The Most Precious Substance on Earth Page 15

  IN THE PHOTOS ON the Toastmasters website, everybody wears a blazer and smiles. They run international conferences and give emotionally devastating wedding toasts. They deliver eulogies and everybody cheers, “Encore! Encore!” Their charisma is electric. Their handshakes are earthquakes. Confidence makes their skin shine. They’ve mastered the most daunting challenge of all: speaking while being judged by others. According to the stats I looked up before my first meeting, if you offer the average person the choice between giving a five-minute speech to their peers or sitting in a dark, confined space full of Lovecraftian arachnids, they’ll choose the arachnids. Public speaking is scarier than monsters. It’s scarier than death.

  At the Toastmasters meeting, everybody is dressed like a slob and I feel dumb for wearing a blazer, even though I’m only wearing it because I’ve come straight from work. I hang the blazer over the back of my chair. We’re in a rented, over-airconditioned classroom at Dalhousie. Out the window, university students are hunchbacks with backpacks against a red sunset, gripping double-doubles, hurrying away. As people file into the classroom, they smile at me, help themselves to Styrofoam cups of water and store-bought oatmeal cookies, then sit around the horseshoe of tables. The regulars exchange pleasantries, some in thick accents. A cloud of earnestness puffs up above the group like cigarette smoke.

  “First time here?” asks a guy as he slides into the chair next to me. I nod. “Don’t be nervous,” he says, patting my bare shoulder with a damp hand. He introduces himself as Dave. He’s maybe ten years older than me, in his late thirties or early forties, with small, close-set eyes. His strong jaw and grey buzz cut, combined with his paunch, give him the look of an ageing football coach. His muscular legs are spread so wide apart that one of them takes up the space where my legs should go, so I keep mine tucked under my chair.

  “You’ve been doing this for a while then?” I ask.

  “Oh, ages and ages. Public speaking has always been something I’m good at.”

  “Then why did you join Toastmasters?”

  “Well, I’m very competitive.” He tilts his chair back and balances on its two back legs. “Planning to take this to the next level—you know, the competition circuit.”

  “Of course,” I say, though I can’t imagine him pictured on the Toastmasters website.

  “So, how nervous are you?” he asks. He leans in as though he’s telling me a secret, his breath acrid.

  “I’m a teacher, so I’m used to speaking in front of a group. I’d like to get better at it, though—cut down on the ums and ahs, figure out what my weaknesses are.”

  Most of the people gathered are seated now. A woman approaches the classroom door. Her walk is a shuffle, tennis shoes quiet on the linoleum. She’s slight, in a billowy, aubergine caftan over black tights, and her loose black ponytail swings behind her. Her eyes are steely. She grasps the doorjamb.

  “See that girl there?” Dave lowers his voice only slightly, pointing at the door with zero subtlety. “I know her. She’s a regular, too, but she never comes inside. Every week she comes right up to the door but doesn’t have the balls to come in!”

  “So she just watches, you mean?”

  “Well, we close the door before the meeting starts. One day she’ll make it inside!” He laughs, like he’s certain she’ll never make it.

  I think for a moment. “On Reddit I read about a guy whose stage fright was so intense he had his doctor prescribe Valium just so he could attend the Toastmasters meetings. It must have worked.” I make my face earnest. “He attended for years and years and ended up placing third in the international contest. Now he’s a stand-up comic.”

  “Interesting,” says Dave.

  “…and that man’s name is Conan O’Brien.”

  “Wow, really?” asks Dave.

  “No,” I say. “Not really.”

  * * *

  I signed up for Toastmasters because, even after six years of teaching, I’m afraid that when I speak in class, my students hear the droning voice of the teacher from Charlie Brown. That when I ask, “What does Lord of the Flies tell us about humanity?” all they hear is wohwohwohwohwoh. At a teaching skills seminar the teachers union offered at the start of the semester, they instructed us to record ourselves during class and watch the footage back to evaluate our posture, gestures, volume, tone, eye contact, nervous tics, etc. So I borrowed a camera from the library and set it up at the back of my classroom, and then I gave my Grade 10s a fifteen-minute lecture. Later, at home, I played back the recording on my laptop. Or I started to, but as soon as I saw my ogre face, and my Humpty Dumpty body, and the stretch marks on my upper arms, and my shoulders rounded like those of a cartoon vulture, I turned the video off. That was twenty seconds in. After self-medicating with two glasses of wine, I tried again. “Okay, guys,” I heard myself say, in my warbly pigeon voice. “Ummm…we’re going to get started…” Upspeak turns all my sentences into rhetorical questions. “I guess we’ll start with…ummm…” I clicked the Pause button. Smoked a bowl and watched an old episode of Parks and Rec for a boost of positive feelings before I pressed Play again. In a loopy haze of wine and weed I watched the whole damn recording. I felt like I was standing naked in a sorority house, having my flab circled with the blackest available marker. Watching yourself public speaking is something nobody should ever have to do.

  In the recording, I talk about the symbolism of the conch. “It represents order,” I say to the rows of zoned-out faces. Ageing fluorescents flicker over us in the yellow room like in a scene from one of the Hostel films. A student yawns. “Respect, power, ummm…civilization.” Another student extracts his phone from his pocket.

  I pull a conch shell from my desk drawer. I borrowed it from my dad. Every night before he prays, he purses his lips and blows air into the conch. As a kid, I imagined it was the sound of an amicable goose announcing his approach before tucking his beak into my palm. Later, I learned that, according to Hindu scripture, the shell radiates a primordial music—the sound of the universe vibrating. I’ve been an atheist for years, but still, this belief feels exquisite and real. My dad handles the conch so lightly, like a musical instrument; I always understood it was sacred.

  In the video, I hold up the conch with one hand. With my other hand, I open my creased copy of the novel and read, “The conch was silent, a gleaming tusk; Ralph’s face was dark with breathlessness and the air over the island was full of bird-clamour and echoes ringing.” When I lean on the front edge of my teacher’s desk, one of my legs shakes incessantly under my rumpled skirt. I instruct the students to pass the conch around. “Whoever holds this has the power. They command attention. They control the silence.” A boy in the second row whispers to his smirking friend next to him. When the conch reaches him, he blows into it to make a loud honking noise, and the whole class laughs. I chuckle obligatorily and motion for him to pass it on. I’ve set the novel down on the desk, so my hands are empty through the rest of the lecture. I hold them in front of me, flopping down from the wrists at breast level, limp and curled—dinosaur hands. I’m a useless, feeble T-Rex, destined for extinction.

  * * *

  After I tell the Toastmasters group I’m an English teacher, I’m given the role of Grammarian. I try to decline but there are only nine people, not enough to take on all the roles, which include Toastmaster, Topicsmaster, Jokemaster, Timer, Ah-Counter, and Vote Counter, among others—there’s even a Sergeant at Arms. The roles rotate, but this branch has chosen to keep one guy fixed as the Toastmaster, the genial host. The only other person in work attire, he has the slick appearance of a company president, with thick salt-and-pepper hair swooshing back from his forehead, and a pressed shirt with one button undone at the neck. He ushers us smoothly into each segment of the meeting. With the exception of me and an Asian woman named Annie, the others are all men, in varying shapes, sizes, and colours.

  “All right, everybody! Time for Table
Topics!” The Toastmaster rolls up his sleeves to indicate we’re getting to work. “Remember the goal here is to keep your thoughts organized. Be clear and be brief.” Table Topics is a key element of Toastmasters, during which each person gives an impromptu one-to-two-minute speech on a provided topic. Sample topics: Arbour Day, Your Favourite Food, The Difference Between Living and Existing, Bad Movies, How to Get Away with Murder.

  Two people take their turns. Their mouths move and they gesticulate and everyone claps, but I don’t hear any of it. My body shudders with mild panic—as though panic could ever be mild. The feeling is not so much butterflies but insidious plant growth in my chest, roots finding purchase in my gut, a vine winding its way up my windpipe. And then it’s my turn. I stand up.

  “Nina, please answer the following question,” instructs the Topicsmaster. “How do you split a subatomic particle?”

  “Um, what?”

  “Just run with it,” the Toastmaster encourages. “Follow your instincts.”

  “Your time starts…now,” says the Timer.

  “Uhhh, subatomic particles.” I spend five hours a day speaking in front of people, yet this is my opening statement. “Subatomic particles are…well, to begin with, they’re very small.” The Toastmaster and Annie nod and smile. Dave crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. He clears his throat. The Toastmaster eyes him. “They’re tiny. Subatomic. That’s like, smaller than an atom.” I laugh. “Sorry, I’m terrible at this.” Nobody says anything. They’ve been instructed not to interrupt. A few more seconds pass. I glance down and my hands are curled in front of me. I press them down to my sides. I try to remember high school Physics. I try to remember if I even took high school Physics. “I’m trying to remember high school Physics. But all I remember is failing.” This was intended as a joke, but everyone is silent. Annie looks embarrassed for me. The Jokemaster is unamused.

  “Thirty-five seconds,” says the Timer, with finality.

  “I’m sorry, I think that’s it for me.” I sit back down.

  “Good first attempt,” the Toastmaster tells me. “Next time you’ll make it the full minute. The trick is to segue into a topic you do know about—move from the foreign to the familiar. For example, you could’ve talked a bit more about your physics class and what you learned.”

  The truth is I did okay in high school Physics. I drew plans for a hotel to be suspended over the Northwest Arm, the narrow inlet separating the Halifax Peninsula from the mainland. I built a prototype out of a Lucite jewellery box and some old VCR cables. There was a flaw in my calculations though, and my teacher pointed out that the hotel would likely go the way of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge, undulating in a calm breeze then collapsing due to aeroelastic flutter. Hotel guests drowning inside a prism, scraping their fingers against the glass as they tried to escape. After the semester ended, defeated, I removed the VCR wires and gave my mom back her jewellery box. I stopped taking Physics after that.

  Dave clears his throat. “What I might suggest—”

  “You’ll get a chance in the next round, Dave,” says the Toastmaster. With his natural authority he’s skilled at managing the room, and I get why he’s the permanent Toastmaster. He’d make a good teacher.

  Annie is up next. She removes her watch before she starts and sets it down on the table where she can see it. “My favourite food is…oh gosh that’s a hard one. I love eggs. They’re so versatile! You can scramble them, bake them, fry them, poach them, boil them.” She’s killing time. Her eyes swim to the ceiling and I can see her processing, churning up the next thing to say. Every few seconds she straightens up, resetting her posture, as though there’s a thread coming out of her scalp that somebody keeps tugging. She’s wearing a loose floral dress, and as she moves about it swishes around her knees. “And omelettes…” she sighs. “Growing up I used to go on errands with my mom, and we would stop at the street vendors on our way home—in Bangkok, that’s where I’m from, as some of you know. We would stop for kai jeow, Thai omelette. They mix egg with a little fish sauce, sugar, and ground pork, and pour it into hot oil”—she illustrates mixing and pouring with her quick hands—“and then sizzle! And then scoop!” She mimes a chef scooping and sliding the omelette across a wok. She’s transported. She’s Proust. She’s the critic in the penultimate scene of Ratatouille, who takes a scrumptious bite of a humble vegetable dish and flashes back to the French countryside of his youth. “It was like a brown cloud. Does that sound tasty? Maybe not.” Everyone laughs. “But it was. Yummy and crispy and soft. We ate it right there on the street. I had mine plain, but my mom had hers on top of rice with a sprinkle of soy sauce. When I smell eggs cooking, I think about my mom. I haven’t seen her in years, except on Skype.”

  “Beep beep,” says the Timer.

  The Evaluator for her speech is Dave. He has thirty seconds to give his feedback. He pushes back his chair. “To start with, you need to speak at a louder volume.” He flattens his hand and raises it to indicate volume. He slows down when pronouncing the word louder, as though he thinks she won’t understand.

  “Start with the positives, Dave,” the Toastmaster reminds him.

  “Right, right, can we start the thirty seconds over?” asks Dave.

  “Just this one time,” says the Toastmaster.

  “Your speech wasn’t too bad,” Dave continues. “You need to speak louder so everyone can hear you. The thoughts seemed scattered, just all over the place. Like I didn’t think you needed the parts about your mom. It was a bit off-topic. I’m not sure I learned anything from that.”

  Annie nods vigorously and takes notes as Dave speaks, though it’s the worst critique I’ve ever heard. When Dave finishes, the Toastmaster adds, “Great work avoiding the ums. I can tell you’ve been working on replacing them with thoughtful pauses.” Annie beams.

  During the break, I go visit the washroom, which is down the hallway, around a corner, past a study area with comfy chairs. Sitting cross-legged on one of these chairs is the woman I saw earlier, who left before the meeting started. The Shy Woman. Her eyes are closed, and she’s breathing deeply. In that posture, she looks like she might levitate.

  The rest of the meeting consists of three prepared speeches, one by Dave. When it’s his turn, he stands up by the whiteboard, marker in hand. His nipples assert themselves through his faded maroon T-shirt. So far, everyone else has simply stood behind their chair. Dave has decided to speak about the difference between male and female thinking. He tries the marker but it doesn’t work, so he wipes the board with the heel of his hand and picks up a second marker. When he takes the cap off, the room turns pungent. On the board, he draws a straight line. “This is the way a man thinks,” he says. Next to it he draws a mess of loops and spirals, taking up half the board space. “This is the way a woman thinks.” I survey the room. The men laugh and nod. The Toastmaster checks his watch. Next, Dave holds up a photo that shows washroom doors at what must be a bar or restaurant. On the door for the men’s room are four simple letters smack in the middle, spelling blah. On the women’s, blah BLAH blah blah BLAH is written all over the door, in a mess of fonts and sizes and directions, from top to bottom.

  His Evaluator, one of the seven men, suggests a snazzier intro and more eye contact, while praising Dave’s ideas and humour. “Reminds me of the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.”

  I raise my hand.

  “You don’t need to raise your hand, Nina,” says the Toastmaster.

  “Umm, how important are research and facts?” I’m trying to be diplomatic. “Like, you know women don’t actually think in squiggly lines. I’m pretty sure I read that men’s and women’s brains are basically the same.”

  “It’s satire,” explains Dave, glaring. “You’re meant to observe. This is your first time here. You don’t have the necessary experience to offer criticism.”

  I shut up.

  We conclude by det
ermining who will prepare a speech for next week. “Nina, can I add your name to the list?” the Toastmaster asks me.

  “Umm, I guess so. How long does it have to be exactly?”

  Dave jumps in. “About the length of a miniskirt: short enough to be interesting, but long enough to cover the essentials.”

  “Four to six minutes,” says the Toastmaster.

  * * *

  When I was a teenager, I used to imagine somebody was constantly watching me, having set up a surveillance system that followed my every action. If I did something wrong, like being rude to my parents or spilling Gatorade on myself or farting or crying un-beautifully, I’d imagine my viewer missing the imperfect moment, because they suddenly had to go get a snack. Or I’d think, Take 2, Take 3, and imagine a director’s clapperboard slapping closed, erasing my mistakes. I do almost the same thing while practising my Toastmasters speeches over the next few weeks—I stand in front of the mirror or my cellphone camera, and as soon as I fudge a line I start over. As a result, the intros of my speeches are flawless; the rest is a word-blur.

  Practising for the first speech, I can’t get my failed Table Topic about subatomic particles out of my head. My idiocy is a brain chorus: “Uhhhh…like…sorry…” Stupid idiot failure loser I hate myself. I rewrite the speech in my head. But if you could rewrite it, it wouldn’t be a Table Topic. After my first prepared speech, a short introduction to myself, the easiest possible topic, the Ah-Counter tells me I said um forty-three times. For the next week, every time I hear myself say um in regular conversation I want to scream.

  I sign up for my second prepared speech, determined to squash the ums. After I deliver the speech, the Ah-Counter tells me I said um forty-seven times, and I go home and actually do scream, dropping my face to the floor and muffling my mouth with the carpet. Thankfully, I live in a building with a concrete frame.