John Irving - Until I Find You

Emma Oastler inhaled appreciatively, giving Jack a secretive look. She seemed to be conducting a survey of the clothes in his mom’s closet. She held up a sweater and examined herself in the closet-door mirror, imagining how the sweater might fit her; she held one of Alice’s skirts at her hips.

“She’s kind of a hippie, your mom—isn’t she, Jack?”

Jack had not thought of his mom as a hippie before, but she was kind of a hippie. At that time, especially to the uniformed girls at St. Hilda’s and the ever-increasing legion of their divorced mothers, Alice was most certainly a hippie. (A hippie was probably the best you could say about an unwed mother who was also a tattoo artist.)

Jack Burns would learn later that it was no big deal—how a woman could look at an unfamiliar chest of drawers and know, at a glance, which drawer another woman would use for her underwear. Emma was only thirteen, but she knew. She opened Alice’s underwear drawer on her first try. Emma held up a bra to her developing breasts; the bra was too big, but even Jack could tell that one day it wouldn’t be. For no reason that he could discern, his penis was as stiff as a pencil—but it was only about the size of his mother’s pinkie, and his mom had small hands.

“Show me your hard-on, honey pie,” Emma said; she was still holding up Alice’s bra.

“My what ?”

“You’ve got a boner, Jack—for Christ’s sake, lemme see it.”

He knew what a boner was. His mom, that old hippie, called it a woody. Whatever you called it, Jack showed Emma Oastler his penis in his mother’s bedroom. What probably made it worse was that Lottie was limping around in the kitchen below them, just as old Mrs. Wicksteed was waking up from her afternoon nap, and Emma gave his hard-on a close but disappointed look. “Jeez, Jack—I don’t think you’ll be ready for quite a while.”

“Ready for what ?”

“You’ll know,” she said again.

“The kettle’s boiling!” Lottie cried from the kitchen.

“Then shut it off!” Emma hollered downstairs. “Jeez,” Emma said again, to Jack, “you better keep an eye on that thing, and tell me when it squirts.”

“When I pee ?”

“You’re gonna know when it’s not pee, Jack.”

“Oh.”

“The point is, tell me everything, ” Emma said. She took his penis in her hand. He was anxious, remembering how she’d bent his index finger. “Don’t tell your mom—you’ll just freak her out. And don’t tell Lottie—you’ll make her limp worse.”

“Why does Lottie limp?” Jack asked. Emma Oastler was such an authority, he assumed she would know. Alas, she did.

“She had an epidural go haywire,” Emma explained. “The baby died anyway. It was a real bad deal.”

So you could get a limp from a childbirth that went awry! Naturally, Jack thought an epidural was a part of the body, a female part. In the manner in which he’d assumed his mom’s C-section referred to an area of the hospital in Halifax where Jack was born, so he believed that Lottie had lost her epidural in childbirth. Jack must have imagined that an epidural was somehow crucial to the female anatomy; possibly it prevented limps. Years later, when he couldn’t find epidural in the index of Gray’s Anatomy, Jack would be reminded of his C-section mistake. (That his mother had never had a Cesarean would be an even bigger discovery.)

“Tea’s brewing!” Lottie called to Jack and Emma from the kitchen. Only when he was older would it occur to him that Lottie knew Emma was a menacing girl.

“Have a wet dream for me, little guy,” Emma said to Jack’s penis. She was such a good friend; she gently helped his penis find its proper place, back inside his pants, and she was especially careful how she zipped up his fly.

“Do penises have dreams?” Jack asked.

“Just remember to tell me when your little guy has one,” Emma said.

Jack’s grade-two teacher, Mr. Malcolm—at that time, one of only two male teachers at St. Hilda’s—was inseparable from his wife, whom he daily brought to school for dire reasons. She was blind and wheelchair-bound, and it seemed to soothe her to hear Mr. Malcolm speak. He was an excellent teacher, patient and kind. Everyone liked Mr. Malcolm, but the entire grade-two class felt sorry for him; his blind and wheelchair-bound wife was a horror. In a school where so many of the older girls were outwardly cruel and inwardly self-destructive, which was not infrequently blamed on their parents’ tumultuous divorces, the grade-two kids prayed, every day, that Mr. Malcolm would divorce his wife. Had he murdered her, the class would have forgiven him; if he’d killed her in front of them, they might have applauded.

But Mr. Malcolm was ever the peacemaker, and his shaving choices were ahead of their time. Growing bald, he had shaved his head—not all that common in the early 1970s—and, even less common, he preferred varying lengths of stubble to an actual beard or to being clean-shaven. Back then it was a credit to St. Hilda’s that they accepted Mr. Malcolm’s shaved head and his stubbled face; not unlike the grade-two children, the administrators of the school had decided not to cause Mr. Malcolm any further harm. The blind wife in the wheelchair made everyone take pity on him.

In the grade-two classroom, the children worked diligently to please him. Mr. Malcolm never had to discipline them; they disciplined themselves. They would do nothing to upset him. Life had already been unfair enough to Mr. Malcolm.

Emma Oastler’s assessment of the tragedy was colored by her own intimacy with human cruelty, but in her view of the Malcolms as a couple, Emma was probably not wrong. Mrs. Malcolm, whose name was Jane, fell off a roof at a church picnic. She was high school age at the time, a pretty and popular girl—suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. According to Emma, Mr. Malcolm had been a somewhat younger admirer of Jane’s. He fell in love with her when she was paralyzed, chiefly because she was more available.

“He must have been the kind of uncool guy she would never have dated before the accident,” Emma said. “But after she fell off the roof, Wheelchair Jane didn’t have a lotta choices.” Yet if Mr. Malcolm was her choice, even if he was her only choice, Jane Malcolm couldn’t have been luckier.

The blindness was another story; that happened to her later, when she’d been married for many years. Jane Malcolm suffered from early-onset macular degeneration. As Mr. Malcolm explained to the grade-two class, his wife had lost her central vision. She could see light, she could make out movement, and she still had some peripheral vision. At the extreme periphery, however, Mrs. Malcolm experienced a loss of color, too.

The loss of her mind was another matter; there was nothing Mr. Malcolm could say to protect the kids, or himself, from that. Thus periphery and peripheral were the so-called vocabulary challenges for opening day in grade two—every day, there would be two more. As for crazed or delusional or paranoid, they were never words on the grade-two vocabulary list. But Wheelchair Jane was all those things; she’d been pushed past the edge of reason.

When Mrs. Malcolm would grind her teeth, or suddenly crash her wheelchair into Patsy Booth’s desk, head-on, Jack often looked at Lucinda Fleming—half expecting that Jane Malcolm’s visible rage might trigger a silent- rage episode in Lucinda. It was insanity to assault the Booth twins separately. Whenever Mrs. Malcolm attacked Patsy’s desk in her wheelchair, Patsy’s twin, Heather, also screamed.