by John Irving
"She sounds like she's the boss, mon," Peewee said. Jack couldn't argue with that. Emma had slumped down in the backseat, pulling him down beside her.
"I'm gonna give you a valuable tip, Jack," she whispered. "I'm sure there will come a day when you'll find it useful to remember this."
"Remember what?" he whispered back.
"If you can't see the driver's eyes in the rearview mirror," Emma whispered, "that means the driver can't see you."
"Oh." At that moment, Jack couldn't see Peewee's eyes.
"We have such a lot of ground to cover," Emma went on. "What's important for you to remember is this: if there's anything you don't understand, you ask me. Wendy Holton is a twisted little bitch--never ask Wendy! Charlotte Barford is a one-speed blow job waiting to happen. You're putting your life and your doink in her hands every time you talk to Charlotte! Remember: if there's anything new that occurs to you, tell me first."
"Like what?" the boy asked.
"You'll know," she told him. "Like when you first feel that you want to touch a girl. When the feeling is un-fucking-stoppable, tell me."
"Touch a girl where?"
"You'll know," Emma repeated.
"Oh." Jack wondered if his wanting to touch Emma's mustache was necessary to confess, since he'd already done it.
"Do you feel like touching me, Jack?" Emma asked. "Go on--you can tell me."
His head didn't come up to her shoulder, not even slumped down in the backseat; there was the suddenly strong attraction to lay his head on her chest, exactly between her throat and her emerging breasts. But her mustache was still the most appealing thing about her, and he knew she was sensitive to his touching it.
"Okay, so that's established," Emma said. "So you don't feel like touching me, not yet." Jack was sad the opportunity had been missed, and he must have looked it. "Don't be sad, Jack," Emma whispered. "It's gonna happen."
"What's going to happen?"
"You're gonna be like your dad--we're all counting on it. You're gonna open your share of doors, Jack."
"What doors?" When Emma didn't answer him, the boy assumed that he had hit upon another item in the not-old-enough category. "What's a womanizer?" he asked, imagining he had changed the subject.
"Someone who can't ever have enough women, honey pie--someone who wants one woman after another, with no rest in between."
Well, that wouldn't be me, Jack thought. In the sea of girls in which he found himself, he couldn't imagine wanting more. In the St. Hilda's chapel, in the stained glass behind the altar, four women--saints, Jack assumed--were attending to Jesus. At St. Hilda's, even Jesus was surrounded by women. There were women everywhere!
"What are charity cases?" he asked Emma.
"At the moment, that would be you and your mom, Jack."
"But what does it mean?"
"You're dependent on Mrs. Wicksteed's money, Jack. No tattoo artist makes enough money to send a kid to St. Hilda's."
"Here we are, miss," Peewee said, as if Emma were the sole passenger in the limo. Peewee pulled the Town Car to the curb at the corner of Spadina and Lowther, where Lottie was standing with most of her weight on one foot.
"Looks like The Limp is waiting for you, baby cakes," Emma whispered in Jack's ear.
"Why, hello, Emma--my, how you've grown!" Lottie managed to say.
"We've got no time to chat, Lottie," Emma said. "Jack is having trouble understanding a few important things. I'm here to help him."
"My goodness," Lottie said, limping after them. Emma, with her long strides, led Jack to the door.
"I trust The Wickweed is napping, Jack," Emma whispered. "We'll have to be quiet--there's no need to wake her up."
Jack had not heard Mrs. Wicksteed called The Wickweed before, but Emma Oastler's authority was unquestionable. She even knew the back staircase from the kitchen, leading to Jack's and Alice's rooms.
Later it was easy enough to understand: Emma Oastler's man-hating monster of a divorced mother was a friend of Mrs. Wicksteed's divorced daughter--hence their shared perception of Jack and his mom as Mrs. Wicksteed's rent-free boarders. Emma's mom and Mrs. Wicksteed's daughter were Old Girls, too; they had graduated from St. Hilda's in the same class. (They were not much older than Alice.)
Calling downstairs to Lottie, who was aimlessly limping around in the kitchen, Emma said: "If we need anything, like tea or something, we'll come get it. Don't trouble yourself to climb the stairs, Lottie. Try giving your limp a rest!"
In Jack's room, Emma began by pulling back his bedcovers and examining his sheets. Seemingly disappointed, she put the covers loosely back in place. "Listen to me, Jack--here's what'll happen, but not for a while. One morning, you're gonna wake up and find a mess in your sheets."
"What mess?"
"You'll know."
"Oh."
Emma had moved on--through the bathroom, to his mother's room--leaving him to reflect upon the mystery mess.
Alice's room smelled like pot, although Jack never saw her smoke a joint in there; in all likelihood, the marijuana clung to her clothes. He knew she took a toke or two at the Chinaman's, because he could occasionally smell it in her hair.
Emma Oastler inhaled appreciatively, giving Jack a secretive look. She seemed to be conducting a survey of the clothes in his mom's closet. She held up a sweater and examined herself in the closet-door mirror, imagining how the sweater might fit her; she held one of Alice's skirts at her hips.
"She's kind of a hippie, your mom--isn't she, Jack?"
Jack had not thought of his mom as a hippie before, but she was kind of a hippie. At that time, especially to the uniformed girls at St. Hilda's and the ever-increasing legion of their divorced mothers, Alice was most certainly a hippie. (A hippie was probably the best you could say about an unwed mother who was also a tattoo artist.)
Jack Burns would learn later that it was no big deal--how a woman could look at an unfamiliar chest of drawers and know, at a glance, which drawer another woman would use for her underwear. Emma was only thirteen, but she knew. She opened Alice's underwear drawer on her first try. Emma held up a bra to her developing breasts; the bra was too big, but even Jack could tell that one day it wouldn't be. For no reason that he could discern, his penis was as stiff as a pencil--but it was only about the size of his mother's pinkie, and his mom had small hands.
"Show me your hard-on, honey pie," Emma said; she was still holding up Alice's bra.
"My what?"
"You've got a boner, Jack--for Christ's sake, lemme see it."
He knew what a boner was. His mom, that old hippie, called it a woody. Whatever you called it, Jack showed Emma Oastler his penis in his mother's bedroom. What probably made it worse was that Lottie was limping around in the kitchen below them, just as old Mrs. Wicksteed was waking up from her afternoon nap, and Emma gave his hard-on a close but disappointed look. "Jeez, Jack--I don't think you'll be ready for quite a while."
"Ready for what?"
"You'll know," she said again.
"The kettle's boiling!" Lottie cried from the kitchen.
"Then shut it off!" Emma hollered downstairs. "Jeez," Emma said again, to Jack, "you better keep an eye on that thing, and tell me when it squirts."
"When I pee?"
"You're gonna know when it's not pee, Jack."
"Oh."
"The point is, tell me everything," Emma said. She took his penis in her hand. He was anxious, remembering how she'd bent his index finger. "Don't tell your mom--you'll just freak her out. And don't tell Lottie--you'll make her limp worse."
"Why does Lottie limp?" Jack asked. Emma Oastler was such an authority, he assumed she would know. Alas, she did.
"She had an epidural go haywire," Emma explained. "The baby died anyway. It was a real bad deal."
So you could get a limp from a childbirth that went awry! Naturally, Jack thought an epidural was a part of the body, a female part. In the manner in which he'd assumed his mom's C-section referred to an area of the h
ospital in Halifax where Jack was born, so he believed that Lottie had lost her epidural in childbirth. Jack must have imagined that an epidural was somehow crucial to the female anatomy; possibly it prevented limps. Years later, when he couldn't find epidural in the index of Gray's Anatomy, Jack would be reminded of his C-section mistake. (That his mother had never had a Cesarean would be an even bigger discovery.)
"Tea's brewing!" Lottie called to Jack and Emma from the kitchen. Only when he was older would it occur to him that Lottie knew Emma was a menacing girl.
"Have a wet dream for me, little guy," Emma said to Jack's penis. She was such a good friend; she gently helped his penis find its proper place, back inside his pants, and she was especially careful how she zipped up his fly.
"Do penises have dreams?" Jack asked.
"Just remember to tell me when your little guy has one," Emma said.
10
His Audience of One
Jack's grade-two teacher, Mr. Malcolm--at that time, one of only two male teachers at St. Hilda's--was inseparable from his wife, whom he daily brought to school for dire reasons. She was blind and wheelchair-bound, and it seemed to soothe her to hear Mr. Malcolm speak. He was an excellent teacher, patient and kind. Everyone liked Mr. Malcolm, but the entire grade-two class felt sorry for him; his blind and wheelchair-bound wife was a horror. In a school where so many of the older girls were outwardly cruel and inwardly self-destructive, which was not infrequently blamed on their parents' tumultuous divorces, the grade-two kids prayed, every day, that Mr. Malcolm would divorce his wife. Had he murdered her, the class would have forgiven him; if he'd killed her in front of them, they might have applauded.
But Mr. Malcolm was ever the peacemaker, and his shaving choices were ahead of their time. Growing bald, he had shaved his head--not all that common in the early 1970s--and, even less common, he preferred varying lengths of stubble to an actual beard or to being clean-shaven. Back then it was a credit to St. Hilda's that they accepted Mr. Malcolm's shaved head and his stubbled face; not unlike the grade-two children, the administrators of the school had decided not to cause Mr. Malcolm any further harm. The blind wife in the wheelchair made everyone take pity on him.
In the grade-two classroom, the children worked diligently to please him. Mr. Malcolm never had to discipline them; they disciplined themselves. They would do nothing to upset him. Life had already been unfair enough to Mr. Malcolm.
Emma Oastler's assessment of the tragedy was colored by her own intimacy with human cruelty, but in her view of the Malcolms as a couple, Emma was probably not wrong. Mrs. Malcolm, whose name was Jane, fell off a roof at a church picnic. She was high school age at the time, a pretty and popular girl--suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. According to Emma, Mr. Malcolm had been a somewhat younger admirer of Jane's. He fell in love with her when she was paralyzed, chiefly because she was more available.
"He must have been the kind of uncool guy she would never have dated before the accident," Emma said. "But after she fell off the roof, Wheelchair Jane didn't have a lotta choices." Yet if Mr. Malcolm was her choice, even if he was her only choice, Jane Malcolm couldn't have been luckier.
The blindness was another story; that happened to her later, when she'd been married for many years. Jane Malcolm suffered from early-onset macular degeneration. As Mr. Malcolm explained to the grade-two class, his wife had lost her central vision. She could see light, she could make out movement, and she still had some peripheral vision. At the extreme periphery, however, Mrs. Malcolm experienced a loss of color, too.
The loss of her mind was another matter; there was nothing Mr. Malcolm could say to protect the kids, or himself, from that. Thus periphery and peripheral were the so-called vocabulary challenges for opening day in grade two--every day, there would be two more. As for crazed or delusional or paranoid, they were never words on the grade-two vocabulary list. But Wheelchair Jane was all those things; she'd been pushed past the edge of reason.
When Mrs. Malcolm would grind her teeth, or suddenly crash her wheelchair into Patsy Booth's desk, head-on, Jack often looked at Lucinda Fleming--half expecting that Jane Malcolm's visible rage might trigger a silent-rage episode in Lucinda. It was insanity to assault the Booth twins separately. Whenever Mrs. Malcolm attacked Patsy's desk in her wheelchair, Patsy's twin, Heather, also screamed.
On occasion, Mrs. Malcolm would snap her head from side to side as if to rid herself of her peripheral vision. Maybe she thought total blindness would be preferable. And when one of the second graders would raise a hand in response to one of Mr. Malcolm's questions, blind Jane would assume a head-on-her-knees position in her wheelchair--as if a man wielding a knife had appeared in front of her and she'd ducked to prevent him from slashing her throat. These dramatic moments of Mrs. Malcolm becoming unhinged made grade two a most attentive class; while the children listened carefully to Mr. Malcolm's every word, they kept their eyes firmly fixed on her.
For not more than three or four seconds, not more than twice a week, the tired-looking Mr. Malcolm would be at a loss for words; thereupon, Wheelchair Jane would start her journey of repeated collisions. She sailed forth up an aisle--the wheelchair glancing off the kids' desks as she rushed past, skinning her knuckles.
While Mr. Malcolm ran to the nurse's office, to fetch either the nurse or (for more minor injuries) a first-aid kit, Mrs. Malcolm would be left in the kids' tentative care. Someone held the wheelchair from behind so she couldn't careen out of control; the rest of the class stood petrified around her, just out of her reach. They were instructed to not let her get out of the wheelchair, although it's doubtful that seven-year-olds could have stopped her. Fortunately, she never tried to escape; she flailed about, crying out the children's names, which she'd memorized in the first week of school.
"Maureen Yap!" Mrs. Malcolm would holler.
"Here, ma'am!" Maureen would holler back, and Mrs. Malcolm would turn her blind eyes in The Yap's direction.
"Jimmy Bacon!" Mrs. Malcolm would scream.
Jimmy would moan. There was nothing wrong with Wheelchair Jane's hearing; she looked without seeing in Jimmy's direction upon hearing him moan.
"Jack Burns!" she shouted one day.
"I'm right here, Mrs. Malcolm," Jack said. Even in grade two, his diction and enunciation were far in advance of his years.
"Your father was well spoken, too," Mrs. Malcolm announced. "Your father is evil," she added. "Don't let Satan put a curse on you to be like him."
"No, Mrs. Malcolm, I won't." Jack may have answered her with the utmost confidence, but within the mostly all-girls' world of St. Hilda's, it was clear to him that he was fighting overwhelming odds. The Big Bet, which Emma Oastler spoke of with a reverence usually reserved for her favorite novels and movies, heavily favored the suspected potency of William's genes. If womanizing could be passed from father to son, it most certainly would be passed to Jack. In the eyes of almost everyone at St. Hilda's, even in what amounted to the severely limited peripheral vision of Mrs. Malcolm, Jack Burns was his father's son--or about to be.
"You can't blame anyone for being interested, Jack," Emma said philosophically. "It's exciting stuff--to see how you'll turn out." Clearly Mrs. Malcolm had taken a genetic interest in how Jack would turn out, too.
But the worst thing about Jane Malcolm was how she behaved when her husband returned to the grade-two classroom--with either the school nurse or the first-aid kit. "Here I am--I'm back, Jane!" he always announced.
"Did you hear that, children?" Mrs. Malcolm would begin. "He's come back! He's never gone for long and he always comes back!"
"Please, Jane," Mr. Malcolm would say.
"Mr. Malcolm likes taking care of me," Wheelchair Jane told the class. "He does everything for me--all the things I can't do myself."
"Now, now, Jane, please," Mr. Malcolm would say, but she wouldn't let him take her skinned knuckles in his hands. Slowly, at first, but with ever-quickening strikes, she slapped his face.
"Mr. Malcolm loves doing everything for me!" she cried. "He feeds me, he dresses me, he washes me--"
"Jane, darling--" Mr. Malcolm tried to say.
"He wipes me!" Mrs. Malcolm screamed; that was always the end of it, before she resorted to whimpers and moans.
Jimmy Bacon would commence to moan with her, which was soon followed by the remarkable blanket-sucking sounds that the Booth twins were capable of making--even without blankets. Heel-thumping from the French twins never lagged far behind. And Jack would steal a look at Lucinda Fleming, who was usually looking at him. Her serene smile betrayed nothing of the mysterious rage inside her. Do you wanna see it? her smile seemed to say. Well, I'm gonna show you, her smile promised--but not yet.
It was a not-yet world Jack lived in, from kindergarten through grade two. Pitying Mr. Malcolm was an education in itself. But more memorably, and more lastingly, Jack's education was as much in Emma Oastler's hands as it was in Mr. Malcolm's.
On rainy days, or whenever it was snowing, Emma slid into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car and instructed Peewee as follows: "Just drive us around, Peewee. No peeking in the backseat. Keep your eyes on the road."
"That okay with you, mon?" Peewee always asked Jack.
"Yes, that would be fine, Peewee. Thank you for asking," the boy replied.
"You're the boss, miss," Peewee would say.
Scrunched down low in the backseat, Jack and Emma chewed gum nonstop--their breath minty or fruity, depending on the flavor. Emma would let Jack undo her braid, but she would never let him weave it back together. With her braid undone, Emma had enough hair for both of them to hide their faces under its spell. "If you get your gum stuck in my hair, honey pie, I'm gonna kill you," she often said--but once, when Jack was laughing about something, Emma suddenly sounded like his mother. "Don't laugh when you're chewing gum--you could choke."
There was the puzzling moment when they checked on her training bra, as Emma disparagingly called it. From what Jack could tell, the instructions the bra had given to her breasts were already working. At least her breasts were getting bigger. Wasn't that the point?
Speaking of growing, his penis had made no discernible progress. "How's the little guy?" Emma would invariably ask, and Jack would dutifully show her. "What are you thinking about, little guy?" Emma asked his penis once.
