“Yup. Do the right thing.”
She feels as though there’s a smell coming off her, and she sniffs her fingers to make sure they are clean.
AMERICAN THANKSGIVING
SHE KNOWS THAT the smell will go away if she confesses to Mr. March about the windows. Then she must go to the principal and tell about the tree.
Mr. March’s eyes get big and round, he looks at Madeleine as though he is seeing her for the first time — like an elephant noticing a mouse.
“I’m sorry, Mr. March.”
It’s weird because he says, “Just forget about it, Madeleine.” He doesn’t say, “Forget about it, little girl,” he uses her name, which he never does unless he is reading it off his clipboard.
It’s lunchtime. They are in the hallway outside the classroom. She has confessed to soaping “Peahen” all over the grade four windows. She has also confessed to dressing up as him as a clown going golfing. Throughout, he has not taken his eyes from hers. For once she can see them through his glasses. They are large and grey. As she confessed, she felt cool water pouring over her head, even though her voice was shaking.
Mr. March glances down the empty corridor and asks, “Have you told anyone?”
“No.”
“Well don’t.”
“I have to tell Mr. Lemmon.”
“No you don’t.”
She is surprised, then reflects that he probably wants to tell on her himself. Then he will phone her parents and tell them. “I’m going to tell my own parents,” she says.
“What for? What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
She goes to walk away down the hall because it’s lunchtime, but he says, “Wait a moment, Madeleine.”
She stops, and as she turns back to him, she gets the I’m-not-hungry-any-more feeling, because she realizes that he is going to make her do exercises even though it’s not after three. Just as she had never imagined the possibility of doing exercises in a Halloween costume, she is now ambushed by the prospect of doing them at lunchtime. You can do them in a box, you can do them with a fox….
She follows him back into the classroom, arms limp at her sides, but he just nips over to his desk and takes something from the drawer. He writes on it, then hands it to her. “You got a hundred percent on your reading comprehension, what do you think of that?”
At recess she knocks on Mr. Lemmon’s door. She tells him about the tree. He doesn’t say anything at first, and she thinks, oh no, I’m going to get the strap.
Then he says, “Come here, Madeleine.” He is sitting behind his desk, and she thinks, I’m not going to get the strap after all, he is going to make me do exercises. She feels tired because this means she will have to start feeling sorry for Mr. Lemmon too. She approaches his desk and sighs — she ought to have known that this is what happens. She stands close enough for him to reach out and squeeze her arm muscle, and he does reach out, but he takes her hand instead. He shakes it. “I’m impressed, Madeleine, very impressed.”
That I hacked up a tree?
“Most children would not have the courage to confess as you’ve just done.”
Courage. A hail of bullets. Saving a dog from rapids. Being a juvenile delinquent. Confessing to it.
“Run along now, Madeleine.”
Mr. March doesn’t call the exercise group for a week after Halloween. And then, in the second week of November: “The following little girls will remain after the belclass="underline" Diane Vogel, Joyce Nutt, Grace Novotny …”
Madeleine waits for her name, the hot feeling in her underpants, the sick feeling in her stomach.
“… Marjorie Nolan … and Claire McCarroll.”
What?
The bell goes. The clatter of chairs as everyone but the exercise group gets up to flee for another day. Madeleine remains at her desk and glances over at Claire, who has turned pink. When the room is clear, the members of the exercise group rise from their desks and line up shoulder to shoulder along the back wall, against the coat hooks. Claire follows them and fills the empty place next to Marjorie. From her desk, Madeleine can see that Claire’s knees have turned pink too. What does Claire think is going to happen? She is in the cave now. From outside it looks like an ordinary mountain.
“What are you waiting for, Madeleine?” asks Mr. March.
She rises from her desk, walks to the coat hooks and stands at the end of the line beside Claire.
Mr. March rolls his eyes. “For heaven’s sake, little girl, did you hear your name?”
“No sir,” says Madeleine.
“Well then?” Someone giggles. Madeleine walks back to her desk and reaches in for her homework—“Slow as molasses in January,” says Mr. March.
She leaves. Marjorie giggles again. Diane Vogel looks straight at her, with a solemnity that Madeleine has seen in a photograph in a book. It reminds her of Anne Frank, and that explains why she loves Diane Vogel. Claire is looking out the window.
Madeleine does not go straight home. Kids pour out of the school, yet the air around her feels quiet, muffled mohair. The kids stampeding past seem far away, as though they are in a movie. She traverses the throng and reaches the swings. She feels flushed, as though she has done something bad, and she knows that when she gets home Maman will take one look at her and say, “Do you have a guilty conscience?” Her head is hot and hazy, as though she has been up to something shameful — like watching a boy after he has offered to pee in front of you and all you have said in reply is, “If you want to.” She has watched Philip Pinder pee. That was a sin. But she has not sinned today.
She sits on the swing. Stupid Claire McCarroll, if she hadn’t been picked Madeleine would not feel so guilty now. Like Adam and Eve when God banished them from the Garden of Eden. And they knew they were naked. How dumb did they have to be not to notice in the first place?
She pushes off on the swing as the schoolyard shrieks and empties around her, kicking the scuffed dirt with her Buster Browns, picturing Mr. March, his floppy grey cheeks; how she does her backbends for him and he feels her “sweat glands” between her legs. She closes her eyes and sees Jesus’ face, so sad. Jesus is sad because you have hurt him. Jesus often looks as though someone had just farted. She folds her arms across her knees and rests her forehead there, staring down between her dangling feet at a tiny patch of world.
Only yesterday, she was at home on the couch with her brother and Bugs Bunny, watching The Beverly Hillbillies, and it seemed then that there was no such thing as exercises. All that stuff remained in its own place. As if those eleven minutes after the bell were sealed and stored separately — the way you wrap leftovers in plastic so they won’t go bad. The bag may have leaked a bit before but now it has broken and the smell is everywhere. Because today she was expelled from after-three, and now she is watching this patch of world move back and forth, back and forth….
The toes of her shoes are badly scuffed now. She sits up and stretches her legs out in front. She thinks, everyone thinks I’m just a little girl with white ankle socks. They don’t know that I know about after-three. About the coat hooks, how you can press your spine against one while you wait to see if he will call you up to the front. You try to press so hard against the hook that you will keep feeling it all the way through your exercises. They don’t know that I know about Mr. March. About his smell. Like Javex. But I will go like the wind until all his smell is off me. She starts pumping her legs to get the swing going.
“We ha-ad chocolates, and you-ou di-dn’t”—chanting—“nyah nyah-nyah, nyah nyah!”
Marjorie and Grace are holding hands, swinging them back and forth. Marjorie has chocolate around her mouth, as if to prove to Madeleine that she really did have it after the bell.