“Are you in university, Wayne? Are you up at Memorial? Tell me what you’re studying. You were always so good at math and science, and art too. I remember when we put the class diagrams of ocean life up on the walls, you had the best drawing in the school. Some kind of anemone, wasn’t it?”
“It was a Tealia anemone.” Wayne was surprised Victoria Huskins remembered his drawing. He had spent a lot of time working out the symmetry of it.
“I always loved the grade six science projects. Are you studying any science now?”
“No.”
“Really? I thought for sure you would do something in science or engineering. But you were good at art too. Are you doing some kind of design or drafting?”
“I’m not at Memorial.”
“Are you at one of the technical colleges?”
“I’m not at any kind of college. I’m working.”
Victoria Huskins had unwrapped her burger but now she looked at it, wrapped it again, and put it in her purse. “People don’t know this,” she said, “but you can reheat a burger and it is every bit as good as it was fresh. What kind of work, Wayne?”
“I’m working for one of the wholesalers on Thorburn Road.”
“What kind of wholesaler?”
“Food. I have my own refrigerated van. I make deliveries all over St. John’s and part of Mount Pearl.”
“What do you deliver, Wayne?”
“Meat. Fish. Different kinds of sausages.”
Victoria Huskins looked him in the eye. She did not linger on his hair or his clothing or his makeup. “So you are selling meat from a van.”
She had not asked him about his appearance. They were a thousand miles from Croydon Harbour. She waited for him to tell her more but did not appear to be curious about his maleness or femaleness.
“I never thought of going to Memorial,” he said. “I’m working on figuring out a lot of other things.”
Now her face changed. “What kind of things?”
Wayne felt his own story amass as a cloud. He could not be coherent about it. He wanted to talk to someone but he did not know how, because somehow the facts, with their tidy labels and medical terms, reduced his whole being to something that he did not want it to be. How could he sit here and tell Victoria Huskins what the doctors had labelled him without reducing himself to the status of a diagram like the one she had mentioned: his grade six diagram of the North Atlantic Tealia anemone? He could not begin to explain, so he sat without words. He did not know if he could trust her, and even if he could have trusted her he could not explain his whole being with words. The cloud rose in him and reached his throat, where it amassed as a blockage that felt leaden and sorrowful. He felt it as a lump that threatened to silence him.
“You are sitting here,” Victoria Huskins said, “the picture of misery. I know what happened at the hospital, Wayne. When you were with me in junior high. Did you know that?”
Wayne had not thought of himself as “with” Victoria Huskins in junior high. He had not thought of her as knowing anything. His father had always made it plain that he should not say a word about his condition to anyone in Croydon Harbour.
“I know everything that happened that day and night, because I made it my business to know. My job meant I needed to be on top of what was going on. It was all confidential, but I do know what happened and I know how it has led to where you are now.”
“How did you know?”
“I asked a friend, Wayne. A friend who had a long history of working at the hospital. I asked Kate Davis. She was the nursing administrator there her whole life, and a very close friend before she died last winter. Kate was my dear companion, and I asked her to get a copy of your file because I needed to know what was going on. I needed it to help me know how to deal with you as a student, and with Thomasina Baikie too.”
“But you fired Thomasina.”
“I didn’t fire her, Wayne. The Labrador East School Board wanted to fire her, because someone saw her in the hospital with you during school hours and she had not notified your parents or followed any of the correct procedures.”
The lip gloss that had been applied by the man who resembled Robin Williams had begun to bother Wayne.
“I convinced them to temporarily suspend her. I told them that while she had broken rules she had done it because it was an emergency situation, and I couldn’t have told them that if I had not believed it in my own mind.”
The lip gloss felt gooey on his mouth. He took a napkin and wiped it off, and he thought about the other makeup that the artist had applied to his face and his eyes. He could feel it on his skin.
“That’s the reason I needed to see your file. But Wayne, that’s not important now. What’s important now is why you aren’t at the university, or at college, or doing anything at all with your mind and your talents.”
Over Wayne’s face were two layers of makeup: the foundation and the daubed powder. He began to feel as if his face was smothering under the paint.
“Youth has carried you so far. That’s what I say about all the children passing through my school.”
Wayne remembered how he had not been sure what to think about the eye makeup when the artist had shown it to him in the mirror. He had wondered if it gave him a harrowed look, a kind of false vulnerability that invited people to look at his face in a way different than anyone had looked at it when he presented himself as male. He had these thoughts now as Victoria Huskins questioned him about his mind and his talents, and he did not know what to tell her or what to tell himself. All he knew was that he had to get to a sink and some water and wash the makeup off his face. Why was it called makeup? Did it claim to make up for some deep failing inside a person, and if it did claim to do so, how could the claim be anything other than a façade and a lie? The makeup exaggerated something. Wayne was not sure what it exaggerated. It exaggerated something and diminished something at the same time, and the green shoes had begun to pinch his feet. He felt as if his feet were growing larger with every moment, and his body too, pressed against the seams of the new pants. He knew his body was not really growing, but he knew too that it did not want to be confined in the new outer casing he had found for it at this mall, and it did not want to listen any more to Victoria Huskins, whose voice surrounded him like a third layer of something clammy and alien, on top of the makeup and the clothes. He knew she meant him no harm, and neither had the makeup artist or the salesgirl at Fairweather. But he remembered a cotton shirt and his favourite jeans at home, if you could call it a home, on Forest Road, and he ached to go there and wash the mask off his face and put cotton next to his skin and let it breathe.
“You start out with all the potential,” Victoria Huskins said, “and you’re young. But what happens is, one day you wake up, Wayne, and potential is a thing of the past.”
He did not want to hear this because he already knew it. What was more, he felt that if potential had existed in Victoria Huskins’s other students, it had perhaps not had a chance to exist in himself. Had it? He felt his father had never believed in him. His mother had hoped but had lived under a layer of sorrow throughout his childhood. The only person who knew whether he had ever had potential of any kind, the only one who had ever told him the truth, was Thomasina Baikie. He did not want to sit here talking to Victoria Huskins. He wanted to see Thomasina.
32
Treadway’s Gold
“DAD?”
“Wayne, I’m going to describe to you where I am and I’m hoping you’ll know where that is.”
“Dad?”
“I’m not lost but I’m in a situation where I can’t figure out where to go.”