Everyone from infants to elders turned up to celebrate the opening of the new school. To Paulussie’s great surprise, the construction crew put the final touches on in November, three weeks ahead of schedule. The grounds were cleared of broken planks and nails and the protective wire around the site came down. The modern, two-storey structure gleamed like a shiny new chapter in their lives.
A flurry of excitement marked the days leading up to the celebration, women preparing the joyful feast, sewing tassels and fringes on their best embroidered duffel socks, musicians boning up on their country and western, teachers—including Yasmeen—packing supplies into cardboard boxes and oversized containers in preparation for the move. On the day itself, Paulussie sent the kids home at lunch and gave the teachers time off to get ready.
Earlier that morning, Yasmeen took advantage of the fact that all her students had shown up for school, a rare event. She decided to introduce intersecting lines, following up on the previous lesson when they’d gone outside looking for examples of parallel lines and correctly identified the tracks in the snow left by truck tires and sled runners. Had they been properly installed, the hydro poles would have also been parallel, they cleverly remarked.
“That’s right,” Yasmeen explained. “Parallel lines always remain the same distance from each other. They never ever meet, no matter how far they extend in space.”
They dressed and headed for the designated area, an open space behind the portable large enough to run around in. Audlaluk and Qalingo roughhoused in the snow while they waited for Yasmeen to arrive with her clipboard and whistle. Elisapie and Salatee hopped up and down, blowing on their palms to keep warm.
Yasmeen corralled them around her and told them to listen up. “The difference between parallel and intersecting lines is simple. Let’s see if you can figure it out yourselves.” Since no one volunteered, she picked Audlaluk and Elisapie. Audlaluk grumbled that he didn’t want to work with a girl.
“For heaven’s sake, Audlaluk,” said Yasmeen. She marked two spots in the snow where they were to stand and told them that when she blew her whistle, they were each to run in as straight a line as possible.
“So what did you notice?” she asked when everyone was back inside the portable. The kids were sitting on their desks with their coats still on. She twirled the chalk between her fingers.
“It was cold,” Salatee whispered into her hand. She tossed her hair forward, making a curtain over her eyes.
“Okay, true, but besides that,” said Yasmeen.
“The lines made an X,” said Elisapie, holding out her hands with the index fingers crossed.
Yasmeen clapped enthusiastically. “That’s right.” She drew a pair of intersecting lines on the board. “These two come together right here.” She circled where the lines met. “They have a common point. They intersect.”
She explained that most lines in life intersected, that if you extended the two and waited long enough, if you were patient, eventually they would meet.
•
The gleaming gymnasium was strewn with banners and streamers and shimmery metallic balloons that said Happy Birthday on them, the only kind the Co-op sold. On stage, fiddlers in chequered shirts wailed through microphones and thumped their heels while dolled-up women in flouncy dresses scurried around the room with their Kodak Instamatics. A crowd gathered, banquet-style, along a flattened-out cardboard box set with macaroni casseroles, bannock, frozen rumps of walrus meat, Jell-O and suvallik, a sour-sweet concoction of fish eggs and berries. It was the North’s traditional table setting: a single piece of cardboard on the floor. When one group finished, another impatient one elbowed in, toothless elders, ladies with babies on their backs, surly teenagers, toddlers with ribbons in their hair. The men took their pocketknives to the blood-red carcass while the women carved out pieces for their children with their crescent-shaped knives. They gnawed and chewed and spat out gristle.
As the feast petered out and the wet scraps were tossed into plastic garbage bags, another haul of instruments collected on stage—accordions, banjos, guitars, black-box amplifiers. A pair of wizened throat singers began a guttural duet of repetitive, hypnotic chanting. They drew it out for as long as they could until they lost the pace and erupted in gales of laughter.
Paulussie pushed his way toward the podium, smiling, blushing, shaking hands with people in the crowd. He wore the new clothes Sarah had bought him, black dress pants and a shirt with a collar that dug into his Adam’s apple. On stage he wiped the sweat off his forehead with a hankie that he scrunched into a ball and stuffed into his back pocket. Fidgeting with his necktie, he waited for the applause to die down. He tapped his finger against the microphone and put his mouth up to it and said, “Testing, testing.” He unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket and thanked every name on his list, beginning with the mayor and dignitaries who had made the construction of the new school possible. When it was over he sighed with relief. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the air and said, “Let the party begin.” A harmonica reeled. People paired up to square dance. The neckerchiefed caller lifted his straw hat. He held it over his heart and bowed to the crowd.
Elliot approached Yasmeen wearing a plaid shirt and Wrangler jeans over a pair of cowboy boots with spurs on them. He hooked her arm and tried dragging her into the middle of the floor, but she shoved him off in protest.
“Sorry, partner, I don’t dance!” She was still steaming over a tiff they had had earlier that morning in the staffroom when, waiting for the Photostat machine to warm up, he told her that he had some interesting information to share.
“Oh?”
“About your student, Elisapie.” He lined his document up on the glass surface. “I found out the story behind her baby.”
“Yeah, she gave it away, I know. You already told me.”
He pushed the start button and watched the radiated light sweep back and forth. “Seems that the father of the child was her own father.” The copier made an unnatural sound before it spat out the page.
“That’s horseshit.” Yasmeen stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes tapered.
“Apparently not.” He lifted the rubber flap and removed his original.
She detected a hint of glee in his voice, the great pleasure he took at having insider knowledge. “I don’t believe you.”
“Take my word for it. He’s in jail down south, but it won’t be long before he’s back.”
“What the Christ? No one would do that to their own kid,” she said.
“Sweetheart, it happens all the time.”
The conversation ended with her walking away from him. And now he was all over her like they were best friends or something.
“Hee-haw, just go with it!” he twanged. Huge rings of sweat were blooming under his armpits. “Think of it as walking to music.”
Reluctantly she took his hand and muttered that he reminded her of Jethro Bodine from The Beverly Hillbillies.
“I’ll take that as a compliment, Elly May.”
Compared to the rest they looked like amateurs, Elliot losing the beat and stepping on her feet as the music sped up and the men began passing the women from partner to partner. Yasmeen kept travelling in the wrong direction, clockwise when she was supposed to be going counter-clockwise, do-si-do-ing when she should have been promenading. She felt like a total klutz. Her feet dragged like boulders.
When she found herself eye to eye with Adamie she relaxed a little. His hair was combed and parted to the side and he smelled like a bar of Irish Spring. The last time she had seen him was that Sunday in church after their ride together. She closed her eyes as he took her hand and swept her around. She thought of how he had almost kissed her on the floor of the igloo. She danced fluidly. The instant she opened her eyes she lost the beat and stumbled into his chest.
The flush-faced fiddlers took a quick break to hike up their pants and gulp back cans of soda. Adamie bowed his head at Yasmeen and walked on to the next partner while Joanasi came to stand in his place. He signalled for Yasmeen’s hand and moved toward her.
•
For the rest of the night, they hardly took their eyes off each other. Yasmeen kept finding excuses not to leave quite yet. First she had to take down the decorations, then she had to sweep up and take the garbage bags out. The to-do list kept growing. She had to make the rounds to be sure that no one was hiding in the bathrooms, even though most of the villagers, including Paulussie, had already gone home. Meanwhile Joanasi dismantled the stage, wrapping extension cords around his arm, helping the musicians pack up their instruments. When it was time to lock up he offered to walk her home and she said, “Okay, I won’t say no.”
A dusting of snow had fallen over the village and a green curtain of electric light rippled across the sky. For no reason—or perhaps because of the northern lights—she broke into the operatic portion of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” forgetting most of the words but stumbling through. They both laughed at how bad it sounded. She wished he would put his arm around her but he just kept walking alongside, careful not to touch her. They played ‘Fortunately, Unfortunately.’
“Fortunately, it’s the weekend,” she began.
“Unfortunately, I have to work tomorrow,” he continued.
“Fortunately, there might be a storm.”
“Unfortunately, I’ll be stranded at your place.” He grinned and lobbed a snowball at her.
“Meanie!” she shrieked. She removed her hat and swatted him playfully.
By the time they got to her place their eyelashes were coated in ice. Wet snow was sliding off his boots. She shook the crystals of snow from their hats and parkas and laid them to dry over the furnace.
“Iik kiii, it’s freezing out there,” she said.
He followed her into the living room, fiddling with the loose change in his pockets. “You have less stuff than I thought you would.”
“I don’t need much,” she said. “My books, my music. Clothes, of course.”
He jiggled the knobs on her boom box and bent the antenna the opposite way. He walked to the bookcase Tommy had savaged and fingered the tattered spines of her books, randomly reading off their titles. “Did you really read all these?”
“Mostly, yeah.”
He pulled out her copy of The Little Prince. Not the banged up one that had endured all her childhood abuse but the one her father had wrapped up and given her as a high school graduation gift.
“Cute,” he said. “A kid’s book.” He flipped it open to the handwritten inscription on the inside cover. “For my little princess—The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” He wrinkled his nose. “Huh?”
“It’s T.S. Eliot,” she said, “a poet. For years, I thought my dad had written it. Do you want a coffee or something?”
He slapped the book shut and lifted his eyebrows. She insisted she’d be just a minute but he followed her into the kitchen anyway. He slid out a chair and sat. She felt his eyes on her. In her haste to prepare the cups, she accidentally spilled sugar all over the counter. “I hope you don’t mind coffee reheated in the microwave,” she said, trying not to reveal how flustered she was.
“Fine, no problem, anything hot is good,” he said.
She tried to think of other things to talk about while the coffee was getting zapped. “By the way, I forgot to thank you for letting the class interview you,” she said. “They super loved it.”
“It was fun.”
“Yeah. Tonight was fun, too.”
“I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you’re a better teacher than a dancer,” he said. They carried their mugs into the living room and sat facing each other, cross-legged, on the couch. She was relieved that he had finally said something.
“So, which one are you?” he asked. He blew over his coffee to cool it.
“Excuse me?”
“Which of the three M’s are you?” He was half joking, half serious.
“Sorry, I don’t get what you mean.”
He looked away and said, “I don’t quite know how to put this.” He glanced up again sheepishly. “You know, the three kinds of white people who come to the North.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I still don’t get it.”
“You really don’t know? Well, there’s the Mother Teresas, the misfits, and ….”
“And?”
“And the motherfuckers.” He blushed. “So which are you?”
Yasmeen’s eyes flared, though she sensed he was only playing with her. “Wow, what a way to ruin the moment.” She set down her coffee cup and whacked him with her book of crosswords.
Joanasi ducked, using his hands to defend himself. “Ouch, ouch! Down, girl!” he hollered while she continued bonking him over the head.
A small part of her wondered whether he actually believed the thing he had said. The rest of her sort of enjoyed the flirting. She brushed casually against him. He bumped back, a little harder. She didn’t mind that his fingers were yellow with nicotine.
“Okay, okay, I know you’re teasing. But I’ll bite,” she said. “Who are the motherfuckers?”
“Oh,” he said. “I thought you would know that.” He pushed a strand of hair out of her face. “The motherfuckers are the construction guys. They make their money, fuck our girls and then they hit the road, Jack.” He held her in his dark gaze, straight-faced.
It unsettled her. She stared down at her fingernails, wondering how to respond. His expression changed suddenly. “I’m kidding,” he reassured her. “I know you’re none of those.”
“You definitely had me going, there.”
“How about some music?”
She was glad for the opportunity to lighten the mood. He flipped quickly through her shoebox of cassettes until he found something that suited the moment. “Yeah, this.” He held out his selection for her approval.
“Let It Be. Excellent choice.”
They listened to the album straight through, slurping their coffee, belting out their favourite lines. They consumed an entire box of Whippets, though it was mostly him. She wondered what would come next, after the record ended, whether they would continue to stall or if he would make his move. It was like being on her first-ever date. At the first bars of “The Long and Winding Road,” she laid down her mug and pulled her knees into her chest. “Lennon or McCartney?” she asked, expressionless.
“McCartney.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Joanasi tipped the last drop of coffee into his mouth and set the mug down by his feet.
Yasmeen noticed a twitch in his right eye, made worse by his refusal to pursue the discussion. He seemed easily offended. She rushed to fill the silence. “Come on, everyone knows that John was the brains behind the Beatles. I’ll take ‘Revolution’ and ‘Across the Universe’ over ‘Hey Jude’ anytime.”
He shrugged, non-committal. “Well, maybe. Could be. Who knows.” He took her hand into his lap and leaned forward to kiss her hair.
She asked him what he was doing even though she knew darn well what he was up to. She gazed longingly into his eyes. The room was spinning.
“What am I doing?” he said. “You’re a smart girl, figure it out.”
“It’s just that, I didn’t think, um, well, I mean I’m …”
“Shh,” he said. He brushed a circle around her mouth with the tip of his tongue.
She could hardly believe what was happening to them, what was happening to her. She cupped her hands on his shoulders and moved toward him. The room disappeared and it was only the two of them and the sound of their breathing.
•
An hour later—or whenever it was, she had no idea—Yasmeen woke up and found him staring at her. The last thing she remembered was cuddling with him.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Are you ever gonna take that shirt off?”
She took his hand and guided it underneath, laying his palm on her belly. The roof creaked as though a large animal were pacing back and forth across it. The wind was howling.
“Maybe it’s a storm,” he said. He moved his hand in slow circles under her shirt.
“Maybe.”
“Wanna know something?” he asked.
“I want to know everything.”
“When you’re out there, in that weather, you have to keep moving. If you stay too long in one place, the snow builds a wall around you. It locks you in. You can’t even see your own hand in front of you.”
“I guess you’ll just have to protect me then,” she said.
He licked the fingers of his other hand and pushed her hair behind her ears. He pulled her toward him and smelled her scalp. He breathed across her cheek. She wondered what his hand would feel like on the other parts of her. She imagined him not stopping, not holding back.
She pulled away and fell back on the couch, making a big deal of it. She lifted her arms over her head to help him get her shirt off.
He removed his too, sniffing around her neck and at the sparse growth of her underarms. He eased down her jeans. It almost made her come. Through the window she could see walls of snow blowing horizontally.
He touched the tattoo on her hip and asked what it was. “Who’s Lipo?”
“Are you jealous?” She smiled and stretched out like a cat. “You aren’t, are you?” When she saw that he might be serious she reached up and touched his nose and said it’s nothing you need to worry about, the guy’s long dead. She felt the dampness through his jeans as he climbed on top of her and rocked his hips in a fluid motion.
•
When she woke up the room was flooded with the harsh light of the sun reflected off new white snow. Except for a slight chill in the air, all signs of the blizzard had vanished. Yasmeen peeked over at Joanasi, buck-naked on his side, arm bent with his palm curled up near his face. He was snoring softly. She held her arm up against his to compare their skin, saw how pale she looked next to him. She covered him with the blanket.
A spidery lattice webbed the windowpane, fine silvery threads catching the sun and intensifying it. She couldn’t believe all the loveliness around her. Holy fuck, she felt great. Only the intermittent sounds of men shovelling and clearing the road reminded her that there was indeed a world out there and that everything about it was right.