Which is to miss the point. Asking him for anything is to admit failure, to admit I couldn’t make it on my own. But I did make it on my own, for seventeen years. Nobody can take that away from Vera Miller. I buried a husband with a seven-month-old baby in my arms and I supported and raised that baby on my own. Until now.
Vera Miller is pride. That’s what I am, pure and simple. Because without pride and hope, how did I ever make it this far? How else did I drudge at all those shitty jobs all those years – chambermaid, practical nurse, checkout girl – without letting myself think I was nothing but those things – chambermaid, practical nurse, checkout girl?
One thing, I never surrendered my dignity. I did my job but you never caught me kissing the boss’s ass, or pretending to his face that I was eternally grateful for the big favour of being allowed to work for him.
Checkout girl was the worst. Six months after I’d gone to work at the supermarket I remember Pooch saying to me, “Well, Vera, now you’ve had a chance to size it up, tell me: What do you hate most about this christly job?” Pooch said it was how her ankles swelled. Said she’d had nice ankles before all the standing, punching the till.
I said, “What I can’t stand is that if I were to stay here until I was sixty-five I’d still be a girl. Notice how you always stay a girl? I call the store manager Mr. Anderson and he calls me Vera. That’s what gripes me. I ran away from home so I could stop being somebody’s girl and I find nothing’s changed. I’m still somebody’s girl.”
Pooch said, “They can call me what they like, so long’s they pay for the privilege.” That’s typical.
Of course, when I broke the news to Pooch where I was moving to, I saw the glint in her eye. She was glad to see me taken down a peg after all of my brave talk. I knew what she was thinking, although for once she was gracious enough not to say it. I have to thank her for that.
Maybe it’s hope I need more than pride just now. Because I’ve got to believe this is right for Daniel, if not for me. Because if I fail Daniel now, I fail his father too, and all that was fine and good and noble in Stanley. All of him that was aimed at higher things.
So I’ve just got to see it as another sacrifice, taking him home and settling in under Father’s roof again. I’ve sacrificed plenty before, for Daniel. And I did it because I had faith in him, I knew he was every bit as brilliant as his father. I was right, too, knew it when they had me to the school to discuss skipping him. It was because I had given him advantages like the Book of Knowledge. There were compliments, too, on how I had raised such a fine, intelligent boy. “Alone as you are,” the principal had said, “it’s something to be proud of.”
The look on their faces when I refused. They weren’t expecting that. But I knew it never does any good to have your head turned by praise. Keep your eyes on the prize. They tried to change my mind. That principal even started to talk more slowly, as if I were too dim-witted to follow what he was saying. “The thing is, Mrs. Miller,” I can still hear him say, “is that we find that boys and girls like Daniel – if they aren’t continually challenged, why, they lose interest in school, become bored. Their marks may even drop. Now Miss Robinson and I have discussed this matter very thoroughly and we’re agreed, as professionals, that it would be best for Daniel to move on to Grade Four at this time.”
That kind always knows what’s best for you and yours. Even though they’ve never stood in your down-at-heel shoes to look at the problem. Because all those complicated tests they’d given Daniel had measured everything except what concerned me. His character. Maybe it’s unnatural for a mother even to admit thinking it, but that I had doubts about.
It didn’t take Mr. Principal too long before he thought he knew why I was hesitating. “Mrs. Miller,” he said, “if it’s buying a new set of textbooks for Daniel in the middle of the year that’s troubling you… some arrangement can be worked out through the school. There’s no need for you to feel any financial embarrassment.” I suppose I’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt and grant that he was trying to be nice. Still, it was sort of insulting. They think just because you’re poor all you ever think about is money.
Well, I wasn’t about to give him my reasons. To suggest maybe Daniel was lazy and soft by nature. It seems to go hand in hand with cleverness. Maybe because everything comes too easy to the clever ones, they never learn any fight. Nine times out of ten it’s them who quit on you when the going gets tough. With Daniel I couldn’t tell whether he’d collapse on me or not. What if he found the work too hard after he was skipped? Would he give up and fizzle like a bad firecracker?
There was nothing to gain risking it. Not after I’d got him that far, all the way to the top of his class. Because one thing was for sure. I knew a checkout girl’s wages weren’t going to take Daniel anywhere. That was as sure as Carter’s got liver pills. If he was going to go to university the way his father would’ve wanted, it was up to me to see he got a scholarship. I’m sure I did right to hold him back the way I did.
Pooch said I was crazy to worry about an eight year old getting into university. She didn’t know the half of it. I started worrying when he was six. But then Pooch couldn’t harbour any hope of that Lyle of hers doing anything to write home about. Unless it was from jail. And as far as Pooch is concerned her responsibility is over once she’s cleaned and fed him.
As far as Daniel goes, my job is never over. Come home dog-tired, make supper, do the dishes. Then get him to do the drills. The flash cards I made from old cigarette boxes with the arithmetic problems printed on them in black grease pencil. All done so that learning arithmetic would feel more like a game, more like fun. Shuffle those cards like a real deck of cards, snap one off at him. “16 ? 16! Come on, Daniel! You know that! Think!” Start counting. He had five seconds to come up with the answer. Just like a game show on the television.
He had more in his head than all the other six year olds put together. The two of us memorized the capitals of all the provinces and all the states. We did weights and measures. How many quarts to the peck, rods to the mile? We did every president of the United States and every prime minister of Canada. The kings of England. He could spell every word in his speller.
Sure he complained. Whined. They didn’t have to learn any of this stupid stuff in school. All I used to say is, “Knowledge is something nobody can take away from you. They can repossess your car but they can’t repossess your knowledge.” But what used to really gall him was the way I made him learn those poems they gave him for memory work. Perfect to the punctuation. Two of us chanting together. “I sprang to the stirrup comma and Joris comma and he semi-colon new line I galloped comma Dirck galloped comma we galloped all three semi-colon.” Full effort for full marks was my attitude. Make the teacher sit up and take notice.
I read him to sleep every night before he learned how to do it for himself. Those were the nice, quiet, peaceful times. I could smell him in his bed, fresh and clean from his bath. Children’s classics. That’s what the librarian called them. She helped me pick. I had read hardly one of them myself. All we had in Connaught when I was growing up was a few broken books thrown in a cupboard at the back of the schoolroom. I remembered reading
The bus slowed jerkily, came to a halt at a railway crossing. The driver flung open the door and sat listening for the sounds of an approaching train. Everybody leaned forward in their seats and listened too. There was nothing to hear but the muffled throbbing of the bus engine. The coach stood crouched in the silence of empty distances, unhindered lines of vision. Everything disappeared into the blank horizon. The grid road upon which they sat dwindled away to nothing there. Below the nose of the bus rails burned, hot silver laid on a bed of slag and cinders.
Suddenly out of the stillness, wind. A dust-devil whirled up dirt and grit from the road and scurried it through the open door and into the coach. The young man in the crisp white shirt and tie covered his nose and face with a large handkerchief. The driver slammed the door against the dust-devil and the bus abruptly snarled and thumped its way over the planks of the crossing.
Medical student. That’s what he reminds me of with that hanky over his face like a mask. He looks exactly like one of those interns and residents from my days at the hospital, back when I was hustling bed pans and wiping old bums there as a practical. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts he’s a medical student. It would explain a dapper young man like him riding a bus. They get paid nothing.
I was sorry to leave the hospital. At least I felt I was doing something good, something worthwhile there. But how could I carry on after the old woman downstairs up and moved out on me to go live with her daughter? Had nobody that would babysit shifts. And you can’t leave a kid by himself for eight hours a stretch. Nine, counting trolley time there and back from the hospital. Chambermaiding at the hotel worked out better. I could be home at quarter after six so he was alone only a couple of hours after he finished school. Of course, it wasn’t much of a life for him, being made to go straight home and lock himself in the apartment. He hated me phoning on my coffee breaks every afternoon around four to check up on him. But he also knew that he’d better be there to answer when
