Swimming carnivals aren’t my thing. I’m allergic to chlorine, so you’ll be hard pressed to get me in a pool these days. But as a teacher I had to attend swimming carnivals once a year. When I was younger and more enthusiastic I took my turn as house patron of the house that always lost every carnival. I would run up and down the edge of the pool cheering my house on, harass unwilling students into the water, paint everyone blue with thick zinc. I exhausted myself for very little reward, and gave up the job after a few years.
In later years I appreciated the iridescent aqua of the pool, unmarred by shadows cast by trees. The view of an Olympic pool under a crystal blue sky decked with mounting cumulo-nimbus clouds, is quite spectacular, especially when it’s lined with hundreds of sun worshipping students. I tried to attend.
The best jobs for teachers at any carnival are recording scores, either on large sheets of paper or on computer screen. These jobs are in the shade, with seats, so I didn’t get them. I got to judge races which means standing at the end of the pool in the blazing sunshine, with a stop watch timing the person swimming in your lane. Woe betide you if you forget to click the watch when the starter gun fires, you have to explain yourself to the recorder who is usually derisive of your ability. Now I wear glasses, so looking down to the edge of the pool is a problem, and this is compounded when carnival organizers insist the judges stand facing into the sun. Big floppy hats and sunscreen aren’t enough protection, and normal glasses preclude wearing sunglasses. So judging was always a trial for me. Depending on the organization you did between one and two hours on your feet, getting sunburned on your sunburn. And you learned how dodgy a process choosing race winners could be, increasing your own disillusion with such days.
The other job I regularly scored was toilet duty. After a blistering time with the stop watch you were able to find yourself a place where you could decently watch the kids going to the toilet without appearing to be a paedophile. Close enough to the toilet block to walk to the scene of the various crimes students commit noisily or smokily when they think you’re asleep.
One year, after doing my time at pool’s edge, I took the book I was reading to the embankment outside the toilet block, and read. I had started Memoirs of a Geisha to check if it was suitable for students to read, got sucked into the story and wanted to continue. I’m good at looking up from the page every five minutes, and reading doesn’t make me deaf, which the students should have realised.
Memoirs of a Geisha has a great cover: a white painted geisha face with a bright red, ambiguous mouth but no eyes or nose shown, and the title plastered across the bottom. Different covers of this novel have similar impact, engaging and confusing you all at once.
It didn’t take long for a teacher to comment, not on the cover, but on the book itself. It seemed they had read it recently (the film had not been released yet). They loved chapter one, with the tipsy house and the image of the little girl slipping over and being rescued. I concurred, although I found the tipsy house a bit contrived, and I read on.
Another teacher arrived, doing some spot checking. She also commented on the book, and how involving chapter one had been. By this time I was deep into the infamy of Hatsumomo, but no-one mentioned her or Sayuri’s ugly would-be lover.
Eventually I went to lunch, sitting on the bench outside the club house to eat and relax. This time it was students who asked about the book. Like: ’Whatcha readin’ Miss?’ You need to understand that I was the teacher responsible for the morning reading program. Every school morning I motored up and down the school, seeing as many kids as possible, making sure they were reading. I filled buckets with free books from every source I could find, engaging the help of family members. Our objective was to gain the interest of six hundred teenagers and their disillusioned teachers. I tidied book buckets, washed book buckets (why do people put chewing gum in them?), refilled book buckets. I loaned students specific books, found comics for them and generally bullied everyone into reading something. I also rewarded readers with stickers and devilish easter eggs. So the fact that I actually found time to read anything myself was a miracle, and here I was doing it in a very public, loud speaker noisy venue.
In the afternoon on toilet duty again, more teachers praised the book, loving chapter one. Very few of them had ever been seeing reading at school, they were always too busy with roll making to engage with a novel or magazine. In this duty session I did have to stop reading to attend to a large pizza delivery accomplished over the fence while other staff were busy. Oddly enough reading didn’t block my hearing or my olfactory senses. The pool doesn’t sell pizza and students weren’t allowed out, a little like the Geisha house.
But by clean-up time, I’d read a considerable amount of Memoirs of a Geisha. Enough to know that chapter one was scarcely representative of the whole book. It set the scene for Sayuri’s sale into slavery, but it did not establish the romance of the distant businessman or the villainy of Hatsumomo and the machinations of Mameha. For the next few days I toted the book around with me, grabbing moments to read, to finish it. There were lots more comments from students who saw it sitting on my desk on top of piles of marking, taking last precedence, but getting there.
The end of the novel disappointed me. It seemed unlikely that an overprotected Geisha would learn English quickly and flourish in America. And I was confused about how an American male writer knew things about Japanese geisha’s. But no-one else was interested, so I had no discussion about these conundrums.
Out of all of this, I was left with a new feeling. Somehow I had become the team talisman. I was like an idiot savant, not much good at swimming and other sports, but great at reading. Community attention had focused on me because I read. Not because I was successful at something, or was beautiful or tragic, but because I took a book to the swimming carnival.
I tried the process again at a cross country where I was provided with a chair and a checkpoint that everyone passed early in the day, leaving me with a lot of peace under a gum tree. I read two long chapters of Wild Swans. Pale green cover, gold writing, very classy graphics but no faces. Teachers commented on the book, but kids ignored it. Perhaps they were more involved at the cross country. Everyone had to walk or run. At the swimming carnival lots of kids just sunbathed, socialized and ate. They promenaded around in their bathers, showing off. They had time to notice their crazy teachers habits. Not so much at the cross country. Or perhaps they had grown accustomed to Miss carrying thick novels around, reading a bit at a time.
Whatever the reason, it didn’t help in morning reading. I still had to use the Uncle Buck method of persuasion: if you don’t read, you walk with me. It was sooooo embarrassing to have to walk around the school with Miss, kids ran back to the safety of class where they could sit looking at the first page of the book for as long as possible. They might even read the first chapter and the blurb so they could pretend they’ve read the whole thing. And I didn’t even have to wear my Uncle Buck pyjamas to embarrass them. Encouraging reading is just so un-cool.
Since then, I’ve had a similar experience on a train. On one long trip to Sydney I read People of the Book which had a woman’s face and part of her torso on the cover. It’s not quite as arresting a cover as that of Memoirs of a Geisha, but other passengers would see the face on the book and go quiet, sneaking little looks occasionally. Someone asked about it, but hadn’t read it. There was the same attitude all over again, so now I think it’s the face. Human beings respond to faces from birth, it’s wired into us for survival. When people see a face on a book they respond intuitively. Perhaps graphic designers know this, and that’s why they put faces on the covers of magazines. Someone should tell them all those faces on magazine racks make one confusing crowd. One book in a train carriage is different.
And I’ve also learned more about the floating world of Memoirs of a Geisha. Japanese people have been telling versions of this story for hundreds of years: The handsome Prince meets a young girl from the lower ranks of the aristocracy, falling in love at first sight. The Prince (Genji) watches the girl (Murasaki) grow more beautiful and cultured for years, but he marries and has other romances that never become permanent, until something pulls the lovers back together again. This is the universal story of unrequited love told with lavish pictures, sometimes satirized, but finally finding its way into Manga and the modern world. The Japanese drawings of the story generally show the whole figure of the characters, but the faces are white in a sea of colour and pattern and so they stand out, just as the face on Memoirs of a Geisha stands out.
So now I understand more about the impact of the cover of a book, particularly the cover of Memoirs of a Geisha. But nothing has dulled the magic of that afternoon in the floating world of the swimming carnival.
