Dirty Wings (4 page)

“Does that mean something?” Felony cranes her neck, peering upward, and trips over a pothole.

“It means you should watch where you're going, you dumb bitch,” Cass says, and takes off running.

“Give me back my fucking strawberries, you mangy little whore!” Felony yells, and they whoop back and forth, their voices echoing down the deserted street, as they race each other the rest of the way home.

NOW: NEWPORT BEACH

The best of their days are like this one, waking when the sun on their faces is too bright and insistent to let them slumber any longer, stumbling on coltish girl-legs to the edge of the ocean and falling in, shrieking, letting the salt shock of the water startle them all the way out of sleep. Boiling water and coffee grounds on their little camp stove, the resultant sludge strong enough to make their teeth chatter. If they're lucky, like today, the beach will be abandoned. They'll flop down on a sandy blanket above the high-tide line, let the sun bake them into a stupor, crisp their skins golden. Cass is so unselfconscious about her body that it's contagious, and now both of them are naked half the time, not even bothering to hide behind shirts or cutoffs when a stray family wanders their way, parents quickly steering toddlers back down to the waterline when they realize what nest of scandal they've stumbled across.

On days like this they are both happy in a way neither of them has ever been happy before, so happy they are dumb with it, their lazy fingers intertwined as they bask on the pale sand, or one girl's head pillowed on the other's shoulder, bleached and mad-colored strands mingling. They do pushups in the sand, for fitness, collapsing in laughter at the sight of each other, doze like cats, read magazines Cass steals from the gas station, magazines about movie stars who are sleeping with other movie stars' spouses. Maia has brought along a copy of
War and Peace
but cannot manage more than a page without falling asleep; Cass bought a stack of Stephen King novels in a Salvation Army in Portland and is making her way through
Pet Sematary
, reading the most terrifying bits aloud in a stentorian voice. Maia gives up on Tolstoy and makes off with
The Stand.
Cass accuses her of getting sand between all the pages. Maia drops the book in the ocean, accidentally, and they leave it to dry on a campground picnic table.

When they are hungry, if they are hungry, Maia puts clothes on and drives barefoot to the nearest store—in remote places like this, sometimes it's a trip of nearly an hour—and comes back with Perrier and peaches and bags of chips, suntan lotion that makes them both reek of coconut, Dr Pepper and cheese that melts in the hot sun faster than they can eat it, sweating gently in its plastic wrapping. Fried Jo Jos from the deli case, about which Maia has become fanatical. Cass eats Snickers bars by the handful. They both like Cornnuts. Maia never ate food like that before Cass, bright-colored food made nuclear with Yellow #5. The drowsy afternoons stretch into forever, the sun slowly lowering at the western edge of the world until the ocean goes molten and the velvety dark of the sky is pinpricked white with stars. They have nowhere to be and there is no one in the world who knows where they are, no one but each other, and there is no one else they need. Not now, not ever, just the two of them, sun-browned bare-skinned salt-haired girls, brimming over with joy.

THEN

The house is quiet when she lets herself in, and Maia thinks for a moment that she's safe. She drops her bag on the couch, slips the loafers off her feet, pads into the kitchen to ferret out a snack. She doesn't hear her mother's footsteps behind her until it's too late.

“Where were you?”

Maia whips around, hitting the open refrigerator door with one elbow and suppressing a yelp. “I walked home from Oscar's.” Her mother smells of Chanel No. 5 and her lipstick is a dark, elegant red. She must have had a lunch date. Or an advisory meeting with one of her favorite students. Her mother's favorite students are all men.

“Don't leave the refrigerator door open. What do you want in there?”

“I was looking for something to eat.”

“You don't need anything to eat. Dinner's in an hour. How many times have I asked you to put your bag in your room and not leave it on the couch?”

“I'm sorry. Oscar gave me some new music.”

“Then put it by the piano when you come in. Honestly, Maia.”

“Oscar likes me to read it first.”

“Then you should have put it in your room.”

“I know. Is Dad home?”

“How should I know?”

“I thought you were here already.”

“I don't keep track of your father. Go pick up your bag.”

“Okay.”

Maia has no real basis for comparison, but she's fairly sure her life isn't normal. But while her mother is difficult, she's not hard to manage; she operates by tangible rules. No emotion, no dirt, no sass, and no deviation from the careful path she has outlined for Maia. Sometimes Maia thinks her parents should have just adopted a dog: easier to train, fewer impulses toward independence. But then, her mother would never be able to stomach dog hair on the couch. Maia has thought, more than once, of asking them why they wanted her, why they went to such enormous trouble—and, no doubt, expense, though to their credit neither of them has ever mentioned how much her adoption must have cost—for a child neither of them seems to particularly enjoy. Her mother is not someone suited to the role of kindness, or nurture; it's no coincidence she chose the cruel, long-dead world of the ancients, with their quests and wars and bloody-minded people stabbing husbands in their baths, baking children into pies and feeding them to their fathers, putting out their own eyes. Maia's mother herself is something out of another century, ruthless and ambitious and scoured bare of any weakness, like some Amazonian queen.

Maia has good memories of her father, from when she was smaller. He used to take her to the zoo on the weekends, or play catch with her in the park. But that was a long time ago. Sometimes Maia imagines her mother scrubbing him away with a sponge, the way the cleaning lady bleaches the counters and the sinks, until someday he will be erased entirely. As the years pass he grows ever more difficult to see. He's like a ghost permanently haunting the safety of his study, where he's been working on the same novel for as long as she's belonged to the two of them. He would read her chapters when she was little, and she remembers only that they were stories about adults at grown-up parties, the women in pretty dresses and the men sharp and witty. A lot of drinks in winking glasses. The chapters were about things she knew she would understand when she was older, and she'd felt a quick thrill at the idea that someday the world of adults would crystallize with her as a part of it, and she'd know then what it was her father had been telling her. Now writing for him means mostly drinking and looking into space. He hasn't read her chapters in years.

Her parents have money. Not yacht and lakefront money, but big house and two cars money, trips to Europe, a grand piano for her to practice on. They take her to piano competitions, which she wins. They took her to Rome when she was nine and Paris when she was twelve. She rode the Metro and walked across a bridge and went on a boat on the river and everyone around her was drinking white wine, and she ate a croissant at a round table outside a café. Her parents met in New York, when her mother was getting her doctorate at Columbia and her father was spending his parents' money and beginning the novel he has yet to finish. Maia tries to imagine them young and in love, but love seems like an emotion that is beyond the both of them.

Maia does not have friends. She is home-schooled. The only person she sees regularly is Oscar. Her mother likes to have dinner parties, but her mother's friends are composed chiefly of handsome male graduate students and the occasional guest lecturer or visiting professional intellectual. The dinner guests are generally made uncomfortable by Maia; they often seem startled to find her there, peering at her across the table as though she is some sort of mute, exotic pet. Occasionally they ask her about her schoolwork. “Your English is so good,” they will say. She is aware that friends are a thing people possess; she sees other girls her own age, girls in jeans and sweatshirts, girls with bright jangly earrings that dangle from their lobes, girls with lipstick and sneakers and fingernails painted pink or red or blue. Girls walking in packs, hands in one anothers' back pockets, girls eating candy together and laughing. Girls like that seem a different species altogether from the somber, makeup-free face that greets Maia in the mirror. When she can get away with it she buys fashion magazines at the grocery store and leafs through the pages later in the safety of her own room, touching the pictures of long-limbed models in their fairytale-princess dresses, leaping for the camera like the white-tailed deer that bound through the woods near her house, as though she can step through the glossy pages and into another life.

Her only door out is the piano. Four hours a day, six hours a day. Some days eight hours, ten, twelve. Her mother had wanted a good daughter, a doll of a daughter, placid and dainty and dressed in ruffles. She'd sent Maia to ballet lessons, dreaming of her daughter a graceful Clara pirouetting around the Nutcracker prince. Instead, tiny Maia fell over when she tried to plié and cried every time she was put into a leotard. But Maia took to piano in a way her mother hadn't dared hope for. She'd chosen Oscar because he was the best teacher. Even when Maia was only four, it was obvious that she'd become his best pupil. His other students weren't always kind to her about it. “Of course the Asian girl is perfect,” she'd heard one of the girls mutter to another at a recital. But Oscar had heard it, too, and responded with a devastating contempt that Maia hadn't yet known he had in him.

“Do you think it is because of where she was born that she is better than you?” he'd said coolly, in a voice that carried across the entire room. “It is not the color of her skin that makes her less lazy. You have not got half her gift, but even if you had, you are too stupid to use it.” The girl had gotten another piano teacher, but none of Oscar's other students ever bothered her again.

Maia drops her bag in her room. The walls are painted a pale pink she'd picked out years ago and long since outgrown, but she can't imagine what color she'd want them to be now, even if her parents let her choose a new one. Ruffled white eyelet bedspread and matching pillowcases. A framed watercolor of a unicorn.
The girl in the street wasn't been wrong to call me princess,
she thinks.
Cass.
She says the name aloud and then looks around furtively, as though she's been caught out at a lie. But there's no one to hear her, no one to mark the flush the name brings to her cheeks. “Cass,” she says again, letting the word drop into the silence of her room like a dare.
Maybe I'll see you again,
the girl said, her grey eyes serious. What would they do? Steal more beer? Go shopping? Watch television? Maia is not allowed to watch television, other than the news when her parents have it on. She racks her brain for samples of teen activities. Board games? Tag? She imagines herself walking up to Cass, surrounded by urchins and dogs, and suggesting a game of tag, and buries her head in her hands in despair.

 

 

After dinner she takes the Ravel to the piano and pages through it. Oscar likes her to spend a week reading the music without touching the piano, but sometimes his fussiness grows wearisome, and anyway she's itchy to try the piece out.

Her mother comes into the room and watches her practice for a while. Maia is always nervous playing in front of her mother, for no real reason. Her parents aren't like the other parents of the ambitious teens she competes against, most of them failed classical musicians themselves who inflict their own thwarted ambitions on their children, or else career musicians whose luminous talents outshine their unfortunate offspring, doomed forever to labor in their shadow. Her mother likes her to be good at things, and she is better at the piano than either of her parents are at anything they do—even her mother, respected scholar and tenured professor though she is, does not bring to the study of antiquity the rare gift that Maia has for the piano. But as difficult as Maia's mother is, she is content to let her daughter excel without reproach or undue pressure.

“That's Ravel,” she says, as Maia works through the first page. “
Gaspard de la nuit.
”

“Yeah,” Maia says, surprised. Her mother finds the Romantics lugubrious.

“Yes, Maia, not yeah. Did Oscar tell you about the piece?”

“No, he just gave me the music at the end of my lesson today.”

“Each of the movements is based on a Bertrand poem.”

“Bertrand?”

“Aloysius Bertrand. Ravel thought his work encapsulated Romanticism—he meant to satirize it, I think, originally, but then ended up writing these sort of hallucinatorily romantic pieces in spite of himself. The poems themselves were a cult thing; the book didn't come out until Bertrand had already died of tuberculosis. The whole story is sort of ridiculous, really. Tubercular poets and demonically inspired composers. Baudelaire loved him—Bertrand, I mean.
Gaspard de la nuit
is an old French expression for the devil.” Her mother has slipped into lecture mode, her elegant hands punctuating her points, her eyes fixed on some point over Maia's head. Maia can see why she's a beloved teacher; she's charismatic and engaging when she's telling people what to think. Maia wishes, not for the first time, that she'd drop the act and just be human.

“How do you know all this?”

Her mother comes back to herself, shrugs. “I used to take piano lessons when I was your age.”

“You played this?”

“Oh, good lord, no. I was nowhere near as good as you; that piece would have been impossible for me. And to be honest, I liked to play showier things. My teacher used to say there's no reward for the virtuosity required for a piece like that, because it doesn't sound that difficult to the listener. She loved the Romantics. Oscar reminds me a little of her, actually. I have the poems upstairs somewhere in my library, if you want to read them.” Maia follows her mother upstairs. It takes a bit of searching but her mother finds them at last in an anthology of French poetry, tucked behind a copy of Racine's
Phèdre,
and hands her the book. The covers are falling apart and it gives off the dead and faintly mildewy smell of something found abandoned in the fifty-cent box at an estate sale. The poems are illustrated here and there with old-fashioned line drawings, crotchety and crabbed in their execution.