(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Another classic among Emma’s nap-time stories, and a close rival to her tale of the kindergartners’ abandonment in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, was her saga of the squeezed child. It was a tale with three different endings, but it began, as Emma’s stories always did: “You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired.”

  Jack napped between Gordon and Caroline French, brother-and-sister twins who had to be separated because they despised each other. Another set of twins in Miss Sinclair’s kindergarten class, Heather and Patsy Booth, were identical girls who couldn’t bear to be separated. When one of them was sick, the other one stayed home to grieve—or perhaps to wait her turn to be sick as well. When the Booth twins napped, they overlapped their rubber mats and wrapped themselves in the same blanket—possibly to simulate their former occupancy of the same uterus.

  Both sets of twins became agitated, but in different ways, during the telling of the squeezed-child tale. The identical Booth girls sucked their shared blanket; they emitted a wet humming sound, which in turn upset Jimmy Bacon, who commenced to moan. The agitation of Gordon and Caroline French, the boy-girl twins on either side of Jack, was more physical in nature and came in unexpected bursts of frenzied, seemingly pointless activity. Under their separate blankets, the French twins thumped their heels on their rubber mats, their stiff legs drumming out of sync; as startling as this was, it was more disturbing when they stopped. The French twins stopped kicking so abruptly, it was as if they’d died of a shared disease—in spite of their enforced separation from each other.

  The three possible conclusions to Emma Oastler’s squeezed-child story had the kindergartners enthralled. “For three of you,” Emma always said, “your bad day just got worse.” Sudden heel-thumping from the French twins, which was quickly followed by their as-sudden deaths; identical blanket-sucking sounds intermingled with humming from the Booth twins; dire moaning from Jimmy Bacon. “One of you is spending the night with your divorced dad,” Emma went on. “He has just passed out from too much sex.” (Jack hated this part.)

  Maureen Yap, a nervous girl whose father was Chinese, once interrupted Emma by asking: “What is too much sex?”

  “Nothing you’ll ever have,” Emma answered dismissively.

  Another time, when Jack asked Emma the same question, Emma said: “You’ll know soon enough, Jack.”

  Jack shuddered under his blanket. He was relying on his flawed understanding of his mom’s conversation in Amsterdam with Saskia and Els. If you looked sexy, Els had said, men thought you could give them good advice. Sex, therefore, was related to advice-giving; like advice, Jack guessed, sex could be good or bad. If the divorced dad in Emma Oastler’s story had passed out from too much sex, Jack suspected this was the worst kind.

  “Your dad has had bad girlfriends before,” Emma continued, “but this one is just a kid. A skinny, tough kid,” Emma added. “She’s as tough as a stick, her fists are as hard as stones, and she hates you. You get in her way. She could have even more sex with your dad if you weren’t around. After your dad passes out, she grinds her fists against your temples—you think she’s going to crush your head!”

  The French twins were flutter-kicking, as if on cue; more blanket-sucking, humming, and moaning. “Meanwhile,” Emma always said, “one of you has a single mother who’s passed out, too.” (Jack really hated this part.)

  “Too much sex again!” Maureen Yap usually cried.

  “Bad sex?” Jack sometimes asked.

  “A bad boyfriend,” Emma informed the kindergartners. “One of the biggest bad boyfriends in the world. When your mother passes out, he comes and lies on top of you—he covers your face with his bare stomach.”

  “How do you breathe?” Grant Porter, a moron, always asked.

  “That’s the problem,” Emma usually answered. “Maybe you can’t.” Unprecedented, out-of-sync heel-drumming from the French twins; soggy-blanket noises from the Booth twins; moans, approximating suffocation, from Jimmy Bacon.

  “But what about your mother who has a girlfriend?” Emma asked. (Jack hated this part most of all.) “She has bigger breasts than all your mothers. She has harder breasts than all your dads’ youngest girlfriends. She has bionic breasts,” Emma said. “Like they have bones inside them—they’re that big and hard.” The very idea of breasts with bones inside them would, years later, still wake Jack Burns from a sound sleep—not that any of the kindergartners slept a wink during the squeezed-child saga. “Which of these poor kids are you?” Emma asked every time.

  “I don’t wanna be anybody!” Maureen Yap predictably cried.

  “I especially don’t want to be trying to breathe with the bad boyfriend’s big belly on my face,” Grant Porter usually made a point of saying.

  “Not the breasts with bones!” James Turner, another moron, always yelled.

  Sometimes Jack mustered the courage to say: “I think I like the tough, skinny girlfriend’s fists of stone the least.” But Emma Oastler and Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford had already made their selections. With his eyes tightly closed, Jack could nonetheless sense them moving into their chosen positions.

  The divorced dad’s skinny, tough girlfriend with the fists of stone—well, that was Wendy Holton. She squeezed your temples between her knees. Her knees were as small and hard as baseballs. She could give Jack a headache in less than a minute—and the view up her skirt, when he dared to look, was disappointingly dark and unclear.

  The unthinkable mother’s girlfriend with the bionic breasts, the breasts with bones inside them—that was Charlotte Barford with her melon-size knees. No breasts ever felt like knees—not before there were implants, anyway. As for the view up Charlotte’s skirt, Jack never looked; the imagined consequences of her catching him looking were too intense.

  And the mom’s bad boyfriend, the one who spread his bare belly on your face and made you fight for your last breath—that was Emma Oastler, of course. Jack first located her belly button with his nose; he found a little room to breathe there. Once, when he explored her navel with his tongue, Emma said: “Boy, do you ever not know what you’re doing.”

  It was only slightly less scary at the actual bat-cave exhibit. While Miss Caroline Wurtz was losing her mind, the grade-three children could at least rest assured that only vampire bats and giant fruit bats might approach them. No divorced dads’ bad girlfriends—no single moms’ bad boyfriends or girlfriends—were hanging out in the bat habitat! Compared to these sexual predators of the recently divorced, what did the kids have to fear from mere bats?

  As for those grade-three children who’d not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda’s, they were initially unfrightened by the power failure in some of the mammal displays at the Royal Ontario Museum; they’d had no previous experience in the bat-cave exhibit to be frightened of. But the former kindergartners among them were frightened enough that their terror was infectious.

  That Miss Wurtz was also afraid was at first unsurprising—she had a history of coming unglued in the grade-three classroom. However, in the bat-cave exhibit, Miss Wurtz could not call upon The Gray Ghost for help. In the environs of the junior school, Miss Wurtz was routinely rescued by the supernaturally sudden appearances of Mrs. McQuat. Not in the Royal Ontario Museum with Jack and his fellow third graders wailing around her; that they’d instantly closed their eyes further disconcerted Miss Wurtz.

  “Open your eyes, children! Don’t go to sleep! Not in here!” Miss Wurtz cried.

  Caroline French, with her eyes firmly closed, offered the hysterical teacher some excellent advice: “Don’t startle the fruit bats, Miss Wurtz—they’re only dangerous if they’re startled.”

  “Open your eyes, Caroline!” Miss Wurtz shrieked.

  “If the hot, moist breath is at your throat, that’s another matter,” Caroline French went on.

  “The what at my throat?” Miss Wurtz asked, her hands on her neck.

  Jack’s feelings for Miss Wurtz were deeply conflicted. He was embarrassed for h
er that she had no mastery of stage presence in a real-life crisis, but he believed she was beautiful. He secretly loved her. “She means a vampire bat,” Jack tried to explain to Miss Wurtz, although Caroline French detested being interrupted. (Her brother interrupted her frequently.)

  “You’ll just frighten Miss Wurtz, Jack,” Caroline said crossly. “Miss Wurtz—if the hot, moist breathing is at your throat, go nuts. Just swat it away.”

  “Swat what away?” Miss Wurtz wailed.

  “But if you feel the breaths on your belly button, remain calm,” Gordon French said, in seeming contradiction of his hostile twin sister.

  “Just don’t move,” Jack added.

  “Nothing’s breathing on my belly button!” Miss Wurtz screamed.

  “You see, Jack?” Caroline French said. “You’ve made it worse, haven’t you?”

  “Don’t panic,” the voice on the loudspeaker repeated. “The power will be restored in no time.”

  “I forget why we have to crawl inside the bat cave,” Jimmy Bacon said. (None of them could remember that part of Emma Oastler’s story.)

  “Nobody’s crawling inside the bat cave!” Miss Wurtz raved. “All of you open your eyes!” Jack thought of telling her that the ultraviolet lights would blind them somehow, but she seemed too upset for more bad news.

  “I feel a fruit bat,” Jack whispered, without moving, but it was Maureen Yap; she had dropped to her knees and was hyperventilating in close proximity to his navel.

  “Stop that!” Miss Wurtz shouted. Jimmy Bacon was moaning while he rubbed his head against her hip. Miss Wurtz may not have meant to grab Jimmy by the throat, but Jimmy reacted in the vampire-bat fashion; he went nuts, screaming and swatting away. Miss Caroline Wurtz screamed, too. (And to think she believed so adamantly in “measured restraint” onstage!)

  That was Jack’s first school trip at St. Hilda’s. Like much of his junior-school experience, it would have seemed slight without the necessary preparations for the journey ahead, which had been provided for him in kindergarten by Emma Oastler—the nap-time storyteller who had appointed herself his personal girl guide.

  Oh, what a lucky boy Jack was! Safe among the girls, without a doubt.

  9

  Not Old Enough

  When Jack started grade one, Emma Oastler and her companions had moved on to the middle school—they were in grade seven. Less fearsome girls became the grade-six guides of the junior school; Jack wouldn’t remember them. Sometimes a whole school day, but rarely two in a row, would pass without his seeing Emma, who fiercely promised him that she would always keep in touch. And Jack’s occasional sightings of Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were usually from a safe distance. (Fists-of-Stone Holton, as he still thought of Wendy. Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, as he would forever remember Charlotte and her melon-size knees.)

  Miss Wong, Jack’s grade-one teacher, had been born in the Bahamas during a hurricane. Nothing noticeably like a tropical storm had remained alive in her, although her habit of apologizing for everything might have begun with the hurricane. She would never acknowledge by name the particular storm she had been born in, which might have led the grade-one children to suspect that the hurricane still flickered somewhere in her subconscious. No trace of a storm animated her listless body or gave the slightest urgency to her voice. “I am sorry to inform you, children, that the foremost difference between kindergarten and grade one is that we don’t nap,” Miss Wong announced on opening day.

  Naturally, her apology was greeted by collective sighs of relief, and some spontaneous expressions of gratitude—heel-thumping from the French twins, identical blanket-sucking sounds from the Booth girls, heartfelt moaning from Jimmy Bacon. That the grade-one response to her no-nap announcement did not inspire a storm of curiosity from “Miss Bahamas,” as the children called Miss Wong behind her back, was further indication of the lifelessness of their new teacher.

  During junior-school chapel service, which was held once a week in lieu of the daily assembly in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap whispered to Jack: “Don’t you kind of miss Emma Oastler and her sleepy-time stories?” There was an instant lump in Jack’s throat; he could neither sing nor make conversation with The Yap, as the kids called Maureen. “I know how you feel,” The Yap went on. “But what was the worst of it? What do you miss most?”

  “All of it,” Jack managed to reply.

  “We all miss it, Jack,” Caroline French said.

  “We all miss all of it,” her irritating twin, Gordon, corrected her.

  “Shove it, Gordon,” Caroline said.

  “I kind of miss the moaning,” Jimmy Bacon admitted. The Booth girls, though blanketless, made their identical blanket-sucking sounds.

  Did the grade-one children crave stories of divorced dads, passed out from too much sex? Did they long to be defenseless, yet again, in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum? Did they miss the single-mom stories, or the overlarge and oversexed boyfriends and girlfriends? Or was it Emma Oastler they missed? Emma and her friends on the verge of puberty, or in puberty’s throes—Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton and Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford.

  There was a new girl in grade one, Lucinda Fleming. She was afflicted with what Miss Wong called “silent rage,” which took the form of the girl physically hurting herself. When Miss Wong introduced Lucinda’s affliction to the class, she spoke of her as if she weren’t there.

  “We must keep an eye on Lucinda,” Miss Wong told the class. Lucinda calmly received their stares. “If you see her with a sharp or dangerous-looking object, you should not hesitate to speak to me. If she looks as if she is trying to go off by herself somewhere—well, that could be dangerous for her, too. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what we should do, Lucinda?” Miss Wong asked the silent girl.

  “It’s okay with me,” Lucinda said, smiling serenely. She was tall and thin with pale-blue eyes and a habit of rubbing a strand of her ghostly, white-blond hair against her teeth—as if her hair were dental floss. She wore it in a massive ponytail.

  Caroline French inquired if this habit was harmful to Lucinda’s hair or teeth. Caroline’s point was that teeth-and-hair rubbing was probably an early indication of the silent rage, a precursor to more troubling behavior.

  “I’m sorry to disagree, but I don’t think so, Caroline,” Miss Wong replied. “You’re not trying to hurt yourself with your hair or your teeth, are you, Lucinda?” Miss Wong asked.

  “Not now,” Lucinda mumbled. She had a strand of hair in her mouth when she spoke.

  “It doesn’t look dangerous to me,” Maureen Yap said. (The Yap occasionally sucked her hair.)

  “Yeah, but it’s gross,” said Heather Booth.

  Patsy, Heather’s identical twin, said, “Yeah.”

  Jack thought it was probably a good thing that Lucinda Fleming was a new girl and had not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda’s. Who knows how Emma Oastler might have affected Lucinda’s proclivity to silent rage? Between mouthfuls of hair, Lucinda told Jack that her mother had been impregnated by an alien; she said her father was from outer space. Although he was only six, Jack surmised that Lucinda’s mom was divorced. Emma Oastler’s saga of the squeezed child, no matter which ending, would have given Lucinda Fleming a rage to top all her rages.

  Jack Burns avoided what was called “the quad,” even in the spring, when the cherry trees were in bloom. The ground-floor rooms for music practice faced the courtyard; you could overhear the piano lessons from the quad. Jack occasionally imagined that his dad was still teaching someone in one of those rooms. He hated to hear that music.

  And the white, round chandeliers in the dining room reminded him of blank globes—of the earth strangely countryless, without discernible borders, not even indications of land and sea. Like the world where his father had gone missing; William Burns might as well have come from outer space.

  Jack looked carefully for evidence of Lucinda Fleming’s silent rage for the longest time, never se
eing it. He wondered if he would recognize the symptoms—if he’d had a rage of his own here or there, but had somehow not known what it was. Who were the authorities on rage? (Not Miss Wong, who’d clearly managed to lose contact with the hurricane inside her.)

  Jack wasn’t used to seeing so little of his mother; he left for school before she got up and was asleep before she came home. As for rage, what Alice had of it might have been expressed in the pain-inflicting needles with which she marked for life so many people—mainly men.

  Mrs. Wicksteed, who did Jack’s necktie so patiently but absentmindedly, stuck to her be-nice-twice philosophy without ever imparting to the boy what he should do if he were pressed to be nice a third time. That he was instructed to be creative struck Jack as a nonspecific form of advice; no silent rage, or rage of any kind, was in evidence there. And Lottie, despite having lost a child, had left what amounted to her rage on Prince Edward Island—or so she implied to Jack.

  “I’m not an angry person anymore, Jack,” Lottie said, when he asked her what she knew about rage in general—and the silent kind, in particular. “The best thing I can tell you is not to give in to it,” Lottie said.

  Jack would later imagine that Lottie was one of those women, neither young nor old, whose sexuality had been fleeting; only small traces of her remaining desire were visible, in the way you might catch her looking at herself in profile in a mirror. Glimpses of Lottie’s former attractiveness were apparent to Jack only in her most unguarded moments—when he had a nightmare and roused her from a sound sleep, or when she woke him up for school in the morning before she’d taken the time to attend to herself.

  Short of asking Lucinda Fleming to talk to him about her silent rage, which would have been far too simple and straightforward a solution for any six-year-old boy to conceive of, Jack worked up his courage and asked Emma Oastler instead. (If Emma wasn’t an authority on rage, who was?) But Jack was afraid of Emma; her cohorts struck him as somewhat safer places to start. That was why he worked up his courage to ask Emma by asking Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford first. He began with Wendy, only because she was the smaller of the two.