By the time I was fifteen, everything shifted around
again, just as they had when we left Detroit, Sichuan, Chang Chun, Malaysia,
Hong Kong, Chicago, Ferizaj, and Minnesota. Everything was always shifting, a fact of my childhood. We spent four
years overseas and returned to America every fifth year, my parents moved to a
different country every three years, and of each year’s twelve months, I spent
eight at boarding school and four wherever my family was at the time. That summer, just before my
fifteenth birthday, my family moved from Prishtinë to Macedonia and I moved two villages south in Germany, from
Schliengen-Liel to Holzen. Mr. Jespersen and Aunt June had gone back to Canada
to be near their twin grandchildren, and I lived in a new dormitory with twenty
other girls.
I had four sets of dorm parents for my four years of
high school, all wildly different. There were the quirky Canadian Schultzes
from the Ukraine who made better kimchi than the Koreans and sent their
daughter to the prom with a corsage of red chili peppers instead of flowers,
the boisterous Grays from Philadelphia who had been camp cooks for several
decades and served everything with a side of Ranch, and a young kindhearted
couple who had lost their first baby, a little girl named Anna Pearl, the year
before they became our house parents. The last set, the Patersons, arrived
late, as they had been trying to sell their house to pay their way to Germany.
Jim and Lynn were from Toronto, where Jim was a
full-time artist. Their house had a white picket fence around a backyard that
Jim had decorated with a few dozen television trees—old televisions sets put up
on poles with faces painted on their screens, looking like they were trying to
escape. He explained it to me once as a sage commentary on the nature of
reality, but I think it may have increased the difficulty of selling their
house.
Jim often sat by the fireplace in the evenings,
patiently building a fire and waiting to see if any of us would join him beside
it. My sister Hallie and I most often came down to talk with him and drink tea
on the leather couches, our conversations leaping from the mundane to the
bizarre. My favourite conversation with Jim began when I sat down on the hearth
one day, and he said to me,
“Erin, my friend. Speak to me of the profound.” I
laughed nervously, knowing that the depth of Jim’s mind was immeasurable, and
nothing I could say would ever be ‘profound’ in comparison.
He waited for a moment, then turned toward the fire,
and sighed, “This morning, as Lynn and I were eating breakfast, I turned to my
wife and said, ‘Darling! Speak to me of love!’ and she stammered and blushed
and said nothing of the sort.” He shook his head and stared into the fire,
brooding. Later that night, Jim showed me his designs for the furniture he was
making for the dorm. He filled the kitchen with paintings of our village and
painted sunflowers onto all of the cabinets and closets. He slowly to change
the dormitory from a building deadened with stained grey linoleum and ripped,
donated furniture into a home filled with rich rugs, paper lanterns, and
bizarre sculptures.
Even Jim, though, couldn’t entirely transcend the
dismal rules and regulations of our boarding school. The only day Jim and I
ever bickered, I was running down the stairs, late for the bus, when he stopped
me by the front door and told me to kneel on the ground. In his hand, he held a
yardstick, and on his face he wore a grim expression I had rarely seen. I
stared at him, and he told me again to kneel, that he needed to measure my
skirt to see how many inches it was from the ground, if it missed the modesty
mark: two inches. For a full thirty seconds, we stood staring at each other, he
with his yardstick and me with my book bag, until I slowly shook my head, no.
No, I will not kneel and be measured. I turned and walked out the door, feeling
numb.
As I walked to the bus, I remembered that Jim had
recently met with our school’s dean, a Mr. Laird, a stickler for modesty who
often made girls wear a full painter’s jumpsuit if they wore anything against
dress code: jeans with rips, tank tops with straps thinner than three inches,
or shorts that were shorter than their fingertips. For my first two years of
high school, Mr. Laird doted on me, a model student, soft-spoken and
high-achieving, interested in studying medicine later in life. But during my
junior year, I found my spirit, stumbled across it as I awakened in the bloom
of a Black Forest springtime, began reading EE Cummings and Khalil Gibran, and
started dating a boy named Collin who played in a folk band, wrote love songs,
and graffitied stencils of me as a ballerina on the town firehouse. Collin and
I got caught skipping class—trespassing in the town recycling center looking
for treasures, exploring an abandoned house we found out in the woods, climbing
apple trees in full bloom, and finally trying to crawl through an underground
tunnel we found connecting two of our school buildings. Mr. Laird gave us a
week’s worth of detentions, kicked me off student council, and hated me after
that day. I have vivid memories of sitting in the teacher’s lounge, scrubbing
dirt and spilled food off the floor, as Mr. Laird sat in a chair and watched
me, hissing in my ear that I had disappointed him, that I was deceitful and
untrustworthy, that he would make me resign my National Honour Society
membership because there was nothing honourable about me.
During my senior year, when Jim was my dorm dad and
I had fallen from Mr. Laird’s good graces, Mr. Laird began to have conferences
with Jim to talk about my behaviour. When I had mono, Mr. Laird called Jim into
his office to say that I was probably lying and that I would be penalized if I
ever missed class or an assignment, regardless of any supposed illness or the
doctor’s orders I had to stay home from school. I only missed one day of class,
despite the fact that the doctor ordered me home for two weeks. When I tried to
switch out of a calculus class I had taken unnecessarily, Mr. Laird wrote my
mother to say that I was lazy and belligerent because I wanted to take choir
instead. I stayed in calculus in attempts to appease him, and even wrote an
elaborate apology that I read to him in his office. When I started a petition
asking the administration not to cut the funding for the girls’ weekly Bible
studies we all were part of, Mr. Laird told the board who reviewed my petition
that I was more interested in causing trouble than in studying the Word. Not
only was our funding cut, but the school announced a ban preventing girls from
meeting together to study the Bible in unofficial groups that had not be
reviewed and approved by the activities board. They never approved a single
group. A month before I graduated, Mr. Laird called Jim to tell him that my
spirit needed to be broken before I left. That was his mission when it came to
me—to break me.
I shouldn’t have cared, but the fact that Mr. Laird
had spread poisonous words about me to all of my teachers, my dorm dad, and my
parents made my stomach feel sour. I shook whenever he walked by me, and felt
bitter resentment knot my throat whenever he was nearby, hating him for the
power he had over me. It was a small school, and a long year, as I felt Mr. Laird
looking over my shoulder everywhere I went. He began lashing out at my friends
as well, taking an interest in my best friend, taking her into dark classrooms,
closing the door and asking her personal questions about both me and her
boyfriend, trying to get information by paying her strange and flattering
compliments. He wrote several mass emails to the entire teaching staff about my
mentor, the poetry, theatre, and choir teacher, saying that she was incompetent
and accusing her publicly of having affairs with students. When she found out
that she had breast cancer my senior year, he tried to have her fired, saying
that she was too weak to be of use to anyone, despite the fact that she battled
through cancer twice and continued to teach. Jim, who had several times
expressed to me his outrage at the lies Mr. Laird spread, had begun to design a
prayer machine—a sixty-foot machine built like a long arch or tunnel that moved
when a crank was turned at one end, swirling around itself and whoever walked
down its avenue, mimicking the way that prayers are formed and wing their way
to heaven. I often pictured myself walking down the prayer machine’s serene
center whenever Mr. Laird came near me to rebuke me, or to make me kneel before
him as he measured me and found me wanting. I imagined myself walking through
the machine and up toward God, like the angels Jacob saw climbing the ladder to
heaven.
That same spring, a month before I graduated, I
confessed to Jim and Lynn that I had been drinking on the sly for several years
and that we girls had been sneaking out of the dorm in the middle of the night
to meet boys and have bonfires out by the vineyards. Jim and Lynn, with tears
in their eyes, put their arms around my shoulders and told me that Christ’s
command was to forgive one another in his name, and that they absolved me of my
sins against them. They showed me grace when they could have had me expelled
from school, and taught me about loving rather than hating. At the time, Jim
was building a series of guns out of found items, and he pulled one off the top
of his Schrank to show me. The gun was built of wood, wire, an old trumpet, a
bookend, and something painted dark green like the velvety head of a duck. When
I put the gun to my eye and aimed it, staring into the sight, I found that I
was peering into my own face staring back at me in surprise. Jim replaced the
sight with a mirror, so that whatever you tried to shoot, you aimed at
yourself. If there was anyone I
wanted to shoot, it was Mr. Laird, the man who filled me with shame and a sick
sense of helplessness every time I saw him. But Jim’s gift to me was the gift
of grace—looking in the mirror and walking through the prayer machine instead
of descending into violence and bitterness.
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