"The sport of--"
"Shut up and kiss me, honey pie," Emma said. They were scrunched down in the backseat of the Town Car again. It was a fairly recent development that Emma could give Jack a boner in a matter of seconds--or not, depending on the little guy's unpredictable response. Emma was in grade ten, sixteen going on thirty or forty, and--to her considerable rage--she had newly acquired braces. Jack was a little afraid of kissing her. "Not like that!" Emma instructed him. "Am I a baby bird? Are you feeding me some kind of worm?"
"It's my tongue," he told her.
"I know what it is, Jack. I'm addressing the more important subject of how it feels."
"It feels like a worm?"
"Like you're trying to choke me."
She cradled his head in her lap and looked down at him with impatient affection. Every year, Emma got bigger and stronger. At the same time, Jack felt he was barely growing. But he had a boner, and Emma always knew when he had one. "That little guy is like a coming attraction, honey pie."
"A what?"
"At the movies, a coming attraction--"
"Oh."
"You're soon to be all over the place, Jack. That's what I'm saying."
"This girl is just jerking your wire, mon," Peewee said.
"Just shut up and drive, mon," Emma said to Peewee. He was, as Jack was, in her thrall.
Jack would wonder, after his mom had returned the push-up bra to Mrs. Oastler, what possibly could have transpired between the two mothers that had led to him being left alone with Emma again. And Jack and Emma were alone a lot; they were even alone, for an hour or more at a time, in Emma's house. Whether Emma's mom was at home or not, they were left alone there--no Lottie banging around in the kitchen below them, screaming some nonsense about tea.
The Oastler house in Forest Hill was a three-story mansion bequeathed to Mrs. Oastler by her ex-husband; the alimony settlement had made Emma and her mother rich. Women who scored big in their divorces were treated with immeasurable scorn in the Toronto tabloids, but Mrs. Oastler would have said it was as good a way to get rich as any.
Emma's mom was a small, compact woman--as her push-up bra would suggest. As Emma's mustache would imply, her mother was surprisingly hairy--at least for a woman, and a small woman at that. Emma's mom would have had a more discernible mustache than her daughter, but (according to Emma) Mrs. Oastler frequently had her upper lip waxed. She would not have been rash to consider waxing her arms as well, but the only other visible preventative measure taken against her hairiness was that she had her sleek black hair cut as short as a boy's in an elfish pixie. Despite her prettiness, which was petite in nature, Jack thought that Mrs. Oastler looked a little like a man.
"Yes, but an attractive one," Alice said to her son. She thought that Emma's mother was "very good-looking," and that it was a pity Emma "took after" her father.
Jack never met Emma's dad. After every winter break from St. Hilda's, Emma returned to school with a tan. Her father had taken her to the West Indies, or Mexico; that was virtually the only time they spent together. Emma also spent a month of every summer at a cottage in Georgian Bay, but most of that time she was in the care of a nanny or a housekeeper--her dad came to the cottage only on weekends. Emma never spoke of him.
That Mrs. Oastler thought Emma was too young to have her mustache waxed was a source of contention between mother and daughter. "It's hardly noticeable," Emma's mom would tell her. "Besides, at your age, what does it matter?" And there were other issues between them, as one might expect of a divorced woman raising a "difficult" only child--a sixteen-year-old daughter who was physically bigger and stronger than her mother, and still growing.
Mrs. Oastler also thought that Emma was too young to have a tattoo--an intolerable hypocrisy, in Emma's opinion, because her mom had recently been tattooed by Daughter Alice. This was news to Jack, but so was almost everything Emma told him. "What's her tattoo? A tattoo where?" he asked.
Well, what a surprise! Emma's mom had been tattooed to conceal a scar. "She had a Cesarean," Emma said. That old business again, Jack thought. "It's a scar from her C-section," Emma told him. And to think he'd once believed this was the ward for difficult births in a hospital in Halifax! "She had a bikini cut," Emma explained.
"A what?"
"A horizontal incision, not the vertical kind."
"I still don't get it," Jack said.
This necessitated a trip to Mrs. Oastler's bedroom. (Emma's mother was out.) There Emma showed Jack a pair of her mom's panties--black bikini briefs, no doubt a fetching match to the push-up bra. Mrs. Oastler's scar was called a bikini cut because the incision was below the panty line of the briefs.
"Oh. And what's the tattoo?"
"A stupid rose."
Jack thought not. He was pretty sure he knew what kind of rose it was, in which case it would have been too big to be completely concealed under the panty line of Mrs. Oastler's bikini briefs. "A Rose of Jericho?" he asked Emma.
It was, for once, her turn to be uninformed. "A Rose of what?"
This was not the easiest thing for a nine-year-old to explain. Jack made a fist. "It's about this big, maybe a little bigger," he began.