by Carol Anshaw
Maude didn’t reply, didn’t even turn to acknowledge that Alice had said anything. She shrugged a little, maybe to shake off Alice’s hand.
One of the cops peered into the open trunk of the Dodge.
“We’ve got a little mail problem here,” he said.
The other cop had found Olivia’s tapestry bag on the ground, and was fishing out various Baggies filled with grass and hash and pills; also cellophane envelopes, amber prescription bottles.
Olivia hiked herself onto her wounded car, then sat smoking on the upended fender, white patent leather boots planted on the side of the tire. Graciously, she told the cops, “Please. Help yourself.”
“Looks like you’ll be riding with us,” one of the troopers said. He pressed the back of her head down and folded her into the backseat of one of the cruisers. As the car pulled away, she turned so she could look out the rear window. She appeared confused, unclear why she was being singled out.
The girl’s name was Casey Redman. She was ten years old. One of the ER nurses identified her immediately; her son was in the girl’s fifth-grade class. Her family lived very near where she had been hit, on the stretch of highway between Black Earth and Cross Plains. The parents were stunned, of course, that she had been killed, but also just that she had been outside at night by herself. No one knew what she might have been doing there. She’d been sleeping over at a friend’s. She was on her way home for some ten-year-old’s reason. Her father was headed to the station now.
They got this information piecemeal from one side of phone calls taken and made by the young deputy who typed their statements very slowly, with two fingers. They had little to offer him in the way of details. They were all sorry, of course. Their sorrow was huge. But they were, variously, asleep, distracted, to be honest, a little drunk. No one offered anything to lift any of the blame from Olivia, who had been taken into custody—a place that existed somewhere beyond a pale-green metal door inset with a small, thick, wire-meshed window. Except for Nick, they didn’t even know her. She was driving; she was stoned. Laying the accident at her feet turned out to be a small, nearly synchronized motion.
The girl’s father—Terry Redman—came through the front door of the police station. He did this by kicking it open. He was small, but wiry, as if he had been forged, sparks flying off him, rather than born. The first thing he did was yank Nick off the plastic chair where he had nodded off. He pulled him up by the lace front of his wedding dress and proceeded to smash Nick’s nose with a single punch to the center of his face.
They all watched him go down. Everyone was tacitly deferring to some universal law that, while his daughter lay in the hospital morgue, a father was allowed to punch out the guy lounging around in the wedding dress.
When all the statements had been taken, all the forms filled in, then whited-out here and there, then filled in again, the cops took Maude and Tom and Nick off to the hospital to get their injuries looked after. Alice asked Maude if she wanted her to come along, a suggestion that elicited a stare as blank as paper.
It was morning by now. Alice stepped out the front door of the police station and started down the road alone.
titanium white
Alice walked the last block home to cool down. She was quickly chilled, having worn only shorts and a T-shirt. The morning she had just run through would turn into a warm spring day. The air was still sharp, but the bottom had fallen out of winter. Inside the loft, she went looking for cigarettes. She was a smoking runner these days. She hoped these activities canceled out each other, leaving her about even in terms of health.
She had been back living in Chicago a couple of years, since right after the accident. She had needed to get back to the real world, provide herself with urban distractions. She’d found a huge, moldering loft, half of one floor in what used to be an industrial laundry. Nick put in a shower and sink and toilet, helped her sand the floors, scrub the walls, then paint them titanium white, like gesso on a fresh canvas.
She painted here every day she could afford. To support herself, she pushed out illustrations for low-end newspaper ads. Flank steaks and buckets of tripe for Moo & Oink, the South Side grocery. Mattresses and recliner chairs for Goldblatt’s, a budget department store. She also had a volunteer gig through the park district—two workshops at a senior center. One in crafts, another in painting. The most popular project was laminating grandchild photos onto vinyl tote bags. Two women were becoming adept at making stuffed terrycloth picture frames. In the painting class, although some of the students had a deft hand, their subject matter veered into a kind of contemporary religious area. Angels working as school crossing guards. Jesus mediating peace with world leaders. Helping her students make art that was hideous but meaningful to them was a small torment Alice had devised for herself.
She was left with a couple of days a week to work on her own paintings. She inhabited a hardscrabble world with friends who, like her, rose and fell on the inhale/exhale of reviews and group shows and sales to collectors. Some had MFAs and adjunct teaching positions, but no one made a decent living. All of Alice’s friends struggled along in musty lofts like hers, or in apartments that smelled sour with roach spray and still had tons of roaches. They worked as costumed waitresses in theme restaurants, night doormen in Gold Coast buildings, bike messengers in the Loop. They belonged to food co-ops and had refrigerators filled with many heads of lettuce and industrial blocks of cheddar. They drank Louis Glunz wine ($3 a bottle), Red White & Blue beer ($1.49 a six-pack).
Today she painted all the way through into night, then cleaned brushes and sorted out the studio, made a cheese sandwich and fell into bed around one in her painting clothes. The buzzer woke her. She looked at the clock; the numbers were flipping from 3:23 to 3:24. This happened occasionally; there were two rowdy bars on her block. She didn’t answer, but the buzzing continued. She got up and went to the window, pushed her shoulders through the frame so she could look down. Standing in the shadows between streetlights was a tall blonde who, as she looked up, revealed herself to be Maude.
Alice got stuck for a moment, then went to buzz her in. This was a completely surprising event. Since the accident Alice had only seen her once, at the baptism of Carmen and Matt’s baby, Gabriel. They gave each other a wide berth. Now here she was in some agitated state, in jeans and a sweatshirt turned inside out. Ten feet tall. Hair a tangle, expression feverish, smelling like lilac and biscuits. If Alice believed in a God she would have asked him: Please give me this.
“I don’t know anything about how to do this,” Maude said. It was the first thing she said.
“Shhh,” Alice said, kissing her, biting her lower lip.
“Here it is, so much later and—”
“Yes,” Alice said.
And then Maude was crying all over Alice’s neck, but at the same time pushing Alice’s hair back, snagging her fingers on a few small snarls, making Alice wince. Then dragging her big, stupid model’s lips down the side of Alice’s neck, stopping when she ran into the hollow at the very beginning of shoulder, where she sucked hard, drawing skin between teeth and tongue.
Something dumb and profound stirred inside Alice, like sound running over the tiny filaments of the inner ear, tendrils of coral rustled by a tropical sea. As a lover, Maude was not artful, only blunt. Before they even made it to the bed, her hand was so far in that Alice could feel the chunky silver links of Maude’s bracelet clicking against her where she opened up. “Can you hear me?” Maude said. “I’m trying to tell you something.” And suddenly Alice was so wet she was embarrassed. She was the hostage in the darkened cellar, or in the forest clearing, a gun pressed into the small of her back.
This was how it began again.
She was awakened the next morning by the smell of butter sizzling. She pulled on some jeans, a T-shirt. Maude was at the stove, fixing an omelet.
“In college I worked at the Happy Pan,” she said, and her moves did appear assured. She whisked the eggs into froth, then slid
them into the buttered pan. She was a study in motion efficiency and body English—a shove then a quick flip and the omelet folded onto itself. This seemed to Alice not just an inconsequential set of assembly-line skills, rather another sparkly aspect of an overwhelming whole. All through the night Alice had tried to break down the elements of Maude, then add her up, but she kept getting lost in the higher math, the exponential blur.
Like now. Maude, turning quickly, pulled an about-to-be-lit Marlboro from between Alice’s lips, slid her hands under Alice’s arms to lift her onto her feet, then pressed her against a blank stretch of wall.
“Your choice,” she said at Alice’s ear, already unbuttoning Alice’s jeans, “omelets or smoke or sex.”
Alice experienced Maude like a drug—an element facilitating sensory change.
What happened from there was all the same thing, just in different locations. In the studio. Also at Maude’s apartment. At the movies. At Chez Josie, a cheap French restaurant down on Lincoln where, while feeding each other crème brûlée, they were asked to leave. On the third beach down from Fullerton. Maude laid claim to Alice and Alice, in turn, surrendered the territory of herself. She made herself utterly vulnerable, and not just sexually. By two weeks in, she had told Maude so much of her darkest stuff—unsavory fantasies, of course, but also low moments of pettiness and envy, descriptions of various embarrassments. She could make herself thrillingly ill imagining the betrayal and treachery ahead. Still, all this exposure seemed necessary to set their course.
They broke only for work and Maude’s classes. She was finishing up her nursing degree. (She put Alice’s limbs into splints, made the bed with Alice still in it, listened to Alice’s heart, checked the pressure of the blood in her veins.) She said there wouldn’t be enough years in front of the camera to make a career of modeling; she would need a backup.
Maude wasn’t out as a dyke; this was not the whole problem, but it was the largest piece. She was the daughter of a mother who ran a tight ship. Marie’s children were expected to get married, to someone Marie approved of. Someone Catholic. Then it was time for a baby, a bun in the oven. And then, they didn’t want little Timmy or Lucy to grow up an only child, did they? The family was already on Carmen to get knocked up again. Family was what mattered, and got celebrated at every possible occasion. Weddings of course, baptisms, first communions, confirmations, anniversaries. Maude had not yet found a way to let her mother know how far she had veered off this program. Marie already thought Maude’s friendship with Alice was unhealthy. Alice couldn’t really blame Maude for ducking, but she still didn’t like being forced back into the closet herself. This was, she supposed, one of the pitfalls of bringing someone out.
That she wouldn’t be able to bring Maude all the way over wasn’t her biggest fear. In a deep recess, an inchoate space where thoughts tumble around, smoky and unformed, Alice’s biggest fear was that she and Maude and the accident were tied in an elaborate knot—that her true punishment for what happened that night would be God, or the gods, or the cosmos giving her Maude, then taking her away. But this had not happened yet.
Maude told Alice the worst medical story. She had been working at the hospital long enough that by now there was a worst. It was a degloving, a man brought in from a factory accident. He’d been caught in a machine, his skin peeled off in one piece down the bottom half of his body. Maude had degloved Alice’s soul. If Maude left, Alice supposed she would never get over her, that the application of time—even in great quantities—would not be up to the job of getting over Maude.
This, of course, put Alice in a very bad position. She could never quite be relaxed and normal around Maude. A haze of supplication, she knew, hovered over her like incense at an altar. This was another part of the problem. Maude would have had to be a better person not to use this advantage, and she was not; she was merely an ordinarily good person. Maybe, Maude would speculate, when she’d finished school she should move to New York for a while, to wring as much as she could out of modeling. Or she should move to L.A. to see if she could break into movies. Her fascination with hypothetical versions of herself was bottomless.
When she was attentive to Alice, though, it was with such ferocity and ardor that Alice was stunned, went around for days at a time exhausted and exhilarated, bleary, bumping into things, her spatial sense way out of whack, her mouth bruised, her joints aching, hollows under her eyes, her appetite engaged only by strong lures. M&Ms. Fries with mayonnaise.
Alice saw this disorientation as a good thing, maybe the best thing, but Maude was ambivalent. She would suddenly get claustrophobic. Alice was too close for comfort, or too intense, or too complex; Maude would need to get away to sort things out, or breathe some uncomplicated air. For Alice, unfortunately, the air was always uncomplicated. She only ever loved Maude. That was where she was every day. And so she could only stand still and breathe shallowly and brace herself through Maude’s tremors and vacillations. Bad weather that would pass.
Today, a Saturday, Maude was sleeping in, dozing on her stomach and Alice lazily traced the edges of her shoulder blades, thinking what she knew was a fatuous lover’s thought—that they look like the place where wings would be attached on angels. And then suddenly this moment was zapped by the door buzzer.
“Oh shit. I forgot,” Alice said, looking at the clock. “Carmen and Gabe.” It was one p.m. on the dot. Carmen was always on time.
“Did we interrupt anything?” Carmen said coming out of the elevator, probably sniffing sex in the air. Carmen didn’t much care for Maude. Alice wasn’t sure why, but was certain this would smooth out with time.
“Hey big guy,” she said to Gabe, and set him up with paper and finger paints, then got Carmen and Maude moving. “Let’s hang some paintings.”
“Over a little more,” Alice gestured at Maude and Carmen with a freshly lit cigarette. They were each holding on to a side of the painting’s stretcher, and made an odd pair of helpers. Maude in threadbare cords and a Superman T-shirt, yellow leather Moroccan slippers; Carmen coordinated in burgundy wool slacks and a peach sweater. She was wearing makeup. Her hair was, as always, perfect—heavy and dark, spilling lustrously (but in an organized way) over her shoulders.
Everything about Carmen was organized. She kept an appointment book and a little wipe-off marker board on her refrigerator door to keep track of her days on at the shelter, her pickup times for Gabe at day care. She was in possession of a schedule, a child, and a husband. Carbon steel kitchen knives and a new sofa—as opposed to Alice’s sprung red velvet junker brought down from the co-op. She had a serious approach to every aspect of life—motherhood, her job, her political work. Still a ways shy of thirty, Carmen had Alice beat hands-down in the race to adulthood. Coming at life as Alice did, from a more oblique angle—a lack of any real plan at all, a tenuous relationship, a line of work that yielded no security of any kind—it would be easy for her to ridicule Carmen as a tight-ass, but she didn’t, ever. Their alliance was deep, formed in the trenches of childhood where they were each other’s landsmen, comrades in strategy and survival, in warding off the contempt of their parents, and in protecting their brother. These positions had been set up early and were not subject to realignment. So she and Carmen always approached each other carefully, with respect—minor diplomats, one from an arctic, the other from an equatorial nation, attempting to understand each other’s customs, participate in each other’s holidays.
Crushing out her cigarette, Alice headed over with pencil, hammer, and nails. This was the last and largest canvas for the show, which was to start Friday—a group project of the artists who had studios in this old laundry. They were getting write-ups in the Reader and Newcity. They might get some real traffic through here.
“I see hordes descending,” Maude said. “I hear hoof beats.” She was always encouraging about Alice’s work.
Alice said, “There might be people, but they could just be cheese-seekers. There. Perfect. Don’t move.”
“
It doesn’t matter if they come for the cheese,” Carmen said, leaning against the wall a little dreamily, filling in the blank of Alice’s future for her while Alice pounded in a nail. “The more people, the larger presence you have on the scene. You’re entering the marketplace.”
“Maybe,” Alice said, but really she was happy for her sister’s belief in her, to hear her use words like “presence” and “marketplace,” which until now they’d only used in reference to their father, a painter whose presence in the marketplace of art was fairly large. He encouraged Alice’s aspirations until she started being taken seriously. Now he was subtly dismissive. Horace saw every other painter as a threat, now even (or maybe especially) Alice.
“Finish,” Gabe said from the floor, but didn’t look up. Then, he found he was mistaken, that something wasn’t quite finished, and so he just kept painting.
“Man.” Alice hunkered down behind him. He had painted, from memory, his backyard and, in the corner, Carmen’s garden-in-progress. It was all there, wobbly and from about four different perspectives, but there. The beat-up garage, a doghouse left behind by the previous owners, a trellis draped in clematis, his father asleep in the hammock. It wasn’t really a child’s painting.
“All here,” he said. Each of his fingers was dabbed with its own color. He was a tidy little guy.
“Yeah, well, this is—” Alice didn’t say it was incredible, that at two and a half he should only be up to green and brown trees, round yellow sun, stick-figure humans. He hated being told he was too young to do things. “Next time we’re moving you up to a brush.” He wore a striped jersey tucked into the elastic waist of his pants. His bottom was padded out with trainer pants. Despite being an artistic genius, he was not yet 100 percent potty trained. His hair fell over his eyes as he painted. He looked like a kid from an earlier era, or a smaller place, heading into the rougher neighborhood of real life.
