Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre is telling us stuff in French about speaking French. We’re talking about speaking of love and romance to your girlfriend or your boyfriend. At least, that’s what I think we’re talking about. But you never know. My French isn’t very good. We might be talking about what Tarte au Sucre had for breakfast this morning.
Now we’re going to have our conversation game. We work in pairs. Our topic is supposed to be romance. If we had any girls in the class it would be a bit easier. Since there are no girls, Tarte au Sucre sets it up so that one guy plays the girl for five minutes and then we switch.
Tarte au Sucre rings this little bell she has to tell us when the five minutes is up.
We’re supposed to be on a date, having a fancy dinner with candles and music. We’re supposed to be saying romantic things to each other because we’re madly in love.
It’s one of the dumbest things Tarte au Sucre gets us to do.
And the little bell she rings drives everybody wild.
A couple of guys on the other side of the room don’t want to be girls, even for five minutes, and a fight almost breaks out before a guy they call Fabio gets things settled down. Fabio is a monster who’s been on steroids since about grade six. Fabio says that the two guys who don’t want to be girls even for five minutes are now going to be girls for as long as he says they’re going to be girls and that’s it, that’s all! And if they don’t like that, then Fabio will stuff them inside their own desks!
I wind up partners with a guy named Roddy. Roddy’s idea of something really hilarious is making imitation dicks out of anything he can find and passing them around the room. This is his one and only joke. Making dicks out of anything he can find.
Even Fabio doesn’t think this is funny after about the tenth time. And Fabio’s idea of funny is to take something out of his nose and go around and show it to everybody.
Right now, I’m playing the girl and Roddy’s got a lot of paper rolled up, and he’s got a big eraser from graphic arts taped to the end of the roll. Our whole romantic conversation in French for five minutes is him waving this thing at me. I keep looking out the open classroom door. I’m hoping Connie Pan doesn’t walk by in the hall and see us.
When Tarte au Sucre’s little bell goes off and it’s time to switch, Roddy passes the rolled-up paper with the eraser taped to the end of it over to me.
Everybody’s doing Tarte au Sucre’s bell. The classroom sounds like a bell factory. Guys are doing little tinkly bells, other guys are doing big bong-bong bells. It’s like all the bells on Parliament Hill all of a sudden blew a circuit and they all went berserk.
A guy they call Robin, because he’s always imitating Robin Williams, runs around the room covering his ears and dragging his leg, as though the bells are driving him crazy. He’s pretending he’s a hunchback. “The bells! The bells!” he’s yelling.
Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre is following him around the room, saying stuff in French to him. Probably trying to get him back in his seat.
I take Roddy’s imitation dick and crumple it all up into a ball and walk up to the front of the room and dump it into the wastebasket.
When I get back to my desk I can tell that Roddy, the world’s greatest comedian, isn’t in a very good mood. He’s giving me one of those phony you’re-a-dead-man looks that he’s got from watching serial-killer videos.
His face is in a twist. He hasn’t quite got the look perfected yet. It might be just gas. I look back.
I’ve got a new look now that works pretty good. I use it on Roddy.
My look says, “I come from a part of town where they shoot people, dead, right under my bedroom window, pal!”
Dink the Thinker once told me that millions of years ago, when humans started walking upright instead of on all fours like animals, we got cooler because the sun’s rays didn’t strike such a large surface area of our bodies. Therefore we didn’t need thick pelts of fur to shield us from the sun and we became naked. Because we needed less water, we developed this super cooling system, very efficient, and then our brains were able to grow larger than any other animal’s.
Like a computer, the better cooling system you have, the bigger computer you can build, the bigger brain you can have.
I often wonder, when I look at Roddy, what went wrong.
Somewhere between walking naked on his hind legs and developing a brain, he missed out.
I keep watching the hallway and sure enough, Connie Pan walks by.
The difference between Connie Pan and Roddy is the same as the difference between a butterfly and a cockroach, a goddess and a worm.
I leave Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre’s class and catch up with Connie Pan in the hall. That’s the kind of a teacher Tarte au Sucre is. She doesn’t know if you’re there or if you’re not there.
Connie Pan is an A student. Her main course is graphic arts. She’s a terrific printer and drawer.
Last year, during a volleyball game she organized on Westboro Beach, she printed each player’s name and country by hand on pieces of cloth and tied the cloth like an apron around each player’s waist.
Everybody thought the printing was done by a professional. Even long names of new Canadians like Somasundaram Selvakumaram of Sri Lanka looked professional when done by the delicate but strong hands of Connie Pan.
Connie also takes welding.
She wants to be a famous sculptor.
She’ll draw her art first on the drafting board. Then she’ll sculpt it by welding pieces of metal together.
She’s already won a prize in her class for a sculpture she did. She made a running man out of a coathanger and welded him onto a bicycle wheel rim. Then she welded a loonie onto the wheel.
When you spin the wheel, it looks like the man is chasing the loonie. But he never catches it.
She printed the word “Unemployment” under her sculpture.
She’s also a student volunteer for the E.S.L. department. E.S.L. stands for English as a Second Language. She helps the E.S.L. teachers organize stuff for the new Canadians to do, so they can feel better about being in a strange land.
Some of them have never seen snow before, never felt the freezing cold.
“Imagine in your brain,” says Connie, “how afraid they might be, when it is a record temperature of minus so many degrees!”
This week she has a different project, though. She’s trying to teach a guy to read. But the guy is not an E.S.L. guy. This guy is not a new Canadian. He’s not from some foreign country. He’s from Ottawa. From Westboro!
The English teachers at Tech can’t teach him to read because they only teach English to people who can already read.
And the E.S.L. teachers can’t teach him to read because he’s not from a foreign country. They only teach foreigners, new Canadians, how to read.
So, let Connie Pan give it a try...
This kid’s problem is he can only read a word if the picture of the word is there beside it.
For instance, if there’s a picture of a chicken, and then the word “chicken,” he can read the word. But if you give him the word “chickadee” without a picture of a chickadee, he thinks the word is “chicken.”
Big problem.
Connie Pan figures that he’s got to be taught how to sound out letters, not pick out pictures, if he’s ever going to get anywhere.
We’re sitting in the cafeteria and I’m having fun watching Connie trying to help this poor guy. Jimmy Smith’s his name.
She’s sounding out different letters and combinations.
She’s getting him to sound out the letters CH. “Ch! Ch!” says Connie.
Dink the Thinker has a book of anatomy at his place. I was looking through it the other day. Looking at the names of different parts of the body. I was looking for one special part.
I’m looking at that body part right now. I’m looking at Connie Pan’s philtrum.
I’m watching her philtrum, the way it moves when she pronounces the sounds for poor Jimmy Smith. Getting him to read out the letters CH.
Connie Pan has the most beautiful philtrum on the planet Earth.
The philtrum is that groove in the center of your upper lip, just under your nose.
I want to kiss her there.
And I want to tell her the terrible secret I have.
But I can’t.
One thing I’m glad of, though.
I didn’t tell Detective Kennedy anything.
I didn’t tell her that I saw the man, and more than once. That I saw him where Connie Pan works, at the Hong Kong Beauty Salon. And I didn’t tell Detective Kennedy that Connie Pan would even be a better witness than I am.
I didn’t tell her that Connie Pan has been close enough to the guy who drove the killer van to have her beautiful hands on his awful head.
That she probably even knows his name!
I’ll protect you, Connie!
I watch Connie’s philtrum and feel fear and loneliness.