The Anatomy of Wings

by Karen Foxlee

  When she saw us she began to cry, which was normal, but now she cried with a half-drooping mouth. Her rose-covered nightie heaved up and down. Real tears fell down her face, a long string of spit fell out of the sagging corner of her lips.

  “Don't,” said Mum. “Please don't.”

  She sat on the bed and put her arms around Nanna and we couldn't see her face anymore. Nanna started speaking but she spoke in Finn. Her Finnish words were all joined together in a line. Mum hushed her.

  When Mum had finished hugging her we all had a turn. I went last. Only one of her arms worked. She wanted to hold my head between her two crinkly hands the way she always did but she only hit me in the head with one open hand instead. She didn't mean it. She pulled me in close to her face and I got some dribble on my cheek. She spoke into my ear.

  “My,” she said slowly. “My.”

  I thought she had finished but she held my head with her one hand.

  “Girl,” she said even more slowly, and then she let me go.

  “Rest,” said Mum.

  But Nanna wasn't finished speaking in her strange new voice.

  “I go,” she said, and she beat her chest with her good hand. “I go.”

  “Don't,” said Aunty Cheryl, and she got a tissue and wiped away some of the drool. “Have a nice sleep now.”

  “I go,” said Nanna fiercely.

  “Mummy,” said Mum.

  “Beth,” said Nanna.

  Late that evening Mum phoned the hospital again.

  “I see,” we heard her say. “I see.”

  Danielle and I lay in our beds in the dark, listening, but when Mum came to our door we both closed our eyes. Afterward I didn't know why. I wanted to know what was happening but the urge to close my eyes was stronger. It was becoming commonplace in our house: the shutting of eyes, the turning of heads, the swallowing of unsaid words.

  In the middle of the night Dad came home and banged his way off the hallway walls toward his bed. I heard Mum whispering to him and then nothing.

  “Is that it? Is that all you have to say?” came her voice, suddenly loud.

  Dad was out of bed again. Stumbling. He was at Beth's door, trying to open it up, which was a crime.

  “Get out, get out, get out,” Mum screamed.

  “I want to go to sleep,” Dad said, and he was sobbing. “I just want to go to sleep.”

  He was down on his knees. I could see them in the hallway, struggling with each other. It looked like they were wrestling. Danielle got up and shut our bedroom door. After that all we heard were tears. No words. Until the tears faded into silence and all I could hear was the ticking of the Bessemer clock.

  3 DARDANELLES COURT

  MRS. O'MALLEY TALKED AND MR. O'MALLEY SANG AND THEY AVOIDED EACH OTHER'S EYES. A long time ago they had come to town to get rich quickly but ended up staying forever. Mr. O'Malley sang songs about the sea and his voice filled up the cul-de-sac beneath the flame-colored evening sky. Some people shut their windows to block out the sound of his songs and some people opened them.

  When they first came Eva O'Malley didn't wear colorful nylon dresses but pencil skirts and blouses and peep-toe shoes bought from catalogs and also she had a ponytail. She talked but not in the same way that she would come to after the death of her firstborn. And Joseph O'Malley sang but usually only when he'd drunk too many, when the dances had ended and his mates cheered him up onto the stage. The way he sang later, after the baby was gone, it was difficult to describe. Even though the notes were rich and rounded and he sang in tune, for a long time it still reminded people of a man wringing his hands over and over again.

  When Eva was first pregnant he sang through the skin of her belly. She lay with her legs up on the sofa and he knelt on the floor beside her and sang to the unborn child. Sometimes he made up the words and tunes and he made Eva laugh. She said Joseph, don't, you'll make me want to pee. So then he kissed her belly instead.

  He often remembered being at sea. How the frigate had pitched on the gray waves and how they had walked uphill and downhill in the mess room and how men had suddenly embraced and shoved each other off again during a violent heave that sent them flying across rooms. And he remembered wondering where his life would take him. All those years in the navy, he felt he was heading somewhere, even though the ships just went in circles from port to port.

  When he sang to her belly he remembered that thought and wondered if he had arrived. But he didn't think so. He would know it surely. It made him shiver, the feeling that it was all unfinished. Even after she was born, he knew it, there was some other point he would need to travel to.

  He never told Eva that. She laughed when he told her all his life he had been waiting for her. Not because she didn't believe him but because everything back then made her laugh. She wore red lipstick and smiled. She was hopelessly impractical. She packed ten pairs of shoes to go out west with him.

  Her mother said you'll not last one day.

  But Eva refused to believe it.

  She didn't feel every action in her life had been a step toward that moment with Joseph singing through her belly. She didn't ever think things like that. She leafed through catalogs when she was pregnant looking for dresses she might wear again when she was back to her normal size. She didn't give much thought to the birth. It would all work out. She was completely unprepared. Afterward she always remembered those days as filled with sunlight, so bright that they were luminous. That looking back into those rooms, those scenes, the car pulling into the new Dardanelles Court, just painted, grassless, the baby in the baby basket, she needed to shield her eyes from the light.

  Their baby had been named Gayle. She had been very pretty. They were not biased. She was an incredibly beautiful infant. Even the midwives who were immune to pretty babies could not believe this baby's sweetness. Each day when Joseph took the cage up and the rock slid past his face he felt he was being spewed up out of the darkness into the day. And he took the stairs two at a time to see his daughter. He ran his hands over her legs and arms to see how much she had grown. He told her, in words, real unsung words, how glad he was to see his littlest darling, the apple of his eye. He picked her up out of her cot and examined her perfect face.

  He ignored that other feeling. That there was somewhere left to go. It was easy to. He remembered asking his wife how could it be? How could it be that they had produced something as beautiful as this? And his wife, who could not find words for her contentedness, had been only able to smile.

  The bucket that their baby drowned in was filled with water Eva was going to water her petunias with. In those days she kept a lovely garden, petunias, marigolds, white cosmos, purple salvia. The bucket was in the laundry waiting for outside. Gayle had only just begun to crawl. Both Joseph and Eva were home so not one or the other was more to blame. All they had done was turn away for half a minute. They said that in the beginning. No one was to blame. They whispered it first into each other's hair and then screamed it up and down the hallway and through slammed doors.

  After the baby was gone and the bucket and the pool of water and all the frantic wet footsteps had been mopped away, the evening closed in on the house. Eva lay on the sofa with her legs up and held her belly as though she could begin it all again. There was an open cut inside her. Later, much later, she would fill it with words, when people looked at her and away from her or spoke to her about the price of groceries.

  Joseph realized he had arrived at that place where he had always been heading. He was surprised to find himself suddenly there, beside the pale pink walls of her nursery, the sun setting behind the ranges, in the middle of nowhere. Evening and quietness filling up the rooms. He could not have imagined it, that it would have been this.

  At some point they stopped looking into each other's eyes. Eva talked. Joseph sang. And the years poured through their fingers.

  “This can't be right,” Eva said, “this cheaper flour is not worth the seventy cents I spent on it. The gravy is as lumpy as
ever. Mr. O'Malley, you'll have to allow me more money next week and I'll have to buy another sort. See what happens when you skimp.”

  Never there was such a beautiful rose, Joseph sang as he walked past her into the laundry to wash his hands in the sink.

  “Are you listening to me?” she asked, and he raised his eyes so she knew he was.

  It was a mistake they sometimes made. What traveled between them was immense. It washed over the table and chairs suddenly like a wave. It dashed the evening to smithereens. It blew them sideways and capsized them.

  “Of course I'm listening,” he said.

  She began to talk immediately to lessen the pain. He sang “Abide with Me,” softly, and they carefully avoided each other's eyes. Gradually they righted themselves. The night settled down around them. The ache settled. They moved apart from the table. She spoke to herself softly. Hush now, hush now, hush now, she said, even after he had gone outside to sing about the sea.

  IN OCTOBER BETH GOT HER SECOND AND LAST JOB. It was at Sandy's Sports Store. Dad didn't help; she got it herself by circling an advertisement in the paper and phoning the number. Mum still wanted her to go to boarding school but Beth said it was too late.

  “Let's see how long you last in this one then,” said Mum.

  Beth's job was to stock the already stuffed shelves that reached from ceiling to floor. It was badly lit. Rows of lures and sinkers winked inside of dusty display cabinets. It smelled of the leather of baseball gloves and the rubber of bicycle tires and years of accumulated dust. She crammed plastic bags full of tennis balls on top of boxes already filled with tennis balls. She stacked Gray-Nicolls cricket bats on top of other Gray-Nicolls cricket bats.

  “If you can manage the stock,” said Sandy, “you can have a go on the register in a month or two, but first I want my girls to get a feel for the stock.”

  Sandy smiled at her when he said it. He had a silky blond handlebar mustache and shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair. She had tried to call him Mr. Vale but he had forbidden it.

  “No one calls me that here,” he said. “We're all friends here.”

  There was only one other girl who worked at Sandy's Sports Store and this was Sandy's daughter Moira, who was fat and combed her bangs down flat with water and every morning dragged a stool from Sandy's office and placed it in front of the register.

  Beth didn't like Sandy. He smelled of desperation. He sat in his office for hours looking at his ledgers with his head in his hands. When he wasn't doing that he came to watch her stock shelves. He watched her on the stepladder.

  Beth came and went from home. She packed her little canvas bag and was gone for days. Whenever she arrived back she looked tired. She ate whatever she could find and then slept for hours on her bed. Sometimes Mum followed her from room to room asking her what she thought she was doing with her life. Beth didn't answer.

  “I never would have thought it'd be Beth that'd go wild,” said Aunty Cheryl. “You should have got rid of that Miranda Bell straightaway.”

  Mum didn't say anything.

  Aunty Cheryl was full of advice. She said she was glad Kylie had turned out so well. Kylie still went to Miss Elise Slater's Jazz Ballet Dance Academy. She breathed loudly through her sinuses while she danced. Aunty Cheryl said she was really starting to blossom.

  Some days Sandy asked Beth to tidy up down the back. Especially the bottom shelves he said. He came and stood beside her while she was kneeling on the ground. She removed tennis rackets from their dusty jackets. While she unzipped them he watched. He stood with his arm resting on a shelf and his body facing her.

  “If you can get on top of it,” he said, and smiled, “I'll let you go on the registers in a month or two.”

  Beth worked at Sandy's Sports Store for nearly the whole of October. Mum said she was pleased with her. Beth had beaten her previous milestone without causing any incidents. Dad said she must be doing a good job. They wanted to know what Mr. Vale was like. Was he a good boss? Had she made friends with the other girls?

  “Why don't you wear a nice skirt one day,” said Mum. “That embroidered one, the one Nanna made.”

  “I'm not wearing a skirt,” said Beth. “Believe me. I'm not wearing a skirt.”

  Nanna said it was all her praying to Saint Monica that had given Beth her second chance. In a matter of weeks she would be gone.

  A hot dusty wind arrived and bothered the town for days. It banged at windows and rolled over bins; it blew up in restless gusts. It hurt our eyes and it made us cough on our words. Mrs. Bridges-Lamb closed all the louvers and put up hessian and it felt like we were in a cave. I couldn't see any sky or birds. She said it was time to get serious. She said we were about to learn some of the most important things in our education.

  While the wind banged against the louvers she told us we were going to learn about the most important civilization in history, which was the ancient Romans. They were important because of their great ideas and contributions across many fields including sanitation, building, politics, and the military. She said we would also learn how to count using roman numerals, which was very important. Mrs. Bridges-Lamb loved the ancient Romans. The other class was doing projects on the space shuttle Columbia but Mrs. Bridges-Lamb said that was nothing compared to what the ancient Romans had given society.

  Before we got to the Romans, however, we had to learn about the ancient Greeks. Mrs. Bridges-Lamb wasn't as excited about them. She rushed us through the Acropolis. We raced past the Minotaur in his damp smelly labyrinth, barely looking back at the young maidens being slaughtered there. We flew past Zeus, the first Olympians, Marathon. We spent an afternoon with the Spartans, who seemed to stir something in her because she had to remove her glasses twice and clean the fog off them with her handkerchief. We stopped at the myth of Icarus.

  The myth bothered me. For instance, Icarus's father didn't seem to care when his own son, all melting wax and feathers, fell from the sky and into the sea. Instead of stopping he just kept flying on to freedom. He did not look back once. And it was he who had thought up the stupid and impractical idea in the first place. And also, everyone in the class knew, but no one said a thing, that the sun is a lot farther away than you might expect.

  After she had told us the myth Mrs. Bridges-Lamb took out a pile of butcher paper from the cupboards beneath the blackboard. She told us we were going to make our own Icarus wings. She said, in this instance, there were no rules. We had to make our wings exactly the way we imagined them.

  Everyone was excited. It was the first time all year we had been without rules.

  My wings were yellow. They didn't turn out the way I wanted. First I had drawn the anatomy in pencil. It had been difficult. It was hard to make both sides look the same. It was very technical and one humerus turned out longer than the other. I was only doing it from memory and I fell behind the rest of the class.

  When Mrs. Bridges-Lamb said we only had five minutes left all I could do was grab a yellow felt pen and cover over the bones as best I could but the yellow felt pen started running out halfway through and everything ended up wrong. Everyone had to form a line to tack their wings to the back wall. Massimo asked if mine was an X-ray of Big Bird and that made everyone laugh. Anthea smiled at me without showing her teeth and made sure I saw her wings had individually shaded feathers.

  “Shame job,” she said when we went outside. “Your wings were very stupid.”

  “Not as stupid as you are,” I said.

  “Well your sister is a dirty slut,” said Anthea.

  “She is not,” I shouted.

  My cheeks were burning.

  “She is,” said Anthea. “My big sister said it. Everyone says it.”

  I pushed her. I rammed my two hands against her shoulders and she fell to the ground.

  “Ouch,” she said, and started to cry.

  A group of girls helped her up and escorted her to the principal's office to tell on me. Angela stayed beside me.

  “What's a slut?�
� she asked.

  “Something very bad,” I replied.

  The day we made our Icarus wings I saw Beth on her bike and she was doubling Miranda Bell. I saw it out of the back window of the redback panel van just as we passed the football club. They were looking back at a group of boys sitting along the gutter and they were laughing. At first she didn't see me, face pressed to the rear window of the panel van, but then some of the boys raised their hands and called out because the van caused a commotion wherever it went. By the time she turned to look she was already disappearing into the distance. She waved but I couldn't tell if she was smiling. The sinking feeling was very strong.

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE WEEK UNTIL THE TALENT QUEST AND ANGELA WAS FULL OF HOPE. After I told her about my nanna's stroke she said it was more important than ever. Nanna could only get better if I could sing to her. She made everything sound like it was written in a fairy tale.

  We walked the long way by the riverbed to Campbell Road and the caravan park. I kept thinking up excuses. For instance, what if Miranda had left town? She was always moving. She never stayed anywhere that long. She said so herself. Or what if, instead, we just went to the top of the hill and I tried yelling or screaming and Angela could hit my back until my voice dislodged?

  “Don't be silly,” said Angela.

  We walked to Miranda's caravan against the tall chain fence. It was very quiet.

  “Go on,” said Angela as though it was all my idea. “Knock.”

  I put one foot on the metal step and knocked quietly.

  There was nothing for a while, then footsteps. Miranda stood behind the screen. She was in a man's AC/DC T-shirt. It came to her knees. Her long brown hair was unbrushed. She held her stomach.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

  She looked behind her and opened the door slowly. She came down the steps and stood on the gravel in bare feet. She had bruises on her legs. Her skin was no longer like fine porcelain. She shivered even though it wasn't cold.