Butterfly (3 page)

Maureen Wilks considers her openly, so Plum feels her gaze like probing fingers. She would back into the darkness of her room, heave the window and pull the blind shudderingly, if only that would not appear rude the way this spying lady is rude, staring and listening and intruding. “You look like Rapunzel in her tower,” the woman says. “Standing up there, waiting for a prince to rescue you.”

Plum bridles: Rapunzel is her most-scorned distressed damsel. Those coils of moldery moth-eaten hair, the idiocy in never thinking of lowering herself to the ground, rather than waiting to be climbed. “Do I?” she answers uncivilly.

The neighbor steps forward, her shadow skimming the fence. Her head is tipped to see Rapunzel, and Plum can see down her cleavage. “Would you like to come to David’s party, Plum? We’re having a picnic. There’s plenty of food, and we’ve filled the pool, but there are no guests except me.”

Plum’s window is high enough to overlook every corner of the neighboring garden, and she notices now, in the shade of a tree, the small boy lying on his stomach in a shallow wading pool. She’s seen him in the garden before, breaking twigs, investigating. Laid out on a rug at a safe distance from the pool are platters of food that say only
childhood:
triangles of bread dotted with hundreds-and-thousands,
frankfurters pierced with wooden toothpicks, lemony cupcakes and bowls of Smarties, bottles of garish fizz. Every immature morsel Plum has banished from her own party; everything she’s loved, and still does. Though caramel yet clings to her teeth, her heart longs for cupcake, her heart demands fizz. “Is it David’s birthday?”

“Yes; he’s four. Please come. His father’s away, there’s only me. He would love to have a guest. Wouldn’t you, David?”

David, startled by inclusion, dips his face into the water. Plum hesitates, naturally antisocial: but her desire for the party food is like the tug of a clutching hand. She needs a frankfurter, she pines for sparkling drink. In the space of mere moments she could be sitting on a rug, being six years old again. And if her mother opens the door, she will find her daughter’s room deserted. Plum’s absence will first puzzle, then worry her family, and make them think back on how they’ve treated her. “I’ll come,” she says. “Wait a minute.”

She shuts the window and quickly changes out of her pajamas, pulling on a T-shirt and a pair of toweling shorts. From a shelf she takes a picture book that has no place in her heart.
Dear David,
she writes on its opening page.
Happy
. . . She doesn’t know whether it’s forth or fourth.
Dear David, Happy birthday. Love from your neighbor Miss Ariella “Plum” Coyle.
Underneath this she adds the elaborate flourish she’s been practicing of late. Then she creeps downstairs, book under her arm, Roman sandals soundless on the uncarpeted
stairs. She hears her parents and brothers talking at the dinner table — Plum would like to know if they’re discussing her, and pauses: then hearing laughter, complicated and conniving, hurries on as if shoveled. She feeds herself through the querulous screen door, then speeds across the summer-sharp lawn to the footpath, rounds the fence that divides her house from the next, and trots up the neighboring driveway. And it’s only now that Plum remembers all those naive little girls tempted into vans or past a front door, lured by lollies or the promise of a puppy, never to be seen again. The recollection slows her, rolls her eyes in her head. The evening seems unnaturally quiet, her home suddenly far away. Yet she cannot turn back, she’s committed herself now, and if Plum must vanish she’s already vanished, and her great destiny was only to become a legendary lost girl. “Hello?” She passes through the side gate with her heart like an anvil. “I’m here — hello?”

The little boy, David, has left the wading pool and is standing on the lawn with his arms held out, his body shining bluely with water. His mother is kneeling close to him, drying his back with a towel. At the sight of Plum, the boy twines his feet and smiles. His smile is oddly graceful, and makes Plum feel confused. Looking away, she sees that the garden is different to how it appears from the height of her window. There’s a flowery scent, and the coolness of damp, and the ticking of leaf against leaf; most weirdly, everything seems stretched skyward, making her think of fairies and of sleepy tumbles down rabbit holes. She looks past
the fence to her bedroom window — how peculiar to think that, moments ago, she had been standing so forlornly at the sill. She wonders if Rapunzel, returned to the ground, looked up at her tower and realized it was not what she had believed. That she could have jumped.

“Here’s our guest!” The mother, Mrs. Wilks, rises, smiling at Plum. “You see, David, I told you someone would come. Now we can have a proper party!”

Plum hands over her gift. “Happy birthday, David. Sorry, I didn’t have wrapping paper.”

“Oh, a book! How kind! David, what do you say?”

David says, “I got a truck.”

Plum doesn’t consider herself good with children, nor does she find them endearing. She resents their chaos, their self-absorption, their compulsive stealing of the limelight. This child, however, is like a shy little calf, and glances away sweetly when Plum meets his eye. “What sort of truck?” she asks; and the boy heaves a sigh and says, “A Tonka truck.”

“A Tonka truck!” Plum plucks a tidbit from a past she wasn’t part of, wanting the boy to think well of her. “My brothers had Tonka trucks when they were little.”

“Did you hear that, David? Justin and Cydar had Tonka trucks too.”

It surprises the girl to hear her brothers’ names fall so familiarly from the woman’s mouth, but at once it is understandable: neighbors know the names of neighbors. Maureen Wilks had known Plum’s name, and Plum somehow knows hers. The whole world is joined, like a dot-to-dot, by
someone knowing somebody else’s name. Her inclusion in this intricate web fills Plum with a warm sense of humanity’s oneness. The night is beautiful, the world is beautiful, and for all her imperfections Plum is included and wanted. For a moment, she is happier than she’s ever been.

They settle on the tartan rug, the platters laid out between them. Plum says loudly to the boy, “What a lot of food! Were you expecting a king?” The child looks at her blankly; Mrs. Wilks passes out paper plates. “Everyone help themselves,” she invites. David takes a frankfurter and a cupcake: “Frankfurter first,” his mother instructs. Plum blots tomato sauce onto her plate and selects a party pie. Mrs. Wilks fills three mugs with creamy soda — Plum can’t decide if there were always three cups, or if the lady fetched a third from the kitchen while Plum was changing out of her pajamas. Mosquitoes arrive and wobble about; Mrs. Wilks sprays her son’s arms and feet with repellent, and then, laughing, does the same for Plum. The smell of the food, the tingle of spray, the scratch of the rug, the taste of the toothpicks, the hiss of the soda which is like bubbly snake venom — all these mingle in the February dusk into something that is the essence of childhood, feels exactly as the best days of Plum’s childhood felt. And she’s stricken with sudden nostalgia for the life she’s been so eager to pack away, she wishes there was some way of being everything at once — grown and sure and clever, young and protected and new.

They eat in silence for a time, the song of the cicadas
rising, the sparrows hurrying to roost. Mrs. Wilks sweeps her palms through the grass, David spills soda on the rug. A fragile mosquito bogs itself in Plum’s tomato sauce — Maureen says, “Poor thing,” and picks it out with a fingernail. Plum notices that David is choosing from the platters the same morsels she chooses for herself, then studiously watches how she eats them — one bite, one sip, several ruminative chews — and eats the same way himself. She throws a Smartie into her mouth, gulps it down like a pelican; shyly, the boy tries the same. She juggles two Cheezels but he won’t attempt this, only gives her his cautious smile.

Mrs. Wilks says eventually, “I’ve eaten too much.” She leans on her hands and tilts her face to the sky, closing her eyes in a way that makes Plum a little embarrassed. “I love the last days of summer. There’s so much . . .
poignancy
in the air. As if summer were a living thing that’s drifting gently into death. Don’t you think so, Plum?”

Plum says, “I guess.”

“There’s an owl living in that big melaleuca near the fence — she’s quiet in winter, but she hoots through these mild nights. Do you ever hear her?”

“No,” says Plum; then, dissatisfied, changes it to, “Sometimes.”

“Look at the moon, David.” The lady’s eyes glide open, she raises a sculptured hand to the disc above their heads. “And that bright twinkling dot isn’t a star — it’s a planet. It’s Venus, I think — is it Venus, Plum?”

“Maybe.” Plum struggles.

“A huge mighty planet, tinier than an ant! Isn’t that amazing, David?”

“I have this idea.” Plum shuffles forward. “I think we should change the name of the planet Uranus. Nobody likes that name, so we should change it.”

“What should we change it to?”

“We should change it to
Velvet
—”

“Velvet! That’s perfect! Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Velvet, Neptune, Pluto. Much prettier!”

Plum grins. She feels welcome and pacified here, and wishes she’d brought a better book. But then Mrs. Wilks says quietly, “I hope you’re not still sad?” and Plum’s cheeks inflame. She would rather not speak of the spectacle she’d made of herself at the window. So often, of late, she finds herself ashamed to reflect on her behavior. It’s ridiculous that a miniature television could reduce her to sobs, regrettable that the subject of her birthday is now tainted with shouts and sulks. Yet Plum owes this woman something for her kindness, and makes herself reply, “I wasn’t sad — not really. Sometimes my family makes me angry, that’s all.”

Mrs. Wilks smiles. “I think that’s what families are supposed to do, Plum. My family used to make me so angry that I dreamed about burning the house down, with them inside it.”

Plum chuckles obligingly. “I don’t want to do
that,
” she says. “I just wish they’d remember I’m not a baby anymore. I’m nearly fourteen. I’m having a party, too,” she adds. “Not like this one — a slumber party.”

“Did you hear that, David? Plum is having a party too, a grown-up party. The thing is, Plum, you
are
the baby — you’ll always be their baby, even when you’re old and married, even when you’re
much
older than fourteen.”

“Hmm.” Plum knows this, and privately finds it comforting. “It doesn’t mean they should treat me like a kid, though. They never take me seriously. They act like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Her neighbor nods, and Plum sees that she is thoughtfully considering the complaint, not laughing it aside as Plum’s mother would. Mrs. Wilks is quite a beautiful woman, in an Ali MacGraw, midday-movie kind of way. She is, perhaps, the same age as some of Plum’s teachers, which is oldish but not
old.
Her face has no creases, her skin is smooth. Her hair is long, lustrously dark and fashionably flicked. Her eyes, also dark, are also quite long, and heavy with green shadow. She wears a turquoise, ruffle-sleeved dress which has geometrical shapes printed across it. The material clings to her flat stomach and lean thighs. For some reason Plum thinks of a word she’s only heard used about the weather:
sultry.
“You think they don’t respect you,” Mrs. Wilks is saying. “They don’t respect your decisions.”

“That’s right!” Plum sits up straighter, charged by the exactness of the phrase. “They don’t respect my decisions! I think I’m old enough to stay home alone at night, but Mums says I’m not. When I wanted more pocket money, Mums said I don’t need it. Whenever I go out, I have to
say where I’m going and when I’ll be home. And look at me — I’m fat. But when I told Mums I didn’t want dinner, she
made
me eat it, even though I’m fat! I’m not even allowed to decide what to eat!”

“You’re not fat —”

“I am! Look at me! I’m a whale!”

The intrusion of this subject causes instant dejection, turns the whole evening monochrome. Mrs. Wilks, however, laughs, although not as Mums would. She laughs like someone who knows what is true. “That’s puppy fat, Plum. I had puppy fat too, at your age.”

“But I’m ugly,” Plum sulks. “You’re not ugly.”

“Ugly!” Mrs. Wilks claps her hands. “Who told you that? Only yourself, I bet. You’re not ugly, Plum. You have nice olive skin. You’re already tall. You have rich thick hair, a pure jet color. You’ve got good bones in your face. You’ve got a straight nose and a friendly smile and interesting eyes. You’re exactly the type of girl who could become a fashion model.”

Plum balks as though bitten. “Really?”

“Absolutely. You have the features that fashion photographers look for. You should never think you’re ugly. You could be in magazines.”

Plum lists sideways, dazed. Color is streaming back into the world — enough, and then too much, so the grass is emerald, the sky is mercury, the rug a circus of scarlet and sapphire. The lady’s smile lingers on her; then she looks at her son. “Is it time for the candles, David?”

Disturbed into life, the child chirps, “Yes!”

“It’s time for the cake.” Maureen finds her feet like a turquoise doe. David is quick to follow his mother, so Plum is left sitting alone. In private she runs her fingers around the good bones of her face, up the steep slope of her nose, into her rich jet hair. Maybe things are not so terrible as she has believed. Magically, her body already feels less heavy, less sweaty and sluggish. When Mrs. Wilks emerges from the house with the cake, Plum looks at her with something like first love.

The candles are lit and the song is sung; Mrs. Wilks sings the
smell like a monkey
version. David huffs air on the four trembling flames, his mother and guest applaud. Mrs. Wilks slices three wedges of chocolate sponge, and again the partygoers dine in silence. There is not much light left in the clouds now, and the sky is empty of birds; mosquitoes hover needfully at the fringe of the picnic rug. Maureen refreshes the repellent on her son, then beckons Plum nearer so she too may be doused. The droplets sizzle on the girl’s sunburned cheeks; she can’t remember the last time her own mother sprayed her with insect repellent. Sucking cream from under her fingernails, Plum gazes around the garden, druggedly content. “It’s much better here than at home.”