Back to Issue 11.

It’s What People Do

Andre Narbonne

April 1985

And then, for a moment, everything falls silent. The endless pounding stops. Harriet says, “I understand,” which is her expression for “Yes.” But she says it in a subdued voice, and I know that this time it means “No.” I know I have murdered understanding by trying to understand. I feel in my pocket for the note that reads, “I love you,” the note that mysteriously appeared in my jacket at lunch.

“Love is the confession that looks outward,” Harriet had told me only an hour earlier, embarrassing us both. Glass lovers, we stood stooped with our heads bowed, eyes reaching out of our foreheads searching for a reaction by which we might identify each other as… what?  

Uncomfortable co-conspirators—atheists during grandfather’s prayer…

I broke us. I said, “Words. Just words.”

*     *     *

We all have words, each of us a semanticist trying to define experiences that hurt too much to experience, substituting words for touch and taste, love and hate.

“It’s so unfair” and “what a waste” are Sam’s. He pulls them out when we get bad service at the strip-mall restaurant we frequent after class. He says, “If we were older we wouldn’t get treated like pigs”—says it loud enough to be insulting to the ever-surly waitress, and then putting a hand to his brow like an actor in a silent movie moans, “It’s so unfair.” It never fails: his dramatic gesture renders him supremely trivial, to the point where he disappears from the angry world of adults surrounding him, surrounding us. He says the same words in the designated smoking area outside of the school lunchroom, says, “It’s so unfair,” to his empty pack, or “What a waste,” to the cigarette he is about to butt on the window. They are his words, his attitude. They protect him from eighteen. Grade thirteen. The end of the line.  

And Hurricane Janice shouts, “You say that again and I’ll kill you.” Not to Sam, who is dying, but to everyone else. It is her reply to “Good morning.” “Did you finish your homework?” “Is that new?”  

“You say that again and I’ll kill you!”

But Harriet is the thinker, a brown-haired dreamer who reads Shelley and Nietzsche and still dreams of fitting in. The rest of us gave up on fitting in by the end of grade nine, and we don’t read half as deeply. Harriet has large, sad eyes. When she says, “I understand,” her magic words, the expression on her face and the sound of her words match gentle compassion with belief.  

I used to think she was too understanding to be one of us. After a while I decided she was too understanding to be one of them.

Something happens. Just like that. We are waiting for the end when something happens; the important things in life take forever to happen quickly.  

It is a cold Thursday and the grass outside the lunchroom is still stiff from winter. We are gathered before heading home, inventing some use for the evening. I have a six-thirty commitment to act in a school play about a nineteenth-century Ontario family that’s so mean to everyone the whole town joins together in an angry outburst of morality and kills most of them. I play the priest who inadvertently spurs the town into action. And I’m working on my “Bless you,” working on how to say it with my hands when Hurricane Janice complains, “What are you, Lurch? The antichrist? You’re making your cross backwards.”

Sam corrects her: “It’s not Lurch. It’s Lurker. Will you get it right? Lurch is a butler on an old TV show.”

“Chris looks like he could be a butler.”

“That’s not it. The butler in the show is a freak—a monster like Frankenstein.”

“It’s the punchline to every joke in the series,” I tell her. “The monsters are funny and anyone normal is a threat. If you have a flat head, you’re good: a bouffant hairdo, not so good.”

“Oh,” she frets—it’s amazing how quickly and thoroughly she frets. “Why would anyone think that’s funny?” Taking my hand in hers she makes a proper sign of the cross in the air. “I don’t think you’re a monster,” she apologizes. At two hundred and fifty pounds, Janice is very sensitive to insults about appearance. “We’ll stick with Lurker.”

“You could just say Chris,” I respond. I try an air-cross on my own. “Bless you.”

“Thanks.”

“So there’s nothing going on?” Harriet asks.  

“I’ll be done at eight-thirty,” I offer. “We could try to find a pool table…”

“Too late,” Sam mutters. “I have physio, and that wipes me out.”

“I can’t make it either,” Janice says. “I have uncles. Well, one uncle. He’s staying tonight. He’s beastly, but I have to be niecely. Hey, did you hear about Rock Hudson?” But she realizes how bad the question is and turns red. Everyone knows. It was all over the news. 

“So there’s nothing going on?” Harriet asks again, the question no longer a question but a period.  

She is in her obscene shirt again. Because she knows a guy at the nearby shirt shack she has been able to get the words “Fuck art, let’s dance” ironed on a t-shirt. She says it comes from her reading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, says it expresses her turn from Apollonian order to Dionysian ecstasy. “I don’t understand,” I told her the first time she explained, and she’d laughed at my parody of her soulful tone. The shirt is her flag, her philosopher’s Jolly Roger, but it is difficult to wear. It means she can’t take off her jacket inside school for fear of a teacher noticing the word “Fuck,” but by the same token it also means that she will take her jacket off as soon as she steps outside. So on cold days like today she either boils or freezes, depending on where she is standing.

I don’t want to lose the night. There aren’t many left before we’ll be scattered, not memorable to each other, to the school, to ourselves. I try again. I say, “There’s nothing going on unless you want to watch the rehearsal and do something afterward. We could try to find a pool table…” 

I don’t get to finish. I am cut off by a jock named Bruce. He passes by too close—close enough to make me flinch, but this time instead of a punch he throws a word at me:  “Faggot.”

I don’t look up for a while. I stare at my feet. For four years I have been bullied with that word and by the violence that occasionally accompanies it all because of my last name—Nightingale. Chris Nightingale. In public school it meant I was “the bird” to my schoolmates. In high school it means I am “the faggot.” It had gotten me beaten up more than once before Harriet “understood” and started walking home with me after school. Just walking. At first I had no idea who she was—just someone with an inordinate interest in the chestnut trees that banked my street. Afterwards we became friends.

“Idiot,” Sam spits out. He says it loudly enough for Bruce to hear, but Bruce isn’t a strip-mall waitress. He isn’t about to let Sam disappear into triviality. Bruce builds the moment into one of supreme consequence by doing nothing.  He stops and stands awfully still. His expression says, “It doesn’t matter to me that you’re in a wheelchair—you decide what happens next,” and Sam mutters something submissively apologetic. At last Bruce turns and walks away, glancing back once to let Sam know not to relax his apologetic expression—ever. “I’ll see you tonight,” Bruce says to no one in particular.

I look at Harriet and her eyes are soft sorrow. She seems to have absorbed the punch that was meant for Sam, the word that marginalizes me. I tell her, “It’s okay. It’s not me, you know. It’s him. He’s a tough guy, a tough coward. That’s what tough cowards sound like.”

She nods. 

“Will you come then, tonight? Just you and me, we’ll do something.”

“All right. 8:30, after the practice.”

Mr. Willis walks by. He is the school counselor. Over the past year Janice, Sam and I have seen a lot of him, but not for the sake of planning our futures, which is why most students speak with him. We know our futures are inconsequential. Our task, always, is to manage the day at hand. Sam’s health is deteriorating because of the bad blood he received in the hospital. There is no point even planning on university. He might get through but the other side is a chasm of pain leading to an early death. Janice doesn’t have the grades. She takes her debilitating depression at being morbidly obese into Mr. Willis’ office on a regular basis. He tells her not to mind what people say. He tells her she is beautiful. I gather he says that to everyone, but she stops by to see him anyway to get her regular fix of that word.

Did he hear Bruce? He looks angry, depressed, confused. He doesn’t say hello although he regards us with all those expressions at once. Maybe he’s noticed the word on Harriet’s shirt, not that it should matter.

“Bless you,” I say, and Janice cries, “You’re doing it backwards!”

I am probably drained of hope. I look at her and I say, “Yes.”

My parents are all right. They mean well. I don’t blame them. Sometimes I even imagine what it was like for my father. He may have confronted the same abuse in the fifties as I do now. He is a Nightingale, too, of course, which means he probably didn’t get the fun retro nicknames like “Daddy-O.” My father is a gentleman in every sense of the word. But in my imaginings, he is an avenger. He knocks down the meathead in the leather jacket who uses the f-word on him in the schoolyard. He splits the twit’s lip and stands over him ready to strike again if his taunter doesn’t get up submissively, apologetically. If I’m doubly angry he has to throw another punch. One time, he knocked a kid out. The kid looked remarkably like Bruce.  

At the dinner table I imagine him punching Mr. Willis.

“What are you doing after play practice?” Mother asks.

“Harriet,” I reply.  

I know I don’t have to explain. That word is enough. If they could, my parents would have married me to Harriet regardless of our own intentions. I like them for that.

“Do you need money?” she asks. If I’d said Sam or Janice there’d have been no offer of money. I know this about them, too.

“Twenty dollars.”

She gives me forty. Everyone loves Harriet.  

And then I become Jim Hawkins overhearing the mutineers, but I don’t mean to.  

This is why it happens: it happens because I hate any sound that has ever come out of my body. It doesn’t help that our house is funny. I’ve heard the architect was drunk when he dreamed it up, wrote our house into existence like a story made of intersecting lines on a blue page, but who knows these things?—who knows the blueprint is crooked when the blueprint is almost invariably more beautiful than the construction. The only real evidence of him being off his game is the acoustics in the bathroom, which are a real embarrassment. The bathroom ducts on the main floor link with the ones in the bathroom below—my basement toilet—the two share air. The upshot of this is that I’ve always had to time my visits, plan to go at the exact right moment when I know my parents are either absent or engaged in something that will keep them out of the upstairs bathroom.  

This time I guess wrong, and I sit in silence listening to the sounds of my parents in the room above. They should be washing dishes, which is de rigueur. My parents are fastidious. But this night they stop part way through and retire to the bathroom to engage in a hushed conversation that is too, too audible.

Mother opens with, “We’ll have to tell him soon.”

“Soon, yes, but not now.”

“The sooner the better.”

“Don’t press. I still don’t know how to tell him. I don’t want him to think it’s his fault.”

“No, it’s my fault.” Then:  “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I know you don’t mean that. I don’t mean that. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You don’t have to be amicable.”

“I want to be.”

“I know he’ll be okay. He’s got good friends. Is he seeing Harriet? Are they dating? It’s none of my business.” Then: “Two weeks. We might have told him sooner.  I’m not very brave about leaving. I can’t bear to think about the future.”

“You don’t have to leave.”

“I do. It’s time.”

They are gone, and that is it. And I am reduced to that boy lost at sea, hiding in the apple barrel and overhearing the pirates’ talk of mutiny, except that by comparison to that romance my own life seems crude, scatological. I feel emptier than I’ve felt all year, which is no small accomplishment, but I don’t know why. Half my friends’ parents have divorced. Why not mine? Somehow it seems more particular than it did when my friends discussed it. Somehow it seems to involve me, but like everything else that is happening, I can’t quite make the connection. It eludes me.

And they are so, so together when I leave for rehearsal. Leaning out of the kitchen door to say goodbye, they look real. Or maybe not. I am reminded of the families in commercials. My parents might be trying to sell me detergent or breakfast cereal or a Pinto. They smile. I smile back. Just another picture-perfect family of unrelated actors. I reach into my pocket for that piece of paper I discovered half a world earlier when I returned to Mr. Willis’ office to pick up my jacket. The words are bold but the note is paper-thin. The handwriting is invented—the characters so straight they must have been drawn that way intentionally to disguise ownership. Were the letters inclined in either direction, spiked or round, they might have told me… something.

Mr. Willis pulls me aside to complain: “You don’t seem to understand your role in all this.”  

I am in costume—dressed like a second-hand priest (at least my clothing smells second-hand). It seems weird to be berated by someone who looks like a teacher. Where’s the hierarchy? And Mr. Willis is young by school standards—maybe twenty-five. He is like us. He smokes one cigarette with us every lunch. A single Craven A Menthol. He stands up for us, tells us we aren’t losers. I know Harriet is curiously repulsed by him, but to Sam and Janice he is someone who can make sense of our world. 

I am his special student and we know it. My problems have a singular resonance with him. He’d been picked on too, he tells me.

Since September I’ve been dropping into Mr. Willis’ office to talk about “my prospects” on a weekly basis.  

“You have more opportunity than most of the people who come through this door,” he’d told me last month and I’d answered, “Opportunity is a word, just like Nightingale is a word. Which do you suppose is more likely to get me beaten up?”

“Don’t be facetious. You can’t leave high school without some sort of plan. Julius Caesar once said, ‘Any plan, even a bad plan, is better than no plan at all’.”

"I don't think being murdered in the Senate is much of a plan."

I still see him shaking his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know with you. I don’t know what to say to you.”  

I gather he was trying to dismiss me politely. But now that Mr. Willis is directing our play I have more, not less, contact with him, so if getting rid of me was his plan, it hasn’t happened.  

As director he is a model of efficiency. He knows his way around theatre and is willing to be an “actor’s director” provided the actors like him. Everyone always does. Except for tonight. Tonight, he is driven to prove I am mistaken for ever thinking I could act.  Have I read the whole play, or just my lines? Do I understand what it means to want to fix a dangerous situation and to instead have everything explode because of my efforts?

“Yes,” I say, and that closes him. Treachery. Mutiny. We look at each other in silence. He appears defiant, accusatory. And it occurs to me that this is wrong. It occurs to me that I am the student and he is the adult. Where’s the hierarchy? I should be the petulant one. But all my adults are in a state of rebellion.

“What you have to understand,” he tells me when he can handle the silence no longer, “is that the priest doesn’t want anyone to die. He asks his parish to put an end to the madness but he doesn’t think they’ll take arms like the mob that attacks the monster’s castle. They hear him wrong.”

“You’re the second person to mention Frankenstein today,” I reply. I wonder if the duplication is significant. Maybe everything that happens is chance.

“Say the line right. Try again.”

“Make it stop.”

“That was passive. That was wrong.”

“Make it stop.”

“I don’t hear fear. Where’s fear?”

“Make it stop.”

“Better, but try it this way. Now try saying it like you want the mob to kill.”

Three syllables: “Make it stop.” I pound them out like I am stepping heavily on a hateful grave.

“Good. Good. Good. Now find a middle ground between the two. Find a way that means you do and you don’t want the mob to kill.”

“Make it stop.”

Harriet has been watching all along, not wanting me to see her. I have felt her eyes. They touch me with something I don’t understand. During the break I seek her out, grab her before she can sneak out the back. I say, “Did I do something? Where are you going?”

“No. You? No. What do you mean?”

“Aren’t we playing pool?”

She draws in her breath. “Yes. Okay.”

“You know, then? You’ve heard it too?” I feel sick. I pull my hand out of my pocket to feel my face, to see if it is real, and I discover a piece of paper stuck between my fingers—the note.

Harriet is ashen. She looks guilty and afraid. Then she smiles bravely and says in the voice of someone changing the subject, “Mr. Willis was mean. He came down on you pretty hard. He might have been kinder. He’s always kind to Janice.”

“I can’t act.”

“I wonder about that.”  

Her eyes are fixed on the paper. I open it and show her. “This was in my pocket.  Someone put it there. Imagine.”

“Why would someone do that?” she asks, but she is insincere—it is audible. And it occurs to me in a flash that I was mistaken. So mistaken, I killed the world for nothing.

And then Harriet surprises me. She is always capable of that. Her eyes  still fixed on the note, she says, “Love is the confession that looks outward.”

We look down. We look up. I bite my lip. I say, “Words.  Just words.” I know I have killed their meaning, transformed the artificially straight letters on the note into trivial forms.

She looks like she is about to  cry. “You’re fucking mean,” she whispers. “How could you do this to me? What are we to each other?”  

It was her. After all those years of protecting me, she loves me. (Loved me?) How is that possible? How is it possible to love someone you protect?

Then she is gone.

After the rehearsal Mr. Willis and I share a cigarette behind the gym. Despite his animosity he needs something from me and we both know it. He asks if I want a drink. He’s brought a flask of red wine, which strikes me as odd. I’d assumed that all flasks held whisky. I have a sip. It tastes thin and metallic. He takes a bigger sip and holds out the flask again.

“We need this.”

It is a conspiracy, that’s what it is, an agreement and a lie at the same time. 

“You can never, ever come back into my office.” 

I don’t know what Mr. Willis is thinking now, can’t imagine what his next sentence will be, but the argument I am having with myself is suddenly shattered.

Bruce steps out of a shadow, like he’s been waiting. Watching. A gargoyle. A farce. The world. I remember how he’d walked past after the last practice, how he’d regarded us with a strange expression. Maybe he’d seen us more times.  

He’s dangerous. I’m angry. To his, “What’s this, a fag’s convention?” I answer, “Bugger off.”

“Oh, brave,” he replies. “Do you think your little friend here will help you?” He gestures towards Mr. Willis, who is visibly shaken. “You think you can be brave because your girlfriend will protect you? She won’t and I’ll tell you why. She won’t because I’ll tell everyone what I saw when I was sent to her office in third period. Oh, she knows what I mean. She saw me come in. Fucking perverts. I saw you kissing.” He sounds drunk. Maybe it is the sheer exhilaration of having power over us.

I look to Mr. Willis for confirmation and his expression says everything. It is an expression of supreme weakness. I’ve been so, so wrong. His fingers are much too delicate for the strength of that note.

“I’ll tell you what,” says Bruce, “I’ll give you a head start. I’ll count to five and then I’m going to pound the shit out of you.  

“Start running, fruit. One.”

Mr. Willis is beyond saving. He won’t save me. He is exposed, tortured, wracked with consequence.

“Two.”

“The future is large,” he’d told me. “You can’t hide from it. You have to be large, too.” What did that mean?  It was adult-to-child speak. Words. It meant nothing.

“Four.”

Where was three? Did I miss it while trying to penetrate Mr. Willis’ mind or is Bruce being ironic? All I can get out, all I can shout at Mr. Willis to shake him from his stupor, is “Make it stop.” Perhaps it’s the wrong tone. He doesn’t act.

And then Bruce shouts “Five!” and I feel my legs buckle. One blow is followed by another, then another and another. I know he is kicking me. I know Mr. Willis says nothing. He is cursing me. Mr. Willis is silent. He spits on me and kicks again, stops being a student, becomes a pirate. And I am the one who has seen too much, who knows the pirate secrets. In a romance of pain, I am lifted from my apple-barrel toilet and thrown against the bricks that hold the roof, that hold my education. I am lifted again, gentle Jim Hawkins, the boy who knows too much. The pirate raises his arm.

But this time someone holds it. Another pirate. She is small, a teenage Anne Bonney. Size doesn’t count says my mother to my father seventeen-bathroom-memories ago. It’s the angle of leverage, I gather. Anne Bonney hooks the bad pirate, catches him off-balance. They dance for a while. Then they bow and part.

And now I know. It is Harriet. She loves me. She saves me. She watches me from a safe distance as though afraid I’ll contaminate her with my blood. It’s a big issue these days and everyone is afraid. I can forgive her for that.

Where is Mr. Willis? Did he evaporate? Was he ever there?

The answer is no. In the morning, he’ll be gone. In the morning, there will be an announcement. The play will be cancelled and there will be an announcement. It’s anyone’s guess what the announcement will say. I can’t predict that. But Mr. Willis was never real.

And Harriet comes to me at last and says, “I have to know how long you were with him.”

“I was never with him.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I was never with him. He wanted to kiss me so I let him. He said he was helping me decide, so I let him. He wanted to do it for me, he said.”

“But why did you do it?”

“I don’t know. It’s what people do. They kiss. Everyone’s doing it.” Then I try to help her, the girl who knows everything. I say, “Harriet, I can’t feel anything. So just go. I don’t even feel sad. I don’t feel scared. I have never been able to feel, and I won’t feel anytime soon. You love me because I’m different. And you hate me because you think I’m different. You protect me because you think I’m different but you want to protect yourself, that part of me that you think is you.

“And it can’t be done. You cannot love, hate, protect someone who cannot feel.”

She stares at me. Glue unglued. The night begins to rock. The moon,aslant, looks difficult. It frames her. 

And then, for a moment, everything falls silent. The endless pounding stops—the pounding in my head. Harriet says, “I understand,” which is her expression for “Yes.” But she says it in a subdued voice, and I know that this time it means “No.”  

about the writer

André Narbonne is the reviews editor of the Windsor Review. His writing has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and won the Atlantic Writing Competition, the FreeFallProse Contest, and the David Adams Richards Prize. A short story collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight (Black Moss Press), was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.