by Anna Shapiro
“Lit ref,” brayed Maddie.
Maude hadn’t heard that term since Seth. It wasn’t a literary reference. Jacob Riis was not literary. Just because it was a book title. “Lit ref.” Good God.
In response to Philip’s remark, Weesie wore her embarrassed-happy-disapproving face. It disclaimed the mortifications of wealth while firmly clutching the riches for her hospitality. She waved her long white arms like snakes, the bangle up above her elbow over a sleeve on her skinny upper arm. “Who wants wine?” It was a risqué offer. Always there was her keyed-up, heightened look of finding herself ridiculous, ridiculously funny, and expecting you to join in. And you did. Everyone smiled without knowing why. It was like a contact high.
Sensitive Isaac shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Sure,” he said, closing his goatlike eyes. He had thick, ashy curls, as unfashionable at the end of 1968 as they had been for his whole adolescence. All the boy could do was manage a side part and let the dense mass bulge over one eye. With his skinny neck and full lips, he looked sprung from the 1930s.
He and Maude greeted each other with their usual half-suppressed smiles of being in on a private joke. The joke was that they were “intellectuals,” a joke on them, that they couldn’t help.
“So, I gather you’re in college now,” said Isaac, in his good-natured but ironically drawn-out way, his goat-eyes closing as he spoke.
College had been Milton’s suggestion, surprisingly. He saw Maude come back from her bike outing, expressionless and saying nothing, as was her new mode in defense against Milt’s new nastiness. “So what was that about going back to Bay Farm?” he’d mercilessly asked.
At dinner, apropos only of silence and chewing, he’d said, “Of course you could try community college.”
“Community college?”
“Well, if it’s not good enough for the Ice Princess, forget it. But I thought you might prefer it, since an ordinary high school is beneath Your Highness.” He laughed at her expression. “If looks could kill.”
“So, I could go to school with stupid older people instead of stupid younger ones.”
“You snotty little snob.”
“I think when something is shit, you should say it’s shit.”
Milt looked ready to come at her. He made a move such as a dog will make when it’s offended but trying to keep its dignity, turning his head aside stiffly, so that she was conscious of the tendons and loosening skin of his neck. She wouldn’t give him the excuse to hurt her physically. She had seen enough of that with Seth, who was openly rebellious. She had always been so pathetically super-good.
The next day, having inquired on her own, she told him that she would, after all, be starting there.
“I guess they’ll take anyone.”
“That’s right, Daddy.”
At sixteen, she was two years younger than the next-youngest in a very mixed class of former dropouts, middle-aged non-native-English speakers, prickly unwed mothers, and aspirants to private or state universities whose degrees might actually have some currency. Within a short time she was on something called the Dean’s List that they posted in the hall, and then first in the class, a fact that caused her both pride and shame.
The grand Philip interrupted before Maude could answer Isaac. “Yes—Miss Pugh, the artiste, is so far beyond the rest of us, she had to just skip two years of high school and go straight into the world.”
Philip should have been widely disliked. He was plump and insulting, with dead-white skin like a slug and sharply articulated cherry lips. His greasy hair was always falling over his smeary glasses—but people tended to greet Philip’s insults with smiles, as if they were love pats. He often had said to Maude, flourishing his brush as they stood at their easels, “I am an artist. You are an artiste.”
Weesie responded for Miss Pugh, the artiste: “I don’t think that place is brimming with artistes, Philip.” Weesie thought it was pretty hilarious, community college. She didn’t want to think of it as brimming with artistes. It ruined the stereotype. She hated Long Island too.
Mrs. O’Donnell brought a bottle of white wine on a tray with glasses. “I know you asked for the plain glasses, Miss Louise, but are you sure you’ll not be having the white-wine glasses? Then I can bring you a bottle of red, at least, perhaps your guests would care for a wee touch of—”
Weesie beamed as if delighted with her, taking the tray. “No, Mrs. O’Donnell, really, you’re too kind, not at all, Mrs. O’Donnell,” managing her more in the lordly way Jock Herrick did—“Waiter, my chicken is not deboned.” She would have been mortified to know of the resemblance.
The children heard Mrs. O’Donnell mutter from the hall, “Underage drinking. Bunch of young ruffians.”
“You paid her to say that,” said Philip, tossing back the greasy bangs and using his index and middle fingers to push up his glasses.
Weesie rolled her eyes. “She comes with the house,” she said sotto voce, her eyebrows raised, and then shook with her crackling, generous laugh that people couldn’t help joining in.
“Mmm,” said Philip, tossing the bangs again and holding up his glass of pale yellow wine, “tastes just like urine.” He said it you-rhine.
Maude thought this the height of sophistication. Then Isaac said, “How would you know?”
“Touché, my boy, touché,” said Philip, shooting the sleeve of his tweed jacket. Like every East Coast prep school boy, he wore jeans, in his case artistically dashed with a brushstroke or two, and an oxford shirt with his tweed. Isaac was nestled like a fuzzy chick into a fleecy shirt, rust-colored. He and Maude shared a love of autumn colors and artists who influenced no one. The first time they met, they practically clutched each other in their joy at encountering a teenager who cared about Emil Nolde and Ensor. Who’d heard of them.
“I think the wine is fine,” said Maddie, hunched into a soft chair. Studious, somber, and defensive, Maddie always reminded Maude of a turtle drawing its head in.
Plump, white-faced Philip turned his back to her and said, close to Maude, “Remind me—why is our darling Louise friends with this cube?”
Maude, praying that Maddie couldn’t hear—because, more than she disliked her, she felt sorry for her—responded, “But, Philip, don’t you know? Weesie aspires to cubedom.”
She’d never said it so flatly. It had always been a joke, because Maude didn’t believe in Weesie’s downward aspirations. As Maude spoke it, she felt defeated almost to the point of crying. Please don’t be ordinary, she found herself praying as she looked over at Weesie. Please don’t be like other people. As Maude looked at her, she realized that it was actually within the realm of possibility that Weesie might not be as exceptional as Maude believed. Both of them might not be.
More people arrived. I thought it would just be me, Maude thought.
As she encountered everyone, or they her, there was an instant of blankness in their eyes despite their polite faces, as if they could hardly remember her. Or else they thought she shouldn’t be there. She thought she heard someone say, “What’s she doing here?” But they might have been saying it about poor Maddie.
Weesie put on the White Album. Weesie was the first to get it. Everyone was picking up the unadorned jacket and opening the cover, studying it as if for clues. Weesie didn’t care about pop music (or any music). But Maude had to admire her savvy. She herself hadn’t heard of the album until this.
Across the living room Maude saw Mary Jane come out of the conservatory into the entrance hall, her head bowed, listening to something Milt was saying. Milt craned his knobby neck, looking for Maude. She thought this made him look like a goose. She thought it with satisfaction.
The lights had not been lit, and she could see Weesie’s arms—even her arms were special, so thin, so white and blue-veined—waving in silhouette overhead, not exactly to the music but in mockery of her own pleasure. Weesie embodied irony. Maude was reassured by a familiar melting sensation in her chest, proof that she was not incapable of good fe
elings about people.
She sidled through the crowd to negotiate with Milt to stay later. Seeing her, Mary Jane took Maude by both shoulders and pressed her close, then set her back as she was. “You’re so thin. You girls, you starve yourselves. You were beautiful before, Maude. You don’t need to be a skeleton.”
Maude was aware of Milt’s uncertain expression, and pleased. She’d been waiting for Milt to notice. The whole point of starving was for him to notice. She cooked those fancy meals for him every night, complicated dishes, hollandaise, stuffed eggplant. She ate only the tiniest tastes. She ate a little to make it harder for him to notice. She ate to show what she was given. It was a demonstration, for Milt to see how little he gave her. She ate that much.
The starvation was easy to see, evidently, for Mary Jane. Mary Jane didn’t see the point, however; she thought it was for fashion. Maude imitated Weesie’s beaming, generous grin that was like a shield. It was much like imitating Weesie’s patrician disdain of satisfying appetite. It seemed valiant and strong to resist appetite’s pull, like enduring an ongoing tribal rite of initiation. It was hard to say what this thin, indomitable tribe was. Better people. As the coolies had been. Better people: that tribe.
“Daddy, why don’t I get a ride home later with some-one else?”
Milt drew himself up. He sometimes used the presence of other people to say things that would wound in ways only Maude would detect. But other people also sometimes cramped his style: These kids were drinking. What if no one was going her way? And at what hour? Didn’t she have classes tomorrow?
But he let her stay. Probably because kids were drinking, Maude told herself, on the theory that, in anything Milt did in regard to her, there had to be malevolence. He probably hoped they’d crash and she’d be off his hands, like Seth.
That evening, she’d been so happy to be with Weesie again, “as if nothing had happened,” then hurt that others had been included, so casually, without even letting her know, without her being in on it. And then, when the crowd was there, it turned out to be soothing in a different “as if nothing had happened” way. But no one had mentioned Danny. It was as if he had been banished too, not that he had been part of this crowd, the art crowd. Still, didn’t they look at her and notice something missing—an arm, her skin, her insides? Apparently not. It gave her a light-headed feeling. There was a crack in reality somewhere, and it seemed to run through her life. Danny, some voice in her beseeched—but, no, she couldn’t. She knew he was waiting and hoping, that he expected her to be with him again. She could feel it. But to be with him again was to assent to being replaceable and insignificant. She couldn’t consent to that—to even more of that than already oppressed her.
Painful as it was, it was easier to consider Weesie. Maude felt betrayed by Weesie too, but her sense of it was that it was her, Maude’s, problem, not Weesie’s. If Danny’s infidelity meant the feelings Maude could compel were humiliatingly weak, it was her failure. That something of Weesie’s feelings persisted must, then, be a credit to Maude’s magnetism and Weesie’s love. Their problem was elsewhere.
When Maude had asked, seeing something of Weesie’s, early on—the signet ring from Hills Girls School; the photograph of a childhood drama production that looked like a Broadway set, only tasteful; the framed original of a New Yorker cover hanging in Weesie’s room; the donation, published in the alumni bulletin, that Jock and Mary Jane gave Bay Farm—how rich were they?—Weesie had used her charming deprecatory smile, the one that creased her starved cheeks, and said, “We don’t have anything. We live on air.”
They’d learned about epiphytes in biology. The Herricks did not resemble epiphytes. Maude said she wished they, the Pughs, had that kind of air.
“My father has very good credit,” Weesie said. Her tone, both scathing and comic, said this was ridiculous and shameful, more shameful than the lie. Weesie’s smile was brightest when it was most false. She was angry at Maude for asking.
When Weesie went on her first Bay Farm camping trip, she wore green, sueded hiking boots that Mary Jane had had custom-made for her in Switzerland, the ones Maude had seen in Maine. Her lightweight pack was from Abercrombie & Fitch, as were the monogrammed nested pan-bowl-dish set, collapsible mug, and the fork, knife, and spoon that screwed together into a case like a brie wedge. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the daughter of a professor, on scholarship, hadn’t said, “Abercrombie and Fitch.” Abercrombie’s wasn’t mail order; it was ritzy and Upper East Side and breathtakingly expensive. Getting your camping gear at Abercrombie was a little Marie Antoinette as a milkmaid. Almost everyone else got their stuff from L.L. Bean.
Maude was the other standout. She, for instance, didn’t know what L. L. Bean was until she went with Weesie to Maine. Her equipment came from a discounter in deepest Brooklyn, and all of it had been Seth’s. She had an old wood-frame canvas pack that looked about as heavy as a doghouse; cheesy Dacron sleeping bag with pictures of hunters and deer on the flannel lining; and workboots that were so obviously too big, hardened in the shape of Seth’s feet, and worn-down, the pale soles thin and uneven, that people wished they hadn’t looked.
Weesie thought Bay Farm students were acting out a fantasy, in their blue work shirts and orange shitkickers, even if they did actually shovel shit in the Bay Farm chicken house, a fantasy of self-sufficiency, closeness to nature, and independence from civilization—a fantasy she had the sense of irony to mock, even while she took on chicken-house duty with her shovel, like everyone else. Her fantasy, after all, was to be a poor urban Jew. Her parents, on the other hand, didn’t shovel shit even at a fancy private school. Though they wanted, in a general way, for everyone to live pretty nicely and were aware that not everyone did, they had no desire to experience that kind of life. They were baffled by Weesie’s freak for Bay Farm and for what she called “regular” people. Though they indulged it, they liked their own well-padded life just fine.
Mary Jane Herrick had never been on a New York subway train. She hadn’t even gone down to look. New York existed at street level and up. When they lived there she had never descended below the doormanned lobby. She had never seen a building’s basement.
When Weesie went to the city, she promised Jock she’d use cabs, put up with the taxi money he stuffed in her pocket, and took the subway.
In a restaurant once when Maude was having dinner with them, Jock Herrick handed his plate back to a waiter without turning his head: “Waiter. This chicken is not deboned.”
Weesie made him apologize.
Their address had no street number, just ——Estate.
When they stayed in Manhattan, they went to the River Club. Just for sleeping, and cocktails. They did not consider the club’s food up to par.
Jock and Mary Jane’s pictures appeared on the Food Family Fashion Furnishings page of the Times, with the name of the designer of Mary Jane’s gown, at the Aqueduct ball. Jock Herrick III appeared on the business pages, with altogether too many zeros. When Weesie said their names, people recognized them. Oh, they said, their eyes getting bigger.
Not having the benefit of Drivers Ed at Roosevelt Field Community College, Weesie was taking private driving lessons. Ernie, the not-chauffeur, drove her to them. There were curtains on the backseat windows, and Weesie closed them, in case some stray Bay Farm person might catch a glimpse of her.
It would be easy to conclude that friendship did not tolerate difference; that it was little more than a convergence of conditions and convenience—an obsession with Barbies, houses near each other, a shared homeroom, a crush on Nureyev; you both had parents who were painters. You were the same age, you thought the other one was smart, which is to say, like you. What did any of this have to do with loyalty? What did it have to do with love?
The fact was, each time there had been a shift in schools, Maude had lost a friend. When her best friend had gone on to junior high, Maude was still at the elementary school doing sixth grade. That was the end of that. She had lost the next whe
n she went to Bay Farm. That girl had treated Maude’s departure from public school as defection, or personal rejection.
Maude had separated herself from Weesie by money. She had said she couldn’t go back to Bay Farm because of money. It was as if Maude had said, You’re rich, I’m not. It was the sixties. She might as well have said she was the better person.
When Maude told Weesie she wasn’t going back and why, Weesie had said, “That’s fucked up.” Yes, it was fucked up. It was so fucked up that merely saying it was fucked up was hardly a sufficient response, yet Weesie had instantly turned to other things, as if panicked. She was panicked. She couldn’t afford to sympathize with outright deprivation or it would make her, too, helpless and victimized—and it would make them too unequal. Though everything had changed—they now had not only dif-ferent presents but different prospects—clearly the way forward was for both to behave as much as possible, with each other, as if nothing had happened, to keep that appearance of conflu-ence, hold on to what little convenience there was. It might be a kind of deeper sympathy and loyalty; it could be called tact. Disappointing though it was, it was more than Maude’s previous friends had managed.
Philip drove her home, in his parents’ boat of a car, gesticu-lating so lavishly, Maude was afraid he would drive them off the road and fulfill Milt’s possible wishes. “Tough break,” he said, “not coming back. But that doesn’t matter to an artiste like yourself,” he added, tossing his greasy bangs and smiling. In his view, the aristocracy of art trumped the privileges of material wealth. And she too had always believed that such trivialities as money were as nothing next to the kinship of taste.
He wanted to come in to talk to Milt, much admired by the Bay Farm art crowd, but the house was dark.
Maude made her way to her room thinking about this paradox: that the more she tried to hold on to or hold together what mattered to her, the less she held. It was like clenching ice. It just got smaller and smaller in her hand.