farmer would accept repayment of the excess.
When the voice of the girl who does the announcements begins to emit from the speaker in the wall, Vanessza stands promptly and glances at the angle of Mr. Corn's profile for direction. They are alone and her teacher walks to the door and stands just outside the threshold. She feels comfortable doing so too. She leans against the opposite doorjamb, across from the roped-off memorials to the dead students from the world wars. She had not known Canada fought in them because she had not known Canada existed before two years ago when a classmate in the Gypsy high school in Miskolc had cried to her that her parents told her their family was moving to Canada two nights before they laughed together because they would both be moving there, and a month before they stared stupidly at each other and at a downloaded map of Canada that showed Edmonton and Toronto a few inches apart, resolving to take the bus to see each other on weekends. Mister taught them a lot about Canada in the same way they had learned a lot about Hungary (she learned the day after arriving in Toronto that Edmonton was 3000 kilometres away). He barks at two students to stop removing the materials they need for their period one classes from their lockers. She looks the other way where down at the end of the hall outside Miss's classroom Viktoria laughs at her and Laura B. makes faces. Then O Canada comes on and Vanessza looks at nothing at all. Mister was the first teacher who taught her what the words meant, but she forgets half of them. Her favourite phrase is “True Patriot Love,” what makes her think of her parents and her house in Miskolc, next to the river where her father and brother fished, even when it rained. She stayed inside and helped her mother cook or clean when it rained. There was nothing else to do. When it rained she waited until it stopped raining.
When the song ends she returns to her seat and looks again at her teacher. During the first fifteen minutes of class Mister always glances darkly and humourlessly at the classroom door. Students come late, but only for fifteen minutes, and that is good. Vanessza never once gives a thought to the names on the pink attendance paper who never appear because after fifteen minutes neither the educational nor the social benefits of entering are worth Mister's eyes. After 8:45am, Mister's classroom is orderly and smooth. Vanessza does not know it is actually more so than any other class in the entire school, Mister's other classes included. Vanessza touches her right hand to her right front jeans pocket as her teacher begins the lesson. She is still the only one there. The words come out of his strong mouth with the pinkgray skin and full set of white teeth. They are like raindrops, like the rain in Miskolc: outside of her, numberless, pooling. She sits calmly and listens. She does not understand, so she waits. Mister points to the maps on the wall and she watches. He asks questions that get answers from other students who use words she cannot identify, and still she sits and watches and listens, and she bides her time until she can ask her question when Mister is free: “What picture Mister?” If there is a worksheet, she writes her name and the date right away at the top, and asks when it is her turn: “What I do Mister?” Today there is no worksheet. There is no individual work time. She cannot ask her question, even though she waits and watches and listens and sits still. But she does not mind. She is almost always able to do what Mister wants her to do by the end of class because she almost always finds a way to get Mister to show her how to do it, and then she understands. When she understands she no longer watches and listens and waits. She sits calmly and does until she is finished.
She is always the first out of the door whenever Mister says “Let's go,” but nobody notices that today she is the last. She checks her folder and closes it and closes her binder and cinches the velcro and touches her right hand to the right pocket of her jeans and then walks out of the classroom. She does not understand where they are going. She walks past the other students to be close to Mister. They walk down the hall and she hears students' voices and sees Mister going alone and does not wait any longer and asks her question: “Why walk Mister?” She sees the countless raindrops around her head swirl. She waits to have another question and meanwhile she walks. From time to time Mister stops and she stops and it begins to rain again. Sometimes it rains for a long time and sometimes for a short time. Mister asks questions and the Gulyas siblings and Margit give answers and she listens. Mister touches the walls when he rains the words, and where he touches the walls the colours or the textures change. Each time the walls are the same in being different where he touches them while he rains a lot or a little. The school is big and it has different walls. Some look new and a lot look old, but some new paint covers old walls. The pictures in the classroom are different colours and different ages too. The buildings in the pictures are the school. Mister taught them the school is old. In two years it will be 100 years old. There is something else different in the pictures. They look different. They walk. There is no rain. The buildings look different. Some are further away. Somebody pokes her in the back. Some are smaller and bigger. There are different angles. The walls are different. Some are flat and some are bumpy. Mister touched them both. The pictures are in the classrooms and they are on the walk. She feels a finger in her back. She stops. She hears a window in her mind open, and another. A soft breeze fills her skull. Her school is old. It started small. Then they built more and more. Now it is big. Each time they built, they did it with different material and different paint. You know this from pictures and walls. Her father and his brothers built her house on the edge of town in Miskolc. It also has an addition. Her grandmother lives in the addition with one uncle and his family while Vanessza is in Canada with her family. She is a citizen, but she goes back to Hungary in the summers.
They walk back to the classroom and she sits back down calmly in her seat. Mister is in front of the classroom, but he is not raining. He was raining before and now he is saying the same things but he is not raining. She hears and sees. She still sits. She still waits. The bell rings. The students leave. She closes her binder again. Mister is taking down the pictures from the chalkboard. Vanessza goes close to him. He looks at her and she asks her question: “Why Mister? Test?” He downpours. She does not know there will not be a test but Mister never gives them tests she does not know about. She says: “Bye Mister.” She leaves the room, clutching her binder with the envelope and the missing letter on the flap inside the special folder, and she touches the lump in her pocket. She walks directly to her period two class.
Laura B. and Viktoria are on the computer in the class when she gets there. Vanessza's boyfriend Istvan is also there but he does not try to kiss her because his buddies Laszlo and Janos are there. A half dozen girls including Laura V. (who isn't showing yet) are either sitting on the backs of chairs or leaning out windows and talking with the students smoking below. Outside the classroom door are another eight or ten students against the walls. More of the students outside than inside are Miss's students. She is standing in front of her laptop bent over. The projector shows a website on the screen in front of the class. The bell rings. None of the students react. Miss does not react. Her friend George sits next to her. He sits and rains with Atilla. They are having such a nice conversation. Istvan comes up and puts his elbow around her neck. She looks at Atilla. She instructs: “Megy az osztályban.” He argues: “Te megy az osztályban.” She answers: “Ez az énem osztály.” Atilla knows how to have a conversation. He is very smart. She walks out of Istvan's elbow and stands next to Laura B. and Viktoria. They are chatting with their friend in Miskolc. She looks up at Miss. She touches the $11.50 in her pocket. More students enter the room and exit.
She stands uneasily. Atilla is sitting on her desk. Istvan lurks. Laura and Viktoria are very late for class with Mister. Miss is occupied. Luara V. is wearing the knee-high boots she got at H&M. So are her friends Katalin and Beatrix who goes by Bianca. Most of the girls got knee-highs and to top up to $100 makeup or earrings. Half of the girls wear the boots with miniskirts in January, but Miss said boots were okay because they are warm. The boots have heels the girls said grip in the snow. The boys from the villages got denim jackets and the boys from Miskolc got crew-neck sweaters. A lot of them topped up with money clips. Zsolt was the only student who chose a winter coat from Winners. Some of the students went over $100 even before the tax, but most were like Vanessza. She wonders if everybody went overboard, who paid all that money? Everyone is wearing the clothes they got at Dufferin Mall, except for five or six students in the class who did not go on the trip. Atilla did not go on the trip. George is still talking so nicely with him. George is there when something important needs translation. He does not have a job or a family.
Rain jumps out of Miss's speakers and then jumps back in. Miss stands and says: “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Atilla sits in her seat. Vanessza sits in the back. No one else who is standing sits. Some students who are sitting stand. George stands. The classroom is a downpour. George says: “Fiúk és lányok.” Miss and George rain, but they don't require that everyone else stops raining when they do. Atilla speaks with Miss and George in between, and she tries to hear. She understands Miss. She listens and she hears. She watches and she sees. She doesn't wait always with questions. Miss speaks Hungarian. Her husband is Hungarian, but he doesn't speak. George is Hungarian, but he speaks. Miss doesn't have any children like George, but she has a job and is a woman. Vanessza has one brother. She wants to have children, but not until she is older. She will not have Istvan's children; she will have someone's children like Atilla. She wants to speak English. George speaks English and Hungarian. Atilla is very smart. He is only in Canada three months, and Miss said he will go to ESL B in February. She doesn't know if she will go to ESL B in February. Miss did not say. She is fifteen. When she is eighteen she will finish high school and then she will speak English with Miss and Mister and George and Atilla. They will all be citizens and friends. She will get married (to someone as nice and smart as Atilla). She will wait two years and have children. She will run a nursery. Or she will do cleaning. Her husband will do painting and building. They will speak Hungarian with each other and English with their children. They will not live in an apartment building. They will buy a house. Toronto is expensive. Maybe they will move to Edmonton. There are Gypsy people there. They are building and there are jobs. Alexandra lives there. They will help take care of each other's children. She will try to convince Alexandra to start a nursery together. Their husbands will work together. They will all speak Hungarian and English. They will make additions on their houses as their families grow and for their parents when they are old. This life will start three years from now after she finishes school. Who she will marry she doesn't know. Somebody who speaks English and is smart and can have a nice conversation with somebody like George and is Gypsy.
The porter from the Dufferin Mall is raining in the speakers. George is translating. Miss stops the raining from time to time and asks for quiet. She rains about the porter. She rains about the See Be See. She rains about Roma people. She rains about Canada and immigration. She doesn't rain on normal days like this, she rains on special days. On normal days she rains about respect. George translates. Atilla shares nice words with Miss and George. Istvan tells George to stop translating. The voices of the students are in the speakers from the website. The students want to hear themselves. Some students laugh and shout at the speakers and some students laugh and shout at the students and some smile. George says it is important that Roma people are on the See Be See. He rains at Miss. She stops the speakers and rains more about human rights, about Gypsies and Roma, about respect, about $2000, about new clothes, about teachers. George translates, but it sounds just like rain even though it is Hungarian rain. Miss makes the porter finish in the speakers. Miss says: “So what do you think?” Richard Olah says he thinks the porter was hot. Miss yells: “Get out!” He does not go and then George tells him that it is disgusting after listening about the Roma on the See Be See. Richard Olah marches out and kicks the door and slams it. Miss is sad. Every week Miss gets sad. She and George give everyone a worksheet with questions about the Dufferin Mall. A lot of students say: “O!” The students who are not Miss's students push the worksheets onto the floor. They crumple the worksheets and push them onto the floor. They graffiti their names on the sides of the worksheet. They write things in Hungarian. They do not answer the questions. Miss comes and picks up the worksheets off the floor. She rains. Laura V. speaks with Katalin and doesn't look at Miss. Bianca says: “Hagyjon ma!” Katalin laughs so loud. Miss rains. Atilla is writing. So is Zsolt. Viktoria and Laura B. have pencils but they are not writing. Janos gets up and goes to the door. Somebody is at the door. He stays there. Istvan goes to the door. Zoltan's head is in the doorway. Zoltan smokes a lot of weed. He says to Laura V. and Bianca: “Mit akar világítani?” They run out after the boys. Katalin stays and laughs. Istvan looks at Vanessza and goes. The door is wide open. The classroom is quiet. Miss rains. Atilla gives nice words to George. No one else talks. Miss closes the door. Viktoria and Laura B. come and sit at desks. Miss picks up more worksheets off the floor. She uncrumples them. She looks at them. Vanessza writes. Atilla writes. Viktoria writes. Laura B. writes. Zsolt writes. Katalin sits. Laszlo sits. Bianca sits. Vanessza writes in Hungarian. The questions are in English and Hungarian. She does not look at the English. She wonders if Atilla is writing in English. She wonders what he writes. Most of the questions are rain. She wants to write good answers but she doesn't know how. Atilla writes and writes. She doesn't know what Miss wants. Miss is nice, but she is sad. She doesn't say anything. She sits in front of her computer and types. Vanessza wants to ask: “What write Miss?” She doesn't. She writes the answers she knows will not make Miss happy. There is no test. Atilla still writes. She is finished. She sits calmly. She waits. Some of the students who are finished talk quietly. She opens the velcro of her binder. She smells weed. Katalin laughs. Miss goes to the phone and calls rain. Istvan does not smoke weed, but his friends do. Atilla is not friends with anybody in their classes. He is friends with George and Miss. He is not friends with Mister because Mister is friends with teachers. She is friends with Viktoria and Laura B. She will be friends with George and Miss when she speaks English and finishes school. She wonders if Atilla will become a citizen like her. He is smart and the judge will see that because he will speak English with the judge. Her judge was nice. Maybe Atilla will get the same judge. She wonders if Atilla likes girls. He is smart and has nice conversations and a nice face. She doesn't know any gay people. Atilla wears a cross. He doesn't talk to girls in class except for Miss. She wonders if he wants to get married and have children and a house with an addition after he finishes school and he speaks perfect English. There are Gypsy people in Edmonton and it is cheaper there.
The bell rings. She touches her pocket. It is lunch. She says to Laura and Viktoria: “Én Jövök.” They go and stand by the door. She opens the special folder in her binder and removes the sealed envelope and puts her right hand in her right pocket and removes the bill and three coins. Atilla finishes writing. The students give their worksheets to Miss or George. Laszlo leaves his on his desk without his name on it. Vanessza waits. George and Atilla are raining. Everyone else is gone. Miss is sad behind her computer. Vanessza approaches and holds out the money. She says: “Too much pay money Dufferin Mall.” Miss stares at her eyes. Miss is nice but sad. Vanessza extends the card. She says: “This card for you from my family.” Miss stares. Atilla and George are looking. Miss says: “O Vanessza. Thank you! Köszönöm szépen. Nagyon szép!” Atilla says: “Speak English Miss.” Vanessza looks at Atilla not looking at her. They are the only students in the room. She says: “You are good teacher Miss.” Miss stares holding the envelope and the money. She does not rain words.
Vanessza walks home with Laura B. and Viktoria and dozens of other students, leaving Atilla and George raining nicely and Miss with $11.50 and a card. The forsaken envelope with the three letters on the triangular flap points like an arrow to nowhere in particular.