Free The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan Page B

book, in which we kept a daily list of our assignments. But she treated everybody the same way she treated me—as if you mattered. And she always made little jokes about how hopeless she was when anybody gave her a compliment. And if somebody criticized her, she’d only smile in her nice, kind way and agree with what they said. No wonder Paulie loved her and tried to protect her by tidying up the mess she left behind. Paulie remade Tory’sbed every morning so she wouldn’t get a gating for untidiness and listened for hours to Tory complain about her father, who was the principal of Kings College and expected Tory to excel in her schoolwork.
    Paulie had no place in the hierarchy. Nobody knew what to do with her. As for me, I was a new girl with a funny little limp and a hunched shoulder. Perfect fodder for Miss Ibister, who stood beside me, a clipboard in her hand and a whistle in her mouth, ready to blow your eardrums out when the players did something wrong.
    Meanwhile, back at the game, our players were charging toward the rival goalie, who lumbered toward them, her knee pads bunching and unbunching like the body of a centipede. Viciously she kicked the ball out of her territory. And then a tall phys-ed woman with the physique of an ape broke from the pack and loped toward our goal post, and everyone on the embankment screamed.
    The Virgin suddenly appeared on the stone steps behind the pitch and began to pace the edge of the embankment, angrily calling out to our defense to get their sticks on the ground. She was dressed in her unflattering charcoal suit.
    I looked at the field. One of our guards had stopped the forward, and Tory was running with the ball. Now the hefty forward was chasing Tory, waving her stick as if she wanted to smack the bum of my roommate, who seemed to be running away from us all—running to victory in a whir of white dandelion hair and green bloomers and purple knee socks pulled up over her shin pads, so even her nice ankles looked fat.
    Then suddenly, something went wrong. The stick of the ape-woman hooked Tory across her right ankle, and she fell flat on her face on the grassy pitch. Miss Ibister sounded her whistle, and the players came to a standstill like pieces in a shattered clock. “Tory’s down!” somebody shouted. Everyone rushed toward the middle of the pitch, and Tory disappeared behind a phalanx of female bodies.
    On the embankment a few girls called: “Two, four, six, eight! Who do we appreciate? Tory! Tory!”
    Miss Ibister pipped her whistle in my ear. “Don’t just stand there like a ninny! Cover her with this while I get the nurse!” She handed me a coarse wool blanket and pushed me, stumbling, over to where Tory was lying in an awkward crumple on the grass. Her lips were blue, as if she were cold. I bent down beside her, pretending I was Morley on a house call.
    “She’s had the wind knocked out of her,” I said to nobody in particular, and I tilted back her head and lifted her jaw. Immediately her cheeks went pink again and she began to breathe. Her tongue had been stuck in the back of her throat. I am good with my hands, Sal always said so, but I don’t know how I knew to do this. I must have read it in one of Morley’s textbooks and stored it away to use in a fantasy that featured me as the rescuer. I was borrowing his manner, too. The I-will-make-you-well set to his shoulders he put on in front of a patient; the reassuring taking of the pulse.
    Tory weakly raised her head and somebody cheered, and then two prefects carrying the tray of oranges pushed me out of their way and back into the crowd. On every side of me, women’s bodies shut out the sky. My head was barely higher than the rows of breasts bulging out of their blouses—some pairs large and jolly as pumpkins; others, in the stiff, pointed cups of their bras, narrow and sharp, like dangerous instruments that could slice open your skull.
    Across the field, a skinny fair-haired woman with a face like a