The Anatomy of Wings (22 page)

“All the biggest,” said Mrs. O'Malley.

“Any of the small?” asked Mr. O'Malley.

“None of the small,” whispered Mrs. O'Malley.

They looked at each other then.

A glimpse, a little piece of their story, flapping like ribbon in the wind.

“Now,” she said, “young Jennifer Day. You've nothing to worry about here in the middle of nowhere. Nothing can happen to us.”

Beth lasted five weeks at Our Lady's Secondary College. Each morning when she got out of the car all the girls in their checkered uniforms and brown socks moved back from her as she passed. In the corridors they held their hands over their mouths and whispered into each other's ears.

Here was the girl who gave blow jobs.

The girl with the boyfriend whose neck got snapped.

The strange blue-eyed girl.

In the small airless demountable classrooms the nuns treated her harshly because they had accepted her as a difficult case that needed to be fixed. Right from the beginning they needed to get on top of her behavior. But they had expected a lot worse.

They could only fault her on small things. For instance her daydreaming and her sliding brown socks. When she chewed her fingernails she was made to swallow the chewed pieces. That was all.

Beth made unlikely friends. At first only one or two, girls curious of the strange newcomer with her sand-colored hair and the bored, slightly disappointed expression. But then there were more. Later they flocked to her like moths to a flame.

Mostly they came with the intention of meanness.

“We know all about you,” they said.

“We've heard what a slut you are,” they said.

“Lucky there are no boys here,” they said.

“She'll probably try to do it with Father Matthew,” they said.

Beth didn't say much back. She shrugged.

“So what if I do.”

They shivered in their brown socks and thin white skins.

They found her irresistible.

These were good girls, immaculately groomed, with charm bracelets and white sandshoes. They played tennis. They went to band practice. They were
pretty and unattainable. They wanted to talk to her about sex. They wanted to know things. They had questions about kissing and love bites and hands on breasts. They sat on the brown grass near the cement tennis courts and listened to Beth talk about it. She liked to watch them squirm. They were both excited and revolted. Sometimes they squealed and held their hands over their ears.

They reminded Beth of porcelain dolls in cellophane wrapping with their polished skin and shiny ponytails. They were sterile and scentless.

They jostled for her attention.

Beth held her pencil to her lips like a cigarette. She was like a still-faced Saint Catherine looking skyward before being strapped to the wheel. Sometimes she looked straight through them but when she came back to earth and smiled it was like the explosion of a star shell.

Everyone wanted a piece of her.

Just to touch her checkered uniform, a part of her pale skin, to be the recipient of one of her smiles. Mostly they didn't know why. They undid their top buttons just like her. Let their socks fall down. They smoked their pencil cigarettes in class. They tried to imitate her calm disinterested features.

The Shelleys came in boyfriends’ cars and parked alongside all the mothers in their brand-new station wagons waiting for the last bell to ring. They laughed
at Beth's uniform and called her a cattle tick. She pulled her black rubber-band bracelet from her pocket when she stood beside the car and put it on. Miranda, sitting in the front seat, said she'd stopped going to school. She flicked her cigarette ash out the window. She stared right ahead as though she didn't care if she saw Beth or not.

“You should do something to get expelled,” Miranda said. “Anything, it wouldn't take much, would it?”

“You shouldn't be talking to those girls,” said Mum when she arrived to pick Beth up.

“Why not?” said Beth.

“Because they're more than half your problem.”

It was the cooking sherry that she brought to school that was her undoing. And the classroom full of polished girls who smelled of it, and later the parents crying in corridors.

“But it was only a small bottle,” Beth said.

She said it to Mum, who had her head in her hands in the living room. She was going through the telephone book looking for faraway boarding schools. She wanted a school with locks on the dormitory doors and occasional caning.

Beth said she wasn't going. She said she was getting a job. There was mostly a lot of screaming and crying.

“I've had enough of you,” shouted Mum. “I really have. I can't get it through to you, can I? You can't just do whatever you want.”

“I'll get a job,” said Beth. “I really want to get a job.”

“You think you loved this boy?” said Mum. “You think just because he died your whole life is over? You don't know anything about love. How long did you know him? A month, two months, do you think that's love?”

She sounded like she had been waiting a long time to say that.

Dad came home but he didn't even make it up the steps. Mum banged open the screen door against the patio railing.

“She's bloody done it again,” she said.

“Dad,” said Beth from behind her.

He sat down on the step and put his crib port beside him.

“What have you done now, little mate?” he said.

He looked at her properly, for the first time in months.

“She took my cooking sherry to school. She's bloody been expelled,” said Mum. “I had to walk past all those wretched women crying because their daughters were plastered. She thinks she's not going to boarding school, that she's getting a job. She's just fourteen, for Christ's sake. I can't stand it. I can't
stand another minute of it. Why don't you sort her out for a change? Tell your father, tell your father now what you've gone and done.”

“You were fourteen when you finished,” said Dad, rubbing his eyes.

“I knew it,” screamed Mum. “I knew you'd do this.”

She threw her arms up in the air.

Mr. and Mrs. O'Malley came out onto their front patio and pretended to look at the sky for rain clouds.

Mum slammed the screen door again when she went inside. Dad patted the space beside his crib port and Beth sat down with him on the step. He looked at her and shook his head.

“I'll try really hard,” she said.

She pushed her hair behind her ears. It had grown back to just above her shoulders. She looked down at her toes. She chewed her nails.

“You give it a go,” said Dad, “but it's tough. I reckon you'll only last a month or so. But that's not the point, is it? You're only young. You can go back to school later if you need to.”

“I want to try it,” said Beth.

“I want you to be a good girl,” said Dad, putting his arm around her. “What happened to my good girl?”

“I'm trying,” said Beth.

“I know you are.”

Dad got Beth a job at the Mission Street Mechanics. For a little while things settled down. She didn't ride her bike at night. She stopped drinking at the water tower with Miranda and the Shelleys. A fever had broken. She had changed. It was much better. She wasn't so restless.

She opened up a bank account and saved some of her money. She could lie on the sofa without getting up again every five minutes to look at herself in a mirror, to feel her face to make sure it was still there, to pack her bag, to smoke a cigarette, to start an orange and then throw it away. Danielle asked her what she was saving for but Beth just shrugged.

She started wearing a knee-length skirt and little black pumps and she took out all the earrings from her ears, which she had pierced with sewing needles. She didn't wear any makeup. She brushed her hair and rolled it into a bun the way she did when she danced. Our mother ironed her white shirts with fake pearl buttons. When she entered the workshed she didn't look up.

Beth's office at the Mission Street Mechanics was the size of a small cupboard. Summer came early. It arrived with a blast. The temperatures soared into
the hundreds. During the day the shed heated up like an oven and a small dirty fan blew hot air that smelled of grease and smoke and men. The front wall of the office faced into the workshed and was made of clear plastic. Beth was like a rare flower in a glass hothouse.

Mr. McNally, who owned the business, was short and sweaty and permanently grease-stained. He handed her piles of pink and green invoices with blackened hands. He was Scottish. He called her lass. He smiled at her whenever he could because he'd told Dad he'd look after her. Beth added up the numbers on a grimy calculator bolted to the desk.

“Mission Street Mechanics. May I help you?” said Beth when she answered the phone.

She practiced it at home in the evenings and made us laugh. Mr. McNally puffed out his chest when he heard it. Business was up for the beginning of September.

“Mr. McNally to line one, please,” she said over the public-address system.

It made the mechanics and their apprentices look toward the plastic window.

Beth was very good with numbers.

“She is just like me,” said Uncle Paavo.

“Only not an arse-tight,” said Nanna.

Beth took the green and pink invoices and separated them. She added, multiplied, subtotaled, and
totaled them again. She skewered the copy when she was done. She sorted through years of old accounts. She scrubbed the filing cabinet clean. She swept her hothouse floor. She stayed inside at lunchtime so she could answer the phone even though Mr. MrNally suggested she go across the road to one of the highway cafés.

Beth didn't go outside until the second week. She asked Mr. McNally first. It was just for a cigarette at morning and afternoon tea. Mr. McNally laughed at her choice of words.

“Are you expecting fine china, lassie?” he asked.

Beside the shed there was a gravel yard enclosed by a tire fence and behind the fence the dry riverbed lay. Beth used a jerry can to climb onto a metal drum. She smoked her Winfield Greens. Two at morning tea and two at afternoon tea. She drank from a chipped and stained cup that read
REPCO 76
.

Frankie was the first to join her. He reminded her of Marco with his white skin and glossy black hair. He planted his feet apart in the gravel and showed off the muscles in his arms at every opportunity he could by leaning forward to pick up a handful of gravel, by straightening a tire along the fence line, by yawning and stretching his arms above him. Because his last name was Toscani the others called him Toss.

Then came Whitey. He had faded skin and white hair. He turned the metal drum on its side and made
a charade of not noticing Beth when he sat beside her and then jumping with fright when he did.

“You're a bloody dickhead, Whitey,” said Toss.

Jeffrey was third, the shyest. He had the face of a cherub on the body of a giant. He built Beth an awning over her drum chair without ever having said a word to her.

“I really like it, Jeffrey,” she said.

“You'd get burned, that's all,” he said with his head down, pawing the dirt with his foot like a flighty horse.

Gavin came last. He was barrel-shaped with thick black hair on his forearms and sticking out from his collar like stuffing. He wore a tight fixed smile. He came under the pretense of looking for an old Sigma part that had been left in the yard. He watched her with dangerous eyes.

Beth flourished in the young men's eyes. She grew more beautiful each day. On the third Monday while she was bored she took her hair out and put it up again. Mr. McNally, noticing something different in the air, looked up from his blowtorch and found every face turned toward the plastic window. He sent Beth on an errand to the newsagent's. He stewed on it for a day before he exploded.

Toss was dancing past Beth's window. Mr. McNally grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and walked him backward toward his station.

“Keep your bloody mind on your bloody job,” he shouted.

He threatened to dock Frankie's pay if he looked up from his work.

“That's ridiculous,” said Frankie.

Gavin stared at her through the window. She stabbed an invoice onto her paper stake knowing her days were numbered.

Whitey's trick was to visit the cupboard office to check up on parts he had only ordered five minutes before. On the bottom of his order forms he wrote in block letters
YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL,
in pencil, so that she could erase them. Mr. McNally watched him closely.

“Watch it, boy,” he said under his breath whenever Whitey passed.

Jeffrey drank gallons of water from the water fountain beside the office. She listened to Jeffrey guzzling while he watched her with one eye.

“Don't think I'm not onto you, laddie,” said Mr. McNally.

“I'm really thirsty, Mr. McNally,” said Jeffrey.

“But you're not a bloody fish.”

Gavin grew louder and his grin tighter. He walked backward and forward in front of the office without looking at her but occasionally rubbing his hairy arm against the plastic the way a tomcat marks its territory.

On the last day at smoke break she took her seat and waited.

Toss struck a pose and tried some dance moves in front of her. His feet sprayed gravel and cigarette butts.

“I've already seen it,” she said.

“No wait,” he said. “I got more.”

He patted out the borders of an imaginary window.

“She said she's seen it,” said Gavin, and snapped forward like a thrown rope and pushed Toss to the ground.

He lay in the gravel with a surprised look on his face like Marcel Marceau and then Gavin was on top of him, pummeling him with his fists. She sat very still on her overturned drum with its awning. Whitey leaped onto Gavin's back and attempted to prize him off. Gavin was speechless, red-faced. Hate bled out of him.

“Stop it,” she said.

She stubbed her cigarette out on the ground. She picked up her handbag. She walked inside. She bumped into Jeffrey's chest.

“Quick,” he said. “I think Mr. McNally's having a heart attack.”

After Mr. McNally was taken away in the ambulance she went home. She walked the whole way along the highway toward an ever-receding mirage.