Whistling for the Elephants Read online

  Although there were only a few weeks to the endless American summer holidays, Father registered me in the sixth grade of Amherst Elementary School. The school was big with hundreds of students and there was a lot to learn. Not so much in the lessons as in the structure of the place. Even Adam and Eve knew that, if you want a little control, first you have to learn to name everything. Lesson one — everyone had a ‘homeroom’. This was where you belonged. Your sorority as it were. You might spend part of each day elsewhere but your homeroom and, more specifically, your homeroom teacher, was base. Outside the homeroom you had a long, thin, metal locker with a combination lock. In this you kept everything of value and your lunch. My locker was number 69. I was the last to join class 6A and locker 69 had been empty all year. I didn’t know but it had belonged to a girl who, at the age of eleven, had been kicked out of school for ‘going down’ on the assistant football coach. There was a general sense that her unnatural precocity was catching and no one had wanted her locker with its sniggering number. I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know sixty-nine was a funny number. I thought going down was something you did in a lift. I didn’t know why everyone whispered when I approached my locker down the long, dark corridor. I was blinkered. I just liked having a locker with a lock. I thought it was a secret place for secret things.

  My homeroom teacher was Mrs Shepherd. She was a nice woman with black glasses which swept up into great wings at the side of her head. She counted us in and counted us out again each day and, in her own way, also covered history. I suspect she even liked history. She was certainly enthusiastic but her broad Brooklyn accent made all life, past and present, impenetrable to me.

  ‘So, class, let us awl look again at Waallwor One. It was a tearable wor. Lots of people doyed all over Yarrup. It was really tearable.’

  Yarrup? I spent the first week trying to work out what Yarrup was. It was only when Mrs Shepherd showed us a map and combined pointing at it with the word that I understood. Europe. It was where I came from. Although Mrs Shepherd’s picture of a Britain where everyone still blessed Yanks for gifts of silk stockings and Hershey bars was somewhat remote from my own experience. I didn’t tell Mother or Father about coming from Yarrup.

  I got to grips with school basics quite quickly. ‘Colour’, ‘neighbour’ and all other words ending ‘our’ lost their U with no grief on my part. I went to baseball games and learned to shout, ‘We want a pitcher, not a glass of water,’ although I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. I concentrated hard to pick up everything else. The whole school was too big for everyone to get together each morning. Instead of having an assembly we sat listening to tannoy announcements in homeroom.

  ‘This is Coach Harding. All football tryouts will take place on the field this afternoon. Remember — no show today, you don’t get to play.’

  ‘The Recorder Group will not be meeting in first lunch period due to the unexpected demise of Mrs Baxter. Our condolences to the Baxter family and if anyone’s mother teaches recorder could she please call Principal Markowitz.’

  I learned the pledge of allegiance by the second day and would leap to attention, hand over my heart, once the announcements were over. ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible before God with liberty and justice for all.’ It was like the Our Father in English assemblies only a bit shorter.

  I knew my locker combination, I knew the way to the sports field and where to sit at lunch. It was the big stuff I wasn’t sure about. Suddenly I was supposed to have an opinion on a bewildering range of things. No one had really asked my opinion before. America was in a new state of doubt and even as kids we seemed to have to hold an awful lot of truths to be self-evident. Television was beginning to have an impact and every night Huntley and Brinkley intoned the dead of Vietnam. Forty thousand US soldiers dead. Two hundred fifty thousand wounded. On my second day the whole school had a sit-in. I don’t think Amherst Elementary was particularly current-affairs-conscious. It was happening across the country. That year there were more than 1,800 student demonstrations in every type of educational establishment. Our age didn’t mean we didn’t have to be involved.

  Everyone in the class wrote off for silver bracelets bearing the name of an American PoW. You ordered them from the back of some magazine which involved children wanting a Better World and Mothers Calling for Peace. Lots of kids had a bracelet. Each one had a different prisoner’s name inscribed on it whom we supported. The idea was that we weren’t supposed to take the bracelets off until the men got home. Mine was Lt James Hutton.

  Nixon was campaigning for the fall elections on a pledge to get the US out of South-East Asia. Although I wasn’t exactly sure where Vietnam was, I learned to chant, ‘LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’, wore a badge that said Give a Damn and one that said We Try Harder. The first was for black equality and the other was from a car-rental company, but in my mind the message was much the same. I learned the routine. I was for the Black Panthers, against the war, for free milk in schools, against the SST airplane, for free love but against overpopulation. Maybe it was my age, maybe we had travelled once too often, but for the first time anywhere I wanted to belong. I really tried.

  I persuaded Father to let me go to school on the yellow school bus. I thought I would meet people. That’s how I met Gabriel. Gabriel Aloisi worked for Jacobson’s Garage up on the corner of Palmer and Lindhurst, but in the mornings he drove the school bus. He was handsome. Italian handsome. Singing-gondolier handsome. Gabriel wanted to be a racing driver. He drove the big yellow bus fast, swinging into Cherry Blossom Gardens at a quarter of eight like he was Mario Andretti. He was nice to me. He always stopped the bus in front of our house and I was always first on. I’d be standing there as he reached forward for the handle to unfold the door. I guess he must have been around eighteen because I remember the morning he got his letter from the Draft Board.

  ‘What’s it say?’ Gabriel thrust the letter at me. He wasn’t exactly a high-school graduate. Gabriel knew cars, not words. I read the letter over.

  ‘It’s from the Draft Board.’

  ‘It’s from the Draft Board, right?’ Gabriel was a little slow.

  ‘You’ve been called for your “pre-induction physical exam”,’ I continued.

  ‘Pre-induction physical exam. Geez.’

  ‘Tuesday the fourteenth.’

  ‘God damn. God damn. I am a good American, you know that?’ I nodded. I knew this. Being American came with a presumption of goodness. ‘I am a goddamn good American but I am not going to fight no goddamn foreign war. You know what you need to know to be a good American?’ I shook my head. The other kids were piling on the bus and I leaned forward, desperate not to miss what he was saying. This was information that I needed. ‘All you need to know is that the Chevy is a primo car and Bud Harrelson is the greatest shortstop of all time. Gabriel slammed the door shut and took off.

  Since 1964 draft dodgers had been gathering force in the US. They had a fairly straightforward slogan which even Gabriel could come to terms with: ‘We won’t go.’ Gabriel was not the type to run to Canada. It was too far and too foreign. So he just decided not to sleep any more. It was not an uncommon dodge. He figured if he didn’t sleep for ten days or so he would fail his physical and go back to the garage. Gabriel was about four days into his plan when it started affecting his driving. At first we helped him out. The kids took turns standing beside him and steadying the wheel as he drove. Unfortunately our house was the first one on his route (pronounced ‘rowt’). There was no one else on board to correct Gabriel as he made a wide turn into the Gardens, ploughed right through our holly hedge and came to a stop next to our front porch. It so happened Father was sitting there that morning, reading the New York Times. To give him credit he never flinched.

  ‘What, may I ask, is going on?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s just Gabriel,’ said Donna Marie, who had been waiting on t
he corner. Donna Marie lived next door but one. She was the one who thought I had cooties so I never sat with her on the bus. She attempted to unjam our mailbox from the bus door and get in.

  ‘He probably fell asleep at the wheel again. Asshole,’ Donna Marie’s cousin, Dirk, volunteered. Dirk lived over on Hampshire. He was a senior and he didn’t exactly approve of Gabriel. Dirk had very short hair and wanted to be a Marine. I tried to explain to Father.

  ‘No one else’s house would have been a problem. You see, we’re the only ones with a hedge around our lawn. No one else has anything on their lawn that Gabriel could have hit and it’s only that he hasn’t been sleeping so the Army will say he can stay home. After all, the escalation of the Vietnam War was done without the will of the American people. It’s up to the goddamn Commies to sort themselves out, not the US Marines.’ I took a deep breath. Normally the word ‘goddamn’ would have caused a stir but Father wasn’t listening. He was only fixed on one thing.

  ‘He doesn’t want to do his military service?’ Father’s quiet disgust cut through the noise of the bus horn which Gabriel had chosen to rest his head on.

  ‘He doesn’t want to kill people he doesn’t know,’ I explained. ‘It’s… uhm…’

  ‘Un-American,’ said Donna Marie. We nodded to each other in political agreement. It was thrilling. Father folded his paper and came quite close to slapping it down on the porch railing.

  ‘But he appears perfectly happy to kill people he does know.

  Father drove the bus that day and forbade me to wear my Vietnam PoW silver bracelet any more. I felt disloyal to Lt Hutton, but it was probably just as well. The inscribed bangle had already made my wrist go a slightly green colour. It was odd seeing Father drive a bus. I don’t believe he’d ever been on a bus in his life. He sat rigid, driving on the right with disapproval, and never said a word.

  I never heard what happened to Lt Hutton. Gabriel made 4F (Physically Unfit for Service) and wasn’t made to join up. Dirk reported for duty a week later on his eighteenth birthday and was thrown into uniform. He ended up as a stores clerk at a supply base in Santa Monica. Ten days in, he was killed when an unstable consignment of baking powder collapsed on him in the warehouse. After that we used to watch the news with a slightly different atmosphere in the house. Every night Huntley and Brinkley would start by telling us how many Americans had now been killed in action. I would feel sad for Dirk, while Father sat upright with his gin and tonic. I couldn’t help feeling he saw them all as a bad lot and did not mourn.

  Father was coming to grips with America in his own way. Each night after dinner he would spread a US map out on the dining-room table. He had blocked out the names of all the states and he and I would sit trying to remember their names. It was a British Empire attitude.

  That which can be mapped can be ours. Within a week I could have made my way across the Midwest blindfold, but it wasn’t enough. Once we had done the States we moved on to county Ordnance Survey. Through the evenings Mother slept and my fingers passed over new frontiers.

  I carried on making my adjustments. I gave up ham sandwiches for lunch and moved on to peanut butter with Welch’s grape jelly, marshmallow fluff and baloney stuffed in a brown-paper bag. That part was easy. Mother never looked at what we were buying anyway. I never drank someone else’s soda without wiping the top off first, I put a peace symbol on a rainbow up on the inside of my locker and I learned all the words to ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ by Peter, Paul and Mary. I still didn’t have any friends. I tried hanging around my locker between classes to see if anyone would bump into me. There was one girl who looked hopeful. Connie Emerson. She was in my homeroom and I often caught her looking at me. One day I was just turning my combination when she leaned on the locker next to mine.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,, I responded, trying not to look too pleased. Cool, I needed to be cool.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure.’ God, it was going so well.

  ‘The others want to know if you’re a boy or a girl.’ I looked across the hall. A small group of giggling girls were watching. I flushed.

  I pulled my peaked cap low over my short hair. ‘Dorothy. My name is Dorothy.’

  ‘Yeah, but the tie and everything. We thought you must really be a boy.’ Connie collapsed into laughter and ran off with the others. I watched them run. Their arms flailed out sideways and their legs looked all bendy. It was a hopeless girly gait and somehow I knew I would never be able to run like that. I did make one or two other friendship efforts after that but it was no use. I thought about giving up the tie but before I had had time to make all the necessary changes the summer vacation came and I didn’t know anyone. It was only June. The unoccupied months stretched interminably ahead of me.

  Like a colour-blind chameleon, I fumbled at adapting. Mother, however, refused to play the game. As I let my accent grow as wide as the American continent itself, hers shrank to a small town in Kent. She began making pinched little noises as if she were simultaneously speaking and unwrapping toffees with her bottom. I think everything was too big for her and so she withdrew further and further from life. I suppose if she liked anything about America it was the ephemera. She was particularly taken with the concept of the Dixie cup. A childhood in the war had taught her never to throw anything away. She had spent a lifetime hoarding and counting. Until the Dixie cup. It was a very American concept. The Dixie cup was a brand-name paper cup. It was quite small and came in many colours with a matching dispenser. The Dixie company encouraged the notion of a different-coloured dispenser in each room in the house. We had yellow in the kitchen, blue in the bedrooms and, rather shockingly, the all-new avocado in the bathroom. If you wanted a glass of water or a glass of anything in any room you simply reached for a Dixie cup, used it and threw it away.

  Quite often Mother had drinks for no reason at all, so if we shopped, when we shopped, we always stacked the trolley high with multi-coloured cups. About twice a week Mother would make the effort to be up and out before the banks closed and we would go to town. It was a small circuit that we did. First to Johnny on the Spot, the dry cleaner, to collect Father’s shirts, where I got a free Bazooka bubblegum. Then on to the A&P supermarket, which Mother patronized because you got free pink and white dinner plates with any purchase over $10. She would let me buy Oreo cookies and Kool Aid in different flavours just to make sure we got the plate. It wasn’t long before we had enough plates for twenty people to be able to drop in unexpectedly for dinner but they never did. I liked the A&P because of the fruit and vegetable man, Alfonso.

  Alfonso wore a red apron, a white short-sleeved shirt and the obligatory small black bow tie. He was very thin with a crew-cut, which made him look like a pencil with a rubber on the end. Alfonso was quite old by then. He had lines all over his face like one of his prunes but he smiled all the time. A sort of grandfather but without the beard or the rocking chair. He was a man happy in his work, for Alfonso loved fruit.

  ‘It’s a wonderful world of fruit, Dorothy,’ he would say, letting me polish some of the apples with a special cloth. ‘Look at this banana. See this label? That came from a banana tree in the Caribbean. Can you imagine that? That little yellow fruit has travelled further to be with us in Sassaspaneck than I have in my whole life. The Caribbean. Why, they have pirates and palm trees there and everything.’

  Alfonso stroked the Caribbean product as if it had been entrusted to him by Pirate Pete himself He laid the yellow offering back on his regimented display and carefully picked up an apple. He smiled at me. It was a big-toothed smile. Probably from so much healthy eating. He stood polishing the apple on his apron with pride while I did another one with a cloth.

  ‘Did you go to the zoo yet?’ He leaned confidentially toward me. ‘I do the fruit for the zoo, you know. Miss Strange used to come in for it but now I go out there.’ He stood to attention as the manager strode past. Alfonso smiled another flash of teeth and straightened a pineapple b
efore going on. ‘Used to be the main attraction in town. People came from miles around to see the Glorious Burroughs Animal Collection. Even after the shoe plant closed down it kept us on the map for a while. Now pretty much no one is interested. TV, that’s what did it. I think sometimes families go to the zoo on Labor Day or something, but that’s about it. That don’t mean the animals don’t have to eat. Every Tuesday, out I go with the fruit. Course, it’s not as exciting as it used to be. Nothing really escapes any more. You know, when I was a young man I was going home from work one evening and a polar bear come right up Amherst Avenue. You see, Mr Burroughs, John Junior, he was back from one of his trips. He was always travelling. Seen more fruit growing round the world than I have here on my stand. So he’d got this polar bear and he thought he would take it fishing down at the river. It seems people used to do it all the time.’ Alfonso moved a grapefruit for emphasis. ‘You know, Miss Strange told me, Henry the Third of England, he kept a polar bear in his menagerie way back in the thirteenth century. He often took it down to that Thames River in London to catch fish, and he was a king. So it seems John took the bear down to the Amherst River and took off its muzzle. This was probably a mistake but it was brave. They can be mean, polar bears. John was like that. Always trying new stuff. He didn’t care. Well, the waters move fast down by the old house. They were streaming by and so, pretty soon, was the bear. It wasn’t thinking about fishing, it just jumped right in the water and swam off So you know what John Junior did?’

  ‘No.’

  Alfonso chuckled. ‘Why he thought it was long gone so he just ordered another one. I called him to say I’d found his bear outside the store. Gave me a start, I’ll tell you. Not what you expect in Sassaspaneck. You should go out there. To the zoo, before they close it. Take a banana for the gorilla.’