Luck (17 page)

At the time Beth’s particular kind of rarefied, upper-atmosphere beauty had high purposes, nothing as commonplace as attracting the attentions of boys, who anyway, when she was at school, steered clear of her and certainly did not call her for dates; as if she scared them. Well, girls, too. It’s not that they were friendly or unfriendly, more that they drew apart when she appeared. She walked as if she wore books on her head, or tiaras. She didn’t care. She was beyond them. She went places, she won things, she had opportunities and gifts they could not dream of, just as her mother said.

How far has she walked? Gravel pokes into these thin sandal soles. There’s so much bright green and bright blue out here. Funny how those colours work together outside, but otherwise not. Like, you wouldn’t paint a room in bright green and bright blue, and a dress in exactly these shades would look tacky. “No class,” as her mother said sometimes, looking over Beth’s competition.

There was her mother: adjusting hems and hair, breathing hope and ambition, back at the wheel, driving them on.

Later smells and sounds were harsh and metallic. That was
in the time of disinfectants and unpampered bodies, and voices that yelled, wept and whimpered; others that comforted, commanded and advised
impulse control.
The point is—the point is, this air out here is starting to smell gentle to Beth, this light begins to feel kind. The sounds aren’t so strange, just occasional traffic and birds and invisible rustlings through grass.

Or it could be she’s excited. Happily on edge. On the brink of something joyful. Maybe this is how her mother felt, driving home full of prospects and plans, talking about decisions that would need to be made soon.

Everybody’s got a story—how obvious, how banal. Beth, too, although she keeps hers to herself, and tucked far back in her mind. It’s also true that the elisions and collisions of individual stories create and break love and care, they lead to murder, rape, slaughter and war, as Sophie enjoys pointing out, and also to acts of generosity, kindness. Experiences and trajectories ricochet off each other, they take slow curves and sharp turns, they wreak confusion here, salvation there and—this is the hardest thing—there’s no way to predict which detail or tiny decision may grow huge in its consequence.

There is, for instance, a way of seeing what happened with Beth and her mother as an outcome of failed air conditioning in their van on a summer day even hotter and more humid than this one. A mechanic who, for reasons of lassitude or incompetence or pressure in the plot of his own unknown story, fails to spot signs of an exhausted bit of equipment under the hood; which creates an excessive scratchiness of voice and mood in the overheated front seat during a long drive home from a pageant; which leads to—well, leads to catastrophe, really.

Or: in a longer-term view Beth’s father’s choice of careers repairing highway rigs like those now and then hurtling past her results in insufficient funds for plane fares except for Beth’s and her mother’s farthest-flung journeys, so that they must mainly travel by road with their mountains of luggage and garment bags.

Or: if at that one particular pageant Beth had lost instead of won, if she’d even come in second rather than first, that might have put a dent in her mother’s hot, exhausting enthusiasms. An extra word or absent gesture, who knows what makes a difference? If, if—a multitude of slightly altered circumstances and moments, and that day would have gone entirely differently, and this day would not have arisen, Beth would not be picking her way over gravel along a rural roadside, examining the airy August light and promising weeds. She would be, at this moment, in some other place, maybe even some other country. She would never have caught Nora’s eye, would not have wound up living with Nora and Philip and Sophie, shifting her limbs and expressions to Nora’s commands.

This is just life, of course, the extraordinary luck of the draw, torrential water under the bridge.

The pageant at which Beth comes up once again the winner is a national one. The prizes are concrete and promising, and include a cheque for ten thousand dollars, and a full-length mink coat. This is big time. Beth bends and sweats under the weight of the coat, but her mother strokes it as if it’s a lush, favoured pet. She tries it on, too. “So lovely,” she says. “Such luxury.”

“You keep it,” says Beth. “It looks nice on you,” although too tight all the way from her mother’s shoulders on down.

This pageant has taken place five hundred and fifty kilometres from their home, via a complicated interplay of
highways and roads. Heading home without air conditioning in the van, Beth is light-headed, her mother perspires, heat rises in shimmering rhythms off asphalt. “Oh dear,” is her mother’s view. “But it’s only a few hours.”

Beth is seventeen, a weary young winner, as well as spoiled, possibly, in unusual ways. Her mother is—what?—in her early fifties. Her waistline is failing her, she has chunky hips, only the buried bones of their resemblance remain. She has deep lines around her eyes, some of them probably from squinting for so many hours at so many highways. Brackets have formed at the sides of her mouth, and railway-track lines along her top lip. There’s something tissuey about her cheeks, her throat is a river of small, choppy whitecaps. Flesh on her upper arms swings at each turn of the wheel. Beth is propped against the passenger door watching her, hearing her voice. She thinks her mother is old. She thinks her mother’s very red lipstick and highlighted cheeks are overdone and also the wrong colours for the altered textures and shades of her skin. Beth can’t imagine ever being that old, so far gone.

She wishes that instead of home, she was going someplace like a beach. With friends. She doesn’t have the kind of friends that drive to beaches for happy days playing in water and sand. Well, she doesn’t have any kind of friends, really. There’s a commercial, Beth’s probably seen it three dozen times in hotel rooms here and there, for some kind of beer or cooler or soft drink or juice. The product doesn’t matter, the young men and young women playing volleyball in the sand do. They chase each other through dunes and water, they gather around a beach campfire at nightfall with their drinks, they look so pleased with themselves and each other, they’ve had a totally excellent day. They look like people who live like this just about every day.

Her mother says, “That coat is just stunning, don’t you think? And the money’s a good nest egg. I’m thinking, though, that we can’t wait any longer, we need to get down to business right now.” She means today, she says, or tomorrow. She speaks again of Beth’s
gifts
, and of her
accomplishments.
She says, as she has said so often, “You are lucky. I wish I’d had your opportunities when I was your age.” Instead, she married Beth’s father when she was a year older than Beth, and commenced mourning her multitude of lost choices.

“Here’s how I see it,” she says. How she sees it is that they must decide, finally and absolutely, between pursuing ever-higher-level pageantry, aiming at scholarships, cars, clothes and jewellery, leading to any beauty-related career from advertising to acting; or diverging immediately towards high-end modelling, with its international glamour and travel, magazine covers, famous acquaintances. “I know your body isn’t quite right for that, but it could be. The thing is, you’re already nearly too old. Some girls are only fourteen, fifteen. So we really do have to decide right away.”

None of this hopeful future, except perhaps its immediacy, comes new from her mother. That’s why it must be the heat that helps turn Beth’s stomach over. She watches her mother’s face glowing with hope as well as humidity, her streaked hair piled carelessly up off her neck, damp wisps stuck to her forehead. Her hands on the steering wheel are scattered with tiny red heat-dots. She keeps picking at her white cotton blouse, pulling it away from the moist skin of her breasts. She hikes her light denim driving skirt higher. The skin above her knees looks crackled, like an old painting. The flesh of her thighs is dimpled and plump.

What is this old woman doing, living Beth’s life in her hoarse, on-and-on voice?

Not that Beth has any better ideas.

Even Beth’s mother is not indomitable, however, even she gets worn out, worn down. By the time they’re pulling into the driveway of home, she is complaining of a violent headache. When she goes upstairs to grab a quick shower and to change her clothes and locate the Aspirin, Beth stays downstairs. “I’ll make tea,” she says, and it takes a while, but she does.

This is long before Beth makes a study of teas. She is not subtle or delicate in her preparation, but she is certainly blinded by insistent, irresistible, unexplainable, indefensible purpose. Impulse.

At the first sip, her mother’s mouth curls radically. “Oh, Beth, this is terrible stuff, it’s undrinkable, what on earth is it?”

“I know it doesn’t taste good, but if you drink it down in one swallow, it’ll fix you right up, I promise.” And just like that, just because Beth says to, or because she doesn’t think not to, Beth’s mother does.

It’s like watching a movie; about aliens, maybe. It involves some dissolution of edges and borders, as if her mother collapsing, heaving, to the floor is transformed from human form with all its crumplings and wrinklings and streaked hair and dotted flesh and bright lipstick into some other, unknown and unfamiliar, more wavery creature. All jellyfish and strange colours.

Beth looks away. She tilts her head back, turning her attention upwards.

Are there sounds? There must be. For sure there are smells.

“Oh, dear God,” says Beth’s father when he gets home from work. Beth hears that.

It doesn’t seem to occur to him or to anyone, not even to the men who come in the ambulance, that anything about
this is deliberate. Beth herself, they must suppose, is in shock, immobilized as she is in the kitchen, staring hard and determinedly up at the ceiling. They may be right about the shock. They take her arms and lead her outside and drive her to the hospital, too. She makes no resistance. Anyway, she’s too slight to resist burly men. At the hospital, her mother goes one way, Beth another. In a very few hours various people arrive in Beth’s hospital room wearing strange expressions. They talk and talk, to each other and to her.

Her father comes, too, several times. He is agitated. “Why?” he cries, but Beth cannot say. Also he asks, “What did she do?” as if he might, if it were explained properly, be able to rest blame on Beth’s mother.

Beth doesn’t have words. She is surprised, too. She’d thought, insofar as she thought at all, that it would be faster. Easier. And then—well, she hadn’t supposed consequences, more just poof, a vanishing.

More particularly a silencing.

Who knew the contents of mouse-killer, even vigorously mixed with extra-strong tea, would be so stomach-wrenching, bowel-churning, lip-frothing?

Also, who knew they would be so immediately discernible inside the dead human body, which surely to God she never meant to be dead? Her awful, disastrous mistake. Somebody should have instructed her better about resisting swift unconsidered compulsions, and about consequences and flat, hard results, not just about skin-toning and blush, straight hems and dipping necklines, tiaras and sashes, mink coats and pretty speeches about the importance of music. But it seems nobody ever mentioned cause and effect, action and reaction.

Or if anyone did, she can’t have been paying attention.

Once in, there’s no out. She is steered here, driven there, finds herself in rooms painted ivory, rooms painted green, rooms painted grey, each with its own shape and formation of heavyweight furniture. People talk and talk, in excited high voices and dark, lower ones. Tones are harsh or wheedling or solicitous, faces are grim, or they smile in familiar, false ways. Sometimes men, sometimes women take her by the elbows, or urge her with hands in the small of her back, to move in this direction or that, stand up or sit down or lie down. Not even her father puts his arms around her.

So many words, all of them wrong.

What would be the right words?

There aren’t any. This is why she mainly keeps silent. Let other people make what they will out of that.

In the last place, where there are so many different urgent and unhappy voices, Beth finds quiet in a small brown room of books. It’s the pictures first: tendrils of stems, little flowers, fat leaves, pale, bulbous roots. Living things that are useful and silent and still. One thing leads to another, pictures to useful, silent, still words.

She sees what she did wrong, how unfortunately indelicate her blunt recipe was. A product of ignorance. Cruel and destructive.

She will not be so ignorant or cruel or destructive again.

She is, leaning astonishingly over these books, becoming
gifted;
she achieves some
accomplishment.

There are particular hours when she has to go to other rooms, where people talk on and on about loss and responsibility and the likelihood or unlikelihood of further offence, and the importance of
impulse control
and its practices. They assess her in light of various symptoms of detachment, and urge confession, discussion, getting it
out of your system
, as if
her act were a spirit that could be driven out, not truly part of herself.

Beth learns about holding on: to paragraphs and pictures of fat roots and thick leaves and unremarkable flowers.

And one day, having achieved, they say, a
more coherent sense of reality
, she is returned into the world. It’s more or less true that she knows what she’s done, even if she can’t feel it. Or won’t. It’s not that she doesn’t remember, she just doesn’t care to. Anyway, her teas really are designed for good purposes. Once out, she gets to try actually making them. She practises and practises, observing each taste and every effect.

She finds work of a sort her mother never dreamed of, posing for artists and students. Naturally she has had to tell lies, there’s a big gap of time in her history that must be accounted for. So she has padded her resumé with more pageants, more modelling, further triumphs on one stage and another than ever really occurred. She has even given herself a small role in a small movie, just as if her life had unfolded in a way recognizable from the overheated front seat of a van. “And then,” she tends to explain, reaching truth at last as if truth were a far shore, “I met Nora and she had her ideas, and they seemed like something to try for a change.”