As if things weren’t bad enough already, Typhoon Freda hit Vancouver two weeks later. There was little warning. The day before, high winds had knocked a tree on top of a car in Stanley Park, but the weather forecasters thought that would be the end of it. The tree didn’t hurt anyone, although the accident caused traffic to back up over town, and my father was late for dinner. Being late usually meant he was working overtime, paid or not, and he would call from the office to warn Bunny. This time, she only knew what was happening because of CKNW.
“Sorry about that,” my father said, kissing her cheek as he came in. “Things keep going wrong, don’t they?”
“They’re calling for more rain tomorrow,” Bunny said. “Wind, but not nearly as bad.”
“And how was school today?” my father asked.
By this time, my parents were keeping as sharp an eye on school as they did on the weather. After we’d come back from seeing Andy down the creek, my father had got everything out of me at dinner. Not that it was difficult. Dams burst less noisily.
They won’t talk to Norman and me. Won’t let us play. Calling Norman Brain and Moron and Spazz, and teacher called me Mary again and said I have an attitudinal problem, and I can’t make that up. And I was right that the Elizabethan age was named after Queen Elizabeth the First, and what does Virgin Queen mean anyhow?
My father knew that Mr. Eisenstadt went to work early, and he phoned him first thing the next morning. Mr. Eisenstadt must have spoken to Angela Oliphant at lunch. Not long after class got back that afternoon, one of the boys made a rude noise after a boneheaded answer from Gord Brewster, and Miss Oliphant went off like a rocket. Behaviour like that wasn’t tolerated in her classroom. She insisted on civility, and asked Lucy Oliver what that meant.
“Being nice to each other,” Lucy replied, looking straight ahead.
“Precisely.” Miss Oliphant gave a generalized glare at the classroom while taking no particular notice of Norman and me. Most people got the point, of course, and it was reinforced when she called on Norman not long afterward for a difficult answer, even though he still wasn’t putting up his hand. When Darryl Wall tried an experimental snort, Miss Oliphant strode over to his side and rapped her knuckles on his desk as she said each syllable.
“What did I say, Dar-ryl?”
It was a relief to find respite in the classroom, even though Miss Oliphant was still our teacher. Of course, nothing changed on the playground. Norman and I remained excluded, and while the teasing grew more sporadic, it was nastier when it occurred. Norman’s knapsack was thrown into the ditch. A boy tried to trip me as I skipped rope.
Mrs. Horton patrolled the schoolyard more alertly in those tense days, and that might have been part of the problem. The meanness built up and erupted more violently when her back was turned. Norman’s knapsack wasn’t just thrown in the ditch. It disappeared from his hanger in the cloakroom and was only found after school floating in the rank water. The boy who tried to trip me ran up from behind, and he might never have been found out, either. But I caught a glimpse of something coming and managed to take the boy down, kneeling on his back so I could pick up his head by a handful of curls, revealing Kenny Potts.
My father had started to question me minutely at dinner, not just about what did you learn today, Mary Alice, but is there anything you’re not telling me.
No, I’d say repeatedly. It went fine. Kenny Potts and I were sent to the office, but everything was fine.
“You were sent to the office,” my father said.
“I told him Kenny tried to trip me, and Mr. Eisenstadt didn’t give me the strap. He just said, ‘Call a teacher next time.’”
“So you’ll do that.”
“Of course she won’t,” Bunny answered. “Did you?”
By then, we were back to eating dinner in the kitchen instead of in front of the TV. I knew that my parents were trying to protect me from further upset, but that was impossible. Everyone else was watching the news. Bunny had been one of the first mothers to stockpile food, but from what I heard, everyone else was following. Darryl Wall’s father had taken night shift so he could spend the day digging his bomb shelter, even threatening to bring in a backhoe. And Darryl’s younger brother, Scott, had started rocking back and forth in his desk in grade three, humming quietly to himself.
All this, and Mr. Manners refused to stand down. From what I overheard, Mr. Duprée formally warned Jack Horton to teach the curriculum and suspended him for two weeks without pay. Yet my father said that Mr. Manners still wanted the Hortons fired, and that he was taking the matter to the school board. After my father had a couple of drinks with Mr. Horton one evening, I heard him tell Bunny that the board was going to schedule a special session.
“Having been presented with a petition as long as your arm.”
I understood by then what a petition entailed, and knew that Jim Manners had been collecting signatures not just in our subdivision but throughout Grouse Valley. I watched him set out every evening after work, sometimes on foot but mainly in his car, ready to go door-to-door like an encyclopedia salesman. From what I picked up at school, he’d been telling people who didn’t know him that he was their neighbour, a fellow ratepayer, a householder, even though he’d become more like a tenant living in the Manners basement.
That part wasn’t public, but observation showed.
“What are you doing out on the sundeck in this weather?” Bunny asked one day, not long before the typhoon.
“Mr. Manners came out from his basement again. He didn’t close the door properly, and you could see inside, how there’s a bed made up on the rec room sofa.”
A brief pause. “That’s other people’s business, Mary Alice. Come inside and help me peel some apples.” When I balked: “You can throw the peel and see who you’ll marry.”
“I’m never getting married.”
“Fair enough,” Bunny said, surprising me with her tone, the one she used to speak about the cost of living. It was surfacing more often these days, especially when my father got home from work.
“Another call,” she’d say, although she refused to go into details in front of me.
I knew anyhow. Bunny’s friends spoke to her in person, too. Mrs. Armstrong told her in the bank lineup one afternoon that she and Mr. Armstrong didn’t like what Jim Manners was doing, but they didn’t like communists either. Cathy Cole’s mother told her in the drugstore, “I don’t agree with him, but everybody’s signing, and we’re backed into a corner.” Then there was the day the egg man had a flat tire and only showed up after school. Mrs. Wall turned away when she saw us waiting for our eggs as if she’d remembered something important, her retreating back looking awfully familiar.
“Herd mentality,” my father said that night. “It’s not something I have any use for.”
By then I was spending a good deal of time eavesdropping just inside my bedroom door.
“So when you were overseas,” Bunny said, “you let your men do whatever they damn well pleased.”
My father’s exasperated silence.
“The communists want to take away all the freedoms you fought for,” Bunny said.
My father was about to answer when I called through my cracked-open door, “Norman’s father told him he doesn’t even like Russians.”
In the silence that followed, I got up and went into the kitchen, the feet of my flannelette pyjamas making a swishing sound on the linoleum, which I normally enjoyed. I was breaking the rules of eavesdropping, but everything else was breaking. Glass, friendships, my heart.
“His mum and dad aren’t your friends,” I said. “But Norman’s mine.”
“Sweetheart . . .” my father began.
“I want it to stop. Why aren’t you making it stop?”
Even I could hear the waver at the end of my question. My father held out one arm so I would come over and sit on his lap. When I ignored him—and this was the first time—he took his hand back and rubbed his eyes behind his glasses.
“Your brother has been coming over,” he said, lowering his hand.
I had to concede that much.
“There are laws and procedures in a case like this that need to be followed. Your brother is finding out what they are.”
“As if the law’s going to decide this,” Bunny said.
Seeing the conflict between them, I began to shake. It started in my knees and spread to my stomach, which began to churn. My heart thumped hard and my shoulders quivered and my teeth began chattering so uncontrollably that I became like our house the next evening, juddering through a typhoon.
“Come to bed, now. Come to bed.”
My father carrying me to comfort, a warm parent on either side as I failed to fall asleep.
The meteorologists hadn’t predicted Freda because it was a once-in-a-century event. My father told me afterward that the storm had formed west of Hawaii, as typhoons usually did. But the winds had weakened as they approached North America, which was also usual, and Freda was downgraded to a tropical storm. On the radio beforehand, the forecaster had said we would suffer nothing worse than wind gusts and rain.
Yet this time, the system had hit a powerful jet stream, picking up fury until it made landfall in California, roaring north through Oregon and Washington State at a peak velocity approaching three hundred kilometres an hour. The West Coast hadn’t seen stronger winds in all the twentieth century, winds like a cavalcade of warplanes, one after another and another knocking down power poles and billboards and trees as Freda roared toward Vancouver.
It was already raining solidly as Norman and I walked home from school. Steady downpours weren’t unusual in Vancouver, and especially on the North Shore, where clouds could get trapped against the mountains and drop their rain. It had rained far harder the previous week, making the creek run so high we could hear it thundering from inside the house.
My parents had forbidden me to go down the creek, but I didn’t want to go anyway. When Norman and I reached his house, we made plans to meet in the morning and spend our allowance in the village. With no use for marbles, we’d got in the habit of buying the drugstore out of comic books. Plus, Norman had started wanting to go to the fruit and vegetable store every week for penny candy. He was eating so much candy he might have been working through a hoard, even though Halloween was still three weeks away.
Mr. Horton’s suspension had started the previous day, so he must have been inside the house as we stood in the driveway, although I saw no sign of him. Maybe this was the reason Norman didn’t invite me in, or ask to come to my place. In my heart, I was glad. I was growing tired, not of Norman but the Hortons, or at least what was attached to them. Norman might have been tired of me too, the witness of what was going on. In any case, I slogged home alone through the rain, saddened and wet right through, before walking through the front door to a surprise.
Bunny was waiting in the hall with a big fluffy towel still warm from the dryer. Without a word, she wrapped it around me from my wet hair to my water-logged shoes, enfolding me gently. I disappeared inside the warmth of that towel and the strength of her arms, her reliability and tenderness, and never wanted to emerge.
“It’s really starting to blow out there, isn’t it?” Bunny said, and slowly began to swab me down. “Your father’s getting off early after a meeting. How was school?” Without requiring an answer, she took away the damp towel and said, “Now go get out of those wet clothes. There’s clean ones on the bed.”
Afterward, we sat in the living room with coffee, Bunny having made mine according to Debbie’s recipe, mainly hot milk and sugar. The wind was gusting rain against the windows now but we weren’t concerned. We didn’t have the radio on, not bothering with the news.
“I guess Mr. Manners isn’t going to go out today,” I said.
“Coward,” Bunny said. I was surprised, although she sounded more reflective than accusing. “That seems to be what he goes around thinking about himself. That’s the real problem.”
She seemed to be talking to Debbie, or maybe to her reflection in the darkening window. She glanced at me briefly. “That doesn’t mean I think very highly of Norman’s father.”
“He dumped Mrs. Manners,” I said. “Andy Manners told me. She told me what affairs are, since I’m old enough to know.”
Bunny digested this.
“Men,” she said finally. “It’s always about them. Now here’s all my friends phoning me, or more to the point not phoning me, all because some man couldn’t keep it in his . . .”
A hard gust of wind, a snap, a flash up the road and our lights suddenly went out.
“Away from the window,” Bunny ordered, jumping up to draw the curtains. When I sat paralyzed, my mother herded me into the kitchen, still holding my coffee in both hands. Grabbing a flashlight from the string drawer, she guided me from behind by the shoulders, steering me downstairs to the rec room. Leaving me there, she continued without speaking into my father’s workshop, where she seldom went, coming back with candles and matches. I watched her light one, dripping wax into an old chipped saucer and securing the candle in place, where it glowed feebly in the twilight.
“That looks lonely,” she said, and lit another.
“I guess there isn’t any TV,” I said, and Bunny held up a finger. Going back into my father’s workshop, she returned with his battery-powered radio and tuned it to CKNW.
“Typhoon,” a newscaster said, and Bunny snapped it off.
We looked at the radio for a long blank moment as wind rattled the house.
“Well,” Bunny said finally, “tell me what comics you got last weekend.”
“You don’t care about my comics, Buns.”
If she wanted to be adults, I would try to be adult.
My mother looked at me for longer than we’d looked at the radio.
“Drink your milk before it gets cold,” she told me.
“Coffee,” I said.
My father found us in the dark rec room with three lit candles and two cans of pork and beans bubbling on the camp stove. On the coffee table was a plate with thick slices of bakery bread, the butter dish with the square of ice-cold butter I’d begged, a plate of sliced tomatoes and another of sliced dill pickles for colour. The pork chops we were supposed to have for dinner had gone back in the fridge.
By this time, the wind and rain were loud. People use words like roar and howl, and the wind did that, making animal sounds. But as the night grew darker, it started sounding like giants punching the house and rattling the windows to get inside. The wind whistled through any cracks it could find, making the candle flames flicker. After our excellent dinner, I felt gusts of it on my cheeks and hands, puffs of humidity that were surprisingly uncold. Meanwhile, I kept telling myself that none of this frightened me. It was just the wind, which was air, and there was that expression my Uncle Punk used: safe as houses.
“What I heard on the way home,” my father said after dinner, having to talk more loudly than usual. “What we should be prepared to see tomorrow. The wind is knocking down trees on the boulevards over town. It’s uprooting trees in Stanley Park. But the trees behind us—I’ve shown you this—they’re fir and cedar, some of them old growth. Grouse Valley wasn’t logged out to the same extent the forest was elsewhere. Smaller operators worked the land and they didn’t clear-cut. That’s part of what makes this a special place. Are you listening, Mary Alice? The trees are going to keep us safe.”
Safe as houses. Safe as trees.
Some of which became houses, when you thought about it.
“You can listen to CKNW if you want,” I said, being polite, and hoping he wouldn’t take me up on it.
“If the transmission tower hasn’t blown down,” Bunny said.
“They called it a typhoon,” I found myself saying. “Is that like a tornado?”
“No, it’s not a tornado,” my father said, although the wind outside had grown as loud as the wind in The Wizard of Oz. “A tornado is a big whirlwind. This system is blowing in on us straight. Almost horizontally.” And because he was congenitally honest, “Like a hurricane in the Atlantic.”
“Or the Bomb?” I asked.
A crash, and glass splintered upstairs, a branch, a projectile shattering a window. Then I was screaming and screaming, panting in my father’s arms as he carried me and a flashlight into his workshop, where I was astonished into silence by the sight of our patio chairs set up, complete with green-and-white cushions, and the plastic tables beside them.
“Okay, we’re going to be safe in here. We’re going to be safe, Mary Alice,” my father said. “You know there aren’t any windows. Look and see. There aren’t any windows in here.”
And the astonishing thing was, resting in my father’s arms in a patio chair in his underground workshop, I soon fell fast asleep.
The next morning, Vancouver woke up to find that seven people had been killed and there were many millions of dollars in damage. Four thousand trees were down and some people would be without power for a week. But Grouse Valley hadn’t been badly hit. All we saw out our windows were fallen branches strewn over lawns under a light sporadic rain.
We were still without power, although the breaking glass that had frightened me so badly was only the bathroom window being shattered by a runaway street sign. The bathroom was almost completely tiled, so Bunny mopped up the rain easily, and the window was small and quickly repaired.
Since we’d made plans, Norman soon came over, maybe a little obliviously. My mother had to tell him that without electricity, the stores wouldn’t be open in the village. Nor could we go down to the creek in high flow.
“Maybe you’ve got enough comic books already,” Bunny said.
“How did your house come through?” my father asked. “Keeping your father busy?”
“My mum,” Norman answered warily.
It remained very damp. My father soon took us outside in our rain gear to help clear the yard and then the street of branches. Further up Far Creek Road, a neighbour revved up his gas-powered chainsaw to cut up one of the few fallen trees.
I liked being of use, but Norman was less interested and soon went home, then came back out of boredom, then left again when I wanted to watch my father saw the bigger branches for our woodpile, handing him the ones I could manage. When the power came back on early that evening, Bunny cooked up the pork chops, saying they wouldn’t be good tomorrow, even though we’d only opened the fridge for milk, keeping in the cold.
None of us anticipated what would happen the following week, when the missile crisis would begin, so it felt as if the bad times had ended and we’d made it through. Or mysteriously, the reverse: we’d made it through, so the bad times had ended. I told myself that when I went back to school the next week, people would treat me normally. Our street was back to normal, my father as greeted as he’d always been, even though many of our neighbours had signed the Manners petition. Maybe it would have been different if Mr. Manners had been there, but he’d been caught over town by the storm and hadn’t come home. This was according to Andy, who helped us clear branches from the street while Cal and the younger boys raked up their yard.
“Hall Parker,” Mr. Wall said, dropping by. “Harvesting yourself some firewood.”
“Need any of it, Mac?” my father asked.
“My cherry went over in the backyard,” Mr. Wall said. “I do like the smell of a cherry wood fire.”
“How’s the excavation?”
Mr. Wall looked less cheerful. “Swimming pool,” he said.
Behind him, Darryl Wall nodded at me. But boys only ever nodded at girls in the presence of their fathers, so that was all right, and I figured everything else soon would be.
Maybe you can remain pessimistic and frightened for only so long. Or I could. Norman’s father was still suspended from work and the school board hearing loomed. But both these things felt small in the face of the typhoon and easily blown away. When Uncle Punk and Auntie Nita brought my brother over the next afternoon, I wasn’t surprised to find that for once, Bob and my father greeted each other easily.
Football wasn’t on the menu, post-typhoon. But my father had fired up the barbecue on the patio outside and my mother had made potato salad and one of the jellied salads that Uncle Punk liked, even though jellied salads were becoming unfashionable and she wouldn’t have served it to one of her friends.
I was a little worried, having heard my mother mention how thoroughly Uncle Punk disliked my father’s support for the Hortons. She and Auntie Nita had talked on the phone, and serving my uncle’s favourite food seemed meant to indicate her agreement with his position. I’d noticed that Bunny often did this with food, signalling approval or maybe her wish for approval. Mrs. Oliver loved date squares, so Bunny always baked them when her friends came over, even though no one else liked them. Mrs. Oliver had to take most of the leftover squares home wrapped in tinfoil, to which I didn’t object, especially if there were Nanaimo bars left over.
“So how’s it going, Don Quixote?” Uncle Punk asked, lumbering through the rec room toward my father, who stood just inside the patio.
“And here we are, having a nice family barbecue,” Auntie Nita said.
It was a warning and Uncle Punk took it, stopping in place, then retreating to an armchair.
The air remained heavy outside and our woodpile had got wet, but my father and I had scavenged enough dry logs to light a fire. It crackled and burned as I sat by the fireplace, toasting my back while Auntie Nita asked after my sister Debbie. As Bunny answered, my brother sat upright and impatient on the arm of his chair. Bob never had any use for small talk, and today he’d barely managed to survive saying hello. He looked at our father, who stood by the window frowning out at the barbecue, having had to light the coals twice already.
“I managed to get hold of Jack Horton’s union rep,” Bob told him, the moment Bunny finished speaking. “It’s about what I suspected. They’re not prepared to go to the wall, not on this one. The rep will be at the school board meeting, but it doesn’t sound as if he plans to say more than ‘Hi, how are ya.’ They’re worried about being tainted by communism, especially when it’s a lost cause. Rep told me there’s a morality clause in the collective agreement, how teachers are bound to uphold decency. The wording is vague enough that the board can define decency any way it wants. So they can use it not just for moral failings, but for political ones.”
My father was going ramrod by the window as my brother spoke.
“I looked at the wording,” Bob went on. “The rep’s right. It’s ambiguous. Which is smart. You don’t want a list of reasons for dismissal that ends up being exclusionary, leaving out someone with an unprintable predilection for . . .”
My brother stopped when he realized I was listening and shook his head.
“I’m afraid it’s a lost cause,” he repeated. “The trustees can do anything they want.”
“So there you go, Don Quixote,” Uncle Punk said. “Even his union won’t back him.”
My father remained silent.
“He doesn’t have a comeback,” Uncle Punk needled.
“Actually, I have a problem when politics are confounded with morality,” my father said.
“I agree there’s usually no connection,” Uncle Punk replied.
“And if you were dismissed for your political views,” my father asked, “using the excuse of a morality clause in your collective agreement? I’m not sure I like the precedent.”
Uncle Punk was left without a comeback, while my brother thought it through, then smiled.
“Here’s the irony,” he said. “Strictly speaking, Jack Horton is in breach of the morality clause. Having an affair with a pupil’s mother is exactly what it’s designed to address. Moral turpitude. One gathers that Jim Manners won’t be pressing that particular issue. But under his contract, Horton is absolutely liable to be fired. Just for reasons other than Manners is arguing.”
“You said yourself he was implicated,” Bunny told my father, speaking in her wavery voice.
“Horton taught an ill-advised class, or part of a class, outside the curriculum,” my father said, “and received a two-week suspension without pay. That was harsh, and a warning, and no one wishes more than me that it had stayed there. As for the rest . . .”
He stopped, glancing at me.
“Oh, the Manners girl told her what’s going on,” Bunny said.
“Mr. Horton dumped Andy’s mother,” I said, wanting to be helpful. “And he told Norman he doesn’t like the Soviet Union.”
My brother smiled again.
“Here’s something to chew on, Tinker,” he said. “You can be a communist without liking the Soviet Union. People can hold to the ideal without liking the reality.”
He turned to the others. “I put the question to Horton point blank. He says he’s not a commie.”
“Does he?” Uncle Punk asked.
“Says, ‘I’m not,’” Bob continued. “Present tense. Ask him about the past, and here comes temper. Scorn might be a better word.”
I shifted on the hearth, stung by the word.
“Which brings me back to my question,” my father said. “Whether someone should be fired for his private political views. Especially if he no longer holds them.”
Uncle Punk paused.
“I’ll give you this much,” he said. “We ought to get rid of morality clauses. Leftover from days of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Apply them by the letter and you’d lose half your membership. We ought to consider it for the next round of bargaining.”
“And meanwhile, you have no qualms about the man being fired.”
“Much less his wife,” Auntie Nita said unexpectedly.
Uncle Punk sounded exasperated. “The man had an affair. Yes, the poor wife. Who probably ought to spread her . . .”
“Donald!” my aunt said, and everyone went quiet for a surprisingly long time.
“Actually, Dad’s right,” Bob said.
His words struck like a whipcrack, making my father look surprisingly hopeful. An outsider might have thought he hoped Bob would help the Hortons. But everyone in our family understood that what really moved him was that my brother had said he was right, taking a step back from their long disagreement.
“It’s a hard one,” my brother said. “But there might be a way to handle it.”
In the discussion that followed, the only thing I understood was that my father and brother were speaking over Uncle Punk’s head. My father stayed by the window, keeping an eye on the barbecue, and it didn’t occur to my brother to join him. They spoke companionably, the way fathers and sons were supposed to speak when discussing joint projects. Moving the woodpile. Cleaning out the gutters. Not that my brother did any physical labour, but that was the feeling between them.
Meanwhile, I could see that Uncle Punk was getting restless. He chafed at Bob’s long talk with our father, disliking not only what they agreed about, but the fact they agreed. I knew how proud he was of my brother, and understood how much credit he liked to take for Bob’s achievements. Whether his attitude implicated Uncle Punk in the long discord between my father and brother is something I couldn’t see the bottom of. I knew that Uncle Punk would have been shocked and wounded if I’d said that it did. But my mother’s word implicated hung in the air, and I knew it meant something like tangled-up wool. I also knew families were like that, implicated in each other.
“I’d just be sure,” my uncle put in finally, when there was a break in the conversation. “You better be sure that Horton isn’t lying about being a member of the Party. My understanding being,” he told Bob, “lawyers like to be sure of the answer to a question before they raise it.”
My brother got up and pressed an affectionate hand on Uncle Punk’s shoulder, which had the effect of settling him further into his chair. Afterward, he and my father went outside to continue their discussion by the barbecue. Through the window, I saw them both looking genial, and marvelled at the healing of the breach between them. The typhoon had carried us to Oz, where magical things happened. Uncles became just uncles, if disgruntled ones, while fathers turned back into fathers. When I returned to school, I was certain that people would welcome me and Norman back, too.
The next morning, Norman and I walked into the schoolyard to find the playground louder than usual. A chaos of running, skipping, hopscotch. Everywhere, rampant glee. Grouse Valley had survived the typhoon and everyone was proud of themselves. Younger kids ran around happily, and big girls played little girls’ clapping games, giggling to find themselves doing a baby thing and enjoying it.
Nearby, the bigger boys kicked a ball around, with Jamie Manners providing the type of running commentary we heard on B.C. Lions games. Jamie was the grade six Manners, louder and rougher than his younger brother Harry. Yet even though Jamie was in charge, no one booted the ball at Norman or called him names. They didn’t acknowledge him either, but a few of the girls who hadn’t managed to see me for a month smiled in my direction. Laura Stanton from choir even came up and asked if our house been damaged. Theirs had lost shingles, she said.
In the classroom, even Miss Oliphant was buoyant. She started the day by singing along to “God Save the Queen,” which she’d never done before. I was surprised to hear a pretty voice, sweet and melodic. She would surprise me again that afternoon by saying that her mother had slept through the typhoon, but their budgies had been a bother.
Miss Oliphant had never mentioned her home life, even when she was Mrs. Persson. I realized she must have gone back to live with her mother after her divorce the way Mr. Duffy had. That teacher possessed a hard shell, which was part of what made her so dislikeable, a beetle in glasses. But as I glimpsed a few personal details, I wondered for the first time if Miss Oliphant might be human.
It was dry that afternoon, neither warm nor cold, nothing special. Yet I went home feeling blithe, certain that the scorning would soon be over. And it’s true people were friendly enough for the rest of the week, certainly in comparison to the past year, or what felt like a year. They continued to ignore Norman, but he wasn’t taunted, and more girls risked sidling up to me and speaking.
The buoyancy of that first Monday dissipated from day to day in a slow leak. But the level of what we thought of ourselves, or expected of ourselves, seemed to have risen a little, like a lake after a storm. We had lived through something big and we’d become bigger, and it’s possible that Norman and I would have been accepted back if the universe had given things a little longer to settle, and the petition Jim Manners was circulating had grown less urgent.
But Cuba came back in the news as the typhoon receded, turning everybody harsh. More talk of the Bomb, of the Soviet Union. Adults became punitive and superstitious, children panicky. Then the Cuban Missile Crisis arrived, and we all grew terrified that the world was going to end, as it very well might have.
Or maybe I should say, as it did, since some worlds can come to an end even as our poor old Earth keeps spinning.