The Hunger (2 page)

As he finished the last phrase, a groan rose from the class. The big problem with the enriched classes was that there was always some huge year-long assignment.

Paula didn’t groan. While other students would put off their big assignment until a day or two before it was due and then pull a few all-nighters, Paula had more discipline than that. She was an A+ student not because she was brilliant, but because she was organized. She’d start on her project tonight.

“You have a choice,” intoned Mr. Brown. “If you wish, you can trace back one branch of your own family tree until you get to the person who immigrated to Canada. The bulk of this project will be detailing the historical events that led this ancestor to immigrate.”

Mr. Brown’s eyes gazed around the class then rested on Bob Maracle at the back. “For some of you, this might be too much to ask. Bob, for example, your ancestors have been here for thousands of years.” Bob nodded in agreement. “In your case, you can trace back to a pivotal ancestor and then do research on the key historical events of that era.”

“For others of you,” Mr. Brown continued, “this would be too easy.” He stopped beside Janet, Paula’s gymnastics nemesis. “Your parents just moved to Brantford from Ohio two years ago.” Chuckles rippled through the class. “You can do the same thing that Bob’s doing.”

“If you don’t want to do a family history, you can choose instead to examine a single ethnic group in Canada and determine the political and cultural reasons for that group’s decision to immigrate to Canada.

That didn’t sound too hard, thought Paula. Her mother’s mother, Gramma Pauline MacDonald, lived in town and Paula saw her every Saturday. But Paula couldn’t recall any immigration stories. She had a feeling the MacDonalds had been in Canada for a long long time. Her father’s parents had moved to Canada from Ukraine just after World War II. It would be simpler to interview them, she decided. They lived in Toronto, but she would have plenty of opportunity to interview them when her family visited them over the Christmas holidays. In the meantime, she could start picking her father’s brain.

“Hey nerd-face, I like your glasses.”

Things were not going so smoothly for Paula’s younger brother Erik. This was his first day at Ryerson Junior High, and it was also the first day that he’d had to wear his new glasses out in public. Troy Smith towered head and shoulders above and he deftly grabbed the glasses from Erik’s face and put them over the bridge of his own nose, bending the gold-wired frames to make them fit.

Erik knew that physically he was no match for Troy. Who was?

“Keep them,” said Erik. Then he walked away. Troy was surprised at this reaction. Most kids would’ve tried to grab them off his face, giving him the chance to taunt them further. This was no fun at all. In disgust, he threw the glasses down and kicked them into the dirt with the toe of his Nike. Erik walked slowly towards the school doors, but let Troy pass him at a faster speed. Once Troy was through the doors and safely out of sight, Erik retrieved his glasses. They weren’t broken, but there was a scratch down the middle of the left lens. He cleaned them with the cuff of his sweatshirt, shrugged his bangs out of his face, and put the glasses back on.

He got into his home room just before the late bell rang and sat down at the only desk left. Right beside Troy. “Great,” thought Erik. He looked around the classroom as the morning announcements droned in the background. As long as he could remember, Erik had managed to be in the same class with several of his buddies, but when he saw who was in this class, his heart sank. Not a single one he’d consider a friend. This was going to be some year.

The first class was English, and it was held in home room. Next came French. Erik noted with dismay that he again was sitting close to Troy, who gave him a malevolent smirk. When recess came, he searched for
his buddies from the other class, but when he found them, it was almost time to go back in. By the time lunch rolled around, Erik was feeling really down.

By fluke, Ryerson was actually closer to his house than Agnes Hodge had been. Even though he had packed a lunch, he decided to go home. He didn’t have the heart to walk into the lunchroom friendless and vulnerable.

The house was just around the corner on Oak Street and Erik was home in less than a minute. “Maybe this day isn’t totally lost after all!” He spied a familiar mailer from
Computer Gaming World
propped up on the stoop of the front door. Just a week earlier, he had finally saved up enough money for the computer game,
Civilization II,
and had sent away for it. Erik ripped open the package and shouted for joy. It was his anticipated game. Retrieving the house key from under the welcome mat, he let himself in and headed straight up to his room.

His bed was still unmade from the morning and there were items of clothing in various stages of dirtiness scattered about. He brushed off a pair of socks from his computer chair and sat down, loading the CD before he even thought about lunch, getting back to school on time, or anything else.

As the game clicked through the options, Erik opened his lunch bag and pulled out a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. He absent-mindedly
munched on it as he selected the pre-game customizing options. “Hmmm,” he mumbled, “I’ll be the Indians and I’ll set the age of the earth to five billion years.” For climate he chose warm, and for terrain he chose arid. And for other civilizations, he chose the Russians, Japanese, Germans, Americans, Aztecs, and the Carthaginians. He chose the “king” level of difficulty, which was four notches up in a difficulty scale of six. He bit another piece of peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watched as the game adjusted for his choices. The screen went black except for a couple of squares of green terrain in the centre. He moved his men around and gradually the black receded and was replaced by green land, with trees and hillsides. “I hope this isn’t an island,” he mumbled to himself as he noticed far too many blue squares revealing themselves. “Drat!” he said. It was an island! It was much harder to build a civilization on an island. He knew that much from years of playing the original
Civilization.
He was going to have to develop shipbuilding before he could do anything else. Erik was so mesmerized in game strategy that he didn’t hear the front door creak open. He didn’t even hear the sound of footsteps coming upstairs.

“Why aren’t you at school?”

Erik jumped at the sound of his father’s voice. He turned around and regarded the man, who was so tall and muscular that he took up practically the whole
doorway. No one who looked at father and son together would ever have realized that they were related. Although his job as a construction supervisor provided him with plenty of opportunity for physical exertion, he supplemented that with a daily six-mile run. Erik noted his father’s sweat-covered T-shirt and realized that his father had been able to leave the job site long enough in the middle of the day in order to have an early run. A rare occurrence.

“It’s lunch time,” replied Erik, waving his sandwich as proof.

“Do you think this is a good way to start off the year?” asked his father, who had grabbed a hand towel from the upstairs bathroom and was mopping off his sweaty brow. He cleared a space for himself on Erik’s bed by dumping some more dirty clothes on the floor. “When are you going to clean this mess up?” he asked.

Erik sighed. This was so typical of his father. Nothing he did was ever right. What was so bad about a messy room? And what was so terrible about being home at lunch? You’d think he was an axe murderer, the way his father went on. He couldn’t admit the real reason he came home, because his father was decidedly unsympathetic when it came to bullies. Mr. Romaniuk had urged him to take boxing lessons, karate, anything so he could defend himself, but Erik had steadfastly
refused. He didn’t want to get into that argument again. “I forgot my lunch,” he lied. “So I decided to come home and get it.”

“Okay,” said his father. “But let’s not make a habit of this. I want you to make some friends at this new school.”

Like that’s possible, thought Erik. But he nodded in agreement for his father’s benefit.

“When do you have to be back at school?” asked Mr. Romaniuk, glancing at his wristwatch.

“I’ve got another thirty minutes,” replied Erik.

“Well, finish up with that computer stuff then, and come on outside with your old man and we can shoot a few hoops before I jump in the shower.” Erik knew better than to argue.

When Emily Romaniuk came home from work just before six o’clock, she was delighted to see that, as usual, her daughter had already begun to make dinner. Potatoes were boiling in a pot on the stove, and the aroma of garlic sausages sizzled from the frying pan. Mrs. Romaniuk removed her red silk jacket and hung it up in the front hall closet and then methodically went through the pile of mail that was neatly stacked beside the telephone in the kitchen.

“You’re supposed to call Dr. Del Roy as soon as you can,” called Paula as she pulled apart a head of romaine lettuce and arranged the pieces in a glass bowl.

“Oh darn,” said her mother. “I meant to call him back before I left the hospital.” Emily Romaniuk was the manager of pharmacy at the Brantford General Hospital, and due to cutbacks, pharmacy services for all three local hospitals had been consolidated into hers. Unfortunately, more help didn’t come with the added responsibilities. Sometimes it felt like she lived and breathed her job.

Mrs. Romaniuk rooted through the kitchen freezer and drew out a shrimp and Oriental vegetable Lean Cuisine. “Can you zap this for me, honey?” she asked Paula, handing her the package with one hand as she dialed the telephone with the other.

“Why don’t you just eat what we have for a change?” asked Paula. “I think you’ll like it tonight.”

“You know that I don’t eat potatoes, hon. And garlic sausages? Seriously! I’ll have some of that lovely salad you’re making, though.”

While her mother finished one phone call and started up with another, Paula got the dishes out and plopped them in the middle of the table. She walked out of the kitchen and over to the foot of the stairs, “Erik,” she hollered. “Come down now! Supper will be burnt and you don’t even have the table set.”

Moments later, Erik loped down the stairs and walked into the kitchen. “Smells good, sis. Are you going to make gravy for the potatoes?”

Paula lifted the lid from the frying sausages and
tilted the pan. There was a fair bit of sausage fat at the bottom of the pan, so she added some water from the kettle and some gravy thickener. “Sure,” she said, reaching to tousle her brother’s hair, but he darted out of the way in the nick of time.

Mr. Romaniuk had been home for an hour already and just finished mowing the lawn. He sat down at the kitchen table, his powerful chest and arms still sweaty from exertion.

Paula opened a bottle of beer and set it before her father, and then got out a Tab for her mother. She poured Erik a glass of milk and got a tall glass of ice water for herself.

As she placed the food on each plate, Mr. Romaniuk grimaced with irritation. “Emily, why are you eating that crap again?”

“You know I have to watch my weight,” replied Mrs. Romaniuk.

“Look at Paula,” Erik Romaniuk responded. “She’s cut back a bit and now she’s almost thin. You could learn a lot from your daughter.”

Paula stared down at the food on her own plate and felt her cheeks burn a bright red. She hated it when her parents had this argument, and they seemed to be having it frequently of late. She speared a single round of garlic sausage and carefully chewed, trying to block out the sounds of her parents arguing.

“Good gravy, sis,” broke in Erik. Paula looked over at her brother who was enthusiastically digging his fork into a huge mound of gravy-covered mashed potatoes. The sight made Paula feel slightly ill.

She turned to her father, “We got our projects for multicultural history today,” she said.

He smiled at her and said, “What’s the topic? Not that it matters, I know you’re going to ace it as usual.”

Paula explained what the possibilities were and how she was interested in interviewing Baba and Dido Romaniuk about their immigration experiences from Ukraine.

Her father shook his head. “I very much doubt you’ll get either of them to talk about it,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“They had a rough time,” her father responded. “Your grandfather especially. He went through some nightmarish events. I don’t think you’d be doing him any favours by making him relive them. Just leave it alone, okay?”

Paula agreed, but reluctantly. What was she going to do for her project now?

Emily Romaniuk speared a shrimp with her fork and pointed it at her daughter. “You should interview Gramma Pauline.”

Paula shook her head. “Her family must have come over ages ago. Besides, MacDonald isn’t exactly a multicultural name.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said her mother. “Gramma Pauline immigrated to Canada when she was little girl. She’s Armenian, you know.”

“Armenian?” repeated Paula. “Then my grandfather must have been Scottish.” Paula could not recall ever meeting her grandfather. He was probably dead by now, she reasoned. She knew that he had taken off on her grandmother decades ago.

“Your grandfather was Armenian too.”

“Then how did he end up with a name like MacDonald?” she asked.

“He was an Armenian orphan, and no one knew his mother or father’s name, just his first name, which was Mgerdich, or Johnny in English. He got the name ‘MacDonald’ because that was the name of his sponsoring family.”

How was it that no one had ever told her any of this before? “Do you think Gramma would mind talking to me about how and why she immigrated?”

“I’m not sure how much she even knows,” replied her mother. “Why don’t you ask her and find out?”

After supper was over, Paula gathered the dirty plates and scraped the excess food into the garbage. This was a job that she always elected to do by herself. There was barely any food left on Erik’s plate or her father’s. Her mother had eaten every last molecule of her Lean Cuisine. What the rest of the family hadn’t noticed was Paula’s own plate. She had
eaten most of her salad and that single round of sausage. The rest, she scraped into the garbage.