Free The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan

what Sal would think of Miss Vaughan’s etiquette. Maybe Sal would be impressed and make Morley and me eat our bananas that way, too. Now, in a quick, aggravated motion, my headmistress hacked off both tips with her knife.
    “And how are you liking our school, Mary Beatrice?” she said.
    “Oh, it’s very different from what I’m used to,” I replied, watching her hands peel the banana so that its skin collapsed on her plate in long, sloppy strips.
    “The strangeness will wear off, won’t it, Ismay?” the Virgin said.
    “Oh, yes,” said Ismay the Simp. The Virgin’s banana lay on her plate like a swollen tongue. And now, very slowly and methodically, the Virgin began to chop the banana—
whomp, whomp, whomp
. In a moment it lay diced in eight precisely matching chunks, as if by a machine-shop tool.
    Up and down the table the porcelain rang with the sound of girls chopping and eating bananas without touching them. Somewhere in the dining room Paulie was doing this, too, only I never thought to look.
    The next thing I knew, the Virgin carefully laid her knife and fork side by side at the left of her plate and stood up. All talking stopped and the girls scrambled to their feet in a thunderous explosion of scraping chairs. I stood up, too, and Miss Vaughan scanned the tables with her unblinking eyes. She smiled. It was as if the sun had come out after a rain squall. Everybody relaxed, and Miss Vaughan said grace in her whispery girl’s voice and walked out, all our eyes on her broad-shouldered back. A smiley Mrs. Peddie jiggled after her carrying two cups of hot cocoa for them to drink in the staff room. There goes Lola the Les, I thought, trying out my new vocabulary. From across the table, Ismay Thom called my name.
    “Mary Beatrice, you didn’t get her cue. When she asks you if you’d like a banana, you’re supposed to say, ‘No thank you. Would you like a banana, Miss Vaughan?’ That way, she gets to have it first. Understand?” Ismay giggled nastily. “I thought she would have told you this before you came. She’s your aunt, isn’t she?”
    “She’s only a third cousin,” I said, and kept my head down so I didn’t have to see the other girls staring at me as they filed out of the dining room. I always stayed behind until the last girl left, because I didn’t want anybody to notice I walked favouring my left side. To make matters worse, the nurse had ordered new orthopedic oxfords for me. Ordinary oxfords were bad enough, but these oxymorons were as heavy as a man’s dress shoe, and the built-up right heel made my foot look deformed. And then, wouldn’t youknow, just as I was feeling really sorry for myself, somebody whacked me on the bum.
    “Don’t be a snob, Mouse! Wait for me.”
    I jumped, all nerves. It was Tory. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I thought I was alone in the dining room, but there she was, lurching along and giggling because she hadn’t finished stuffing her feet into her oxfords. The backs of her shoes were broken down, so that she could step into them like slippers without bothering to do up the laces. It was these broken-down oxfords plus the ripped-out hems on her tunics and her knee socks that bunched like a pair of droopy drawers around her ankles (not to mention her school tie with the purple threads all picked out) that made Miss Vaughan sigh “Oh, Victoria” when she saw Tory in the hall. Somehow, her slobby uniform didn’t make Tory look ugly, though. She always looked feminine—with milk-white hair you could die for and plump, high cheeks that coloured up the second anybody teased her.
    Now she took my arm and leaned into me the way Lady sometimes leans against Morley and whispered how glad she was I was a full-time boarder. Pauline went home on the weekends to visit her grandfather, so Tory had nobody to talk to except me and Lewis. Of course, they had to be careful, or else the Virgin wouldn’t let him do odd jobs around the school. And then