The Wives of Bath (2 page)

It’s rare for novelists to be shamelessly satisfied with their book’s journey into film. However, I feel as if my story about boarding school girls has passed through the imaginations of three women sitting around a campfire, each one adding their unique knowledge to my tale of female rebellion and adolescent love. Writers and readers should never hold it against a film if the film isn’t exactly like the book it was based on. The question is—is it a good movie? That, in the end, is film’s truest service to a work of literature.

Tell me also, to what conclusion
were the generative organs made,
And fashioned by so generous a maker?

—from the prologue to
The Wife of Bath’s Tale
,
by Geoffrey Chaucer
(author’s translation)

My name is Mouse—Mouse Bradford. Mary Beatrice Bradford, if I want to be long-winded about it. I’m sixteen now, the same age Paulie was when she performed her weird, Napoleonic act of self-assertion. It was my father’s scalpel she used, not the X-Acto knife mentioned in the news—a B-P Rib Back surgical blade, one and three-quarter inches long and brand-new. My stepmother, Sal, must have ordered it for Morley from the Hartz medical catalogue. I kept it in his doctor’s bag in my room at school. The bag was hardly bigger than a lady’s purse. A real dandy in black natural-grain cowhide with a wrap-over lock and double handles of solid leather. I needed to have it around to remind me of Morley. Otherwise I had nothing to prove I was his daughter except for my deep-set eyes with their odd, luminous stare, and my queer five-inch fingers. “A pianist’s hands”—that’s how the guidance counsellor described them. She didn’t say I had surgeon’s hands like my father. She didn’t expect girls like me or Paulie to have a serious profession. Even our headmistress, Miss Vaughan, believed a backup skill was all we needed. I can’t say their views bothered me. I didn’t want to own hands that could wield a scalpel with semi-murderous precision. I mean—yes, I’d better be clear about what I mean or Alice will have my head—if you could slice precise little rips in the right places so nobody would know you’d carved your patient up like the Thanksgiving turkey, well, then, you’d be capable of carving up anybody, anytime.

Luckily, for me a medical life was never in the cards. I faint easily, for one thing. The sight of blood does me in. Even the word “needle” makes me feel lightheaded. I can’t imagine my own hands on Morley’s scalpel cutting out a new identity for myself.

I’m five foot four and a half in my stocking feet—not really what you’d call big, although I have met many girls shorter than I am. The main mouselike things about me are my slender, fan-shaped ears and my long, pointed nose, which makes me look older and wiser than I am. I am clever, though, and I don’t take up much room. My left shoulder is also slightly rounded—some would say I’m humpbacked like a rodent, and I can’t argue with that. I call my hump “Alice,” after my real mother; it’s from the German name
Adelaide
, meaning “of noble birth.” Alice, poor soul, is not as smart as I am, but she keeps me on my toes. She won’t stand for anything but the truth.

For instance, I know Alice would feel better if I told you about my part in Paulie’s crime, because there is no one else who will listen. I can’t talk to Sal, whose shaming voice is more than I can handle. You see, Sal took me out of school when Paulie did what she did and sent me off to stay with my uncle in Point Edward (or Punk Edward, as Morley used to call it). Sal says it doesn’t matter that I did nothing legally wrong. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so it’s better if I stay out of sight.

I wasn’t born with gross spinal curvature, or kyphosis, as doctors like Morley call it. Polio caused the muscles in my back to atrophy and made my spine torque to the left, as if somebody had twisted it too tightly with a screwdriver. Morley thought I might outgrow the torque in my spine, but the specialist the school sent me to said I needed chiropractic treatment. Morley meant to take me to a specialist sooner or later. Morley meant to do a lot of things.

As Sal likes to point out, shoemakers’ children don’t have shoes. She used to tell me this as she pushed me out the door of our
kitchen in Madoc’s Landing, right after she’d muffled me in a headscarf wrapped around my mouth, like the veil of Islam. On the way to school my breath would coat the scarf with moisture, and the moisture would freeze into tiny ice balls, and the icy material would rub my nostrils, already raw and pink from too much nose blowing. I’d want to cry, but that would only make my nose wetter and rawer, so I’d lurch down our front walk, past the snowdrifts that rose as high as our windowsills, devising ways to raise my temperature. A fever was the only symptom Morley respected.

A half a line higher than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and I could stay home. When I turned twelve, I experimented with hot cloths and small mustard plasters on the forehead. Masturbating made my forehead hot, too. Only I wasn’t organized enough to pull it off. And I was afraid Sal would walk in and catch me with the evidence on my forehead or my hand where it wasn’t supposed to be.

The cold is a funny emblem for unrequited love, but that’s how it is with me. I get three doozies of a head cold a winter because of the unresolved feelings I have about my father. I guess some people have dead saints to worship, and I have Morley. At least the common cold isn’t as embarrassing as amoebic dysentery, whose description in Morley’s old medical text as a severe disturbance of the gastrointestinal tract sounds like a weather condition. I used to pretend I’d come down with the symptoms so Sal would take me to see Morley. It was hard to believe the huge, distracted man balancing on an office stool, his white coat smelling of starch and chemicals, was related to me.

At first, Morley went along with the charade. He’d wink at Sal and scribble out a prescription for me. I’ll say that for my father: he could relate to anything in a medical textbook. Then Sal told him he was training me to be a liar, and he stopped.

Whenever I start coming down with a head cold that would lay even the great doctor Morley Bradford flat, I hear Sal’s voice talking about shoemakers’ children. If I’m feeling hard on myself
I’ll let her go on for a while. But if I’m in a nicer mood, I’ll say to myself, Oh, poor Mouse, have a good cry, you dear soul, bawl your heart out. And then, of course, I can’t cry a drop.

There are other things to know about me, but I wanted to bring up the main points first: my hopelessly unrequited love for Morley and my unsightly back. The other notable feature is my shyness.

Usually I don’t talk much, but when I do, Sal claims I go off on tangents, like a tomato plant that grows too many tendrils. “Back to the root now, Mouse,” she says whenever I get to the good part of my story. Sal likes me to stick to the main subject and avoid tendrils like the plague. I like tendrilling, but it’s a suspicious pastime to a farm woman like Sal, who grew up on the Elmvale flats and happened to be hanging around Madoc’s Landing after my mother, the first Alice, went and died on my father. But Sal has more imagination than you’d expect. For instance, she’s good at making up sayings you’d never think of yourself. Most of her sayings are about dogs. As in “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Or “It’s a dog’s life.” Or “You can lead a dog to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

When the scandal blows over, Sal says I can come back and help her ran the rooming house she’s made of Morley’s home and mine in Madoc’s Landing. Until then I have to stay here in Point Edward with my uncle and my companion Alice, who is like a mother to me. Except no mother I know tells off-colour jokes.

So you see, Sal is right: I’m going off on a tendril now when I should be getting back to Paulie Sykes and how she played her little game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey at Bath Ladies College.