John Irving - Until I Find You

“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.