by Anna Shapiro
This was what she’d come to. Maybe she’d found her level.
Maude looked up. Then away. Stand was wearing frayed cutoffs and, as was evident from his lounging with one foot up, no underwear. She could see straight to his balls. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell someone, like that their slip was showing—um, excuse me, sir? Your balls are hanging out.
“You don’t much go for this music, huh?”
“I—”
“I thought with Seth being your brother and all—”
“I like old blues. Like, you know, broken-down old guys with regular guitars, not electric. Sad guys, who are really blue.”
Stand looked at her a minute and got up, his balls mercifully retracting behind cloth, and put on a hymn plinked out on guitar strings. In God there is no East or West. She rewarded him with a smile.
“Yeah, Seth kind of liked girls’ music.” “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” “Thought I Heard Somebody Call My Name.” No wonder she’d cleared the pop hovel.
In Stand, Maude could discern the outlines of Seth’s old crowd, the crowd one step below the brains—the brains being the serious, smart,hard-working kids destined for good colleges, who were popular, who starred in the school plays and ran the literary magazine (Metamorphoses). Seth’s crowd worked on the literary magazine but didn’t run it. They played the maid or Third Gentleman; they were in the guitar club but not the debating society. The girls wore long bangs and serapes; the boys wore their hair like the Beatles, which most boys didn’t, yet. Seth’s hair was so long he got kicked out for it once. The square kids said, “Girl, girl,” in the hallways.
Maude had looked on this crowd in admiration, slight fear, envy—and with an undertow, as she got older, of disappointment, a disappointment, she now realized, Seth may have felt himself. They were “underachievers,” the officialese word Seth preferred. He loved words like that, the very kind that made Maude wince.
It sounded important to Seth just because it gave what he was a name in the new “value-free” lexicon—a name that replaced, for instance, “bad student,” not to mention “self-deceiving slob.” He was “unmotivated.” He was “conflicted.” That was true enough. Typically, this group got C’s and D’s in school but high scores on standardized tests, which was what alerted the officials, who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to consider these deadbeats intelligent—just a kind of vaguely beatniky variant on hoods, who were universally seen to be dolts. Seth bragged about the double-eight-hundred P.S.A.T.’s of his friends who were juniors. He complained about how easy the school was, and how boring, but not about his own mediocre grades. He must have feared they were just.
Stand was one of those with a perfect score on his college boards, eight hundred verbal, eight hundred math, which was a lot better than Maude had done when she took them this year, as you could arrange to do whether you were in school or not. Stand had flunked out of high school. Maude felt judged by these tests, even though she rationalized her performance by saying they only showed how good you were at taking tests. It was hard to imagine how much crummier Seth felt. He was contemptuous of everyone else and had talked about himself as if everything were possible, whatever he chose. He didn’t realize he was contemptuous. He thought he was nice. After all, he was only contemptuous of people who deserved his contempt. Like Milt.
Maude was disappointed in herself, but she struggled not to buy into Milt and Seth’s view of her. When she took her S.A.T.’s, she had been told she should take an “achievement” test as well and had selected biology, mainly on the basis that she had Danny’s old thick, oversize paperback on how to study for your biology achievement test. She had come closer to eight hundred on that than on her verbal. Her biology teacher at Bay Farm had said she didn’t have “a biological mind,” which was amusing, from a verbal perspective. But she knew what he meant, even if he was a clod at articulating it. She didn’t think literally. In fact, she had an ax to grind with literalism. The mere isness of things could be beautiful and soul-enhancing in the physical world, but as an object of thought: inert.
Physical reality didn’t have to be literal either. Stand’s apartment was poetic because it was the embodiment of metaphor. The old shed stood in for a house, was poetically like a house; the camp trunk stood in for a table; a cooler with a spigot, where he kept his water, was a gently satirical suggestion of plumbing. It was beautiful the way a dollhouse was beautiful, the way using an acorn cap as a bowl, a handkerchief for a sheet, a fancy matchbox as Barbie’s jewelry case was beautiful; the way Picasso’s monkey head made out of a toy Volkswagen was beautiful.
What was the point of reality if one part of it didn’t suggest another part, and if parts couldn’t be captured and framed so that you felt you could contain it? That it didn’t just contain you. Seth had once said to her, as if he had discovered her besetting flaw, “You think everything’s connected.”
She found it hard to care what reality thought of reality—that did seem to be the “biological,” the scientific perspective: no one’s point of view. What mattered really, she thought, was where you stood and how you put everything together and what it felt like, and finding a way to come out of the isolation of your view so someone else could recognize it—or just have an even bigger as-if experience, come into your experience as if it were theirs.
The point of view of formalism was to turn art—so deplorably unsystematic! so unimpressive compared to nuclear bombs and hydroelectric plants—into science. Paint should not be made into houses or faces or trees; red was just red, a square was just square. That was what Milt strove for: no meaning. Isness. Lit-eralism. “You’re so literal-minded,” Maude would hurl at him, and Milton would smile his thin-lipped, luckily-I-know-better smile. His paintings were “experiments” intended to measure the effect of one color against another, the effects of color on edges and angles.
If there was anything beautiful in it, Maude had lately come to think, it was the very fact of not really being an experiment. The beauty was in just playing with color. The artists who believed their paintings were science were like great big children, quite young children, in a big game of let’s pretend. Let’s pretend to do science, using mud and sticks and leaves from the garden. Because what measured the “success” or “failure” of these experiments? Pure subjectivity. Appeal. There was no sense in which they could not work, except by looking bad. At best, these “experiments” were metaphors for some romantically conceived purity of science. Or just metaphors of purity.
It was virtually impossible for paint not to mean, unless it was just the coating of a wall. And even then, it told you a lot, it told you what the person who chose it thought that place ought to be—institutional, original, ritzy, feminine, whatever it was. Cool. It gave you a feeling. And she loved that about it. It was what Milt’s black walls were a denial of, that there was meaning. Like that awful red canvas at the Whitney that time. Which even Milt hadn’t liked. But he wouldn’t like anything contemporary in a museum. Not unless it was by him. Maybe he was the most jealous man in the whole world. Maybe only he could have things, or if he couldn’t, no one could, no one could be allowed to deserve anything.
What did Stand’s unpainted walls mean? That he couldn’t be bothered, which was that whole crowd, in a sense, in a nutshell.
“So did your folks, like, tell the police?”
Maude put her winglike brows together. “I can’t remember police coming to the house.” She looked full at him. “I guess I don’t know. It kind of wasn’t as if there was this moment he was gone. I mean, it seemed pretty bad when he just didn’t show up for dinner and didn’t call and didn’t come home that night and wasn’t there the next morning, and never got there. They must have called the police. My mother was frantic. Not that my father wasn’t upset, but he was mostly trying to calm her down. She just shrieked the whole time. My father was saying, He’s probably with a girlfriend, he’s probably with friends, he probably just forgot to call. Which he couldn’t keep saying after
like a week. Of course, my mother was just imagining all the stuff I’ve been imagining for years. You know—”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to say.” But they both had to stop and process the tabloid-style pictures that pressed themselves upon their inner vision—hideous mutilations, Seth in pain or terror, moaning in a ditch or tossed, about to land, seeing his death before him, his face twisted with fear. Maybe those things were less likely to happen to a boy, but he had been only a kid, even if he was a man-size kid, a year younger than she was now. You hoped for the best, but you imagined the worst.
“I like to think of him living in the East Village or something.” This was where the girl who’d screwed up at Bay Farm was living. “I like to think I’ll just be walking down the street one day and I’ll just run into him. Sometimes I imagine him, like, picking apples and peaches—you know, working his way up, crop by crop, from Georgia to Canada—did you know he did that once? Maybe lumberjacking in winter. And sometimes—I mean, imagine he just sort of became someone else. He could be like living in the Midwest. He could have kids; he could just have this whole other life where nobody knows. But whatever I imagine, it’s always this life where he never even hears the word art.”
Stand smiled, benign with pot or memories. That couldn’t mean much to him, never hearing the word art. “Man, we thought it was cool when he disappeared. Like just, how cool. I thought he joined a motorcycle gang.”
“You mean ’cause that’s what you would have liked.”
“Wow. Yeah. I never thought of that.”
People were amazing. Just amazing.
“What else did people think?”
“Aagh. I don’t think anyone was like giving it a whole lot of thought. It was a fun scandal for a while, that’s all. I’ll tell you one thing, everybody figured he was in pussy heaven—begging your pardon.”
“Oh, sure. I’m sure that’s just how the girls were thinking of it.”
“Nah. You’re right. Who knows what they were thinking.”
“But did you have any idea? I mean, did anyone see anything about it, see it coming? When they thought about it later.”
Stand sucked at his roach until it nipped his finger with heat and he had to drop it into a dish. “I’ll tell you one thing, he thought you had it really easy. He thought you had it so great ’cause you were a girl. The apple of Daddy’s eye.”
“You don’t know how funny that is. And I thought he was so great, even though he practically ripped my arms out of their sockets—that was just his way of saying hello. Still—don’t tell me I’m any reason he left. He didn’t like me, but it’s not as if I mattered. He had the world’s most horrible relationship with our father.”
It came back to her, as it always did when she thought of this: Seth red-faced, yelling at Milt—the color of raspberry sherbet, desperate, cornered. He fought with Milt every day, he did everything not to comply, to make life hard for Milt; and he demanded to be loved for it, and his wide-eyed, challengingly staring, angry face, quivering, looked always ready to flinch. He had a naked face that didn’t know how to be closed. “You rotten kid,” Milt would say. “You rotten kid.” Then Seth would turn to Nina. Milt’s face was stiff with reproach but about to collapse into bitterness and disappointment. Nina would cling to Maude as if Maude could save her.
“So, anyway, they hire a detective?”
Maude liked the way Stand talked. It was reassuring—paradoxically, his own sheer literalness made things solid and defined. Nothing was slipping around here, assuming new identities. He wasn’t a doubled person like Milt or her or Seth or Weesie, a person with versions of himself behind other versions of himself, struggling toward the literal. Or not. He was easy with himself. He didn’t hate himself for flunking out or doing drugs and scaring his parents, or feel demeaned by his circumstances. He loved his Poppy and Gram, as he called his grandparents; he was proud of his fifty thousand brothers and sisters. (She couldn’t keep track, but there were a lot of them.) His world was solid. He told Maude she could take a high school equivalency exam and have a degree and apply to colleges like Cooper, if she still wanted. She hadn’t heard of high school equivalency.
“I never thought of a detective. I don’t think so. But, I mean, they wouldn’t tell me. I mean, you can’t say Seth’s name around them, pretty much. I thought detectives were only in movies!”
“Nah, where you been, Pugh? Get with it! I got an uncle’s a P.I., used to be a cop.”
Private investigator? “A detective! Really. Huh.”
7.
HER MOTHER DID not look happy, but when had she, really? Nina’s face was puckered and defensive, as if expecting a blow, and yet she looked ready to administer one if Maude said the wrong thing. It was Maude’s first visit since Nina and Rod Patrick had moved from the geodesic dome: it had proven impossible to heat. The couple were now in an apartment in what looked like an old farmhouse. Maude found herself saying, “I have to admit, you’ve improved your living conditions.” To herself she sounded like Weesie—as if she had a secure, lofty perspective and weren’t subject to anyone.
Then Nina did look happy, as if she’d at last gotten the approval of her stern mother, seventeen-year-old Maude. Fleetingly she thought of Danny; her mother’s daughterliness raised the specter: how dare Danny be obedient to her spoken wishes! Like a good little boy. How could he do that to her, put her in charge?
Maude fielded Nina’s childishly naked “You like it!” with a stingy “It’s very nice.”
As soon as she was with her mother she wished she weren’t. Even more, she wished she didn’t wish this, didn’t wish Nina away. She set herself to give Nina what Nina wanted.
“We had such a time moving in here. The landlord did noth-ing, nothing. We discovered a leak in the bathroom wall and had to get a plumber in. You wouldn’t believe what these guys charge. He pulled at this, he potchkied with that, and what happens? Rod has to find the leak. No kidding, Rod just looks at some—pipe, I guess, and says, ‘What about this?’ And that was it! Unbelievable. Unbelievable, these guys. Isn’t Rod great? Isn’t he?” Nina’s look connected hotly. She nodded, to indicate to the unresponsive girl the correct reply. “Oh! Did I tell you I’m painting again? Rod thought it was criminal I gave it up, criminal, and look—” she gestured toward the wall over the sink, to a delicate rendering of the living room visible through a door—“a breakthrough,” Nina said. “Don’t you think?”
Nina was talented. It had been a shame she’d given up. “It’s really nice, Ma. Really good.” Not quite enough. “You’re talented.”
Nina nodded some more, her smile brightening.
“And look at what Rod’s doing.” Nina brought a picture in from another room, and another and another.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Oh, sorry, baby. We should go into the living room. Come into the living room.”
“Can’t we stay in here?” said Maude. She would be more committed farther in. But she was letting Nina see . . . “Or, but—”
She let Nina lead her in, as she knew she had to. “You have to see the furniture we’ve gotten. It’s amazing what people throw out. Perfectly good stuff, beautiful stuff.”
“You always said I shouldn’t buy clothes from thrift shops. You said they had germs. Aren’t you worried about germs?”
“Look at this, is that amazing? Is that a marvelous piece? Cottage Victorian, that’s called.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s much nicer than—”
“Oh, well. Bauhaus has its place too. Don’t you go knocking your father.”
“I don’t think I can give him worse criticism than you have,” Maude muttered. She looked up warily. Across Nina’s tired, soft face, guilt battled anger. “Do you know what we sacrificed for you to go to Bay Farm? Huh? Huh? Do you know what I’ve had to do without?”
Maude just looked at her. “You mean I’m the reason you left Daddy?”
“You wanted for nothing, nothing. Ya spoiled rotten
, that’s what you are.”
“Spoiled!” Maude laughed miserably. “I wish.”
Nina, standing, was all helpless rabbit’s paws, and yet her face was menacing. She took a step toward where Maude had sat, in the instability of a rocking chair. Maude felt herself in danger of wincing. She froze her face. It didn’t matter that they lived apart, that weeks, months went by and they didn’t see each other. As soon as they were together, they were in the thick of it. They both wanted the selfless sympathy of a mother.
Nina stood over Maude, could almost be said to tower. Nina’s hand shot out. Maude couldn’t help flinching. “Oh, oh, oh,” Nina wailed. She bent over, tottering.
“What is it, Ma?”
Nina put the back of her hand to her forehead and rolled her eyes up. “Oh! Oh!” she yipped some more. “Get a wet cloth. I need to lie down.” She sank onto the studio couch, knuckles still to forehead.
Maude stood. “You mean like a maiden in a Victorian novel?”
“A cloth, a cloth,” Nina breathed, as if she could manage nothing more.
Maude quickly found the bathroom—indeed, panels of bulging melamine siding had been removed, revealing brown darkness and lengths of pipe—grabbed a washcloth, wet it, and brought it back to the living room. She could not bring herself to lay it on Nina’s forehead. “Here,” she said, flopping it onto Nina’s hand like a dead fish. Nina arranged it on her forehead and closed her eyes. They looked like the eyes of the redwinged blackbird Maude had wanted to draw and that Milt had tried to chase from the house—bulging and endangered, thin membranes over jelly.
