The Nine-Chambered Heart. Janice Pariat
in class. You’re mystified by acrylics, using them like watercolours, but they dry too fast and leave hard blotches of colour in the wrong places.
Maybe later, when I’ve been teaching for years, I’ll know how to deal with students like you. For now, I’m clueless.
I feel I’ve tried it all: threat, coercion, indifference, patience. I’ve spoken to your other teachers, and they can’t understand it either. You’re quiet and good in all their classes. Slightly scornful of chemistry, fond of literature, biology and history, and you’re intuitively skilled at maths. But about that I’m not surprised.
I really do feel I’ve lost you, until one day I ask if you’d like to play with paper.
‘And do what?’ You sound scornful of this too.
‘Well, we can make shapes for starters …’
You seem thoroughly unimpressed.
‘Have you heard of origami?’
Tentatively, you shake your head.
How much you must hate admitting not knowing something. I’m almost gleeful.
I hand you sheets of paper and a beginner’s How-To manual. I have a feeling you’d prefer this to taking instructions from me. You examine the pages, pick a pattern, lost in concentration. It’s remarkable. You’re marvellous at it. From your fingertips spring cranes and boxes, frogs and butterflies, crabs and flowers. Neat and intricate, the lines pressed and folded with industrious care and precision. They are exercises in exactitude. Each the same size and shape as the other. You sit in the corner of the classroom, patiently creasing, folding and lining them all up when they’re done. I want to tell you they’re beautiful, but I worry this might dissuade you instead, so I watch and do not offer praise.
After this, there’s a sea change.
You are the first to enter class, and the last to leave.
Your eyes follow me around, while I’m moving from one cluster of students to another and when someone walks up to my desk for help. You linger at the end, showing me all you’ve made that day, eager, if I’m not mistaken, for my approval.
At first, I’m not quite sure how to respond. Do I appear pleased? Do I ignore you now, in return? I think in my confusion, I do a bit of both, but this doesn’t deter you. If anything, it seems to make you even more determined. You catch me in corridors, and in the library, sometimes on the lawn, and initiate the most sweetly mundane conversation. We talk of the weather, and lunch, and whether I like cats or dogs.
‘Dogs,’ I say.
‘Cats,’ you say.
And everything I answer is followed by ‘why?’
Why do I prefer peas to potatoes? Why would I like to own a bicycle rather than a car? Why dogs? Why am I vegetarian? Why do I like dark chocolate? Why do I read poetry? When I turn the questions back at you, I find you pleasingly impulsive. You don’t take your time. You like beetroot for its colour. Cats for their eyes. White chocolate because it’s not quite chocolate. Poetry befuddles you. You reply from your gut. Everything, at this age, is instinct.
You show me test papers and essays, work you’ve been merited on. I praise you like I think a parent would. You aren’t that fond of sports, you tell me. Even though you’re made to run and throw and participate. You’re fond of music, but have no inclination to play an instrument. ‘I like to sing,’ you tell me shyly.
‘Sing me something.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
We’re outside, walking down a path in the school grounds.
‘What would you like me to sing?’
‘Anything.’
You take a moment to choose, and start singing. So softly, I must lean in to listen. It’s an old song from the ’70s. I wonder how you know it. Maybe your parents play it at home, and you’ve grown up listening to it. It’s a song about a man making a phone call to somebody he loved, and who left him. It’s sweet and silly, and incongruous, coming from you, but you sing it to the end, and I applaud.
Once, you hand me a flower, a full, heavy magnolia blossom. It had fallen to the ground in the rain, and now lay in my hand, wetly glistening. Creamy pink, deepening in colour at the centre, palest at its waxy petal edges. I slip it into a bottle filled with water, and carry it home with me at the end of the day. I am thrilled by your attention, and also disconcerted. It is intense, like walking out into noonday sunlight. I’ve never been at the receiving end of something like this. And then I tell myself you are a child, that you cannot know better. Your feelings will turn this way and that, flitting from thing to thing, person to person. Soon enough you will tire of this, and someone else will fascinate you. But it doesn’t seem to wane, your affection, anytime soon.
I think perhaps it is better to push you away slightly, to be a little distant, less accessible. After all, we don’t want you doing something wayward. So I’m polite but more reserved. I duck into rooms if I see you coming down the corridor. I tell you I’m busy when you chance upon me in the library. I walk out of school with my other colleagues. I sit on the lawn with a book, preoccupied. You seem puzzled, though undeterred. But the more you clamour for my attention, the less I give you any. It’s a terrible dance, and I feel sick, but I don’t know what else to do.
On some days, I find paper cranes on my table, sometimes, a dragonfly.
At first I would collect them, placing them on a shelf like a disorderly, inanimate zoo. Now I try telling you that you could take them home to your parents to surprise and please them instead, but you look at me in silence. When I persist, eventually you say you can’t, and you walk away.
This disturbs me, but it isn’t something I can ask you about directly. At least not now. We haven’t built up that kind of trust. I wonder if we ever will. So I speak to the other teachers, the ones who have taught you longer, and ask if they know more about you and your life at home. There are several conjectures. Someone asks, aren’t you an orphan? Or the child of a single parent? No, say the others, they don’t think it’s like that at all, but there is something slightly out of the ordinary with your circumstances at home. Then your maths teacher speaks up, saying if he isn’t mistaken it’s not that you’ve lost your parents but that they live elsewhere, and so your home, at least during the school term, is with your grandparents. Not that you’ve been abandoned, he adds hastily, but your father works in another state, one with few if any, well-regarded schools. My heart goes out to you and your paper companions.
From then on, I am kinder.
You aren’t entirely unskilled at clay sculpture, but I’m more encouraging than I would have been.
‘That’s a fine cow,’ I say.
You look at me doubtfully. ‘It’s meant to be a horse.’
Hastily, I give a talk on how art lies in the eye of the beholder.
‘So it doesn’t matter what I’m trying to do?’ another student asks.
‘It does. But you cannot control how others choose to see.’
You stay back in class, hanging around until the others leave. I wonder why. I don’t think you’re about to ask me about the subjectivity of interpretation. You shuffle up to my desk, papers and books in hand. Your hair, usually braided in plaits, has come undone, your ribbon trailing down your arm. You are twelve, but your limbs seem at odds with your age, like they will settle only a decade later. You will be tall and beautiful, I’m sure, even if now you’re gangly and awkward and coltish. You glance at me, your eyes dark as paint.
‘Have you always wanted to do this?’
I ask what you mean.
‘This.’ You gesture around the room.
I lean back in my chair. No one has asked me this. At least not here. I could