Pammy was a good curler – one of the best in grade seven. She didn’t have any trouble with her aim, or with getting just the right amount of push into her shot.
Her parents were at the curling rink two nights a week, and then most of Saturday. It was a plain place, full of cigarette smoke, beer, and adults raucously comparing their performances.
The rink was long, quiet, fresh. Pammy was a natural at sliding along on her one slippered foot, rubbing away at the marbled surface with the broom she’d received for her tenth birthday. She wondered how anyone could feel uneasy while curling; it was like singing.
The day of the field trip to the rink dawned crisp and brilliant. Ellen slept in late. She forgot her mittens. The mine whistle was moaning as she slid into her seat, so she missed the Lord’s Prayer, and there was no USSR because the class was heading out first thing. They walked through down the blue-grey sidewalks under a diamond-like sun, their ears and noses freezing. At the curling rink, Pammy chose Ellen to be on her team.
“I haven’t played curling before,” mumbled Ellen, feeling clammy. She gulped.
Festus McGillicutty was at the other end of the rink, organizing the boys.
“No problem,” Pammy assured her cheerily. “I’ll teach you the basics.”
But the basics to Ellen were untenable. She was more artist than athlete. Her shots wobbled, her sweeping was forlorn. Her feet wouldn’t stay put. Finally one of them swung out and tripped Pammy just as she was guiding another team member’s shot down the lane.
“Goddammit!” Pammy said angrily, mimicking her redneck parents. She picked herself up off the ice. “I never knew you were such a loser!”
Ellen’s skin crawled. Her tardiness in the morning meant she hadn’t had time to take a shower. Her long hair stuck to her shivery neck. “You shouldn’t say that.”
“Shouldn’t say what, Mawmouth?” sneered Pammy. “Goddammit?”
“Mawmouth – what the heck does that mean?” crowed one of the other team members. All of them had clustered nearby, on the scent of an impending attack.
“Oh, that’s just Ellen’s little nickname at home,” said Pammy offhandedly, brushing the frost from her pants. “Because she never fucken shuts up.”
She tossed a glare at my Ellen. It could have been viewed as almost affectionate.
“But what the heck is a mawmouth?” asked Cammy, coming closer. Her eyes glittered; she had very long black hair that hung all the way down to her waist. Her mittened hands stroked the handle of her broom.
“I don’t know, something that never shuts up, I guess,” mumbled Pammy.
“No, no,” said another teammate impatiently. “A maw is, like, a set of jaws. On some carnivorous animal. A hungry, greedy, dripping set of jaws. I read about it in my novel the other day, during USSR.”
The group tittered.
“Mawmouth,” they murmured. “Mawmouth. Mawmouth.”
“Well, it’s redundant, anyway,” said Pammy, calm now. “Mouth and maw are the same thing; one’s just more, kind of, hungry than the other.”
Lunch hour was spent at the curling rink.
“How is your sandwich, Mawmouth?” the girls asked Ellen. “Is it a meat sandwich? Are you voracious? Are you rapacious?”
“I think she’s got more of an appetite for words,” suggested Cammy in a sly tone.
“That’s for sure,” laughed Pammy.
Ellen’s stomach twisted with hunger. She hadn’t had time for breakfast – just a slice of bread on the way out the door. With longing, she looked at the lunch kit before her. Ham, cheese, mustard. Carrot sticks. A banana muffin. Apple slices. I need to eat, she realized.
A group of six girls opened their eyes wide as she took the first bite.
Then they crowed.
“She is! She’s voracious!”
“She’s so hungry!”
“Look, she can’t even talk, her mouth is so full.”
When her throat reflexively closed down on the food with a hard gulp, tears came to Ellen’s eyes. After that, they wouldn’t stop. The girls’ faces became bright, hardened with triumph. All the way back to the school, they tossed the whisper, “Mawmouth,” down the line of grade sevens until it came to rest at the feet of Ellen, who limped along behind everyone else.
In the classroom, Ellen put her head down on her desk. It was dark inside her arms, and warm. No matter how persistently they tapped her, she refused to look up. She was down a cozy tunnel and was never coming back. Even the angels in heaven couldn’t locate her.
Pammy eventually shrugged her shoulders and said in a calm tone, “She’s exaggerating. She always does this.” Then she patted Ellen’s back and returned to her seat.
Ellen fell asleep. When she awoke, the rest of the class had gone outside for afternoon recess. Only Mr. McGillicutty was in the room; he was using a long foam eraser to clean off the blackboard. When he turned around, he found Ellen staring at him, her face resting on her arms.
What a tortuous maze of insecurity inside that head, he thought with a sigh.
He’d seen the whole thing. The worst part of it was Ellen – who usually stood up so tall to her friends – cowering before them as if her spine had transformed into pudding. There she was, gulping at their words, sobbing, reduced.
Was it that name they were using? What was it? Mawmouth, that’s it. What kind of a nickname was that? He pictured Ellen’s big mouth, her impulsive expressiveness, her vast loneliness. Mawmouth.
“Feel better?” he asked her.
“Not really.”
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Not really.”
“If I have any experience, it looks like kids being unkind and – well – jerky to other kids.”
“Uh huh. That’s about it.” Her chin trembled atop her forearms.
He went closer.
“Were you having a bad day already, or was it just this?”
“Already,” she breathed. Another roll of tears erupted.
Festus gave her a box of tissues. He hoped she wouldn’t go on to describe everything. There was stuff he knew he didn’t need or want to know.
“Look, I’m sorry you’ve had a bad time today,” he said. “But I have to tell you something.”
He got down on his knees before her desk.
“It’s like life is a big fat highway, Ellen. There are lanes, and we’re all driving, and we’ve all got to do our best to go where we need to go. Your mom and dad, your family, your friends, everyone’s driving down the road. And everyone – everyone – has got their own vehicle.”
Ellen nodded dumbly.
“Well, guess who’s got their hands on the steering wheel, Ellen?”
She gazed at him, looking tired. “Who?”
“You do, Ellen! You! You’re holding the wheel; you’re driving the car. And you can believe in God if you want to, you can ask him for help. But when it comes down to it, even God’s not driving your car. You are.”
Ah, I tell ya, everyone up here was just roaring with applause for that little speech. Finally – finally, someone on earth had figured it out. And an atheist, at that! We all guffawed. The Buddhists had gotten a handle on the truth way back before Jesus, but then they got all sanctimonious about it and ruined everything. Bald monks who’d never even had sex were preaching to mothers on how to be patient while raising children. Sinless, desire-free lamas and gurus were spouting off all sorts of wisdom about how to get enlightened, but none of them worked at factories or as car mechanics or prostitutes. They’d go on about levels of consciousness. It just didn’t measure up. Jesus did say, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” and people listened to him for a while. But that kind of talk was fast becoming archaic. We needed someone like Festus to put it into plain old North American.
For the people, as they say.