The Wives of Bath Read Online Free Page A

a knot.
    And Sal needed me because she had a secret. She drank. Only in her “C” mood, of course. She also had “A” and “B” moods. In her “A” mood, when Morley was around, she trilled her voice like an Irish colleen (Sal’s word for anybody pretty). In her “B” mood, when Morley wasn’t around, she talked gruffly, like thefarmers who came to town to buy hip-length waders for smelt fishing. It was her “C” mood, the nightmare mode, that caused trouble for me. In her C mood, she fell asleep by supper, and I had to tell Morley she was tired from waxing the floors. Morley saw so many sick people every day in his office, I didn’t want him to come home and face taking care of a drunk wife, too.
    The worst thing about Sal, though, wasn’t her drinking but her shaming voice. She always found something wrong with me and Morley no matter what we did. Morley would shrug it off, as if he expected it, but I took it to heart. You see, nobody’s perfect. So no matter what Sal said, I felt she was right in general, even if she’d singled out the wrong thing specifically.
    Meanwhile, in the front seat, Sal was turning her shaming voice on Morley. She tucked a large hunk of black hair back under her pillbox, her pearl hatpin between her teeth, and sighed. “Isn’t it a little late to be having a change of heart, Morley?” I sat up. Was Morley going to utter the one sentence he should have spoken when Sal had come up with the idea in the first place?
My daughter will go to that school over my dead body
.
    Naturally, I didn’t want to go away and leave Morley. Maybe my father wasn’t everybody’s idea of Captain Courageous, but he came closer than anybody else to my all-time favourite hero, John F. Kennedy.
    From what I’d read about Kennedy, I knew he’d never send his daughter, Caroline, to a girls’ boarding school. If Sal had tried that on him, why, he would have slammed the door of his bubble-top limousine and hurried up the steps in that way of his which kept people from noticing his sore, stooped back. Then he would have thrown himself across the entrance, barring the door with his body.
    “Look he-ah, Sal,” he’d say. “It’s not natural to stick anybody in a girls’ school, cut off from her family. It’s not how the real world is, Sal, back where I come from.” And Sal would crumple up like a used Kleenex and throw her arms around my knees and beg my forgiveness.
The Trouble with Alice
    Alice has always caused me problems. Children don’t like her because she’s a hump. I hold Victor Hugo responsible. And the actor Lon Chaney. Quasimodo had a hump in the back
and
the front. Plus protruding teeth and the zits that Victor Hugo politely referred to as “wens.”
    I don’t look like Quasimodo, but when children notice me coming, that’s who they see—Lon Chaney in the film version of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. A double-humped, one-eyed creature with legs that touch at the knees, like sickles. Never mind how nice Quasimodo was in his heart. Children don’t think of that. They see a monster when they look at me, and then they behave in ways I’d still rather not talk about. When I was twelve they threw rotten oranges at me on my way home from school. That was when Sal first mentioned Bath Ladies College.
    “Won’t the girls treat her worse there?” Morley asked.
    “Don’t be silly,” Sal said. “They like misfits at those sorts of places.”
    And Morley, the fool, replied: “Well, Sal, you’re a woman. I guess you know best.”
    In the front seat, Morley answered Sal’s question. “Yes, Sal, it’s too late to change our minds now.”
    “Good,” Sal said, and fiddled with her hat for the tenth time. “Because Mouse doesn’t want to go back to the Landing. What would Norman Vincent Peale think about a girl who gave up on a place before she even tried it?” Sal paused. “He’d think she was a quitter, wouldn’t he, Mouse?”
    I had to hand it to Sal. Norman Vincent Peale