A Girl in Three Parts Read online

  “So you see, children, telling the crew they couldn’t have sauerkraut made them actually want it—and consequently they all ate it—and what do you know? Not one of Captain Cook’s crew on the Endeavor ever got scurvy.”

  I’m thinking about Joy’s fruitless life, her sweeties jar and her curly hair, which is actually a little bit corkscrew. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever seen her eat a piece of fresh fruit and wonder if the colorful drinks she has with the Liberty Club ladies have any vitamin C in them. I might need to slip her some of Matilde’s sauerkraut next time we have mint tea.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  It’s late and I’m in bed but so wide awake that it may as well be morning. I can’t push this blessed Confirmation thing out of my head. The thought of choosing just one sponsor makes the metronome part of my heart swing back and forth badly out of time. How can I choose between Joy and Matilde? Father Brennan said we have to choose just one role model. Maybe, though I didn’t realize it before now, I have two role models. I love Matilde and I love Joy, but do I actually want to grow up to be like them? I can’t be like them because there is no them….There’s Joy and there’s Matilde, and to be like one is to be totally unlike the other. I don’t know if either one is full of God’s grace, but I do know that if I make one of my grandmothers happy by choosing her, I’ll make the other one seething mad.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Rick has given me eighty cents to spend at the Mother’s Day stall. He does every year and says the same thing: “Just get yourself a little something you fancy, Al Pal.” I like to spend wisely and most years I’m the last at the table; it can be hard to choose just the right gift and card. The pretty-smiley mums who help on the stall are really nice and do up my gifts with extra potpourri sprinkled inside the tissue paper.

  I’ve got the last six years’ worth of gifts all wrapped in a box under my bed.

  I’m torn between the scented bath bombs and chocolate hazelnut whirls when I spot a silver figurine at the back of the items for sale. It’s a mother angel holding a baby and—Patricia agrees—it’s a girl. The writing across her wings says A Mother’s Love Is Forever.

  My heart moves my hand, and I’m holding the figurine gently when Kimberly Linton pipes up with a bark from behind us and says: “Hands off. I was just about to get that!”

  “Bad luck, Kimberly. Ally got it before you,” says Patricia.

  “Well, Patricia Poo O’Brien, I actually have a mother to buy for,” bites Kimberly. “Not a dead mother. An alive mother!”

  My arm goes limp. My blood backs up. My vocal cords constrict.

  “She’s no angel then, is she!” whips back Patricia with the words I’d use if I could actually find them. “She’s probably got BO. Get her some Avon.”

  Patricia pulls me toward the money-taking mum, and in exchange for my eighty cents the figurine is mine.

  For once Kimberly is stopped short, stumped for a comeback, and we leave her with the Blue Grass eau de toilette in her hand and a you’re dead look in her eye.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I’ve abandoned the sauerkraut idea altogether, officers or no officers. I just don’t think Joy would eat it. Instead I decide to tempt her with something sweet with vitamin C. It’s Saturday afternoon and I find Matilde letting down the hem of my dressing-gown in the front room. I curl up in the upholstered chair by the bookcase and flick though My First Body Book, the one that Matilde gave me for my sixth birthday and has tested me on regularly ever since.

  “Matilde,” I say, my eyes hovering above the skeletal system while sneaking sideways glances at her for possible signs of God’s grace. “Next time you make your cherry strudel, could you please show me how you do it? You know, when you put the old bedsheet on the kitchen table?” I don’t tell her why I have a sudden interest in baking; I’ve only been an eater before now, not a cooker.

  She looks up from her thimble, over the top of her glasses, and seems pleased. It’s a Matilde style of pleased. Joy does big-and-plentiful pleased, but you could miss Matilde’s pea-sized pleased altogether if you didn’t know to look for the smallest vibrations around the edges of her mouth.

  “Well, Allegra, you are almost twelve years old. So yes. Yes. Now is a good time for you to learn how to make the strudel. I was about your age when my mother taught me. There is no time like the present,” she says, packing away her sewing box with a task-switching face. “But first we need Liszt.”

  Liszt is not an ingredient. Matilde is talking about Franz Liszt, her favorite Hungarian composer. She sends me to the linen press to get the strudel-making bedsheet while she goes to her old gramophone and puts on a record of the virtuoso who, she has told me so many times while insisting I practice, actually invented the piano recital.

  I help Matilde cover the kitchen table with the bedsheet. It smells laundry-powder clean but is stained dark pink in parts from years of Matilde’s strudel making. As Liszt’s music starts up, I ask Matilde how many strudels she thinks she’s made in her whole life.

  “That’s hard to know precisely but if I would make the guess, definitely more than eight hundred but probably fewer than one thousand,” she says, showing me how to sift the flour with the salt and stir in the egg mixture with a little water and oil.

  “Good. Now that’s done, we listen to Liszt. We really listen, Allegra.

  “This is his ‘Hungarian Rhapsody Number Two.’ In the 1800s he filled concert halls all over Europe and had the genius idea to turn the piano around on the stage so the soundboard faced his audience and they could see his large hands move like magical acrobats. He didn’t have the usual webbing connectors between his fingers, so he could cover a much wider span of notes on the keys.

  “He is seeking our full attention now. Can you hear that? Give Liszt your full attention, Allegra.” I’m listening, hearing, feeling Liszt, and losing myself in his surrounding rhapsody.

  “Now, for our strudel we must throw this ball of dough exactly one hundred times from shoulder height against the side of the mixing bowl. You will do it for this your first strudel, Allegra, but wait. We will soon be at five minutes into the rhapsody, and at that point Mr. Franz Liszt will give us the exact tempo we need to make our dough perfect.

  “Here it comes. Are you ready? Now, with larghetto, go! Allegra, go now!”

  I’m throwing the dough hard. Counting as it hits the side of the bowl. I’m concentrating with all my might, making sure the dough goes from exactly the height of my shoulder and lands in just the right spot. Matilde is keeping tempo with her beater, the baton, and I’m keeping count. She is looking hard at me, and her blue eyes are becoming darker. They start to glisten.

  Matilde is my conductor. I look at her between every throw and she keeps me in time, but somewhere between twenty-nine and thirty she starts to blur around the edges. There is a growing sting under my right shoulder blade. Matilde’s movements speed up and her gaze soars. It could be that I’m blurring for her, too. Then I’m no longer seeing Matilde. I’m seeing Franz Liszt. I’m no longer throwing the dough. It’s the music raising my arm. The bowl becomes a mile wide—I couldn’t miss it if I tried. I’m connecting every single time. The sting under my shoulder blade softens and warms and spreads, I don’t need Matilde’s direction now, the dough heats my hand, through my arm, up to my throat and down to just above my kneecaps. Eighty-five. Eighty-six. Eighty-seven. I don’t want to reach one hundred, not ever. But according to Matilde’s count, suddenly, I do.

  “That’s it, Allegra. One hundred. Done.”

  And at precisely Matilde’s last count, the piano hits its last note and I’m feeling a lot of E words: Exhilarated—Exhausted—Expanded.

  Matilde simply snaps back to Practical.

  “Now we must roll out the dough until it is one-quarter-inch thick. Sprinkle the bedsheet with the flour and smooth it all
around. Use both your hands. I’ll put on ‘Un Sospiro.’ ”

  Back in the kitchen with the green linen tea towel over her shoulder and little beads of sweat across her brow, Matilde tells me with a stage whisper: “ ‘Un Sospiro’ means A Sigh. Can you hear Liszt use the piano keys so we sigh with him?”

  “Yes, I can hear it, I really can,” I say, returning her whisper.

  “Good. Now we must stretch this dough slowly, moving rhythmically so it covers the whole of the table.” I don’t know if Matilde realizes it, but she lets out a long throaty sigh.

  “Here, Allegra, slip your hands underneath our dough. Put them palm down on the bedsheet, and use the backs of your hands to pull the dough gently to the edges of the table.”

  Matilde places her hands on top of mine. They are warm and worn. Under the dough, the joints of her fingers let me know they have led a long life full of many experiences.

  “Now we move our hands with the motion of Liszt. He is coaxing us to take great care. His music is guiding us so we don’t tear the dough.”

  We are in rhythm with Liszt and in touch with each other. A thought enters that part of my heart that turns facts into feelings: that while over the years Matilde has cooked for me, cleaned for me, sewed for me and read to me, she has very rarely touched me. Doing my hair there was a brush between us. Scrubbing my back there was a sponge between us. But now as we work and thin the dough with our slow dance around the edges of the table, Matilde’s hands are on top of mine, and I know that the numbers on her left wrist are sitting directly above my birthmark. I’m glad I didn’t powder my birthmark with Joy’s matte makeup this morning.

  “Our dough must be thin, so thin that we can read the newspaper through it. Now I will lift the dough very gently and you will test it, Allegra.”

  I fetch the day’s paper and choose the comic section, sliding it under the tunnel Matilde has created. And yes, it is actually transparent. I can read Charlie Brown saying, “Life is like an ice-cream cone; you have to lick it one day at a time.”

  “Now we brush our dough with the melted butter and sprinkle it with breadcrumbs. For the filling we must use only the sour Morello cherries.” She is reaching for the top shelf of the pantry, where she stores all her preserved fruit. No one would ever drop dead from scurvy on a ship captained by Matilde.

  We spread the cherry filling six inches in from the longest edge of the table and do together what I’ve seen Matilde do on her own many times before. We lift the bedsheet and roll the strudel.

  “Roll it…and roll it…and roll it,” she says, and our strudel becomes one long sausage, which we curl, dust with sugar and place onto Matilde’s largest baking tray.

  “You know talent is not a gift, Allegra. No, not at all, it is a decision. Liszt worked on his piano for twelve hours every single day. And still he showed the greatest generosity, all through his life. Generosity with his time and generosity with his money. He taught his students without ever asking for one forint. And then when he was a man of advanced years, he established the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest.

  “He helped many people, Allegra. He helped the poor, he helped the sick, he helped the victims of disasters and even he helped the small orphans.”

  The clouds in my heart are clearing. Matilde must be full of God’s grace.

  “Do you think Liszt is your role model, Matilde?” I ask, opening the oven door as she places our strudel on the hot shelf.

  “My role model? What sort of question is that? I am my own person, Allegra. I have no business with a role model. Besides, at the end of his life Mr. Franz Liszt became a Franciscan monk….Such nonsense!

  “Now shut the door quickly, Allegra. You are letting the warmth out.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Lucinda Lister and I are sitting cross-legged playing Spit on my front porch when the man with the gray Plasticine face, who drops off the piecework for Matilde, pulls up and hauls in so many bags of fabric from his trunk to our door that I know it must be another rush job. Matilde will be at her sewing machine nonstop until the work’s done, so now’s my chance to take the strudel to Joy. I whip through the game and thrash Lucinda so thoroughly that she leaves in a huff, forgetting she’s left her dragster against the front wall of Number 23.

  Slipping through the side gate to Number 25, I hear the sound of Whisky Wendy’s husky voice. The back door, with its colored glass panels of kookaburras sitting on a leafy branch, which Joy normally keeps wide open, is only half ajar. Through it I can see all the usual Liberty Club ladies, but there are no colorful drinks, no sweeties jar, and certainly no music. Only mint tea and a bottle of disinfectant. There is a new lady, though, and she is the one talking now. She sounds very sad. Not missing-someone sad, but scared sad.

  “It started as early as our honeymoon—at Surfers Paradise—almost overnight. I confided in my mother soon after we got home, but she told me that I just had to toughen up. Can you believe that! She told me, her own daughter, to be a proper wife. Not to make a fuss. Even now my mother says that I just need to try harder and avoid doing things that make him angry, but that means I’m walking on bloody eggshells all the time, and that in itself seems to set him off.”

  Joy has her hand on the lady’s shoulder. All the other ladies have cranky-sad faces, and the lady talking about her mother has one eye closed and all puffy and bruised; it looks like a big fat dark-blue silkworm is sleeping across the lid. The bottom of her chin is sewn up with the same blanket stitch that Matilde does around the edges of my face washers. I’m wondering if Joy’s matte makeup is enough to cover up this terrible sight.

  “A few months ago he got laid off at work. That’s when the drinking started up first thing in the morning instead of after work. Twice, without any warning, he just exploded like a madman and pinned me up against the wall with the broom handle across my throat. I let out such a bloody scream that the neighbors called the cops. Both times they came to the door, but both times he just told them we’d had a bit of a tiff and everything was good now; he said he was just trying to calm me down. They just pushed off up the path, and the second time I heard one of them say: ‘Seems to be just a night full of domestics.’ ”

  I feel that part of my heart that pipes air into my stomach gurgle with hot and cold froth.

  “I did think about leaving him, a couple of times, I did,” the lady continues. “But he keeps such tight control on the money and I’ve got nothing, no savings, not even access to a bank account. I’ve got nowhere to go. Mum would be too embarrassed if I went home to her place—and there’s Mandy, I’ve got to think about her. I made some inquiries about somewhere else we could live, just till I got on my feet, but I was told that women and children don’t qualify for emergency housing if the matrimonial home is still intact.”

  I’d better not interrupt Liberty Club, and I don’t really want to hear any more, so I crouch down quiet as a mouse to leave the Tupperware container of strudel on Joy’s back porch.

  Then I get an almighty kick, hard, in the left heel.

  “I’m allowed to play with this tortoise.” A strange little girl startles me from behind. She has hair the same color as the scared-sad lady inside and is wearing dirty yellow pajamas even though it’s well after lunchtime.

  “Who are you?” I ask. I’ve never seen a child in Joy’s garden.

  “Mandy. My mummy is inside and her is Dee and my daddy is Ron but we runned away from him.”

  The little girl has Simone de Beauvoir upside down in the palm of her hand. Simone is wriggling as the little grubby fingers are tightening dangerously around her neck. Joy would need a very big glass bottle to catch all the tears she would cry if anything bad happened to Simone de Beauvoir.

  “Why did you run away from your dad?” I flip Simone de Beauvoir right side up and tap her twice on the shell to let her know i
t’s me.

  “Daddy keeped hitting Mummy even when she’s fallen down and she was crying on the bathmat. I hided under my bunks with Kevin and when Daddy fell asleep on the couch me and Mummy sneaked out. Then we had to run our very fastest and we couldn’t bring Kevin.”

  “Is Kevin your brother?” I ask.

  “No!” she says, giggling. “Kevin is my cat. He had to stay at home because he wouldn’t like the hospital. I didn’t like the hospital but I was brave. They put needles into Mummy’s face.”

  I just want to leave the strudel and go.

  But Joy must have heard my voice, because swinging the back door wide open, she says, “Ally! Darling! You found little Mandy, how nice. Would you like to play with her in the garden while I talk to her mummy?”

  I tell Joy, “Not really,” holding back that Mandy actually gave me a kick from behind and she was holding Simone de Beauvoir upside down, way too tight. And anyway, why is she wearing pajamas when it’s after lunchtime?

  Joy gives my elbow a little squeeze and is suddenly very happy to see the Tupperware container. “What do we have here, Ally? Look at this, Mandy, darling!” Joy’s right hand, the one that she uses to draw circles with her fingernails at the nape of my neck, is playing with one of Mandy’s knotty pigtails. Mandy is still holding Simone de Beauvoir way too tight, and Joy is just ignoring it. Joy would never ignore me holding Simone that way.

  “I made you cherry strudel,” I say. “It’s got vitamin C in it and I specially made it, just for you, Joy, so you won’t get scurvy.”

  I don’t want Joy sharing my cherry strudel with Mandy.

  “Cherry strudel! Oh, how clever, Ally!” Joy opens the lid and does a sniffy-beamy face. Mandy looks up, copies Joy and does a sniffy-beamy face too. She looks like such a faker. My heart closes my jaw hard and tells me that I don’t want to share anything with Mandy, especially Joy.