Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  Milton handed it to Maude to read and dropped the bill that came with it into the trash.

  “Daddy—what are you doing?”

  “Well, at prices like that, we’re certainly not sending you back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we can’t afford it.” With that, he turned and went up to his studio, where in moments the classical station and the happy scratching of brushes could be heard.

  He had recently discontinued a number of his classes. Though he had more than enough canvases for several shows, he was painting, with the upcoming show in mind, a group of pictures to hang together. He didn’t have to tell Maude that he was buying time with the painting sales, time for his own work. Still. There had to be more money. The school said so. They saw the tax returns.

  As when someone close to you dies, it takes a while, sometimes a long while, for the fact of this disappearance and absence to be believed as death, so Maude at first did not absorb the news that she would not be returning to Bay Farm. There wasn’t any something-else. Every once in a while she stopped herself, to make it real, to remind herself: she caught herself planning what she was going to do for her next Selected Work week and then remembered: right, I won’t be doing that; that won’t be happening. She fantasized what she would wear for graduation and then remembered. She thought of which teachers she had hoped to have for certain courses, which school jobs, evening programs, a certain person she had just begun a tentative friendship with—it was as if each element, large and small, had to be fondled and considered in detail for her to say goodbye—and she couldn’t say goodbye.

  One afternoon in the library, working the untrafficked check-out desk, she composed a letter on the library scratch paper (old notices Xeroxed on yellow paper, cut into eighths and stacked blank side up) with the stubby eraserless pencils the library supplied for jotting down call numbers. It addressed her headmaster, but it was a love letter to the school, or a eulogy. She wrote about what Bay Farm meant to her—what she had learned there, how great the people were, how she wished she were going back. She used a whole stack of the little chrome-yellow slips. Later, when she was typing out overdue notices, she typed the letter.

  She imagined the decision as all in the hands of the headmaster, a genial, ineffectual fellow who, in truth, putting his hands nervously in his pockets and looking away the few times he had spoken to her, found Maude Pugh discomfitingly intense and cosmopolitan. But she thought: a plea of love like that, surely they would forgive the tuition, make some arrangement, let her stay. Teachers—except the ones who couldn’t stand her—valued her, she knew it. She was practically a faculty stepchild! Faculty children went to the school free . . .

  Within hours of dropping it into the jaws of the blue metal mailbox, she wished she could pull the letter back.

  When an envelope came through the door, she felt a pang of fear and then a thumping, slightly nauseating relief that was almost the same as disappointment. The flimsy overseas envelope with its florid, exotic stamps was from Danny. She rushed into her room and lay on the bed with it against her chest until her heart slowed, as if she could absorb him through the paper. But she couldn’t wait to see what he had to say.

  “Oh, Maude, I miss you and love you,” it began. “I wish you could be here so I could share this with you in a real way,” his clear, flowing, fountain pen-blue script read. What he then described reminded Maude of films she had been shown in elementary school UNICEF programs, of African children with yaws. The surroundings had been dusty and squalid, the children crying or befuddled, their mothers impassive, the few men shown who weren’t doctors making sharp, angry gestures. She couldn’t imagine feeling welcome there, but Danny said it was amazing how friendly everyone was.

  Mostly the letter was about the other kids in the program and the leaders and—since it was written almost on arrival—about their twenty-hour trip on a cheap propellor-plane flight, followed by a ride in the back of an open truck with their frame knapsacks and duffel bags. “There’s only one word for a bunch of rich kids singing ‘I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More’ in the back of a truck on a barely existing track through an African jungle: surreal.” There had been a rat in the back of the truck, enormous, and they had shooed it out, shrieking and making cracks.

  Dear Danny,

  I can’t put enough into that “Dear.” It sounds so pathetic. I imagine the feeling of your skin, touching your cheeks, and then I can’t stop imagining, and so I’ve been in bed all afternoon, not sleeping. Sweaty. It’s incredibly hot here, and I try to think what it’s like there and if it’s even worse, and right away I’m with you under that mosquito net (I hope there’s a mosquito net and not with a hole in it—please don’t get malaria). Being there with you in my mind, it is hours before I come back to this room or the reality of this letter. The only reality we have right now. The only us. I feel as if, while you’re there, you’re so far away. Of course you are far away, but I mean you are going away while you’re there, changing, while I’m in the same place, not changing. I’ll try not to whine. It’s a sin to despair, I remember.

  Maude sat with her pen over the tissuey air-mail paper she had bought with her library money for writing to Danny. How could she convey the is ness of it all? What she wanted was to convey herself; transport herself. But should she even be writing? He thought she was a Bay Farmer, and she wasn’t. Just a girl from Levittown.

  The pen was slippery with sweat and humidity. At the library she had a fan, but in her room the wet, heavy air seemed part of the general oppression of the household. On a pad she added up the amount she would earn for the summer and subtracted it from the amount of tuition. It left over a thousand dollars. Two Milton Pugh paintings, she figured; one, maybe; but she couldn’t think how she could make the money. Which was really the only solution.

  She was embarrassed to tell Danny any of this. If he were there, she could tell him, and he would make up the difference by caring. But he seemed remote in more than miles. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe she’d made a fairy tale of him.

  She had written pages of longing for him in a letter already sent, which he probably had not yet received. She pushed down the weightless page. The sheet of ruled lines that considerately came with the stationery showed through clearly. She lifted her hand off the stationery and watched the lines cloud and become diffuse. She felt that it would take just nothing, the merest slip, for her to end up like the hapless painters Saul Partridge and Immerman. She’d always thought art would save her, if nothing else did. Maybe they had too.

  She had biked home from the library with groceries from the Grand Union in the shopping center and as usual made dinner for her father and herself. Planning meals and trying out new recipes offered the chief variation of her days, and she found herself focusing on it in the slow hours, looking at The New York Times Cook Book in the library, thinking about making a scallion soufflé with the onion grass that grew in the empty lot and wondering whether that would go well with the string beans dangling in the garden and looking up different ways to cook them. And then they ate the increasingly elaborate and accomplished meals in silence.

  "My goodness, look at that,” Milt said when she brought the soufflé to the table. She thought of soufflés as something fancy, upper-class and unknown. She hadn’t realized it was considered a bit of a triumph to get one to rise, particularly in a dented aluminum pot. She couldn’t understand why cooking had eluded her mother—all you had to do was follow the recipe. It was so much easier than art. It always turned out.

  “Well, Maude, you could be a professional chef if you wanted.”

  Maude looked as if she smelled something bad instead of steamy egg and baked Gruyère. He would never have said something like that to Seth—Seth who would be lucky to be able to be a chef. He’d be glad for Seth to carry on and be an artist, he wouldn’t regard Seth as competition . . . She didn’t let her eyes rise to her father’s gaze. Yes, he would like it if I were a cook. H
e wants me not even to try.

  It seemed dangerous to let him know her thoughts or anything she might want: he was sure to keep her from having something, if he thought she wanted it. Seth always said what he wanted and he always wanted too much. With big fights, he got much of what he wanted in the end. But with her, she only got what she wanted if she kept it a secret.

  Nevertheless, she let out, “I don’t want. As you know.”

  Though it was even more perverse than that, what happened inside her. It suddenly seemed glamorous to be a professional chef, attractive; and at the same time an utter attack on her that he should suggest it; that he saw her that way.

  That was the first time he called her the Ice Princess. As in, “Well. The Ice Princess speaks. Not good enough for you, is it? You think you’re so high and mighty. Think you’re better than where you come from. Just see how long that lasts, now that you’re not at that cockamamie school.” As if she had done something to hurt him

  Before July ended, Maude heard from the headmaster. He said he was so moved by her “lovely letter”; she described the specialness of Bay Farm so well; could he, he wondered, have her permission to reprint passages as part of the next alumni fundraising appeal?

  PART IV

  1.

  DANNY WAS PICKING her up in his parents’ giant Caddie. He’d been back a whole day before he called, a black mark against him already. She wanted just to be glad, but resentment dragged at her.

  He got out of the car to watch her walk the path to him. He’d changed. The preparations of her imagination left too much out; they had changed or reduced him, so that the reality of him was a shock. It was as if everything she had thought or remembered was a little wrong, and everything about him was not only subtly different but a little contradictory, so that he looked at once thinner and broader, older and younger. His face wouldn’t coalesce. It was both handsome and weirdly stretched and rubbery.

  It seemed even stranger that he was unaware of this and responded to her just as always, his words spaced out by laughter. His arms opened to wrap around her in a huge clasp. Danny never made declarations, and his measured, gentle affection never suggested the kind of desperate passion that could give Maude the reassurance she craved—of being the unique entity that could satisfy a bottomless need. This hug delighted her with its enthusiasm.

  She disengaged herself quickly, however. They were still at the curb, the studio window above them like Milton’s jealous, baleful eye. She got herself into the big, heavy car, its hot seat not uncomfortable in the air-conditioning. Air-conditioning! As he drove, Danny took his hand off the wheel and put it on her thigh, where she covered it with both her own. She was letting out only the good feeling and hiding the resentment. Maybe the resentment would go away. On a shady street where the houses were set far back, he pulled over and kissed her until they were both gasping.

  At his parents’ tomblike house, they ran up the pretentious curved staircase and shut themselves into his room, giggling and shushing. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I have to show you. I brought you something.” He rummaged next to the head of his bed and whirled to unroll a rug over the beige carpeting.

  “Oh, my God, Danny! It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s East African.” He had traveled a little at the end of his medical stint.

  The rug was mostly a deep orangey-yellow, with small squares of red and cobalt, stair-stepping to make a diamond and two triangles. Square-headed lions marched across a darker orange in the mosaic of the border. The rug was like panels of sun on the floor. It made her think of Greenwich Village apartments she had visited. She thought of a song she’d heard that summer, high-voiced, that evoked such a life—music with an acoustic guitar (Seth would approve). It suggested, as Maude had always wanted to believe, that if you had the material things right—sunshine, a bowl of oranges, a farm house—happiness followed. Better living through design.

  They lay on the rug. It scratched their bare skin as they writhed, reasserting their claims on each other. They wouldn’t feel able to talk until this was accomplished. “Oh, oh,” came deeply out of Danny as he rolled them both to their sides. “Now I’ve really come home.”

  “Dann-nee?” They heard his mother’s creaking footsteps approach down the hall.

  “Just a minute, Ma. I’ll be right out.”

  He jumped into his cutoffs and T-shirt no more quickly than Maude pulled on her scrap of a calico dress and the bikini underpants, which now stuck to her.

  As soon as he came back, holding a Dannon yogurt his mother had given him—she was afraid he was too thin—and rolling his eyes, Maude announced, “I’m not going back to Bay Farm this year.”

  “What do you mean?” he said, licking off some yogurt that had gotten onto his finger. He handed the full carton to her. Raspberry, her favorite. It seemed a wonder to her, nourishment produced like that, by a mother, unasked for, as by magical hands in a fairy tale, or Mrs. O’Donnell. She looked into the little round cup, swirled with deep pink.

  “Milt won’t pay my tuition. My scholarship got reduced because he had more money, but he says it’s really because I’m not smart enough, and he says he can’t afford it anyway, that he’s had to struggle and do without the whole time. He said he hasn’t paid the phone bill in three months.”

  Danny immediately said, “I have savings. Use my money. That’s ridiculous. The man should be shot. What’s his problem?”

  If a stranger had seen Maude at that moment, they might have laughed. Her mouth was a perfect O of stunned surprise. She couldn’t believe she’d just gotten what she’d hoped for, for much longer back than she had wanted even Bay Farm.

  “Danny! Can you? Do you really think you should? That’s—I mean, your savings. I’ll pay you back, of course.” Surely he would hate her for it if she accepted and, after a while, wish he hadn’t done it. “Do you know how much money it is?”

  He swaggered across the room, picked something up off his young-suburbanite teak desk and tossed it to her. She fumbled but caught it with her elbow against her ribs. It was a passbook, in its plastic envelope.

  “Go ahead. Open it.”

  She had to turn a number of pages to get to the current balance, but she got the idea. It was a lot of money. Six figures. It could pay full tuition for years at Bay Farm, more years than anyone could go there.

  She hadn’t known how exposed generosity—or charity—could make you feel. This might be the most personal act that anyone had ever committed with her. When that hairy senior had tingled her nipples and she had felt the shock of someone else’s fingers in her labia, it was almost impersonal. This was the closest anyone had ever been willing to come. Money was private. It was unmentionable. It was bad form not to have it, because then you had to say things like, “I don’t have the money for that.” You had to have money to be able to afford not talking about it.

  And her father had been venomous about it—as if she had set out to deprive him. She had always known better, before, not to ask for things, and she’d been right.

  Milt would say the Sterns were vulgar and nouveau riche and that this was a typically vulgar nouveau riche thing to do.

  She thought: I should be happier.

  Because what she wanted was for Milt to want to make her happy, even if he couldn’t. For him to say, I’m sorry, baby, I’d love for you to have Bay Farm.

  And she wanted Bay Farm to want her. To value her enough to help her over this hump.

  It felt surreal and furtive for it to be Danny, and when she still felt far away from him. She had always had reservations about Danny—secret, guilty, critical thoughts. She felt very guilty for them at that moment. Even for the reservations that were, so to speak, on his side: she would envision him with various girls, the ones she thought of as the “good girls,” the ones who did well in unconnotative work like algebra and French grammar and took things like having eventual husbands and children as their right, just like their skiing vacations and Easter in Barbados; girls who
had sunny, even expectations of life, who embraced it with cheerful enthusiasm rather than Maude’s crablike wariness.

  She would probe him now and then—didn’t he think Didi Bates was a dish? Or someone else of his own healthy disposition. And he would surprise her by saying, “She’s boring.” The surprise was as much at her own lack of gratification by this as at the sentiment itself. Couldn’t he see how wrong for him she, Maude, was? She had allowed herself to feel contempt for his lack of perception, as if loving her made him a fool (the voice of Seth she carried around in her, especially since his death-like disappearance, that said loving her made anyone a fool). She had taken it for granted that when Danny got to Harvard there would be some suave, confident Cliffie, and that would be that.

  She had even suggested Weesie—she could imagine their sparky jokiness together. “Weesie? Are you kidding? Never!” he had said, as mystified that she could propose it as she was that he didn’t see the beauty. She would take Weesie over her.

  But anyway she was saved, saved for the time being, and Danny was her hero, though she inwardly squirmed to imagine how it would take place—would he hand her a check? How could she even bring it up?

  Impatiently, Maude waited for Monday so that she could call the school. She didn’t know if it was even possible for her to re-enter the class of ’70. School started in a matter of days. Levittown Memorial High School started a day sooner than that. She had gone to the fortresslike brick building in June, to register. It felt like being drafted for the Army, to put her name down there, or like joining some list where an experiment was to be done on your body, where you were to be subjected to a disfiguring, possibly fatal disease, and this was wanted of you, wanted for you.