by John Irving
The junior school got a half-hour head start for lunch. How fitting that it was under the blank globes of the dining-hall chandeliers, those unmarked worlds, where Jack spoke to Wendy. How well (and for how long!) he would remember her haunted eyes, her chewed lips, her unbrushed, dirty-blond hair—not forgetting her scraped knees, as hard as fists of stone.
“What rage was that, Jack?”
“Silent.”
“What about it, you little creep?”
“Well, what is it, exactly—what is silent rage?” he asked.
“You’re not eating the mystery meat, are you?” Wendy asked, viewing his plate with disapproval.
“No, I would never eat that,” Jack answered. He separated the gray meat from the beige potatoes with his fork.
“You wanna see a little rage, Jack?”
“Yes, I guess so,” he replied cautiously—never taking his eyes off her. Wendy had an unsettling habit of cracking her knuckles by pressing them into her underdeveloped breasts.
“You wanna meet me in the washroom?” Wendy asked.
“The girls’ washroom?”
“I’m not getting caught with you in the boys’ washroom, you dork.” Jack wanted to think it over, but it was hard to think clearly with Wendy standing over him at his table. The word dork itself unsettled him; it seemed so out of place at a mostly all-girls’ school.
“Forgive me for intruding, but aren’t you having any lunch, Wendy?” Miss Wong asked.
“I’d rather die,” Wendy told her.
“Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear that!” Miss Wong said.
“You wanna follow me, or are you chicken?” Wendy whispered in Jack’s ear. He could feel one of her hard, bruised knees against his ribs.
“Okay,” he answered.
Officially, Jack needed Miss Wong’s permission to leave the dining hall, but Miss Wong was typically in an overapologetic mood (having blamed herself for attempting to force lunch on Wendy Holton, when Wendy would rather die). “Miss Wong—” he started to say.
“Yes, of course, Jack,” she blurted out. “I’m so sorry if I’ve made you feel self-conscious, or that I may have delayed your leaving the table for whatever obvious good reason you have for leaving. Heavens! Don’t let me hold you up another second!”
“I’ll be right back,” was all he managed to say.
“I’m sure you will be, Jack,” Miss Wong said. Perhaps the faint hurricane inside her had been overcome by her contrition.
In the girls’ washroom nearest the dining hall, Wendy Holton took Jack into a stall and stood him on the toilet seat. She just grabbed him in the armpits and lifted him up. Standing on the toilet seat, he was eye-to-eye with her; so he wouldn’t slip, Wendy held him by the hips.
“You want to feel rage, inner rage, Jack?”
“I said silent, silent rage.”
“Same difference, penis breath,” Wendy said.
Now there was a concept that would stay with Jack Burns for many years—penis breath! What a deeply disturbing concept it was.
“Feel this,” Wendy said. She took his hands and placed them on her breasts—on her no breasts, to be more precise.
“Feel what?” he asked.
“Don’t be a dork, Jack—you know what they are.”
“This is rage?” the boy asked. By no stretch of his imagination could he have called what his small hands held breasts.
“I’m the only girl in grade seven who doesn’t have them!” Wendy exclaimed, in a smoldering fury. Well, this was rage without a doubt.
“Oh.”
“That’s all you can say?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” Jack quickly said. (How to apologize was all he had learned from Miss Wong.)
“Jack, you’re just not old enough,” Wendy declared. She left him standing precariously on the toilet seat. “When I knock on the door from the hall three times, you’ll know it’s safe to come out,” she told him. “Rage,” Wendy said, almost as an afterthought.
“Silent rage,” Jack repeated, for clarity’s sake. He saw that he should approach Charlotte Barford a little differently on this subject. But how?
When Wendy knocked on the washroom door three times, Jack exited into the hall. Miss Caroline Wurtz looked surprised to see him; there was no one else in the corridor. “Jack Burns,” Miss Wurtz said perfectly, as always. “It disappoints me to see you using the girls’ washroom.” Jack was disappointed, too, and said so, which seemed to instill in Miss Wurtz the spirit of forgiveness; she liked it when you said you understood how she felt, but her recovery from being disappointed was not always so swift.
Jack had higher expectations for what he might learn from Charlotte Barford. Charlotte at least had breasts, he’d observed. Whatever the source of her rage, it was not an underdeveloped bosom. Unfortunately, he hadn’t fully prepared how he wanted to approach Charlotte Barford before Charlotte approached him.
Once a week, after lunch, Jack sang in the primary choir. They performed mostly in those special services—Canadian Thanksgiving, Christmas, Remembrance Day. They did a bang-up Gaudeamus at Easter.
Come, ye faithful, raise the strain
Of triumphant gladness!
Jack avoided all eye contact with the organist. He’d already met a lifetime of organists; even though the organist at St. Hilda’s was a woman, she still reminded him of his talented dad.
The day Jack ran into Charlotte Barford in the corridor, he was humming either “Fairest Lord Jesus” or “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”—similar adorations. Jack was passing the same girls’ washroom where Wendy Holton had forced him to feel her no breasts while imagining her rage—he would remember that washroom to his dying day—when Charlotte Barford opened the washroom door. With her hands still wet and smelling of disinfectant from that awful liquid soap, Charlotte pulled him back into the washroom.
“What rage, Jack?” she asked, pinning him to a sink with one of her big, bare knees. There it was, in the pit of his stomach—a so-called breast with bones in it!
“The silent, inner kind—rage that doesn’t go away,” Jack guessed.
“It’s what you don’t know, what people won’t tell you, what you have to wait to find out for yourself,” Charlotte said, driving her knee a little deeper. “All the stuff that makes you angry, Jack.”
“But I don’t know if I am angry,” the boy said.
“Sure you are,” Charlotte said. “Your dad is a total doink. He’s made you and your mom virtual charity cases. Everyone’s betting on you, Jack.”
“On me? What’s the bet?”
“That you’re gonna be a womanizer, like your father.”
“What’s a womanizer?” Jack asked.
“You’ll know soon enough, squirrel dink,” she said. “By the way, you’re not touching my breasts,” Charlotte whispered. Biting his earlobe, she added: “Not yet.”
Jack knew the exit routine. He waited in the washroom until Charlotte knocked three times on the door from the hall. He was surprised, this time, that Miss Wurtz wasn’t passing by in the corridor at that very moment—there was only Charlotte Barford, walking away. Her hips had the same involuntary roll to them that he remembered of Ingrid Moe’s full-stride departure from the Hotel Bristol, although Charlotte’s skirt was much too short for Oslo in the winter.
There was a lot he didn’t know—not just what a womanizer was, but what were charity cases? And now, in addition to penis breath and doink, there was squirrel dink to ponder.
Jack could not imagine that this was “proper” material for his next necktie-tying conversation with Mrs. Wicksteed—not in her early-morning curlers and avocado oil, fortified only by her first cup of tea—nor did these issues strike the boy as suitable to raise with Lottie. Her earlier hardships, her undiscussed limp and the life she’d left behind on Prince Edward Island, did not predispose Lottie to stressful dialogue of any kind. And of course he knew what his mother’s response would be. “We’ll discuss this when you’re old enough,”
his mom was fond of saying. Certain subjects were in the same category as getting your first tattoo, for which (according to Alice) you also had to be old enough.
Well, Jack knew someone who was old enough. When he was adrift in grade one, under the apologetic supervision of the weatherless Miss Wong, Emma Oastler was in grade seven, thirteen going on twenty-one. No topics were off-limits for conversation with Emma. There was only the problem of how pissed-off she was. (Jack knew Emma would be furious with him for speaking to Wendy and Charlotte first.)
Don’t misunderstand the outlaw corridors and washroom thuggery—namely, the older girls’ behavior outside the classroom. St. Hilda’s was a good school, and an especially rigorous one—academically. Perhaps the demands of the classroom created an urgency to act up among the older girls; they needed to express themselves in opposition to the correct diction and letter-perfect enunciation, of which Miss Wurtz was not the only champion among the generally excellent faculty at the school. The girls needed a language of their own—corridor-speak, or washroom grammar. That was why there was a lot of “Lemme-see” stuff—all the “I’m gonna, dontcha-wanna, gimme-that-thing-now” crap—which was the way the older girls talked among themselves, or to Jack. If they ever spoke in this fashion in their respective classrooms, the faculty—not only Miss Wurtz—would have instantly reprimanded them.
Not so Peewee, Mrs. Wicksteed’s Jamaican driver. Peewee was in no position to criticize how Emma Oastler spoke to Jack in the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car. To begin with, both Peewee and Jack were surprised the first time Emma slid into the backseat. It was a cold, rainy afternoon. Emma lived in Forest Hill; she usually walked to and from school. After school—in both her middle- and her senior-school years—Emma normally hung out in a restaurant and coffee shop at the corner of Spadina and Lonsdale with a bunch of her older-girl friends. Not this day, and it wasn’t the cold or the rain.
“You need help with your homework, Jack,” Emma announced. (The boy was in grade one. He wouldn’t have much homework before grade two, and he wouldn’t really need help with it before grades three and four.)
“Where are we taking the girl, mon?” Peewee asked Jack.
“Take me home with him,” Emma told the driver. “We’ve got a shitload of work to do—haven’t we, Jack?”
“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 o
f 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.
