Soul Siren (5 page)

Jasmine didn’t give a damn about playing along. She said sweetly, “And I was about to give Deborah here a sample of Mace I brought back from my trip to Rochester.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Miss Ogis. “Only I know you won’t do such a foolish thing. Not in a public place. And certainly not in front of
me
.”

“It’s Saturday,” said Jasmine, still talking in a mild singsong, “and you’re not our teacher here.”

Miss Ogis matched her tone perfectly and replied, “That’s right, Jasmine, I’m not. Which means I’m free to call the store security and tell them about the five lipsticks I saw you stash away in your purse.”

I tried not to laugh as I watched the blood drain out of Jasmine’s cheeks.

“So what’s it going to be, my dear? You want to show how you’re not a lady and have a fight right here by the counter? Or do you all want to take yourselves out on Yonge Street?”

Jasmine gave Deb, Sarah and me a last look full of daggers and turned on her heel. Off she went with her friends in tow. Miss Ogis turned and gave us a curt nod.

“I suppose you think she’s worth it,” she said.

Deb didn’t know it was better for her to keep her mouth shut. “How can it be her fault? She’s not even here!”

“No,” said Miss Ogis. “No, she’s not. Maybe you should think about that.”

Roles

D
eborah did think
about it. I knew something was wrong, that something had profoundly shaken her up when we were playing basketball in the gym, MacDonald versus Danforth Collegiate. Deb badly fouled one of the Danforth girls, which cost us a penalty shot easily dunked through the hoop by her victim. I saw Miss Ogis go over to her on the bench and obviously ask
What’s going on with you?
Deb shook her head, muttering a noncommittal answer I didn’t need to hear. She kept playing, but her game was off. We lost. And long after the other girls had quickly showered and gone home, I finished up helping to put away some equipment and found myself staring at Deb’s back as she leaned against the locker, her dark arms and neck still polished with sweat.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Her voice raw with emotion.

“What’s going on, Deb?”

“That stupid little bitch…”

“Who?”

She turned around, and I could see all the anger, all the self-loathing and tearful pain. “Jasmine! That fucking little peroxide bitch. She really pegged it. I’m a joke, aren’t I?”

She didn’t know what to do with herself so she finally stripped off and grabbed her towel, going for a perfunctory shower. I stood outside the great tiled room, caught up in her rant, doing my best not to look like I was staring at the soap suds running down her long legs and her belly.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Erica!” Deb shouted over the hiss of the water. “I’ve been such an idiot over her, Mish! I’m a joke. And you know what? It’s gonna stop. I’m gonna find my own look, I’m not going to ask her
anything
anymore on how to do stuff and—”

“What?” I demanded. “All because of what that cow Jasmine said? Deborah, get real! She was talking about us singing—”

“It’s bigger than that, and you know it, Michelle. Everybody thinks it’s so funny—”

“It’s not like that,” I argued. “I borrow clothes from Erica, she borrows clothes from me, and you—”

“No,”
she insisted, stepping out and towelling herself off. “You guys swap stuff. She doesn’t need anything of mine. She doesn’t hang on
my
every word. You want to be part of the Erica Jones fan club, Mish? You carry on without me. Jesus…”

She was frantically getting dressed, and as she pulled out her top from the locker, she noticed it was another one of her collection that she’d copied from Erica’s wardrobe. Standing in her bra, wishing she could toss it aside and wear anything else but. She looked up at the ceiling.

“A fucking joke,” she muttered again.

“You’re not,” I said, hugging her now to comfort her. “You’re beautiful, you’re talented. You know that, you must know that…”

I wrapped my arms around her waist, patting her back, and she held on to me for what felt like dear life. She was half a head taller than me, my face buried in her hair, her body so warm, and I don’t know what it was that made me lose my mind, but I kissed her neck like a close friend, like a sister. And as she sniffed and pulled back to rub her eyes, I had my face very close to hers, and I moved in.

Startled, she stared at me and demanded:
“What the hell are you doing?”

Oh, God. Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God—there’s no taking it back. Idiot, you’re an idiot, oh no—

“Nothing, Deb, you’re upset, and I was trying to make you feel—”

“Mish, get your hands off me! What is this?”

Dying inside, I still held her hands and wasn’t letting go. She yanked them savagely back even while I said, “You don’t understand! I didn’t mean anything, Deb, please don’t make such a big deal out of—”

“I’m not stupid, Michelle! I know you and Erica think I am, but I’m not! And I’m not a…”

“I’m
not
either,” I said stupidly, as if a denial could do anything now.

“I can’t deal with your shit on top of mine, Mish.” And she stormed out of the locker room.

I
t was me upset now, wailing uncontrollably, facing a worse shame than Deb could ever expect in the MacDonald hallways, and I was still crying when
she
found me in the shower, hugging myself against the wall, wondering how I could come back the next day. Miss Ogis, stepping forward just beyond the sprinkling beads of water, no longer in her coaching track suit but in her formal wear for the classroom.

“You’re going to be all right,” she said.

“You don’t know,” I sobbed, “you don’t know…”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I heard.”

“You…? You heard us?”

She kicked off her shoes and stepped closer to me, putting a hand on my bare shoulder. “Poor dumb Deborah hasn’t even guessed the real truth of it, has she?”

I felt my nose running as I stood naked in the pounding spray of water, and it was this that temporarily embarrassed me. Fool. Your nose running while all of what you are will be out there tomorrow for ridicule. I wiped my nose and rubbed my eyes. Hurt and broken, I said, “What are you talking about?”

“Deborah. She dresses like Erica, she wants to sing like Erica…She even copies her gestures. That’s why you reached out to her. And that silly girl doesn’t even know she’s not the one you really want.”

I felt my body racked by a new uncontrollable sob of agony and I slid down the tiles of the wall to my knees.

“Come on now, come on,” whispered Miss Ogis, kneeling quickly and rocking me in her arms. “Despite what the books say, no one ever died from having an overflow of love to give.”

“I’m—tomorrow’s freak—for—for Home Room!” I stuttered through sobs.

“No, you’re not,” she whispered. “You won’t be. Honest. You’re a beautiful girl, and there is nothing—
nothing
wrong with this need you feel. Or how you want to express it.”

Her face was very close to mine, and her fingertips were gently caressing my face. She wasn’t clumsy and unaware of what she was doing, not like I was with Deborah.

I could taste the salt of my tears running down my cheeks, and I had forgotten for a moment that I was naked, wrapped up in my own shame and personal agony. I heard Miss Ogis whisper again
Come here,
and she embraced me protectively once more, her hands running down my back. When I sat back against the tiled wall, I laughed self-consciously because her blouse was all wet from the hug, and she shook her head to say, Hey, forget it.

“You don’t know what to do with yourself, do you?” said my teacher.

Her fingertips ran down both my breasts and then ever so gently felt their weight, and she held my eyes. “Do you want to know what it’s all about?” she asked me. “Do you want to know how it can be?”

I nodded dumbly like a child, feeling the rush of heat between my legs. I sat there, still half in the spray of the shower nozzle like rays of a spotlight, beads of water collecting and running down my breasts, and Miss Ogis—because this is how I still thought of her—sat in front of me, her golden brown face shining with the steam and the spray. Her blouse had become transparent with the water, a gauze curtain in front of two beautiful globes of that light hue, and she kept massaging my breasts with gentle pressure until my puckered nipples felt enormous. I felt like I had collapsed into a dream, feeling expert fingers touch me between my legs, playing with my clitoris, and then her small perfect mouth enveloped one of my nipples and sucked, making me shudder.

When I opened my eyes, I could still feel her right hand pushing into me, but her left had quickly unbuttoned her blouse, her small dark nipples poking over the lace of her bra. Her skirt had ridden up so that I had a tantalizing view of her white panties. She was drenched, but the shower spray couldn’t have reached her there.

“Are you sure…?” I was looking towards the door back to the changing rooms.

“We’ll be all right,” she told me. She withdrew her hand only to unzip her grey skirt and slip it off, tossing it with a lazy throw towards the entrance. Here in our private rain-forest, her fingers were back inside me, and the steady rhythm was at first deliciously pleasurable and then the tingle of my very first orgasm began in my thighs and rushed through me. “Uuuhhmmm! Eeeeeuuuhhhmm! Eeeeuuuhhh!” The sensation I couldn’t feel when Bobby Drake put his cock into me with a bull-in-a-china-shop force in a friend’s rec room, taking my virginity and leaving me hollow. This was different. Ecstasy.

I watched my teacher slither down into the shallow lake of shower water, me so ignorant, so naïve and without a clue, until she put her mouth on me, and I didn’t recognise myself from my moans. As I lay there afterwards, panting and spent, she sat up and smiled, her face so cheerfully grateful that she could give me this, rivulets of water slowly running down her flat belly and the tops of her thighs, a sheen of light on her golden brown breasts now completely visible through the soaked bra. The tuft of her black fur was a vague cloud behind the wet panties, and it was the slight protrusion of her hipbones, such a girlish detail, that made me want to take her.

I lay there as the water sloshed up against my shoulder blades and flowed around my ass and heels, and I stretched out a hand, my eyes thanking her, telling her I wanted to give love back.

“Come home with me,” she said. Then she smiled and added, “But not just yet.”

She rose to her feet and slipped off her panties, unhooked her bra, and I beheld the fullness of her, the full flowering of this mature woman. Her straight black hair trailed like a mane all the way down to the small of her back, accentuating the beautiful curve of her round ass. She was incredibly exotic to me. I got to my feet, and I took a bar of soap in my hand and lathered her buttocks. She seemed to swoon and put out her hands against the tiles, and I ran the soap around to her belly and lathered her breasts. We kissed for the first time in a soapy wet embrace under the pounding of the shower water, and it was another first for me. Lips that yielded to mine, that let me coil my tongue around hers in a dance and didn’t invade my mouth with a masculine brutishness.

I remember afterwards her buttoning her suit jacket to cover her drenched blouse and squealing over the chill of the wet cotton on her skin. Her skirt was dry enough for us to “escape.” I remember her driving me back to her house, both of us very quiet. I remember my first impression of her décor, a mixture of Indian curios, like the multi-armed statue of Shiva, and Fifties-style furniture. You wouldn’t think they would go together, but she had blended them well. I didn’t know much about Indian culture then, still don’t to be honest, but I noticed briefly the depictions of the Indian god Krishna on the walls. He was blue in some framed pictures and black in others. “Those belonged to my ex-husband,” she explained. “I should really get around to buying some new things to hang up.” But two whole walls in her living room were already completely covered in books, one shelf devoted to feminist literature, another to novels by Hanif Kureshi, Arundathi Roy, Salman Rushdie.

I asked her about a couple of books, still foolishly calling her Miss Ogis, and she smiled and replied, “I think you can call me Karen here.”

I was seventeen. I was still in the stage where I blurted out everything that came into my head. “You don’t have an Indian first name?”

“Sure I do,” she answered. “But I don’t use it. I was born here, grew up here, and I’m kind of between two cultures. White people just mangle our pronunciations anyway. Karen’s easier. If I get to know you better, maybe one day I’ll tell you the other name.”

I felt a peculiar shock of hurt. But I was young, holding on to the foolish teenage assumption that intimacy was a leveller, that it made us equals. One minute we were lovers, the next I naturally deferred to her.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked politely.

“Sure,” I whispered nervously. And I clumsily stepped forward to kiss her again.

“We have time,” she said. “Try to relax. I need to change.”

She lived in a bungalow in an upscale part of Scarborough, and when she stepped into her bedroom, my eyes could follow her. I saw her strip off her wet blouse and then slip once again out of her skirt and her underwear. For a moment, she stepped naked in front of a full-length mirror and, seemingly bothered by something about her appearance, she brushed her long hair. I watched covertly as she put on a lacy red bra and a pair of red panties with a flowery pattern in the mesh. I took this as something done for me.

She pulled on a T-shirt and put on a long navy blue skirt with a high slit up the side and then padded back out to me in bare feet, and I was captivated by the mere idea of her lingerie under her casual clothes, by the easy grace of her movements and by the sway of her skirt. When we sat down to drink our tea, she curled up on the couch, and the skirt fabric slid away to give me a view of one gorgeously shaped leg.

“I’m glad you came with me,” she said, and we held hands for a moment.

“So am I.”

“You’re going to have to be careful, you know,” she advised.

“I would never…”

“No, no, not us,” she said. “I’m sure I can trust you. I meant Erica. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment.”

“I’ve forgotten all about Erica.”

“You’re sweet,” she told me. “And you have to learn to be a better liar. You’re in love with her, and it’s excruciatingly obvious.”

I was past tears but I still shuddered with embarrassment. “I’m so stupid. Deborah’s gonna blab this all over school—”

“No, she won’t,” said Karen flatly, and I heard the steel in her voice. “Deborah will do no such thing. I’m going to get up in a minute and place a call to Mr. Isham.”

Mr. Isham was a history teacher and the vice-principal. It had always been assumed that because they were friendly, Isham and Karen Ogis were having an affair. Now I knew differently.

“He will call Deborah at home, and he will explain that you’re very upset, and that she shouldn’t talk about that episode
to anyone,
” Karen went on. “If she does, we’ll hear about it, and she’ll find herself not only out of the girls’ basketball team but having lost her credits for the semester. They’ll be incomplete, and she’ll have to spend another year in high school.”