Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  “Why would he call her and not you guys? And why wouldn’t she tell you?”

  “Not if he doesn’t want her to. He would never call my father, never. And, I don’t know. He hates me.”

  “Maude.”

  “No, he really does. It’s weird. He was nice to me when I was little, and I used to try to stop Milton from, you know—doing mean things to him—”

  “Milton mean?”

  “Oh—he probably doesn’t mean to be. He just doesn’t notice anything for incredibly long times and then, whomp, you get in his way and he’s ready to, like, kill.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I guess he seems like someone who would never get angry. He seems so floating above it all. But he has this—you can’t believe his temper. I mean, short fuse does not describe it. He even killed my cat.”

  “He killed your cat?”

  “It was an accident. It was me he was angry at.”

  “What was he angry at you for?”

  “He was pounding Seth, and I called him a bastard. Milt, that is.”

  “And he killed the cat?”

  “He was chasing me, and the cat was like sitting there, and he kicked her. She hit the brick wall, you know, the chimney. It was really awful. She just lay there with her eyes open and blood coming out her mouth.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “He said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ like really disgusted, and left us to clean it up. Seth helped me bury her anyway. Oh, poor Ghostly. That was her name. She was white.”

  A log, burnt through, shifted with a spray of sparks and settled once again to a steady crackling.

  “I can’t believe I’m telling you. I never talk about this stuff.”

  “It’s pretty, I don’t know, incredible. Your parents always seem really sweet with you.”

  “Well, it’s not as if I’m making this up. Why do you think Seth left?”

  “So, what did you mean he hates you?”

  “Oh, it’s just—like when I used to come home from school, I’d try to get into my room without him seeing me. Not that he wouldn’t come into my room. I used to beg my parents to let me have a lock on my door, beg them.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He just really, really hurt me. Like he’d grab me and twist my arms so that—I can’t describe it, I guess. I always thought something was about to break. I even heard cracks; I’m not kidding. Sometimes I blacked out. That scared him. Once, he got my head between the wall and my dresser and pressed, and I guess I stopped breathing or something. I really thought that was it. And it was so weird: one minute he’s trying to kill me and the next, we’re sitting there; I’m holding my throat—it’s so awful when you just can’t get air. He said I was blue. He’s like staring at me. And that’s the thing: it felt as if we were in this conspiracy together. He’s trying to kill me, but in this weird way, I’m still on his side. I can’t explain it. I don’t think I even told my parents. Not that it would have made any difference.”

  “I wish I could meet him.”

  This made perfect sense to Maude. Weesie had seen the impressive tape collection and heard of Seth’s participation in Freedom Summer, his summer jobs as a migrant worker picking cherries, then peaches, and working his way north to apples just before he had to go back to school. It was easy to imagine him in some gorgeous wreck of an apartment in a broken-down neigh-borhood in Brooklyn or Hoboken, or in some tough waterfront hotel maybe, letting his mother know that he was still alive, was all right, but swearing her to secrecy or she would never hear from him again. Apprenticing himself to a bookbinder or working on the docks or something.

  Maude was only away a few weeks, and nothing in Milt’s letters hinted at anything amiss. It was always Milt who had written the rare times she had been away. The one summer she was at camp, when she was so young she couldn’t read, he had sent letters that were mostly pictures—him climbing up a ladder with a nestling he’d found in the grass; the nest with the other baby birds, beaks gaping; a toad with which he’d been rewarded for making one of his coerced attempts on the lawn; a picture of his brother, Maude’s uncle, who had come by with his loud wife, Marjory; a picture of Maude’s teddy bear, Rusty, who missed her, he said, so much that the thread holding his chest together was coming undone.

  His two letters to Maine were more grown-up but showed a similar consideration for her concerns, something that didn’t happen when she was around. He told her they finally had tomatoes from the garden and that if, when she got back, she wanted to paint her room, he’d pay for the paint. It was Milt the good father who wrote, as if letters made love safer.

  He’d always offered this kind of care to Seth. Seth’s interests had prestige. Milt built them up, if anything. Then he hated Seth for losing interest and disappointing him.

  Standing in the comfortably blowsy old-fashioned Maine kitchen that looked out at an overturned boat being repaired, Maude was so moved that her guard fell and she forgot to worry. It was like being cradled in comfort. This momentary lack of vigilance so frightened her by what might have happened—she was like a nervous passenger who believes that she must pay attention every second to keep the plane in the air—that her anxiety surged back with full force. She could feel the sensation—like squirrels chasing each other through her chest—of her heart missing beats, and the fear inflating her belly.

  Yet she swam in the freezing water; took sweaty, apparently pointless hikes; fell in love with meadows of wildflowers; was baffled at why waiting for clams to roast on a damp chilly beach with sand getting into your shorts was supposed to be fun, and was equally baffled at why, afterward, it seemed to have been fun; could at no time be coaxed into a sailboat; and loved lying in the dark in the spool bed, in a room that smelled of old wood, talking to Weesie in the four-poster.

  No one wore perky matching outfits except the tourists they saw when they went into town. Maude’s instinct for what was acceptable had not been far off—a preference for the worn and the casual prevailed, as at Bay Farm—but she was not practically equipped: her cheap acrylic sweater was as useless for keeping warm as it was nasty to touch; her grayed, delightfully hole-ridden sneakers wobbled and slid on steep trails; and her paint-stained sweatshirt was a bit much, looking either grubby or ostentatiously arty. Everyone had suede hiking boots that laced over hooks and peculiar shoes whose lower halves were ribbed rubber—so ugly that Maude felt, when she saw them, they surely couldn’t mean it. Then she wanted a pair. In one of her tiny sundresses, with the rebozo she had saved to buy in Greenwich Village, she had looked, at an outdoor chamber music concert, unself-consciously to the manor born.

  Then she came back to the manor she was born to.

  As she was dropped off, the usual children were drooling and pummeling each other in the crabgrassless lawns of the houses all around, while teenage girls on towels glazed like rotisserie meats basted with Coppertone. At the verge of their own dandelion-studded lawn, only her father’s van rested like an obedient elephant by the curb in front of the pricker bush and green-apple-filled tree.

  A class was letting out as she walked in. Departing housewives turned their teased heads to look back at the master counseling a woman who was explaining that she just couldn’t make charcoal work: “It doesn’t do anything fa me.” She had the kind of New York accent that was starting to be called a g’Island accent, after people who glued together the g and I of Long Island, Long- gylind. Matching the bright shirt she wore was a perky hemmed triangle of cotton, tied over her ears at the back of her neck.

  As soon as he got the last of them out and closed the pink front door, Milt’s face, affable and wise, crumpled. It was like the stock shot of demolition where an apartment building folds in upon itself and silently bursts into clouds of dust. He fell on Maude’s shoulders, gasping and weeping.

  “Daddy?”

  She didn’t have to be told. She knew what she’d really known for weeks, and somehow he hadn’t—that Nina was leaving them, slipp
ing away. It wasn’t Seth coming back; it was Nina leaving. Bearing the unbearable weight of her father, her shoulder wet, Maude could see the vegetable plot, which once again looked like an extention of the uncut field beyond. He hadn’t weeded the garden. She’d said to keep it weeded. Her hands rested uneasily on his thin, shaking back. His bottomless need for sympathy and reassurance and his equally bottomless contempt would, now, fall all on her.

  PART III

  1.

  IT WAS A geodesic dome, its many faces made of old car doors welded together, their original colors intact, some shiny, some dull: orangey, turquoise, pale green, flat gray—colors no one was making cars in anymore. The welds looked like bluish, shiny, badly healed scars. Maude ran her finger along one as she hesitated in a yard messy with pottery wind chimes, a picnic table improvised from an electric-company spool, planters made from the giant cans army-surplus peanut butter came in, and a large vegetable garden that bore little relation to the one from which Maude was taking the final orderly harvest. This one had no rows; it was sprawled with zinnias and other random flowers, and guarded by several inventive scarecrows that tended to be taken as lurking people at first glance. One wore, or was, a suit, with Clark Kentish black glasses—a sarcastic scarecrow. Her mother, who thought that to be around rich people your clothes had to match, was living here? Maude knocked on the metal, which, by itself, already ticked in the October sun. Cornstalks grew to either side of the ugly scrap-wood door.

  Annoyingly, the song that had been a hit that summer, which Weesie and Maude had sung along to in the car, collapsing in giggles, would not stop going through Maude’s head: it said to put flowers in your hair, to be a part of the Summer of Love, in a voice so syrupy it had to be cynical. Maude had loved maidenish flowers in long hair before they were a hippie cliché or, anyway, before hippies were a cliché.

  It had certainly been a summer of love, for some people.

  Nina burst through the door. “Oh, Maudie, Maudie. Thank you for coming.”

  Inside, the dome was oddly dark—odd because plexiglass hexagons appeared at intervals among the metal ones, overhead and at every height, one so low it showed scrubby grass and insects, next to which a cat sat poised, twitching. The effect of the curving walls and small, unpredictable windows was unsettling and unhomelike, outerspacy yet claustrophobic, no doubt a perfect illustration of the unheimlischbecause reminiscent of the original home, the womb. It was as hot as an attic.

  Nina, her hair in two gray-streaked braids, shyly indicated a shadowy corner—if anything could be called a corner—near the mattress on the floor. “Rod built it all himself, just this year.”

  Rod Patrick came forward, aggressive belly first, his face red above the beard, though only from heat. “Hi, Maudie.”

  “Only my father calls me Maudie.”

  Nina swiveled away. She got something out of another dark niche and placed it on a tray she had ready to take outside. “I make my own yogurt,” she announced. So pleased to have made something herself.

  “That’s great, Mom. Did someone give you a culture or you just start with Dannon?”

  “Oh,” she said sadly, “you know all about it.”

  “Well,” Maude said, helplessly apologetic, “some kids in evening rec were making it. They’re even trying cheese. They had to get rennet. Did you know there was stuff in cheese from a cow’s stomach?”

  “Your mother was thinking of trying cheese,” said Rod Patrick.

  Maude ignored this, taking the tray from her mother’s hands and stepping into the breathable air outside. “You want it here?” she said, setting it on the electrical spool. It had been spread with an old tablecloth Maude recognized. That cloth had always been folded in a trunk in her parents’ closet, full of stuff no one used. The pattern showed a trellis covered with nasturtium, like a message about a neat, decorative world.

  The yogurt, just made, was in a big mayonnaise jar, still warm, with little bubbles that had jelled at the top. Fresh pickling cucumbers were sliced into a bowl of the kind that was becoming an icon of the nation of hippiedom, hand-thrown in a less than perfect round, with an external surface like a day-old beard, its thick sides glazed in unshiny earth tones. A similar bowl held applesauce. “I made it,” said Nina, seeing Maude’s gaze.

  “What’s come over you, Mommy?” She narrowed the range of her query: “I thought you hated cooking.”

  “Maybe your mother just needed someone to believe she could do something,” said Rod, swaggering out and planting himself near the table. “Maybe she needed to know something was worth doing besides trying to be an artist in terms The New York Times can understand.”

  “Don’t you mention my father. Don’t allude to him. If you want Nina to have the—. I won’t see her. Do you understand?”

  She muttered to the side, but audibly, “Anine.”

  Nina twisted on her seat, knuckles against her cheek, Bernini updated. Rod touched her averted shoulder and left his big hand there as though to protect her from Maude. “It’s all right,” Nina choked out. She swallowed ostentatiously, demonstratively. Then she pulled herself together. All dignity, a little stern, the braids over the front of her blue scoop-necked leotard giving her the look of a member of a Plains tribe in a painting by Remington, Nina held a bowl toward Maude, who sat and took it. Despite Nina’s display in rising above hurt, rising above the hurt was about the most grown-up thing Maude had seen her mother ever do.

  “I see,” said Rod, sitting heavily. “Business as usual.”

  Maude raked him up and down with her black-olive eyes. It was exhilarating to be able to hate someone without reservation, without obligations. She enjoyed hating Rod Patrick.

  “The applesauce is great, Ma.”

  Nina told her about the apples, too lumpy and bug-bitten to eat uncooked but more delicious than any that could be bought once made into a sauce, from an ancient tree, an artifact of a defunct farm, discovered in some scrubby eastern Long Island woods.

  2.

  MILT MIGHT OR might not have been an artist in terms The New York Times could understand, but the sales to the Herrick connections were having their effect. His pictures hung among Mondrians and Rine-harts, Alberses and Klees, in the houses of people who bought serious art and where other buyers of these rarefied objects saw them and where, it was seen, the Pughs looked at home with the Mondrians, Alberses, Rineharts, and Klees. They fit right in—though Milt much preferred them in the museum of his house, emerging spacelessly from black walls. But he could not demand that his customers paint their houses black and hang nothing but Pughs.

  It was no surprise that a show emerged out of this, a one-man Fifty-seventh Street gallery show. It was the kind of thing that just “happened”—people talked at a party, and the artist’s name was heard at another party; then people wondered why they didn’t know about this much-talked-about artist and why they hadn’t heard of him before; and this was connected to a sense of uneasiness about whether they were, at that moment, part of the in crowd or had been deluded all along about being part of it; and then the artist was no longer an obscurity but rather a mystery, which they believed it in their power to solve. They could be among the discoverers. They could be one of the people who knew him first, who bought a Pugh way back when, when no one had heard of him. Except them and their friends, people who bought art.

  Milt was introduced to a famous gallery owner. It was at a party. She was a woman who’d had a little money and lots of luck, and who, in exchange for the money and renown her artists brought her, was generous to them, and so her fame grew as artists flocked to her. She leveled on Milt’s saleable looks her assessing gaze. That distinguished white mane, she thought, that height, that skinniness like Giacometti without being so tubercular-looking or unhealthily intense.

  Her assessment rapidly kindled to warmth. In its glow, her artists
tended to forget business was involved at all; so grate-ful, they would forgive anything: they were collecting tens of thousands: what did they care that it was only fifty percent of what their creations brought?

  Milton, introduced to the gracious, polished lady with the short, expensive haircut, was not so self-destructive as to remind her that for years he had sent her his dearly purchased, unre-turned slides, or that he had been introduced to her before by an art-school classmate of his who had done well but not quite well enough. He bowed slightly—maybe the bow was a little sarcastic, just a little, but who was to say?—and said he was so pleased to meet the legendary——-. He behaved like gentle-folk. Because in a way he was. And he was pleased to meet her. Again. Though it could truthfully be said that it was the first time she met him

  It would be a small show, just the back room. The gallery was really booked for the next two years; she was shoehorning him in. Because she was so excited about his work. His work was so exciting. It was hard-edgy without that tapey, machined look; it had a little op without, thank God, being op, which had become passé almost as quickly as it was snapped up to copy for dress fabrics: Pughs were oppy without being, so to speak, go-go-esque. They were minimalist, maybe even color-fieldy (despite the tiny size—had he done any larger work?) without being, she didn’t like to use that word, but, barren. There was something reas-suringly old in feeling about them, as if she had discovered an unknown early modernist, and yet it was so—modern. Making no gesture toward gesture, it yet had the feel of hands’ having touched it. Devoid of imagery, with only incidental, accidental signs of brushwork, it was yet unmistakably human. It felt believed in. It was solid.