“Sweet Jesus, look at that thing!” Meredith said.
“That’s nothing,” Amanda said. “You can get bigger than that, can’t you, Jack?” He was as big as he’d ever been before. He was afraid that if he got any bigger, he would burst.
“It’s beginning to hurt again,” he said.
“That’s a different kind of pain, Jack.” Amanda gave him a friendly squeeze before she let him go.
“Better not catch that whopper in your zipper, Jack,” Meredith warned him. She stood up and ruffled his hair.
“Maybe you’ll dream about us, Jack,” Amanda said.
The cut on Jack’s penis healed in a couple of days, but those dreams didn’t go away.
Miss Sinclair, Jack’s kindergarten teacher, echoed Alice’s conviction that Jack would be safe with the girls. This illusion was further advanced by the participation of the grade-six girls in the kindergartners’ nap time. Emma Oastler was a volunteer, along with two other grade-six girls—Emma’s good friends Charlotte Barford and Wendy Holton. They were Miss Sinclair’s nap-time helpers. These older girls were supposed to assist five-year-olds in falling asleep; that they kept the kindergartners awake was closer to the truth.
Miss Sinclair was distinguished in Jack’s memory for her habit of condemning him to nap with three grade-six girls. What he remembered best about Miss Sinclair was her absence.
The naps began with what Emma Oastler called “a sleepy-time story.” Emma was always the storyteller, an early indication of her future calling. While Wendy and Charlotte circulated among the children, making sure that their rubber mats were comfortably rolled out, their blankets snugly wrapped around them, and their shoes off, Emma began her story in the semidark room.
“You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired,” Emma’s stories always began. For stories intended to induce sleep, they had the opposite effect—the kindergartners were too terrified to nap. In an oft-repeated classic among Emma Oastler’s nap-time tales, Miss Sinclair lost the entire kindergarten class in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. In reality, Jack’s first school trip to the Royal Ontario Museum was led by his grade-three teacher, Miss Caroline Wurtz.
Miss Wurtz was the teacher Jack would remember most fondly, and not only for her fragile beauty; she was an important mentor for him in his early mastery of stage presence, another area in which she excelled. Miss Wurtz was a maven in the dramatic arts; in the innumerable school plays in which Jack performed at St. Hilda’s, she was usually his director. However, her talents as a classroom teacher were lacking in comparison to her theatrical gifts; control of the grade-three class eluded her. Offstage, out of the fixed glare of the footlights—either in her undisciplined classroom or in the marginally more lawless outside world—Miss Caroline Wurtz was an easily confused creature, bereft of confidence and without an iota of managerial skill.
On school trips, Miss Wurtz could have been a star in one of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time stories—she was that inept. When she lost control of herself in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, most of the grade-three kids were already suffering from total recall of Emma’s classic horror tale. (That they were then eight-year-olds, not five-year-olds, hardly mattered; the real-life circumstances were frighteningly familiar to the former kindergartners who’d first heard of the bat cave from Emma’s fiction.)
When the announcement on the museum loudspeaker informed them that some of the mammal displays were experiencing a temporary loss of electrical power, the children knew this was only the first chapter. “Don’t panic,” the voice on the loudspeaker said, while Miss Wurtz dissolved into sobs. “The power will be restored in no time.” The ultraviolet lights in the bat habitat were still on; in fact, they were the only lights that were on, which was exactly the case in Emma’s story.
In Emma’s version, inexplicably, the defenseless children had no recourse but to crawl into the bat cave and sleep with the bats. Emma advised them to be aware of a crucial difference between the alleged “sucking habits” of the vampire bat and those of the giant fruit bat. The kids had to keep their eyes tightly closed at all times, or the ultraviolet light would somehow blind them; and while they slept, or only pretended to sleep, the children were told to pay close attention to the exact location of the hot, moist breath they would certainly feel before long.
If they felt the breath against their throats, that indicated the vampire; the kids were instructed to swat the bat away and protect their throats with both hands. (In Emma’s own words: “Just go nuts.”) If, however, the aforementioned hot, moist breath was detected in the area of their navels—well, that was the area of interest of the despicable giant fruit bat. It would heat the children’s stomachs with its breath before licking the salt out of their belly buttons with its raspy tongue; while this sensation might be unpleasant, the children’s injuries would be slight. In the case of a fruit bat, the kids were to lie still. In the first place, the giant fruit bat was too big to swat away—and, according to Emma, fruit bats only became truly dangerous when they were startled.
“But what would a startled fruit bat do?” Jack remembered Jimmy Bacon asking.
“Better not tell him, Emma,” Charlotte Barford said.
The conclusion to Emma’s tale of the kindergartners’ abandonment in the bat habitat was nerve-wracking. When you consider that most of the children were too frightened to fall asleep, they surely knew that Emma Oastler and Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were breathing on them—not the bats. Nevertheless, the kids responded as instructed. The kindergartners having their navels breathed on kept still. In the many retellings of the tale, Jack learned to distinguish the not-so-subtle differences between Charlotte’s and Wendy’s and Emma’s tongues. Their tongues were not raspy; indeed, discounting future nightmares, the children’s injuries were slight. And they responded with appropriate zeal to the neck-breathing tactics of the vampire bat—in short, the kids went nuts, covering their throats and screaming while they swatted away.
“Time to wake up, Jack,” Emma (or Charlotte or Wendy) always said. But he never went to sleep.
Charlotte Barford was a big girl, a grade-six virtual woman in the mold of Emma Oastler. Wendy Holton, on the other hand, was a feral-looking waif. If you overlooked the evidence of puberty-related troubles in the dark circles under Wendy’s eyes—and her swollen, bitten lips—she could have passed for nine. Her smaller size and childlike physique didn’t diminish Wendy’s navel-licking capacity; her fruit-bat imitation was more aggressive than Emma’s, more invasive than Charlotte’s. (In keeping with her melon-size knees, Charlotte Barford’s tongue was too broad and thick to fit in Jack’s navel—even the tip.)
Did Miss Sinclair ever return to her kindergarten class and find the children refreshed from their naps? Did she mistake how alert they looked for their being well rested? The kids were relieved, of course, and no doubt looked it; that they’d survived another of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time tales, both the not-falling-asleep part and the always creative manner in which they were woken up, gave them thankful expressions.
Another classic among Emma’s nap-time stories, and a close rival to her tale of the kindergartners’ abandonment in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, was her saga of the squeezed child. It was a tale with three different endings, but it began, as Emma’s stories always did: “You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired.”
Jack napped between Gordon and Caroline French, brother-and-sister twins who had to be separated because they despised each other. Another set of twins in Miss Sinclair’s kindergarten class, Heather and Patsy Booth, were identical girls who couldn’t bear to be separated. When one of them was sick, the other one stayed home to grieve—or perhaps to wait her turn to be sick as well. When the Booth twins napped, they overlapped their rubber mats and wrapped themselves in the same blanket—possibly to simulate their former occupancy of the same uterus.