“Repeat after me: May I show you the way out of here?”
Candice is a librarian during the day and an ESL teacher every Thursday night. She is a curvy woman, dressed in striped bell-bottoms, crisp white shirt, and beads. She wears her hair long, with a crocheted cap the same colours as the coat of the biblical Joseph. The women in the class like her because she is their vision of a quintessential Canadian girl. She wears pants, smokes on the break, looks men right in the eye when she talks to them. The men in the class like her because she is way more exciting than the women they are used to at home. More importantly, she behaves like a modern girl, and she is not their sister or mother. I like her because I want to be her.
The classroom is full of people that come in skin colours and accents covering the spectrum of humanity. Each student exhibits mannerisms that are peculiar to everyone else except, perhaps, Candice. I am already fluent in English and don’t really want to be here, but I talk the teacher into letting me stay so that I can help tutor my father at home. The truth is my father is too exhausted and too demoralized to come by himself, and I am there to give him a boost and help him prepare for a job that no one, least of all me, is sure he’ll be able to get. At first, I bring my own homework to occupy me for the two hours of class. But when Candice realizes that the adult students ask me for help at break and after class, she sees an opportunity for both of us, and makes me her unofficial assistant. Later, when we become friends, she tells me that she is testing me to see if I am up to a student position at the neighbourhood library where she works. With Candice’s help, I end up working there for my five years of high school.
My father would have given up on the English class by now. It is hard for him to sit in one place when he has many other things he thinks he should be doing. He is grateful to la signorina, who has taken me under her wing, and is answering questions for which no one I know seems to have an answer.
“Someone to give you a hand up doesn’t come every day in a new country.”
My father knows this.
Still, he is not quite sure about her. He cautions me that she seems nice, but a bit frivolous. She might give wrong ideas to naïve girls like me. Time proves that he is wrong about Candice being frivolous, but right about me being naïve. Five years later, on the eve of my wedding, Candice’s view on the big step I am about to take is the same as my father’s. She doesn’t like my husband-to-be, thinks I am too young and inexperienced, and pleads with me to think carefully about what I am doing. To my detriment, I don’t listen to the advice of either of them.
But at fourteen, when my head is still on straight, my main reason for going to English classes is to help my father lift himself up and out of the work that is slowly killing him. Every night, he comes home red-eyed and gray from the poisonous chemicals he has to use in the furniture factory. The fumes invade him outside and inside. They sneak into his clothes and hair until he can’t even stand the smell of himself coming home on the bus. They creep into his lungs until they create as much damage as three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. At least, that is what the doctor told me to translate to him.
“Take your pick, sir. It’s either your job or your life. The mask is useless after the first five minutes.”
My father has heard this before. He shrugs.
“Well, what can I do, doctor? I have to work.”
The problem is that this is my father’s second job in Canada, and the first one was killing him too. He injured his shoulder on a construction site, something that left him useless as a labourer, a liability to his crewmates. Rather than take compensation, which pays little and injures pride as well, he finds another job through an acquaintance. He won’t take assistance, which he calls charity. I don’t know enough about it to talk him into it.
I don’t tell my mother what the doctor says, but I am miserable for all of us. I have waited so long for my father to take his place back in the family, and now, he will probably die in Canada. And if my father dies, what will we do? I worry, until I hear a talk called “What’s My Occupation?”
Our grade eight homeroom-teacher invites three parents to talk to her students about what they do for a living. She frames the class as a quiz show to keep our interest. There is a pilot, an industrialist who promises us a tour of his plastics factory, and a postal worker. The first two are as interesting as anything could be to grade eights, who pretend not to be excited about anything. The third, we expect, will be even less thrilling, but we are wrong. He is the most compelling of the three. He is grandiose and comical at the same time. He uses his Scottish accent to entertain us with mock horror stories of “the grrr-eat mail depot,” the common denominator being “the grrr-eat disorr-der of the grr-reat mail depot.”
Our teacher, we can see, is not particularly happy about the humorous curricular deviation, but by the end of the talk, we all wish we could sneak into the mail depot to see for ourselves what is going on. We clap for him the most.
But I have another reason for my interest in our guest. If his stories about the chaotic mess are true, then a job at the post office is perfect for my father. Unlike my mother, he likes nothing better than to restore order where there is none. In his seven years of work in Germany, he has become, himself, a German. His life’s quest is to establish internal and external discipline – everything in its place, a place for everything. It is a goal he is not able to achieve with his wife and children, but he could easily achieve it with strangers when he is earning a living doing it. He could fix the great postal depot, fix his finances, and fix his health at the same time. The more the man talks, the more I convince myself that this must happen.
I picture my father in a blue-gray uniform, looking like the Maytag repairman, his name embroidered in red and white, and affixed above his right shirt pocket. I ask the affable mail depot dad what you have to do to apply for a job, and he sends me, through his daughter, a stack of forms and newsletters that should take me a year to understand. I mull over it, and ask Candice for help. I learn two things: Number one, my father is qualified to work only as a maintenance person. Number two, he must be able to pass an English comprehension test even before applying.
Never mind that he has only an elementary school certificate. Or that he understands only the English that sounds German, and speaks almost no English at all. There is another obstacle: he is incapable of bragging about himself, a requirement that Candice tells me is essential in a Canadian job interview.
These are big problems. If I tell him the requirements, he will give up, and all my arranging won’t bring him back. It takes me weeks of sitting across from him at the kitchen table, wearing him down with careful argument, convincing him that there is life beyond the backbreaking work of the construction site and the poisonous fumes of the factory. I have given him the impression that a few English phrases and proof of enrolment in Candice’s class are all he needs to prepare for a job interview at the postal depot.
In the meantime, I am anxious to find a way inside the postal depot, which, according to the mail sorter dad, is more guarded and more impenetrable than Fort Knox. Typing class provides the strategy I need. Our assignment is to write a tactful letter of complaint. The typing teacher, ever ready with useful hints, advises us that bureaucracy and industry work the same way. If you want fast action, you must address your complaint or your request to an individual and not to a nameless department.
“Girls, always find out the name of the person you want, and direct your inquiry to him,” and “Always remember that politeness will get you three quarters of the way there, girls,” and “Always conduct yourselves well and you will be rewarded.”
I don’t know about the rest of my classmates, but these words are like manna to me.
That day, I go home and look at the post office papers again. There, I find out that at the postal depot, the name of the manager in charge of “Plant Operations” is Mr. J. McAlbey. My plan is to contact him by phone, and make him believe that I am closer to twenty than fourteen-and-a-half. This is no small task, since people tell me I look like twelve and sound like ten. Books on assertiveness do not tell me how to change my voice to get what I want, but they do encourage me not to give up.
I try something I have seen on an episode of I Love Lucy. Lucy wants to impersonate a man. She wears men’s clothes and a fake beard. She darkens her voice to sound like a man. She passes, at least with people who don’t know her.
I don’t plan on dressing up like a man, but I do have to practice an older voice, the words well-enunciated, and the tone more authoritative. By the time I call Mr. McAlbey, I almost believe that I am twenty.
“Good afternoon, may I speak to Jim?”
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Tell him it’s Licia. He knows me.”
It’s another trick I learned from a do-it-yourself book on how to find people who owe you money.
“Ask for the person as if you know him.”
I know the elusive Mr. McAlbey, who normally has his calls screened, is wondering who I am and what I want. Curiosity gets the better of him, and he answers the call.
“Yes?”
“Mr. McAlbey?”
“Speaking. How do we know each other?”
“Through one of your employees, sir. He said you were the best person to talk to about this.”
“About what?”
“Sir … I am asking you to please give my father, Marco Giganteschi, a job. He is a hard worker and has a great amount of experience. He is a good employee.”
“Young lady. He has to apply like everyone else. The applications are screened by a committee. I make only the final approval.”
“He did apply, but he never got called ... he just needs an opportunity to prove himself.”
“There is a clear process. He fills out the application. If he qualifies, he’ll receive a call for an interview.”
“He has had an application in for almost two months, but he hasn’t been called.”
“Probably because he doesn’t qualify. In any case, all applications are destroyed every six months, and then he can try again.”
“Sir, my father needs to work right away. He is dependable and loyal.”
“Really? And how do you know that?”
“He worked in Germany for seven years and his employer was so happy with him, he wrote him a letter of recommendation. He’s a very hard worker, and he has never been fired from a job. He speaks Italian, German, and enough English to get by. He’s a fast learner. Please can you give him a chance?”
“How much English? Is he likely to pass his English test?”
“Of course, he will. I’ll be with him. You won’t regret it.”
“What you’re proposing is against the rules. People take tests alone … you didn’t know that, did you?”
“No … no … I didn’t mean that I would help him cheat. I would just translate some of the harder words in the instructions … so he knows what to do.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
I could tell that I was wearing him down.
“Please, Mr. McAlbey…”
“Fine. Can you get Mr. Giganteschi here by 9:00 am tomorrow? I have ten minutes to see him.”
“Of course. We just need your address.”
What Mr. McAlbey doesn’t know is that I have no clue where to take my father. The Great Postal Depot might as well be located on the moon. In the three years that we have been in Canada, my father has been opposed to letting me go anywhere that would take more than a ten-minute walk. Downtown, where he is sure the den of iniquity is located, is out of the question. My life is lived in a six-block diameter that includes my high school, my work at the library, the corner store, the house. I can’t even confirm the direction of Toronto’s main intersection, Yonge and Bloor, let alone the whereabouts of Mississauga.
That evening, I call everyone we know to find out how to get to the Mississauga Postal Depot and how long it will take. No one, except for a Portuguese neighbour who works for a roofing company, has ever been there. As it happens, his work gang drives right by it every day. Every morning at six, rain or shine, the man waits at the corner of our street, along with two other men. They sigh with relief when a dented, beaten-up white van picks them up for the day’s work. They pass by the Postal Depot at 6:45 am. I am ashamed to ask, but I do anyway.
“Joe, can you ask the driver if my Dad and I can come along?”
“We have room for you, but are you sure you want to do this?”
“What else can we do, Joe?”
“It’s dirty at the back of that van. And we’re all men.”
“It’s okay. I’ll stay near my father.”
“You’ll be there early, waiting outside. Maybe it will be cold or raining.”
“It’s okay. We’ll wait.”
“You’re a good daughter.”
The next morning, when the door of the mail depot finally opens for us and we go in to see Mr. McAlbey, my lips are as blue as my father’s fingernails. I don’t know what Mr. McAlbey makes of us as we enter his glass office: a thin, middle-aged man with calloused hands, and a waif of a girl with a coat two sizes too big.
He looks at us in a curious way, pausing as if he remembers something. He hands me the forms and the English test, and tells me to have my father complete them while he goes to a meeting. He leaves us alone in his office, and I write down all of my father’s information. The test is basic for me, and I ace it. The paperwork takes me half an hour, but we wait another hour for Mr. McAlbey to come back, so that we can put it in his hand.
Coming home from Mississauga takes three hours. Our bus, when it finally arrives, makes so many stops, we could have gone to Hamilton and back. By the time we get home, it is afternoon and we are both hungry and tired. Papà has missed a day’s pay at the furniture factory, and I have missed my afternoon classes.
A month later, my father is arranging and rearranging paper in the mail depot, the place he calls Il Labirinto, the Labyrinth. He stops coughing, and gradually, the colour comes back to his face. He never meets Mr. McAlbey face to face again until over two decades later, on retiring from his job as senior maintenance person at the Postal Depot. But if he looks up from the great paper hall, where he is one of hundreds of workers scurrying from place to place, he spies the manager at his desk, overlooking the loudspeakers and the mail and the dust. Mr. McAlbey is located on the second floor, suspended above everyone, in an office made of steel and transparent glass. My father would like to shake his hand, just once, to thank him for the job. He has to wait twenty-three years.
At his retirement party, Mr. McAlbey hands him a 2' x 3' portrait of a silver wolf surrounded by pine trees and snow. It reminds my father of when he was a seven-year-old working with his brothers up in the steep mountains of La Sila. Young Marco meets a wolf just like this one on his way back to Aquilonia. His brothers regularly send him, alone, back and forth from Aquilonia to La Sila, his donkey loaded with grain and other necessities. In reality, it is the donkey that senses the wolf first. The somara has been trotting at ferocious speeds, when suddenly she stops in her tracks and begins scratching the frozen ground with her front hooves, turning, hopping, braying like a savage beast. Despite carrying a full load, and her teats bursting with milk for her foal back in Aquilonia, she becomes light on her legs, a gazelle, a dancer, and a boxer in one.
The wolf simply stares. Undaunted, she stands by the side of the road, takes donkey and child in with ice-blue eyes, growls softly, crosses the path in front of them, and disappears into the forest. Marco, who swears to this day that the donkey and the wolf have made a pact to save his life, falls on his knees and thanks God for making him the luckiest boy in the world.
On the day of his retirement, my father cries for the first time in front of strangers. When he comes home, he uses a nail too thick for the wall and hangs the wolf in the hallway next to his clock, his calendar, and his weather barometer.