What I Learned on the First Day of School

WHEN THE CAME TIME FOR ME TO BEGIN school, it was Annette, the third oldest of my five sisters, who prepared me, instructing me from her daybed in the dining room, a cot my father had brought home from the Army and Navy Surplus and set against the chimney wall. It was a salmon-coloured wall, as were all the walls in the dining room, and when the morning sun filled the single window, the pinkish glow made her complexion look even more yellow than what it had become.

She had said to me with an intensity that made me pay attention: When the bell rings you will line up along the walk in front of the school and put your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you. Keep your eyes straight ahead and wait for a teacher to come out on the steps.

And when the bell rang, the chilly air vibrated with the sound, shriller and harsher than what it had ever been when the periodic ringing of the red disc on the wall beside the school doors had meant nothing to me. The mothers who had come to see their children off to the first grade were grouped behind us as we stood in line and for the last few minutes their noisy chatter had been like a bush of chirping sparrows. They fell silent now and in line behind us as a boy named William, who was a full head taller than all of us kids and square shouldered with what looked to be confidence, led us forward into the intoxicating odours of varnish and Dustbane and the first day of our formal education.

Just as Annette had said, standing in the gloom at the far end of the hallway was the Igloo water cooler and attached to the wall beside it, the paper cone dispenser. If you’re dying of thirst, raise your hand. She had demonstrated how I should wrap my hand around the paper cone and with a gentle tug, pull it out. It occurred to me that she hadn’t said what to do with the cone when I was finished using it.

Neither had my sister prepared me for being placed in line behind a girl named June, and that the shudder of June’s fear would buzz in my hands and arms and in all my bones. To tell the truth, by the time the bell finally rang my underpants were uncomfortably damp. Annette had chanted: “If you gotta go, you gotta go, because if you don’t go when you gotta go, when you do go, you may find you’ve already gone. But don’t forget. You have to raise your hand.” She forgot herself and laughed, her laughter cut short as her hands flew up to the cavity beneath her ribs and caressed the pain in her body that by September had become so severe I’d been warned not to touch her or sit on her bed.

The mothers trooped up the steps and into the school behind us, William leading the way into the first classroom on the right side of the hallway. As the round-faced and sturdy teacher urged the women to quickly and quietly take their place along the blackboard at one side of the room, their smiles collapsed and their ensuing stiffness was unsettling. My mother wasn’t among them. I had hoped to the last moment that she might still appear, while knowing in my heart she wouldn’t. I was, after all, only her seventh child to begin school. Except that she hadn’t escorted the first one either, or any of the others including Annette, nor would she be there for the youngest three who were still at home.

Within minutes we were assigned our desks and sat waiting for our education to begin, hands clasped and at rest at the centre of our desks, feet flat on the floor, one foot placed just slightly ahead of the other. Someone began to cry and for a heart-sickening moment I thought it was me and not June, the smallest among us. She’d been assigned the first desk in the middle row of desks, centre stage, as her chin drooped to her chest and her ears poked through strands of auburn hair that would always shine and smell of vinegar. June Jones, or perhaps her name was June Smith. For a town of 1200, we had more than our share of Smiths. She was a tiny and undernourished-looking child, who one day would be likened to a long-stemmed rose.

Unlike my mother, June’s mother was seen everywhere in town, a house on fire was the way my father had described her. From his shop window on Main Street he could see her coming and going, greeting and being greeted. She was pretty in an exuberant way, face and arms

spattered with cinnamon-coloured freckles and her hair a cloud of amber kept back from her face with a royal blue ribbon. Her flared skirt swung from her hips as she strode across the front of the classroom and knelt beside June.

The teacher cleared her throat. Her name began with a C, Miss Croup, I decided in later years, recalling the burr in her voice. Then even later, when the disappointments of those early years were tempered by my own failures, I remembered her more benevolently as Miss Comma, a young and wide-eyed woman who, in her green plaid vest and pleated skirt, looked like a student herself. My father was on the school board and I recall him saying to my mother that the young woman’s lack of experience was cause for concern; however, she was a country-raised gal and would likely pull her weight. And she could be hired for less. It was the same school board that had voted for modernization when they decided against the ringing of an actual bell in favour of the red disc that was activated by a timer in the janitor’s broom closet. There had been complaints that its irritating shrillness could be heard throughout the entire south end of town.

“I think we can manage this,” Miss Comma said to June’s mother with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. The black ribbon bow at the collar of her blouse had come undone and in frustration she pulled it loose and shoved it in her skirt pocket. “Sometimes it’s best if Mom isn’t here,” she said.

“And sometimes it’s best if Mom takes the child home,” June’s mother replied and June sprang to life, her skinny limbs spider-like and quick as she scrambled up from the desk and clamped them around her mother. Miss Comma looked on, her cheeks vivid with red patches as the door closed behind them, while a light blasted a hole in my brain. My mother would not have done that. In my parents’ handbook, no question, regardless whether a teacher was experienced or not, the teacher was always right. It was obvious that what I’d been given to believe was a universal truth was open to question.

I was satisfied to have been seated midway down the first row of desks beside the bookshelves and the windows above them that fronted the school, just as in the coming years I would be satisfied to remain a mid-class student despite the cajoling and lecturing of various teachers to “live up to my potential.” The bookshelves had been varnished recently and were not completely dry, nor would they be in the weeks to follow when the weather turned cold and rainy. An assortment of magazines collected by the Home and School parents to compensate

for the lack of books became even more tattered and lost more and more of their pages whenever they were tugged free from the shelves.

The windows faced the paved width of Main Street and a row of two-storey wooden houses across it. The largest and oldest among them, a house the colour of mustard and with a tin rooster weathervane at its peak, belonged to the Justice of the Peace, a bald and lumpy man who resembled Winston Churchill. During the past summer when it had become impossible for Annette to continue, my sister’s job of errand girl to the Justice of the Peace had fallen on me.

Within minutes an RCMP cruiser car came to a stop in front of the JP’s house, and behind it, a rusting three-quarter-ton truck towing a hay wagon. The two scarlet-coated policemen got out of the cruiser and stood waiting for the man in the truck to join them before they went up the walk to the door. It seemed to me that the amount of traffic at the JP’s house was busier than usual, but the truth is, how could I know? Until now I’d seldom had this view of the house. I lived well down from Main Street and entered the JP’s yard through the back gate and the house through the back door, just as my older brothers had done throughout the years when one after the other they were hired to hoist the JP into his wheelchair in the morning and out of it at the end of the day. The days when he was required to be in court, they took him there. I recall their complaints that the man was a cheapskate.

Moments later, old Charles Smith came poking his way along the walk and turned in at the JP’s yard. Charles Smith was our neighbour and Ollie Smith’s husband. His scarlet Northwest Mounted Police tunic and spiked helmet hung in the falling-down stable at the back of the Smith yard. The helmet with its white horsehair plume was well worth the small treasures the neighbourhood kids had been willing to pay Annette for the opportunity to try it on. At that time Charles Smith must have been 200 years old, but he was still wiry and quick when he wanted to be, exploding out the door of his house cursing and stabbing the air with his cane whenever he caught someone about to step over the string marking where my family’s property ended and his began.

Once again Miss Comma cleared her throat and I was startled by her presence beside my desk. My attention was required elsewhere, she said, and with a swirl of air scented with Lifebuoy soap she reached across me and drew the window blind. “Feet flat on the floor,” she said and waited for me to straighten the leg I was sitting on before she

returned to the dais at the front of room and the enormous oak desk at its centre.

The mothers had left, and placed in front of me was a sheet of lined paper and what looked to be a carpenter’s pencil. William, across the aisle, filled his cheeks with air and stared up at the ceiling in the way he would continue to do throughout the years to signal his impatience with slackers and slow readers, his frustration whenever the real work of teaching and learning went off the rails.

I was surprised to hear myself say that I wanted to leave the room.

“But you’ve only just got here,” Miss Comma exclaimed sounding disappointed.

“Can I please go to the washroom,” I said correcting myself, repeating what Annette had instructed me to say and feeling as though I’d just accomplished the most courageous act of my life.

“Can you?” Miss Comma asked and answered her own question. “Well, I don’t know whether or not you can. However, yes, you may go to the washroom. Do you know where it is?”

When I nodded she said, “Good. You have three minutes.” Three minutes was all the time anyone would be given, she went on to say.

“Three minutes,” she repeated holding up three fingers. There would be no dallying. And in the future, whenever anyone wanted to speak, would they please raise their hand.

Can I, may I, the words meant the same to me, but obviously they were not the same and obviously whenever I was in the classroom I would need to say may I without understanding why.

I stepped out into the hall and into squares of sunlight shining in the windows of the school’s front doors. The bottom row of windowpanes gave me the view I had hoped for, the crooked elm tree marking where Ottawa Street met Main Street and the White Rose gas station on the corner. While I had hoped to see someone from the neighbourhood, I knew I wouldn’t see Annette. When she first became ill she had practised walking to the top of the street and back without limping; now she had to be carried from one room to the next.

But I thought perhaps I might see my younger brothers pushing the limits of their boundaries for the chance to see the dark-skinned Mexicans. For several days now, a transport truck with a Texas license plate had been parked on the gas station lot, its back doors open and where the two straw-hatted men sat dangling their legs and

smoking cigarettes while waiting for customers to arrive and choose from among the large striped watermelons piled up on the pavement. There was a car being gassed up at the station, but as far down as Ottawa Street I could see there were no people. It seemed to me that the air at the top of the street wavered like the glass in a trick mirror.

The boys’ washroom is in the basement, Annette had said. The girls’ is at the far end of the hallway. It’s the door on the right side of the Igloo water cooler. The door on the left side is the janitor’s broom closet. Which hand do you use when you brush your teeth? That’s your right hand.

The washroom proved to be as she had described it, three grey cubicles, a mirror above a row of sinks and beside them the garbage bin where moments later, balled in a paper towel, I discarded my underpants. Although a telephone had just been installed in my home and given the number 306, we were not yet hooked up to the town water system and the enchantment of water gushing from a faucet remained strong, as was the attraction of the spigot on the Igloo water cooler a moment later, its glass carboy beaded with moisture and glowing in the semidarkness with what seemed to be an inner light.

Just as Annette had said, a gentle tug and the paper cone slid free from the dispenser. She hadn’t prepared me for the sudden coldness of the water creeping up its sides, or the involuntary squeezing of my fingers around the cone and the water spilling over its rim. I gasped in disbelief as the paper cone dropped to the floor, the water a splash of wetness brightening the dark tiles.

I had come to the first grade determined not to be noticed, that my learning would not attract attention. To that end I could print my name and numbers, recite the alphabet and had read two of the four grade one readers from front to back. I was also familiar with the saying there was no point in crying over spilled milk; however, where I came from, spilling anything warranted a heated scolding. The same would happen at school, I reasoned, and I would forever be marked by shame. The spill of water and paper cone would somehow take care of itself. I returned to the classroom fearing that my eardrums would burst from the thrashing of my heart.

Later that morning, during recess and while I was on a swing, the incident was forgotten when I learned from an older girl swinging beside me that my sister Annette would not be returning to school. “She has a blood disease,” the girl said telling me what I hadn’t known. My sister’s blood disease was caused by my mother having

had too many children. It wasn’t normal for a person to have so many children the girl said, her voice strident with authority, the voice of an adult speaking through her. In all my life since, I have never seen a more mean-looking mouth.

She leaned back and drew hard on the ropes, her Mary-Jane feet shooting up toward the roof of the school. A moment later she dragged them through the dirt and hopped off the swing, and before going away across the school grounds she took the time to tell me that my sister would not survive. Annette was going to go to a better place, was how she put it, and went on to say that because my parents had so many other children they wouldn’t miss her.

A moment later the bell rang ending recess and June reappeared just as we were lining up, her hair in a single braid now and fastened with what looked to be the same blue ribbon her mother had worn, a butterfly bow that bounced against her shoulder as she ran along the walk and took her place in front of me. She turned and waved at a grey-haired man watching from across the street.

“You can go now, Dad,” she called. When he failed to move she flung out her skinny arm and pointed in the direction of the empty length of Main Street. “Go,” she commanded as though he was a dog she was telling to get on home. Obediently, and with a final wave he slunk away along the walk.

My legs felt stick-like and ached and I had to pull myself along the handrail as I went up the steps. I had understood what the girl on the swing had said about “a better place” to mean there was something less than better about my place with its pile of boots and shoes at the back door, the large gate-leg table that swung open to accommodate the oldest of us and our parents around it when we took our meals, the smaller square table across the room beneath a window where the youngest ones sat and where from its sill Jew’s harp and Christmas cactus trailed down the wall. The bedrooms my father had divided in two with half walls and filled with army bunk beds and cots and trunks, had all in an instant become abnormal and a cause for sickness of the blood.

I returned home at noon wary of the unpredictable rise and fall of the stone-pitted walk beneath my feet. Sunlight filtered through the arch of autumn trees along Ottawa Street, their leaves seemingly incandescent, while in the northwestern sky a band of dark blue the colour of a sea rose above the town. In my mind I replayed what the girl on the swing had said about Annette going to a better place. A

place better than our whitewashed wood frame house with its blacktrimmed upstairs and downstairs windows fronting the street, the tilted and muddied wooden steps at the door sinking into the earth.

There was a car parked in the driveway when I arrived home, the Buick my father sometimes borrowed from a friend. I knew it meant that he and Annette were going to the city hospital some forty miles away, where my father would give blood and Annette would receive it.

I entered the house through the front door rather than the back where I would need to pass through the kitchen and the hubbub of the lunch hour, my mother rushing about between the stove, cupboards and the table, barely listening as my father reeled off the latest news, the hullabaloo caused by several town boys who’d been chased off while siphoning gasoline from a farmer’s fuel tank. At the small table beneath the window, the youngest of my siblings would be waiting for him to finish his story and meal when he would light up a cigarette and blow smoke rings they would poke their fingers through.

I scooted up to the second floor to the oversized bureau standing in one corner of the bedroom I shared with just two of my sisters now, as Annette, who required medicine around the clock, slept in a cornered-off space in my parents’ room. I returned downstairs a moment later, feeling complete with the dryness of cotton against my skin.

Before leaving for work that morning my father had carried Annette downstairs to the daybed in the dining room where she lay fully dressed and appeared to be sleeping. An unopened packet of pencil crayons and a sketch book, a recent gift brought to the house by one of her classmates, lay in the folds of the blanket at her feet and there was a bowl of fruit cradled between her legs, which meant that someone had gone shopping in the city, as fresh fruit wasn’t often available in either of the two stores in town. The coloured pencils and sketch book would be put away unused in the china cabinet drawer along with all the other gifts that no longer held her interest, and which my mother forbade us to touch. The fruit would be turned into jam or a sweet syrup to spoon over a pudding during winter.

Now, when people came to inquire about Annette, they didn’t linger, or they came without my mother knowing. She would find a parcel for Annette left on the doorsill or on the freezer in the porch. Once, someone left a gift on the kitchen table while she’d been away in another room and I was struck dumb when she discovered it and

began to howl, her cries hollow, sounding like a child shouting into an empty rain barrel. “They couldn’t even look me in the eye,” she cried, believing the person had wanted to spare themselves the sight of her grief. “Oh, yes, just wait, you’ll see, you’ll see,” she bawled loudly and harshly, in a way that sounded like a threat.

My sister’s blunt dark hair framed her yellow face, her eyes sunk deep in shadows that looked like bruises. Only months earlier she’d been an exotic cecropia moth flitting among the shade of the trees at the back of the yard where we had made our circus, her arms spread wide and her sundress lapping at her scuffed knees as she teetered across the length of the hemp rope our father had strung between two trees. In my mind I saw her weeks later, standing between my mother’s knees with her dress hiked up and clenched under her chin as my mother probed and pressed and found the hard and large lump in her groin that was causing her to limp.

In the following month, a misdiagnosis of rheumatic fever came with instructions that my sister was to remain in bed as much as possible so as not to overtax her heart. A second diagnosis of leukemia had my parents anguishing over the lost time. She might have finished the final weeks of the school year, taken part in Field Day, my father cheering her on, saying to whoever stood beside him, to himself, “Look at her go. She’s got it.” She’s got it meaning that my sister had inherited the lightness of foot and wiry strength that ran in his family. Of all his children, Annette with her belly laugh, dark hair, eyes and skin, her Métis joie de vivre, most resembled him.

I didn’t fully understand the implications of what the girl on the swing had said during recess but I did sense that the distance between my sister and me, the width of the dining room table, had become as vast and incomprehensible as the distance between the Earth and the stars.

She felt my presence and pulled herself upright to lean against the chimney. “So, did you have fun at school?” she asked. We had hardly done anything, I complained. “You will. Wait and see,” she said. When she saw how I couldn’t stop staring at the bowl of fruit she asked me if I wanted one, knowing how much I did. Knowing that I coveted the treasures stored in the china cabinet drawer, the puzzles, scrapbooks, sketch pads and paints that cried out to be put to use, for me to connect dots with dots and reveal the hidden images. I wanted to feel the smoothness of the shiny paper of the get-well cards with their Southern belles in sequined gowns and feathered bonnets,

the weight of the tiny and perfect porcelain baby in the palm of my hand.

She scooped up an apple from the bowl. “Here, catch,” she said and threw it at me across the dining room table. Then she threw another, this time harder, an orange, and on until the bowl was empty. I didn’t try to catch any of the fruit but shifted and ducked and let it hit the salmon-coloured wall behind me. She dropped back into the pillows banked against the chimney, her chest heaving and her yellow face slick with a sudden wetness. “Lunch,” our oldest sister called to me from the doorway, and seeing Annette, she hurried over to help her lie down, covering her with the blanket, taking care to gently tuck it in around her narrow body.

When I returned to school, Miss Comma stood waiting at one side of the door and as we filed past her into the classroom she looked at each of us singly as though she was counting. When we were seated she stood before us, her fingers laced together and hands cupped at her green plaid waist like a child preparing to recite.

“Boys and girls,” she began and slowly and carefully told us it had been brought to her attention that someone had spilled water in the hallway. She and the other teachers had conferred and concluded that it had to have been someone from the grade one class. “Whoever spilled the water, will you please raise your hand,” she said.

The clock on the wall behind her made its clicking sound as the minute hand passed through the number 6, the burning hum of electricity filling the silence. It was as though my wrists were bound and I couldn’t raise my hand even if I wanted to. Miss Comma’s eyes drifted across me as she scanned the room, then returned to rest on me for a moment before she turned away to mount the dais and sat down at her desk.

“All right, then. It doesn’t really matter who spilled the water. Accidents will happen,” she said in a way that sounded as though she was talking to herself.

However, my relief vanished when she went on to say that what mattered was that the person responsible should clean it up. She had put several paper towels on top of the cooler that were to be used to wipe the floor and discarded in the wastebasket beside it. Then she demonstrated how all of us, including herself, would now cross our arms and place them on our desks and rest our foreheads against them.

When we had done so she said, “Close your eyes and keep them closed. There will be no peeking,” she added sternly, her voice muffled

as she buried her face in her arms. The person responsible for the spill was now free to leave the room and return unseen.

My breath returned to me in the cave of my arms, hot and meaty smelling. A pinwheel of light churned in my head urging me to rise up, to put one foot in front of the other and do the right thing. Go, I told myself, but my body wasn’t deceived by my resolve and refused to obey. A moment later there was a scurry of sound as someone got up from their desk and crossed the room to the door and a short moment later, that someone returned.

“All right, class, you may now raise your heads,” Miss Comma announced a short time later. Daylight jumped into the room as I opened my eyes, all of us sweaty-faced and bleary looking as though we’d been prodded awake from a dream.

I don’t recall what might have been accomplished in the way of formal education that first day of school but I will not forget how studiously I coloured a mimeographed picture of an apple, and beneath the apple, the first letter of the alphabet, all the while pressing hard on the crayon, being careful to keep within the lines, as though this extra effort might somehow absolve me for my act of cowardice.

And as though it happened yesterday, I recall the look of irritation in Miss Comma’s face when at the end of the day, we filed past her to the door. How she took June by the arm and drew her aside.

“You couldn’t have spilled the water,” Miss Comma said to June bending to peer into her face. “You weren’t even here. So why did you clean it up?”

“I just wanted to,” June replied with an exaggerated shrug, her voice quavering.

“Well, you shouldn’t have. The person responsible was supposed to do it. I was trying to teach someone a lesson,” Miss Comma said angrily and gave June a little shake before releasing her. Once again, a light bomb exploded in my brain. Miss Comma had peeked.

At the end of the school day, Annette and my father had not yet returned. I entered the house through the kitchen and the chaos of everyone having arrived at once. My mother glanced at my colouring of the apple without commenting and an older sister took it from me and added it to the collage of achievements on the refrigerator door. When I complained that I didn’t feel well, my mother said “good grief” in a way that suggested the information was more than she needed at that point.

I had reasoned that my failure to own up to having spilled the water was absolved by the teacher having cheated. However, I could not have

put in words what I knew instinctively. June was a larger person than I was. For the remainder of the day wherever I went in the house, my legs ached and the stink of something like old cheese went before me.

Not long after, and in the darkness of an early morning, I was awakened by what sounded like a fit of coughing, what proved to be my mother’s cracking sobs and gasping for breath, and beneath it my father’s quiet weeping. I lay rigid, listening, feeling as though I’d been struck by lightning, unable to move, my teeth clenched, bones and muscles vibrating as I followed their movements in my mind, the gathering up and carrying of my sister downstairs.

Hours later we sat around the big table in the kitchen, wide-eyed and silent, spooning up Corn Flakes, while the older ones sat out on the back steps hugging their knees and others wandered aimlessly about the yard, their features crooked and hard looking. In the living room Annette lay on the chesterfield, a sheet drawn up to cover her face while my parents sat on chairs at her side, their shoulders touching and hands folded in their laps as they waited for another hour to pass when the town would awake and they could make the necessary calls, for the doctor to come, and then the undertaker to take her body away. Only then would my father call his brothers in the city, and my mother her parents in the south end of town.

In turn, my grandparents sent word to the church ladies who arranged for the church to be scrubbed and polished, the furnace fired up for a time to consume the dampness in the painted wood pews and floor, the coffee urns taken out of storage. I don’t recall anyone telling me or my sisters and brothers that Annette had died, we knew, we just knew.

Often when I went out into the yard I would recall how we had played on the seesaw, Annette teasing me by chanting the chorus of a song about brown eyes being more beautiful than blue eyes. “Brown eyes win,” she crowed, her dark head tipped back on her shoulders and her mouth opened wide to the sky as she laughed at my bawling. She would still be laughing when I got off the seesaw and she dropped to the ground with a thud.

My sister’s brief illness and subsequent death had opened a space of almost five years between me and the next oldest of what were now only four sisters, a gap that would prove to be too large for me to bridge. It was me who was feeling gravity now, the absolute hardness of the Earth.p