And there on the other side of the playground is Matilde. She’s been to everything at St. Brigid’s, and now she’s standing at her post near the girls’ toilets, all dressed in fawn, for the very last time.
Sister Josepha moves in close to us with a conductor ruler and beckons all eyes to look straight ahead and only on her. I’m scanning the crowd for Joy. She’s been to most things at St. Brigid’s, except of course my Confirmation day. And there she is on the benches under the mulberry tree with someone who looks very much like Patricia O’Brien’s mother. And that lady is sitting next to someone who looks very much like…and actually is…Patricia O’Brien!
The dropping bubbles shoot back up through my windpipe and into my throat, giving me direction and volume so that I send every word of “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love” toward Patricia O’Brien, and I don’t take my gaze off her throughout “I Am the Bread of Life” or “Blessed Are the Peacemakers.” And when we break into “My Sweet Lord,” written by George Harrison, selected and conducted by Sister Josepha and her rocking ruler, Patricia is beaming and jumps to her feet. She’s leading the crowd so that everyone joins her in arms-up swaying: everyone, that is, except for Father Brennan and Matilde. Although Matilde’s arms are firmly by her side and she’s fixed like a statue, she does have a slightly relaxed look around the edges of her mouth.
And now it’s time for Kimberly to step forward and announce our choice of song.
“As our farewell to St. Brigid’s, I have chosen for sixth grade to perform for you ‘The Pushbike Song.’ ”
Sister Josepha, facing the rest of us, probably doesn’t mean to, but she rolls her eyes ever so slightly. But I just don’t care anymore about Kimberly Linton, because Sister knows I chose “The Pushbike Song,” the whole sixth grade knows I chose “The Pushbike Song,” and I know I chose “The Pushbike Song.” And at long last, as I’m about to leave St. Brigid’s after seven tricky years, I’m exchanging a look that says everything, and is understood completely, by my best-ever friend, Patricia O’Brien.
And finally it feels like Kimberly Popular has no power over me.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Patricia tells me, between bites of charcoaled sausage covered in tomato sauce and wrapped in white bread, that she’s down from Armidale until just before Christmas. She and her mother are staying in Glebe. That’s quite a long way from North Bondi, I tell her, I know, because Rick and I had to drive to Glebe to collect Joy after her face was burnt.
I don’t bother walking around the playground to have my uniform signed by all the kids in the class but instead hang upside down on the monkey bars for the very last time with Patricia. With our hair swinging just above the bitumen, hers blowing whiffs of green-apple shampoo, we start hatching a plan to spend as much time together as we can now that she’s in Sydney and school has broken up for the year.
“I could ask my mum if you can come and stay with us in Glebe, have a sleepover. There’s lots of room there.”
“Nah, I wouldn’t be allowed. Matilde would never let me do that.”
“Well then…we’ll just have to run away together…don’t you reckon? Maybe we can go bush, to the Blue Mountains. We liked it up there.” Even though I know Patricia is definitely bátor and she could probably keep us alive for months in the bush, I also know she’s not really serious. Patricia is a perfect mix of the best ideas, laugh-out-loud funny and dependable sensible.
“Yeah, we can definitely do that when we get the hippy van after we finish high school,” I say, feeling pressure behind my eyes building against gravity. “Hey, I could ask Matilde if you can stay the night at our place.” I’m trying to sound like that’s actually an option, even though on the inside, still upside down, I doubt it will work. But with the rush of blood to my head, I decide to give it a go. I tell Patricia to wait under the mulberry tree while I try my luck with Matilde. I find my fawn grandmother standing next to Sister Josepha, having what looks to be a serious conversation.
“Ah, Allegra,” says Sister as I walk toward them, wondering what they are talking about, “I was just telling your grandmother the good news I received yesterday afternoon….You, my dear girl, did very well in the selective exam, yes indeed. You have been accepted into Sydney Girls High. What do you think of that? The only student from St. Brigid’s to do so in more than five years. Isn’t it marvelous! Your grandmother is very proud of you, and rightly so. And I have to say I am, too. Well done, dear!”
My timing couldn’t be better, although Matilde doesn’t see the point of a sleepover: “Why would you want her to stay for the whole night when you will just be asleep, Allegra?”
And I have to beg her: “Because it will be so much fun, Matilde, and we can see each other last thing before we go to sleep and first thing in the morning, and we can do things together all day.” She does seem to be listening to my plea.
“Matilde, pleeease! Patricia’s my best-ever friend and soon she’ll be going back to Armidale and I don’t know when I’ll ever get to see her ever again.”
“Patricia is a delightful young girl, Mrs. Kaldor. She is a worthy friend for Allegra,” says Sister Josepha in her nunly way, which is a statement and an instruction all at once, even, it seems, to a Jew. And guess what, it does the trick. Matilde is selective-school pleased with me and reluctantly agrees to inviting Patricia O’Brien to stay with us overnight at Number 23.
It’s the best-ever ending to my last-ever day at St. Brigid’s Primary School.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Patricia arrives the next day just before lunch with a little bunch of gardenias tied at the stems for Matilde and a big bag of Twisties for me. Even though Matilde acts like she’s not much interested in our sleepover visitor, I can see that she has gone to extra trouble with her cooking, because she serves us her chicken schnitzel with herbed mashed potatoes and pan-fried cabbage for lunch, which Patricia wolfs down in happy quick gulps.
“That was delicious! Thanks, Mrs. Kaldor. Reckon it’s some of the best tucker I’ve ever had. How do you get the crumbs to stick on the chicken like that?”
“It’s simply a matter of coating the chicken with best-quality flour and whisked egg and then crumbing it swiftly and lightly. It is critical that you let the chicken sit in the fridge for a couple of hours before you fry it in a hot pan with a tablespoon of butter and a good slurp of virgin olive oil. Do you care for another piece?”
“If that’s okay with you,” says Patricia.
“I would not offer it to you if it was not okay with me,” Matilde replies deliberately, but her eyes start to soften when Patricia smiles up broadly as though Matilde has just shared a warmhearted joke.
“This cabbage is so good, Mrs. Kaldor. Did you get it from Joe the Robber?”
Matilde throws up one hand, looking pea-sized pleased, and announces to Patricia: “No, he would never have a cabbage that fresh. It is from my vegetable garden.”
“Really, you grew that cabbage yourself? Do you grow anything else?”
“Allegra will take you out and show you my vegetable garden once you have finished your lunch.” I knew Matilde would like Patricia, even though she’s not the best speller.
“Your nana is cool,” says Patricia, crunching down on a red pepper while we’re walking between the garden beds.
“Yeah, I suppose, but sometimes she can be pretty scary.”
“But she grows all this stuff and she cooks you all that good tucker. And look at your house: everything is neat and clean and nice inside. She’s not scary, Ally; reckon she’s just busy.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
We slip through the brown gate and find Joy sitting in her butterfly chair under the magnolia tree, reading from her Liberty Club linen notebook with Simone on her lap. Joy looks up, delighted to see Patricia, and Patricia is clearly pl
eased to see that Joy’s face is healed, and is pretty stoked to finally meet Simone de Beauvoir.
“Can I hold her?” asks Patricia.
“Certainly, pet,” responds Joy. “I was just discussing with Simone de Beauvoir some of her own wisdom.”
Joy gently passes the penny tortoise to Patricia and shares with us out loud, “De Beauvoir summed up the female condition so well when she said: ‘her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.’ That’s it exactly! And yet she still urges us to be loved…be admired…be necessary…be somebody.”
Patricia is looking somewhat uncertain; she is studying Simone for evidence of wisdom, a voicebox and maybe cut wings.
“And here…just listen to this, girls,” Joy continues. “ ‘One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship and compassion.’ ” Joy closes her eyes and pauses for a moment before adding, “So even in the face of robbed choice and curbed freedom, Simone still speaks of love as the greatest principle.”
“Does Simone really speak to Joy?” Patricia asks me with an incredulous whisper.
“She seems to speak to all the Liberty Club ladies,” I say, then realize that it might sound kind of strange.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Patricia has been staying for four nights now; she loves it here at Number 23. She says her tummy has never been so warmed-up full, and she tells Matilde that she should open her own restaurant and call it Tildie’s Tucker.
“You could have a sign out the front and set up long tables out the back in between the garden beds. Me and Ally could be waitresses, and afterward we could do all the washing up.”
Matilde dismisses this suggestion with a wave of her tea towel, but I can tell that she thinks Patricia is a bit of a trick. Each morning we ask if Patricia can stay just one more night, and while my best-ever friend never seems surprised when we ring her mum and she says yes, I am surprised that Matilde keeps agreeing.
Maybe Patricia is right: maybe Matilde is kind of cool and I just never noticed before now.
Patricia and I find a new rhythm. Having long days together, which roll on through the evening and into the night without a looming close, stretches everything out. Our games go on longer, our jokes seem funnier and our ideas bounce off one another’s, becoming bigger and bolder. Our edges start to blend in the way two hues do when they combine to make a new color. And if I had to name it…it’d be our take on the color of sunshine.
“Do you like Bing Crosby?” I ask Patricia as we set up a game of Mouse Trap on the front porch.
“I’ve never met him,” she replies.
“I haven’t either. He’s actually a famous person—he lives over in America. But tomorrow you’ll get to hear him when Joy puts up her Christmas tree at Number 25. I always help her on December eighteenth—every year without fail—and we play Bing Crosby on her tape deck and listen to him telling the story of The Small One while we put on all the tinsel and decorations and arrange the nativity scene. You can help us if you like.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool. I would really like to do that…we had a Christmas tree once. Is Matilde going to go in and help too?”
“Nah. She doesn’t go anywhere near Joy’s place.”
Patricia looks up from the cheese wheel as though this needs further explaining, so it seems that I have no option other than to spell it out: “My grandmothers can’t stand each other. They don’t even speak.” I’m surprised that Patricia hadn’t picked up on this before now; she’s usually pretty sharp.
“Ohhh,” she says. “Is there bad blood between them? That’s no good—bad blood—it happens sometimes….” She moves her mouse along the path. “But you get on with both of them. From what I can see, they love you real hard. I reckon they’d both kill for you, Ally.”
“Yeah, I suppose, but it’s too much being put into just one person, and the way they love me…well, it kind of flows into me in a weird way. Sometimes I wish they could just love me less and take what’s left over and put it into liking each other a little bit more.”
“You’re trapped in their bad blood. You should tell them, Ally, tell them that. They’re both cool—maybe they’ll take it onboard and make their peace with each other,” Patricia says.
“I don’t think so. It’s been like that forever,” I say.
“Well, what about Rick? He could sit them down and have a yarn.”
“Rick! They don’t listen to him. And he doesn’t really talk to them, either.”
“Jeez, Ally, all three of them. Looks like you’re trapped inside a bad-blood triangle.”
■ ■ ■
And now the man with the gray Plasticine face arrives with even more bags of fabric than ever before. I overhear him tell Matilde that “those stupid sows at Bolton’s are all on strike and bringing the business to its knees.” It’s up to Matilde and the other outworkers to fill the orders by the end of the week or Bolton’s will shut down forever and that will be it. There’ll be no work for Matilde—or anyone else—ever again.
The cooking stops and the machine starts up, and Patricia can’t seem to believe it. “Your nana can do anything,” she says, watching Matilde across the hall from the end of my bed once we’re bunked down for the night, head to toe.
“Yeah, she’s pretty able. I think she wants me to be able like her.”
“That’d be all right. It’s good to learn stuff from your nana. Wish I still had my nana to teach me stuff.” Patricia rolls slowly onto her back and, with her hands behind her head, looks up at the ceiling. Her whispered words are touching on wounded, but I’m being pulled out by the undertow of sleep, and my tongue feels too big for my mouth and too floppy to respond. I’ll console her about her no-more nana tomorrow.
After four nights of head-to-toe I can’t stay awake a minute longer.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The moon is lighting up the turned-down summer quilt at the end of my bed where Patricia was lying before I went off to sleep. She’s not there. Maybe she’s gone to the bathroom. I wait for sixty-apple-pie, but she doesn’t come back. I hope she wasn’t missing her mum suddenly and made off to Glebe in the middle of the night.
Or perhaps she’s gone over to Joy’s house. Patricia still thinks Joy is a champ for taking a blow for her when her fake dad threw that kettle of boiling water. But I can see from my window that Joy’s place is nothing but darkness.
I’ll check the bathroom.
Matilde’s machine is still going, only it’s not sounding as urgent as it usually does in the dead of the night in the middle of a rush job.
Padding out of my bedroom, I can see from the hall clock that it’s twenty past three. And there in the front room in the soft glow of the lamp, sitting at her Singer, is Matilde. Her glasses have slid down the sweat gleam on the bridge of her nose, her foot is pressing rhythmically to the floor and her metronome head is keeping time with the recording of Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage playing on her old gramophone. While anchored at her machine here at Number 23, Matilde is traveling through Geneva, Bologna and Rome.
And the mystery is solved.
Patricia is there too, in her shortie pajamas, working silently at the ironing table. She looks content to be able, and Matilde looks pea-sized pleased to have Patricia pressing and hanging her perfect pieces.
I watch on, half hiding behind the side of the doorframe. Matilde and Patricia look up briefly as though waiting for their next instruction, and without seeing me, they exchange a glance with each other before returning in time to their separate tasks within the same score. It’s not a look past, or a look through, but a shared thing. I’ve never seen two people I love share a look like that before. I step forward out of the darkness of the corridor, but still they don’t see me. They are watching someone else who has gathered the
light.
He is tall and he is thin. Straight-nosed, strong-jawed, with a small pale face and a beautiful high shining forehead. His mop of thick hair moves with the music covering—then uncovering—his directive expressions.
I’ve seen him before. When I was throwing the dough.
It’s Franz Liszt. And he’s here in the front room.
His arms are carving through the air. His torso bends way back, then moves fully forward, as though he’s fanning the flames of a fire. He is waving his baton, bringing Matilde’s foot-pedal presses into unison with Patricia’s bow strokes of the hot iron.
He is conducting a two-step between the body and soul of my grandmother and my best-ever friend.
They are in time and in tune.
That part of my heart that has always craved to join the dots between the people I love is pressing down lightly, drawing a line between Patricia and Matilde: a line that is following the fire-tipped baton of Franz Liszt. But then the invisible ink starts to sting because I wonder why Matilde has never allowed me to stay up in the dead of the night to help her at the ironing table.
Liszt suddenly turns sharply and looks straight at me. I draw a deep breath; he might be about to bring me in. But his left index finger shoots out and directs me toward the door. I realize that these perfect pieces don’t have me in them tonight.
I slip back to my room and climb into my empty bed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Patricia is helping me feed the chooks and water the veggies because Matilde is still crouched over her Singer and pedaling hard to finish the rush job before Monday. She’s been wearing mostly the same clothes and the same look around her lips, jaw and brow for three solid days. I wonder if she’ll ever stand up straight again.
The man with the gray Plasticine face comes by late every day to check on Matilde’s progress. He tells her that if she wants to be paid anything at all, she’d better “speed it up, pick up the pace, and just get the friggin’ job done.” Patricia says he sounds like a train screeching on its tracks: “Metal on metal grinding…I hate that sound. We used to live next to the train station when we were living with Mum’s boyfriend Ozzy in Muswellbrook, and I had to sleep with it going all through the night.”
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