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By Root 520 0

I’ll get the full picture. Fine people, she says, the best. All she knows of them is holding Mrs. Podiuk’s head, or Mrs. Podiuk holding hers, while the old tub wallowed, but never mind – the voyage makes them kin for ever. Of course, quite right – so it did, but I didn’t see that then. They’ll welcome the boy, she tells my dad – he’ll be like their own son to them. This prospect didn’t exactly fill me with delight. I didn’t know the Podiuks from Adam, and I didn’t want to. But the first week in Winnipeg, off I went – seventeen, you know, and with this strangely faulty sense of direction – I was always getting on the wrong streetcar and ending up at the opposite side of the city from where I’d intended to go. I finally found the place, a little brown stucco house on Selkirk Avenue, and here were all these thousands of young kids mobbing around the front door. Somehow the sight of them stopped me and I just stood there staring until they got really suspicious and started yelling “Whaddya want, mister?” What I wanted was to get the hell out. It seemed crazy to be looking someone up just because your grandmother had come over on the same boat. I asked them where Mr. and Mrs. Podiuk were, and they said – all together, you know, like a Greek chorus, this gruesome chanting – Dead, dead, dead. I didn’t wait to see if the next generation of Podiuks was in residence. I just beat it. All I could think was how relieved I was. I was actually relieved they were dead, so I didn’t have to see them. You know?”

He’s easy to laugh with. Then I see that his eyes have changed, and even though he’s still laughing, he’s watching me.

“I talk too much,” he says. “You should interrupt me. Do you like teaching, Rachel?”

He has asked only out of politeness. I wish he hadn’t. I’d rather listen to him talking. There isn’t much to say about myself, nothing that can be spoken. And yet, now when he puts his head down on my lap and props his long legs over the chesterfield’s rim, I feel as though I might talk to him and he would know what I meant.

“I like it – yes, but there’s something about it I can’t get used to.”

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe it doesn’t affect you. Your classes are older, and when they move on, they soon move right away and you don’t see them any more. But mine are only seven, and I see them around for years after they’ve left me, but I don’t have anything to do with them. There’s nothing lasting. They move on, and that’s that. It’s such a brief thing. I know them only a year, and then I see them changing but I don’t know them any more.”

His face looks momentarily troubled. I shouldn’t have said all that. What will he think?

“You get pretty attached to them, I guess, Rachel?”

“Oh – well, I realize one isn’t supposed to, and of course I don’t with all of them, but there are some you can’t help liking better than others, and then you feel – I don’t know – it seems kind of futile.”

I saw James on the street a few days ago. I was thinking of Nick at the time, so I could almost not mind when James zoomed past me without seeing me. Why should he see me? By the time he has finished grade school he’ll have had eight teachers. He can hardly be expected to take much notice of that number, for evermore.

Nick frowns, looking at me now.

“It isn’t a very good situation for you, Rachel.” Then, unexpectedly, he jumps to his feet. “I think there’s a little rye left – have some?”

“All right. I – I didn’t really mean anything much by what I said about the kids, Nick. You must’ve thought it sounded peculiar.”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t think it sounded peculiar at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

But he wants to change the subject. He brings our drinks, and then goes rambling around looking for cigarettes.

“Jago always keeps an extra packet stashed away somewhere.”

“Where is he tonight, Jago?” The thought has just hit me, and all at once I expect to see him walk in right now. What would it matter if he did? And yet, because I’ve been to bed with Nick, it seems to me I’d show it. I’d betray everything in my face or by some slipped and askew