Helen Ho
Mr Ebanks took it upon himself to take me around the school one last time – reminding everyone on each floor as we walked around that, “it’s Ms Wu’s last day,” to receive the same response: an apologetic thank you, it was so good to have you here, we’ll miss you. Four months prior, Mr Ebanks had done the same thing – leading us around each floor while reminding everyone we passed it was my birthday. I was going to miss seeing him every day in the morning, waving at me through the glass window of the school office before I arrived.
We went to his classroom and I sat in the chair behind his desk for the first time, and I asked him if that was what it felt like to be him. He said, “it feels good, doesn’t it?” We went to my classroom, and he instructed me to touch each of the empty walls, saying, “thank you walls, thank you chalkboard, thank you classroom.” We went to the cafeteria where we had eaten lunch together for the last year and he said, to the walls and the benches, “you’re always welcome to come by and eat with us here. Other things might change but at least we know that the lasagna special won’t.” I told him I would try, and we both pretended to not know what we were actually saying.
We went out into the parking lot and shared what would probably be our last cigarette together. I told him I was quitting. He said, “why, people in Montreal don’t smoke?”
I told him that I wanted to run a marathon. It was hard to run a marathon, see, if your lungs were black and shrivelled up. I told him that Mrs Lithgow let me into the labs a few months ago, after she found out I was leaving, to see the dissections. She let me up to the front of the class to cut up a piece of pig kidney. Even kidneys can be affected by smoking. My clothes smelled like formaldehyde for the rest of the day.
Mr Ebanks asked me if I had ever run a marathon before. I said, no, but that I cried whenever I watched people do it. He told me that where he was from, they ran the marathon in a closed loop. He said it was one of the easiest marathons in the world because the Cayman Islands were entirely flat.
“Maybe I could run that marathon and not have to quit smoking,” he said. “Ha ha ha.”
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Both of my parents were artists: my mother was an abstract painter from Winnipeg; my father took photos in the back of his father’s corner store in Toronto. My mother came in to redo her passport photos when she was twenty-five. She was wearing her best red sweater. My father said that at the time, he had no idea that someone’s face could get that pink from the cold. He asked her if she had a hat. She said she did, but she hadn’t worn it, because it would have messed up her hair for the photo. He said, it’s a good thing you didn’t then, because the wind has fixed it for you.
Winnipeg is colder, my mother always says.
I asked her, what about Montreal?
She has never lived in Montreal, so Winnipeg is colder.
I asked my mother once why she picked Toronto.
“Because your father was here.”
She has only been back to Winnipeg twice since meeting my father: once, after they got married, and a second time, a year after I was born, when her dad had a stroke. She stayed for four months to look after him. My father would take a photo of me every day to attach to an email chain for her. They kept doing this after she got back; for twenty-seven years, my father meticulously catalogued my growth. It was something we hadn’t talked about, even though I was moving – the death of this catalogue. It was strange to think that these photographs would end abruptly after I moved – as if the girl in them had suddenly stopped aging or died. It was strange to think that was how Toronto would remember me – the girl whose photos stopped aging.
◆
My friend Adriana, who was studying to be a doctor at Queens University, took a weekend off to come see me before I left town. We went and got lunch at the bistro down the street. It felt like a winter thing; we would always go to the bistro in the winter before she moved. Now, going to the bistro would be a winter thing from before I moved. “You know,” Adriana told me, “it’s not really a bistro – bistros are more French.”
I told her maybe it was what you could call a nouveau bistro. She asked me what I meant by that. I said maybe because they used to serve French food but then they decided they could still call themselves a bistro while serving other foods: perogies, cheesecake, all-day brunch. We both ordered a coffee and sat near the window, to people-watch. She asked me, “Montreal winters are really cold, aren’t they?”
I told her I didn’t know, but that I was excited to find out.
“Has Jamie said anything?”
It seemed inevitable that we would circle back to Jamie, but I hadn’t expected Adriana to remind me of my failed relationship so soon – or maybe I had just forgotten how to-the-point she was. I pulled the ends of my sleeves over my fists. I wasn’t sure how to answer her question, because Jamie had said lots of things and he also had said nothing about my move.
“But has he like, said something?” She asked when I told her this, “I mean, like, has he asked you why or asked to keep in touch, or…”
His face popped into mind, smeared as if behind dirty glass. I remembered Jamie had said, maybe in the future, but just not now. I remembered Jamie had said, I think of you very dearly and I do want to keep you in my life. Come to think of it now, those were the only things I could remember Jamie having said to me. I could remember that school had just started that week, and that Ms Marsh’s classroom was suffering from a leaky ceiling. I remembered that it was Brianna Newell’s birthday that day, because her friends had decorated her locker, which was just outside of my class. When I thought about the end of us, it seemed as though there was hardly anything there at all to begin with.
I wasn’t sure why I came around to telling him I was moving – I had barely told anyone else. I think it was just hard to imagine a world where I didn’t know him anymore. When I told him I was moving he got a very strange look on his face. “Montreal,” he repeated back to me. “For how long?” I told him the answer: indefinitely. We finished our lunch together, and for the first time, he asked for one bill, lightly placing his black credit card on the tray when the waitress returned with our long receipt. I felt, against my better judgement, satisfied. I was so satisfied I hadn’t tried to say another goodbye after parting ways at the subway; I gave him a one-armed hug and walked home without looking back. For the first time since we had been together, I had moved him to act. It felt as though it hadn’t mattered, up until then, what I did.
I told Adriana he hadn’t. I told her he barely even said goodbye to me, just that he wished me well. She would just have to accept that as the end of things, like I had, like he had decided.
◆
After school, Mr Ebanks and I went down the street to the coffee shop. It was more out of the way than the one across the street from the school, but was less populated by students as a result. Still, as it happened, a few of the girls in Grade Twelve were there with their laptops spread across a table, drinking Frappuccinos. “It is Frappuccino Friday, after all,” he said.
“How’s your last day going Ms. Wu?” asked the girls. “Are you sad to be leaving? Will you miss us?”
I told them I would, but only some of them.
“I bet you’re actually happy to be leaving, ‘cause then you don’t have to deal with teenagers anymore.”
I told them that I had actually been very happy to know some of them.
“We wanted to give this to you earlier,” said the girls, “but we weren’t finished and we wanted to make sure it had everyone’s signature on it…”
They handed me a cream coloured envelope with the words: TO MS WU printed on the front of it in pink marker. I thanked them as I opened it – all of their faces smiling in anxious excitement to see me view their handiwork. The card was blue, with THANK YOU! spelled out in bubble letters and surrounded by flowers. The inside of the card had THANK YOU MS. WU! WE WILL MISS YOU! scrawled across the middle, flanked with dozens of signatures and messages on the top, bottom, left and right. I spotted the messy handwriting of my best students and the barely legible scribbles of other, less favoured ones.
It was very sweet. I told them this much. For the first time all day, I felt a quivering in the base of my throat. My eyes felt hot and wet. I swallowed it down, and told them, thank you, thank you all so much, this is so kind, thank you.
The girls asked if they could hug me. Ami first, then Sarah, then Olivia, and the rest followed suit. I said, yes, sure, okay. They took turns, Ami, then Sarah, and Olivia, and Violet, and Sam, and Caitie. They each thanked me for having been a good teacher. They told me they would miss seeing my outfits. I said, I’ll come visit, I’ll see you guys around. They asked me if they could follow me on Instagram or Facebook. I told them if they could find me, I would allow it. My chest felt heavy, and my ears were hot. I said, you’ll all do great at University, or college. Mr Ebanks bought us both coffees and we said we have to go now, to the girls. I said, good luck with everything, girls, good luck Ami, good luck Sarah, good luck Olivia, good luck Violet, good luck Sam, good luck Caitie. Bye, bye, bye.
◆
“I’m trying not to think of it as goodbye,” Mr Ebanks said, when we had walked back to the school. “because it’s not goodbye. It’s nice that you’re getting out actually. I think there is going to be some other movement with staffing soon. Some layoffs. You’ll have more time to do stuff you want to do. Art and stuff. You should start painting again. There’s a good arts scene in Montreal. That’s when I had the most time to do stuff, was when I lived there. And I wanted to do stuff, when I lived there. I was like Leonard Cohen, but a lot poorer, and a lot less talented.”
I asked him if he really thought I could paint again.
“I do. I honestly do.”
We did one last loop around the courtyard garden inside the school, which was usually closed in the winter, but Mr Ebanks had asked the janitor for permission since it was my last day. I asked him if he ever thought he would leave this place and he said no. I asked him if it bothered him how they treated him; too many kids in his classroom, no aid, cutting funding for the teams he coached. He said it did but it didn’t matter what he felt – they did this whenever there was going to be another round of layoffs. In just one year he would be on sabbatical. I flipped off the office through the glass and Mr Ebanks laughed. He said, “yeah, you’re better than this place.”
I admitted to him that I didn’t think that was true. I just wanted to be upset with something. I told him I thought it was better to be sad leaving a workplace than to be happy because it meant that you had a good time there, that it was an important part of your life. I don’t know if I necessarily believed it, but that’s what I told him.
Mr Ebanks agreed. “It’s probably better,” he said, “to be in a new place when you’re figuring out what you want. To have so much distance from a place you know so well.”
He had met his wife in Montreal. That’s why I picked it. I didn’t tell him this.
We lingered in the front of the school for a long time, as if we were students. I wanted to say, I thought adults were past this. I wanted to say, we can just get a drink sometime. I’ll come for lunch, you should come to visit. Bring your wife. We can go to the galleries. We can get coffee, get lunch. Maybe I’ll finally have a boyfriend you can meet. You can watch me run my marathon, we’ll help each other quit smoking. I wanted to say all of these things but they wouldn’t come to my mouth. Instead we talked about things like movies and all the old jobs we had worked.
He told me, “when I was your age, I was the poorest I’d ever been. You’re going to be okay.”
It’s so weird, I said to him. Because I saw you every day, and now I won’t see you anymore.
“I know,” he said.
I wanted to say, I’ll miss you. I said something else instead.
“Yeah,” he said, “we will see each other soon.”
I thanked him again for my coffee. I wished him good luck on everything again. I reminded him to take good care of my plants, of my kids, of himself. I said, have fun when you go on your sabbatical, take lots of pictures. I said, I’ll miss our walks. I said, yes, yes, I will come have lunch with you whenever I’m back in town. I said, yes I will keep painting, I really want to. Bye, Mr Ebanks, no, not bye. See you later, Clark, see you later. Thank you so much. Drive safe. See you later.
BIO: Helen Ho has not worked a permanent full-time job since she graduated. She is based in Toronto. PHWOAR! magazine is her first (solo) publishing venture. She was inspired by the fine people over at Taco Bell Quarterly, after she was published in their 5th volume.
2 responses to “offboarding”
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I read this while eating breakfast and shed a little tear. It’s my first day at a six month contract and I hope I like it and am sad when it ends.
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Helen, I think you are a terrific writer. The little details in this story really got me in an emotional level, and how you connect this story with Ms. Wu’s personal background and social environment make this a truly absorbing, clever piece of work. I wish to make a movie you wrote in the future, and I hope you’ll find a full-time job you’ll be happy in!
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