The Wives of Bath

by Susan Swan

  40

  Sal’s Shrine

  I have my shrine to Morley, the father, and Sal has her shrine to Morley and Sal, the couple. In the front hall, where my mother’s photograph used to hang, she’s put up one of herself in her nurse’s uniform. This shows a younger, thinner Sal with a nurse’s cap stuck on her dark head like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She gave me my mother’s portrait and the only snapshot I have of my mother laughing. My mother is wearing a long flannel skirt, and she’s standing on the lawn in front of my grandmother’s house holding me by the hand. She looks carefree and happy. And I look bald, with luminous, deep-set eyes—Morley’s eyes. And a pair of fan-shaped ears. Mouse Bradford. I had my mouseness even before the polio. Then there’s another picture of me with my mother, after the polio. I’m sitting on a tall white wall. My shoulders are as high as my ears; one leg is stuck awkwardly forward. I’m in a white pinafore, and my mother has her hand on my shoulder, looking into the camera over my head. She looks sad.

  And Mine

  Let Sal have her shrine; I’d got what I wanted. I’d sneaked it: when Sal had gone out to stop Billy Bugle from burning down our garage with trash from the incinerator. Morley’s doctor’s bag. I was keeping it so that Morley could come back and claim it, just in case he decided to get himself resurrected. His bag was as big as a lady’s purse, with neat leather compartments designed to hold bottles and narrow instruments like a pair of surgical scissors and Liston’s single-edged amputating knife—a seven-and-a-half-inch blade as elegant as a cheese knife. I kept everything I found inside the bag. I needed it all—even the nasty-looking scalpels and dissecting scissors. Not that I intended to use them. I simply wanted everything of Morley I could jam into his doctor’s bag. The stomach and intestinal clamps, the Clay Adams utility forceps—which looked like the tongs Sal used for extracting hot dogs from boiling water—and, of course, the stethoscope. I wanted the Stryker electric bone saw, but I couldn’t fit the foot switch into the bag, so I left it on the examining couch. A puzzle for Sal to brood over.

  41

  Sal was verging on her “C” mood the morning I left for school, but she made me my favourite breakfast, anyway—boiled eggs with only the yolk. And she didn’t ask me to finish my milk. I hate milk. It’s too white—like bones. I don’t like egg white, either—too much like skin. Sal says I have these food preferences to annoy her. She says everybody likes milk and egg white. That morning, she didn’t say anything like that, so I figured it was safe to ask her a few questions.

  Q: Why didn’t Morley spend time with me?

  SAL’S ANSWER: Why would he do something for you that he didn’t do for me? We were members of a doctor’s family. We had to accept that we were second-best.

  Q: Is it right for a father not to have conversations with his daughter?

  SAL’S ANSWER: HOW could you expect a man bushed from standing on his feet all day to come home and chatter away with you? When he was about to drop on the spot? Why not expect him to play canasta, too?

  Q: Was it my fault Morley didn’t pay more attention to me?

  SAL’S ANSWER: Mouse, you’re too much of a worrier. I never heard Morley say he wished you were a boy, even if you didn’t play baseball or know how to throw a football. Be sensible. With your shoulder, how could you be good at sports?

  I didn’t ask Sal any more questions. I let her drive me to the Greyhound stop on the main street in Madoc’s Landing. I didn’t kiss her good-bye. Instead, I turned and said: “I guess you wish you’d given Morley a son. That way, he might have stayed home with us more.”

  Sal just sat behind the wheel of Blinky, her mouth open, and I knew I’d put my finger on an old nerve. I climbed into the bus with my suitcase, not looking around once.

  Part Three

  42

  The Beatles song “She Loves You” was playing on the radio the afternoon the taxi drove me through the school gates.

  It surprised me that there was no snow. The leaves were off the trees, and the ravine looked ragged and unwelcoming as we climbed toward the school, which now rose clearly visible through the stripped camperdown elms—as much a prison as ever. No pigeons flew up from its mock turrets as the driver opened my door. I wondered if the mysterious poisoner had finished them off. Behind the hockey pitch I saw a huge mound of dirt and rubble. It was the excavation for the new wing, which everybody said the Virgin was building to accommodate male boarders when Bath Ladies College merged with Kings College. Its dark lump made me think of Morley’s grave. I wondered if the earth had thawed enough so he could be buried. I looked around, startled that I lived in such an old-fashioned place. Bath Ladies College would make a perfect creepola subject for one of Mrs. Peddie’s assignments asking you to use specific description to create a menacing atmosphere. I thought of the essay I’d written for her on Wuthering Heights. “Stormy weather and the powerful north wind had slanted the few stunted firs at the end of the house, and the range of gaunt thorns all stretched their limbs in one direction.” Not bad. What would I say about our school? “The cold winter rains from the lake had stained its chiselled fieldstone with ominous brooding shapes that no sunshine would ever turn white again.” It sounded like old Charles Dickens. I preferred Brontë.

  The scent of fresh paste wax hit me the second I walked in. Now Tory personally loved that smell; she called it words like “heady” and “full-bodied” and said it spoke to her of new beginnings. Not me. I’ve never been able to smell cleaning fluids of any kind since then without getting pretty depressed.

  For once, I was one of the last girls there. Miss Cockshutt sat in her cubicle unplugging and plugging small rubber hoses into the switchboard panel and angrily answering a question from a student I didn’t know. Slowly I walked up the circular stairs dragging my suitcase. The staircase looked just as I’d remembered it, the red paint worn off in the middle of each step, where thousands of girls had tread before me. I noticed my legs were stronger, and this made me think of Tory, and I wondered whether she’d be back.

  In my room, I saw a fourth bed. And a new girl with dark hair—coiled as tightly as a poodle’s—reading on a chair. Then I saw the wide-open windows. I sighed. Ismay the Terrible. She’d had a perm.

  “Guess who’s been kicked out of the room?” Ismay said. She was reading Reach for the Sky.

  I guessed. “Paulie?”

  “Well done, Bradford, old girl. And we’ve got a new roommate, Asa Abrams. Apparently, Asa asked if she could room with you and Victoria.” I shrugged and turned my back to her.

  “We’re all dreadfully sorry about your father, of course,” she added. To my surprise, I heard real sympathy in her voice.

  Then the door opened, and Tory hobbled in ahead of Asa and thrust a Gideon bible into my hand. Tory was no longer on crutches, but she looked thinner and older, and a little distracted, as if she had something sad on her mind. I thought immediately of Paulie and of what she’d told me at Morley’s funeral about Rick, and I wondered if this had anything to do with the new bewildered expression I saw on Tory’s face. I wanted to put my arms around her and hug her, but I was too shy. So I just stood there, smiling a little and feeling the same old grateful feeling I always felt when I saw her: just thrilled to pieces that somebody as nice and gentle as Tory would have time for me. I opened the bible to the frontispiece, where she’d inscribed the words, “To Mary Beatrice Bradford, who is true blue—This is Peter Marshall’s prayer for a time of bereavement.” It was such a Tory thing to do—to give me a modern version of the New Testament with a nice prayer. I read the first two lines: “Thou hast promised to wipe away all tears from our eyes. I ask thee to fulfill that promise now.”

  I sat down heavily on my bed and tried to think of something distracting, like Jack O’Malley, so I wouldn’t cry. And the next thing I knew, our room was full of girls unloading the pockets of their dressing gowns with my all-time fav, peppermint Oreos. They stood single-file in front of my bed as if they were lining up for prayers and, one by on
e, deposited the cookies on my pillow. I felt touched, and surprised; I couldn’t even manage a Mouse nibble to show them I appreciated their concern.

  Excusing myself, I picked up my pyjamas and went off to the washroom to undress. I heard Tory whisper as I went out, “Poor Mouse. She’s going off to cry.”

  The small, cramped washroom felt clammy from the black stockings and purple bloomers that had been hung up to dry. It was very still, and I sensed the girls listening from my room. I didn’t want to cry and get people worked up for nothing but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  I bent my head and began to sob in short bursts like hiccups. Sob and wait. Sob and wait so the noise wouldn’t bring Miss Phillips. I could feel the sympathy from Tory and the other girls back in my room, and this made me bawl even more. And then I heard Tory making excuses for me to the matron. One good thing about Morley’s death: I’d get special privileges—for a day or so, anyway.

  43

  “Pssst, Bradford. In here,” I heard somebody call. The voice was coming from Asa Abrams’s old cubicle. I recognized the plaque on the door. It was a quote by Frances Ridley Havergal. “Why did God promise us a new heart?” the Anglican hymn maker had written. “Because our old hearts are so evil that they cannot be made any better; so nothing will do any good but giving us quite a new heart.” I peeked in. A radio was playing “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by the Four Seasons, and Paulie was mouthing the words as she stood on her bed, her head stuck out the high, skinny little opening that passed for a window in most of the tower rooms. The room reeked of hairspray. Paulie turned slowly around and blew a smoke ring at me. She didn’t say anything and for a second, I thought she didn’t know who I was. Her eyes looked mean and little. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed that before. Or maybe it was the weird blue light. Paulie had put a blue bulb in her study lamp, turning King Kong in the poster above her bed blue as well.

  “Did you see her?”

  “Who?”

  “Tory, you nitwit.” Paulie threw me a fag and grinned then like her old self, and I felt better. “I heard her telling you how sorry she was about your old man. Did you like the bible she gave you? She bought it with me last weekend.” Paulie reached outside the window and brought in a bottle of Old Vienna. “Come on up. I’ve been cooling the suds for your return.”

  I hoisted myself up carefully. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t act like her flunkey this term, and here I was sliding right back into it. Of course, it wasn’t just my weak Mouse will. I was curious, too.

  “C’mon. Let’s see you do it in one go.” Paulie clapped my good shoulder, just the way Morley used to greet my uncle Winnie. “Chugalug it like a man.”

  I thanked her meekly. I knew the beer was a sign she felt sorry for me, only I didn’t want somebody to clap me on the back and hand me a beer. For once, I wished Paulie would act like the other girls.

  But I sipped a little of the beer to be polite, and we leaned out her window, passing it back and forth between us while Paulie told me the reason for the change in rooms. She’d picked a fight with Tory’s brother over the holidays and cut Rick with her bowie knife. The Virgin had taken away the knife and told Paulie she had “no other choice” (the Virgin’s very words) but to isolate Paulie from Tory and the rest of her schoolmates until she proved she was capable of getting along with people.

  “You knifed her brother!” I said. “That’s horrible. Tory must be mad at you.”

  “I only nicked his hand. I could have done worse.”

  Paulie gestured to her throat and then flipped her lit cigarette so it stood straight up from her bottom lip like it was stuck on with glue. A new trick. I made a little gasping sound.

  “Okay. Tory was a little upset, all right? But she’ll get over it. Because he got off easy this time. Nobody calls me a punk and gets away with it.”

  “What do you mean, this time?”

  Paulie grinned. “Nothing. I was only kidding. You aren’t mad at me, are you, Bradford?”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Paulie worried about me being mad at her? Looking back, I understand. Paulie was afraid of losing me. She’d lost her place as Tory’s roommate, and she couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of me. She sensed what had started with Morley’s death. Despite myself, I was moving away from her. One day at a time, I was leaving Paulie for good.

  44

  — Mouse, did you hear the one about the woman on an airplane? It’s really my worst penis joke.

  — Leave me alone. It’s time to re-create the night of the murder.

  — A man sat down beside a woman on an airplane and asked her what she was reading. She said, I’m reading a book about penises, and he said, and what are you finding out? And she said, this book says black men have long, thin penises and Jewish men have short, thick ones. What’s your name? she said. And he said, Benjy Goldstein.

  — That is your worst penis joke.

  — You’re getting tired of me, aren’t you?

  — It’s just that a part of me is still there—always will be. For ever and ever. Some things don’t end.

  — I want to hear you say it out loud. You’re sick of me.

  — Of you, Alice? Never.

  — Yes, you are. I can tell.

  — All right. You said it, not me. Oh, Alice, who would think the male organ could be lopped off and reapplied so easily?

  — I know what you mean. As if the penis is a Groucho Marx nose girls can put on when they feel like it.

  — Exactly. Only it wasn’t that easy. Not when you know what really happened.

  In January, the Virgin announced the merger with Kings College and everybody got depressed, and then in February an underground rebellion began. Mysterious announcements were posted in long corridors demanding nondenominational prayers in morning chapel and denouncing the system of compulsory games. I tried to imagine the faces of the rebels in the older girls who passed me each morning in the corridors, their tunics swinging, their arms full of books. Who had written the exciting sentences—“We demand student-run clubs without staff control! School spirit is irrelevant! We want political analysis and action—down with bourgeois attitudes!” I couldn’t believe these words lurked behind the cheerful faces I saw. I didn’t think these girls had it in them.

  To relieve the atmosphere, the Virgin announced that our usual school dance would be held early, immediately after exams. Soon nobody cared about the manifestoes anymore. The Virgin was clever. She was one step ahead of her “wards,” as she called us—to my chagrin. It was a word that always made me think of orphans.

  I lay on my bed in my housecoat, listening to the day girls chattering with some boarders down the tower corridor. The day girls were allowed to visit the boarding school before the dance, although none of them had come into our room. They didn’t like Ismay, and Tory had gone home to her parents to help her mother prepare the breakfast party. Asa was in the bathroom washing out the horrible hairdo she’d got at Crescendo’s, and Ismay was standing in her merry widow bleaching her arm hairs with peroxide. For aesthetic reasons, of course. None of the girls liked black hair on their arms or legs. It looked too hairy. At the window, our formals spun and twirled from the curtain rod, like bodies in plastic cleaner bags.

  I was waiting for my chance in the bathroom and flipping through Morley’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy. I often looked at my father’s books when I felt nervous because it reminded me of Morley.

  “Mary Beatrice, are you listening to me?” Ismay had finished with her arms and was dabbing at the faint moustache above her lips. “Paulie’s been stealing things, you know. That bloody girl wants to be here in my place.”

  “Oh, you’re exaggerating,” I said. I skipped through a thousand pages or so (who would think the body could take up so much space!), and now I was staring at the diagram of the female organs of generation. What I saw gave me the willies: a head with wild, wavy hair spreading like flames around its face. And this face had no features except for two small open wailing mou
ths calling out in distress. As if this weren’t bad enough, two flattened cylindrical flaps lay like pea-pod ears on either side of the tiny mouths. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what a boy would find to like in something so weird. Not that a boy’s penis would take the prize at a poultry show. I thought of Jack then and turned with an embarrassing fluttery feeling to the section on male organs.

  “Somebody’s taken all my musical scores, and last night I found a horrible little stick drawing over my bed.”

  “A stick drawing?”

  “Yes, made with a penknife or something.” Now Ismay was swabbing the black stubble of her shaved armpit. She said the dark stubble looked gross. “Paulie’s dangerous, that’s what I think. She doesn’t have a normal background, you know. Her mother’s dead.”

  “I don’t have a normal background, either,” I said, still looking for the section on the penis. Somebody had torn it out. I closed the book, puzzled. I considered asking Paulie about it and then thought better of it. Maybe Morley had taken it out for some reason. Maybe, I smiled to myself, he was worried I’d read his book someday and didn’t want me to see that part.

  “Mouse! Pay attention! I need your help.”

  I put the medical text down. Ismay had stopped the bleach job, and her upper lip was erupting into a blotchy mess as we watched.

  “I must be allergic to hydrogen peroxide,” she sobbed, and pushed past me, making a terrible racket, to find Miss Phillips. I quickly walked over to Ismay’s bed. On the wall above the headboard somebody had carved a strange little drawing of a boy and a girl. The girl consisted of three circles—one for the head and two grotesque balloons for her breasts. The boy had equally large and grotesque genitals. Underneath I read the words, “I.T. sucks cock.”