The Wives of Bath (16 page)

The Old Mill didn’t look like much, either—just an old brick house beside a muddy creek. It stood all alone in the north end of the ravine, which twisted off between a ridge of wooded hills toward Toronto. Once a real gristmill had stood beside the tavern, but that was over a hundred years ago. I could have been in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t in Madoc’s Landing, with its string of narrow shops running down to the government wharf. Or downtown Toronto, with its streetcars and windy streets like concrete valleys, stuffed to the brim with dour-looking people. At least these sad-looking city people knew they belonged somewhere. They had an identity. Although I have to admit, I don’t really understand what an identity is. For one thing, it’s what makes you different from the rest of the world (which is what Alice does for
me). And it’s also what you have in common with others—i.e., the way I have something in common with girls.

So I squeezed my rabbit’s foot hard for luck and tried not to think about what the Virgin would do to us if we were caught, or what lie I could make up if somebody nabbed us for being under the legal drinking age. And then Lewis gave me a little push and I half fell into a hall as dark as a church. Did I say dark? I mean pitch-black except for a pair of stained-glass windows on the far wall. Instead of a picture of Jesus, the windows displayed a sheaf of wheat next to a beer mug. This was the Ladies and Escorts room, where boarders were not supposed to go. I could hear people playing pool somewhere to the left of us and to the right, male laughter and the clink of glasses. To my relief, we walked into the little takeout restaurant beside the beer hall. Two St. Mary’s girls in blue tunics sat smoking at one of the tables. “Behold the prey,” Lewis hissed in my ear. Our dates wore pinky-white lipstick, like beatniks, and their hair was teased into thickly hair-sprayed beehives. Convent girls were wild, Lewis said, because their schools were so strict. At St. Mary’s the nuns rang little bells if the girls danced too close to a boy. Sitting at the table with the two girls was one of the Kings College boys we’d fought by the river. When he saw us he stood up and whispered something to the girls, and all three of them stared at me, as if he’d told them about what had happened.

My Mouse heart quaked. The last thing we needed was another rumble.

“Get lost, creep,” Lewis said, and jabbed the Kings College boy with his knee. He looked around to see if anybody was watching and then dragged himself off into the gloomy beer hall, and I realized that Lewis had succeeded in doing the unthinkable—i.e., kneeing him in the groin. Then we sat down, and the two girls put their heads together and giggled as if we didn’t exist. Lewis didn’t seem to notice. So that’s how you act, I thought—as if what other
people do is of no importance. I couldn’t help wondering, just the same, if the boy had told the girls about me, and, if so, if the girls believed him. I watched Lewis for a sign that he was concerned, too, but Lewis only lit up a fag, never once taking his heavy-lidded eyes off the girls’ breasts swelling under their blue tunics. They were more developed than either Tory or me, and the breasts of the girl sitting next to me looked as big as Ismay’s—a 38 C, or my name wasn’t Mouse Bradford.

That was because she was fat. The sleeves of her beige blouse were strained tight across her forearms, and when she raised her hand to smoke, I spotted a B.O. stain.

“Lewis, who’s your friend?” the slighter girl asked. Nervously, I looked away over their bouffant hairdos, pretending I was more interested in Dave Keon’s Maple Leaf hockey sweater in a glass case on the wall, framed like one of Sal’s china plates.

“Lewis, why doesn’t your friend talk?” she asked when I didn’t say anything.

“He’s from Athens, Beth.”

“Well, they speak English there, don’t they?”

“Not him. And he doesn’t like people to draw attention to it, either.”

“Oh, pardon me for breathing.” The slight girl looked at the fat one, and they both started laughing again.

“His name is Nick,” Lewis answered for me.

“That’s a nice name,” the fat girl said. “My name is Josie. It’s short for Josephine.” She put her hand on one of my skinny biceps. “Oh, what big muscles Nick has!” she said, and both girls snickered and hooted.

“Mine are bigger,” Lewis said, and rolled up his sleeves to show them.

“Can’t Nick talk, Lewis?” Josie said when they had finished ogling.

“Endaxy,” I said.

“Oh, he wants to get a taxi,” Josie said.

“No he doesn’t,” Lewis said. “He means he’s agreeing with you—he can’t talk much. See?”

Then Lewis ordered four coffees, and the girls smoked and whispered to each other without touching their cups. I didn’t drink mine, either—my hands were shaking too much. So I just sat there like a dope, watching Lewis through my dark glasses, waiting for a sign from him that would tell me what to do.

When the signal came, I couldn’t believe it. Lewis put his empty mug back on the tray and announced, rude as you please, that he and Beth were going for a walk. Beth looked a little surprised. Then they left, Lewis swaggering ahead, while the men at the counter turned to stare at the girl’s nice round calves in her black winter stockings.

“Would you like to do something with me, Nick?” Josie said pointedly, and I waited for her to start up her giggling again. But she put on a show of looking serious, taking my arm and helping me to my feet as if I were a child who needed instructions.

Outside the Old Mill, the sun was turning the agate-coloured stream almost summer-blue. The air felt warm on my cheeks, and I heard bees droning in the bushes down near the storm sewers. We walked a little way in silence, and then, for no good reason, Josie stumbled against me and clutched at my hand with her fat fingers. Did she think I wanted to hold hands? How perverted! I thought. Then I remembered who I was.

“Is anything wrong?” Josie asked. For a second I almost told her. “I know I’m a little overweight,” she whispered, as if she were trying to keep somebody from overhearing. “But I’m going on a Metrecal diet this weekend.” I must have looked taken aback, because she giggled and said, “I can see you don’t have to go on a diet.” I shook my head and noisily started to chew gum, because I didn’t know what else to do. Her forward manner terrified me. She smiled, as if she wanted to reassure me, all the while chattering
on about how much she hated Latin at St. Mary’s. I didn’t say anything, and after a while she stopped talking, and we walked in an uncomfortable silence toward the wooded end of the ravine.

The river ran quite fast here through a concrete bed. A wall of cement lay flat on either side of the stream, like two strange concrete shores. The water had no choice but to follow the man-made bed. Then Josie said, “I just love the countryside, don’t you?”

I know that feeling superior to people is not polite, but how could anybody think a funny little culvert just outside the city was real countryside? Obviously, Josie didn’t know a river from a hole in the ground. I felt mad at her for being so dense, and a teeny bit of contempt, too, because she hadn’t guessed I was a girl. Then, the next thing I knew, Josie was slapping her chest and shrieking at me about a bee getting caught in her blouse. And all of a sudden she was lying flat on her back in some bushes, and I knew something was going to happen that I didn’t like.

“It’s inside my brassiere, Nick. Get it out, please!”

I bent down and started to peer under her blouse, and she kicked me impatiently.

“Hurry, it’s stinging! Ouch! Oh, it’s mad as can be.” She grabbed my hand and made it yank down the cups of her bra, and then she was spilling out everywhere—lying like a crazy fool in the bushes, her tubby legs spread and her poor pillow-sized breasts bare for all the world to see.

She’d stopped moaning and just lay there without moving. I thought she’d died. And then she said my name in a whispery little voice, and I knew she wasn’t hurt and maybe there hadn’t even been a bee at all. And what’s worse, I understood that this was the moment Kong was waiting for, and I’ve never felt so frightened in all my life. Josie looked not just fat but big—bigger than me by a hundred times. Bigger than the ski mountain in Madoc’s Landing. And I thought with a little shock, this is how you’d look, too,
Mouse, if you were lying there waiting for a boy’s hands to love you. I’d be scared—maybe more scared than the boy. And not knowing that I was a mountain to be scaled.

“Nick, sit down like a good boy.” She patted the ground beside her, and I did what she said, but I kept on my cap to hide my long hair, and even Lewis’s sunglasses, because I was afraid she would see I had girls’ eyes and not boys’ eyes, although, as it turned out, she kept her own eyes half-shut, as if she didn’t want to see what was dead obvious to anybody who cared to look.

I lit a fag to stall for time and thought what a shame it was I had to act tough when my ideal man was John Kennedy. The least I could do was behave like a gentleman and not stare at her breasts. If John Kennedy had been in my position, I know he would have kept his eyes averted. Besides, Josie had embarrassing breasts, and I was sure somebody with breasts like that wouldn’t want anyone looking at them too closely. Funny little white lines ran off from the edges of her nipples, as if her breasts were starting to crack open like a window some kid had broken with a stone. I knew those funny-looking lines were stretch marks, because I’d seen them on Sal’s cousin Ginny, whose body fell to pieces, Sal said, after Ginny had five kids.

Meanwhile, Josie started squeezing me all over and giggling and whispering in my ear about how hard my legs were when they weren’t hard at all. She inched her fingers up toward my crotch and asked me in that fake whispery voice if I had a rubber. I didn’t have a clue what she meant, and she started to laugh again, and just when I thought I couldn’t stand her laughing at me anymore, she kissed me with a wide-open mouth. And I kissed her back, my sunglasses still on. I knew that’s what she wanted me to do, and I did it not just to be polite but because I was curious, too. And she opened her mouth even wider, and all of a sudden I had the stupidest idea that she was like a house with too many open windows. I wanted to warn her to board herself up, because any
robber could crawl into a house like that. And then she snatched my hand and placed it on her breast, and for no good reason I let my hand rest on her soft cool skin—as cool as Plasticine. And then she suggested that I take off my shirt, too, because she wanted to see my breasts.

“Not on your life,” I said, forgetting I wasn’t supposed to speak English, and that’s when I realized that Josie had never believed I couldn’t speak English in the first place. And she’d never believed I was a boy, either.

“You don’t like me because I’m fat,” she said, and started to cry, as if I’d been manhandling her.

“That’s not true,” I said weakly.

“Liar,” she said, sobbing, as she tucked herself back into her bra.

Then she ran off, weeping, and I stood for a long time smoking while Sal’s shaming voice rang and rang in my head. It said all the usual things and a few new bits about how disgusting it was for one girl to touch another, but mostly it kept at me about getting what I deserved for being deceitful, and I had to grant the voice it had a point on that count. When I told Lewis about it, I left out the part about Josie knowing I was a girl, and I wondered if Lewis knew. I said Josie got mad when I touched her, and all Lewis replied was, “You can’t be a real boy, Mouse, until you stop getting sucked in by what girls say. They always want to make everything your fault.”

This wasn’t exactly true, but for the life of me I didn’t know how to argue with him.