Best Canadian Stories 2018 Read online

  These sentences alone serve as explanations for why we read this genre.

  Food for Nought

  Shashi Bhat

  This student of mine has turned in an eating disorder poem. She’s not the first. There’s one nearly every semester—thin, with loopy handwriting. I admit there is something poetic about self-starvation, and though Jessica’s poem included a tired metaphor about a broken ballerina, she also surprised me by describing hipbones as shark fins jutting from ocean water. A month or so ago she turned in an impressive sestina about mirrors. It’s clear this poem’s about her, which makes it hard to give feedback. “Try to experiment more with enjambment,” I write. “Too many similes?” I query. I consider writing “This poem makes me want to be sick.”

  Grade 10 English is the period after lunch, but because I spent my lunch hour at the QEII visiting my father, who has just had a heart attack, I’m eating the sandwich I brought with me at my desk. It’s kind of a sad sandwich—potato curry on Dempster’s multigrain, but one slice of the bread is the loaf end, because that was all I had left. I have it in one hand while eating, hoping I have enough time to finish chewing and marking before class starts, when Jessica comes in early, presumably because we are workshopping her poem today. It’s the third or fourth poem they’ve written for me; I’m never sure whether to count the haiku or not. “Hey there,” I say stupidly, through potatoes. She adjusts her lean body neatly into her front-row seat, and for the next seven to ten minutes, she watches me eat my lunch, which, I realize, too late, is composed entirely of carbohydrates.

  While examining him after his stent surgery, the doctor had said to my dad, “Oh, you’re Indian. You’ve been eating too much butter chicken!”

  “I told him real Indians don’t eat such things, and our South Indian diet is very different than what you see in restaurants here. In fact is the utmost healthy cuisine,” my dad said to me. He eats nothing but rice and vegetables. He doesn’t eat butter, salt, cream, or fried foods. I’ve never seen him eat a dessert, though he once claimed to have a weakness for maraschino cherries. He’s been a lacto-vegetarian his entire seventy-two years, except for one single bite of a hot dog he took at my tenth birthday party. Lying in his hospital bed, he still regretted that hot dog: “All of you were eating them,” he said, “you and those friends of yours, eating hot dogs with such relish”—he laughed at his intentional pun—“and I thought, this is a real North American item I must try...” I told him not to blame that hot dog for his current situation, and that my doctor friend said Indian men have notoriously small arteries. I was sorry I said it, because my mother, who I had forgotten was in the room with us, started to cry. She was wearing the same colour blue as the plastic chair she was sitting on, and it looked as though she’d grown four metal limbs.

  The rest of the students arrive. Some days my class looks particularly hostile—there’s the frowning one and the one who always crosses his arms and the one who rolls her eyes when I use Pretty Little Liars as a hip pop-culture reference. I wonder how aware they are of their facial expressions. The best semesters are the ones when I have nodders, students who nod whenever I say anything even half true. “Poetry is still relevant,” I say, and they start to nod. In my Psych 101 class in undergrad, the professor told us if you are in a conversation but don’t know what to say next, you should start nodding, and the person will be motivated to keep talking. Nodding can influence the nodder’s own thoughts, too, so even if I believed that poetry was entirely irrelevant—which I don’t but I’m just saying— if I nodded vigorously enough, I could convince myself otherwise.

  So we start class and I talk about last night’s episode of Pretty Little Liars and how that show has way too many suspicious hunks. I say something trite about body image and the media, as an easy segue to talking about Jessica’s poem. “Sooo, what did we like about this poem?” Two other girls seem to be texting each other. I see one type on her phone and the other start suppressing laughter, and then she types and the first girl smirks. If only they weren’t laughing, I could pretend they were texting about what a great teacher I am.

  “I like that this poem is relatable,” says one student who I’d been calling Mike the first month of the semester because that’s the name on my attendance sheet, but then he told me he prefers being called Matt, except I can never remember in the moment which it is. So now when I say his name I make the M sound and sort of muffle the part after that.

  “This poem flows really well,” says another student. I like her, despite her use of poorly defined verbs. She wears unassuming hoodies and showed up mid-semester with a nose ring. I think we would be friends if she weren’t my student.

  “Well, what’s up with this rhyme scheme?” says my devil’s-advocate student, and then I hear, “I don’t know if anorexia is really worth writing about,” from my controversial student. The class erupts into a fantastic debate about whether some topics are more worthy of literary rendering.

  “Just look at Seinfeld,” says our one nodder, “It’s a show about nothing!”

  “But that’s not literature!” another student practically shouts. I’m not even participating in the discussion, just sitting back and picturing this scene as a scene from one of my favourite movies, Dead Poet’s Society or Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dangerous Minds or Sister Act 2. Excellent movies about excellent teachers, where all they have to do is deliver some quotable quote—“Play the sunset,” or “Once a marine always a marine,” or “I’m not really a nun”—for their classes to pass the standardized exam or win the national choir competition. Twenty minutes pass and I conclude the discussion by gently discouraging one student’s suggestion that the poem be made into the shape of an hourglass.

  I give a brief lecture and then assign an in-class writing exercise. Five minutes before class ends, I look up to see if they’re still writing. Jessica is not writing, but has her arms stretched out in front of her, her pencil clenched in both hands. With their flexed tendons, her arms look like the braided wires that hold up a suspension bridge. Her head bends down almost to touch her paper. It might be a yoga pose. Her hair, falling over her arms, is of such an indefinite brown that when it goes grey, probably no one will notice.

  Two weeks later I’m grading poems at my parents’ house in the North End. My dad has returned from the hospital and taken a leave of absence from his job as a real-estate agent. He spends his time discovering innovations from a decade ago. “I just opened a Twitter account,” he tells me. He has it open on his laptop screen while another window streams Slumdog Millionaire. Lately he’s been really into Indians who’ve succeeded in Hollywood. “Indians have come such a long way,” he says, and starts googling pictures of the actors. One features the ragamuffin children from the movie wearing tuxedos to the 2008 Oscars; another has them lined up at the Mumbai visa office. He turns the screen to show my mom.

  “That was us!” he says.

  “Speak for yourself,” says my mother, chopping a large pile of vegetables. We’re in the kitchen. My dad and I are at the table, and my mom seems to be cooking dinner with foods I’ve never seen in our house—kale and flaxseed and avocadoes—I can’t imagine how she’s going to combine it all. She pulls out an egg carton from the fridge. I am certain my parents have never eaten eggs before, a thought that’s confirmed when my mother cracks the egg by tapping on it with a spoon. She breaks it over a bowl and attempts to separate the white by using the spoon to scoop out the yolk.

  “The nutritionist suggested egg-white omelettes,” my dad says.

  “And salmon,” says my mother, shaking her head.

  “And she said to stop eating white rice,” my dad adds. “Can you believe it? I’ve been eating white rice two meals a day since I was a small boy.”

  My father launches into a story about growing up in a village house. It sounds like the home of a cartoon gopher: clay walls, red dirt floors, root vegetables piled in a corner on a sc
rap of burlap. My father’s sister still lives there, her back perpetually bent at a ninety-degree angle, a result of the house’s low ceilings and doorways, and of carrying heavy things for long distances. My father claims they took ten-kilometre walks with bags of rice hoisted up on the tops of their heads. This image clashes with the one I have of him yanking bags of rice from the trunk of his SUV.

  “But one day,” my dad continues, “there was no rice in the house.” They went ten days without rice, eating curries made from gourds as they waited for their arecanuts to be harvested and sold so they could afford to go to the store. “For an Indian, rice is everything,” he says, closing his eyes. I remember the time he made mushroom risotto from an Uncle Ben’s packet, stirring, tasting it with a look of surprise, then stirring again, patiently, as though he could coax it into tasting better.

  I don’t know how to respond. You can’t trade stories with people who’ve lived a long time, because yours will come out meaningless. You can’t trade stories with people who’ve been hungry.

  I root through my pile of poems, find Jessica’s, and read it aloud.

  “I don’t know what to do with this,” I say. “We discussed it in class, but it’s like there’s something missing from the discussion. Everyone loudly tiptoes around the fact that she’s writing about herself. Of course it’d be worse if they did acknowledge it…”

  “Don’t you think you should inform someone? Her parents? Or the counselling office?” asks my mother.

  The guidance office in our school consists of a gym teacher in a skirt suit. It’s clear: a girl in my classroom is gradually destroying her body. But then, aren’t the smokers out by the bus stop doing the same?

  “The first time somebody turned in a poem like this, I handed it back with a little note saying she could talk to me if there was a problem or I could make her an appointment with the counsellor. The student never came to me, but one of my student evaluations that year said I should ‘mind my own goddamned business,’” I reply to my mother, who has somehow burned the omelette and is scraping the pan off into the sink and rinsing it, gagging at the smell.

  Perhaps it’s mass hysteria—all the other students start writing about their bodies, too. We read one poem about budding breasts that actually uses the word “budding.” There’s one about skin picking that I recommend the author submit to the school arts magazine. There are only two boys in my class, and one of them writes about the pressure to take steroids and the other writes about being short. Jessica proposes a class project: “Let’s build a plaster woman,” she says, and explains that we should each contribute a body part, even the boys (to symbolize a non-binary view of gender). Then we will fasten the parts together with wire.

  “We could write lines from our poems on it,” suggests the impassive student, and the nodding student begins to nod, and soon everybody is nodding, and I agree, since really you can do anything in an English class as long as you assign a writing response afterward.

  The next day they bring in rolls of plaster of Paris bandages and economy-size tubs of Vaseline. We fill empty yogurt containers with water from the bathrooms and space them out on the desks. One student plays music from her tablet, a mournful playlist full of violin solos. It’s not what I thought my students listened to, and I wonder how well I know them, despite their thinly veiled autobiographical writing. The humble notes of a bassoon form a backdrop to nineteen people covering themselves in plaster by dipping crumbly sheets into cold water and molding them on to greased upper arms and calves and necks and noses. It looks like a plastic-surgery recovery room. One girl carefully covers her chin, the waffle weave bandages spreading upwards like wings.

  Two girls each volunteer a breast, and one more says she’ll do her upper thighs. They build a privacy curtain by draping jackets over chairs and backpacks in a huge pile. One of the boys heads over there, where he’s left his backpack—“Gotta check my phone,” he says, and I point him back to the other side of the room.

  “Can we use your stomach? You have such a flat stomach,” somebody says to the likeable student, and Jessica looks angry. The likeable student declines, wrapping her arms protectively around herself.

  “I was going to do my hand,” I say to her. “Why don’t you do yours instead?”

  She offers her hand up to them—“Why would we want your hand?” somebody asks. Jessica says she’ll do her stomach, and instead of going behind the privacy screen, she lifts up her shirt and knots it high above her midriff. Three girls begin rubbing Vaseline on her and wrapping plaster around her in the shape of a corset.

  I excuse myself from the classroom, promising to return quickly, though honestly, I want to get away from all the bodies. At the guidance office I find the school’s one counsellor, who is wearing sweatpants today. “Hey Joyce,” I say, “congrats on the Senior Girls’ win last week.”

  “It was all them,” she says, swivelling her chair to face me. “They’re a hardworking bunch of kids. Really put in the effort to improve.” Volleyball trophies decorate her office shelves. “Can I help you with something?” she asks.

  “Well, I have a quick question…say one of your girls was showing signs of...a personal problem. An eating disorder. Would you confront her about it, or…?”

  “That can get serious,” Joyce says. “We had a player at an away game once who vomited so violently it ruptured her esophagus. We had to take her to the ER in Moncton. You better give me the student’s name.”

  On the weekend, I go with my parents to the gym because my dad has signed us all up for a discount family membership he found on Craigslist. We walk purposefully into the lobby, where we are suddenly unsure of what to do with ourselves, never having been inside a gym before. My mom signs up for a spin class and later, disappointed, tells us that “spinning” is only another word for indoor cycling. My dad experiments with weight machines before a gym attendant hurries over and tells him to stop.

  I escape to an elliptical machine. I am thinking about what an odd contraption the elliptical is, and how it doesn’t translate to real life the way a treadmill or bicycle does—I imagine separating this machine from its base and using it for travel—and then I worry that if I don’t concentrate, I might fall off and become tangled in the equipment’s swiveling parts, when I think I see Jessica immediately ahead of me, climbing on to a treadmill. She walks for a while and then starts running. There’s an episode of Full House where D.J. starts dieting and over-exercising. In one scene she walks off the treadmill and immediately passes out. One of the show’s numerous father figures has a concerned talk with her. D.J. never skips a meal again.

  I notice that on the treadmill next to Jessica is another one of my students, the nose-ring wearer, the one I like best. I hadn’t realized they were friends outside of class. I wonder if Joyce has called her to the office or telephoned her parents. Does she know it was me who reported her? There’s a giant mirror on the gym wall, and I imagine the girls spotting my reflection and glaring at me in unison. I leave the elliptical under the pretense of buying a bottle of water. I imagine going to school on Monday and finding an empty, boycotted classroom. I imagine a workshop mutiny, where everybody disagrees with every single thing I say—all nineteen of them sitting in their desks, frowning and crossing their arms and keeping their heads perfectly still, two of them texting each other to say that I am not a good teacher after all.

  The school lobby forms a T-shape with its intersecting hallways. At the top part of the T, inside a display case about nine feet long, is the plaster woman, wired together and suspended with rope. It looks like a body cast without a body, displaying its hollow eggshell insides. They’ve installed it in a sideways swimming position, with one arm stretching forward and one backward, bent realistically at the joints. Her outside is painted in streaky maroon and powder blue—the class couldn’t agree on a colour. She shimmers garishly under two coats of varnish. Instead of clothing, she wears glit
ter that spells out lines from the class’s poems in confrontational block letters and alluring italics. I lean close to read them and they are all about acceptance and hope and loving your body—lines from poems so sentimental that the students themselves, when forced to read their work aloud to the class, blush and stammer, admit to having written them the morning they were due.

  I turn left with the intention of heading to my classroom. It’s early, so the hallway is empty except for one caretaker and one chair outside the guidance office, where Jessica is sitting. She sees me and says, “I don’t have an eating disorder.”

  “It’s okay,” I begin, but she interrupts.

  “No. I don’t. Nur is bulimic.”

  Nur is the name of the likeable student, the one who uses the word “flow” in workshop. When confronted with this class project, she did not eagerly sacrifice her body to the cold strips of wet plaster. She unveiled her hand from under the long sleeve of her shirt, which billowed like a poncho when she sat near the air vent.

  Around the corner in the hallway behind me, Nur’s hand, narrow and bony and now replicated in plaster, is fixed to somebody else’s forearm, behind glass. Her hand’s so small it holds only a single letter, the “o” in the word “steroid,” likely not even a word she’d find meaningful to her situation. The “o” could easily be mistaken for a sparkly hair elastic.