Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  By Monday morning she was so anxious that she misdialed the school’s number twice before getting the placid ringing. She listened to the tinkling trills as if they were the knells of fate. “Come on.” The secretary put her through to the headmaster. It was all first names.

  They had accepted a couple of new juniors, the headmaster told her. The class was full. Since she’d been a student in good standing, however—she could hear his discomfort in saying this; she knew he disliked her, and she felt hyperintellectual and Jewish in his presence—they could probably make room for her, he said, as they would not for an outsider.

  She wasn’t an outsider!“Re-prie-v ed,” she thought, in the tune from The Threepenny Opera.

  That was the good thing about having parents like Milt and Nina, the very good thing: you were filled with the world’s riches. You could have La Primavera as your favorite painting as a kid, because you sat around looking at your father’s art books; you knew all the Brecht-Weill songs; you could think of a poem when you needed one, at least some of the time. You knew about Bay Farm and how to go there.

  That morning, Milt looked at her as if for explanation. They were having toast and coffee, as always, over the Times. Maude was waiting for the front section. “Danny invited me on a bike trip,” she said, so happy that it felt like a substance inside her that would come out, as she spoke, like light.

  It was true that Danny had invited her—the night before. She was determined to let Milt know nothing until it was absolutely locked up. She smiled at him. She laughed. What she’d been given made her feel dangerously generous.

  Milton grimaced, as if she were laughing at him. “What?” he said. She continued laughing. “What?”

  She said she couldn’t explain.

  Then, as she went out the door: “I think I’m going to be going back to Bay Farm.”

  It was an extraordinary day, perfect for their bike expedition, golden sun and just a hint of chill in the shade, like mint. What can he do? He can’t do anything, she assured herself. He can’t stop me. The bolt of fear through her chest made her eyes tear. “Danny!” She ran down the walk to her savior and, in the big car’s front seat, clung to him like a little girl.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I’m just glad to see you.” She twisted to peer behind her. Milt stood in the pink doorway, looking grim. But he also looked bewildered. He looked abandoned.

  Danny followed Maude’s glance, saw Milt and offered his cheery wave. Milton started as if he thought he might have been invisible. He jerked his hand in a tentative wave back, a forced, self-conscious expression on his face.

  Danny had picked their bikes up from school.

  Maude thought Long Island the ugliest place, all commercial strips and “developments,” as her parents called the grids of identical houses Levittown had spawned, spreading like mold across the landscape. It was always an amazement to come into the range of the estates. Almost surreally, you could turn off of the clogged ugliness that was Northern Boulevard and be on a shady lane with horses grazing, ponds glimpsed through willow fronds, lush fields.

  They left the car off, at the entry to a track with a chain across it. Their destination was an estate that had recently been opened to the public. Here and there along their way, a twig of maple was precociously showing color.

  “Are you sure you know the way?” said Maude. The car, left at the private road, looked like a friend they were deserting. She was well aware that what to her was a long, difficult ride was to Danny the merest little one-hand-behind-his-back exercise. She was the kind of rider who kept the handlebars in a death grip. Only with keyed-up, always-on-the-alert-for-fatality Weesie did Maude feel okay about her own relation to physical risk or exertion: Weesie was so anxious and nervous that Maude could almost be the normal one. “There won’t be too many hills, will there?” Most of Long Island is flat as the landing strips, but there are hills on the North Shore. They had learned it in school: the terminal moraine.

  Danny smiled. “Think I’d do that to you on this old junker?” He shook his head as he lifted out her beatup Schwinn. “There are a couple of hills, but they’re not too bad.”

  “Oh, great. Sure.” She knew Danny’s idea of “not too bad.”

  “Really.” He was laughing—as well he might, she thought, looking at the gears and levers on his bladelike ten-speed racer.

  She got her crotch over the boy-bike bar. “You should at least have a bike that’s the right size,” said Danny, not for the first time.

  It was Seth’s bike. Her previous bike, a tiny two-wheeler, had also been Seth’s, at first too big for her and then too little. Before that, the tricycle. Nana Resnikov had given her that tricycle. It was red and shiny and new. Milt gave it away, to her best friend, who lived across the street. That was what he did: he made sure she didn’t have what she wanted.

  As if willful deprivation had enforced in her a need to do without, Maude shrugged: she wasn’t wasting tuition money on a bike

  As she suspected, the way was longer and harder than Danny made it sound. He waited for her at the top of one long hill, at the end of which she wanted to pound him.

  “It’ll be great on the way back,” he said, seeing her face.

  “I hate downhill,” she said through her teeth. “You know that.” She braked all the way down hills.

  They arrived hot and sweaty, Maude not speaking, not even willing to look at Danny. He followed after her like a well-trained dog that’s been spoken to.

  “I don’t know why I agreed to come with you,” she said, thunking down the canvas pack that held their lunch, without asking if he liked the spot. It was just such an outing when he’d told her about going away.

  “Don’t say that. Please, Maude. Don’t ruin it.”

  “Me ruin it,” she said, flashing ire at him out of those black-olive eyes.

  Then she remembered what he was doing for her. “Sorry. Never mind.” She began pulling packages out of Seth’s old camp pack. She looked Danny in the face at last, at his melting eyes (baby seal eyes, she didn’t stop herself thinking). She saw the muscles under his skin relax as he sensed forgiveness.

  “Where’s the blanket?” He was supposed to have brought the blanket. He wasn’t carrying anything. “Jesus, Danny.”

  “And you’ve made such a beautiful lunch,” he said mournfully, watching her lay it out. She tried not to make too great a show of distaste at having to lay plates in the grass.

  It was the Pugh Picnic. Though it had been the dearest wish of the juvenile Maude and Seth to eat at every passing diner when on long drives, and they were clamorous in favor of Dunkin’ Donuts and Jolly Roger, Pughs did not go in for such things. Too expensive, the children were sensibly told, and at the appropriate time, in the desirable spot, they would stop and have hard-boiled eggs, seasoned with salt from a twist of aluminum foil; tomatoes, and sometimes cucumber, that they would cut up on the spot; bread of solid character, buttered (not the Wonderbread the children craved); and a variety of cheeses, cut into slabs and wrapped in cellophane. There would be juice and milk in cartons, frozen the night before and still retaining jagged slivers, delicious to suck. Fresh fruit was to be cut into wedges, followed by cookies, disgorged from a ridged cylinder of foil wrapping.

  At sixteen, Maude no longer saw any need for improvement in this except to add pieces of roast chicken, each preserved separately in tin foil, and the pretty enameled plates and cups Nina had once been given.

  She herself felt pleased by this lovely plenty and her own providentiality, despite the missing refinement of a cloth to spread it on. It wasn’t as if she could forget that; it irked her every second; she had to work at her enjoyment. But, gradually, the flame-throwing aspect of her irritation died away. Instead of irritation at Danny, there was merely something small but inconsolable in her at the lack of perfection in what so easily could have been perfect.

  With a sigh of repleteness at the end of his feast, Danny lay back on the flawless g
rass with his hands behind his head. Maude felt free then to admire him. His gorgeous olive skin looked bronzed against the grass, the llama-lashes furring the tender lighter skin beneath his closed eyes, and a swag of black hair over a forehead that seemed to her now unequivocally manly. She didn’t feel like a jerk for loving him.

  Leaf shadows artistically dappled this prospect. Maude tried to imagine how she would paint him dappled by shadow. She could feel which colors she would use—she felt this in her fingers, as if she were squeezing the tubes. This was accompanied by an urgent feeling that had the savor of anxiety or despair, over whether there was any way she could get the arrangement of colors to communicate how it felt to be there and see him—that would make someone her, there, at that moment. It would always be another moment. She herself would never again be who she was at that moment. Customs, communication, culture would change.

  She put a hand on his chest, its warm rising and falling. He loosed one of his hands from his head and placed it on top of hers, big, warm, and dry. He didn’t open his eyes. “It’s so nice to be in a place with grass and trees,” he murmured.

  “That’s just about the most interesting thing you’ve told me about Africa,” said Maude, who had found his letters frustratingly abstract, after the first one.

  “Really? I thought I told you everything in my letters.”

  There was something about the way he said this. “It didn’t seem like everything, Danny.” She wasn’t looking for anything in particular—just a filling out of experience. She’d wanted his letters to be like a novel or the kind of paintings she wished to make, so that she could feel what it was like to be there, at that moment. But then she knew there was something particular. Still as he was, he became stiller. He froze. His hand on hers was like dough. She slid hers out from under. “Danny?”

  He heaved a sigh from the pit of himself, opened his eyes as if to check on the degree of danger in her face, and closed his eyes again.

  Oh, don’t let it be that, Maude thought. Let it be anything else. Let it be something he thinks is a big deal but I really don’t. Something I don’t care about, something bourgeois, conventionally ambitious, some stupid nitpick over scientific ethics.

  “It really wasn’t anything, Maudlin. It was just a stupid—I didn’t even like her.”

  Maude drew away. “Someone forced herself on you, did she?” she said. She was always self-possessed. She always had this horrible poise

  He let out air as if deflating and told her both more and less than she wanted to know. It was stupid. He described the girl well enough so that Maude could see it was true, that she had been the instigator, not that there was anything stopping Danny from holding her off. He had, at first. “But I just—I felt stupid.”

  “Yeah. You are.”

  Buxom. Blonde. Snappy as a firecracker. Johns Hopkins, not Radcliffe. There was that.

  “I was going to tell you. Really.”

  She had plucked two blades of grass and was engaged in tying them together without breaking them. There. She plucked out two more. “Are you writing to her?”

  “No. I was just—summer entertainment. She has a boyfriend.”

  “That seems to have been mutual.”

  “Maude. It really, really didn’t matter. You’re what matters.”

  “Well, if it really, really didn’t matter, why do it?” She waited. In the face of his undenial, she added, “It matters. It. Matters. To me.” She thumped her thorax.

  Oddly, it was Danny who cried. But she could hardly spare him sympathy. First, there was that knife, or whatever it was, splitting her. It started in her chest and slashed down right through bone. It made it hard to breathe, but breathing was the least of her problems. Her problem was hurting so much, at his hands, and still wanting him to put his arms around her.

  She began packing up instantly.

  “Don’t, Maude. Don’t.”

  She wasn’t moving with angry swiftness. She felt almost too weak to lift the trifling items. Nevertheless, she continued. Danny took the pack from her. Silently, she let him.

  So urgently did Maude wish to get away and contemplate her hurt and confusion without distraction that for once she didn’t brake all the way down the hill. She didn’t remember the sudden turn at the bottom either.

  Out of control, the bike swerved into a low stone wall, sending her somersaulting over the handlebars to land on the far side.

  It was hard to convince Danny she was okay. The skin on one shoulder felt raw, but there wasn’t any bleeding. Oddly, there would be a freckling of discoloration on the spot for the rest of her life; it would always look like a new abrasion.

  The bike was mangled. It was still rideable, just, with the pincer of one brake squealing against the rear tire, its other half uselessly dangling.

  2.

  AREN’T YOU INCREDIBLY thin?” said Weesie. It was a rare afternoon that Weesie wasn’t at school, when the days had gone from golden to gray—a Bay Farm “half-holiday,” with no afternoon jobs or sports. You were supposed to use it to study. Maude was tagging along for Mary Jane’s lesson with Milt to see Weesie.

  “You should talk,” said Maude. Weesie looked pleased and skeptical, as she did with all compliments, deflecting them. Maude added, “I just went off the pill, that’s all.”

  Weesie raised her eyebrows and made a comical face: she didn’t want to know. Maude was glad she didn’t have to discuss her humiliation by Danny, and disappointed. She wouldn’t have to reveal that particular confirmation of her unlovability, but she did wish Weesie cared. She wouldn’t, however, supply Weesie with an added incentive to join the rats. If Maude was a sinking ship they were all deserting, she would damn well joke and laugh until the water covered her head.

  “I wondered if you were still seeing him.”

  “I’m not.” Maude didn’t think Danny would give the reason away, since he and Weesie weren’t the great buddies Maude thought they should be. With any other girlfriend, Maude would have been subject to relentless questioning, and there was, on Weesie’s face, an uneasy look, as if she worried that she should do something. Maude realized it reminded her of Nina, this look—uncertain and dependent.

  Weesie gave an uncomfortable Ninaish little laugh and began telling Maude about something a mutual friend had done, a Bay Farm girl. Her reaction, weeks earlier, when Maude told her she wouldn’t be continuing at Bay Farm, had been minimal. She had accepted Milt’s reason, that he couldn’t afford it, and it embarrassed her. It was clear she didn’t want Maude to thrust the knowledge on her.

  Maude had been dying to know everything that happened at school. But as Weesie went on, bringing in this person who’d done this and that person who’d done that, Maude felt worse and worse. The ground had shifted. A new culture had emerged, with conventions she didn’t know. “Maddie?” said Maude, picking up on the mention of a girl none of them had liked.

  “Sure Maddie,” said Weesie, giving Maude a look as if she were being obstructive—a look of instruction, really; to keep Maude from her own uncoolness. To be cool is to know. “She’s very droll.”

  Maude wasn’t missed, and not only was she replaced, but she was replaced by someone she didn’t even like, someone Weesie didn’t like. But she would justify rejection if she revealed how grudging and jealous she was. She mimed amusement, as if she too had always found Maddie Johnson “droll.”

  In a distant part of the house, the doorbell rang.

  “Oh,” said Weesie. “I meant to tell you. A couple of people said they might come by.” The two girls were in Weesie’s room, at Maude’s request—Maude wanted to see what Weesie had brought back from her trip to Italy at the end of that summer. As Weesie rather helplessly pawed through this or that, it had become clear that she barely remembered and wasn’t much interested. “Italy! It seems like five thousand years ago,” she said.

  “What’s this?” said Maude, who had come across an etching leaning against the wall on Weesie’s bookshelves.

  �
�An etching.”

  “I know that.”

  “You knew I was taking art.”

  “No, I don’t think I did. I mean, if you told me, I forgot.” She turned away: “Not that I would.” She turned back to the grayish little rectangle. “So you did this? You’re talented.”

  “Oh, God, that’s what my mother always says.”

  “That’s not exactly aw—”

  “We should go down.”

  Weesie ran out to shield her guests from Mrs. O’Donnell. Maude lingered, looking at things, as if her friend were there among the things—the little volume of Howl, the tiny Goreys (whose manner the etching somewhat imitated), the framed Pace illustration for a New Yorker cover. Voices came faintly from downstairs. She picked up the photo of Weesie from her days at Hills Girls School, where she’d worn a uniform. Weesie always joked, “You know how they say inside every fat woman is a thin one trying to get out? Well, inside me is a fat woman trying to get out.” The real me, she’d called it. Pre-skinniness, pre-contacts. Preirony and febrile tension. There was the bud that made her upper lip like a beak, and the genial, direct gaze. She looked so easy to be friends with.

  When Maude went down, surging into the living room were Isaac, who’d gone on the Italy trip—Maude used to think of him as her ally in the art room; when had he become Weesie’s friend?—and a boy named Philip in whom Maude had always found an amusing sparring partner and enjoyable enemy. And there was the lumpish Maddie, whose only connection to these youthful aesthetes could be Weesie. It was a surprise to Maude that Weesie was friends with Philip, even more than Isaac had been. They were the art people.

  “My, my, my,” said Philip in his grand, cutting style, tossing back his greasy bangs. “So this is how the other half lives.” Philip Neuberger was rich enough, but not the kind of rich that appears on the society pages. Donors to the American Jewish Committee didn’t have balls at the Metropolitan Museum.

  Isaac, sensitive and cultivated and almost overrefined, showed his appreciation of the reference with an upward curling on one side of his mouth.