by Anna Shapiro
She squinted at him a long moment before complying. Hot in the October sun, he had removed his flannel shirt and glis-tened hairily, his belly looking Vaselined and pregnant over his low-slung jeans.
Nina beamed and excitedly began saying where everything would go in the spring, when the mulch was turned over. She explained mulch: “Hay, that is. It decomposes into the earth and feeds the plants. It’s this cycle—”
“I know, Ma. We learned it at school.” Her mother’s face puckered, looking for what she’d done wrong, like a toddler’s, mysti-fied but distressed at a cross word. Maude took the worn wooden handles of the wheelbarrow. “You making a compost heap?”
Nina looked hopeful again, loved again. “Yes!”
Maude loved her gardening job at school—liked her job assignments better than the required sports, even though she’d chosen the least gymlike sport, bicycling. The boys always managed to find hills to race up on their ten-speeds while she plodded behind with her ancient Schwinn, walking the second-hand three-speed as if it were a balky burro. By contrast, forking up potatoes was like finding treasure, like uncovering clutches of eggs hidden in the earth, offering themselves amid the rich smell of fecundity itself. Even stacking tomato frames or rubbing trowels with steel wool and oil had the appeal of establishing order. A raccoon preyed on the compost heap, waddling down its paw-wide track to pick at cabbage cores and squash pulp with polyplike black fingers. If Maude came too close, it looked testy, pausing like a teacher in black spectacles who’s been interrupted while pondering lecture notes.
“Where are you getting hay?”
Rod straightened his back and rubbed his beard. The school grew and baled its own. He looked at Nina, who shrugged and giggled. Maude had to look away from her. She offered to gather the long dried grasses from the field.
“Oh, could you?” said Nina.
“I just offered, Mom.”
“What would I do without you?” she cried. It was her catchphrase.
None of them realized what weeds the wild grasses would introduce into the virgin soil.
PART II
1.
BY MID-MAY, the garden was beautiful, with its florettes of exotic lettuces—reddish, icy green, frilly, tender as tongues; filigrees of pea vines with curlicues like harpsichord music; and clumps of chives like exuberant brushes, bursting into purple pompoms. The garden would have formed a new center for the family if, as Nina complained, Maude were not always at school and Milton in his studio or out giving lessons. He was giving lessons to Mary Jane Herrick, at her studio, and she had recommended a friend who had recommended another friend and so on. He was making house calls. And sometimes the ladies came over—in their toggled car coats, in Pucci, in perfumes that smelled like sitting in the good seats at the opera, in silk scarves as intricately patterned as illuminated manuscripts. Sometimes they looked at his work and actually bought a picture.
They complained and exclaimed that his prices were too low. When he’d heard this enough, he browsed a few galleries in the city and realized it had been a while since he’d examined a price list. His eyebrows shot up as he flipped over the onionskin with the lists’ little red dots for the stupendous prices. He went home and quadrupled his asking, sure that no one would ever pay it, and one of his holdouts promptly snapped up a quartet of his smaller squares as if, by raising their prices, he’d raised their value.
And he didn’t even have to hand fifty percent of it over to a gallery.
His teaching Mrs. Herrick changed the painting style that had been as easy to like as patchwork quilts, and it made Maude feel exposed as well as proud, but it pleased the girls in practical ways. It was easier for Maude to visit, because Milt always seemed to be puttputting over in the little VW. Whenever they hit a bump and were bounced, sometimes as high as the car’s sloping roof, “Never lose the feel of the road!” Milt would mock. That was what it had said in the owner’s manual. Nevertheless, when Nina complained that she had no way to get around, with his new practice of house calls, he went out and used his recent earnings to buy another one, this time the VW “bus,” a van with even harder seats and more awkward handling, but in which he could transport paintings and field trips, and the girls could stand with their heads through the sun roof, waving like princesses.
It was odd that a car whose advertising boast was its unchanging sameness was the very marker of automotive nonconformity. Owning this cheap car, you could feel superior to all the slobs paying extra for bad mileage and an illusion of power. It was such a phenomenon in their subdivision that even after weeks, children still hung around to see it and ask for rides with the sun roof open. The local teenagers had always called the VW owners communists or (much more rarely) Nazis, depending. It was almost a happy day for Maude when this changed to, “Yah, what are ya? Flower children! Hippies!”
(Milt, on the other hand, in addition to intoning “Never lose the feel of the road,” also liked to say of the skinlike cover over the sun roof that “the numbers only show when it rains.” They all knew Germans and Austrians with numbers on their arms and relatives whose fillings had been melted down for God knew what.)
They jounced along the private lane that led through the estate—always looking for a glimpse over the high rhododen-drons of the former ambassador and cabinet member who never seemed to be home in the main house, a grand brown-shingled cottage—up to the white-and-stone Herrick residence, with its pleasing confusion of porches and additions, surrounded by hydrangeas not yet ready to bloom. The air was Long Island steamy but not yet sticky hot.
The girls did homework together up in Weesie’s room. They were working on papers that had different subjects but, sprawling on the rug, they liked to read sentences out to each other. Maude kept being so excited by what she was coming up with, or worried that a sentence didn’t make sense, that she had read half her paper out loud. Eventually she read something out and Weesie didn’t look up.
“I’m trying to think, Maude.”
Maude jumped up and strode to the bedroom door. She intended to storm out, but the egg-shaped porcelain knob turned from the other side as she touched it.
“I just thought you girls would be wantin’ yer snack.” A good-looking middle-aged woman from Ireland oversaw the household. She was always offering Weesie things she didn’t want or, rather, wanted but didn’t want someone serving her.
“Mrs. O’Donnell, please, really, don’t bother. If we want something, we’ll come down to the kitchen. Please, you’re too good.” Weesie, in her excessively keyed-up way, looked so pained, Maude couldn’t imagine someone persisting in the face of it.
“I couldn’t cut you a wee sandwich? There’s some lovely ham. A bit a chicken, then? Just a few biscuits on a plate, let me bring you up, and a jug of milk. No?”
Her accent seemed to slip sideways through familiar syllables, making them watery or brisk in surprising spots. Maude thought a ham sandwich magically appearing on a plate in the uphol-stered bedroom sounded pretty good, but Mrs. O’Donnell wasn’t hers to refuse or accept, in her plain apronless uniform and a molded-looking hairdo that could have been the ambassador’s wife’s.
Mrs. O’Donnell kept offering, with her sad, beseeching look, and Weesie smiled back hard, such a back-tooth-to-back-tooth smile, you might almost have been fooled that she was delighted to see the housekeeper. Finally, Mrs. O’Donnell accepted her defeat, with one last “Yer sure, now?” and softly closed the door.
“That is so creepy,” Weesie said. This was her peace offering to Maude, who stood at the just-closed door. “That woman doesn’t have enough to do.”
“She looks so sad, Weesie. She’s dying for you to let her do something for you.”
“I can’t go into the kitchen—you know how it is. I’m not allowed to open the refrigerator by myself.”
Mrs. O’Donnell came with the house. She was part of the rent. She had an apartment on the third floor.
“I wish we were poor Jews,” Weesie continued, “living
in the West Thirties. You know—I am kind of hungry,” she finished. She pushed papers, books, an embroidered cotton jacket and other bits of clothing she’d abstractedly discarded to the side in a colorful pile. Maude admired this—beautiful scarves trailing over a jumbled hairbrush and perfumes on a dresser, an open drawer with something pretty hanging out, a spangle of glittering Indian earrings on the bedside table, a red leather belt over the back of a chair—a casual, decorative carelessness that, she was sure, came precisely from having Mrs. O’Donnell around. Maude knew she could never achieve this effect—at once royal and welcoming, since there is an openness in such display, as if it opens its arms to you as a novel does, capturing ongoing action in medias res—could never achieve it because if it were done by her, it would be on purpose, which was antithetical to the effect. Sometimes it seemed to her that the very beauty-marked whiteness and length of Weesie’s snaky arms, so thin that she had slipped a bangle well above the elbow, came from money rather than genes.
They crept down to the kitchen as quietly as possible; Mrs. O’Donnell’s apartment connected to it by the back stairs, so they used the big open front ones, suppressing giggles. Trying not to clink plates, opening the closetlike stainless-steel refrigerator with its double doors as gently as they could, they removed the remaining ham, still on its bone, and a bunch of green grapes, feeling it too risky to carve or search out condiments in the echoey lifeless white profusion, under racks of tub-size hanging pots or on the marble-topped table for making pastry. Thinking it safest, they went directly out of the kitchen door to the garden, where suddenly all constraints were off.
“It’s so beautiful!” Weesie cried in her uncontainable, popping, wildly exuberant way—meaning the spring, meaning being outside, being fifteen and at the end of an arduous year; arduous just in the way it demanded the assimilation of new ways of seeing and doing things. Maude’s paper, in fact, was on Bay Farm as its own culture. Maude had shown a wild rush of freedom in interviewing seniors with questions like “Under what conditions can it be cool to sit in the dining hall with a freshman?” Addressing the implicit values so brutally made her feel she had lost whatever status she had left to lose, and she had been astonished to uncover an essential dynamic: that this was, precisely, what cool was—utter carelessness as to what others will think. Combined, of course, with social knowingness.
In any case, she continued to care and, for the most part, to be inhibited by caring. And not caring could be feigned no more than carelessness in scattering beautiful clothes and bibelots.
“Mm,” said Maude in her inhibited but, as it happened, equally heartfelt way. Something sweet and vegetal hung in the air, linden or honey locust. They came around a corner of the house, heading toward a gazebo, when they saw movement in the conservatory. It was not unlikely that there would be movement there, where teacher taught pupil, where two painters conferred. But it looked—through the fronds inside and the ivy trailing across the glass—like a couple pulling apart from an embrace.
Weesie made a little sound like the languageless wild child of Aveyron, about whom they’d learned in lit. As freshman history started with human evolution, lit had begun with an examination of language and how or whether it affected worldview: could you, for instance, express something, or even think it, if, like the wild child, you had no word for it?
The ham tipped onto the grass.
They did not find a word for it. They retrieved the ham and continued on to the gazebo, where they sat on the bench that bent its way around the octagon. Weesie brushed blunt slices of green from the pink meat. “It’s probably pretty clean.” The garden, a mostly green place of grass and shrubs more than flowers, was so clipped and trimmed, its furnishings so white and neat, it looked clean.
“Probably,” said Maude, nevertheless discarding the first, exposed, slice to get to the piece underneath. Weesie watched her cut, chew, and swallow the entire piece before saying, “How can you eat?”
“I’m hungry!” said Maude. She felt like a peasant.
Weesie hugged her elbows. She glared, but not at Maude.
“You have a crush on him!” Maude cried.
Weesie turned away, squinting into green.
“Do you think they’re really . . . ?”
“They’d better not be,” said Weesie.
“He’s only here in the afternoons. They’re always in the conservatory. It has glass walls, for God’s sake.”
“So I noticed.”
“Did you ever see On the Beach?”
“Why?”
“That’s how I feel now.”
“You mean when everybody knows they’re going to die and they’re the last people alive anyway and that the world was ending and there was no way to stop it?”
“Yeah.”
Weesie considered. “You’re right. It is the end of the world.”
Infidelity. Adultery. Divorce. Adulteration. They didn’t say the words.
“Would be. If.”
Weesie reached her pale arm, turquoise-veined, the tiny beauty marks that dotted it liked flocked netting heightening its whiteness and elegance, to pluck a green grape. They both sat hunched over, feeling hollow and sick.
“Has your mother ever—?” “Has your father ever—?” They spoke at the same time and answered together: “Of course not.” They had to look away from each other again.
“You know—I wouldn’t mind if my father had an affair with you. It would make us kind of sisters.”
Though what she would have liked more than anything was for motherly Mary Jane to be her mother. It would be perfect, in a way, for Milton to annex Mary Jane. Maude would have everything. Still, “I’d a lot rather he had one with you than, you know,” she said loyally, only disloyal to her own wish.
Weesie’s thin, sharp lips curled at the corners in her pale, palely and attractively freckled face. In the sun, her hair was fire colors. She herself looked as delicate as an apricot. She pushed a sparkling curl behind her ear, past the spot where the freckles grew denser next to a narrow band of shell pink. Maude couldn’t imagine how someone could fail to fall in love with Weesie. She had thought this before, in relation to the idiot boys at school, who didn’t. You would love, she thought, her pale-blue gingham boat-necked sleeveless top, unlike anyone else’s, and her collar-bones, and her unself-consciously new jeans, stiff and rolled at the hem. You would love her prehensile-looking rosy feet, with their big knuckles. You would love the wrought-silver ring that always ended up twisted to one side.
As they walked back through the house to resume work on their papers, the textures of carpet, cool stone tile, and polished wood rich under their bare feet, they passed within earshot of the conservatory.
“Hey, girls—Louise, come see what your mother has done. Maudie.”
“Your mother”—this was just the way Milt always referred to his wife if he was talking to Maude.
They were doing a crit, Milt said. Mary Jane had been working on still lifes. They were not like the still lifes Maude had seen in September. It was as if, to begin with, color had been leached away. Maude knew her father’s rap on this; Milton was always telling students they were “using color irresponsibly,” though he only bothered to attempt the issue with the few he found less than hopeless in terms of understanding or aptitude. What he’d been telling Weesie’s mother—if it was about art—Maude could imagine. Maude had liked the old pictures, the unembarrassed sweetness of their colors, but she could see in these new ones something more serious, or serious in a different way. She thought of this quality as “museumy.”
On a broad white sheet of heavy, ragged-edged paper, bigger than most of her actual paintings, Mary Jane had rendered with great meticulousness a tumbled pile of garbage. You couldn’t take in quite what it was at once, the jumble of crumpled papers and springs, empty cans, God knew what, so that the immediate effect was of an abstraction in black ink, gouache, and delicate grayish pink—mauve. And then you realized what it was, how exactly realistic i
t must be, so that you almost felt tired looking at all the detail. But you didn’t get lost in the detail. The rhythm was what stood out, a pattern of light and dark. Maude could see it was a better picture in some way than the unstudied ones had been—better or just more “museumy”—but she felt a sadness that its subject had been made not to matter, as if it were her, Maude’s, responsibility to uphold subject matter, to make a claim for the subject’s integrity. She had posed. She knew what it was to be a subject. She felt the weight of that on her chest. In a second of nonthought, the kind that comes at moments between sleep and waking, as full of compressed meaning as the Oxford English Dictionary that you read with a magnifying glass, this seemed like a worse betrayal than whatever else Milton might be doing with Mary Jane Herrick. Or the same betrayal.
Weesie looked listless, inspecting the pictures. Her mother had installed a fluorescent light, which, unnecessarily on, imparted a harshness to the pictures and gave the people who looked at them sad black crags in their faces as if they’d been painted by Roualt. Weesie was leaning over a drawing, her Botticelli hair hiding her face. Maude leaned next to her and hissed a direction into her ear: “Flirt.” Weesie’s profile, when it emerged from the curtain of hair, was pink. She looked right into Milt’s eyes, smiled, and twitched her hair back between two fingers, swaying her skinny shoulders.
Milt grinned, amused; and pleased, registering knowledge received.
Though her clear blue eyes went from Weesie to Milt, and her chin went up a notch, Mary Jane had that all-too-fine-to-take-notice look, like those matrons on New Yorker covers. “Mrs. O’Donnell is going to be serving tea in the pouch,” she announced. The pouch was what the Herricks called a certain small sitting room or lesser living room that they found cozy. Mary Jane lifted her hands to signify helplessness. “We’ll hurt her feelings if we just ignore it. What can I do? We’re just her creatures.”
