Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  She had sat on Seth’s bed and looked at the pitiful twigs of skeletelized winter saplings cutting the white sky like the frailest black lace, the stiff stalks of the field with its creepy wall in the middle, meant for handball but now decrepit, and of course the houses edging the field like plastic monopoly houses, with their roofs slanting at her like turned backs. She looked out and didn’t feel anything. Not anger or impatience, not yearning for something better, not even sorrow. Just nothing. What was left was barely a pilot light, just enough vitality to experience this as not a good thing. She had sat long enough for a star to appear. I wish, she thought—I wish I may, I wish I might—. Nothing came up. I wish I could want again.

  Something clutched at her when this formulated itself, a swirl of horror at her own nullity. It was hardly even an effort anymore not to eat. What was the last thing she had wanted? She had to think. The lack of calories must be affecting her brain, though schoolwork continued to be easily mastered, even physics, even calculus, which she had expected to be trouble, taking the extra tutoring sessions offered in anticipation. The last thing she had wanted . . . Milton had asked what she wanted for her birthday. Number seventeen. It seemed the age of ruination. He looked sour and impatient when he asked. I don’t know, she had said. Can I think about it?

  And the image that insistently presented itself, when she did think about it, was flowers. She imagined pressing her face into the fragrant embrace of a silky bunch of lilies, roses, narcissi, stock—the soft-petaled flowers with deep, nourishing scents.

  When she told Milt, he had looked at her suspiciously. “Flowers? That’s all?” He couldn’t stand it; he couldn’t stand anything about her; he could hardly stand to look at her; and he was furious at her for not demanding something exorbitant, the expense of which he could hold against her.

  When she came home from school on her birthday, a sheaf of stalks was stuck into a pitcher on one of her yellow dressers. The stems were wide, flat, and ridged like cactus, and along them were papery, rattling, narrow furls of purple—a fingernail paring’s width of color. It was something called statice, apparently. Florists used it to fill out bouquets of real flowers. This wasn’t from a florist. Florists would have added baby’s breath and ferns. It was one of those bunches commuters could get for a dollar at the station, with a rubberband at the bottom, along with daisies dyed unnatural colors or rosebuds that drooped the next day and never opened.

  Maude felt like such a sucker. How could she have set her-self up like that? And she would have to thank him. He would know she had to, and he would know she was thanking him for a slap in the face.

  She did also get a card (All best wishes for birthday cheer, To a girl who’s sweet and dear) and a ten-dollar check from Nana Resnikov, a card (airbrushed kittens, a sprinkle of glitter) and a smaller check from a great-aunt, and nothing from Nina, who forgot. (“Oh, well, you don’t really care about that sort of thing, teehee.”)

  She had thought she’d buy herself the bouquet she wanted. She would wait a couple of weeks, so it wouldn’t be so obvious and inflame Milt, and then she’d go to the florist—she knew just the one, where flowers were like a misty rainforest behind the glass—and get those giant lilies with raised pink spots, with that deep, sweet scent, and pale roses, and cinnamony white stock; baby’s breath and ferns all around; maybe white iris, because she loved irises. They’d wrap it in tissue. They’d tie it with a ribbon.

  However, by the time two weeks had passed, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It wasn’t the money. She’d spent ten times that on Christmas presents. She just felt a kind of limpness about it, as if her muscles couldn’t manage it.

  That was the last thing she could remember really, really wanting as she sat on Seth’s bed, her seventeen-year-old hands useless in her lap.

  Every morning she tried to imagine how she’d feel if she were waking up about to go to Bay Farm. Every night, she missed Danny. Every day she thought about hearing from Weesie, but didn’t expect to. Sometimes she did. But it was as if Maude had used up her wanting muscles.

  So spring this year had an altogether different feel from what it had in any year she could remember. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t always thought it beautiful. La Primavera. But this year she was grateful for it. She felt her inward self had locked and that, like underground shoots pushing from kernels, and fiddleheads unfurling, she too might strengthen, lift up, and, in a creeping manner, imperceptible except to stop-action photography, feel the snap of life.

  On this first warm day, she was wearing a dress she hadn’t had on since junior high. It fit her again. Sturdy cotton in ridged pink stripes, with an empire waist and straight, narrow skirt. When she wore it at thirteen, it had made her feel fashionable and grown-up. Now it felt more like a memory of safety. Sometimes she thought she would have been better off if she’d never gone to Bay Farm. Then that would scare her. Even though she could get into the pre-Bay Farm dress, it was constricting. If she stretched her arms out, the cuffs would pop. By the time Stanley Delaney stood in front of her again, in all his burly beefiness, her muscles were stiff by force of involuntary demureness.

  He had a round head and shiny face wreathed in ripples of smile and squint as he stood before her, in front of the Quonset hut and trailer, with a motorcycle helmet in each hand. He was squat, not really much taller than she was, but twice as broad. “So, is today the day?” His grin might not have been a grin, just part of the squint.

  She had told him “sometime.” She shrugged, squinting back, thin and weak as an invalid. “Sure. Why not?” she said, feeling not unlike the girl in the motorcycle mama story—she’d be doing something really different, that none of her friends had done, with the kind of guy they’d never even talk to. She wouldn’t do it either, though, if she had more congenial options. She was doing something none of them ever did, that she could almost make herself believe in as racy, except that it still seemed pretty stupid and pointless.

  He handed her the helmet and adjusted it on her. She adjusted the helmet after him, as if to erase his touch. It was clearer suddenly, the antipathetic nature of the venture. It wasn’t just the speed, noise, and idiocy; this involved bodies. She would have to embrace the huge bike with her thighs; she would have to touch Stanley Delaney.

  They would think this was so cool—that got her through it. Climbing onto the damn thing, having to let the narrow skirt wrinkle right up to her white panties—they would think this was so cool. “No, you have to put your arms—what’s the matter? I don’t bite.” They would think this was so cool. It was an actual Harley, which he had to tell her. She never would have noticed. Boy, was the noise unpleasant. The thing started off with the stench of gasoline, a clobbering machine fart, and then she was being shaken the way babies get killed, like a balky saltshaker in humid weather, no rice grains. Her back teeth knocked together. The noise and vibration were mind-annhilating, but somehow she did have enough brain function left to feel angry at what was being done to her and what she’d allowed.

  At the same time, she still felt: hey, look at me. She tried to enjoy it. Holding his large, too intimately sweaty middle. And suddenly feeling, as they veered along the old runways where he took his joyrides, as if she were falling off. “Lean, lean!”

  “What?”

  “LEAN. Lean into it,” he shouted. “Like bike riding.”

  She leaned, a little. Now she really felt as if she were falling off. “Don’t go too fast!”

  The old runways were riddled with zigzags of burgeoning weeds through widening cracks. The motorcycle bumped and hiccupped over them. The scenery was comically minimal. There was no scenery. Just flat to the horizon, scraggly grass, cracked runway, and in the direction of the Quonset huts, to which they were at last heading, two saplings in bandages that looked like sticks a child had jammed into the ground and called trees.

  They came to a gravel-scattering, shuddering halt. He put out his squat legs on each side, steadying the bike for her to get off. The shaki
ng stopped—there was a sudden, dramatic silence—but her legs still shook. She stood up like a wobbly fawn, removing the bowling-ball helmet and rolling it through her palms toward him, to take back.

  “So?” He peered into her face. He had a deferential, almost courtly air, like that sports director at Bay Farm who’d had a soft spot for her and given her the easy jobs. “Not going to be a biker chick, huh?” he said—so disappointed, and working so hard to be good-humored about it. He had to turn his head away and summon a smile before he could look back at her with his round, shiny face.

  “I’m sorry. I guess it’s just not my thing.” She pulled at the pink-striped skirt, trying to get it uncaught and hanging.

  He asked if he could take her to a movie sometime. “Not on a bike,” she started to say, but he got there first: Not on a bike. As it happened, there was something crucial he hadn’t told her about himself. She guessed what it was when he called her up on her new number, though that in itself turned out to make the guessing almost superfluous.

  “I thought you might have the same number as this old buddy of mine who had the same last name as yours.” That’s what he said when he called.

  She looked at the lit-up, translucent dial of the phone that bloomed around the label with her number on it. “You’re not Stand, are you?” Stand and Deliver. Big joke nickname among the big, rowdy boys.

  “You are Seth’s sister,” said Stan Delaney. “Man, what the hell happened to that guy? He like really did a vanishing act, didn’t he?”

  No one who knew Seth mentioned Seth to her. It was the first time anyone had even by implication allowed that she had a right to care about him.

  5.

  THAT NIGHT, THE phone rang after Maude was in bed, in the dark. She knew who it was. Maybe it was the hour or the awareness that college admission letters had arrived that day, hers included—two wait-lists, both wanting her to finish high school—but she always knew when Danny was calling. She used to say she could tell from the sound of the ring. But why had he taken so long? Who on earth, if he loved you, would be stopped by being told not to call?

  It wasn’t her phone. Danny didn’t know about her phone. It was her father’s, and he had picked up, upstairs. She heard his footsteps. It always seemed as if they were on her head. She went into the black hall and called, “Tell him I’ll call back on my phone” before Milt said anything.

  “All right.” Thump, thump, thump.

  “I hope it didn’t wake you up,” she called up to him.

  “It’s okay.”

  There were these moments, like truces, like love showing up in the middle of the battle.

  She got back into bed and lifted the gratifying receiver. The little gizmo sprang into light.

  He picked up during the first ring. “Maude?”

  “Hi. Congratulations.” She knew Harvard had accepted him.

  Danny was the only person who had ever been in any doubt.

  “It’s not what I wanted.”

  Maude knew he meant her, that he wanted her. “Oh, Danny, don’t be a . . . Yes, it is. Anyway. It’s not as if I could have gone with you. I never would’ve gottten into Radcliffe.”

  “Yes, you would. Of course you would!”

  “I don’t think so. Not the way I was struggling in math. And anyway, they have like zero studio art. Just art history. I hate art history. I mean, I don’t hate the actual history of art, but it’s so arid the way they do it. That Clement Greenberg person is there, who Milt thinks is hot shit. It’s all formalism.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Maudlin, it’s so wonderful having you say stuff I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She could just about laugh at Danny’s enjoyment of the novel sensation of ignorance he could receive at her hands.

  “You remember what formalism is.”

  “Like painting in a tuxedo, right?”

  An old joke. She had always loved it.

  “So, what I’m calling about is—Maude?”

  “I’m here.” She could see the ridges of her legs under the covers, like a mountain range on a relief map.

  “I wondered—you know, I don’t have any paintings by you. You are still painting, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m painting. Jesus, how could you ask?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Anyway—I’d like to have a painting of yours. To take with me.”

  “To Harvard? Well—I guess you could come pick one out. In August or something.”

  “Hey, as soon as that, huh?” It was mid-April.

  “You’re right. Maybe that is too soon.”

  A silence ensued, one of the expensive, ocean-in-a-shell wired kind that happens between people connected by mutual injuries.

  “What I was hoping was, you’d do a picture for me. I mean, just for me.”

  “A commission. Huh.” He was approaching her as an artist, not a girl. Safe, wasn’t it?

  “Kind of.”

  “What would you want in it?”

  He reeled off what amounted to an anthology of her style. It always surprised her—sometimes like doom or fate—how Maude her pictures always looked, how irrepressibly her touch and perceptions insisted on their recognizable identity. She might have liked to subdue them. Maybe that was why Milt painted squares. You could not derive Milt from a set of squares. She painted from imagination. There wasn’t much outside for the paintings to look like.

  He wanted a nude, in a room, with a plant or flowers. She did stuff like that all the time.

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “I’ve never done a painting to order before.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I don’t have to anything, Danny.”

  “Sorry.” Why was he so obedient? Why didn’t he rescue her, overcome her refusal? Overcome her. Court her, beg, apologize and apologize, call ten times a day, appear with flowers? She knew he wanted her, but not enough to do anything about it. Or he thought of himself as so without standing that he couldn’t. He left it all to her.

  “I like the idea.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Another expensive succession of message units passed in silence. That was what they were called on the bills, message units. “Danny?”

  “Yes?” he said eagerly.

  “I want to hang up.”

  “Maude—”

  “I’m going to hang up. Do you want to say good night?”

  He didn’t say anything. Slowly, so there would not be any harsh sound, not even a click, she depressed the button that controlled the circuit. About halfway down, the light went out. The lovely light. The mountain range of her legs disappeared.

  6.

  STAND LIVED IN his grandparents’ backyard, in what was more or less a garden shed. His grandparents’ house was in a rundown prewar lower-middle-class community, with bigger backyards and bigger trees. The houses had porches. If you were generous, you could call the shed a small barn. Stand had run a heavy yellow construction-gauge extension cord through a basement window out to his barn so he could have electricity, even though he lived semi-camping style, with a portable stove that burned Sterno.

  Inside, the walls were mostly sheetrocked but unpainted, with the nailheads gleaming. Maude found it attractive and even domestic. It had a feeling she craved, of being almost secret and handmade—a hideout, but better than the forts she used to build in the field with scraps from Milt’s studio. With Stand’s clothes and records strewn around, and a ridiculous transparent plastic chair that was inflatable, like a pool toy, it felt more domestic than Nina’s dome.

  Stand offered her a beer, pulling one from a Scotch cooler. Maude had only tasted beer once and thought it was horrible. She sat on the pool toy. She wasn’t going anywhere near that bed, which sank when Stand sat on it, curving like a hammock. He reached to one side, to a little decorative box on the metal trunk that was his night table, and took out a joint. He took a deep, practiced toke and
held it out to her, his forehead wrinkled in his round, shiny face. She shook her head. He jerked the joint insistently in front of her face, but she turned her head aside, feeling like Miss Priss but thinking, He’s trying to seduce me. She knew Milt would say she’d asked for it, going home with a boy.

  Stand, however, seemed to give up at this and leaned back against his one thin pillow, half hanging out of its jungle-print case, and enjoyed his joint. “Man, you don’t know what you’re missing. This is good stuff. Uptight outasight.”

  “I know what I’m missing. Pot just makes me feel uncoordinated and tired. It’s supposed to make you happy, but it doesn’t make me happy. It makes me feel as if I can’t do anything. It makes me more uptight.”

  “You’re weird, Pugh.”

  “Yeah. I’m weird Pugh.”

  He thought that was very funny. It’s hard not to feel contempt for people who are too amused by mild humor, but of course he was stoned. She took out what she smoked these days to keep herself company, little cigars. She felt they made her special, even though that was pathetic—something Weesie would never stoop to—but she had convinced herself she liked the taste. Her mouth felt like a garbage pit. Stand duly made the appreciative remark about the little cigars, which looked like brown cigarettes. He was only more impressed by her: wow, a girl who smoked cigars. She wished her skirt weren’t quite so short. It was a child’s skirt she had found at the Hadassah Thrift Shop that happened to look fabulous on her. Oh, well. She looked fabulous. She’d have to live with it.

  Stand put on a record, one of those reiterating-the-obvious I’m-a-MAN blues kind of things that boys seemed to get off on (I’m a MAN; I’m a backdoor MAN; MAN sounded like MAIN). The album covers scattered around bore illustrations familiar to her, but she didn’t know the music, because she never played popular music, except a little on the brittle white-plastic clock-radio Seth had left behind, but never albums. She still had her old Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov records, from when she made up ballets in the living room, and she had the singer they all worshiped. She had listened to a certain twenty-minute song for hours this year, all about a woman who was so special, no man would ever understand her or be able to approach her—a song that made Weesie scoff. Now it was Weesie who found the alleged poet’s lyrics ungapotchkeh, only she said de trop. Anyway, the last time she had talked to her, ages ago.