The Wives of Bath Read Free

likes to point out, shoemakers’ children don’t have shoes. She used to tell me this as she pushed me out the door of ourkitchen in Madoc’s Landing, right after she’d muffled me in a headscarf wrapped around my mouth, like the veil of Islam. On the way to school my breath would coat the scarf with moisture, and the moisture would freeze into tiny ice balls, and the icy material would rub my nostrils, already raw and pink from too much nose blowing. I’d want to cry, but that would only make my nose wetter and rawer, so I’d lurch down our front walk, past the snowdrifts that rose as high as our windowsills, devising ways to raise my temperature. A fever was the only symptom Morley respected.
    A half a line higher than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and I could stay home. When I turned twelve, I experimented with hot cloths and small mustard plasters on the forehead. Masturbating made my forehead hot, too. Only I wasn’t organized enough to pull it off. And I was afraid Sal would walk in and catch me with the evidence on my forehead or my hand where it wasn’t supposed to be.
    The cold is a funny emblem for unrequited love, but that’s how it is with me. I get three doozies of a head cold a winter because of the unresolved feelings I have about my father. I guess some people have dead saints to worship, and I have Morley. At least the common cold isn’t as embarrassing as amoebic dysentery, whose description in Morley’s old medical text as a severe disturbance of the gastrointestinal tract sounds like a weather condition. I used to pretend I’d come down with the symptoms so Sal would take me to see Morley. It was hard to believe the huge, distracted man balancing on an office stool, his white coat smelling of starch and chemicals, was related to me.
    At first, Morley went along with the charade. He’d wink at Sal and scribble out a prescription for me. I’ll say that for my father: he could relate to anything in a medical textbook. Then Sal told him he was training me to be a liar, and he stopped.
    Whenever I start coming down with a head cold that would lay even the great doctor Morley Bradford flat, I hear Sal’s voice talking about shoemakers’ children. If I’m feeling hard on myselfI’ll let her go on for a while. But if I’m in a nicer mood, I’ll say to myself, Oh, poor Mouse, have a good cry, you dear soul, bawl your heart out. And then, of course, I can’t cry a drop.
    There are other things to know about me, but I wanted to bring up the main points first: my hopelessly unrequited love for Morley and my unsightly back. The other notable feature is my shyness.
    Usually I don’t talk much, but when I do, Sal claims I go off on tangents, like a tomato plant that grows too many tendrils. “Back to the root now, Mouse,” she says whenever I get to the good part of my story. Sal likes me to stick to the main subject and avoid tendrils like the plague. I like tendrilling, but it’s a suspicious pastime to a farm woman like Sal, who grew up on the Elmvale flats and happened to be hanging around Madoc’s Landing after my mother, the first Alice, went and died on my father. But Sal has more imagination than you’d expect. For instance, she’s good at making up sayings you’d never think of yourself. Most of her sayings are about dogs. As in “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Or “It’s a dog’s life.” Or “You can lead a dog to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
    When the scandal blows over, Sal says I can come back and help her ran the rooming house she’s made of Morley’s home and mine in Madoc’s Landing. Until then I have to stay here in Point Edward with my uncle and my companion Alice, who is like a mother to me. Except no mother I know tells off-colour jokes.
    — That reminds me, Mouse. Why don’t girls have penises?
    — Because they don’t want them?
    — Don’t be a dope. Because girls think with their heads.
    So you see, Sal is right: I’m going off on a