‘I like Anne,’ said Christine, returning Lucy Maud’s classic,’ but I don’t like Heathcliff.’ She dragged Wuthering Heights incongruously from her Mickey Mouse schoolbag, frowning at Carter for support. He laughed, parrying her censoriousness with a question of his own, ‘Why do you think so many women find him attractive?’
‘They are foolish,’ she answered. ‘A man must not mistreat a woman.’
Imperceptibly at first, but inevitably, Christine overhauled her sisters. She made Canadian friends more easily than they, and gradually disassociated herself from them at lunch time, preferring a circle of cheerful older girls, classmates of her Ukrainian friend Jenny, to the familiar comfort of the ESL classroom where Carter ate his lunch with the others.
All three girls were devoted to the school. It represented for them security, opportunity, and an inchoate but passionately-held hope for the future. Their devotion was to cost them dearly. One night, substituting for an absent colleague’s night-school class, Carter noticed that the light was on in Room 241, and went to investigate. There, at ten past ten, the three sisters were writing English sentences on the blackboard, and improvising a little play of their own, giggling at their own inventiveness.
‘You should be at home,’ he scolded. ‘The school is closing now. It’s not safe.’
’But Monsieur Carter,’ protested Christine, ‘the late bus passes at 10:30 and it’s too crowded at home…’
It was a cold, dark December night. Carter hesitated to offer them a lift home, recalling the recent dreary staff meeting, during which an earnest principal and a grim-faced union official had together exhorted teachers to do no such thing. ‘Think of the liability!’ the Principal had hissed. ‘What if you had an accident? What if you were accused of abuse?’
As it happened, the sisters returned home that night without incident, but one spring evening, Cathy, the pretty middle sister, returning alone on the late bus and taking a short cut through a park, was assaulted near her apartment building. The other sisters would not say much about the trauma, except to disclose that the police and the hospital had been involved, and that their sister was recovering. The attack was never mentioned in the media. Whenever Carter asked after Cathy, the sisters, with averted eyes on account of the shame, would say little except to thank him for his concern.
Cathy did not return to school in September. Her older sister Lucy, by then no longer a teenager, left abruptly in mid-semester for an opening at Algonquin College. Christine, by contrast, went from strength to strength. Placed at Carter’s insistence in his Grade 11 Advanced English class, she was the first to see Orwell’s fable Animal Farm as a political allegory, and startled her fellow-students with a passionate denunciation of totalitarianism, correctly identifying the duplicitous Napoleon as Stalin, and his fellow-pigs as the detested Communist Party. She reacted with wide-eyed disbelief to Carter’s rejoinder that Orwell was a disillusioned socialist, clearly sceptical that the lunatic left could claim such a perceptive writer as one of their own.
Anonymous2 years ago
This is a moving story. Teaching is such a noble profession. I wish I could teach longer. And that I Thank you for sharing this. I also wonder what happened to the Trang sisters. Are they happy? Do they remember the days they learned ESL with you? Do they think about their teacher from time to time?
Peter Scotchmer2 years ago
As is the case with so many former students of ours, we inevitably lose touch with them, and they with us.. We ourselves get older, retire, move, or die. They age, marry, move, or who knows? The past recedes into the distance. Perhaps they lose their idealism or become disenchanted with their earlier selves. Perhaps they are not given to reflection. Yes, it is a pity I do not know anything else about the sisters, and about so many of those I continue to remember with affection. I am sure it is true for you, too…. / P.S.