Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  Having to tell the potential new teacher about herself—needing to charm him—awakened something. Describing her life in that disowning, ironic way—it was like making a picture or tabulating an ethnography. It put it to one side as an object, apart from her. This put her, strangely, in a place where she could begin to experience again. It almost willfully pushed aside the black veil.

  Bruno grinned back at the prospective student, exposing a gap between his front teeth. His cheeks glinted with pale stubble. His blond hair fell to one side and covered his collar. He looked both dangerous but—if you were careful—strong and powerful enough to be benign. Above his hard and knowing grin, his eyes gave the impression of being round openings that revealed, inside his head or behind it, like a Magritte, cloud and sky. “You look likely,” he said, and laughed and laughed. “Yeah. You’d be good in the class.”

  She took her high school equivalency exam on the first day that promised summer heat. As a Nassau County resident, she was assigned to a school just over the border in Queens. This was fine on a map. Or by car. But to get to it, she had to go away from it, taking a commuter train into the city, then the subway almost the same distance in almost the same direction she’d come from. Two hours.

  As she held a strap, swaying, looking from the elevated subway into the walled backyards of Queens, crossed with laundry lines and pocked with raised swimming pools, it struck her that this would be the first day of Selected Work Week. She felt Bay Farm tug on that shoulder, the one poking east.

  The test was held in one of those city high schools for several thousand, vast and aspirational, built of brown stone, with a wide staircase intended to be magnificent, over which the disaffected student populace sprawled. Some of the black kids sprouted Afros, and there was a straw-haired hippie in a Hawaiian shirt, but most of these kids were of the Add-a-Pearl type and their consorts, still teased and, amazingly, greased. Their hair seemed like an emblem of a sad premise, that nothing in their lives would be better than this, their adolescence.

  She made her way up the many steps through this army, through glass doors and down wide, brown hallways echoey with mad shouts and clatter, to an office where she was directed back outside to the glare and around to a quiet side entrance at street level. A piece of paper was taped to the door: GED candidates, with an up-arrow colored in with magenta Magic Marker.

  General Education Diploma? Maude was never enlightened as to what the initials signified. Gutted Edification Drivel. Gelid Energy Derivatives. Geriatric Enemas Divided. They used to play this, she and Danny, she and Isaac and sarcastic Phil; passing a VFW hall on their bikes, it was Vaginitis for Winifred. Vicious Flying Worms.

  The Gelid Energy Derivatives or Geriatric Enema aspirants were exactly the community college population: parents and grandparents, overworked immigrants for whom English was a second language, a swaggering dropout in his twenties, people who looked anxious, as if they might not pass.

  Since this was the period of her life when she looked into everyone as into a mirror, it occurred to Maude that maybe she wouldn’t, herself. She had no idea what you were supposed to know at the end of high school. She was years younger than anyone there. It was reprehensible for her to think she was different; she was a snob, just as Milton said.

  It was just a few hours, this test, but they were to stay in her mind forever, hours utterly, almost brutally, prosaic—the stubby, mendicant diploma candidates, the unnecessarily stern yet robotic proctor, a school librarian who noticed that Maude carried a paperback of I And Thou and, with a meltingly indulgent, embracing look, remarked that a reader of Buber seemed an unlikely candidate for a GED; the teeming front steps wall-to-wall with strangers her own age, the unexpectedly quiet, tree-lined street in which she found an empty luncheonette during the break.

  The test questions were grievously easy, with their sets of four answers, of which only one was to be selected by filling in with No. 2 pencil between the dotted lines. With outrage hardly distinguishable from resignation, she thought, I could have passed this test in seventh grade.

  It was administered in sections, verbal and math, morning and afternoon, three hours each. Which was short for all of high school. Maude finished the first, even with checking her answers, with more than an hour and a half to spare. Everybody looked at her as she stood with her test form. There was almost a gasp. Maude looked through the pages again, just in case: every sheet, every numbered question had its dully shiny graphite mark. She proceeded apologetically to lay the form on the proctor’s metal desk. The heads went down, their glances reapplied to the test, with expressions painful to see.

  As she did to the classes that made her feel déclassé, Maude wore a dress too proper for the occasion, one of her carefully sewn A-lines of rough Mexican cotton in eye-popping shades, and eyeliner all around her eyes. She never developed a repulsive starved look, a Rosette look, but her movements were careful, conscious, almost prim. She was always aware of being looked at. She carried a picture in her head, like a tiny television monitor, of how she must appear, as if, by imagining what people saw, she could remember who she was.

  At the luncheonette, she sat on an old-fashioned steel revolving stool and ordered coffee. That was her usual lunch. She was very hungry. She counseled herself to wait for the deeper hunger, a booming, thudding set of pangs like the ringing of the big schoolbell at Bay Farm. On the counter was a metal cakestand holding, under its suave glass cover, twisted crullers or beignets, dusted with sugar. She indicated she’d have one of these.

  The cruller was of the puffy, light school of fried dough rather than on the crusty-solid end of the spectrum. It was celestial; mythical. Nothing had ever tasted this good. Nothing ever would again. She’d never be this hungry again. Every cell called out for sustenance; every cell cooed with delight over the morsel.

  The counterman, an old fellow in a white cap like an envelope, like an army cap, leaned back, in his white apron and white short sleeves, and relished her pleasure, his arms crossed over the bib.

  10.

  MAUDE GOT AND lost several jobs over the summer. Nothing dramatic was involved, but she felt her deficiency, though even that seemed an aspect of her distaste for the roles she had to play, which felt false and distorting. For a while, she was a mother’s helper on Fire Island. All she wanted to do was lie on the beach, reading, and, in the evening, flirt with boys among the gangs of well-off teenagers who hung around the gratifyingly honky-tonk strip of bars, crabcake stands, and boutiques near the ferry landing. Instead, she was meant to be pleasing Dr. Shapiro’s healthy, self-delighting boy and girl, who were most greatly entertained if they could perform for Maude, or get her to watch Batman with them when they were in their summer pajamas, laundered by her. Everything about them expressed complacent self-satisfaction, not least the expensive pajamas. Taking care of Baba and Russell, so greedy for attention that they excluded her, was uncomfortably like being with small, good-natured, but voracious Milts and Ninas. She didn’t like the sand grittily underfoot on the floor, which she was expected to vacuum, or the embarrassed way bald little Dr. Shapiro looked at her in her bikini on the weekends. Evidently big, warm, buxom Mrs. Shapiro didn’t love it either.

  In those weeks, she walked on the beach while a man walked on the moon and, really, she couldn’t have cared less. She could not participate in other people’s excitement about it.

  The next job was in a dark, unsuccessful bookstore that was like summer in a tomb. No walks on the beach. Despite the lack of customers, Maude was not allowed to read, as though reading—advertising the product!—were a bad thing. Mrs. Reeves, the depressed but not defeated proprietor, always found something for her to do that didn’t involve books at all—sorting through unsold ornaments that got peddled at Christmastime, neatening untouched stacks of bookmarks. Let go without rancor or explanation, as with the Shapiros, as she was handed her pay, Maude went back to her old part-time library job, where she had the pleasure of order—the double pleasure of both bo
oks and order—but only at the ass-end of August, while the regular girl was away.

  At least it was the ass-end of August. It was a matter of days now, and she would begin daytime classes at the groovy art school. All year she had felt stunned, in a state of suspended animation, but summer was as if all of life was in intermission, not just her own. She walked on the moon.

  Weesie’s life wasn’t in intermission, though. Weesie had been away, in Maine; not at her family’s place, but working at a camp a former Bay Farm teacher had started. Much of the staff was from Bay Farm. You had to be asked.

  Weesie called during the interlude of after-camp, before-school. “You’ve got to come over. I’m dying of, like, sclerosis from a diet of rich people. My father’s got this English lady here—Lady Goodfellow, can you believe it? And my mother’s got Father Penleigh. Remember Father Penleigh?”

  Maude had not thought of him, but she did remember. Mary Jane sponsored his art program for street kids. There’d been a picture in the metropolitan news section of the Times, grinning kids on the sidewalk with their poster-paint artworks. Weesie started mock-singing, “In the ghet-to, in the ghet-to,” and burst into embarrassed, mocking laughter at the radical chicness of her mother, this lunch, their lives.

  Ernie, the not-a-chauffeur, met Maude at the local, deserted train station and deposited her on the gravel of the Herricks’ drive, so clean it looked washed and bleached. Weesie came bounding from behind the house, in a striped bikini. “Oh, my God!” said Maude, standing back after the initial shrieks.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” said Weesie, looking down at herself. “Gazongas.” She laughed as if her body characterized her as little as her parents’ way of life did.

  “You’ve gone from Audrey Hepburn to Sophia Loren.” Wee-sie had gained about ten pounds, but somehow all in the right places.

  Weesie pretended almost not to hear. “It’s the fat person in me, trying to get out,” she corrected.

  A silver-haired man of great height, with icy eyes, wandering by in white pants, roared, “You look wonderful, Louise. Don’t lose an ounce.” He ran a corporation that made instruments for NASA and the Pentagon. Weesie rolled her eyes and shook her head, pretending to be droll but compressing her lips sternly.

  “I think my mother’s about to have lunch served,” Weesie told Maude, as if this were the most damning and ridiculous thing yet. “I’d better put something on.”

  There was a flurry of introductions as they entered the screen porch, where two square tables, covered in linen cloths splashed with poppies and cornflowers, were laid. Jock and Mary Jane sat with the Lady, with her carefully styled gray hair that looked colored in in one shade, and her big sparkly rings. The scary ice-eyed man sat at that table too.

  At their own table they had Father Penleigh, officially and heartily interested in Young People. Celibate unnecessarily and unnecessarily publicly, he was also an appealing and tremendous flirt, in his collar and short sleeves. Mrs. O’Donnell served: herby veal, scented rice, watercress salad, white wine and rosé in decanters and iced tea in crystal pitchers.

  As usual, Maude felt intimidated and, as usual, no one would have guessed. It was a relief when the girls were free to run off to the beach.

  It was so different from the beach at Fire Island, where she’d watched little Russell and Baba in the wide swath of fine white sand stretching to the horizon, fringed by seagrass and rust-red storm fences slatted into the minimal rise of the dunes. In that dark sea, the waves could grasp you and toss you down you knew not where, waves that reared up like thunderheads, curling and foaming. No matter how far you walked down that endless beach—passing women in hairstyles and golden bikinis fastened by bangles, whose frosted lipstick contrasted with their leathery tans—it was exactly the same. That was the ocean beach. This was the North Shore. There was a strip of sand, but then mostly pebbles; waves barely lapping, hardly more turbulent than a lake; and dunes and cliffs topped by shrubs. Thick, mowed grass came right down to the beach. No smell of Coppertone. No other people at all. It was like the crescent of beach at Bay Farm, except that the grass there was allowed to grow into a meadow. Maude had often gone there between classes, to sit in the intensified quiet made by the plashing wavelets. And she’d gone there with Danny.

  The girls settled on towels. Or not quite settled. Weesie, with her typical restless energy, couldn’t. She rearranged her towel, lay on it squirming, and rearranged it again. She ran back to the house to get a drink. She came back, threw herself onto her stomach, began reading the paperback she had with her and almost immediately cried out, “Is this incredible! Is this incredible!” and had to read a passage out loud, and then, “Oh, my God, listen to what he did next.”

  At last Weesie lay on her back, to sunbathe or talk. Maude turned her head to look. Weesie’s face wore the expression of a puppy caught in a child’s grasp, defeated into quiescence. The beaky bead of her upper lip was like a pout within a pout. It seemed part of her charm, her exceptionality, that—coexistent with her enthusiasm, mockery, and jokes—was this persistent, chafing dissatisfaction, her restlessness. It was what led to the enthusiasms—for Milt and high-toned art, to wanting to live “like poor Jews in the West Thirties”; it endowed dull Maddie Johnson with a sheen—and, because Weesie didn’t hesitate to be judgmental, made her attention, however brief and restless, feel like grace.

  Throwing her arm over her face, Weesie said, as she often had before, “You’re so lucky. You’re so lucky you know what you’re going to be.”

  Maude let loose a bark. “How would I know that? I don’t even know if I can go to college.”

  “You know what I mean. Being an artist and everything.”

  “I don’t know. I might rather be an anthropologist.”

  “Do you know you got the only A in anthropology for our year? In fact, you and Lizzie Eldredge got the only A’s in it ever.”

  “How an earth do you know that?” Bay Farm gave grades, but only for college transcripts. They were secret grades. To discourage competition. You got descriptive reports, called comments. It was more personal.

  “Didn’t you hear? Parker Knowles and Steve Pearl broke into the office in June and got everyone’s records.”

  “Oh, God. I must have pretty bad grades in algebra and geometry.” B-minus? The comments had commended her sense of logic.

  “D’s. And C in French.”

  “D’s!” They listened to the tiny waves, sip, sip. “I’ll never get in anywhere.”

  “We all did shit, that was what was so incredible. Almost no A’s. Boys got A’s, go figure that. Your friend Mr. Danny. And, you know, Francie Perkins and Melissa Ciro.”

  “Them! The grinds?”

  “Exactly. Who would’ve thought being a grind—I mean, they’re not that smart, those girls—who would’ve thought that would pay off?”

  “It’s not as if I didn’t work. I knew they hated intellectuality. They hate ambition. Think of that stupid Rod Patrick—do you know the first thing he said in my first class, ‘No one here is going to be an artist’? And you would never guess from the comments. My comments were always great.” She had gone to Bay Farm to become an underachiever, like her brother!

  “They’re punitive puritans. And hypocrites. We’re too cosmo-politan.” Weesie flopped over onto her stomach again, uncomfortably, because of the gazongas. “There goes Radcliffe, anyway.”

  But Maude could see Weesie didn’t feel judged. She felt secure in her restless Weesieness, and Maude helplessly continued to admire her. She would never get what she wanted from Weesie. Okay. Maybe she’d never get what she hoped for from anyone. Maybe she wouldn’t have known this if she had continued at Bay Farm. Maybe she would never have had to.

  Weesie was cackling that Lanie, of the former teased hair and falsies, had dropped the divine Boy for Ed Platner; it seemed that the Boy might prefer boys. Not a ripple. Weesie didn’t recognize self-doubt.

  Maybe it was okay to accept a lesser fate. Maybe it wasn�
��t lesser. Maybe it didn’t mean you were a failure.

  11.

  THE LAST HOT days of August she spent answering want ads for jobs in the city and looking at apartments. This led to men who interviewed her breasts and, after leering at her for some requisite time, showed her out. She didn’t wear a bra, on the one hand, and she was a seventeen-year-old dropout, on the other. The apartments always were in neighbor-hoods that had her nearly choking with fear just to walk down the streets to them. The metal stanchions of their police locks extended halfway across their cramped kitchens, and still hadn’t kept the burglars out.

  Her G.E.D.—Get Educated Dearly?—scores came: passing, but less good than they might have been. And that was all she would ever remember of them. The damning Bay Farm grades Weesie had told her were emblazened in some hot place in her chest. But this document from the Board of Regents of New York State, which represented a lost, damaging, unframed part of her life, a time that both defined her and didn’t seem part of her, dissolved from her mind instantly like tissue in water. She cherished her difficult-to-unfurl June ’68 student-body picture from Bay Farm, with its two hundred tiny faces, hers among them, but the 1969 document that purported to represent the equivalent of a diploma disappeared. She must have sent a copy of it with the college applications she made that winter. But she had no memory of ever seeing it after unfolding the flimsy pale blue-and-white sheet, perforated down one side.