That was Jack's first school trip at St. Hilda's. Like much of his junior-school experience, it would have seemed slight without the necessary preparations for the journey ahead, which had been provided for him in kindergarten by Emma Oastler--the nap-time storyteller who had appointed herself his personal girl guide.
Oh, what a lucky boy Jack was! Safe among the girls, without a doubt.
9
Not Old Enough
When Jack started grade one, Emma Oastler and her companions had moved on to the middle school--they were in grade seven. Less fearsome girls became the grade-six guides of the junior school; Jack wouldn't remember them. Sometimes a whole school day, but rarely two in a row, would pass without his seeing Emma, who fiercely promised him that she would always keep in touch. And Jack's occasional sightings of Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were usually from a safe distance. (Fists-of-Stone Holton, as he still thought of Wendy. Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, as he would forever remember Charlotte and her melon-size knees.)
Miss Wong, Jack's grade-one teacher, had been born in the Bahamas during a hurricane. Nothing noticeably like a tropical storm had remained alive in her, although her habit of apologizing for everything might have begun with the hurricane. She would never acknowledge by name the particular storm she had been born in, which might have led the grade-one children to suspect that the hurricane still flickered somewhere in her subconscious. No trace of a storm animated her listless body or gave the slightest urgency to her voice. "I am sorry to inform you, children, that the foremost difference between kindergarten and grade one is that we don't nap," Miss Wong announced on opening day.
Naturally, her apology was greeted by collective sighs of relief, and some spontaneous expressions of gratitude--heel-thumping from the French twins, identical blanket-sucking sounds from the Booth girls, heartfelt moaning from Jimmy Bacon. That the grade-one response to her no-nap announcement did not inspire a storm of curiosity from "Miss Bahamas," as the children called Miss Wong behind her back, was further indication of the lifelessness of their new teacher.
During junior-school chapel service, which was held once a week in lieu of the daily assembly in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap whispered to Jack: "Don't you kind of miss Emma Oastler and her sleepy-time stories?" There was an instant lump in Jack's throat; he could neither sing nor make conversation with The Yap, as the kids called Maureen. "I know how you feel," The Yap went on. "But what was the worst of it? What do you miss most?"
"All of it," Jack managed to reply.
"We all miss it, Jack," Caroline French said.
"We all miss all of it," her irritating twin, Gordon, corrected her.
"Shove it, Gordon," Caroline said.
"I kind of miss the moaning," Jimmy Bacon admitted. The Booth girls, though blanketless, made their identical blanket-sucking sounds.
Did the grade-one children crave stories of divorced dads, passed out from too much sex? Did they long to be defenseless, yet again, in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum? Did they miss the single-mom stories, or the overlarge and oversexed boyfriends and girlfriends? Or was it Emma Oastler they missed? Emma and her friends on the verge of puberty, or in puberty's throes--Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton and Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford.
There was a new girl in grade one, Lucinda Fleming. She was afflicted with what Miss Wong called "silent rage," which took the form of the girl physically hurting herself. When Miss Wong introduced Lucinda's affliction to the class, she spoke of her as if she weren't there.
"We must keep an eye on Lucinda," Miss Wong told the class. Lucinda calmly received their stares. "If you see her with a sharp or dangerous-looking object, you should not hesitate to speak to me. If she looks as if she is trying to go off by herself somewhere--well, that could be dangerous for her, too. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what we should do, Lucinda?" Miss Wong asked the silent girl.
"It's okay with me," Lucinda said, smiling serenely. She was tall and thin with pale-blue eyes and a habit of rubbing a strand of her ghostly, white-blond hair against her teeth--as if her hair were dental floss. She wore it in a massive ponytail.
Caroline French inquired if this habit was harmful to Lucinda's hair or teeth. Caroline's point was that teeth-and-hair rubbing was probably an early indication of the silent rage, a precursor to more troubling behavior.
"I'm sorry to disagree, but I don't think so, Caroline," Miss Wong replied. "You're not trying to hurt yourself with your hair or your teeth, are you, Lucinda?" Miss Wong asked.
"Not now," Lucinda mumbled. She had a strand of hair in her mouth when she spoke.
"It doesn't look dangerous to me," Maureen Yap said. (The Yap occasionally sucked her hair.)
"Yeah, but it's gross," said Heather Booth.
Patsy, Heather's identical twin, said, "Yeah."
Jack thought it was probably a good thing that Lucinda Fleming was a new girl and had not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda's. Who knows how Emma Oastler might have affected Lucinda's proclivity to silent rage? Between mouthfuls of hair, Lucinda told Jack that her mother had been impregnated by an alien; she said her father was from outer space. Although he was only six, Jack surmised that Lucinda's mom was divorced. Emma Oastler's saga of the squeezed child, no matter which ending, would have given Lucinda Fleming a rage to top all her rages.
Jack Burns avoided what was called "the quad," even in the spring, when the cherry trees were in bloom. The ground-floor rooms for music practice faced the courtyard; you could overhear the piano lessons from the quad. Jack occasionally imagined that his dad was still teaching someone in one of those rooms. He hated to hear that music.
And the white, round chandeliers in the dining room reminded him of blank globes--of the earth strangely countryless, without discernible borders, not even indications of land and sea. Like the world where his father had gone missing; William Burns might as well have come from outer space.
Jack looked carefully for evidence of Lucinda Fleming's silent rage for the longest time, never seeing it. He wondered if he would recognize the symptoms--if he'd had a rage of his own here or there, but had somehow not known what it was. Who were the authorities on rage? (Not Miss Wong, who'd clearly managed to lose contact with the hurricane inside her.)
Jack wasn't used to seeing so little of his mother; he left for school before she got up and was asleep before she came home. As for rage, what Alice had of it might have been expressed in the pain-inflicting needles with which she marked for life so many people--mainly men.
Mrs. Wicksteed, who did Jack's necktie so patiently but absentmindedly, stuck to her be-nice-twice philosophy without ever imparting to the boy what he should do if he were pressed to be nice a third time. That he was instructed to be creative struck Jack as a nonspecific form of advice; no silent rage, or rage of any kind, was in evidence there. And Lottie, despite having lost a child, had left what amounted to her rage on Prince Edward Island--or so she implied to Jack.
"I'm not an angry person anymore, Jack," Lottie said, when he asked her what she knew about rage in general--and the silent kind, in particular. "The best thing I can tell you is not to give in to it," Lottie said.
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