Mrs. Machado knew it, too, and she encouraged him. Two thirds of the points they scored were hers, but she was the one who needed to rest. He wasn’t the one who got tired.
Wrestling was a weight-class sport, Chenko kept reminding him. If or when he ever got the opportunity to wrestle a kid his own size, both Boris and Pavel agreed that Jack would pound him. But there was no one Jack’s size in his life, at least not for the remainder of that summer.
When Emma came home from the fat farm, she’d lost ten pounds—but neither her disposition nor her eating habits had improved. “They just fucking starved me,” was how she put it.
Emma still outweighed Mrs. Machado, whom Emma briefly replaced as Jack’s nanny. Emma was in Toronto less than a week before she had to leave for her father’s cottage in Georgian Bay for all of July. Still, in the few nights they were alone together, Jack could have told Emma about Mrs. Machado. He didn’t. It was upsetting enough that he told her about her mom and his, about discovering them in bed together. What upset Jack most was that Emma was unsurprised. “Well, I’ve seen them do everything but lick each other,” she said with disgust. “It’s no wonder they’re sending you to fucking Maine and making me a goddamn boarder!”
“Lick what?”
“Forget it, Jack. They’re lovers, okay? They like each other in the way girls usually like boys, and vice versa.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t care what they’re doing!” Emma cried. “What pisses me off, baby cakes, is that they won’t talk to us about it. They’re just getting rid of us instead!”
Jack decided that he had a right to be pissed off about the issue of not talking about it, too. It seemed a further injustice that there were photographs of Emma and Jack, often together, all over the Oastler house. Surely these pictures were evidence that they were a family, that Emma and Jack belonged there—yet they were being sent away!
And if Jack’s mother wouldn’t talk to him about her lover, why should he tell his mom about Mrs. Machado? It was Emma he should have talked to about Mrs. Machado—that is, sooner than he did. But before Jack knew it, it was July. Emma was off in Georgian Bay, and Mrs. Machado was once again his sparring-partner nanny.
15. Friends for Life
If what Mrs. Machado did to Jack qualified as “abuse,” why didn’t he feel abused at the time? It wouldn’t be long before Jack had other relationships that he knew were sexual; the things he did and the things that were done to him only then registered as experiences he’d previously had with Mrs. Machado. But at the time it was happening, he had no frame of reference to understand how inappropriate she was with him.
She sometimes physically hurt him, but never intentionally. And he was repulsed by her, but many times—on occasion, simultaneously to being repulsed—Jack was also attracted to her. He was often frightened, too. Or at least Jack didn’t understand what she was doing to him, and why—or what she wanted him to do to her, and how he was supposed to do it.
One thing was certain: she cared for him. He felt it at the time; no later reconstruction of his pliable memory could convince Jack that she didn’t, in her heart, adore him. In fact, however confusingly, Mrs. Machado made him feel loved—at a time when his mother was sending him to Maine!
Interestingly, it was only when Jack asked Mrs. Machado about her children that she was ever short-tempered with him. He presumed that they had simply grown up—that this was why they’d moved “away”—but it was a sore point with her.
It was Mrs. Machado’s fondest hope, or so she said, that Mister Penis would never be taken advantage of. But by whom? By willful girls and venal women?
Jack was an adult when he saw his first psychiatrist, who told him that many women who sexually molest children believe that they are protecting them—that what the rest of us might call abuse is for these women a form of mothering. (“Too weird,” as a girl Jack hadn’t yet met would say.)
What he noticed most of all, at the time, was that he changed overnight from someone who could keep nothing from his mother to someone who was determined to keep everything from her. Even more than he submitted to having sex with Mrs. Machado, he absolutely embraced the secrecy of it—most of all, the idea of keeping Mrs. Machado a secret from his mom.
Alice was so involved with Leslie Oastler, which was a parallel pursuit to Alice distancing herself from Jack, that the boy could have kept anything a secret from her. That Mrs. Machado was obsessed with doing the laundry—not only Jack’s sheets and towels and underwear, and his workout clothes, but also Alice’s and Mrs. Oastler’s laundry—was nothing Alice or Leslie appeared to notice. (If he’d gotten Mrs. Machado pregnant—if he actually could have—it’s doubtful that Alice or Mrs. Oastler would have noticed that!)
When Emma came home from Georgian Bay in August—with her body all tanned, and the dark hair on her arms bleached blond by the sun—Emma noticed that something had changed in him, and not only because her mom and Jack’s were lovers. “What’s wrong with you, baby cakes?” Emma asked. “What’s with all the wrestling? Anyone would think you were fucking Mrs. Machado!”
In retrospect, Jack would wonder why Chenko—or Boris, or Pavel—didn’t suspect something. They certainly observed that many of the women in Krung’s kickboxing classes were inordinately interested in watching him wrestle with Mrs. Machado. And after Emma returned from Georgian Bay, she once again became Jack’s nighttime nanny. Surely Chenko and Boris and Pavel were aware that he regularly left the gym in Mrs. Machado’s company—for an hour or two almost every day, in either the late morning or the early afternoon.
“Thees ees a growing boy, and eet’s August in the ceety! He needs to breathe some fresh air!” Mrs. Machado announced.
They went to her apartment, which was within walking distance on St. Clair—a dirty, dark-brown building, in which Mrs. Machado barely maintained a sparsely furnished walk-up on the third floor. There was a partial view of the ravine that ran behind Sir Winston Churchill Park and the St. Clair reservoir, and in the building’s small courtyard, where the grass had died, were an unused jungle gym and swing set and slide—as if all the children in Mrs. Machado’s apartment building had grown up and moved “away,” and no more children had been born to replace them.
The air was no fresher in Mrs. Machado’s small apartment than in the Bathurst Street gym, and Jack was struck by the absence of family photographs. Well, it was no surprise that pictures of Mrs. Machado’s ex-husband were absent—because he was alleged to assault her periodically. Why would she want a picture of him? But of her two children there were only two photographs—she had one photo of each boy. In the photographs, they were both about Jack’s age, although Mrs. Machado said they were born four years apart and they were “all grown up now.” (She wouldn’t tell Jack their present ages—as if the numbers themselves were unlucky, or she was simply too upset to acknowledge that they were no longer children.)