Until I Find You

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.

Well, Jack knew someone who was old enough. When he was adrift in grade one, under the apologetic supervision of the weatherless Miss Wong, Emma Oastler was in grade seven, thirteen going on twenty-one. No topics were off-limits for conversation with Emma. There was only the problem of how pissed-off she was. (Jack knew Emma would be furious with him for speaking to Wendy and Charlotte first.)

Don’t misunderstand the outlaw corridors and washroom thuggery—namely, the older girls’ behavior outside the classroom. St. Hilda’s was a good school, and an especially rigorous one— academically. Perhaps the demands of the classroom created an urgency to act up among the older girls; they needed to express themselves in opposition to the correct diction and letter-perfect enunciation, of which Miss Wurtz was not the only champion among the generally excellent faculty at the school. The girls needed a language of their own—corridor-speak, or washroom grammar. That was why there was a lot of “Lemme-see” stuff—all the “I’m gonna, dontcha-wanna, gimme-that-thing-now” crap—which was the way the older girls talked among themselves, or to Jack. If they ever spoke in this fashion in their respective classrooms, the faculty—not only Miss Wurtz—would have instantly reprimanded them.

Not so Peewee, Mrs. Wicksteed’s Jamaican driver. Peewee was in no position to criticize how Emma Oastler spoke to Jack in the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car. To begin with, both Peewee and Jack were surprised the first time Emma slid into the backseat. It was a cold, rainy afternoon. Emma lived in Forest Hill; she usually walked to and from school. After school—in both her middle- and her senior-school years—Emma normally hung out in a restaurant and coffee shop at the corner of Spadina and Lonsdale with a bunch of her older-girl friends. Not this day, and it wasn’t the cold or the rain.

“You need help with your homework, Jack,” Emma announced. (The boy was in grade one. He wouldn’t have much homework before grade two, and he wouldn’t really need help with it before grades three and four.)

“Where are we taking the girl, mon?” Peewee asked Jack.

“Take me home with him,” Emma told the driver. “We’ve got a shitload of work to do—haven’t we, Jack?”

“She sounds like she’s the boss, mon,” Peewee said. Jack couldn’t argue with that. Emma had slumped down in the backseat, pulling him down beside her.

“I’m gonna give you a valuable tip, Jack,” she whispered. “I’m sure there will come a day when you’ll find it useful to remember this.”