Dirty Wings

by Sarah Mccarry

  “I can make spaghetti. If the sauce comes out of a jar.”

  “Your mom cooks?”

  “My dad does. If he isn’t drin—if he feels like it. My mom’s not really that domestic.”

  “Her house is sure clean.”

  “She pays people to do that.”

  “Huh,” Cass says.

  The omelet is one of the best things Maia’s ever eaten. “Wow,” she says. “You’re good at a lot of things.”

  Cass smiles. “I only let you see my best side, princess.”

  Maia shovels omelet into her mouth as though it’s her last meal.

  “My mom used to drink a lot,” Cass says casually.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I mean, she probably still does. I just don’t live with her anymore.”

  “Is that why you ran away?”

  “No.” The expression on Cass’s face tells Maia not to ask anything else. She picks up their plates and carries them to the sink.

  “Don’t tell me I have to teach you how to do the dishes, too,” Cass says, laughing.

  “Oh, come on,” Maia says. “I’m not that helpless.”

  “If you say so, princess. Listen, I should probably go before your mom gets home, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I had a really good time this weekend.”

  “Me too,” Maia says.

  “I hope she doesn’t kill you for the hair.”

  “It looks so good it’d be worth it.”

  “I don’t know about that. It does look good, though. Go practice your piano, okay?”

  “Okay,” Maia says. Impulsively, she crosses the kitchen, throws her arms around Cass in a bear hug. Cass holds her tight.

  “You want me to take you with me?” Her tone is light but she’s not joking. Maia can feel the yes bubbling up in her, overriding common sense and her own cautious nature. But she’s not ready. She’s not Cass, with nothing to lose. Not yet.

  “No,” she says. “It’s okay. Thank you.”

  “Thank you. I guess I’ll see you on the Ave this week.”

  “That sounds good.”

  Cass kisses her cheek and then she’s gone, leaving a faint whiff of patchouli in her wake. Maia washes the dishes, taking more time than she needs with each plate. She’s finished and about to go to the piano when she hears a car door slam in the driveway and her heart sinks. She leans her head against the refrigerator. It isn’t too late to run away. She could climb out the kitchen window, take off after Cass, hang out on the Ave until they see each other next. She could be a little nomad, too, with her new clothes in a pack on her back and nothing else to her name but her toothbrush and her new boots. She imagines trying to carry the piano out the window with her, and she’s laughing when the front door opens and closes. Noises of her mother taking her shoes off, setting her heels neatly side by side. Her mother’s stocking feet, padding across the hardwood floor. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Hi,” she calls out.

  Her mother comes into the kitchen. “Hello, sweetheart,” she says, her voice light and happy. Definitely a two-person conference, then. “How was your—” She stops short.

  “Please tell me that’s a wig,” her mother says. Her voice is cold. Maia takes a deep breath and faces her.

  “I dyed my hair,” she says.

  “And cut it.”

  “And cut it.”

  “What in hell were you thinking?”

  “I just wanted—I thought it might look nice.”

  “It looks awful. You look awful. Where was your father for all of this?”

  “He was here.”

  “Of course he was.” Her mother looks away with a pained expression, as though Maia is so ugly the sight of her cannot be borne. “I don’t ask you for much,” she says.

  Maia licks her lips. “I know.”

  “Is it your mission to upset me? Can you not behave like a mature adult for once in your life?”

  “I’m sorry,” Maia mumbles.

  “You are obviously not sorry, Maia. You are not sorry at all. You are trying to hurt me, and you’ve succeeded.”

  “I just thought it would look nice,” Maia repeats. Against her will, tears are springing up in the corners of her eyes. She wipes at them furiously.

  “Is something wrong?” It’s her father, standing in the doorway. “I didn’t know you were back.”

  “You allowed this.”

  “I allowed what?”

  “This,” her mother says, pointing at Maia. “You allowed her to deface herself. She looks awful. She can’t audition looking like that. I don’t even want her seen outside the house looking like that. It’s an embarrassment.”

  “Oh,” her father says, “Renee, I think you’re overreacting a little. She looks nice. Unique. You look very unique,” he says to Maia.

  “I can’t look at either one of you,” her mother says. “I’ll think about what to do with you later, Maia. I’m going to go lie down.” She sweeps out of the kitchen, imperious. Her father sighs and runs his hands through his disheveled hair.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” he says. “I wish you wouldn’t upset her.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You know how she gets. It’s important to her.”

  “What’s important to her? Controlling my life?”

  “Is that what you think?” her father says. “Of course not. She just wants you to be happy.”

  “She doesn’t want me to be happy. She wants me to be perfect. She wants me to be something I’m not.” Her father is staring at her, startled. “Never mind,” she says. “I’m sorry. I have to go practice.”

  She doesn’t see Cass again for a few days. The air in her house is icy and tense; her mother won’t talk to her, which makes things easier, but the weight of the silence makes her want to scream. Go running through the rooms, slamming doors. Anything.

  Oscar is happy enough with the other pieces he’s chosen for her audition—the Chopin funeral march, Haydn’s Sonata in C-major, Hob.XVI/50—which she has practiced so relentlessly that she dreams sometimes of a procession of ballet dancers pirouetting endlessly across a vast expanse to a surreal medley of the classical and the romantic. But the Ravel is proving to be her undoing. When she plays it for Oscar she can feel his eyes boring into her back, his mouth tightening. Her playing has gone suddenly inelegant, overly technical. In her hands, the piece clanks forward like an automaton. “Again,” he says, “Again. Again. Again.” She can’t land it, can’t nail it, can’t make the music sing the way it should. In three days she is flying to New York to audition at the best music school in the country, and Oscar wants her to play this piece, and all she can think about is her hair.

  “It will show your virtuosity,” he says. “It is perfect for you.”

  “It’s not going to show my virtuosity if I can’t play it, Oscar.”

  “You will play it,” he says serenely. “I know you. I do not give you things to do if I think you cannot do them.”

  His faith in her drives her to practice obsessively. Oscar hasn’t commented on her hair; she wonders if he even noticed it. She wears the clothes her mother bought her, still, but she’s swapped out the loafers for the combat boots, as though her head and her feet belong to someone else. Every time Maia’s mother passes her in the house, she makes a tragic noise at the back of her throat. When Maia sees Cass leaning against a wall on her walk home from Oscar’s, her heart leaps in relief.

  “Khakis and twinsets and combat boots,” Cass laughs, giving her a hug. “You’re teaching me all kinds of new things, princess.”

  “Shut up,” Maia says. “I’m trying to keep a lot of people happy.”

  “Your mom?”

  “Things aren’t great.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. I wanted to.” Maia buys them coffee and they sit on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop, smoking Cass’s cigarettes, which Maia’s slowly gotten used to, in companionable silence.
r />   “I’m going to New York,” Maia says. “For the audition I was telling you about. For that school.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “I’m supposed to play that piece I played for you, the first day you came over.”

  “That sounded really good.”

  “I keep fucking it up. I’ve never played it right, the whole way through. This part in the right hand. It’s not supposed to be this hard. But I can’t get it. I can’t move my hands fast enough.” Maia makes a fist and studies it. She’s been practicing so much every day her hands ache even more than they usually do.

  “What happens if you screw it up?”

  “I don’t get in.”

  Cass is thoughtful. “I’d be sad if you went to New York.”

  “You could come,” Maia says. “Come with me.”

  “I’ve never been there. Maybe. That sounds kind of fun.”

  “That would be great.”

  “You ever done speed?” Cass asks.

  “Are you kidding me? No.”

  “Take some with you. It’ll make you play better.”

  “That seems like a bad idea.”

  “Balzac drank like thirty cups of coffee a day; worked for him.”

  “Bach wrote a cantata in praise of coffee,” Maia says. “Coffee’s not speed.”

  “It was just an idea.”

  Maia thinks about it. “Shit,” she says, “Why not. In for a penny, in for a pound.” Cass reaches into her pocket. Maia laughs. “You just carry it around? Like for a rainy day or something?”

  “You never know,” Cass says. She taps a few pills out of a tiny plastic container and wraps them up in a cigarette paper. “Here. They won’t make you crazy or anything. It’s just dexies. Mash them up on a mirror or something and snort them.” She laughs at Maia’s expression. “You don’t have to take them, princess. I don’t want to ruin you.”

  “My life was just never this exciting before.”

  “Excitement can be overrated,” Cass says. “Put those away before someone sees you. What, nobody ever hand you drugs on the street before?” Cass mock-snorts. “Preppies,” she says.

  Only her father flies with her to New York; her mother is too busy teaching, for which Maia is infinitely grateful. They fight about her hair up until the moment she leaves, her mother insisting she dye it black and Maia refusing. She has never fought with her mother about anything before in her life and the vehemence with which she defends herself startles both of them. Her father hides in his office until the moment it is time to leave for the airport.

  When they get off the plane he straightens a little. Waiting for their suitcases, he taps his feet and whistles cheerily. He guides her from the baggage claim to the taxi stand with a surety that she’s never seen in him, directs the taxi driver briskly, sits back in his seat with a new light in his eyes. Maia watches the buildings flash by, grow closer together. The cab lurches wildly from lane to lane, the driver muttering expletives as he cuts off other drivers and makes sudden turns. Maia clutches her armrest in terror, but her father looks about him with delight. They cross a bridge bigger than any bridge Maia’s ever been on, heading toward the immense and glittering downtown of Manhattan, a place Maia has only ever seen in pictures, and it is not until this moment that she realizes all those pictures are of a thing that is real. The skyline is monstrous, alarming against a headache-grey sky teeming with clouds: a forest of grey towers rising out of the earth like stalagmites, the greatest mass of them concentrated in a spiny cluster at the south end of the massive island. And it is an island, something she never thought about; an island not like any other island she has known, adopted child as she is of the green and silent Northwest. She has never seen so many buildings as tall as trees in one place. She can hear the Frank Sinatra song in her head. New York, New York. If all goes well for her tomorrow she could live here, as soon as the fall. “What bridge is this?” she asks, and her father says “Williamsburg,” at the same time as the taxi driver. She nods as if this information means something to her and looks out the window again. “He should have just taken the tunnel,” her father says under his breath.

  The buildings flash by; the sun glitters on the river. Her father is sitting up straighter, craning his head around to look, pointing things out to her—“Over there, that’s where we’ll go to get Indian food—oh, and I’ll take you to my favorite little coffee shop in the East Village, where I used to go—and I can show you the apartment I used to live in when I was in school—and the bar where I met your mother.”

  “Sure, Dad,” she says, letting him prattle on. He points out landmarks—the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central. “Times Square is over there,” he says, pointing, “but only tourists go there, and we’re not tourists. Oh, sweetheart, you’re going to love it here.”

  “I haven’t gotten in,” she says.

  “Of course you’ll get in,” he says absently, twisting around in his seat. “The Algonquin is over there too—you know, the famous hotel, Dorothy Parker used to drink at the bar there, and all sorts of other people—they were called the Round Table.” Maia wonders if Dorothy Parker is one of her father’s New York friends.

  “Cool,” she says.

  “Well, maybe you should see Times Square, just once. I suppose it’s worth seeing. Of course no one ever went there, when we lived here. We only went to theater things in the Village. Marty”—Maia has never heard of Marty—“used to do the craziest stuff. Oh, you know, these performance art things, he would get all these models he knew to cover themselves in fake blood, and he’d roll around on the floor—He always said it was about capitalism. Linda”—Maia has never heard of Linda—“was so jealous of the models, but after they had the baby she was the one who up and left him. For her guru, can you believe that?” Maia has never heard of a guru. “She lost her mind. Last I heard she was living in Colorado. We just had the best time, in those days. Little space down on the corner of Bowery and Second, we could barely fit all our friends in at once. You could hear all the street noise in there, too. I should have told your mother we’d stay longer. Three days isn’t enough. We can go to the Museum of Natural History and see the dinosaurs. I used to love to go see the dinosaurs. And the Met. And I’ll have to take you to Central Park. And you should really go to MMA. We can see the Guggenheim, too, if you want.” Her father has said more in the last ten minutes than he has in the last ten years.

  “Sure,” she says.

  “You’ll love it here,” he says again. “You’ll just love it. There’s nowhere like it in the world.”

  “Yeah,” she says, looking out at the sidewalks clotted with people, the looming buildings, the streets littered with trash. Bike messengers flash by, deliverymen riding fat-tired bikes laden down with bulging plastic bags, drivers honking, trucks belching exhaust. In the car next to their taxi, a man rolls down his window, sticks his head out, screams obscenities at a woman pushing a stroller who’s trying to cross the street in front of him. Maia watches in horror as a cab drives over a pigeon, looks away quickly before she has to see the smeared, bloody mess. A homeless man in a wheelchair, his feet wrapped in dirty bandages, holds a Styrofoam cup in one hand and a tattered American flag in the other. He bangs the cup against his knee with an expression of resigned despair. No one hurrying past looks at him. The ominous sky glowers down at them, threatening downpour. A dirty cat stares sadly at the sidewalk in front of a corner store, a bloody sore where one of its ears should be, fur matted over its gaunt ribs. Even with the cab’s windows rolled up against the cold, she can smell the cesspool stink of rotting garbage and worse.

  “God, I miss it here,” her father says dreamily.

  Their hotel is very grand. Maia shrinks a little at the marble floor, the crystal chandelier. The ceiling is two stories high and the lobby is enormous, a vast expanse of spotless red carpet and polished cream stone. She feels exposed and awkward crossing it, pulls the cuffs of her jacket over her knuckles. Maia catches a
glimpse of herself in the mirrored walls: frumpy, big-eyed as a bumpkin, disheveled, topped with a ludicrous mess of garish hair. In this city she’s already nobody and not in a good way. The woman who checks them in has sleek shampoo-commercial hair and a fitted skirt that flatters her shapely calves, bats mascaraed eyelashes at her father and won’t look at her. The woman’s shade of lipstick is a tasteful, elegant red. Maia chews her own chapped lower lip and thinks of what Cass would do: throw her shoulders back, half-mast her eyelids, put up the corner of her mouth in the faintest of sneers. Scuff up the floors and track dirt all over the carpet with her boots, on purpose. It’s nice, she can hear Cass say in her ear. If bullshit is your kind of thing. She laughs out loud, and the woman gives her a funny look.

  Her room is across the hall from her father’s. It has a view of the city, solid blocks of buildings spread out below her and bisected by broad avenues pulsing with traffic. Her father leaves her to shower for dinner. She takes the clothes she’s brought out of her suitcase, spreads them across her bed: a black dress for her audition that in Seattle had seemed, if not glamorous, at least elegant, but here looks dumpy and poorly cut, its black the wrong sort of black, its fabric the wrong sort of fabric; her khakis, still pressed neatly; a sweater; two turtlenecks; and underneath them, tucked away like a secret, the soft grey thermal shirt she stole with Cass. The air in the hotel room has the canned taste of airplane, but when she tugs at the window she realizes it’s sealed shut. No jumpers allowed.

  But the water in the shower is hot and the towels are deep and soft, and it’s the kind of hotel that has a terrycloth bathrobe hanging on the back of the bathroom door. She looks at herself for a long time in the mirror, under the too-bright hotel bathroom lights that wash out her skin. Her eyes are tired and a little sad. Most of the dye has faded and now her hair is just bedraggled, the rough-cut ends a sickly, uneven pink. If she were Cass she would smoke in the no-smoking room, raid the hotel refrigerator, flip through all the channels, order a steak from room service. Would her dad notice the bill if she pillaged the wet bar? If he noticed, would he say anything? She opens the door, tallies up the tiny bottles of whiskey and gin. Nothing ventured, nothing gained: She gulps one down, not even caring what kind of alcohol it is, pictures Cass cheering her on. She tucks the empty bottle into the garbage under a pile of tissues, feeling pleasantly fuzzy. She brushes her teeth, puts on the stolen grey thermal and a pair of khakis, wishes she had brought her boots and Cass clothes. Her father knocks gently on the door as she’s brushing her hair and she lets him in. “That’s a nice shirt,” he says.