The Anatomy of Wings (29 page)

And then something wonderful.

The storm took a deep breath and blew open a row of louvers at the back of the classroom. Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's mouth opened. A spray of side-on rain entered the room and fell across our maps of Italy. The wind turned the pages of our atlases quickly and shut them all with a clap and turned its attention to the back wall.

Of all the wings on the wall the wind chose mine to tear free. For a brief and beautiful moment my yellow wings were released from their pin and floated upward into the room. The whole class held its breath. They flapped three times, gained altitude on an updraft, hovered briefly, and then fell to the floor.

When we walked home the whole world had changed. Rain tiptoed on rooftops. A hawk hovered,
surveying the damage. The clouds had drifted away. Water rushed out of downpipes in fountains. Everywhere raindrops sparkled.

We did not want to go home. There was too much to see. The raindrops clung single file to railings. They decorated the park fence. They illuminated spiderwebs stretched between trees. They twinkled along the edges of the slippery slide. They shone. Beneath the swing the ditch had turned into a pond. Two ant explorers had climbed on board a leaf that circled slowly on a sea.

We examined raindrops clinging to blades of grass. We opened rattlepods filled with rain. We ran our hands over the wet surfaces of everything.

“By tomorrow the river will run,” said Angela at the end of Dardanelles Court.

In front of our house Nanna was pulling up in her beige Datsun Sunny.

“Quick,” she said, waving her arms. “It's Danielle's perm.”

Danielle was lying on her bed with hair like Leo Sayer's.

“Oh my God,” I said when I saw it.

“Don't say that,” said Mum.

“Dear Lord,” said Nanna.

“Don't say a thing,” shouted Danielle.

She turned on her side and faced the wall.

“Stop looking at me,” she screamed, so we all looked at the floor.

Nanna phoned Aunty Cheryl for tips on what to do with a bad perm. Aunty Cheryl said whatever you do don't wet it. Nanna relayed the message down the hallway to Mum.

“Whatever you do don't wet it,” she shouted.

“You must not wet it,” said Mum to Danielle.

“Shut up,” said Danielle.

She was lying on her bed with her whole life ruined. Dad was on the back steps coughing and wiping his eyes. He had been laughing soundlessly and then his laugh got caught on some cigarette smoke and he had started to cough. He had to get up and go outside, he was coughing so much. When Beth finally came home there was no one there to meet her but me. She came up the front steps and stood at the screen door like she was a visitor. I stood on the other side.

For dinner we ate meatball porcupines, which was Beth's favorite. At the table everybody tried very hard to forget what had happened. We pretended that Beth had never run away. We pretended that she hadn't fallen down drunk in Miss Schmidt's front yard.

Danielle had come to the table with her bad perm wrapped up in a scarf. She had washed her hair and
tried to comb it out straight. Underneath the scarf I could see the tight curls reforming as they dried. It was as though she had a nest of snakes moving beneath the scarf.

“You really shouldn't have wet it,” said Aunty Cheryl, shaking her head slowly from side to side.

“It's going to have made it a whole lot worse,” said Kylie.

But Danielle wasn't listening. She eyeballed Beth from across the table. She ate her meatballs slowly, spearing them one by one, without taking her eyes off Beth, who was trying to ignore her. Mum noticed and told Danielle to stop.

“Oh great,” said Danielle. “It's never her fault, is it? She's always the right one.”

She said bitch under her breath as she pushed her plate away and some of the meatballs fell over the edge and onto the proper special occasion tablecloth. Her brace made a creaking noise as she got up and left.

“Christ,” said Dad.

“She said bitch,” I said.

“We heard her,” said Mum.

“Helmet head,” I called out after her.

“Stop it,” said Mum.

Beth laughed. She was eating slowly and deliberately. She kept her eyes downcast. Her hair was still
damp from her shower. It hung down on either side of her face in pale waves. Her face was scrubbed clean. She was the picture of an obedient daughter.

The terrible thing about meatball porcupines was that sometimes if you used your imagination the rice poking out of the meatballs could look like maggots. Angela and I once saw maggots in a dead black cat near the river crossing. We cried all the way back to Angela's house and became hysterical when Mr. Popovitch told us that nature would take its course. He had to come with an old blanket and scoop up the remains and bury them in the backyard with a small funeral service. I looked at my meatballs after Danielle left the table and decided I couldn't eat them.

“Eat your meatballs,” said Mum.

“I can't,” I said.

“Well try very hard,” she replied.

“So what do you think of this secretary school thing?” asked Dad.

“Great,” said Beth, shrugging. “It's what I've always wanted to do.”

“We'll have to buy some new skirts and blouses,” said Mum.

Beth nodded her head meekly. She agreed with whatever they said. Mum talked about train tickets and good 40-denier stockings that didn't run and which bag she should take. She talked about foolscap folders, new pens, and sharpened pencils.

“She should get a nice new haircut,” said Aunty Cheryl.

Aunty Cheryl suggested something easier to manage. Something shorter.

In unison we all remembered Mum with the scissors and Beth on her knees in the kitchen.

Beth pushed her hair behind her ears and nodded without really looking at anyone. I listened and pulled my meatballs apart to remove the maggots.

“Well then,” said Mum when she had finished talking.

She lit a cigarette and so did Dad and Aunty Cheryl. They stayed sitting at the table. They smoked without saying anything. Beth chewed on a fingernail. Everyone looked very sad.

After dinner Beth went out into the backyard and climbed onto the trampoline. She lay there on her back with her hands behind her head looking up into the sky. I climbed on beside her and bounced a few times.

“Don't jump, Jenny,” she said. “I just want to lie here.”

She lay there thinking. Her eyes moved as she thought. It looked like she was having that conversation with someone in her head, watching them pace up and down in front of her. Occasionally her lips moved around words. The way they used to in the
afternoons when she lay down after school. I stopped bouncing. I rested on my stomach with my chin in my hands.

Before the rain the earth had been closed fist-tight, cringing, battered by the sun. Now it unclenched. Curled leaves unfolded. Cowering grasses lifted their heads. Trees breathed deeply. A new wetness rose up from the ground. The earth opened its eyes and gazed at the star-strung sky.

“Do you know how to write a haiku?” I asked, hoping it would start a conversation.

“Yes,” said Beth. “Mrs. Rigid-Ram taught us that too.”

Mrs. Rigid-Ram was a horrible name that older children called Mrs. Bridges-Lamb when they were no longer in her class. They would never have dared think of a name like that if they were. Everyone knew she could read your mind if you were thinking bad things about her.

“You shouldn't call her that,” I said.

Beth took her blue eyes off the sky and looked at me.

“I'm only joking,” she said.

“I like her,” I said.

“I know you do, Jenny,” she said. “Have you done Boadicea yet?”

“What's that?”

“She's just this wild woman in England who
drove around in a chariot killing Greeks, or maybe Romans, I don't know, but Mrs. Bridges-Lamb loved her. We did her for a whole week. You wait till you do her.”

She was looking back at the sky. Even while she talked I could see she was only half thinking about it. She wasn't seeing chariots or wild queens. She told me about other things that we'd learn but her sentences kept drifting off into thin air. After a while she stopped talking altogether, midsentence. She removed her hands from behind her head and crossed them on her chest as though she had reached an impasse with herself.

“Are you going to go away?” I asked.

“Probably,” she said.

She lay very still. She stared straight ahead. She lay like that for a long time. The sky was ablaze with stars. The Milky Way burned a bright path above us. I listened to the clatter of Mum doing the dishes. Someone playing the organ in the Irwins’ house. A car turning out onto the highway. Beth uncrossed her arms. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes.

“Don't worry,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”

Her decision had been made. She looked at me and smiled. Already I could tell she was thinking about where she'd go. She was thinking somewhere,
anywhere, there must be something happening. She sat up. She bounced up and down on her backside. She pulled a face at me. It was meant to make me laugh, so I laughed, but it was a counterfeit happiness, both hers and mine.

I forced out the laughter like a painful cough. My smile was screwed on tight. She grabbed my hand and held it hard. She hurt my fingers. I could see the sadness resting on her face like a veil. I saw it by the moonlight and the starlight.

Inside she sat in front of her duchess and brushed her hair. She brushed it in long slow strokes. The strands shone under the electric lightbulb. She put in her two blue hair combs. She painted her lips. First in delicate brushstrokes upward to the bows of her top lip, then she filled in the valley between. She painted the fullness of her bottom lip. She put mascara on her eyelashes. She drew kohl along the inside of her bottom lids. She looked at her reflection. She stared into her own eyes.

She didn't cry. She didn't say goodbye to anything. She didn't look at all the things in her room. Her old stuffed rabbit. Her record player. Her dancing sashes. Her running medals. Her tambourine with its faded pink ribbons. She put the two checks inside her bag.

“I left something at Michelle's. I'm going to get it,” she said at the kitchen door.

Mum was washing the dishes. She kept her back turned to Beth. I could tell by the movement of her shoulders that she was crying. In the living room Dad and Aunty Cheryl stared ahead at the television. Beth touched Kylie on the shoulder as she passed. It was only a light touch but Kylie jumped like she had been burned by a match.

“I'll be back soon,” said Beth.

The house was quiet after the front screen door banged shut. Mum went after her then. She ran barefoot across the wet front lawn.

“I told you I'll be back soon,” said Beth.

“Please,” Mum said, holding Beth's face, smoothing back the hair, and looking into her eyes.

All that night while I tried to go to sleep I kept feeling the words of a song trying to come through. It was a slowish song, humming along inside me. It felt like
If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone, you will hear the whistle blow, one hundred miles, one hundred miles, one hundred miles.

O
N HER LAST NIGHT ON EARTH SHE WENT TO MICHELLE WRIGHT'S FLAT.
Michelle told her there was a party. It was only a few streets away. All day the road had been filling with cars. Miranda was already there. Hadn't she told her? She knew someone who knew someone.

The party was in a brand-new double-story town house. There was a crowd crammed shoulder to shoulder inside. It was filled to the brim with the smell of smoke and sweat and spilled drinks and a riot of voices, conversations rumbling and punctuated by laughter. Word spread quickly of her arrival.

She had time to put her cigarette out and her bottle down before Miranda grabbed her and they waltzed wildly around the living room. People jumped out of the way and clapped and wolf-whistled. They looked at each other while they spun
and everything was forgiven. Beth's blond hair fanned out behind her. Her little canvas backpack was thrown into the corner, her black flip-flops beside it.

She drank wine coolers that weren't hers. She drank them quickly because she had no buzz. A man who played A Grade football poured her a Southern Comfort and then another. He was a big man. An eighteen-year-old built like a giant. He smiled at her while she drank. He rubbed his hand up and down her thin arm.

“I heard you give good head,” he said to her.

She didn't answer but moved away from him then. She went downstairs in the cement courtyard. Cigarette butts rained like fireflies from the balcony above. Finally Miranda came and found her with her head between her knees.

“Do you want to go home?” Miranda asked.

“No,” she said.

Beth wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“Do you ever get so drunk that you forget your own name?”

“No,” said Miranda.

“And then when you remember it, it's like you can't believe that's what you're called. You say my name, my name, I never knew that was my name.”

She pulled herself together, sat up straighter, and tucked her hair behind her ears.