I like these foreign pictures because I can believe in them. I desperately need to believe that somewhere else these other, foreign people exist. No matter that at Sunday school I’ve been told such people are either starving or heathens or both. No matter that my weekly collection goes to convert them, feed them, smarten them up. Miss Lumley saw them as crafty, given to the eating of outlandish or disgusting foods and to acts of treachery against the British, but I prefer Miss Stuart’s versions, in which the sun above their heads is a cheerful yellow, the palm trees a clearg reen, the clothing they wear is floral, their folksongs gay. The women chatter together in quick incomprehensible languages, they laugh, showing perfect, pure-white teeth. If these people exist I can go there sometime. I don’t have to stay here. Today, says Miss Stuart, we are going to draw what we do after school. The others hunch over their desks. I know what they will draw: skipping ropes, jolly snowmen, listening to the radio, playing with a dog. I stare at my own paper, which remains blank. Finally I draw my bed, with myself in it. My bed has a dark wooden headboard with curlicues on it. I draw the window, the chest of drawers. I color in the night. My hand holding the black crayon presses down, harder and harder, until the picture is almost entirely black, until only a faint shadow of my bed and my head on the pillow remains to be seen.
I look at this picture with dismay. It isn’t what I meant to draw. It’s unlike everyone else’s picture, it’s the wrong thing. Miss Stuart will be disappointed in me, she’ll tell me I have more between the ears than that. I can feel her standing behind me now, looking over my shoulder; I can smell her smell of hand lotion, and the other smell that is not tea. She moves around so I can see her, her bright blue wrinkly eyes looking at me over the top of her nurse’s mask.
For a moment she says nothing. Then she says, not harshly, “Why is your picture so darruk, my dear?”
“Because it’s night,” I say. This is an idiotic answer, I know that as soon as it’s out of my mouth. My voice is almost inaudible, even to me.
“I see,” she says. She doesn’t say I’ve drawn the wrong thing, or that surely there’s something else I do after school besides going to bed. She touches me on the shoulder, briefly, before continuing down the aisle. Her touch glows briefly, like a blown-out match.
In the schoolroom windows the paper hearts are blossoming. We make a huge Valentine’s Day postbox out of a cardboard box covered with pink crepe paper and red hearts with paper doily edging. Into the slot at the top we slip our valentines, cut from books of them you can buy at Woolworth’s, with special, single ones for the people we especially like.
On the day itself the whole afternoon is a party. Miss Stuart loves parties: She’s brought dozens of heart-shaped shortbread cookies she’s made herself, with pink icing and silver balls on them, and there are tiny cinnamon hearts and pastel hearts with messages on them, messages from some earlier era which is not ours. “Hubba Hubba,” they say. “She’s My Baby.” “Oh You Kid!”
Miss Stuart sits at her desk, supervising, while several girls open the box and deliver the valentines. On my desk the cards pile up. Most of them are from boys. I can tell this because of the sloppy writing, and because a lot of them aren’t signed. Others have only initials or
On the way home from school Carol giggles and shows off her cards from boys. I have more cards from boys than Carol has, more than Cordelia and Grace have collected in their Grade Six classroom. Only I know this. I’ve hidden the cards in my desk so they won’t be seen on the way home. When questioned I say I didn’t get many. I hug my knowledge, which is new but doesn’t surprise me: boys are my secret allies.
Carol is only ten and three quarters but she’s growing breasts. They aren’t very big, but the nipples are no longer flat, they’re pointed, and there’s a swelling behind them. It’s easy to see this because she sticks out her chest, she wears sweaters, pulling them down tightly so the breasts poke out. She complains about these breasts at recess: they hurt, she says. She says she will have to get a bra. Cordelia says, “Oh shut up about your stupid tits.” She’s older, but she doesn’t have any yet. Carol pinches her lips and cheeks to make them red. She finds a worn-down tube of lipstick in her mother’s wastepaper basket and hides it away, and takes it to school in her pocket. Using the tip of her little finger, she rubs some of it on her lips after school. She wipes it off with a Kleenex before we get to her house but she doesn’t do a good enough job.
We play upstairs in her room. When we go down to the kitchen for a glass of milk, her mother says,