Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  And they were Republicans. That was another mistake Maude had made. She assumed everyone shared her family’s view that Nixon was a variety of slime mold; instead, there were girls who showed up with pink eyes the day after the election. The only time her parents didn’t vote Democratic was when some of these other parents did, for handsome Jack Kennedy. It was remarkable, she was later to think, that at the flag-sprouting brick firehouse, it was possible in 1960 to pull the lever for Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate. Milt said Kennedy’s father was a crook. And these people went to church every Sunday! The Pugh view was unrepeatable, publicly.

  So Maude had gone around in a cramp of semidisguise, trying not to make herself the object of a social football tackle. Equally she feared being pathetic. There was a girl in her seventh-grade class, Rosette, whose offense was her painful thinness and the way she smiled at everyone without distinction, a sweet, shy smile that showed no consciousness of social degree. She looked like a concentration camp victim forgiving the Nazis. Maude used to watch Rosette, wondering how she could stand it, how she continued to smile with such forgiveness, how she could be so dreamy and placid under the scourge of rejection. One tenderhearted girl once said something nice about Rosette. “Yeah, well, it doesn’t help to have a name like a Kotex ad, does it?” Maude had said, raising a laugh she cringed to remember.

  At Bay Farm Maude expected to find her soul’s affine group. Among them would be the best friend she had always looked for. Having found Weesie, she looked for the boy who would become her magically frictionless match. The Boy. Weesie and Maude spent a fair amount of time discussing The Boy. A huge amount of time. They might as well have been teasing their hair and adding a pearl.

  Early on, there was the epoch of sharing a crush. It was wonderful having a crush together, almost better than having a boyfriend. They settled on the same soft-spoken, bookish but popular (athletic) boy, taking fire from a casual remark one or the other of them made: “John Bates is kind of nice, don’t you think?” “John Bates is incredibly nice”—he had spoken to one of them. Their mutuality gave them courage. He accepted little offerings from them and, once, they went together in the middle of the night to his house, not far from Weesie’s, and had a disappointingly chaste visit through his window. Not long thereafter, he could be seen with the school vamp, her long fingernails digging into his upright back during assemblies.

  Maude made a list of the Bay Farm boys she would welcome into her embraces. It was not short. Weesie looked stunned when she saw this list in Maude’s stilted printing that looked like a hand-written manuscript Weesie had once seen at the Morgan Library, handwriting that was like printing. The a’s were like someone kneeling under a palmetto leaf and the g’s looked like goggles. That was how Maude’s were. Spelling out the list of boys.

  “All of them?”

  “Not all at once,” Maude said.

  “Adam Exner?”

  “Don’t you love the way he stands? It’s so—” Maude stood, twitching to one side to imitate this short, slim-hipped boy’s cocky grace.

  Weesie just shook her head. Maude wasn’t sure if she had over-stepped some personal boundary of Weesie’s or if she had violated some norm of good taste. She felt she had revealed something gross about herself.

  But this was forgotten as Weesie began numbering her own choices on the list, in order of preference. “You think the tall guys, I mean the skinny ones, you think their, you know, penises are like long and skinny?” Maude could barely choke out an answer between gasps. “Do you think, like, fat guys, I mean they probably can’t even see it anymore.”

  “Oh, God, what if you were sitting on a guy’s lap and he got a boner?” They shrieked, beside themselves.

  Weesie pointed out that at least half the boys on the list had girlfriends.

  Maude hoped she wasn’t making another avid gaffe: “They could break up.”

  But the great mystery was, how did you get a boyfriend, or was it something you didn’t get but just allowed to happen? What could you do to make it happen?

  They disdained to believe in the efficacy of the hair-teasing, specialty-bra-wearing version of femininity—though they might have noted that the vamp, who had the loyalty of the best boy in the school, only pretended to such disdain. All but the newest inch of her hair was still blonde from a summer experiment with peroxide; she was dazzlingly slender and didn’t hesitate to show it in tight suede pants that invited touch; she mascaraed her lashes and was rumored to have tried falsies. One day she came to school in a belted raincoat and made sure everyone knew she had nothing on underneath. But even when she wore the same workboots and jeans and turtlenecks as everyone else, she still had a way of smiling complicitously at boys, always speaking with a Minnie Mouse cheerfulness that was implausible to any girl but apparently a token of an unthreatening, forgiving nature to every boy, even as they were excited by a manner that suggested cruelty: a terse way of moving and possessive high-handedness.

  Not that Weesie or Maude could have made themselves like that. Not that they could have stood being like that. They couldn’t even bear Lainie, who was unremittingly friendly to them, in her Minnie Mouse voice—“Hi, you two.” They wondered what The Boy, now the ex-Boy, had told her about their shameless, shameful pursuit of him. Lainie caught them staring as she combed her hair in the girl’s dayroom in the basement under the dining hall, where they had lockers and could change clothes. “I only tease it just a little. If I had hair like either of you guys, I wouldn’t have to.”

  Swann’s Way is the Guermantes Way. Even at Bay Farm, apparently, the Pugh view was a bit finer. But, because it was Bay Farm, Maude felt the urgency of crossing to the non-Pugh side.

  One of the reassuring facets of life at Bay Farm, as the catalogue told it, was that rock music, pop music of any kind, was outlawed. Three things could get you expelled without appeal: sex on campus, an illegal substance, or using the cubicles in the music wing to listen to rock, pop, or jazz. People had been caught just sitting there wearing the earphones that were like boxing gloves: they’d given themselves away by the rhythm of their bouncing.

  But—as if teenagers could not be expected to go the entire day, much less into the evening, without the vivifying sounds of their patriotic anthems—a ramshackle outbuilding had been set aside in acknowledgement of this need, at a distance from the civilizing business of school. It was equipped with electricity but no heat and only one primitive window, as if to say they shouldn’t be too comfortable. Because, if adolescence was a country with its own anthems, the allegiance the listeners pledged was to their bodies and the separateness of their culture. That, however, supplied enough heat and light. As other freshman girls paired off with boys, Maude began to understand from them that this hovel was as much about sex as music. The music was as much about sex as music. This was the hot spot for pickups.

  Maude came to school with two albums from her brother’s untouched if not exactly forbidden room. Naturally, these were not the Beatles or the Rolling Stones: one was a sickly sweet folk duo favored by his old girlfriend, and also Maude; the other was a singer obscure even to folkies, so pure that the addition of anything more than a dulcimer to his guitar constituted sellout capitulation to the pop forces of slick commercialism, or so it seemed. That summer Maude had fallen in love with certain lines he sang in a plaintive, rough voice,

  Thought I heard somebody call my name

  Painting a picture across the amber sky

  Of love and lonely days gone by.

  They had a power for her, sitting on the black seafoam floor, she didn’t even try to formulate, and she had played them over and over.

  The other song she wanted to hear, or by which she intended to display herself, was fairly popular: the pretty couple depicted on the cover begged each other to pack up their sorrows and “give them all to me.” Maude saw herself as offering this service to her unknown someone—a selling point (and she knew how good her help could be)—but underneath, she felt the
longing, as if her sorrows really were a heavy sack she dragged along behind her, for an offer of the same from someone else, or just for help in dragging the sack, which seemed to contain her entire family, especially the missing member.

  In the tiny pop hovel, you had to wait your turn, and this was partly its advantage, that you were pressed close together in the pulse of driving songs about love and lust. The one bulb, over the turntable, was blue. Five boys eyed her. There were no other girls. None of the boys was on her list, but you never knew. She didn’t meet their eyes, waiting for the look of recognition that would come when she played her music.

  She stood through a twenty-minute solo by Ginger Baker, whose percussiveness she was beginning to appreciate, when two of the boys began a catalogue of past musical alliances among members of the Cream and an analysis of how this solo related to the backup on another album. When the cut ended, it was the next boy’s chance. You were allowed two cuts apiece. He played the “Blues Project.” Maude’s brother had a wall covered with big reels of taped blues singers, ancient and dead Mississippi Negroes, austere and faintly suicide-inducing sounds between hymn, work song, and dirge, sometimes with guitar or a shaky horn or harmonica but often austerely unaccompanied.

  This was electric instruments and the kind of voice, white, that goes with self-display. You could imagine the young man’s soft, easily lived-in face and almost the precise bulge of his pants, which seemed to be the voice’s message. Yet she found the songs almost irresistibly pretty amidst her discomfort, about violets of dawn and the sounds of a winter’s love at nighttime.

  Pop music was never about anything; it was just love songs, she thought, as if her brother had witnessed her betrayal of him.

  As she went toward the turntable, a boy, seeing the album cover, crowed in tones of the purest adolescent derision, “Mimi and Richard Fariña!” By the time the one cut was over—the lyrics begging a lover to unburden himself of troubles—only two boys remained. Another boy stuck his head in and left as soon as he heard what was on. As she put on her second cut, “Somebody’s Gonna Miss Me,” boy one said to boy two, “Let’s go for a smoke.” She had cleared the pop hovel.

  The train leaves at ten.

  Only I’ ll be back again.

  Somebody’s gonna miss me when I’m gone.

  Or was it Honey, I’ ll be back again? She never was sure.

  She realized that when she heard this song, she heard her brother. She had adored him when she was little—that brother. The brother who listened to this music and could be funny, her once rebel-hero.

  A boy came in as she tried to wipe her eyes without ruining her eyeliner. He was a thin, juvenile-looking sophomore whose name she didn’t know. Despite looking eleven years old, he had the beauties of olive skin like a child in a U.N. flier, long eyelashes like a llama, and straight black hair like Maude’s own. He tilted his head and smiled in a welcoming manner. She brushed past him, eyes downcast, feeling she was bruising an innocent bystander.

  If she had played those records a few years earlier, in 1962, say, the more esoteric phase of what would only after the fact be “the sixties”—her brother was four years older than she was—the music would have struck the right, so to speak, chord. Her brother could not be wrong. It was as if she had expected to catch up with him here, but the new, disappointing classmates were out of tune.

  At the same time, she felt she had revealed herself as a Rosette—drippy, sentimental, girly. It was mysterious why being girly if you were a girl was so awful, but it was. That’s not who I am, she wanted to say, but of course it was; what was wrong with who she was? She had disastrously revealed herself. But her soul’s affine group had to be somewhere, and she still believed that somewhere to be Bay Farm, if she could suss out exactly the right way to be.

  7.

  MR. PATRICK CAVORTED in the backyard with Mrs. Pugh. Rod and Nina. Maude watched with narrow eyes from where she had planted herself on the black couch. Milt couldn’t see what was going on. His big north window faced the street. She looked up from the book again—and there they unbelievably were—and back down at Margaret Meade, for history class. They were doing prehistory and anthropology. The teacher said history was anthropology. He said every era constituted a different culture. How would you mark them off, Maude wondered in an instant of fleeting concentration. Culture must be changing every minute. At this very minute, she could be living in a different culture from the last time she looked up. “Culture is no more nor less than the aggregate of customs, practices, and artifacts of a group.”

  Mr. Patrick, that dopey art teacher, was definitely out there in her backyard. In the dual tracking at Bay Farm, he ran the farm program, which produced salad greens in spring term, up through the first peas, and more solid vegetables for autumn lunches. It was part of the student program to work the farm, their cultivation and harvesting chores an element of the utopian program intended to make the school a self-sufficient community. Before Mr. Patrick had taken over the year before, the gardening had declined to mere fields of potatoes. Upperclassmen talked about how awful the potato harvesting used to be, with machines and a conveyor belt. Though “Rod” had expanded the farm to include the full spectrum, Maude thought he must be too fond of potatoes, because what other vegetable could have made him such a tub? Somehow in sharing his gardening enthusiasm with her mother, he had elicited her offhand agreement that organic vegetables were better. Nina would have had to show off that she had read Rachel Carson; she hated for people to think she knew less than they did. As if her defensive display were the expression of desire, he had offered to help her start her own vegetable patch. And there he was.

  Maude could imagine it: Nina not wanting to have this bear of a man over but not wanting him to think that as artists they were high-hatting him. What Maude wouldn’t have imagined was her mother bent over and jerking with laughter and clutching his hairy bowling pin of an arm to keep her balance. It was a silent movie from where Maude watched, and she couldn’t see that his arm was hairy. But she had noticed it when he showed the class how to soak etching plates in the acid bath. His workshirt had been rolled up—the hair was reddish and also gray; one side of the arm was freckled and brown from all his work in the sun, but the bottom was troutlike and pale, with blue traces. Bubbles of acid gathered in the lines of the zinc plates, digging in.

  Their backyard was just a little patch of shaven weeds. Beyond it, the weeds were allowed to grow into wheatlike heads and wildflowers where the developer had left a square of unbuilt-on land onto which four streets backed. It was Maude’s favorite place in Levittown. You could half-close your eyes, to block out the backyards on the far side, and pretend you were in the country. Once every summer it got mowed, and she ran out to collect the fallen black-eyed susans and pinks from the cool, bouncy, mounded lines of grass.

  Off on one side of the field was a desolate concrete court with a wall in the middle. It was intended for handball but always seemed eerie, a piece of city somehow broken off, alone in a wild field. As children, they had enjoyed scaring themselves with it. Maude remembered her brother hurling a hardball at it as if it were someone he wanted to kill. Well, as if it were Milt, probably.

  There was plenty of sun for the vegetables Mr. Patrick was foisting on them, Maude thought, embarrassed for the one tree, which her parents had planted. Couldn’t they have found out first that weeping willows need tons of water? It had barely grown, a moping, twiglike sapling with its tongue out for the garden hose.

  Aside from the dark square Mr. Patrick was creating with his pitchfork, the shaven weeds came right up to the cracked cement terrace at the back of the house, dandelions and crab-grass alike. Next door, the Lyonses pulled crabgrass, put down bulbs in rows every fall and took them up after they bloomed and wrapped them in newspaper. “Where do they have room for them?” Nina had asked, pulling at the skin on her hands. God knew where they found the room in those tiny houses, which didn’t even have basements, but that wasn’t Nina’
s real concern; she was just hoping to fend off the expectation that she engage in such housewifery.

  Even cooking scared her. She was happy to serve scrambled eggs for dinner, letting Maude add ketchup to her portion, a dish to which they had given the name “blushing bunny.” More often she left it to Milt to broil hamburgers and lower frozen vegetables into boiling water. They came out of their boxes in the shape of the boxes, pebbly rectangles of peas or criss-crossed nests of stringbeans beneath the opacity of ice in which they were embedded. When Maude saw her first Louise Nevelson sculpture, a mèlange of found objects glommed together in a rectangle coated overall in a unifying color, and also John Chamberlain’s briefly chic works, chrome car fenders compressed into cubes, they reminded her of that 1950s contact with nature, these industrial foods. The jolly chrome giant.

  Here the rectangle gradually taking shape, sod by ripping sod, under Rod Patrick’s orange work boot, suggested nature might have more to offer. Nina picked up each square of sod and shook it like a mop. Despite her air of limp helplessness, a spray of earth was released from the grass roots. Unable finally not to be curious, Maude left her book facedown on the woven black of the couch and pushed open the back door. Aluminum, it offered a small symphony—a squealing upward note followed by whispery rattles, a wheeze, and then a whack as it pulled itself shut.

  “Whoa, Maudie,” yelled Rod. All the boys at school yelled whoa. It was part of their big, excluding pleasure in themselves. From this, Maude had the sense that Rod too thought of himself as seventeen.

  “Grab that and take it over to the corner by the fence.” He gestured to the wheelbarrow he’d brought along with the other garden tools. The barrow was piled with the discarded sods, on which the plants still surreally sprouted, heedless of their fates.