Chapter 32: Tuesday Afternoon, Mischa

Editor’s Note:
The next page is another extract from the journal of Mischa Doeple, dated Tuesday December 7th.

When I got back to our room after talking to the shrink, Bec’s grandmother had arrived for a visit.

I said, “Hello, Mrs Baxter,” and we hugged. I listened very carefully and I think I understood what she said. “Hello Mischa, how are you today?”

So I said, “I’m fine.”

I found out I had could mostly understand her if I listened carefully.

We sat down together on one of the sofas with Mrs Baxter in the middle. She tapped Bec on the arm and said, “Look what I have.”

Then she pulled on her necklace and a locket came out from under her dress. She held up her hand and the locket dangled from the necklace.

Bec smiled and reached for the locket. She wrapped both hands around it and held it for a moment. Then she lifted it up and pressed it against her cheek.

Mrs Baxter said, “I’m sorry, my love, but you can’t have it while you’re in here. If it’s okay with you, I will keep it until you come home so you can take it back.”

Bec smiled and nodded. Then she reached around and hugged her grandmother with one arm while she still clutched the locket in her other hand.

A moment later, Bec let go of the locket and sat up.

Mrs Baxter said, “May I show Mischa the inside?”

Bec gave me a warm smile and nodded. Then she leaned her head on her grandmother’s shoulder and watched.

Mrs Baxter flicked the locket open and showed me two tiny drawings inside. One was Mrs Baxter with her daughter who is Bec’s mother back when Mrs Freeman was about my age. Apparently Bec’s mother had drawn it way back then.

The other was a drawing of three girls, all about my age. I could see that one was Bec and the other two looked similar but different. I thought maybe one would be Tara but she wasn’t there. Then I noticed that one of the girls looked just like the young Mrs Freeman.

Then Mrs Baxter said, “Bec drew this for me earlier this year. This is Bec and this is her mother when she was the same age and this is me back when I was 13. She made us look like 3 girlfriends, hanging out together. I love this drawing. Bec had the older drawing in this locket so she could draw her mother and she used some photos in my house to base the drawing of me on. It looks very fine, doesn’t it?”

Then she said, “Bec told me she drew a larger version and then used the photocopier to reduce it down to size. I asked her for the original for my house but Bec said no. She drew a new one for me from scratch at full size. I have that version framed and in pride of place beside my bed.”

It really was a beautiful little drawing. And I could see how meaningful it was to the Freeman family.

I looked at Mrs Baxter and tried to imagine her as a girl. It was difficult. You see an old woman and for all you know she might have always been that age. But once she was 13 like me and she grew up with her own family and her own group of friends and her own problems.

Mrs Baxter must have seen that I was struggling because she said, “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that I was once so young? They were different times, of course. We didn’t have so many things that young people have now.”

So I said, “You must have seen so many changes.”

Then Mrs Baxter started talking about growing up in a little village near Preston in England. I had to listen really carefully to understand her and even then sometimes I asked her to repeat what she said.

I never sat and listened to an old person talk about growing up like that. It was amazing. She talked about her own life and she talked about what it was like living through things that I’ve only heard about in history class at school.

I can’t imagine what it would be like growing up without computers and cell phones and TVs in every house. Where children could run around and play in the streets and not have to worry about strangers. But it was also a time when girls made their own clothes and had no chance to be a doctor or a lawyer or any of those fancy jobs and women had to stop working as soon as they were married and so on. But she lived through all of that and then she lived through the struggles to get women recognition and equality, one step at a time.

Plus there was the Second World War and the moon landings and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King and all of those history things like that which she watched unfold day by day either personally or on TV or in newspapers from half-way across the world. And then there was the excitement of the first TVs and the first cell phones and all of that. She made it sound so alive because she lived through it and she experienced it all.

I was totally entranced by everything she said. And for the entire time, Bec nestled into her grandmother’s side and listened with bright and sparkling eyes.

It was time for lunch so Mrs Baxter said her goodbyes and gave us both a warm hug.

I needed to go to the bathroom and I said to Bec, “The shrink said I don’t have to have an escort to the bathroom anymore but I feel like I would be more comfortable if you still came with me. Will you come with me?”

Bec looked at me for a long moment and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking but then she hugged me and took my hand and we walked together to the bathroom.

When we sat down for lunch, Alice joined us again. She sat down with her tray and she said, “So let’s see what we get today,” as she lifted the lid off the plate.

It was a chicken pot pie with chicken and some vegetables mixed together plus a tub of fruit salad and a box of juice.

Alice said, “I have to give it to them, the food here is okay. People talk about hospital food like it’s worse than dog food, but this place feeds us pretty well.”

Bec and I both nodded and we all started eating.

We were quiet for a bit, then Alice said, “So what’s news? Is there any good gossip around?”

I shrugged and I said, “Bec and I both have to start doing schoolwork after lunch.”

Alice nodded and she said, “We all go into that room over there. It’s set up like an elementary school classroom with groups sitting at big round tables. We all sit there and work on our individualized programs while a couple of teachers wander around and help us when we need it.”

The she said, “It’s strange because everybody is different ages and at different places in their work. But it doesn’t matter because we all sit there and work on our own stuff. Then in the second half they show some sort of video to the whole group, you know history, or science, or geography or drama or whatever and we have a discussion about it or answer a set of questions or whatever. It’s better than normal school. Apart from anything else, you only have to be there for about 2 or 3 hours each day. You get extra worksheets and stuff to do for homework plus we still have to write our journals in the evening so we do a lot when you think about it.”

Then Bec said, “So what happens if you’re having a bad day and can’t focus on your work?”

So Alice said, “Well that’s the good thing about being here. They just toss you out and you come back in here and chill out. They don’t let anybody mess around. They make it clear that we’re there to work. I hated it at first. I guess I’m not so good with people telling me what to do. But the teachers give you the stuff to do and leave you alone. It’s not like a normal school where the teachers are always getting in your face and telling you what to do – stand up, sit down, stand in line, tuck your shirt in, your skirt is too short – they always go on and on and I end up arguing and get into trouble.

“But here there’s none of that shit. They give you the work and walk away. And if you don’t work they say, “Do you need to leave?” If you do the work, they mostly leave you alone so I’m okay with that. And I like that we go in, do the work without wasting all that time like happens at a normal school and 2 or 3 hours later we’re done and we’re out of there.”

We were finished eating so we cleaned up and then we went off to our tutoring session.

The tutoring session happened pretty much exactly the way Alice had described it.

Bec and Alice and I sat together but we each did our own work. I had some math sheets to do. I was expecting Bec to have the same as me because she’s in the same grade but she had a booklet that her grandmother had brought in. She switched between working through that and helping me with mine. I looked at Bec’s booklet and it was all complicated algebra and stuff. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But when she was helping me it was pretty clear she knew her math. She even helped Alice with her work and that was high school math.

Then there was a science sheet we had to read and answer some questions about. It was about chemicals and minerals and so forth. I think both Bec and I found it pretty easy. Alice had a more advanced science sheet to do about chemical equations so Bec and I ended up looking through her sheet and getting her to explain how to do the chemical equations and what they meant. That was interesting. I sat there thinking, “Wow, I’m learning about high school chemistry and I’m understanding it.”

Then we all watched a history video about the time between the first and second world wars. It talked about the flu epidemic and the roaring twenties and the prohibition and the stock market crash and the depression. I’d heard about some of those things but I found out new things about all of them. Then we had a set of questions to answer about the video that we had to answer on our own. Some of the questions were easy because they were straight information about what was in the video. But some of the questions were hard and made you think about things beyond what was actually in the video.

Then the teachers told us to share our answers with the others on our table and have a discussion about how our answers were different. Bec and Alice and I all had more or less the same answers for the easy questions but we had totally different answers for the thinking questions so we had a really interesting discussion about why we thought our answers were right. Alice is a few years older than me and it turns out that Bec is scary smart when it comes to stuff like this so I felt way out of my depth but they listened to my arguments as carefully as they listened to each other.

Like the last question said, “What lessons can we take from these events that would apply to our lives today?” I mean, wow, talk about a big question. Between the three of us we had enough ideas to write a book. I mean it was mostly Bec and Alice but I put in a couple of things. Like we talked about the flu epidemic and how easy it is for diseases to spread today like the bird flu virus and how bad it would be if a serious epidemic started. And the prohibition in the video is like what they try to do with marijuana now. And we went on and on.

I don’t think I’ve even been so challenged in a school type thing in my life. It was exhausting but I felt like I walked out of there having really learned something new. And one of the things I learned was that I’m not nearly as smart as I thought I was.

As we returned to the main part of the ward, Alice said, “I better take off. I think I need to be on my own right now.”

So Bec said, “Okay,” and I said, “See you later.”

We watched as Alice headed off towards her room and then we went into our room and collapsed on our beds.

I said, “I feel like my head hurts from thinking too much. That was hard.”

And Bec said, “I had fun. Alice has a quick mind. You had some great ideas too.”

I groaned and flopped back. Then I said, “The video was interesting. It didn’t feel like it was dumbed down for children.”

And Bec said, “Exactly. I guess the teachers figured they could show it and we would get something out of it no matter what level we’re at. If they showed a kids’ history video, it would have been okay for anyone at a low level but the rest of us would have been bored.”

Then Bec said, “Did you notice Alice getting restless near the end? Even though she was totally into the discussion she still got restless. No wonder she hates normal school so much. Seven or eight hours of school each day must be torture for her.”

So I said, “Is that why she left us so quickly when she finished? She practically ran away from us.”

And Bec said, “Yeah, she’d had enough. If she’d stuck around much longer she would have ended up snapping at us.”

So I said, “So she left? I got the impression she enjoys snapping at people.”

Then Bec said, “She respects us, remember? I think she’s trying really hard not to mess up our relationship. She’s not going to always get it right but I have to give her props for trying.”

So we relaxed for a while. Then Tara and Liz turned up together to visit. They had come straight from school.

Liz had some work for Bec to do. It was a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Bec’s English teacher wanted her to read and do a report on. The report was to “encompass a discussion of the time in which the novel was written as well as observations of the positive and negative aspects of the book when considered in the context of the political, economic and racial climate of the period, which should then be related to the current political, economic and racial climate.”

My jaw dropped. I said, “Is your teacher serious?”

Bec grinned and she said, “Mrs Stone is always serious. She wants me to read this book and she wants me to write about it and place it in a wider context. She keeps pushing me to do more. I’m going to be sad when I move on from her class. She’s the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

Then Bec frowned and she said, “This is not going to be easy.”

So I said, “You don’t say.”

Then Liz said, “That isn’t all. Mrs Stone said she couldn’t imagine you actually finishing that task so all she wanted was for you to get as far as you could in the time available. Then she said that if you got bored with that, she had a list of books on a similar theme that you could read and tie in to the general project. She thought a book called Roots by Alex Haley would make a good follow up.”

Tara said, “Mrs Stone has gone insane. She wants you to do a project on the entire history of slavery and its effects up to today. That isn’t a book report. That’s a book.”

Then Liz said, “That’s your work for English.”

Bec groaned and slumped. Then she said, “I hate my life. Okay. Hit me.”

Liz said, “I spoke to our history teacher, Mrs Nelson. She said if you did that little task for Mrs Stone then she would count that as your history work as well.”

Then Bec said, “I smell a conspiracy. Go on.”

So Liz said, “I spoke to Mrs Gasbury for science. She said that she couldn’t imagine you doing Mrs Stone’s project without mentioning the words genetics or anthropology. She said that progress in both of those sciences during this era was used in both positive and negative ways and that they could provide an interesting lens through which to view the subject matter.”

Then Bec said, “What else.”

So Liz said, “Our geography teacher, Mr Devrow, said that he was sure you would need to draw maps that showed regions involved in the slave trade, routes followed, crops grown and so on and so forth and he said that would be a fine application of geography. Mr Palu said you already had some math to do and you should keep doing that. He also said to remind you that Economics is the application of mathematics to understanding business and politics and that any study of slavery would naturally lead to a study of the economics which drove it. Then he winked at me and he said that some of that project might have to wait until you got to university but don’t let that slow you down.

Then Liz said, “Oh, and I told Mrs Billings I was compiling work for you to do while you were absent from school but she snorted and told me not to be ridiculous.”

Bec looked at me and said, “Mrs Billings is the art teacher for the class.”

And Liz said, “And Miss M said you should do what you can to keep fit.”

Bec nodded and she said, “Tell Miss M I’ve been jumping rope.”

Then Liz said, “Mrs Stone stopped me in the hall at the end of the day. She said for me to tell you that the regulations said the teachers had to set work for you but since you were so far ahead in all your classes, they weren’t worried about you falling behind due to missing a week or two. She said they’d sat in the staffroom together and had a bit of fun putting it all together. She said nobody would be able to claim they hadn’t met their obligations because that assignment would keep anybody busy. Then she said that I was to tell you that none of them expected you to do much more than read the book and do a book report but if you finished that and have more time available, then you should explore the topic in whichever direction appeals to you. The teachers will give you credit for whatever you do.”

Then Liz gave Bec a printed list of subjects and what she had to do for each subject. It was less than half a page but it pretty much set out what Liz had told Bec. Bec put the book and the list in her drawer and I thought we were going to relax for a while.

But Liz sat there and looked at Bec and she said, “I’ve had my turn. Now it’s your turn. You remembered what happened but I haven’t heard yet. So spill it.”

Bec looked at her friend and sighed. Then she said, “If I tell you will you tell the others? I don’t want to keep saying this over and over.”