One February, Mum made me write notes on Scooby-Doo valentines. She called out “run–on sentence” and “comma splice” before ordering me to scratch my patchwork title, then other ones: Klara, and Alice, and Ashlyn, and Eddie—Dom and Nick. But us kids knew these last two, the oldest, most pungent boys, as Dominic. So, when I had to give them two valentines, they latched onto me together, crushing their jaws into my hand. Tooth–marked, I flung fractured crayons at their heads, and shrapnel spread on impact. They were an occasional terror, Dominic, sometimes bruising us kids, always sucking up to the adults.
But by spring, the twins had divided their attention between us and our teacher, Miss Mandible¹. She’d half–sit, half–lie in her desk chair, exhausted after our grammar lesson, by our disregard for her constraints. Her lethargy only encouraged the twins who, just that last winter, would help us animate our Polly Pockets. But in March they learned to deploy Diary of a Wimpy Kid hardbacks as bludgeons, seemed to favour this kind of play. Once, they even plucked Eddie from our lunch table, thwapped his head with the purple book, and crushed him face–first into the partition.
Today, the twins occupy the carpet, and race Hot Wheels into the wall so fast they crack while us kids sit criss-cross applesauce around Miss Mandible’s desk. We release mournful giggles over our half–mother’s half–death, soothe her with whispers, dust off her cloth shoes which are squishy because the world is hard on her bones. Our work continues until we grow impatient and begin to pick at her layer of nylon stocking. We want to rip through to her, but only cue unexpected snooze–slurries of words. Her phrases don’t register in our little brains, but we nearly piss ourselves in euphony, mimicking her syllables—someone actually bursts. Still savouring the finish of Miss Mandible’s codswallop in our mouths and ears, we wipe down at the sink, pat dry.
When we turn back to the desk, a knot of dust passes from one of the twins’ hands into our teacher’s lower jaw. She blinks to life with some virulent mindset, and the reeking twins sprint away, cackling like they’ve made a joke. Miss Mandible, after recovering from her slip in our pee, clenches her jaw and charges. We wail in North Korean funeral fashion as she smacks Dom’s lips and Nick’s butt like this is the UFC.
Miss Mandible punishes by splitting, like today is March’s pioneer school field trip during which our teacher was Jennifer. We had to call her Mrs. Miller in the museum’s schoolhouse despite overhearing, outside, Jennifer’s complaints about her boyfriend’s non–proposal. Still, we didn’t question Mrs. Miller’s pseudonym; the grade eights had told us disobedience in pioneer times guaranteed use of the strap, but more importantly, we were convinced calling her “Mrs.” might make her happy.
Life inside the schoolhouse was just wood and lacquer chips fracturing under our little fingers, theoretical dissection of a cow sketch on blackboard, our revolted labelling of its beef cuts. Mum told me, after her divorce, in chopped sobs and present tense, how she married Dad in that same schoolhouse. I remember my anxious righthandedness etched on the slate—Dom, dunce capped for uttering “Jennifer”—Nick’s sobs about his hatless status and separation from Dom. Us kids found our connections with Dominic akin to our bout with chicken pox, yet we got over the itching, and we cried seeing them apart. But Miss Mandible, chaperone Doug, and chaperone Suzie laughed at our grief, singled each of us out with index fingers. Each adult watched our individual embarrassments, analyzed Klara’s soggy cheeks, Eddies slack mouth, my darting eyes.
So, on the bus ride home, us kids chose to revolt, to slip Dominic some Twizzlers we’d, for preparation’s sake, practiced strapping each others’ wrists with. We peeled the strips in clumps like Scotch Tape off the roll, they were all we had to heal, sugar was the only way we could speak on the bus, the adults would destroy any written notes, they’d tear our words apart, our voices to dust. Dominic’s moping hand reached for us, flexing, only to flick our offerings to the floor and yank away. The culprit erupted a lone head out over the seatback. It was Nick, who cut us off with chaperone Doug’s commandment: “You aren’t allowed candy.”
¹ Character from Donald Barthelme’s “Me and Miss Mandible”
Nathan Erb is an undergraduate student in Carleton’s English program, concentrating in creative writing. His work has been published by the Carleton English department and FASS.
