Writing

Ernest Hemingway said his greatest novel consisted of one sentence:
"For sale, baby shoes, never worn."

How brilliant is that.  Perfection.

A while ago I wrote a short story about a woman who changed my life.  I have already written about the man who transformed me, Northrop Fry, but this woman did too.  Here is my tribute to her:
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Perfection Masked

Going into grade eight was a big step. Because we lived over the school boundary, we couldn’t go to the nearer school, but had to take a streetcar for grades seven and eight and venture into the tough, French part of town. It was a fair hike from the stop to the school and we were often waylaid by the French girls and beaten up because we were middle class and they weren’t. It made you feel guilty about being middle class and English. We were trespassing through their territory and they made sure we paid for the privilege of the thoroughfare they permitted.

Once there, we were safe and supervised in the segregated girls’ schoolyard. When we first came to York Street Public School, we went into grade seven and were treated shabbily by the grade eights. It seemed unfair that you just got out of grade six where you were the senior students, only to be dumped into grade seven where you were again relegated to the lower rung of the pecking order. But now that we were the grade eights, we ruled. It was our turn to treat the grade sevens shabbily. The big question was what form you were going into? In those days (1950s) kids were streamed according to the IQ tests we had to take. There were A, B, C, D and shops classes. A was for the smartest kids. The minute you were told which stream you were in, the groups formed up and you pretty much ignored, from that moment on, anyone who was not in your stream. The relief I felt when I found out I was put into 8-A was huge, but it was immediately tempered by the fact that I knew I would be one of the dumber 8-A kids; all the others were brains.

Getting into that stream also meant the first breach with my female cousins, who had been placed in the B stream. One of the boys actually ended up in D – to everyone’s horror. Now, of course, he is the one with money, thanks to a successful career doing things for others that are actually useful. He can build or fix anything, while the rest of us pay others to merely put up a towel rod. Up until that time, the six of us operated as one big family, due largely to the fact that we all lived within a two-block radius of each other with our mothers totally in charge. This efficient and resourceful matriarchy was presided over with authority and confidence by my diminutive grandmother, from whom the pecking order descended. With three aunts and an uncle, we ate dinner wherever we happened to be at six o’clock. It was like having three mothers and one aunt – my uncle’s wife being the odd one out because she was not blood. Up until I was streamed ahead of some of my cousins, we took all family holidays together, with our fathers and uncles driving from one end of the country to the other. How that qualified as a holiday for those beleaguered and besieged husbands, who toiled in stuffy, unventilated offices without air conditioning all year ‘round, beats me to this day. Imagine spending your two weeks a year with three or four kids crammed into a hot, stuffy car, all the luggage piled on the roof and your back-seat driving wife worrying and shrieking beside you. “My God Henry, there’s a car coming!” To add insult to injury, we didn’t have much money, so roadside lunches, courtesy of the Coleman stove, and cramped cabins at night passed for luxury. I can remember one of my long-suffering uncles sneaking a little rye in the evenings and chain-smoking just to calm down before facing the dreaded packing of the car the each morning.

When it was objectively proven, by means of the IQ test, that I was smarter than some of my cousins, a gap appeared in our relationships. I almost felt guilty about getting into the A stream and sensed a decided chill from then on within our extended family – especially at family gatherings when my rye-drinking uncle made it known how proud of me he was at the expense of his own daughters. But we soon entered a new world, regardless of which grade we were in – a world of boys, more serious sports, hairspray, lipstick and sanitary pads. The chances that I would have stayed close to my cousins, outside of family feasts, were becoming more remote. So grade 8-A I entered.

Getting into 8-A meant we had Miss Anderson for home room. Let me try and describe Miss Anderson. She was tall and ramrod straight. She had to be 65 because our year was her last of teaching before she retired. I had no idea what 65 looked like because she was older than my mother and younger than my grandmother, but to us she was definitely old. She had grey hair, carefully curled in two determined little rows just above the nape of her neck; they never moved. She wore grey wool suits and sensible black, stocky shoes. Her makeup was rigid, her lips thin and her rouge obvious. She never smiled. I knew she was the real deal and I fell immediately in awe of her. She controlled the class simply through demeanor. She never had to raise her voice and never had to send anyone to the principal. She was never in a rush, never hurried anywhere and never chatted. To this day I can see her at the front of the class – queen of her domain, unchallenged and always correct. In her class there was no talking and the hush was so pronounced it literally rang in my ears. I had no way of knowing at the time, but a cliché was in the works because she was to influence the rest of my life.

I had a lot more on my mind that first day than Miss Anderson. I was in a whole new world, with classmates who had come from other schools much different that the WASP environment I had known. There were Jewish kids and I had never met a Jewish person, ever. All the Jewish kids were smart and fearless. There were also poor kids; I had never met a poor kid. There were a couple of Chinese kids and I had never met anyone who was Chinese. There were no black kids. Selflessly and (I thought) valiantly, I became a milk volunteer and helped out at noon with the soup program. The thing about Miss Anderson was that she had no favourites, none. She didn’t care if a kid was Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, rich or poor. If they got the marks, that was all that mattered. The other thing that I loved was that no one was a teacher’s pet in her class. I had never been a teacher’s pet. I was skinny with buck teeth still not fixed by the orthodontist and I had naturally-curly hair, which I could not keep long because it would not behave. I still remembered four-year-old kindergarten, when Miss Earl never picked me to beat the drum because I wasn’t cute and blonde. The whole year, I didn’t get near the drum and it pained me. I had to be content with the triangle and occasionally the tambourine.

I now know that Miss Anderson was a victim of the First World War along with the millions of Canadian sons who were killed fighting it. Doing the math, I realize she must have been born in 1895 and by the time the thousands upon thousands had joined up eagerly and patriotically to commit heroic acts in the mire of blood and guts, she would have been 19. Those young men and her young man were not like the young man I overhead the other day at a local soccer match who, beer in hand, said, “I’d sign up because I haven’t got a job, but I don’t like the odds of coming back.” There were so many killed in that First World War that young women like Miss Anderson had no one to marry, so they had to work and dedicate themselves to being teachers or nurses or secretaries. I thought back then that Miss Anderson wasn’t married because she wasn’t pretty enough. I could not see the young Miss Anderson inside this old woman, but she must have been there. I certainly could not see her as a toddler or a teenager. It seemed to me that she had just appeared as Miss Anderson: teacher without peer. But, of course she must have had other dreams. Perhaps she had said farewell to a love or a fiancé who went gallantly to war and never returned. Had he, Miss Anderson would have been “Mrs.” Someone. She would have disappeared into the anonymity of a Canadian household, been a dutiful wife and mother and would not have touched the lives of as many children as she had. She would have gone to church, held tea parties for her friends and neighbours, raised her small, Protestant brood in a good, Christian home, done her washing on Mondays, her ironing on Tuesdays and her shopping on Wednesdays. She might even have had a touch of sherry on the weekend, but would never have become drunk. Never. But because her fiancé had volunteered to fight for King and Country, Miss Anderson had been liberated to impart her secrets to us. Her brilliance as a teacher would never have shone and so many of us would have been the lesser for it.

Thinking about Miss Anderson (I later somehow learned her Christian name was “Mabel”) as a young woman in her late teens, I began to picture an enthusiastic teenager, an active adolescent and a product of middle-class, southern, Protestant Ontario. Queen Victoria would still have been on the throne in her girlhood, she would have had endless possibilities ahead of her and would not have imagined saying goodbye to her lover, never see or feel him again. When she realized her fiancé would not return to claim her as his bride, she knew she had to devote herself to her craft and her vocation. She had to subjugate her personal will to duty; she had to deny her womanhood, her beauty, her sexuality and her charms. Only 19 or 20, she would have to live her life as a spinster, without ever being able to partake in the communal life of the married woman. She would never be able to join in the life of her church, to make sandwiches or pour tea. These privileges were the exclusive realm of the married woman. Mabel Anderson would have been a virgin at 65. All her life, she would only have been permitted to attend Church services and then forced to retreat to her home. Bridge parties, cocktail parties and Saturday night dances would have been off-limits. A respectable widow had more social dispensations than Miss Anderson. But she accepted all this and knew she had to teach her fatherless children. It was the same after the Second World War, when the baby-boomers arrived – her new charges. I was one of these.

Looking back, I imagine a Miss Anderson who probably had tea and toast for breakfast during the school week. Maybe on her birthday she deviated and had an egg. Her fridge would have been impeccable and after emerging with the egg, boiled or poached would have been the pressing decision facing her. Boiled meant no fuss with the pot, poached meant a bit of clean up, so she probably chose boiled, in spite of the fact that she really preferred poached. When she had been sick as a little girl, a poached egg on toast might have been what her mother had always prepared and it was comfort food for her to this day. Her mind might have shifted back sixty years to the small southern Ontario village house she shared with her mother, father and three brothers. She might have been the only girl, but if the eldest, was probably treated like a boy by her father because he would have expected a male first. When later her brothers came along, her father would still have treated her like a boy and she probably liked it because she was so smart. Her mother would have faded into the background of the household and become the only “female” in the home; everyone else was male. Not that Miss Anderson would ever have had any deviant traits. She remained a girl, but with the expectations given a boy.

In my imagination now, on that morning, as she awaited her egg, she might have enjoyed a reverie so comforting that she closed her eyes to sink more fully into it. Her life so rich and full as a child had been reduced to that of the spinster she had become, after her fiancé had been lost to the Great War. Maybe she had taken a voyage to Europe many years ago and when she visited the graves at Vimy, she might have wondered if he were near, under the soft grass and headstones of the Unknown Soldier.

While I was living my childhood life of 13 years, Miss Anderson was living hers. While I thought a year was a long time, Miss Anderson must have been 52 years old when I was born. The years must have been so long for her.

That last year in grade school, the kids in my class quickly sorted themselves into groups and I gained entry into the strange and wonderous homes of my new friends. I encountered mothers who smoked and was shocked.  Some had a cocktail before dinner.  Scandalous.  When I went after school to my Jewish friends’ homes, I marveled at what they ate and what they didn’t eat. Garlic entered my world, never to depart. I was insanely jealous of girls with pierced ears. Why was this practice verboten in our family? I also wonder now about the kids who never invited you back to their place after school. Why not? Looking back I wonder if someone’s mother might have been an alcoholic and dead drunk at 3:30 in the afternoon. I also wonder if some of my friends were abused in some way and so could not take any chances with their fathers, uncles or grandfathers. Child abuse did not just appear in the last 20 years.

One patent advantage of meeting new girls was that some had older brothers. As the elder in my family, I had only a younger brother who was mostly absent from my aura and a pain in the neck to boot. After he committed suicide years later in his early thirties, I felt badly I had treated him so shabbily at times when we had been children. But all this had not come to pass in that last year before high school and so I plunged happily into friendships with girls whose brothers I had crushes on. Sometimes I really didn’t much care for the girl, but was stuck on her brother, so her house after school was a preferred destination. Not that a boy only one or two years older ever looked sideways at a younger girl, but just to be in the same house and ignored was a heady thrill. Clearly, we were becoming predatory females in our packs and already devising strategies to engage the superior males. Many years later, when I met one such dream brother at a party, I recognized him immediately – even though it had been 35 years since I had last annoyed him. Funnily, I still had the crush. He, for his part, had no idea who I was, but when I reminded him we, tripped down memory lane with gay abandon. Would I have ever picked him as a permanent mate? No, but the old feelings were still there and regardless of the fact that I had made more success of my life than had he, I still looked up to him as the teenage god and football hero he had been.

After school, I met some mothers who actually baked and encouraged us to munch happily on cookies and milk. “Hi girls, I’ve just baked some peanut butter cookies, come on in and enjoy them,” one of my friend’s mothers would say. In our house, cookies were frivolous and superfluous, containing no food value. They were baked only for church bazaars. “Don’t touch the baking in the tins under the sink,” my mother would admonish. “They’re for the church bake sale.” When we tried to sneak a few, tags taped to the tins would warn us off with the message “Do not eat!”

Nevertheless, our house was a regular destination. I now realize that not everyone had had the idyllic childhood I had, with breakfast, lunch and dinner appearing regularly and on time, laundry always fresh and the house clean and tidy. A chemical engineer and scientist, my father did not permit white sugar in our home. The closest we came to dessert was when my grandma came over for dinner – a woman with a purse stuffed with candies and the possessor of the sweetest tooth of anyone I knew. When this lady strode under the lintel and pierced our home, my father cordially allowed cream puffs; they had, he said, “marginal nutrient value” in the cream part. I once asked him why we could not have white sugar and he replied, “Do you know how much sugar cane it takes to produce a teaspoon of sugar?” No, I said. After telling me, he added, “Do you think, dear, it would be normal or healthy to eat that many canes of sugar?” I pictured little children on sugar plantations chewing hopelessly on large canes and grudgingly accepted this explanation. Years later, when I watched a documentary called ‘Big Sugar’, I realized he had been right. Malnutritioned toddlers with no teeth made me think of his ‘no white sugar’ policy in our home, a policy that left me without a sweet tooth and incapable of baking to this day. So, after-school snacks at our place were crackers and cheese or fruit – a practice I see preached from the airwaves of new-wave nutritionists today. Clearly, my old-fashioned parents were well ahead of the curve on this one.

Back then, Miss Anderson encouraged unspoken, but decidedly unfriendly, competition. We had math quizzes and were called upon to stand and solve them on the spot. For someone who still counted on her fingers, this was a daunting challenge. Every Friday afternoon, Miss Anderson would post on the blackboard the names of the students who had scored 100% on the quizzes; mine never appeared. We also had spelling bees, but the most dreaded agony of all was the parsing of the sentence. Randomly, we had to stand up and parse out-loud sentences she would write on the blackboard. They were usually long, tortuous and convoluted, penned by authors like Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy – sentences with clauses of all kinds, adjectival, subordinate, independent, dependent, relative, restrictive and non-restrictive. We had to find the subject of the sentence, the predicate and they had to agree. In our own exercises, we had to identify particles, we had to spot dangling construction, we had to weed out wordiness and we had to eliminate slang (unless, of course, it was used in dialogue). We were horrified daily by dangling, elliptical and misplaced modifiers. Her lessons meandered confidently through the mysteries, beauties, terrors and delights of English grammar and I fell madly in love with my native tongue. Using the dictionary became a joy – an indispensable tool. As Miss Anderson pointed out, “Intelligent people establish the dictionary habit early in life because they know that leaving spelling, pronunciation and meaning to chance is folly.”

When I look back, I think fondly of the wonders of punctuation, the difference between that and which, the joys of the rhetorical question, the tricks of the squinting modifier, the horrors of the straggling sentence, the eloquence of the subjunctive mood, the inscrutability of the vocative, the obscurity of tautology and syllabication and the thrill of upside-down subordination. Miss Anderson was expert at all; there was nothing she did not catch. At first I struggled and fought hard to find the subject of a sentence, coming upon it as often as not at the very end of a long sentence. And let’s not forget “needless shifts in construction.” Back then, a transitive verb stumped me as thoroughly as did a gerund. Now I am able to bore with abandon victims at cocktail parties by informing them that a gerund is a verbal noun. “Shouting upsets the baby,” I will declare, pointing out that “shouting” is the gerund. Some people pretend they know this; many walk quickly away; still others are fascinated. The fascinated I admit are few, but when I meet one, we set off into a world of glorious veneration of our mother tongue. All this was the gift of Miss Anderson. She was akin to a skilled doctor, with her black bag of grammatical rules and remedies – an expert in her field. She cared not for our corp, only for what she could “cure” in our minds – for what she could impart of our native tongue and its delicious intricacies, for what she could implant forever into our brains. My father, the scientist, began to make sense to me.

The school year progressed routinely, with me remaining one of the dumber kids in that oh-so-smart class. One of the other kindred lesser lights was a very quiet boy who sat behind me, near the back of the class. When I saw him on television many years later, I was shocked to see that he had become one of the most successful national CBC broadcasters and journalists in the country. But maybe I should not have been so taken aback because although quiet, he did manage good marks. Did Miss Anderson also influence him in his vocation, as she had me? I decided she had.

For Miss Anderson, her last year must have been unfolding with both relief and dread. For 45 years she had not had to think about anything. She had greeted each new flock of children as they entered her world and perfunctorily bidden them farewell when they departed – all enhanced by her skill and dedication, whether they had known it at the time or not. She had most likely lived with her mother until the latter had died years earlier and so consequently lived alone in a tidy apartment. She must have had cousins scattered throughout southern Ontario, but had not kept in contact with them. Her brothers would have married conventionally and their wives would have taken no interest in the remote Miss Anderson: spinster/teacher. With families of their own, they had nothing in common with her. Their families were personal; hers were universal. Their children were special; hers were ordinary. She had seen so many, but had never been influenced by their parents, their wealth, or lack of it, whether or not they were wards of the Children’s Aid, or spoiled and privileged. Her charges were little people and it was her duty to try and make something of them in spite of themselves.

“Maybe I should take another trip to England,” she might have wondered aloud as March turned into April. In her staff room there were posters featuring England and France, the fresh idea of the new art teacher, Miss Thompson, who said she thought the room needed cheering up. Miss Thompson could usually be counted on to be annoying. In fact, the posters almost made Miss Anderson recoil from such a trip. When she entered the staff room, the other teachers were now soliticious of her. Nearing retirement, Miss Anderson was patronized at times by young women she knew would only teach until they married. “Hi Mabel, sit down. Would you like some tea? I’ve just made a fresh pot.” These new teachers were not the dedicated yeomen, of which she had been one. And why were all the principals men? Miss Anderson had reached the pinnacle of the teaching ladder, but would not have been offered the job of principal. Such positions were offered exclusively to men. With so much to offer, she was better off as a teacher, but it certainly wasn’t just. The principal that year was Mr. Pocock and he taught grade seven. He was so lax that he even permitted us to mark our own tests. Naturally, we all cheated.

By chance after school one day, I rode the bus with Miss Anderson on the way downtown. I had a doctor’s appointment, but she must have lived there. To see her sitting quietly just as any other passenger, was completely bizarre to me. On the bus, we were equals and she was just another rider among many others. She was not in charge here, the bus driver was; she was simply a paying passenger like I, but it did not seem right. The bus driver was as much an expert in his work as she. Both were dedicated to their respective vocations. “Transfer please,” she said to him, as she deposited her fare. He didn’t even reply, just ripped off the transfer and gave it to her without looking, as if she were a nobody in his domain. Naturally, she did not speak to me. Socializing with a student would have been preposterous; in fact, she didn’t even say hello, just took a seat. I deliberately sat well behind her, not only out of fear, but also so I could study her grey pin curls from behind and perhaps discover something new that had not emerged or been revealed in her classroom. I accomplished neither. What could she have been thinking? It did not occur to me until I saw her on the bus that she could possibly have been a person with a life outside our classroom. When I heard later that she had taken that trip to England and France after she had retired, perhaps she had been thinking about it then. Vimy and her long-dead love would have been waiting patiently for a tender reunion. It makes me weep to this day.

In the spring of that final year Miss Anderson’s transformation took place in my mind.  She announced that every Friday afternoon she would be reading aloud from 'Great Expectations', by Charles Dickens. Not having heard of the novel, all I could think of was “Perfect, we can just sit and doze for an hour every Friday afternoon and not do any work.” I didn’t wonder why she had chosen 'Great Expectations', but as she read, I began to understand. As she read, I encountered Miss Havisham, the bride left at the altar by the intended groom. In the novel, Miss Havisham is an old woman, abandoned on her wedding day and as a result has given up on life. She wears a yellowed wedding gown and haunts a decrepit house. Miss Anderson had not given up on life, we were her life. Yet, I pictured her poignantly as Miss Havisham, living alone in her little apartment, covered in cobwebs, donning her wedding dress every evening and wandering among the same wedding presents and unfulfilled dreams that were Miss Havisham’s world.

It was during her trip to Europe, after she had retired, that we heard through a Church-lady friend of my mother’s that Miss Anderson had indeed finally married. But not in any conventional way and not to any unadventurous widower back home. No, Miss Anderson married a man 30 years her junior – someone she had met on her travels in France. The story varied in its telling, but peeling off the luxurious and salacious embellishments, I gathered she had taken a tour of the cemetery at Vimy and afterward had begun a relationship with the son of the owners of the small hotel where she was staying. Suddenly, I could picture it perfectly. Miss Anderson, visiting her long-dead love among the unknown graves, Miss Anderson, shedding her age and cares, Miss Anderson, reverting to the young girl she had been when in love………all this must have been apparent to the young man at the hotel. She must have gone to the gravesite old and ordinary, but returned young and transformed. The world is a looking-glass and gives back to everyone a reflection of his or her own face. Unbeknownst to any of us, Miss Anderson had more than one face. The Mabel Anderson who had taught us and had betrothed her wisdom and aloofness to her unsophisticated students had other personas – personas that finally found release in France. Outside the inflexible and unyielding United Church rules which so rigidly governed her life in Canada, she had at last been able to flower. She picked up where she had left off and at 65, had started a new life with a new love. She never moved back to our town, how could she? Trying to imagine her bringing her new husband to Church or to the supermarket I realized the absurdity of the scene. They disappeared and vanished into Toronto, gone from our lives forever. But I knew from then on, perfection always masked a secret.
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I hope you enjoyed my story.