I'm wearing all the wrong clothes. First day of high school and here I am in the fishbowl of intro assembly and everyone is watching me wearing a burgundy velour cowl neck sweater. Why do I do this to myself?
Moments flash by, like my life is going to end: flash -- me getting off the bus for summer camp wearing a too tight white vinyl pantsuit and matching rubber boots (I wanted to be the girl with the blow dryer in that commercial... the blow-dryer looks like a gun and she's from the wild west -- only in white vinyl. I explain this patiently over and over the next two weeks. The girls from my camp are from the country -- none of them has seen the commercial. The rest of my clothes are just as freakish. I don't even own a pair of jeans.)   Flash: Raggedy Anne tights and a navy polka-dot dress, audience laughing, me, well, worried.... Flash: well, you get the picture.
Vivian sits next to me in assembly and is perfect. Mini kilt and cowgirl boots, smelling like Love's Baby Soft... but with a hint of Eau de Rochas which she steals from her grandmother and which makes her smell older. She's even curled her eyelashes. I feel somehow worse sitting next to her. I didn't even know about the eyelash curling thing.
 

Vivian pokes me when Lisa Simms takes the stage to sing 'At 17'.
"She's the ambassador’s daughter."
I'm embarrassed because Vivian says this so loudly.
"I'm going to go out with her brother. I saw him registering today."  I look at V. hard: long straight thin hair, green eyes, legs just a little apart, those curling eyelashes beating like wings. Ya, I bet you will. And she did.
I think Lisa Simms is ok but that 'At 17' song is way too long and in the audience we're all 13 and to sing about four long sucky years ahead just seems demoralizing. It's really only sunk in the last 15 minutes, after all, that I'm not prom queen material. Why did no one tell me about curling your eyelashes? Forget it.
Next up, Mr. Anderson the science teacher. He welcomes us and begins his talk about science... but he lisps and science is an unfortunate word for him... Vivian is laughing, everyone's laughing. For a second I think about laughing but there he is on stage, like a sad dot from my balcony seat and he's trying to talk through the laughter like he doesn't hear it and every time an s comes the giggles swell and some kids behind us start hissing sss out to the front. I'm going to cry and I'm going to kill them.

Mr. Anderson is my grade 9 Chemistry teacher. He's overweight and a little mean. I would be too. He uses my name in class tests a lot:
"Tracey is combining two bases and she... "
"Tracey is making acetesalycylic acid from scratch in her kitchen. What does she need and how does she make it? Show all work."
I never laugh when he lisps. I think he's funny. He signs everyone else's yearbook "Mr. Anderson," under his picture. He signs my yearbook "to the worst science student I have ever taught. I mean that. I hope you're not in my class next year."
I roll my eyes at him. I decide I am going to be a genetic engineer.

  
Next year he's my homeroom teacher. And my physics teacher.And my soccer coach. He's not a popular teacher. Our school is full of popular approachable teachers... teachers who laugh easily say the right things, put students at ease, dress well... you know.... teachers who are all huggy and smart and who never lisp. Mr. Anderson is difficult to like. Mr. Anderson is made fun of a lot. I watch his hands at the blackboard shaking a little bit. I look him level in the eye before he gets to the s-es. In grade 11 I take enriched chemistry to make sure I'm in his class. I wouldn't say he's my favourite teacher, but we have an understanding, I think... I try to make my notes on organic chemistry, my excellent models of molecules, my elegant proofs on the blackboard like small gifts to him.
He gives me fake marks on my December test... tells me I've failed. His sense of humour is pretty arrested, but it's the trying, right?  

I like his writing, and his hands.I like the way looking at him sends me into making up his whole life... never popular like Jason Simms, never getting a girl like V. Small laughter following him wherever he goes... I imagine him at ten, at twelve at fifteen, at thirty. Wonder why of all places he's decided to come back to this theater of high cruelty. I wonder what he does on days off. I find myself speculating -- doeshe live alone? Does he date? Who does he sleep with?

This takes me by surprise -- I only care about women's lives, never men's. And such an improbable object of attention.... I look at him hard and see acne scars, small beads of sweat on his forehead, his heavy neck, his face getting very red for no reason.

I've moved into my own apartment. It's snowing outside, just after grade 11 December exams and I can see my high school from my window and a note on my porch. It's addressed to me. An expensive Christmas card with a canned verse about how I'm being wished a very special Christmas because I'm a very special person. Under the verse there's a small handwritten note that says "really... you're unique. Merry Christmas." It's not signed. It's in Mr. Anderson's handwriting.

  I wonder if this is really a cruel joke someone is playing on Mr. Anderson. Maybe me... but more likely Mr. Anderson. The note sounds so much like him... the writing is indistinguishable from his. Am I supposed to say something? Is that when the joke's on him? Maybe I'm supposed to get all weird and hate Mr. Anderson like everyone else. I'd rather it be from him. I tell no one about the card. I put it away in a folder marked 'personal'.
When the new year comes, I don't mention it -- it might not be from him, after all, but I up the ante, though, and change seats so I sit right in the front row, in front of his desk. The card doesn't change anything. Just ups my fantasy level. I surprise myself and am in awe at how weird I've turned out to be, liking only grade 12 girls who look like boys and middle aged mean men with lisps.

Vivian doesn't have to think very hard about her easy desirefor Jason Simms, blond, all that innocent groping: "It's so neat you're going out with him.   Let's all head over to his huge house for cocktails."

 

That.That make *so* much sense. This -- me here in the back seat of Jennie's Caprice Classic, her strong hands on my back, under my shirt in the Embassy Hotel parking lot, my imagining just every once in a while that Mr. Anderson's hands are resting clammy and tentative on my thighs as I spread them apart for Jennie. This -- this stuff makes no sense at all and gives you no high school cheering section. I try to image it:
"It's so neat you're going out with her."
No, can't imagine anyone saying that.
"Wow, I can see how you'd be into Mr. Anderson. Can we hang out with you guys and have cocktails in his probably cramped one bedroom apartment?" Uh-huh.
 
It's not true to say nothing changed after the card.I would sit in my first row seat and spread my legs, just a little, just to see if he'd look at my white cotton underwear. I was never sure. I thought hard about whether he had really ever noticed me and whether that mattered. And why him and not one other boy in the whole school? For the rest of high school I behaved as if Mr.Anderson and I had had avery discreet affair -- and I wondered what on earth he would make of the world if he knew that I, teen lesbian gymnast and tough girl, hiding her As in chemistry and smoking in soccer halftime did, in fact, fantasize about him -- just a little -- my eyes closed and his hands in my hair. Fucking him hard because what, after all, did the other grade nine girls know about desire? About how the strangest things can make you scream when you come and they never ever tell you that in Seventeen magazine, urging girls to find only the predictable beautiful.
   
  The year I graduated he came to my apartment for coffee and he sat very still and didn't stay long.
   
   
 


I go back to the school years later, wanting to see him. He'd died only a couple of years after I'd graduated. How did I not know that? Mr. Smythe, the biology teacher, sees in my face I hadn't heard, and grabs my arm hard like he wants me to be very still. He says: "you know, he always talked about you."
   
I have no idea what that's supposed to mean and again, I'm not sure it matters. I ask myself -- what would you like it to mean? Alone in my hotel room I take off my clothes and think hard about Mr. Anderson...  
  ... His hands, his lisp his bad sense of humour I imagine.. No, really want him to know, like it's not too late,
I'm conjuring ghosts, hope that he's watching...  
my hands on my breasts... in this moment it matters...
   
I want him to know,
  my breath coming fast
   
that I hope that he did
 
fuck me in his fantasies,  
 

did
   
feel the pull of me in that front seat,  
 

did

write that card or say my name when he thought that he shouldn't and that,

at seventeen, I want him to know...

 

  

 

that I wanted that.