John Irving - Until I Find You

“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 her 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.

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.