It was a one-bedroom apartment, to be kind, with only a chest of drawers and a queen-size mattress on the floor of the bedroom. There was a combination kitchen and dining room, with no living room—and not even a hutch or sideboard for dishes. There was little evidence of kitchenware, which suggested to Jack that Mrs. Machado, if she ate at all, ate out. As to how she might have fed her family, when she’d had a family, he had no clue; there wasn’t even a dining-room table, or chairs, and there was only one stool at the strikingly uncluttered kitchen counter.
It looked less like an apartment where Mrs. Machado’s children had grown up than a place where Mrs. Machado had just recently moved in. But they came there only for the purpose of having sex, and to have a quick shower. Jack didn’t think to ask her where her children had slept. Or why she still called herself Mrs. Machado, or why the nameplate by the buzzer in the foyer of the building said M. Machado—as if the Mrs. were, or had permanently become, her first name. (Given her ex-husband’s reported hostility, why was she still a Mrs. at all?)
It was these trysts in her apartment, in the less-than-fresh air of August, that finally took their toll on Jack—not the wrestling. He was tired all the time. Chenko was concerned that he had lost five pounds—his mother’s response was that Jack should drink more milk—and his wet dreams, which had started that summer, suddenly stopped. (How could he have wet dreams when he was getting laid almost every day?)
Jack had other dreams instead—bad ones, as Leslie Oastler might have said. Moreover, he had taken it to heart when his mom told him he was too old to be in bed with her. He knew he wasn’t welcome to crawl into bed with his mother and Mrs. Oastler, and if he could—albeit only occasionally—persuade his mom to get into his bed with him, she wouldn’t stay long. Jack knew that Leslie would come and take her away.
Their “family dinners,” which Emma spoke of with mounting scorn, were an exercise in awkwardness. Alice couldn’t cook, Mrs. Oastler didn’t like to eat, and Emma had put back on the weight she’d lost in California.
“What did you expect would happen to me in Georgian Bay?” Emma asked her mom. “Does anyone lose weight eating barbecue?” For dinner, they usually went to a Thai place or ordered takeout. As Emma put it: “In my mind, it always comes down to Thai or pizza.”
“For God’s sake, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler would say. “Just have a salad.”
It was over one such gastronomical event—takeout pizza and salad—that Alice and Leslie discussed the dilemma of delivering Jack to his new school in Maine. It seemed he had no certain means of getting there, nor was it an easy place to get to. The boy would fly to Boston and take a smaller plane to Portland; from Portland, one had to rent a car and drive, and Alice wasn’t a driver. Mrs. Oastler could drive, but she was ill disposed to go to Maine.
“If Redding were on the coast, I’d consider it,” Leslie said. But Redding, which was the name of the town and the all-boys’ school, was in southwestern Maine—inland Maine, not coastal Maine. (There was, Jack would learn, a difference.)
“For Christ’s sake, I’ve got my driver’s license—I can take him,” Emma said. But Emma, at seventeen, was too young to be permitted to rent a car in Portland—and even Emma agreed that Redding was far too long a drive from Toronto.
Emma was reading a Maine road map in lieu of eating her salad. “Redding is north of Welchville,” she said. “It’s south of Rumford, east of Bethel, west of Livermore Falls. God, it really is nowhere!”
“We could hire Peewee to go with him and be the driver,” Mrs. Oastler proposed.
“Peewee is a Canadian citizen, but he was born in Jamaica,” Alice pointed out. (Were the Americans touchy about foreign-born Canadians seeking entry into the United States?)
“Boris and Pavel could drive me,” Jack suggested. “They’re taxi drivers.” They were also wrestlers, he was thinking. He knew he would be safe with them. But Boris and Pavel were not yet Canadian citizens; they had only recently applied for refugee status.
Chenko couldn’t drive a car, and Krung, who drove wildly, was a scary-looking Thai with chevron-shaped blades tattooed on his cheeks. Given that the war in Vietnam had ended only a few years before, Leslie Oastler and Alice didn’t think that U.S. Customs would look welcomingly upon Mr. Bangkok.
“Maybe Mrs. McQuat would take me,” Jack suggested. His mother stiffened as if she’d been slapped.
“One shouldn’t bother teachers in the summer,” Mrs. Oastler said—mysteriously, it seemed to Jack. He sensed that his mom had other reasons for not considering The Gray Ghost; maybe Mrs. McQuat had made clear her disapproval of his mother’s plans to send Jack away.
Miss Wurtz, Jack knew, spent part of her summer in Edmonton—not that he relished the prospect of The Wurtz delivering him to Redding. (The very journey itself would be dramatized, of that he had little doubt.)
“What about Mrs. Machado?” Alice asked. Only Emma noticed that this caused Jack to lose his appetite.
“I doubt she can drive,” Leslie Oastler said dismissively. “That woman is so stupid—she can’t put the laundry back in the right drawers.”
“Don’t you like the pizza, honey pie?”
“Jack, please finish your milk—even if you’re full. You have to stop losing weight,” Alice said.
“If you don’t want the rest of that pizza, I’ll eat it,” Emma said.
“What about that little faggot, your drama teacher?” Mrs. Oastler asked Jack. “What’s his name?”
“Mr. Ramsey,” Emma answered. “He’s nice—he’s a good guy! Don’t call him a faggot.”
“He is one, dear,” Emma’s mom told her. “I’m sure he’s entirely safe,” Leslie said to Alice. “If he’d so much as touched a boy at St. Hilda’s, someone would have blown the whistle on him.”
“What about not bothering teachers in the summer?” Jack asked.
“Mr. Ramsey wouldn’t mind,” Mrs. Oastler said. “He obviously worships the ground you walk on, Jack.”
“Well, I don’t know—” Alice began.
“You don’t know what, Alice?” Leslie Oastler asked.
“It’s just that he is a homosexual,” Alice replied.
“It’s not guys who are inclined to mess around with Jack,” Emma observed.
“I like Mr. Ramsey—he would be fine,” Jack said.
“If he can see over the steering wheel, baby cakes.”
“I guess it wouldn’t do any harm to ask him,” Alice said. “Maybe Mr. Ramsey wants a tattoo.”
“He’s a teacher, Alice—he makes no money,” Leslie told her. “Mr. Ramsey doesn’t need a free tattoo; he needs money.”
“Well—” Alice said.
When Alice and Mrs. Oastler went out to a movie, Emma was left to do the dishes and put Jack to bed. Emma ate the remaining pizza off everyone’s plate. Jack understood why she was hungry—she hadn’t touched her salad.
“Put on some music, honey pie.”
Emma liked to sing when she was eating. She did her best Bob Dylan imitation with her mouth full. Jack put on the album called Another Side of Bob Dylan—loud, the way Emma liked it—and went upstairs to get ready for bed. Even with the water running in the bathroom sink, when he was brushing his teeth, he could hear Emma singing along with “Motorpsycho Nightmare.” It must have put him in a mood.