The Wives of Bath (23 page)

I guessed. “Paulie?”

“Well done, Bradford, old girl. And we’ve got a new roommate, Asa Abrams. Apparently, Asa asked if she could room with you and Victoria.” I shrugged and turned my back to her.

“We’re all dreadfully sorry about your father, of course,” she added. To my surprise, I heard real sympathy in her voice.

Then the door opened, and Tory hobbled in ahead of Asa and thrust a Gideon bible into my hand. Tory was no longer on crutches, but she looked thinner and older, and a little distracted, as if she had something sad on her mind. I thought immediately of Paulie and of what she’d told me at Morley’s funeral about Rick, and I wondered if this had anything to do with the new bewildered expression I saw on Tory’s face. I wanted to put my arms around
her and hug her, but I was too shy. So I just stood there, smiling a little and feeling the same old grateful feeling I always felt when I saw her: just thrilled to pieces that somebody as nice and gentle as Tory would have time for me. I opened the bible to the frontispiece, where she’d inscribed the words, “To Mary Beatrice Bradford, who is true blue—This is Peter Marshall’s prayer for a time of bereavement.” It was such a Tory thing to do—to give me a modern version of the New Testament with a nice prayer. I read the first two lines: “Thou hast promised to wipe away all tears from our eyes. I ask thee to fulfill that promise now.”

I sat down heavily on my bed and tried to think of something distracting, like Jack O’Malley, so I wouldn’t cry. And the next thing I knew, our room was full of girls unloading the pockets of their dressing gowns with my all-time fav, peppermint Oreos. They stood single-file in front of my bed as if they were lining up for prayers and, one by one, deposited the cookies on my pillow. I felt touched, and surprised; I couldn’t even manage a Mouse nibble to show them I appreciated their concern.

Excusing myself, I picked up my pyjamas and went off to the washroom to undress. I heard Tory whisper as I went out, “Poor Mouse. She’s going off to cry.”

The small, cramped washroom felt clammy from the black stockings and purple bloomers that had been hung up to dry. It was very still, and I sensed the girls listening from my room. I didn’t want to cry and get people worked up for nothing but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

I bent my head and began to sob in short bursts like hiccups. Sob and wait. Sob and wait so the noise wouldn’t bring Miss Phillips. I could feel the sympathy from Tory and the other girls back in my room, and this made me bawl even more. And then I heard Tory making excuses for me to the matron. One good thing about Morley’s death: I’d get special privileges—for a day or so, anyway.

“Pssst, Bradford. In here,” I heard somebody call. The voice was coming from Asa Abrams’s old cubicle. I recognized the plaque on the door. It was a quote by Frances Ridley Havergal. “Why did God promise us a new heart?” the Anglican hymn maker had written. “Because our old hearts are so evil that they cannot be made any better; so nothing will do any good but giving us quite a new heart.” I peeked in. A radio was playing “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by the Four Seasons, and Paulie was mouthing the words as she stood on her bed, her head stuck out the high, skinny little opening that passed for a window in most of the tower rooms. The room reeked of hairspray. Paulie turned slowly around and blew a smoke ring at me. She didn’t say anything and for a second, I thought she didn’t know who I was. Her eyes looked mean and little. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed that before. Or maybe it was the weird blue light. Paulie had put a blue bulb in her study lamp, turning King Kong in the poster above her bed blue as well.

“Did you see her?”

“Who?”

“Tory, you nitwit.” Paulie threw me a fag and grinned then like her old self, and I felt better. “I heard her telling you how sorry she was about your old man. Did you like the bible she gave you? She bought it with me last weekend.” Paulie reached outside the
window and brought in a bottle of Old Vienna. “Come on up. I’ve been cooling the suds for your return.”

I hoisted myself up carefully. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t act like her flunkey this term, and here I was sliding right back into it. Of course, it wasn’t just my weak Mouse will. I was curious, too.

“C’mon. Let’s see you do it in one go.” Paulie clapped my good shoulder, just the way Morley used to greet my uncle Winnie. “Chugalug it like a man.”

I thanked her meekly. I knew the beer was a sign she felt sorry for me, only I didn’t want somebody to clap me on the back and hand me a beer. For once, I wished Paulie would act like the other girls.

But I sipped a little of the beer to be polite, and we leaned out her window, passing it back and forth between us while Paulie told me the reason for the change in rooms. She’d picked a fight with Tory’s brother over the holidays and cut Rick with her bowie knife. The Virgin had taken away the knife and told Paulie she had “no other choice” (the Virgin’s very words) but to isolate Paulie from Tory and the rest of her schoolmates until she proved she was capable of getting along with people.

“You knifed her brother!” I said. “That’s horrible. Tory must be mad at you.”

“I only nicked his hand. I could have done worse.”

Paulie gestured to her throat and then flipped her lit cigarette so it stood straight up from her bottom lip like it was stuck on with glue. A new trick. I made a little gasping sound.

“Okay. Tory was a little upset, all right? But she’ll get over it. Because he got off easy this time. Nobody calls me a punk and gets away with it.”

“What do you mean, this time?”

Paulie grinned. “Nothing. I was only kidding. You aren’t mad at me, are you, Bradford?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Paulie worried about me being mad at her? Looking back, I understand. Paulie was afraid of losing me. She’d lost her place as Tory’s roommate, and she couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of me. She sensed what had started with Morley’s death. Despite myself, I was moving away from her. One day at a time, I was leaving Paulie for good.

In January, the Virgin announced the merger with Kings College and everybody got depressed, and then in February an underground rebellion began. Mysterious announcements were posted in long corridors demanding nondenominational prayers in morning chapel and denouncing the system of compulsory games. I tried to imagine the faces of the rebels in the older girls who passed me each morning in the corridors, their tunics swinging, their arms full of books. Who had written the exciting sentences—“We demand student-run clubs without staff control! School spirit is irrelevant! We want political analysis and action—down with bourgeois attitudes!” I couldn’t believe these words lurked behind the cheerful faces I saw. I didn’t think these girls had it in them.

To relieve the atmosphere, the Virgin announced that our usual school dance would be held early, immediately after exams. Soon nobody cared about the manifestoes anymore. The Virgin was clever. She was one step ahead of her “wards,” as she called us—to my chagrin. It was a word that always made me think of orphans.

I lay on my bed in my housecoat, listening to the day girls chattering with some boarders down the tower corridor. The day girls were allowed to visit the boarding school before the dance, although none of them had come into our room. They didn’t like Ismay, and Tory had gone home to her parents to help her mother prepare the breakfast party. Asa was in the bathroom washing out the horrible hairdo she’d got at Crescendo’s, and Ismay was standing in her merry widow bleaching her arm hairs with peroxide. For aesthetic reasons, of course. None of the girls liked black hair on their arms or legs. It looked too hairy. At the window, our formals spun and twirled from the curtain rod, like bodies in plastic cleaner bags.

I was waiting for my chance in the bathroom and flipping through Morley’s copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
. I often looked at my father’s books when I felt nervous because it reminded me of Morley.

“Mary Beatrice, are you listening to me?” Ismay had finished with her arms and was dabbing at the faint moustache above her lips. “Paulie’s been stealing things, you know. That bloody girl wants to be here in my place.”

“Oh, you’re exaggerating,” I said. I skipped through a thousand pages or so (who would think the body could take up so much space!), and now I was staring at the diagram of the female organs of generation. What I saw gave me the willies: a head with wild, wavy hair spreading like flames around its face. And this face had no features except for two small open wailing mouths calling out in distress. As if this weren’t bad enough, two flattened cylindrical flaps lay like pea-pod ears on either side of the tiny mouths. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what a boy would find to like in something so weird. Not that a boy’s penis would take the prize at a poultry show. I thought of Jack then and turned with an embarrassing fluttery feeling to the section on male organs.

“Somebody’s taken all my musical scores, and last night I found a horrible little stick drawing over my bed.”

“A stick drawing?”

“Yes, made with a penknife or something.” Now Ismay was swabbing the black stubble of her shaved armpit. She said the dark stubble looked gross. “Paulie’s dangerous, that’s what I think. She doesn’t have a normal background, you know. Her mother’s dead.”

“I don’t have a normal background, either,” I said, still looking for the section on the penis. Somebody had torn it out. I closed the book, puzzled. I considered asking Paulie about it and then thought better of it. Maybe Morley had taken it out for some reason. Maybe, I smiled to myself, he was worried I’d read his book someday and didn’t want me to see that part.

“Mouse! Pay attention! I need your help.”

I put the medical text down. Ismay had stopped the bleach job, and her upper lip was erupting into a blotchy mess as we watched.

“I must be allergic to hydrogen peroxide,” she sobbed, and pushed past me, making a terrible racket, to find Miss Phillips. I quickly walked over to Ismay’s bed. On the wall above the headboard somebody had carved a strange little drawing of a boy and a girl. The girl consisted of three circles—one for the head and two grotesque balloons for her breasts. The boy had equally large and grotesque genitals. Underneath I read the words, “I.T. sucks cock.”

“What’s wrong with that suck now?” Paulie had walked in without my noticing. She closed the window Ismay had opened so wide and lay down on Ismay’s bed, her hands behind her head. Her braid rested across one breast. She looked almost pretty, except she had on boys’ boxers and a short-sleeved undershirt, so I could see her arm muscles and her large hands.

“She peroxided her armpits. She’s having a reaction.”

Paulie began to laugh. “Was she telling you nasty things about me before it happened?”

“Yeah. She said you stole her music scores.”

“Would you be upset if I had?”

“I guess so.”

Paulie smiled. “Well, I haven’t. She’s just making stuff up to get my goat.”

I could see the top of my head in the rear-view mirror of the school bus, which Sergeant had loaned us for the evening. Paulie—I mean Lewis—was driving. Slowly, I raised my eyes to check myself out. Under my navy Sunday coat I was wearing a short strapless taffeta formal that had looked better on the store rack than it did on me. The nurse had gone with me to help pick it out and she’d persuaded me to buy it because the boxy taffeta jacket that went with it would hide Alice. I’d also sprinkled glitter in my dark hair, which had been pulled straight back from my forehead and tied in a bump at the top. At least the pompadour hairdo made me look older and aggressively stylish. What does Jack O’Malley think of girls wearing their hair up? I wondered.

The bus screeched around the parking lot into the front drive of Kings College. And there he stood on the steps in front of the boarding school, a corsage box in his hand. He wore an old army duffle coat, which made him look even taller. When he saw us, he waved and strode over, stiffly swinging his shoulders as if a curtain rod ran from one side of his long body to the other, holding him up.

Lewis opened the door, and Jack bent his head and stepped in. He hardly looked at Lewis, who had on an old top hat and one of Willy’s old suits. Jack sat down, and the motion of his bum hitting the seat made me bounce. Then he smiled anxiously and put his
arm along the back of my seat, almost touching Alice. “You look nice,” he said, and I moved a little so his hand wouldn’t touch her by mistake. I knew he’d noticed Alice at the Visitor’s Luncheon, but he didn’t seem to hold her against me. But then neither did Tory or Paulie so why should he? Still, I didn’t want to press my luck so I just sat there, glad he’d come and afraid to say anything in case I did something to drive him away. To my surprise, he smelled wonderful. English Leather, maybe. Morley had used it on special occasions, too. Then Jack handed me the box. I knew I was expected to open it, but I was too shy. I let Lewis do the talking for me as we careened down a lane toward Tory’s house.