Maud’s House
A Novel
Sherry Roberts
Copyright © 1994 by Sherry Roberts
Printed version published by Papier-Mache Press
e-Book published by Osmyrrah Publishing
Ms. Roberts’s book, Maud’s House © 1994, is not in any way associated with or related to and should not be confused with the book of the same name written by William Gough, © 1984.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Step Right Up and See Maud’s House
1. Granite Is 25,832 Times Harder Than the Human Toe
2. A Life Like Country Music
3. I Should Have Voted for Lewis Lee
4. Cows Juggling Pine Cones
5. A Picture of Thomas Looking for Pictures
6. The Crime Wave Begins
7. Living with an Electronic Mailman
8. Fred Astaire with a Limp
9. Going Eight Rounds on the Top of Machu Picchu
10. Mailwomen Have Elephant Memories
11. When a Snowflake Is Not as Light as a Feather
12. The Answer to Prayer: What Is the Question?
13. Even Lovers Get the Blues
14. Inevitability Is Owning a China Shop on the New Madrid Fault
15. Dashing Through the Snow in a Horse-Drawn Ice Cube Tray
16. Throwing Snowballs at the Status Quo
17. Don’t Get Your Gooey Fingerprints on my Crystal Ball
18. Looking for Life’s Rest Stops
19. They Come and They Go
20. It Rained So Hard, It Washed the Spots Off the Holsteins
21. Say Good-bye, George
About the Author
Step Right Up and See Maud’s House
Once this house was covered with tattoos.
Pictures of trees and monsters and animals trickled from my fingers like blood. They spread over the walls and the furniture and the dishes. Scenes slithered across the undulated siding. Portraits yawned on downspouts, like the mirror faces in a carnival fun house.
Before I was born, this place was nothing but an old Vermont farmhouse. Misshapen by generations of New Englanders, every one a frustrated architect. Rooms were added as families grew, as wives squirreled away money, as whim took the owners. There was no grand plan, just a grand passion for leaving a mark.
I grew up here. I have those people inside of me. I too have always needed to change my world. I could never be satisfied with just sitting on a porch step and leaving life alone. There was so much inside of me, so many lively, creative itches that demanded with the volume of a fog horn to be scratched. Once all I could feel was creation. It was my food, my water, my air.
I painted here. I made my mark on everything. My house wasn’t just a house; it was a canvas, a roadside attraction. Once people went out of their way to see my house. They asked for directions in town. They asked Wynn Winchester the beautician or Frank Snowden at Snowden’s Store or the Reverend Samuel Swan as he raked the leaves in front of the church. Wynn, Frank, and the Reverend didn’t mind.
“Head north on Highway 100,” they said. “Two miles out of town hang a right on Beaver Creek Road. Probably won’t be a sign; damn kids keep stealing it. Just look for the pole. It’s a dirt road. Follow it, oh, three miles, and you’ll come to Maud’s house. Can’t miss it. You’d have to be blind to miss it. The colors scream at you, like a rock ’n roll band.”
A van full of hippies, high on Canadian weed and an Expos win, found it; “Cool man,” they said, “psychedelic siding.” So many people discovered my house, in fact, that Papa started a guest book, like the museums have, for people to sign. A record of who’d been here and what was on their minds at the time:
“Professors Skillington, Dillington, and Jones. Harvard. Interesting blend of the primitive, mystic, and totemic…” They spent three days with us, roaming the house, eating our food, taking notes, and shaking their heads. They found correlations between my painting and the works of the masters. I agreed with everything they said and would have gotten away with it too if I hadn’t asked, during a long monologue by Professor Skillington on the place of the horse in abstract art: “Miró, who?”
“Bill and Sally. Perryville, Missouri. The cutest little house we ever saw.” They discovered the house by accident. “Oh, look at that house,” Sally said, poking Bill in the ribs until he stopped. They came upon the house suddenly and it startled them. They stared at it as if it were a deer caught in their headlights. They got out of the car, approached it with caution, then began snapping pictures.
“Sandra, Nick, and Jack. Berkeley. Thank you.” I liked them. They arrived looking for something. They touched the house with gentleness, the way you caress the soft spot on a baby’s head. They asked if they could camp in the yard for the night. “You can camp here forever,” I said, totally enchanted by their free smiles and quiet acceptance. But they didn’t. In the morning they headed down the road, their van with the peace sign painted on the side backfiring as they disappeared over the horizon.
It was a house that called to strangers and strange people. Like my husband George. But let’s not talk about him now. George killed the house, before he died himself. George was such a stinker. He still is.
On my fourth birthday, my father gave me the house, home to the Calhouns for generations, the place where my father and grandfather were born. “Gave her every nail, board, and shingle,” my father used to tell our tourists. Papa became rather possessive about the people who used to stop and admire my house; he felt a responsibility to “our tourists” and their sightseeing pleasures. He never minded when they interrupted him milking a cow or repairing an ax handle. He had public relations in his blood. “Twelve rooms,” he told them. “And Maud’s painted every square inch.”
While other parents made threats, swatted bottoms, took away television privileges, my father said: Go ahead. Go ahead and draw on the walls.
He had nothing against discipline.
He was not into pop psychology and the benefits of letting children express themselves.
My husband George said he was crazy.
I said, “No, he just loved me.”
Psychologists say concert pianists, Olympic swimmers, great mathematicians, renowned surgeons, gifted sculptors don’t succeed just because of their natural genius. They become what they become because they had mothers and fathers who provided pianos to bang, pools to swim in, toys to tinker with, frogs to dissect, clay to shape. I said, “Think of the house, George, as a frog.”
George thought of it as real estate.
I knew I couldn’t keep George out of this, so I might as well talk about him. I met George the day I buried my father. There I was fresh from the funeral, wondering why everything seemed changed, banging my shins on the coffee table, when George knocked on the door. He was like all of our tourists, curious about the house. I burst into tears. That was my father’s province. Public relations. The tourists.
“I don’t understand,” I sniffled. “All my life that coffee table has been in the same place.” I rubbed my leg and looked at George in confusion. “You asked what? The house?”
George stepped inside the door, asked where the kitchen was, and took charge of my life, “You need two aspirin and an ice bag for that leg.”
George’s timing was perfect. I know now George and my father wouldn’t have lasted a day in the same house. Papa didn’t like Professors Skillington, Dillington, and Jones either. He sang and danced when they left. And now George is gone, too, cracking up his car on a curve on Highway 100. Up in heaven, I bet Papa’s feeding the jukebox.
Papa had been right about Professors Skillington, Dillington, and Jones; what they knew abo
ut true creation would fit on a postage stamp. Of course, I knew who Miró was. I’d read about him in a book about artists from the Round Corners Library. That’s where I got my ideas at first—from books. When I painted the pictures in the dark, narrow back stairs, I had to use a flashlight. I pretended I was a prehistoric woman in some cave in France, one of the first artists of all time, and the flashlight was flame.
A corner of the Sistine Chapel was my model for the bathroom ceiling. My father looked up as he shaved in the morning and saw men welcomed into heaven or sentenced to hell. What a way to start the day, he growled.
We ate on plates, the undersides dripping with the images of melted watches. We slept under the sensual influence of Picasso bulls. Being a farmer, I thought my father would appreciate that touch of the bucolic. Night after night, he contemplated the furiously erotic creatures strutting about his ceiling, pumped up with power and hormones and nature. He said he thanked the Lord they couldn’t get to his cows.
The whole house was a canvas. The pots and pans, the tables and chairs, the grocery bags, the flowerpots, the kitchen cabinets, the rocks in the yard, the buckets in the barn. Nothing was safe.
My father constantly complained/boasted to Milky Way, our pet cow. “Oughta see what she’s done to the bathroom. I’ve had nightmares that looked better than that. Scared the shit out of me.”
“Papa!”
He’d go on, pretending he didn’t hear me, devoting his full attention to scratching the place behind Milky Way’s ear. “Told her she oughta tone down the places where a man first sits in the morning.”
I have always preferred a clear and simple style. I’ve never been one for flinging paint on a wall with a big bowie knife or scraping it around with an old automobile license plate. I like a cow to look like a cow.
Back then, when I used up paint faster than Snowden’s Store could stock it, or so it seemed, I worked mostly on the large side. I painted murals so big and true they were mistaken for real life. Once, while my father was visiting Aunt Marian in Buffalo, I painted a replica of the barn door on the side of the barn. In the painting, you could see Milky Way waiting for breakfast. The first day home from Aunt Marian’s Papa trudged out into the misty morning to do chores. “Hold your horses, Milky Way,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes, buttoning his jacket, plowing straight into the painting. Almost broke his nose.
Yes, once I was that good.
Good enough to put people’s noses out of joint.
1. Granite Is 25,832 Times Harder Than the Human Toe
The problem is this: I talk to George more now than when he was alive.
Tell them, George.
Describe some of our long existential discussions. You can’t remember the lyrics? Cute, George. Many people happen to think country western songs are extremely existential. I don’t know why I talk to you, when you don’t even listen to country music.
I’m not sulking. I have never sulked in our entire married life, although I had plenty of cause.
Name one? How about the house, George?
That always shuts him up.
I remember the night George suggested we repaint the house. Our neighbor T-Bone, who was over for dinner, choked on the asparagus. I can still hear T-Bone’s gasp, more clearly than a marriage full of George’s words. “Mon Dieu,” he said. (T-Bone always lapsed into the language of his French Canadian boyhood when upset.) It was the year George hoped to beat out Frank Snowden for town moderator. Although one didn’t exactly campaign for town moderator, George apparently thought it wouldn’t hurt to spruce up the place, to present a more organized image to the community.
“Paint the house?” I didn’t understand. “What color?”
“White is nice,” George said.
T-Bone’s fork clattered against his plate, an asparagus still speared by the tines.
The dinner table, I have found, can be a damned awkward place basically because people attempt communication there. Married people have the worst inner clocks when it comes to synchronizing conversation. When she is all abuzz, he is morose. When he won’t shut up, she is as talkative as the roast.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“What do you want me to say?” she says.
“Anything,” he says.
“Anything,” she says.
Anything used to drive George crazy.
Like I said, now it’s blah, blah, blah between George and me. So many nights I fall asleep hugging a Rolling Rock, my jaws tired from parleying with George. And when I wake, my mouth is dry, making me wonder if I even talk to George in my sleep.
I have no professional explanation for these dialogues. My friend Wynn Winchester, who is knowledgeable in most matters of the mind, says I’m still angry with George. Not because he left me, wrapped his car around a telephone pole, and had a secretary that made a fool of herself at the funeral. No, it has to do with the painting.
Wynn has an entire theory about what she calls my “George Period.” She counts off on her fingers: 1) My work got progressively smaller in size while living with George; scenes that once took the side of a barn began to fit nicely on a postcard. 2) My subject matter became increasingly non-human. (This is a reference to the cows I now paint.) 3) And why, she asks with the superiority of Sherlock Holmes, didn’t I ever paint the things George gave me? Like the microwave and pasta-making machine, for instance.
“No, Maud,” Wynn shakes her head, “this whole blocked artist business began way before George turned the fun house into the White House. It began the day you let him into your house.” Not to mention my heart.
Wynn is so smart because, as the owner of a beauty salon, she subscribes to several journals for the edification of her information-hungry clientele and the enjoyment of coupon clippers. Wynn doesn’t put much faith in that quack publication, as she calls it, The New England Journal of Medicine; she goes straight to the real source: Cosmopolitan. Wynn has time to read those authoritative studies because business is slow until her morning sickness subsides and she can face perming chemicals with a settled stomach.
In my experience, reading is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Take Odie Dorfmann, sheriff, town selectman, a politician with reelection on his mind and unkept campaign promises on his conscience. In short, a dangerous person. Last election Odie guaranteed to bring more art to Round Corners. Odie read in the Burlington Free Press about a town in the Midwest that built an entire tourist trade around an old fresco in a church and became obsessed with the idea of commissioning a work of art for the Round Corners Town Hall. It had to be big and powerful, something part King Kong and part Thomas Hart Benton. And it had to be about Round Corners. That is where I came in and how I ended up this crackling fall day, in a graveyard, ruining my favorite cowboy boots.
“Damn you to hell, George,” I whispered, kicking George’s headstone with all my might. Wynn’s magazines would diagnose that I have a lot of displaced anger. There was nothing displaced about it. George and Odie, the baseball buddies, refused to believe me when I said I couldn’t paint anymore. They thought I was just being “difficult.” They didn’t believe that, over the years, the spark had dried up and drifted away. The Georges and Odies of the world got a picture of you in their heads and, like snapping turtles, they never turned it loose. To them, I was, and always would be, Maud the artist. I was artist before I was friend or wife or lover.
I couldn’t imagine George or Odie studying one of my paintings, sighing with longing, and saying, as my father once did: “Damn, that musta been fun to do.” Neither one could distinguish between product and process. If you put in the time, you made the dime in their world.
T-Bone knew there was no such thing as art on demand. He was a farmer. He knew what it was like to work his spirit into the land, to knead his soul into the soil, and come up flat, empty-handed—stunted crops and stillborn calves. Too much sun, not enough. The right vitamins, the wrong feed. It didn’t matter in the end, T-Bone the dairy farmer used to tell me. What mattered was t
o feel the sunshine on your cheek, to gaze down a row of corn so neat and straight it looked like aliens had made it with their high-tech spaceships, to rub your cold hand against the warm neck of cow.
Since Odie believed my artistic impairment to be of a non-existent nature (not to mention psychological, temporary, and easy to fix if I “just stopped pampering myself and put my mind to it”), he proceeded to hound me about the Round Corners masterpiece night and day. Cornering me in Snowden’s Store, he bent my ear with questions: When was I going to start? How long did I think it would take? And did I think I’d be using any real-life characters from Round Corners? Perhaps a lawman?
I gave George’s headstone another whack; pain shot up my leg. I must have bought the hardest damn rock in Vermont. The granite deflected the toes of my western boots as if it were made of diamonds.
The grave is one year old. There is grass but it’s sparse; you can still make out the mound of dirt under the leaves. The grave is about six feet long. Although I bet if you stood George up against one of those criminal catchers in the bank, the height markers on the door jamb, he’d tick off at about five-ten. That’s standing straight, which George always did. And that’s with his blonde hair blow-dried to the correct fluff. When George went to the bank, or anywhere, his hair was styled and he wore a crisp suit.
Those damn suits. I was picking up George’s suits at the dry cleaners even after he died. That’ll be eight dollars, the clerk said. Eight dollars, I fumed, wishing I’d never found the damn laundry receipt.
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