The Anatomy of Wings (13 page)

“Now you do it to me,” said Greta.

Greta lifted her own hand so Frieda could begin.

Frieda touched her fingertip to her sister's palm. She drew a circle first. Then a star. The letter
G.
A heart. An eye with eyelashes.

The footsteps went thundering past upstairs.

“That feels funny,” said Greta.

“Can you tell what I'm drawing?”

“Only if I close my eyes.”

“What's this?”

“Is it… a horseshoe?”

“No.”

She remembered laughing. Her sister's skin, darker than her own, the type that browns to a honey color, could not read the letters she traced. The smooth firm palm was blind.

“You haven't got very clever skin,” Frieda said. “Try this one.”

She drew a house with her fingertip, a square with a triangle roof. A door. One window. A chimney.

Upstairs, the rumble of feet passed overhead, a long squeal of laughter.

“I can't tell,” said Greta.

“Silly, it's a house.”

“Let's draw at the same time on each other,” said Greta.

They crossed arms at the elbow and drew circles on each other's palms.

“I can't tell which hand I'm drawing with anymore,” said Frieda after a while.

“I feel like my hand is yours and your hand is mine,” said Greta.

A loud crash upstairs. The footsteps stopped.

“Gus?” said their mother. “Gus?”

Frieda could not be touched after that. After her
father's funeral the mourners walked along the dirt road to their house and it seemed to her that their purpose for coming was to touch. How her skin had ached inside her sleeves. Heavy-handed women in hats and gloves demanding her to stand still before them, holding her. Oh yes, they said, oh yes, she has her father's eyes all right.

She did not like to be patted or tapped or poked or brushed or tickled or scratched. She did not like the friction of skin. For a while she thought her sister had stolen something from her with that last game. Greta let the heavy-handed ladies hold her and wipe the large glistening tears from her cheeks. This is how she remembered it: greenery, her sister's skin and tears. Later she knew, of course, that it was irrational. Nothing had been stolen from her. Part of her had simply ceased to be.

She could not be kissed.

“If you cannot kiss how will you marry?” said Greta, who later ran away from home, then her husband, then the country.

“It cannot be helped,” said Frieda.

She could not bear to be handled.

The red-haired psychiatrist with the pale freckled face said Frieda had both separation and intimacy issues. He ran his hands through his hair as he talked and shut his eyes. Just being opposite him made her skin crawl.

She hurt no one by being untouchable. Was it such a bad thing? she asked Greta when they still spoke by phone. Of course not, said Greta, you are who you are. From her voice Frieda could tell Greta was thinking of something else completely; she could hear her filing her nails.

After their father's funeral the landlord said they could have five weeks in the house. He knew their mother couldn't do any work around the place, but he wouldn't kick them out just like that. But he had to make a living what with the cane crush coming. Her mother spoke softly to them then. She whispered orders: stand up tall, you must not cry, we will be all right. Their mother sat on the back steps looking out across the cane fields because she could not bear to be inside.

When they left Frieda wondered would the crashing footsteps go round and round the house forever. That wild, merry game of chase that they never mentioned and then left behind.

Years later at her mother's funeral she remembered Greta had tried to kiss her on the cheek. She had moved just in time; she was skillful at such avoidances.

“I'm sorry,” Frieda said when she saw the hurt it caused.

“You're a freak,” said Greta, “with a capital _
F.
”

Later Greta said it was only a word. It was when
she was feeling remorseful, a year later. She had left the commune she'd been living on and needed a place to stay.

“It was only a word, Frieda,” she cajoled. “I could have chosen any: strange, oddball, loony tunes. All right, I shouldn't have said it, it was wrong.”

But “freak” had already settled through the cracks in Frieda's skin.

When she first came to Dardanelles Court the house was brand-new and she didn't have to worry about others having left behind their dirty fingerprints and stale breath. She was in her late thirties by then. She had a good job in the technical library where she filed dead books into the compactors and mended spines and covered new acquisitions neatly and precisely.

When she spoke at work her voice, to her own ears, sounded brittle and unused. She hated the sound of it. Her face flushed each time she spoke. She preferred the silence of her small sterile home. She was considered quiet and strange but harmless.

And she felt it was too late to change.

What she missed about her touchable life was her sister, her sister's skin, that day when they had drawn on each other's open palms and for an instant become one another. If only she could go backward, pick over the bones, sift through things, and uncover that point, she would be changed and whole again.

But she knew that was irrational. That part of her had ceased to be.

“Do you know where I can find her in Antwerp? Did she leave a number or address?” she asked the man in Munich over the phone.

“I have no idea, lady,” he replied.

And she knew that Greta was gone for good.

After she had slipped into the memory of her sister's skin and out again she sat on her plastic-covered sofa and rocked slowly. She said I only have myself to blame.

I
N APRIL DAD TRIED TO GET MUM OUT OF BED BUT SHE WOULDN'T BUDGE EXCEPT TO GO TO THE TOILET AND SOMETIMES MAKE HERSELF A CUP OF TEA.
She didn't have any showers. She smelled like tears.

When I wanted to talk to her I had to kneel beside her bed.

“After
RINSE
do I turn it to
SPIN?
” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said quietly, looking at me with her see-through blue eyes.

“Have you got any money for the cafeteria?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and then after a while, when I was nearly at her bedroom door, “I'm a bad mother.”

“No you're not,” I said.

“I am.”

Dr. Cavanaugh was called and appeared at our front screen door pulling up his blue walk socks.

“Here's the littlest one,” he said to me even though I was nearly eleven.

Dad and Aunty Cheryl led him down the hallway into Mum's bedroom. Mum shouted at him. She said the f-word. Dad came back down the hallway and sat in his recliner shaking his head.

“Come on, Jean,” said Aunty Cheryl. “Don't be like that.”

Aunty Cheryl had more makeup on than usual. She'd done her hair. I saw her looking at herself in the glass doors of the buffet.

Dr. Cavanaugh stayed in the room for a while. We could hear him talking very quietly. Mum saved up some more f-words until the end of the conversation.

“I don't know what to say,” said Dr. Cavanaugh when he came back into the living room. “I think we need to let nature run its course. Grief is a very powerful emotion.”

Dad looked at him with his teardrop birthmark and black rings beneath his sea-green eyes.

“She's not eating,” said Aunty Cheryl.

Her hand with its ringless fingers rested at her throat. She held her mascara-coated eyelashes open very wide.

“What about the children?” he asked. “Does she respond to them?”

Danielle and I were at the dining room table pretending to do our homework, only Danielle was
drawing a sad-faced girl and I was thinking about something bigger to break. A bike maybe or a car.

They started whispering after that.

Mum stayed in bed.

I didn't need to worry about her accidentally seeing me ride to Nanna's flat. Angela suggested we look inside the box again.

“Why?” I said.

“So we know exactly what we are looking for.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “Let's look for wild horses instead.”

“You can't give up.”

“I'm not giving up.”

“You are. I can tell you are.”

“Well what do you want to know?” I said.

“Tell me about the ballet shoes.”

“That's boring.”

“The half a broken heart then.”

All through March and April Beth lied about ballet. Lying had become much easier for her. The lies didn't press on her stomach so much and make her throw up. She lied a lot. She lied boldly. Sometimes she lied like she wanted to get caught.

Her lying is a fact. It can be verified by anyone because in the end everybody was affected by her lies. For example, Aunty Cheryl saw Beth riding along the highway on a school day and stopped the car and
asked her where she was going. Beth said she had two free study periods in the afternoon on Fridays and didn't need to be at school.

“Well why doesn't Kylie ever get these free periods?” said Aunty Cheryl.

“I do art, Aunty Cheryl, and Kylie does all the hard subjects,” said Beth.

It slipped off her tongue easily, she smiled, and there was no stomach sickness. Aunty Cheryl puffed out her chest.

The next time Aunty Cheryl came for Sunday lunch Beth remembered what she had said and called Kylie into her room and told her that if Aunty Cheryl brought the free periods up she had to agree that it was so.

“No way,” said Kylie.

“I'll tell her you know where the picture of Des is,” said Beth.

Des was Kylie's father who'd left before she was born. His photo was hidden behind a baby photo of Kylie next to Aunty Cheryl's bed. Sometimes Kylie said Des was very rich and one day he'd be coming back to get her. Other times she said he was nothing but a mongrel.

When Beth blackmailed her with that Kylie started breathing in and out of her nose.

“These arty-farty subjects give the girls a lot of free time, don't they?” said Aunty Cheryl at lunch.

“I don't know,” said Mum. “You don't do art, do you, Beth?”

Beth rolled her eyes.

“Of course I do art.”

“I thought you had to choose between art and typing?” said Mum.

“They changed stuff around,” said Beth.

“Where are you keeping all the masterpieces?” asked Uncle Paavo.

“Remember when you used to draw?” said Nanna to Uncle Paavo. “When you were just a boy.”

“I never drew,” said Uncle Paavo.

“You did,” said Nanna. “I remember it. You drew machines. Cars and such.”

Kylie eyeballed Beth from across the table. So did Danielle because she was the artist in the family.

So Aunty Cheryl was affected by the lie and Kylie and Danielle. And Mum was too, although she didn't believe for a minute the part about the free periods and threatened to find out, and Uncle Paavo, who every Sunday lunch asked to see a masterpiece, and Nanna, because it made her remember Uncle Paavo before he became very serious and old, and, in the end, even the art teacher, Miss Proust, who was among the teachers at the funeral and who introduced herself as Miss Proust the art teacher: “I never taught your daughter but I remember her well.”

Beth made me lie about ballet. She said she'd tell
Mum eventually that she wasn't going to the classes anymore. All I had to do was tell Miss Elise Slater that Beth was sick. Beth said it was simple. She said it was an easy thing to do.

On ballet days I felt sick in my stomach as soon as the school bell rang. I felt like vomiting all the way home in the redback panel van. While we put on our leotards I bent over double and said I couldn't go.

“Don't be stupid,” said Beth. “You just have to do it one more time.”

“I'm going to go to hell,” I said.

“You're already going to hell anyway,” said Beth.

We left home like we were going to ride to ballet. At the end of the road Beth asked me if I remembered what I had to say. I told her to shut up. She went left so she could ride the long way around to Amiens Road. I went right so I could go to ballet. Miss Elise Slater looked sad when I said Beth wasn't coming again because of her concussion from falling over on the basketball courts. Miss Elise used it as an example to tell the class. She said our bodies were our instruments and we needed to look after them.

After ballet I had to ride to Amiens Road and wait outside the house. I didn't go into the yard but just waited on the footpath. I didn't like the house with its blank expression. All of its blinds were pulled down like closed eyes. The front fly screen
gaped like an open mouth. I tried to look in but all I could see was darkness.

It seemed to take forever for Beth to come out. I rode in circles on the road. The Nana Mouskouri lady came out to talk to me.

“Here you are again,” she said.

“I'm just waiting for my sister,” I said.

“How old is your sister, sweetie?” she asked.

“Thirteen,” I said. “I think when she's fourteen she might be going to get a tape recorder for her birthday.”

“That's lovely,” said the lady.

She asked what my last name was and which schools we went to. The lady seemed very interested in us until Beth came out of the house and then she stopped talking and went inside. Beth told me not to talk to her again. The boy called Marco came out onto the steps to watch her go. He didn't wave. He sat on the steps and watched her walk down the driveway toward me. She climbed onto her bike.