by Anna Shapiro
“You can’t put daisy chain in here!” said Danny.
The definition was only “Something that supposedly goes on in the boys’ day room that no one will tell me about.”
“Does it really happen?”
“We- ell . . .”
“What is it, homos? Are they all—like one behind the other behind the—? Yech. Ugh.” Maude shook her hands as if she were trying to get peanut butter off.
“All teenage boys are homosexual. I mean, they’ll stick it in anything.”
“All? All?” She looked at him pointedly.
“Okay, not all. But—let’s put it this way. Your daisy- chain participants are pretty much your same subset as your coolies.”
He had that ability Weesie had of making fun of the very thing he was saying, disowning it, putting it in quotes, as if only repeating the words of some fool, that was partly the choice of words (your), partly inflection (an unnecessary, nasal emphasis on set, on coolies)—and of course the “your” was just the opposite of the case: he knew they weren’t her coolies, and she wasn’t theirs. Maude could have entered irony on her list of what made people cool. Yet Danny seemed to be able to exercise irony—as Weesie did—while inviting you in. It was warm irony. He made it a private joke that included you. If coolies thought you were getting too friendly, they excluded by making allusive jokes that you had to be one of them to get. Exclusion should be on her list. Danny’s kind of irony, and Weesie’s, was really too appealing.
But Maude couldn’t afford to admit that anything was more appealing. She felt it was necessary to be accepted by the group that was accepted. Everybody, more or less, wanted to be, but she felt damned by her exclusion, as if it specially branded her, as though the exclusion weren’t shared by people all around her, people she liked. She had intended to crack the code by her study, as though by observation and deduction she could argue her way into inclusion or acquire what was needed.
At the same time, the study was an argument against hierar- chy, a protest against status, and she took pleasure in this with a spiteful sense of strength.
Far from this spite, Danny’s interested, intelligent questions, the concentrated way he listened to the answers, the astonishing perceptiveness of his responses were like a forbidden pleasure. Forbidden because it would not further the project of being in with the in crowd. So even though Maude left the orchard with Danny when they heard the bell that was tugged by a long rope from the barn every hour, and even though they walked up to the refectory together, she managed to wander off vaguely, as if to look in her message box, so as not to be seen with someone uncool.
He sat at one of the nondescript tables of miscellaneous too- young- looking boys. Maude always sat with Weesie. The arrangement approached the security and protection of having a boyfriend. But Weesie was already seated at a table where every place was taken—and was in animated conversation. Maude looked desperately around. The tables were mostly full. Still remaining were places at an outer post where the absolute greasy- haired rejects sat. She spied an empty seat between two very cool boys not sitting at the coolie table. She took it and was punished with an uncomfortable lunch period of being ignored and talked across.
“You anine,” said one boy, leaning in front of her to punch the other boy’s shoulder.
The other boy dripped milk through his nostrils, laughing, and found that so funny he gave up his mouthful of chewed cake to his plate. “You douchebag,” he replied.
Maude made a note to include these in the glossary. “Noun form of asinine.” It was small recompense for the reminder of her nonentity and presumption.
The night before graduation, everyone was staying at school late to finish their projects, and a special van was scheduled for midnight to take the last stragglers home. Maude had finished her Bay Farm ethnography well before time but pretended not to have. For a while she sat in the barn studio, doodling, in purple, pictures of dreamy longhaired boys. Around her, less dreamy- looking creatures rubbed at woodcuts and sanded carvings and cursed at slashes and thumped thumbs from impatiently wielded razors and hammers.
Outside, the sky was indigo, with a last band of paleness at the edge of the western horizon. The outlines of bushes were visible in spilled light from windows, and trees were solid and rustling against the dark sky. The pale, pompom- like blossoms of a bush outside the library smelled intensely of cinnamon. Maude felt that love must be very near, just waiting for her to fall into it.
From the pop hut she could hear “Eleanor Rigby,” which had reconciled her to the Beatles. It was about something. She strolled toward the muted tune, which died suddenly, leaving the sound of crickets. It had been hot earlier, and the night air moved at exactly the temperature of another body against her. She felt her naked breasts inside the thin cotton of the little dress she had made, the coolness of grass along her sandaled feet. Two cigarette ends glowed illicitly. Why isn’t it me, she wondered.
Inside the scruffy shack, boys were passing a pint bottle that could get them expelled on the spot. Maude pretended not to see, turning toward the propped- open window, where she met her reflection in the angled glass. She had taken to parting her hair along the center. I’m beautiful, she thought, amazed. Her arms rested on the declivity above her hips, and she imagined a man’s hands there, discovering that sharp inward curve that no one else had touched, recognizing her in her most private self.
This was what she’d always wanted: recognition of who she was.
A tall senior with deep sideburns and twinkly John Lennon- ish wire- rims shambled in. Seeing Maude, the only female, he went to her corner and stood an inch from her.
“Wanna go for a smoke?”
She could smell the sour, suggestive scent of liquor in his breathy undertone, and pungent, almost tasty marijuana. They walked in silence a long way into a rustling field, far enough so that when they stopped and turned, the yellow lights and the silhouetted school buildings looked like a postcard, Maxfield Parrish, innocently unaware of them. She accepted the illicit cigarette, grounds for expulsion, struggling to appear to inhale, putting up with the acridness on her palate. Looking at the boy, looking away when he looked back. Under their feet the crushed grasses released a flowery essence.
Nothing had prepared her. For all the fantasizing, observing, and imagining, nothing had prepared her. Not for the wet slip- periness of kissing or, even less, for the current it generated in unrelated spots, leaping in her womb and licking at her crotch and burning there like honey, making her want to push against the knob offered behind the cloth of his pants. His hands on her breasts intensified the surge. When he met no resistence, he inserted his warm hands up through her dress and she felt the softness of her own breasts as fire between her legs, and when he sucked her nipples, felt she would do anything to satisfy the surge of yearning that erupted and made her have to suppress something in her throat. She didn’t know what satisfaction could be, so surprising, so flabbergasting was each subterranean tug on her parts.
To lie down he had to let go a moment, and she felt a chill where his hands had been, where his mouth had been. The dis- appointment, momentary, was nevertheless so sharp she could have hit him. When his hand wandered into her underwear she felt, first, the astounding shock of being naked to someone. Like being in one of those dreams where you are in public and realize you have no clothes on. Only, in this dream, the next realization was that the public approved. It was all right.
That was before something of keening sweetness—but, yet, with a tang of salt akin to tears coming or the urgency of a full bladder—led to her inner vision’s being engulfed in spattering sparks and sparkles. Some part of her knew this was his fingers on her, but that wasn’t where her mind was. She let it go dark, absent, a backdrop for the sparkles the touch of him on her generated.
She didn’t think of touching him except to clasp him to her. He was just the opacity between her and the sky, the wandering warmness between her ass and the cool, silky grass. He was the fu
r of his sideburns, and horse breaths. She didn’t think of his penis or its state inside his jeans, where he kept it; she did not consider his satisfaction, which he may or may not have had. It was sheerly the new wonder of touching skin, of her skin being touched, of its being allowed, of its being exciting to someone else.
Surprise gradually yielded to a softer stroking and bumping pleasure and then amazement all over again, on the surface of her skin, in tingling, in a sticky pressure her tongue demanded. Time disappeared.
In later life, when satisfaction is available and availed of, nothing would be as exciting as this mere touching, this limited exposure that feels more naked than literal nakedness, more dangerous, even, than the far more intimate embrace of wet inner flesh.
They heard the muted bell like a distant cry, like their own complaint at stopping. They stood up, leaning together, brush- ing themselves down, flicking off strands of scattered hay, and walked toward the lights. At the edge of the field they glued themselves together a last time.
With startling swiftness, like a safety curtain shooting down at a cry of fire, Maude was suddenly bored. She would never see him again after tomorrow. She let him hold her waist, the very spot she’d longed to have known, as they walked into the light. She felt companionable—grateful. She let him kiss her lightly on the lips in front of everyone. He was driving home, but she told him it was better for her to take the van. “See you tomorrow, babe,” he said hotly into her ear.
Maude had been correct in feeling she was about to fall in love. But it wasn’t with Mr. Sideburns. It wasn’t with a person. It was with the place. She had wanted the place, welcomed it, had a kind of crush on it, but it was only in the lush, teary, piercingly lovely scenes that were its final embrace for those departing that she encountered the rich solidity of this feeling that left its possessor more vulnerable.
The girls fluttered over the green lawns in long dresses. The daughter of a diplomat who’d served in India appeared in a shocking- pink sari that looked at home with her straight blonde hair and pink cheeks. Weesie wore a gown in wild purple and turquoise. “Is that a real Pucci?” girls kept asking, giving her the opportunity to reply, “Yes. A real Pucci nightgown.” Her hilar- ity was self- mocking. But no one joined in the mockery—they admired her cleverness and her thinness swathed in curlicues. Maude wished she had been so clever—and yet she didn’t like Pucci and loved what she herself was wearing, wasp- waisted gauze from an antique shop a bunch of them had gone to together.
It was such a drag not having mainstream tastes—not even elite mainstream tastes! It wasn’t a matter of feeling different, inappropriate, left out—or of feeling jealous. It wasn’t so simple as approval or its absence. The bunch of girls had insisted on her buying this dress, because it so suited her. But she could see how at home they felt with Weesie’s choice, as if it better expressed themselves than their own choices did, while Maude they built a fence around, like an exhibit, exhaling as if she were holy.
But this was only a moment in a day that, for once, tended to obliterate the tensions of being separate people, people with skewed visions and disparate destinies. The sheer prettiness of everything, of themselves, made them each feel a movie- starrish sense of being adored through every eye. They all felt daring. They dared show themselves as desirable young women. Maude’s peach slip was visible through the lace- trimmed web; another girl wore a yellow empire nightgown she had also decided could pass for a dress; a couple glittered or shone in old evening gowns of their mothers’. The very atmosphere seemed to be of that naked- in- public dream where it was strangely all right, as if the school really were a lover.
“Like butterflies,” said Mr. Patrick, passing a group of them. “You’ve come out of your winter cocoons and you’re butterflies.”
They waited for him to pass before they rolled their eyes at one another. Feeling beautiful but as if they needed to brush something off.
Weesie flew away for the a cappella performance by the madrigal group she’d joined, a chiffon shawl trailing from her thin arms. The chorus assembled in two rows before the flock of parents on folding chairs and underclassmen cross- legged or leaning back on their elbows on the grass. All attention was on the two rows of singers, who might have been chosen for their Pre- Raphaelite beauties: hair wafting in the soft breeze off the plashing Sound, an armload of golden frizz next to Weesie’s sparkling pale orange next to swirling black and a satin curtain of chestnut; the fluttering Easter- egg- colored dresses, the boys’ earnest, concentrating faces under swept- aside bangs, the sheet music like bird wings—all were a decorative display whose only purpose was pleasure.
But a pleasure so transitory, as ephemeral as the girls’ dresses were ethereal, that it was a melancholy pleasure, melting like the harmonies that went swiftly from major to minor, lingering in inexplicably tragic tones over phrases like “Rejoice in our happy, happy loves” and dying on the moist air.
Maude was crying as one by one the graduating seniors stood up, tall and jerky, swift and confident, dimpling, diffident, to accept their diplomas and a hug in their ribbons or flounces or, among the boys, in the first dashikis any of the audience had seen or wearing the occasional muslin peasant shirt with their jeans instead of the standard oxford. As she furtively ran her finger under her eyes, she saw Weesie doing the same—yet grinning.
Weesie shrieked as the ceremony ended, “Here it is! The rehearsal for the Big One. The first of the long goodbyes!”
“It’s not a funeral,” said Maude, scandalized. She wanted things to be the way they were supposed to be. She wanted to believe. She was not the same person as the author of her scath- ing study. “It’s called commencement, for God’s sake.”
“They get to commence: fucking, LSD—”
Weesie’s welcoming mockery was irresistible. “Living away from home,” Maude joined in.
“But we alone survive.” Weesie’s lit class had done Moby Dick a year early. “It is a funeral. It’s the first harbinger.”
This felt as piercing as the day’s beauty and as undeniable. “How can you know that?” She looked sidelong at Weesie’s comical expression—eyebrows lifted, freckled lips smacking as if it were satisfying to know all life’s losses in advance. This was what she was keyed up for. And Maude, who hated the holy fence other people built around her, couldn’t help adding a rail to the one she had set up around Weesie’s specialness, which seemed to her greater.
The rest of the day and evening passed in a jumble of tears and hugs, of coq au vin eaten while parents made polite conversation in the refectory and their children tried to pretend not to know these living embarrassments, of shrieks and kisses as people who would never get in touch with one another exchanged addresses, and a general breaking up into groups as parents were urged to go home, go away. But the students were being made to go away too as the campus was closed up, so that the groups gravitated to different houses, cramming in with whomever had a car to take them there. As faces streamed by in the dark, Danny Stern’s, smiling garishly, cried, “C’mon. Come over. A bunch of us are going.” He grabbed Maude’s mesh- covered arm.
His father drove them, in a stoic or apathetic silence, in his Cadillac, and vanished upon arrival.
Danny, like the largest proportion of the students, lived not on a socialites’ estate but in a rich suburb, where one large, land- scaped house followed another down muted, tree- lined streets. Each house was like a Hollywood set for a costume drama. There was mock tudor, “colonial,” Spanish- inflected stucco with wrought iron, a front porch from Tara. They presented history in a manner so tamed it was the same as being forgotten. It obliter- ated the real history that was there, the thirty years over which the houses had been built in incarnation of families’ American Dreams. Danny’s was brick, with white shutters.
The students shuffled up a graveled driveway where a lawnboy (black) held a lantern (electric), past azalea bushes rounded by pruning. The last blossoms, stickily fallen onto the gravel, adhered to t
he visitors’ sandaled soles. The Bay Farmers trooped into an entrance hall too small for its grandiose double staircase and chandelier, which was endangered by the head of one of the taller boys.
They proceeded on, sinking into the dense wall- to- wall car- peting that exactly matched an excess of squarish upholstered couches, chairs, ottomans, loveseats, and an immense TV. Someone flicked it on. “Turn the sound off,” said someone else. Unnatural colors blared and were replaced by the black and white of an old movie, though with magenta and acid green vibrating at the edges, as if the technology could not help showing off, being expensive and new. Someone switched the channel to a show Maude had not known was in color. There was a chorus of no’s, and it was switched back.
As people goofed on the old movie, providing lines for the silenced action, Maude found a bathroom. The sink’s faucet was a giant swan, wings spread, the water gushing from its brass beak. The walls were covered in metallic patterned paper. A brass bowl made to look like a shell held soaps also neatly molded into shells, the same aqua and peach as the rank of terrycloth “guest towels” monogrammed in metallic thread. Poor Danny! She cringed inwardly, embarrassed for him, as if Milt were over her shoulder, viewing it all with contempt.
But she might have saved the humiliation for herself. As she crossed the thick carpeting, she heard, “He made out with Maude Pugh? You’re kidding. How’d he have the nerve? Weesie Herrick I could see. She’s funny. But Maude Pugh is scary.”
She didn’t want to be scary. She didn’t think of herself as scary. She didn’t recognize the voice, but it seemed to be saying she should keep to herself.
3.
