by Raji Jayaraman
Audio Version
It didn’t matter that what Addie and Maddie did or didn’t do in their personal lives was none of our business. We made it our business. We thought their behaviour begged some questions, and we made it our mission to find answers. As far as we were concerned the evidence pointed in only one direction. A scandalous one for the conservative community in which we were schooled.
First things first. Addie and Maddie were what they called each other and we called them, behind their backs. Officially, Addie was Addison Richter and Maddie was Madeleine Walker. Miss Richter and Mrs. Walker to us. Maddie was in admin, so we didn’t have much direct interaction with her. She was brick-shaped and didn’t walk so much as waddle. She was married to Terence, who was head of middle school. Both of them smiled constantly. It made you wonder how their faces didn’t hurt. Addie was the phys ed teacher. She was a permanent fixture in our lives. Each week, we had her twice for regular PE, twice for intramural sports, and then if you were on a school sports team, an additional three times. Because she did so much PE she was incredibly fit despite, what seemed to me at the time, her advanced age.
Addie was born in the mid-thirties, which means that she must have been around fifty by the time she entered my consciousness in middle school. The fact that she was, at that age, a Miss and not a Missus made her immediately suspect. Unnatural, even. The story we initially floated was that she had had a fiancé, but then he was drafted into the army and died and that broke her heart, and she remained hopelessly in love with him, disavowing men forever after.
That story turned out to be as watertight as a sieve. In its initial telling, the fiancé had died in World War II. Then one person did the math, and another noted that child marriages were illegal. Luckily, Addie was American so WW II wasn’t our only go to. The Korean War was out because of that child marriage business. That left the Vietnam War until some investigative journalist type ruined it by pointing out that Addie had long left the U.S. by the time the war had broken out, so where was she supposed to have met said fiancé?
All this fiancé garbage was just a prop anyway. We needed to find a good explanation for why she spent all her time with Maddie. Those two did everything together, and I mean everything. They chaperoned hikes and video evenings, played tennis, attended church, sang in chapel choir, did everything that most adults in the school did, together. Always together. Sometimes, they were accompanied by Terry, with whom Maddie had several children. But he was clearly just the third wheel. The bone in the kebab.
On hikes, Terry led the pack while Maddie and Addie brought up the rear. When the two of them played tennis, Terry cheered from the gallery. In choir, Maddie sang soprano and Terry sang tenor, with Addie wedged between them in the alto section. Bizarrely, this configuration was repeated at church services and movie viewings. On these occasions, the seating arrangement should have been Addie-Maddie-Terry, because Maddie was married to Terry and Addie was Maddie’s friend. Instead, it was Maddie-Addie-Terry. That blew our minds. Our sexual lexicon went no further than L and G, and even they made us blush. B, T, and Q didn’t figure. The rest was gibberish, and plus denoted addition. Surely, the only reason why Terry would go along with this nonsense is if he was complicit. So, with characteristic ignorance and lack of imagination, we concocted “Terry the Fairy”.
To our minds, Terry checked all the boxes. He wore pastel-coloured dress shirts, he walked with a perceptible swing of the hips, had a slightly nasal voice, and—this was the most damning—he was extremely nice. At some stage, as head of middle school, he created the Pollyanna award. The way it worked is that every week, middle-schoolers submitted nominations for a fellow student they had witnessed doing a good deed, and then the winner of the award was announced in assembly.
The first couple of weeks of the Pollyanna award were heartwarming. In week one, Annie won for volunteering at the library. No surprises there. Annie was a saint. Week two: Naeem won for helping a sixth grader with his homework. That made sense. Naeem studied a lot and was a helpful boy. Week three: Gino won it for carrying a kid with a twisted ankle to the dispensary. Terry was pleased. We were mildly incredulous. Gino was a nice guy, but class clown was a full-time job. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, but giving Gino the award made the Pollyanna tower teeter a bit.
Then, in week four, Terry pulled the fatal Jenga block. He stood at the microphone in front of the assembly, beaming. The paper in his hands trembled with excitement as he announced: “This week’s winner of the Pollyanna Award is Varun Joshi,…” He looked up briefly, searching for Varun’s face in the amphitheatre. There was pin drop silence. We couldn’t wait to hear about Varun’s good deed. He was the meanest eighth grader in living memory. His parents’ marriage was on the rocks. He was suffering, poor fellow, and he made sure that everyone shared in it. He skipped class and got other kids to do the same, he harassed the girls, he drove little kids to tears, and brought bigger ones to their knees.
Terry read on, his voice brimming with hope that this award had given Varun just the incentive he needed to turn the corner, “…for nursing an injured bird back to health.” The room was stock still as we contemplated the absurdity of this: if Varun had found a bird with a broken leg, he would have broken its wings and then stomped on its head. The silence lasted a split second before everyone burst out laughing. And I mean everyone including Varun, who walked up to receive his award from Terry, guffawing. Pollyanna died that day. It was just as well because, in truth, the only person in middle school worthy of the award was Terry himself.
Public opinion on Terry’s personal inclinations was divided. He was, after all, a married man with kids to boot. More pertinently, he didn’t have a male companion. The same could not be said for Addie, whose questionable choices were further evidenced by two rituals that bookended every PE class: push ups and showers.
School semesters were divided into quarters, each of which was devoted to a different sport, or group of sports. Over the course of the school year, we had athletics, field hockey, gymnastics, basketball, volleyball, softball, and racquet sports. The eighth sport for boys was soccer. Soccer was also the girls’ eight sport until we hit puberty. We were never told whether breasts were meant to be a superpower or handicap. Either way, once they turned up soccer was benched for a potpourri of activities some of which, in my view, barely qualified as sports: archery, golf, netball, aerobics and, of all things, square dancing.
PE class always began with warmups. We’d start with a couple of laps and then have to do ten sit ups and ten knee push ups. The latter two were conducted in pairs, ostensibly for support but mainly for peer monitoring. The laps and sit ups weren’t the problem. Addie watched us run and counted as we passed the finish line. During sit ups, one member of the pair would hold the other’s feet and count, with Addie’s hawk eyes ensuring that the backs of heads bumped the ground.
The problem was push ups, because we all wore baggy t-shirts that initiated ground contact well in advance of our chests. This is where Addie’s pairs solution kicked in. One person would do the push ups and, to make sure that they weren’t cheating, the second person would kneel next to them in a demi-child’s pose, with one arm extended under the push upper’s chest. A push up only counted if your chest touched your partner’s arm.
Ignoring its somewhat problematic nature, this system would have been fool proof if sworn enemies had paired up. Predictably, they didn’t. Addie wasn’t stupid. She smelled collusion from a mile off, and her remedy was to conduct random audits. Paired with our BFFs, we’d set to work fake pumping, synchronised with exaggerated grunts. One minute your t-shirt was grazing your friend’s forearm, with six push ups in the bag. Next minute the auditor was at your side, and you knew what you had to do to earn the remaining four.
After PE class, we’d shower in the locker room before heading to our next lesson. The room had rows of lockers at one end. At the other end lay a large, tiled space with six or seven shower heads lined along two adjacent walls. The shower area was cordoned off from the rest of the locker room by a shoulder-high wall, and you entered through an opening on the far side. As we took turns showering in this panopticon, she’d park herself on the locker side of the room, facing the shower area, with her arms folded over the top of the wall and chin resting on her hands. Standing there, she would chat about everything on God’s green earth, seemingly oblivious to what we considered our irresistibly nubile bodies.
The preponderance of evidence—her inseparable companion, Terry the sidekick, the push ups and showers—led us to only one conclusion. We whispered about it in the hallways and made jokes behind Addie’s back in PE class. Everything she did was the target of ridicule. We showed her no respect. At some point, the boys got a second sports instructor, Mr. Reddy. He was beloved by all. Soon, everybody (not just the boys) was calling him Coach. Because there were two instructors for the boys and only Miss Richter for the girls, Coach sometimes helped out with intramural sports. Soon it was Coach this, and Coach that. When Miss Richter gave us pointers, we’d say, “But Coach said that’s wrong.” “But Coach said I should do it this way.” You could see her frustration mount until, months into our back-talking and back-stabbing she declared, more in sorrow than anger, “But I’m your coach too.”
She was right. In fact, she was much more than that. She was the person who single-handedly built an unparalleled school sports program, in the middle of nowhere, against all odds. This was the eighties. India was experimenting with Nehruvian Socialism, complete with five-year plans and strictly enforced import restrictions. It was incredibly difficult and prohibitively expensive to procure decent equipment for any sport besides cricket and hockey.
Establishing such a rich and varied school sports program at an Indian school, in that era, was a massive feat. We wanted for nothing. Addie built us clay tennis courts and concrete squash and racquetball courts. We had hard courts for (bigger) ball games, and fields devoted to athletics, archery, football, and hockey. The auditorium was stocked with gymnastics equipment and an AV system through which Jane Fonda encouraged us to grow buns of steel, and some midwestern farmer bellowed at us to bow to our partner, bow to the corner, and then do-si-do.
That was just the physical infrastructure. She returned from annual holidays in the States with trunk loads of kits and gear, financed with money raised through her mission. How she managed to procure import permits, I’ll never know. At inter-school competitions our performance was forgettable, but our get-ups were legendary.
You would think that for all that she did, we would feel some gratitude. Show some respect. But we didn’t. We were far too busy dissecting her personal life for evidence of (what in that world constituted) nefarious behaviour. Did we have any business judging her and spreading salacious gossip? Of course not. Do teenagers talk shit about adults in their lives? All the time. If someone had told us to stop we would have told them to mind their own business, with no sense of irony.
Because Addie was such a constant presence in our lives, the question was never whether we would talk about her. It was, at best, how we would talk about her and what we would conclude. That’s where I wish somebody had told us about epistemological razors. Because they may have given us pause, if only fleetingly, on our countless descents down the rabbit hole. The three that come to mind, curiously enough, actually have the word “razor” in their names.
Occam’s Razor because the simplest and best explanation for Addie and Maddie’s relationship was that they were fast friends. How many people who are fit as a fiddle wait up for their laggard friend on hike after hike? How many have a friend who teaches them a new sport in mid-life? How many single women go to the movies with their married friend and enjoy laughing at its punchlines with that friend’s husband? How many married women with young children schedule regular alone time with their single friends? As for Terry, he was probably an enlightened man who supported his wife, gave her space, and stayed home to care for the kids. Or simpler yet, just a nice guy.
There’s Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.” I don’t mean this as a defence for the indefensible. But knowing of it might have helped us see ourselves for the idiots that we were. We didn’t pause to think that what we had concluded would, in all likelihood, have been inconceivable for Addie and Maddie within the confines of their conservative Christian community. It just wouldn’t have been in their choice sets. The same way that if identifying as non-binary had been an option for me growing up, I may have chosen it. But it wasn’t, so I didn’t. The end.
All of which brings me to the final, inescapable razor: Hitchens’s. “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” For the Addie, Maddie, and Terry of my imagination, that’s a fitting end.
As for what became of them, Maddie and Terry retired and moved back to the U.S. to be closer to their family. Addie joined them there a few years later. At some stage all three of them moved into a retirement home. They grew old together. Then, a few years ago, Maddie died. Her death notice requested that donations be made to the school, in lieu of flowers.