The Wives of Bath (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 Ismay 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.”

In the middle of the night, I woke up and saw Paulie standing by our open window, smoking. She looked so much like Lewis right then that I pulled the covers over my head and did what I often did in my bedroom at Madoc’s Landing—i.e., masturbate.

I’d like to set this straight, just for the record. As far as I was concerned, playing with myself had nothing to do with Paulie or boys. Or even sex. Because nothing I saw in the movies suggested a connection to what the curvaceous women did when they lay in men’s arms. Masturbating was a game, like pick-up sticks. You
could play it by yourself over and over, as many times as you liked. In boarding school, all of us needed our solitary pleasures. And next to Oreos, this was mine. Sad to say, just as I was getting warmed up, somebody pulled off my covers.

“Okay, Bradford. Get up.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“Because Kong says so.”

At the fifth-floor landing, Paulie made me stop so we could catch our breath. Below us, we could hear Phooey Phillips complaining to someone about the “troublemakers” who had just coated her toilet seat with Vaseline. Then, to my dismay, the talking below stopped, and echoing up the old tower stairs I made out a drumming that could mean only one thing: any second now, and the Virgin’s white head would rise like the moon out of the dark stairwell.

“Quick,” Paulie hissed. “Up there.” Paulie dashed headlong up the stairs no student was permitted to use, and I limped after her, looking left and right to make sure nobody saw us. I hated myself for caring if I was expelled for breaking into matrons’ rooms; I wanted to be like Paulie, who put tacks on the Virgin’s pew at St. Paul’s when the Virgin stood up to sing. I didn’t want to be like the other simps who thought they had guts because they hiked up the skirts of their tunics and dared the Virgin’s army of matrons to give them a uniform mark. Trembling, I stood on guard while Paulie pulled something out of her pocket. “Ye olde master key,” she whispered. A moment later she pushed me in.

It was cold in Mrs. Peddie’s small parlour. Her rooms were plainly furnished like ours, except for the large Heintzman piano, which she liked to play for us on Sunday evenings after the Virgin had given us a talk.

Paulie bolted the front door from the inside and began to rummage through Mrs. Peddie’s desk. I didn’t know what she was looking for. I could hear the Virgin’s cough in the hall below. “Hurry, Sykes,” I said. I’d never dared to use her last name before, and Paulie grinned and held up another key. Then she rummaged around some more and produced a package of caramels and a diary stuffed with letters. Snickering, she emptied the rest of the drawer onto the floor and tossed the diary to me. “The old bag’s love letters,” she said. Then, with Mrs. Peddie’s key, she opened a tall door beside the piano and pushed me through.

I followed her on my tiptoes down a creaking set of stairs wide enough for Sir Jonathon’s regiment. We went three flights, maybe four—and then we were standing in a little room with two doors. The first door said “Voltage,” and the other didn’t have a name. There was no sound except for the dull rumble of the heating plant.

“Get ready,” Paulie whispered. “You’re about to see the land of the little toilets.”

The unmarked door slid open to reveal a dim tunnel that looked as long as a city block. It wasn’t really dark but the ceiling was low, and the heating pipes undulated in the gloom like fat, dark worms. And then I saw a curious thing: row after row of miniature toilets lined up against one wall of the tunnel. The toilets were coated in dust and looked to be too small even for Sergeant.

“They were left over from the time the junior school was renovated,” Paulie whispered. “The Virgin will never find us down here.”

We began to creep slowly along in the darkness, careful not to touch the hot pipes. Their surface was covered with a coarse cheesecloth that had been glued onto corrugated cardboard. At the second bend in the tunnel, the pipes split into pairs—a return pipe and a flow pipe—heading off in different directions, to various wings of the school. The ceiling was higher here, and there
was dust over everything—thick dust that I could feel in my nose.

A banging noise started up, and Paulie and I jumped. The noise got louder and louder and passed over our heads in a rush of wind and metallic clatter, as if some creature were hitting the insides of the pipes, clamouring to get out and attack us.

“I’m turning back,” I whispered.

“It’s just the furnace,” Paulie said in a normal voice and grabbed my hand. I let her pull me slowly around the bend.

A giant tricycle, like the one in the portrait of the English headmistress, stood against the wall beside a large trunk. It was hard to believe anybody could ride such an awkward-looking contraption (although I know people will say exactly the same things about our bicycles fifty years from now). The headmistress’s bike looked to be a very good model of its kind. It was outfitted with a handsome bell and a leather-covered headlight that hung off its bars like an old coach lamp.

Paulie opened the trunk beside it, which turned out to be full of cycling gear. She pulled out a pair of old goggles and put them on me. She pointed to something that looked like a rectangular tombstone and told me to get on it. She said Sergeant had told her it was the old mounting block Sir Jonathon had used for his horses. I didn’t want to sit on the teetery old bike, whose kidney-shaped seat rose far above our heads. But, as Alice knows, obedience is my worst failing. Sal raised me to do what she said when she said it, although I can’t put all the blame on her. I am a slow thinker, and doing what somebody else says first often saves me the worry of figuring out what I really think until I have the time to puzzle it through properly.