Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  THE GARDEN WAS the best part of that summer. However, as Maude learned to love its sun-warmed earth sinking under her naked feet and the discovery of swelling zucchini in green light under umbrellalike leaves where, the day before, there had been only a nub, it became her main point of contact with Nina and then, as such, the unbearable embodiment of the summer’s events.

  “Daddy? Where’s Mommy? She’s never around these days. What’s she doing?”

  Milton looked at his fierce, wandlike daughter and had the fleeting thought that it was kind of too bad he didn’t do naturalistic work. She stood inside the screen door like a representation of bounty, but Ceres crossed pleasingly, if confusingly, with virginal Athena and, uncompromisingly, herself, her long hair scrolled at the back of her head and trapped with a barrette so that the ends of it flared upward, her skin brown, her cheeks pink from heat, her arms overflowing with silky lettuces of pale green tinged red at the edges and a pile of pea pods whose threadlike ends and stems coiled like the curls nature hadn’t given Maude, as if they wanted to decorate and soften her. Clutched against her radishy chest were also a handful of leafy radishes, the dirt turning pale and tan on their hard, white-streaked, rosy curves.

  “I thought I’d make a salad for dinner.” She was doing most of the cooking.

  “Yes,” he said as if he were answering a different question from the one she’d asked, “you look like a salon painting.”

  “A salad painting?” Exasperated, she stepped around him where he stood at the foot of the stairs. “It’s not to look at, it’s to eat,” she said, as if to deny the vegetable beauty of which she herself had said to Weesie, “It’s so gorgeous, I want to roll in it. I want to, you know, fuck it.” They giggled, fuck still a forbidden mystery. “I go out there in the morning and I could practically cry. They’re like babies growing in there.” That was what she had said. But that couldn’t be shared with Milt.

  Nina came in as Milt and Maude were at the blond wood table enjoying the salad—they did enjoy the salad. She was wearing a denim wraparound skirt and a dreamy smile. She seemed not to see them even as she said hello and wafted past, stopped, came back, sat and folded her arms on the table and laid her cheek on them.

  “Mommy? Are you—are you stoned?”

  Nina popped up from her ragdoll lassitude as if transformed into a jack-in-the-box, laughing, laughing. “I’m just, I’m just naturally high,” she gasped, wiping tears away. Milt joined in the laughter.

  “I don’t see what’s so goddamned funny,” said Maude. That brought up new gusts. “You—shitheads,” she said, standing up.

  “Oh.” Nina gulped. “You’re like a stern mo-mo-mo-mother.”

  Pretending to ignore her mother, tossing the black satin curtain of her hair back with one hand as if she were flipping the bird, Maude flounced down the black hallway and slammed her unsatisfactory door: hollow-core, it barely made a thud. She opened it again to call, “And I’m painting my room. White,” and thudded it again, kicking it for good measure. She threw herself into her pillow. No one would come in to comfort her. She felt she’d already lost her parents, that her family had dissolved. She alone survived. I didn’t do anything, she thought, flipping over and staring at the ceiling, the only light surface, where she could sometimes picture faces and odd mutating tableaux. They don’t care about me. They only care about themselves.

  “They don’t care about me” pricked a gush of tears, salty and slightly relieving the pressure that felt as if her chest and head were filled with saltwater. “They don’t love me” released a better torrent. It was strange how comforting the thought was, a relief.

  In the past, if Maude was upset, Nina had made helpless mewing sounds and looked distressed, her hands dangling like rabbit paws. But Maude had often comforted her mother, cuddled to her as Milton cut into Seth with sarcasm or railed at the unfairness of life. And now Nina was running around at all hours and laughing at her and saying Maude was like a stern mother.

  In the tiny box of a house, Maude could hear the kitchen sink running and the clank of the dishes being washed. She heard Nina’s giddy, oblivious laugh and felt a flash of hatred. She thought of something cruel she could say, about Seth. None of them ever said his name, as if they had agreed to the injunction without need for discussion. She clicked open her door: silence from the kitchen. It was easy to be noiseless as she padded over the linoleum tiles; underneath, the floor was a cement slab. In the kitchen, Milt had Nina clenched to him as she dangled dreamily, her new vague smile, less anxious but as evasive as ever, melting over her lips as his hand cupped one breast.

  Maude dashed back to her room.

  If anyone had been watching, it would have looked parodic, the way she grabbed brushes and hurled herself at the easel she had set up in the tiny black room. She was glad no one could see. She jabbed violent colors onto the canvas she had brought from school, impastoed strokes molded into expressive, expressionistic figures. As she slowed down, pausing, late in the night, long after her parents had gone to sleep—they at one point called good-night down from their room like obedient if mischievous children—she became aware that the picture was startlingly better than those she’d made with more care. It seemed a betrayal of her own sense of being betrayed to notice this, a mere aesthetic consequence. Once she’d had the thought, she couldn’t go on. She watched the bright, lurid picture a while as though it would tell her, now that she’d given it life, what she felt, who she was, what it all meant, stirring the stiff-bristled brushes against the bottom of the can, which still advertised Pomadori Pelati though filled with turpentine, in which color rose like mud.

  Unwilling to go to bed, as if she wanted someone to tell her to, and uninterested, for once, in reading, she slid open her closet and sat on the floor in front of her improvised dollhouse, setting up the doll family in scenes of serene domesticity until the first piercing cheep promised dawn.

  4.

  DOES YOUR MOTHER—? Has she ever—? I mean, it’s like, it’s as if Nina isn’t here even when she’s here.”

  “God—I wish. My mother, it doesn’t matter what she’s doing; it’s, like, she’s on me.”

  “Really? She seems so—polite.”

  “Yeah. She does it in a polite way.”

  “I always think you have all this, like, great privacy.”

  “Mm.”

  “I don’t know.” Maude exhaled from deep within. “I mean, who cares; it’s, like, my mother, right? I should be glad.”

  “No. I know what you mean. I think. I mean, my father. I mean, he’s Mr. Absent While Present.”

  Maude was too polite, herself, to agree.

  “Not that he’s present all that often.”

  “Your father scares me,” said Maude, thinking of the gray-suited figure she had seldom seen. Once, when looking for Mary Jane, she had peered into the wing that contained the master-bedroom suite, and Mr. Herrick had been standing there, silvery and forbidding, and had asked her what she wanted with an air that told her she had no right to be there.

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Also.” Maude had dragged the heavy black phone from the kitchen counter as far as it would stretch into the hall and pulled the curly cord of the receiver taut to get it into her room. She checked to make sure the door was really closed over the obstruction of the vinyl wire. “There have been these hangups. Like, I pick up the phone and I can hear, like—”

  “Breathing?”

  “No, it’s not like that. I mean, someone’s there but not, you know, panting and—gross, or anything. Just someone there, and then he hangs up. There’s a click and, like, I’m saying ‘Hello?

  Hello?’ Like a fool.”

  “He?”

  “That’s the thing. Once he said my mother’s name. Like ‘Neen?’

  You know, hopeful but not really sure.”

  “Jesus. And we were worried about—” Milt and Mary Jane. “Please. I f
eel awful enough.”

  “I’m sorry. Jesus, Maude, I’m really sorry. Oh, God. That’s really—well, can you—?”

  They offered a moment of silence to the potential gravity of the situation.

  “You didn’t recognize the voice or anything, did you?” Weesie went on.

  Long silence. “It did sound familiar. But I can’t, you know, figure out why.”

  “You really could use a vacation. It’s a good thing you’re coming with us to Deer Isle.”

  But as the time approached, it didn’t feel like a good thing. It felt like a bad thing, full of disquiet and apprehension, as if, if Maude let go of anything she was doing, everything would fall apart. She told Weesie, “I’m like obsessed with, you know, weeding the garden. Nina hasn’t been around and there are like new weeds every time I go out there.” She was hoping Weesie would say she couldn’t possibly abandon so important, so critical, a responsibility, as if it were a magical task in one of the fairy tales they both cooed over and were as precious about as if they were babysitting their own infant selves.

  But Weesie could not imagine Maude pulling the sprouts as a girl in a fairy tale—the one with the girl who has to collect nettles and spin them into thread to weave into cloth to sew into shirts to throw over the wings of her brothers to turn them back from swans into men, keeping silent the whole time or the magic won’t work. That was the way it was with magic, you couldn’t speak of it. So Weesie did not say in awed tones that of course Maude mustn’t let the weeds grow in the face of Nina’s dereliction—which would have been to say, really, that of course Maude had to keep her family together, bring back Seth, hold it all in herself for her own sanity and that this could, obviously, be accomplished by pulling weeds, by keeping up with them, keeping the black earth immaculate. She said, “So what?” And Maude could only, helplessly, agree; fighting down that physical sensation that yanked at her stomach and twisted her diaphragm, shameful fear.

  “And there’s, you know, my job.” Maude was working at a subminimum wage part-time at the local library, which was in a shopping center, between a cobbler’s and the five-and-dime.

  There was nothing Weesie could say to that. Maude was poor. Her income for the weeks away would be less than what other girls got for a month’s clothing allowance, and she would use it for textbooks and the school studio fee. Theoretically, Weesie was in love with such real-world constraints. But when it came down to it, she didn’t believe them: Maude couldn’t really have to work. It was a sort of game that made you more romantic, like walking around carrying a hardbound black notebook of unlined pages or outlining your eyes in kohl. Both of which, after all, Maude also did.

  “You don’t want to come.”

  “Of course I want to come.”

  “You’d rather pull weeds and shelve library books.”

  And Maude could feel it. The satisfying instant of release when you tugged a cluster of green to get at the thin pale roots gripping the soil beneath, which cling as the feet of mice will grip and cling if you try to lift them by the tail, the moment the whole plant top and bottom came free. She felt her fingers in the soil, warm for an inch or two, cool and secret beneath, delicious to the touch like anything warm and yielding, but also gritty, irritating beneath the nails and yet, again, satisfying to scrape away. The earth, at first cluttered with spikes and dots and bead-like clusters, cleared to yield a backdrop as color-enhancing as a black wall, highlighting the pattern of tomato plant or lettuce, the growing pile of intruders limp and then shriveling on the grass next to the garden bed. The pop and caress of the smells. You were goodness, doing this. You were the queen of creation. You were taken care of; you were mother. Early in the morning, sun on your arms, not too warm, a fearless nearby robin pulling up worms. Twilight, a cool current like water, fireflies. It seemed far too much to give up.

  And the library, so quiet, the only sounds for long stretches the standing fan’s throat-clearing and creak as it lurched to the far side of its half-rotation and started back the other way, lifting the same page, with the same barely audible rustle, on each pass. Maude felt the abstraction of pushing the wooden cart, scanning the soothingly orderly shelves, plunking a volume into its home slot, with a pleasure that was like sinking under water and discovering that you could still breathe. Yes, there too, you were taking care of things, you were putting the universe in order, and all would be the way it was supposed to be. It was a good magic.

  At the end of the story, the last shirt wasn’t finished, and one brother was left with a swan’s wing.

  “No, I don’t. I want to go to Maine.”

  “Just a minute. My mother wants to say something.”

  Maude heard some shuffling on the other end of the line. “Now, you’re coming with us,” said Mary Jane’s cool, plummy tones, “or you’ve got me to answer to. And that’s that.”

  Maude knew she was sunk then; there was no retreat. Mary Jane thought that she was a poor person being too embarrassed to accept bounty—and that was there too.

  “I’m looking forward to it, Mary Jane.”

  Sometimes Maude sounded like Mary Jane when she talked to her.

  The day before she was to leave, Maude complained to Nina that she didn’t know what to pack, that nothing she had was right. She never appealed to her mother in this way. Nina lit with delight, so that Maude felt almost ashamed of her ruse, guilty of not seeing her mother as a source of help.

  “It is dark in here,” said Nina as they stood leaning over Maude’s narrow bed, where clothes folded into smooth, flat squares were stacked by type, everything she would need.

  Nina made her rabbit paws of helplessness and distress and then chewed on a finger, looking harried and scared. Maude, lifting her hair off the back of her neck in the heat, thought: I shouldn’t have taken care of everything; I should have left something for Mommy to do.

  “Where’s your bathing suit?” said Nina, peering as though she might have overlooked it on the flat surface.

  “Oh, I’ll swim in cutoffs and a tank top.”

  “You have to have a bathing suit. What did you do to your old one?”

  “I outgrew it, Ma. I haven’t had one for a year.”

  Nina sank to the bed and put her face in her hands. At that moment, Milt came to the open door. In the second before his face changed he had a familiar look that expressed his satisfaction at having arranged his life so intelligently: a worshipful, eternally young wife; a clever, talented daughter; a house and land of their own; means to do his own work . . . Then he took in Nina’s abject posture. “What are you doing to her?” he growled at Maude and shoved her as if her proximity to Nina represented threat.

  “No—oh,” said Nina. “She doesn’t have anything decent. She’ll look like a ragamuffin. They’ll think we don’t take care of her.”

  Milton plucked up Maude’s tattered jeans and tossed them across the bed, toppling the piles. “Why didn’t you tell your mother you needed clothes? Hm? Why did you wait till the last minute?”

  Maude was crying. “I don’t need them. We can’t afford them. I just wanted—”

  “Don’t you treat your mother this way! Don’t you do this to her!” He shook his finger in Maude’s face. “Always think you’re smarter than everybody else! You’re not so smart. You don’t know what you do or don’t need.”

  They heard students arriving at the front door. Milt shot Maude a threatening look and went out.

  Maude let herself be taken shopping, not at Roosevelt Field, festival of bad taste and cheapness that was familiar and safe, but at the Fifth Avenue department stores and boutiques of the North Shore’s Miracle Mile, where she finally had to choose something just to forestall purchases of the inappropriate things her mother seemed to want to see her in. Nina held up one crisp, perky matching outfit after another, urging her horrified daughter to try them on. Yet even as Maude reluctantly accepted the hanger from which dangled a lime green piqué shorts set, Nina moaned about the price. The forbidding price
s let Maude off the hook of her mother’s desires, but she didn’t dare look at the things she really wanted, which cost just as much. She just hoped that Nina would somehow insist on those very things. They did come away with a rather opulently sexy bikini fashioned out of purple velveteen. What she most needed was socks, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She would wear Weesie’s clothes.

  “Forgive me?” said Nina, pulling up in front of their mass-produced house and stopping the little car with a jerk.

  “Ma.”

  Nina’s face puckered, hurt and uncomprehending. “Kiss and make up,” she whimpered.

  Maude leaned across the seat and brushed her mother’s cheek. It was soft, with a new slackness. Maude immediately got out of the car.

  “Don’t forget your suit,” Nina moaned, brandishing the bag with its arched handles, restrained logo, susurrus of tissue.

  There was another fight over the suitcase. There was no suit-case. Then Milt got out a heavy, boxy thing with his father’s initials on it. Maude liked its ruched satin pockets inside, the leather stitched around the awkward handle, and the fact that it looked like a prop from a 1930s movie. “Exactly,” Nina said. But they let her take it. They had nothing better to offer.

  “Thank you, Mommy,” Maude said, clinging a little too hard and too long, so that Nina pulled away with a girlish laugh, holding her hands free.

  “Have a nice time, dear,” she said coldly, as if to lower the emotional temperature.

  Maude looked hard into her mother’s face, trying to fix her evasive eyes. “Don’t forget to weed the garden. Okay, Ma? Don’t forget.”

  Nina laughed unhappily.

  5.

  WHILE SHE WAS in Maine, Maude admitted what she had been afraid to hope and therefore to say: that the calls were from Seth.

  “You think your mother is, like, seeing him secretly?”

  They were hunched on the frayed oriental rug in front of the fire, which they had been feeding with pine cones for the crackle and burst of flame. Mary Jane and all the others in a shifting cast of guests had gone to bed. Maude wore a cashmere sweater left behind by some male visitor which, with her knees against her chest, she could pull down to the tops of her sneakers.