Things As They Are? by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Author:Guy Vanderhaeghe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781551995724
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2004-02-17T10:00:00+00:00

The weakness evident in my face. I neglected to mention this when describing my school photograph. The face is humble, it asks only to please.

A woman like Mrs. Dollen was bound to resent other teachers’ enthusiasms being thrust upon her. She would pick and choose her own favourites, thank you very much.

My father.

Certainly this list does not exhaust possibilities, lists never do. It is only a beginning. At the time, however, I did not even have a beginning. I sought very hard for a reason that Mrs. Dollen should dislike me and could not find one. It was a useful lesson teacher taught me, that to demand misfortune make sense is futile.

9.

What this seemed to be was what my father referred to as a “misunderstanding.” He used the word frequently since his life was rife with them because of his satiric urges. I took it upon myself to clear my misunderstanding up, to prove to Mrs. Dollen that she was wrong and that I really was a model student. Throughout every lesson, throughout every hour of the day, I wore an alert and interested face. I was modest, unassuming, diligent, and cooperative. I volunteered to wipe blackboards, pound chalk dust out of erasers, and run messages to Alley Oop’s office. All of which only seemed to stimulate her disdain.

10.

Behind my meek demeanour I fantasized revenge.

What if I telephoned her, claimed to be a former student, and threatened to break into her house with a butcher knife, seeking revenge for the wrong she had done me years ago?

Two or three times I made a dry run, dialling Mrs. Dollen’s number with the receiver resting in the cradle so that her telephone couldn’t possibly ring. But I lost my nerve and dropped even that mild, pale rebellion. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew the game I was playing and would answer despite my precautions, could and would answer a phone that hadn’t rung.

11.

October was devoted to Noxious Weeds. Mrs. Dollen turned our classroom into a rogues’ gallery of the weeds named in the province’s Noxious Weeds Act, hanging illustrations of twenty of the most noxious on the bulletin board. We had orders to find specimens of each, press them, label them, and mount them in a scrapbook. For three weeks I spent every spare moment combing ditches, fields, and my father’s neglected garden patch for Russian thistle, fox tail, creeping Charlie, leafy spurge, chickweed, wild oats. Teacher had made it perfectly clear that seventeen or eighteen, even nineteen weeds would not be good enough. It was all twenty or nothing. We sweated in pursuit of the rare, uncommon ones. Mrs. Dollen’s students bartered weed specimens the way other, happier children traded baseball cards.

“I’ll swap you a wild oats for a wild mustard.”

The weekend before the Monday we were supposed to hand in our scrapbooks I was still short a plantain and so overwrought that my father gave up his only day off, Sunday, to help me on my weed hunt.

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