by Susan Swan
As ever,
Mouse Bradford
September 25, 1963
Dear Mr. President,
I’m writing this in morning prayers. Yesterday Miss Vaughan gave us a little talk about the hymn maker Frances Ridley Havergal. She read us a boring chapter from a book called Morning Bells and talked about how we should give ourselves up to God—i.e., not just our minds but, Mr. President—our hands, feet, lips, eyes, ears, and so on. What for? So we can become instruments of righteousness. “The little hands will no longer serve Satan by striking or pinching; the little feet will not kick or stamp, nor drag and dawdle, when they ought to run briskly on some errand; the little lips will not pout; the little tongue will not move to say a naughty thing.” Personally, Mr. President, I’m going to keep my hands, so that I can write you. This morning the talk is just as bad—i.e., the history of Bath Ladies College. Apparently, this dumb school is modelled after Cheltenham Ladies College in England, like a lot of girls’ schools in Canada. Some of our teachers—i.e., Miss Vaughan and Mrs. Peddie—taught at the British school. Now Miss Vaughan is reading us a funny poem about two British headmistresses from the olden days.
Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts cannot feel
How different from us
Miss Beale and Miss Buss
All the girls laugh, and Miss Vaughan is laughing, too, as if she didn’t realize the girls thought the same thing about her.
In a row against the north wall sit the grade thirteens and the prefects in their yellow knotted belts. The teachers sit in a row against the south wall. Every old biddy has her ankles crossed, her hands cupped in her lap. We’re supposed to sit like that, too. If our deportment isn’t good, we let down the reputation of the school. Queen Elizabeth’s portrait is hung on the wall behind the lectern. She has nicer hair than Miss Vaughan, better makeup, and she has a husband.
At least I know the names of all the teachers now. And, more important, the names the girls call them behind their backs. The Virgin is the nickname for our headmistress, Miss Vaughan. She’s called the Virgin because she is untouched by the male hand. The girls here say they wear their virginity pins in her name. These are circular silver pins that everybody wears on their clothes when they aren’t in uniform. Miss Charlotte Ibister, our gym mistress, is called Hammerhead, because she looks like a shark and has very big thighs. Hammerhead makes the fat girls cry when they can’t do the splits over the horse. Mrs. Peddie is called Lola the Les, because she’s in love with the Virgin, who arranged for her to have quarters near her in the boarding school. Mrs. Peddie teaches English plus sex and scripture. Because she is a divorcée, some of the teachers think she’s a loose woman. (Not me. A man would have to be crazy to ask out somebody who looked like her.) She smiles so hard you can see her gums, and she wears tight wool sweaters when her breasts are way too big. They look like torpedoes about to burst out of her brassiere. Everybody giggles when she and the Virgin walk together down the corridor. They both have big, fat bodies that jiggle when they move, and it doesn’t seem to bother them one bit. The big difference between them is in their height. Mrs. Peddie is short and always smiles, and the Virgin is tall and scowls. They’re like the figures in a Swiss cuckoo clock: one predicts sunshine, and the other, showers.
I know I shouldn’t be so familiar with you, when you are a high official of the land, Mr. President, but do you think I’ll turn into an old hag if I stay here? A few years in this dump and you don’t notice you’re wearing the same stupid shirtwaist you wore to prayers twenty years before. There are no men to say you look nice, so you forget you have a body and face which the world sees. (Nobody, of course, except another les.)
The matrons in the boarding school are dogs, too. Miss Phillips, or Phooey Phillips, doesn’t use underarm deodorant. She uses lamp oil to clean the spots off her dresses because she’s too cheap to send them to the cleaners. I hate her because she gets the rules mixed up and doesn’t let us go to the bathroom after lights out. So you see, Mr. Kennedy, I’m getting to be an old hand. I don’t know the names of the girls yet. They all look the same to me in the school uniform.
Warmest regards,
Mouse Bradford
September 26, 1963
Dear Mr. Kennedy,
Morley’s a writer, too, by the way. He hasn’t had two books published like you. (I know, for instance, you published Why England Slept when you were only twenty-three—ten years older than me!) Morley publishes every week in the Madoc’s Landing Bulletin. His column is called “Bedside Manner.” Example:
Despite claims of chiropractors and osteopaths to the contrary, there’s no reason to ascertain, from the evidence at hand, that few doctors take these quacks I have mentioned seriously.
Morley’s sentence structure gets a little tangled. You, Mr. President, write more rhythmically. Example:
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
I notice you like using the principle of parallel sentence structure. You use balance to create a sense of reason and fairness. It’s the trick of a good rhetorician. I can’t say the same for Morley, but he’s not in your line of work. He has to get people’s heart rates lower. So a lot of jumbled words make them slow down, if you see what I mean. They have to stop and think about what he’s saying, don’t they? So for a doctor, Morley writes just fine. On the other hand, he could try a parallel sentence or two, and maybe you could vary your sentence length, if you don’t mind my saying so.
The worst thing about Morley being a writer is that he never writes me. Well, c’est la vie.
Luff,
M.B.
P.S. Other parallels between you and Morley. In the hero department. Morley won the Intercollegiate Football Championship for Varsity against McGill. With only two minutes to go in the game, he kicked the winning three-point field goal from 43 yards out. Morley saved the day. Just like you did when you towed one of your men away from the sinking P.T. boat, a rope between your teeth.
At least these letters stopped me from waiting for Morley to tell me I could go home. I knew this wasn’t a real possibility. Not after Sal’s postcard the second week at school.
Dear Mouse,
By now you must be getting used to your school. Your headmistress told us the girls often find leave-taking hard, but soon settle in. Morley says to tell you he is taking the three of us to Nassau for Christmas, and we will have a fine time then. (That’s what the last of the big spenders says now, but we shall see what we shall see, won’t we?) Don’t get your heart set on a lot of visits from us, Mouse. I don’t like Toronto, and neither does Morley. Too many clip joints that prey on folks from out-of-town. Morley couldn’t wait to get home and see Lady.
Yours,
Sal
An unreadable sentence had been scratched in at the top of the card. I knew it was a greeting from Morley. His handwriting was illegible because he wrote so many prescriptions.
10
I know, I know, I’m tendrilling again when I should be getting on with what Paulie did. But adjusting to boarding school wasn’t easy. First of all, new girls had to learn the vocabulary. That meant learning words you’d never heard of before, words that stood for feelings and things you would never dream you could say out loud.
Spastics, Finks, and Leses
a les—what everybody thinks the girls are here
spastic or spaz—fun, crazy
nooie-noo—a boy too cute for words
fink—a boy or girl who’s not
bananorama—the chunks of too-ripe bananas that Paulie wings at other girls’ heads
bore-eng (on an up note)—life inside old Before Christ, i.e., Bath (Ladies) College
weird—the only word I knew before I came (besides fav)
Secondly, you had to learn a whole new set of manners, which exaggerated every polite gesture you’d ever learned in the first place. And then, when the matron’s back was turned, you had
to be brave enough to throw all these new rules out the window. Eating bananas was a case in point. We had Jell-O desserts every Thursday and bowls of fruit every Friday, which is how Paulie got her hands on the bananas she aimed at Ismay Thom’s head every Friday afternoon in math class.
“Would you like a banana, Mary Beatrice?”
“No thank you, Miss Vaughan.”
The Virgin looked dolefully at the bowl of fruit the kitchen maid had put on the head table. Across from me, the English girl Ismay Thom watched, smirking.
Ismay Thom was a star music pupil and Paulie’s pet peeve. She lived in the next room down the hall. She smelled overwhelmingly of talcum powder and practised the “Jamaican Rumba” every day on the piano in the music cubicle next door until our walls shook and I was sick to death of a piece that used to move me to the bottom of my Mouse heart. It was Ismay Thom who snickered at Paulie and me as we put on our navy hats and coats for the Sunday church service, because her parents were atheists and she was allowed to stay home. And it was Ismay the know-it-all who scolded Paulie for dropping her g’s in -ing endings.
“Would you like a banana, Miss Vaughan?” Ismay simpered.
“Thank you, Ismay. I don’t mind if I do.” Miss Vaughan set the banana down on her plate as if the fruit was singeing her fingers. And then she speared it with her fork, crooking her baby finger just the way Sal tells Morley not to do. I’d never seen anyone eat a banana with a knife and fork before, and I wondered what Sal would think of Miss Vaughan’s etiquette. Maybe Sal would be impressed and make Morley and me eat our bananas that way, too. Now, in a quick, aggravated motion, my headmistress hacked off both tips with her knife.
“And how are you liking our school, Mary Beatrice?” she said.
“Oh, it’s very different from what I’m used to,” I replied, watching her hands peel the banana so that its skin collapsed on her plate in long, sloppy strips.
“The strangeness will wear off, won’t it, Ismay?” the Virgin said.
“Oh, yes,” said Ismay the Simp. The Virgin’s banana lay on her plate like a swollen tongue. And now, very slowly and methodically, the Virgin began to chop the banana—whomp, whomp, whomp. In a moment it lay diced in eight precisely matching chunks, as if by a machine-shop tool.
Up and down the table the porcelain rang with the sound of girls chopping and eating bananas without touching them. Somewhere in the dining room Paulie was doing this, too, only I never thought to look.
The next thing I knew, the Virgin carefully laid her knife and fork side by side at the left of her plate and stood up. All talking stopped and the girls scrambled to their feet in a thunderous explosion of scraping chairs. I stood up, too, and Miss Vaughan scanned the tables with her unblinking eyes. She smiled. It was as if the sun had come out after a rain squall. Everybody relaxed, and Miss Vaughan said grace in her whispery girl’s voice and walked out, all our eyes on her broad-shouldered back. A smiley Mrs. Peddie jiggled after her carrying two cups of hot cocoa for them to drink in the staff room. There goes Lola the Les, I thought, trying out my new vocabulary. From across the table, Ismay Thom called my name.
“Mary Beatrice, you didn’t get her cue. When she asks you if you’d like a banana, you’re supposed to say, ‘No thank you. Would you like a banana, Miss Vaughan?’ That way, she gets to have it first. Understand?” Ismay giggled nastily. “I thought she would have told you this before you came. She’s your aunt, isn’t she?”
“She’s only a third cousin,” I said, and kept my head down so I didn’t have to see the other girls staring at me as they filed out of the dining room. I always stayed behind until the last girl left, because I didn’t want anybody to notice I walked favouring my left side. To make matters worse, the nurse had ordered new orthopedic oxfords for me. Ordinary oxfords were bad enough, but these oxymorons were as heavy as a man’s dress shoe, and the built-up right heel made my foot look deformed. And then, wouldn’t you know, just as I was feeling really sorry for myself, somebody whacked me on the bum.
“Don’t be a snob, Mouse! Wait for me.”
I jumped, all nerves. It was Tory. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I thought I was alone in the dining room, but there she was, lurching along and giggling because she hadn’t finished stuffing her feet into her oxfords. The backs of her shoes were broken down, so that she could step into them like slippers without bothering to do up the laces. It was these broken-down oxfords plus the ripped-out hems on her tunics and her knee socks that bunched like a pair of droopy drawers around her ankles (not to mention her school tie with the purple threads all picked out) that made Miss Vaughan sigh “Oh, Victoria” when she saw Tory in the hall. Somehow, her slobby uniform didn’t make Tory look ugly, though. She always looked feminine—with milk-white hair you could die for and plump, high cheeks that coloured up the second anybody teased her.
Now she took my arm and leaned into me the way Lady sometimes leans against Morley and whispered how glad she was I was a full-time boarder. Pauline went home on the weekends to visit her grandfather, so Tory had nobody to talk to except me and Lewis. Of course, they had to be careful, or else the Virgin wouldn’t let him do odd jobs around the school. And then she confessed that she was scared because Miss Ibister had asked her to replace a forward on the field-hockey team who had the flu.
“There are the Amazons we have to play—out there!” she said, squeezing my arm. And, sure enough, through the dining-room window I could see a crowd of tall women with wide, thick torsos massing on the hockey pitch. They were the same big women wielding the curved sticks I’d noticed the first day I arrived. Tory said these big women were phys-ed teachers from the university imported by Miss Ibister to give our first field-hockey team practice for the finals. She didn’t know how she could be expected to hold her own against the likes of them, and neither did I. Not that I knew much about the sport. I’d never played it before and would be watching from the sidelines as Miss Ibister’s number-one helper. I couldn’t play sports on account of Alice, so Miss Ibister had cooked up the helper idea as a way of including me.
I told Tory it was a real shame that enthusiasts like Miss Ibister didn’t know when it was best to leave well enough alone.
11
Now see here, Mouse, I told myself in Sal’s sternest voice, you have to stop thinking about how you look in your weird shoes. There’s no point cringing around like an old dog who wants to crawl away into the ravine woods and die. It’s true you have a poor excuse for a body, but someday Morley will realize how much you have suffered and make it up to you. So hang in there the best you can. Never mind that it’s October in Madoc’s Landing, your favourite time in the whole world. Cut up the oranges for the players and pretend you’re interested in this dumb sport.
In front of Miss Ibister and me, the beefy phys-ed women galloped up and down the pitch, their sticks slashing the air left and right but never raised quite high enough to get a foul. Just as Tory said, our girls looked reedy and small in comparison, even though most of our players were chunky, with big muscular thighs like Miss Ibister.
Behind us, on the embankment, the sporty girls jumped up and down, shouting “Go B.C.! Go!” A bunch of day girls sat in an exclusive group on the grassy hill sneaking looks at Lewis. He didn’t give the silly whispering things so much as a glance as he lounged against the hockey shed, his peaked hunting cap twisted on backwards.
Now, suddenly, our team was in the other team’s end zone, and even the day girls jumped to their feet, shrieking their heads off. I guessed they were putting on a display for Lewis, because it didn’t sound like their hearts were in it. They knew this was only a girls’ school, not a boys’ school, where sports were practice for the grownup-man’s game of war.
I Am Honestly Not Sure
Now I need to tendril a little and point out Tory’s place in the hierarchy we lived by at Bath Ladies College. The hierarchy depended on two things: your appearance and where you lived. For instance, the chunky girls ran our clubs
and our school teams and the school houses. They were usually boarders, and I am honestly not sure whether they got chunky from the starchy boarders’ diet or whether they were that way in the first place. The pretty girls were mostly day girls, and they were the followers, who did less-important jobs. They had boyfriends, and they didn’t do things to uphold the school reputation like being the first in the crowd to offer a seat on the bus. Only our school leaders and the prefects did that. They knew how to hold up the side, as they said at school.
Nobody said it out loud—it was just understood—that Tory was a pretty girl who would never make a prefect. Not only was her tunic a mess, but she wore silver keepers in her pierced ears, and when Miss Phillips told her jewelry was against school rules, Tory argued that she had to wear them or else the holes would grow back in. And she wasn’t responsible: she left old apple cores in her underwear drawer and was always losing her brown homework book, in which we kept a daily list of our assignments. But she treated everybody the same way she treated me—as if you mattered. And she always made little jokes about how hopeless she was when anybody gave her a compliment. And if somebody criticized her, she’d only smile in her nice, kind way and agree with what they said. No wonder Paulie loved her and tried to protect her by tidying up the mess she left behind. Paulie remade Tory’s bed every morning so she wouldn’t get a gating for untidiness and listened for hours to Tory complain about her father, who was the principal of Kings College and expected Tory to excel in her schoolwork.
Paulie had no place in the hierarchy. Nobody knew what to do with her. As for me, I was a new girl with a funny little limp and a hunched shoulder. Perfect fodder for Miss Ibister, who stood beside me, a clipboard in her hand and a whistle in her mouth, ready to blow your eardrums out when the players did something wrong.
