Dear Life

what your teacher teaches you? To stare at people who aren’t bothering anybody?”
    Most laughed, but some couldn’t stop watching him even for that. They were hungry for further antics.
    “Go on. Go off and misbehave yourselves somewhere else.”
    He apologized to me for breaking up the class. I began to explain to him my reasons for making this more like real school.
    “Though I do agree with you about stress—” I said earnestly. “I agree with what you said in your instructions. I just thought—”
    “What instructions? Oh, that was just some bits and pieces that went through my head. I never meant them to be set in stone.”
    “I mean as long as they are not too sick—”
    “I’m sure you’re right, I don’t suppose it matters.”
    “Otherwise they seemed sort of listless.”
    “There’s not any need to make a song and dance about it,” he said, and walked away.
    Then turned to make a barely halfhearted apology.
    “We can have a talk about it some other time.”
    That time, I thought, would never come. He evidently thought me a bother and a fool.
    I discovered at lunch, from the aides, that somebody had not survived an operation that morning. So my anger did not turn out to be justified, and for that reason I had to feel more of a fool.
    Every afternoon was free. My pupils went down for long naps and I sometimes felt like doing the same. My room was cold—every part of the building seemed cold, far colder than the apartment on Avenue Road, even though my grandparents kept the radiators turned low there, to be patriotic. And the covers were thin—surely people with tuberculosis needed something cozier.
    I of course did not have tuberculosis. Maybe they skimped on provisions for people like me.
    I was drowsy but couldn’t sleep. Overhead there was the rumble of bed-carts being wheeled to the open porches for the icy afternoon exposure.
    The building, the trees, the lake, could never again be the same to me as they were on that first day, when I was caught by their mystery and authority. On that day I had believed myself invisible. Now it seemed as if that was never true.
    There’s the teacher. What’s she up to?
    She’s looking at the lake.
    What for?
    Nothing better to do.
    Some people are lucky.

    Once in a while I skipped lunch, even though it was part of my salary. I went in to Amundsen, where I ate in a coffee shop. The coffee was Postum and the best bet for a sandwich was tinned salmon, if they had any. The chicken salad had to be looked over well for bits of skin and gristle. Nevertheless I felt more at ease there, as if nobody would know who I was.
    About that I was probably mistaken.
    The coffee shop didn’t have a ladies’ room, so you had to go next door to the hotel, then past the open door of the beer parlor, always dark and noisy and letting out a smell of beer and whiskey, a blast of cigarette and cigar smoke fit to knock you down. Nevertheless I felt easy enough there. The loggers, the men from the sawmill, would never yelp at you the way the soldiers and the airmen in Toronto did. They were deep down in a world of men, bawling out their own stories, not here to look for women. Possibly more eager in fact to get away from that company now or forever.
    The doctor had an office on the main street. Just a small one-story building so he must live elsewhere. I had picked up from the aides that there was no wife. On the only side street I found the house that might possibly belong to him—a stucco-covered house with a dormer window over the front door, books stacked on the sill of that window. There was a bleak but orderly look to the place, a suggestion of minimal but precise comfort, that a lone man—a regulated lone man—might contrive.
    The school at the end of that only residential street was two stories high. The downstairs served students up to gradeeight, the upstairs to grade twelve. One afternoon I spotted Mary there, taking part in a snowball fight. It seemed to be girls against boys. When she saw me, Mary cried out loudly, “Hey, Teach,” and gave the balls in both hands a random toss, then sauntered across the street. “See you tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder, more or less as a warning that nobody was to follow.
    “You on your way home?” she said. “Me too. I used to ride with Reddy, but he’s got too late leaving. What do you do, take the tram?”
    I said yes, and Mary said, “Oh I can show you the other way and you can save your money. The