Ellerslie

The bus put me down at the end of a county road in the rain, and a man from the home met me with a van that had a dent in the passenger door and drove me the last mile without saying anything, which I took as a courtesy and still do.

Ellerslie was a stone building with two wings and a chapel in the middle. The gate at the front was iron and stood open, and there was a chain on it that you could see from the road, which meant the gate was not there to keep people out. It was there to be closed. I noticed that on the first day and I never stopped noticing it.

Inside, there was a table by the door with a stack of forms on it. The intake officer had me stand while she filled in the top of the page, and then she asked me my name, my date of birth, my mother’s name, my father’s name, and whether I had any allergies. I answered all five. Then she turned the page and asked me the same four questions again in a different order, and I answered them the same way, and she wrote down that I was cooperative.

Then I was given clothes. This is the part I want to be exact about, because people get it wrong. It was not rags. It was a good gray wool skirt and two white blouses and a cardigan and a coat, all of it clean, all of it used, and every piece had another girl’s name inked out on the tag in the collar. You can feel a name through a tag. I wore a dead girl’s coat for four winters and I could always feel where her name had been.

Breakfast was at seven. It was a bowl of cornmeal mush and half a glass of milk, and the milk was measured, and one of the older girls poured it, and there was a rule about which side of the bowl you ate from first. Nobody explained the rule. You learned it by being corrected.

Over the door of the dining room, carved into the lintel in raised letters, were three words: Mortify the flesh. Reverend Elmer Crane had them put there the year that wing was built, and he read them aloud on the first Sunday of every term. I want to say what they meant in practice, because they sound like theology and they were actually a budget. They meant the mush was thin. They meant the dormitory was cold until nine and hot until eleven. They meant the hair.

The girls’ hair was Crane’s special subject. It had to be off the collar and out of the face and held with a plain band, and there was a list of approved bands, and the list was one item long, and it was in the handbook, which was eleven pages. If your hair was down at morning inspection you lost a point. If you lost ten points you lost a Sunday. Everything at Ellerslie ran on points, and the points were posted on the wall of the main corridor, in columns, in a handwriting that never varied, and this is where the second thing I learned about institutions happened to me: I found my own name on that wall, in the third column from the left, ranked behind girls I had not met yet.

That was in the first week. I stood in front of it for a while and did the arithmetic, because it was arithmetic. Thirty-eight girls, four columns, and my column had more ink on it than most.

The classroom belonged to Miss Farraday, and Miss Delia Farraday was the one adult in that building who taught like teaching was the job. She was about forty and had a bad hip and sat on a stool in front and made us read out loud, and if you read well she told you so and if you read badly she told you that too, and it was not the same voice either time. She kept a shelf of books behind her desk. It was not a big shelf. There were maybe sixty books on it and the bottom row was Bibles, because the bottom row was what people donated, and the top two rows were what she had brought with her.

Miss Kessel did the younger grades. She had a wooden ruler and a habit of using it on the back of the hand, and she did not shout, and she did the standing punishment, nose to the wall and hands behind and up to an hour, the way another woman might water plants, as a thing that had to be got through in the morning.

There was also work, and nobody called it work. Every girl had a roster and mine, that first term, was the refectory tables, with the corners checked. The shoes were issued one pair a year, black, out of a barrel, and you kept them at the foot of your bed on the left side, and if they were on the right side at inspection you lost a point. I lost a point on the right side in my third week and I have never once put a pair of shoes on the wrong side of a bed since.

I met Tess Baird in the second week, because of a poem.

Miss Farraday had us read a poem out loud, one stanza each around the room, and when it came to Tess she did not read her stanza, she read the whole thing, and she read it slowly, and when she finished the room was quiet in the way a room goes quiet when somebody has done a thing you are not allowed to do. Miss Farraday let her finish. Miss Kessel, who had come in for something and stayed, did not.

Tess got the wall for an hour. Afterward I asked her why she had done it, and she said, “It was four stanzas. It is one poem.”

That was Tess. She had a way of saying the plain thing at the plain volume, and it got her the ruler about twice a week, and it never once changed.

She lent me a book in the third week. It was a paperback of poems with a cracked spine and a coffee ring on the cover, and it was not a Bible. She kept it inside her mattress ticking, which is the only place in a dormitory that is not shared, and she handed it to me in the washroom, which was the only room without a window onto the corridor, and she said, “Back by Thursday, and don’t read it in the dorm.”

I read it in the pantry. I read it in four days and gave it back on Wednesday, and the next week she gave me another one, and that was how we did it for a year and a half, one book at a time, out of a mattress, and it is the reason I know how to do anything at all.

The bell rang at nine for lights. The windows had no screens and no locks and there was no reason for either, because the gate was iron and the gate was closed, and there were thirty-eight of us and four columns and one list of approved bands and one bowl of mush. Mr. Crane spoke at chapel on Sunday about the flesh, and every one of us sat in a row and counted the days until we were eighteen, which was the number that mattered, because eighteen was the number that opened the gate.

I was eleven. I had seven years in front of me and I did the multiplication in the dark: seven winters, seven coats, seven columns. It did not frighten me the way it should have. What frightened me was smaller than that. It was the tags in the collars and the names inked out, and the neat ink column on the wall where my name sat third from the left and twenty-ninth from the top, behind everybody. It was my name and it was not, because a name on a wall is a score, and a score is a thing other people keep about you. I had already lived in one house where the score was kept in a drawer. I understood, that first week, standing in front of the wall with my hands at my sides, that I had moved from a house with a drawer to a house with a wall, and that the wall was bigger.