The Wives of Bath

by Susan Swan

  Lewis took off his cap, and a thick black braid fell down his back. Then he popped in one of his front teeth and smiled. I didn’t know what to say, and Lewis began to laugh. He said he hadn’t meant to scare me—he’d just got a little carried away because he liked practical jokes. And then he took my hand and yanked me into the dark shed and closed the door.

  17

  It wasn’t the boiler I heard. It was the automatic coal feed, Lewis said. He made me listen to its rhythmic clink—a sound like a bicycle chain going round and round, of metal hitting metal in the darkness. I stood trembling beside him, my ear still wet from his kiss.

  Then Lewis—I mean, Paulie—struck a match, holding it between her muscular thumb and forefinger. I stared at her, breathless, not sure what was going to happen next, and not caring. The flame crept slowly down and burnt out soundlessly between her fingers. I smelled something funny under the sulphur, and then I realized she’d put the match out with her own skin. Paulie lit another match and handed it to me. “Your turn,” she said.

  The match burnt down halfway. I felt the heat before the flame touched my fingers. “Ow!” I said and dropped the match.

  “It’s not that it doesn’t hurt; it’s that you don’t mind if it hurts,” Paulie said. “Lawrence of Arabia—remember? That’s what he said in the film.”

  “Yes,” I said meekly.

  Paulie lit a candle this time and held it so close to my face I couldn’t see a thing except the halo of its flame. Fingers suddenly poked my left bicep.

  “You’re flabby, Bradford—like a girl,” Paulie said. She handed me the candle and flexed her arm so her muscles squirmed like small moles inside the casing of her skin. I’d never seen Paulie’s biceps before; they’d been hidden in the sleeves of her school middy. But I’d seen Lewis’s arms. Oh, yes—a few times. It was impossible not to notice Lewis’s arms, dangling like twin cobras from his rolled-up sleeves. No girls I knew had arms that grew like snakes from their torso. And now here were Lewis’s arms on Paulie.

  Or was this person Paulie? Maybe it was a creature who could move with the authority of a man one minute and giggle like a girl the next. The sight was confusing and interesting—like watching a wizard melt into male and female shapes before your eyes. And every change in Paulie provoked a change in me. When she acted like Lewis, I wanted to exhale responsibility for myself like a sigh; when she acted like Paulie, I was myself again. Well, almost myself—as much as a Mouse can be. And then I heard Sal’s voice in my ear—see, Mary Beatrice, you’re a girl after all—deferring to a man the way a woman should. And I felt sick. Was I no different from the dummies at Morley’s hospital, who followed him into the operating room carrying his surgical tray?

  Bewildered, I let Paulie lead me past the hills of coal into the boiler room. It smelled of male sweat, and I saw the white coats of the janitors hanging on the wall. They had made a kind of sitting room for themselves next to the boiler. Two broken-down chintz armchairs spilled stuffing like seeds from a burst milkweed pod. On an overturned Kotex carton somebody had arranged copies of Playboy in a row, the way Sal arranged Morley’s medical magazines on our coffee table.

  Behind this makeshift sitting room stood a door draped with the same striped olive-green curtains the Virgin hung in her office.

  Paulie went right over to the curtain and lifted it, and inside I saw another tiny room, with wooden sides like a horse’s stall. The clink of the coal feed grew fainter as we stepped inside, me still holding the candle. We were standing in an old coal chute. In the middle of the chute was a piano stool with a stack of bananas sitting on top of it.

  Beside me, Paulie lit an incense stick, then dipped her knee and crossed herself, genuflecting as expertly as the High Anglicans we saw at St. Paul’s. Then she made me hold the candle close to the wall, and I saw a creature with mad, raging monkey eyes. His hairy arms held lightning bolts, as if he were about to hurl them into our hearts. I nearly dropped the candle.

  “Give them to Kong,” Paulie said, and tapped my pocket where my Sweet Caps nestled. I just stared at her, and she snatched them up for herself and put them next to the bananas on her altar, the pack open so my fags spilled out onto the floor and shone in the gloomy room like white fingers. I was looking at a movie poster of King Kong—an old one, from the thirties. In the dark, I could see New York at Kong’s feet—a silhouette of bumps no higher than his massive calves.

  Oh, Kong was terrible to look at if he was mad, and lovable as a teddy bear when he was doing things he liked, such as holding Fay Wray in his fist and gently peeling off her clothes. I could see why Paulie liked him. I was fond of him myself.

  Near my cigarettes I spotted one of Ismay Thom’s scarves, some dead geraniums from the Virgin’s favourite plot, a Book of Common Prayer, a sheaf of new school notepaper with the school motto and the tassel of the clover, and—I had to look again—the book by Norman Vincent Peale that Sal had given me.

  Before I could say anything, Paulie pounded her chest and swung her arms back and forth the way Kong does when he’s protecting Fay Wray from danger—like the time he ripped apart the jaw of the Tyrannosaurus rex. “Kong the beautiful, Kong the bold, Kong the brave,” Paulie bellowed. I shrank back into the furnace room, embarrassed for Paulie and her strange behaviour.

  “I fooled you, didn’t I?” Paulie followed me out, smoking one of my Sweet Caps. “And I fooled the Virgin, too. She swallowed every lie I told her about Paulie having a brother. The Virgin thinks she’s so smart, but she swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker.”

  Despite my uneasiness, I was impressed. Oh, Mouse, I thought, here you are with a master rule breaker, you, who bows down to authority like a willow tree in the wind! What a job of mimicking! In her own way, Paulie was a genius. “And Tory?” I whispered.

  “Yeah.” She squinted, as if she were seeing me for the first time. “Kong likes you, Mouse,” she said. “He says you can be a boy, like me.”

  “You mean dress up?” I said nervously.

  “Yeah.” The cigarette flipped upside down and then disappeared completely inside Paulie’s closed mouth. “But you have to pass his tests first, okay?” she mumbled. Wisps of smoke escaped from the lit cigarette inside her mouth and snaked upwards into her nostrils. How could Paulie stand holding the hot cigarette in her mouth? I waited for her to start coughing. Instead, she clamped her lips tightly together so no smoke could leak out. Maybe the moisture from her tongue kept the cigarette from burning the roof of her mouth. And, then again, maybe not. I waited for the smoke to start coming out of her ears.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do.” Paulie flipped the cigarette out of her mouth with a fold of her tongue. “You’ll look better as a guy.” She nodded toward my hump. “It’ll be easier to cover up—that.” She put her hands on my shoulder, and for a second I swear she was Lewis again and she was going to stick her tongue in my ear or do something worse, like French-kiss me on the mouth. But she only laughed and sat me down on the shabby old chairs and outlined what I had to do.

  18

  Here are the preliminary tests of Kong, just as Paulie devised them.

  Lift a full five-foot-square carton of Kotex boxes over one’s head and balance it there like a bunch of bananas. (Estimated weight: forty pounds.)

  Hold a match between thumb and forefinger and let it burn down to the skin without crying. (I got a second chance on that.)

  Stand (only sissy girls sit) on a swing in the junior playground and take it over the top.

  Walk along the tower wall twice without looking down or stopping.

  Adopt an I’m-all-right-Jack attitude no matter what.

  Eat six bowls of fish eyes and glue (tapioca pudding) without puking.

  Practise shaving with Paulie’s shaving kit. (If shaving the hair off your legs only makes the hair grow in heavier, then shaving your face would make you grow a beard, Paulie said.)

  Pee standing up.

  I completed the first two prel
iminary tests and missed the third. (Lucky for me, Sergeant had taken down the swings for the winter.) I did the other tests the next evening. I won’t say how well I performed—not in detail, anyway. Let me put it this way. Kong liked Mouse and closed his eyes to the pee dribbling down my thigh and wetting my shoes. So I could sneak past his exacting standards the first time around.

  Why did I do the tests? I was scared to say no to Paulie, and maybe I wanted her to be Lewis. Lewis was a bully-tease, and I found that exciting, because, although I didn’t know it, I was beginning to develop a taste for fear. Fear makes you feel alive. Without a drop of fear now and again, life wouldn’t be worth living.

  There was one other reason. It was true what Paulie said about Alice: I did look nicer in jackets with padded shoulders. As for what she said about Kong—I thought of it as Paulie being Paulie. We at Bath Ladies College (as Mrs. Peddie would say) felt grateful to each other just for being there to share the misery of school life.

  Although the preliminary tests were finished, I still had three more categories to go.

  Mastery over Nature.

  Mastery over Other Men.

  Mastery over Women.

  19

  Nobody suspected that Paulie was Lewis, because nobody expects a girl to be a guy. Ismay Thom didn’t suspect that Paulie was Lewis, and she was our new roommate. Ismay was the first to point out that I wore the heels of my oxfords into half-moons because I didn’t walk like a girl; I walked jaw and stomach out, the weight on my heels, like a man. Well, of course I did. Paulie and I both did. We practised until it was second nature. Basically, you understand, Ismay couldn’t have given me a nicer compliment. But what I didn’t want to happen happened anyhow.

  Alice and I Discuss the Hard Facts

  — I think it’s too late, Alice. I’ve even got—groan—hair down there.

  — You mean that patch springing out between your legs, as if it’s electrified?

  — Yes. And look what happens if I press my breasts together with my palms!

  — Yikes! Cleavage!

  — Well, it’s not movie star cleavage. It’s more like what you get when you squeeze two very old tennis balls together. I mean, you can see hollows on the outsides of my breasts, but there’s still a genuine little valley in the middle. And only women and fat men have that.

  — Maybe your breasts will deflate like old inner tubes.

  — That won’t happen until I get old and you know it. Oh, Alice, why do we need separate sexes anyway? We all start off as girls in the womb.

  — Not me. I grew out of your shoulder.

  — You’re not listening. I’m talking about the tiny lump Morley’s textbook calls the genital tubercle. It looks like a girl’s privates when it first shows up on an unborn baby. It’s not until much later that this swelling develops into a penis.

  — I thought you didn’t like girls.

  — That’s beside the point. Don’t you see, Alice? If somebody could only arrange it so that lump didn’t develop, we wouldn’t need two sexes. It would save us all so much trouble.

  One night, Ismay walked into the washroom and caught Alice and me doing the nightly once-over. “You’re starkers, Mary Beatrice! Oh, you make me sick. Showing yourself off like that.” I shrank away, my arms shielding my hateful new breasts, which I longed to bind flat, like Paulie. “And you should wear a bra,” she sniffed, “if you don’t want them to sag like a Ubangi’s.” Her ringlets quivering, Ismay marched to her dresser and began the nightly ritual I knew by heart.

  Pull the long flannel nightie covered with apples over her head and do it up to her chin. Then slide out her underclothes, one by one, like a magician discovering doves and oranges inside your ears.

  Sprinkle talcum powder down the open neck of the nightie and move the material in and out so the powder sifts out the armholes and under the hem and makes you choke and the room smell like freshly changed babies.

  Brush her black-as-earth hair a hundred strokes, front, side, and back. Scotch-tape two kiss curls—one to each cheek—and curl the rest of her mop with tiny, spiky wire rollers.

  Polish her oxfords with her own spit, like a soldier in boot camp, and then iron her tunic on her dresser top. (Ismay liked her tunic to hang in hideously neat folds, without wrinkles, just the way the new girls who didn’t know any better wore them. With Ismay, it was a point of pride.)

  Open the barred windows as wide as possible. (The more night air you have, the better your complexion. Ismay thought she had cheeks like an English tea rose. Personally, her papery white skin made me think of English warthogs. But at least the open windows made the smell of her baby powder fainter.)

  Pull the covers up to her chin and read out loud to nobody in particular Douglas Bader’s autobiography Reach for the Sky until Paulie tells her to shut up.

  Halfway through number three that night, Ismay put down her iron and held up her tunic. “Somebody here hates me, Mary Beatrice,” Ismay cried. “They have to—to do a disgusting thing like this.” The back of her tunic was thickly coated with something like chocolate. There was a great big circle of it right on the part that fell over her bum, as if Ismay had bled through the material during her period. I looked closely.

  “It’s only dried ketchup,” I said finally. “The school laundry will take it out.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Absolutely. They use so much detergent and starch, there’s no way this won’t come back clean as a whistle.”

  “You’re a bloody optimist, Mary Bea.” In no time at all Ismay was at number six—my most unfav part—while I retreated to my bed to lick out the vanilla fillings from the Oreos I kept stashed in my underwear drawer. Ismay had her regime to get by on; I had my cookies, which I stole from the matron’s night tray in handfuls—with Paulie’s approval.

  Number six: “It was a glorious spring morning when Bader drove to Roehampton to take delivery and his spirits were soaring at the prospect. He thought it must be the way a woman felt on her way to pick up a new fur coat.”

  “What’s he going to get?” I wasn’t quite brave enough to tell her I didn’t want to hear about her idol Douglas Bader. Bader sounded pompous, not kind and smart like President Kennedy.

  “New legs, of course,” Ismay said. “Wooden ones. Two of them. Bloody exciting, I’d say.”

  “I wouldn’t feel excited about getting a new fur coat,” I said. “I don’t like them.” In my heart of hearts, I felt worried. Maybe Sal felt exactly like that when Morley had given her a fur stole last Christmas. But I didn’t say so to Ismay. Even though women were the most embarrassing gender, it still bugged me when I thought of Sal and the way she seemed to fit those descriptions of fluffheads who liked nothing but clothes and jewels. Not even Sal—-from what I could see—was that simple. Not deep down, not truly. Not when you got to know her. And that was when the most surprising thing happened: Paulie walked out of the closet. She always undressed there, and nobody dared to say anything about it. Ismay and I both yelped because neither of us knew she’d been hiding there, listening. And then I felt ashamed for acting like a girl.

  “You babies,” Paulie sneered, and began to tie her hair off her forehead with an elastic from her bloomers. Her remark made me feel even worse.

  “You’re bloody inconsiderate, Pauline Sykes. A decent person wouldn’t surprise us like that,” Ismay said. She picked up her tunic and waved it at Paulie. “And don’t think I’m going to let you get away with this. I expect you to pay the blasted cleaning bill.”

  “I didn’t touch your stupid tunic,” Paulie said. She was applying white zit cream to her pimples. “You did that yourself. You just don’t want to admit it. Isn’t that right, Bradford?”

  I wish I could say I told the truth. Just between you and me and the gatepost, I liked Ismay. In a lukewarm sort of way, of course. Because she didn’t care what the other girls thought. Because she liked me and secretly gave me her stash of Oreos when Paulie wasn’t looking. If I’d been Isma
y I would have died at the way the other girls avoided sitting next to her at our meal tables and snickered behind their fingers when she sang too loudly in prayers. I will never forget her English voice trumpeting over our soft Canadian sopranos: “Like the dancing waves in sunlight make me glad and free … like the straightness of the pine tree, let me upright be.” I had Paulie to stop me from getting picked on, but Ismay didn’t have anyone.

  Anyhow, I mumbled something like “Maybe so” and kept on polishing off the Oreos. I’d gone through all the white fillings, and now I was eating the crunchy black wafers, one by one. Ismay looked at me as if her heart were breaking and went back to reading out loud. “Dessoutter had a set of three shallow wooden steps with bannisters, and when he put the legs on and tried …”

  “Would you stop reading that stupid fucking book!” Paulie lurched at Ismay, and I swear she was going to sock her one, so I shouted, “Ismay, watch out!” (It was the least I could do.) And Paulie glared at me and grabbed the book about Douglas Bader and threw it out the window. Ismay began to squeal and sob, and our bedroom door opened. In came Miss Phillips.

  “That’ll be enough, Ismay. Pauline, you will report to Miss Vaughan in the morning.”