by Anna Shapiro
3.
THE CURRICULUM OF Roosevelt Field Community College was as unadorned as its architecture, an old Quonset hut on the perfectly flat airfield, left over from the war. The administration office was in a trailer on cinder blocks to one side. Many of the courses were remedial. Maude thought she would like that, something remedial. Remedial Familiality.
She amused herself. She wrote Remedial Familiality course titles down inside the black-agate-patterned cover of her Mead composition book, where it had a grid to fill in by subject and period, as if Mead expected her to be at Levittown Memorial High School.
Bay Farm sold its own notebooks—lined or unlined, with a tasteful silhouette on the plain cover of the refectory barn, the school symbol. Maude hadn’t consented to use lined paper for the past two years. She wrote like an automaton, after all, in straight, even lines. You could draw on unlined.
At Bay Farm, a pale red-haired boy ran the store—a supply closet—open on certain mornings before classes. He leaned over the little counter that folded down into the doorway, hardly able to bear waiting for what you would ask for. He knew (two Bay Farm pads, unlined). He wanted to get on to the person behind you. He knew what they wanted too. He was so pale he looked as if he lived in the supply closet, and there was an impersonal angry impatience to all his motions and to the set of his unsmiling lips. He was like a creature out of Grimm in his closet, a tall, bony, angry gnome. He wore a visor.
Now she was on prole paper, with blue lines, sold in the super-market or soda fountain, next to Crayolas and Scotch Magic Tape and Bic pens. Of this last, hers had to be black, Extra Fine. Good for cross-hatching.
Milt hadn’t found the school store so fairy tale-like. He had been furious going over the bill, which came at the end of terms. But, after all, you needed pens and notebooks. She didn’t even buy textbooks, after the first term; she used the ones on the reserve shelf. Milt got angry in a different way when she got the library job to help pay expenses: “Ungrateful kid. You act as though I don’t support you.”
Why think about this, she told herself, sitting on a tube chair, its Formica desk made to look like blond wood, curving around parameciumlike and one-armed where the composition book rested. She was beautifully dressed. Somehow that was a big deal for her, to be beautifully dressed every day. She wore dresses she made, which, with the amount of time she now had, became more fanciful with each creation, veering away from the Simplicity and Butterick tissue templates. Demure Jackieish cap-sleeved affairs with glass buttons like crystal globes; something Morticia-like in black crepe an ancient beatnik friend of Nina’s once gave her, along with chiffon she had tiedyed in the thirties. Premature capitulation. She had a figure out of the thirties, that woman, a bolster bosom and no hips, with a permy frizz of “bob” to match. Her eyes looked rimless, demanding, and angrily disappointed, though she could be coy too, in a flapperish, baby-talk kind of way. A semi-failure.
Maude wore shaped suit jackets and pleated linen pants from the forties that she found at the Hadassah Thrift Shop near the train station. Worn with her balletish Capezios. Her all-around-the-eyes brown kohl. Her hair hanging to her waist or in a braid.
The other students all but cleared a space around her. The girls had made a fence around her at that first Bay Farm graduation, because of her clothes, her look—too special, too different. But it was mere garden edging compared to this holy fence. There was no cool crowd here. She was it. She pitied them for thinking so and went out of her way to be friendly. Starving, she felt ethereal and gorgeous.
She felt the men and boys look at her too, which really seemed pitiful. Didn’t they see the sign that said Do Not Touch? They did, really. They were painfully respectful, if obviously horny. She recognized her teachers as her affine group. They were smart, mostly, and grateful for her. She and they were mutually grateful. But they weren’t going to come over to play. They weren’t going to invite her over either.
She spent as many hours as possible studying. She read Nietzsche for the hell of it. That was cheering: she really was the last person on earth. Sitting in the spectacularly ugly library of the college, reading these works, led to a sense of exaltation hardly distinguishable from desolation.
She tried Jung. She turned pages and realized that, after the first few paragraphs, she had forgotten she was reading, her mind occupied by other things, though her eyes continued to scan through the lines and stimulate her hand to move at the end of a page. She felt as if she were underwater. She felt as if she couldn’t wake up. She stopped.
She watched old movies on TV. They were the movies her parents would have grown up with. In some hidden, inward sense, she lived in her parents’ generation as much as in the excitement that would be called “the sixties.” She identified with grown-ups. She thought she was one. After Milt was in bed, in his kingdom upstairs, she would put on a plain black silk slip from one of her twenty-year-old evening dresses to watch women in swell clothes enact passion with men who lit their cigarettes and wore suits.
She called the two people she knew in Manhattan, a Bay Farm girl who had graduated and another who had fucked up so badly she never would. Milt said these calls were too expensive. She was calling from 516 to 212. Fine, she said, slamming down the greenish old black telephone. I’ll get my own.
She did. A white Princess phone with its own separate number, PErshing 7–5864. The bills came to her, in her name, fifty cents extra for the Princess phone. What was great about the phone was that the dial lit when you picked up the receiver. This was so pleasing. You wanted to make calls in the middle of the night, with the lights out, just to dial by the greenish luminescence. She could imagine lying on her bed talking by this friendly, personal light, like the burning end of a cigarette, like a firefly. Murmuring. A boyfriend would have come in handy here.
Looking at the compact phone, so new, so white, in her dingy black room where the warm-hued African rug covered some of the ugly seafoam, it occurred to her that, rather than just paint in her room, as she did these days, she could paint the room, as she had threatened to do when Nina was plotting her escape. The worst part turned out to be lugging the cans home with the wire handles cutting into her fingers. Or how much they cost. That hurt too.
Milt had once said he’d pay. Forget that. She’d never ask him for anything again.
No, the worst part was sleeping in that smell. She didn’t mind the odor—there was something pleasurable in its insistently chemical nature, its antagonism to nature, like a medical disinfectant. Like modernism. A smell that took the art out of artifice. It was just that she thought the fumes were probably killing her. Giving her a brain tumor or eating her lungs.
Or maybe the worst was trying to get the chemical effusion to cover the walls, the chipped walls on which the dark paint had faded to deep gray. The chipped spots were white. The new coat of white went on in curving, wild swaths that looked like some modernistic abstract lace, flurrying shawls over the black.
Milton came in and told her not like that. That was a pretty bad moment. She tried not to mind his instructing her. He exercised so much power over her that one ounce more—no, what’s smaller than an ounce?—the weight of a postage stamp more was as if he squeezed her under a press. One of those things that made the frozen-stringbean John Chamberlain sculptures, out of cars crumpled to dense cubes. She felt herself becoming compressed and tiny. “Not sideways—you don’t roll the damn thing in curves. Up and down, for God’s sake.” And that look of disgust, that angry, dignified cat look that disdained to fight. “Go ahead. Show me.”
If she said no, she was pitiful: she behaved like a child and revealed how great she felt his power to be. But it was horrible to do what he said.
She could disdain to fight too. She didn’t look at him. She rolled the fuzzy cylinder in its ribbed pan, caked in black under-neath, and made a swath up, a swath down, sizzle, sizzle.
“That’s more like it.”
Who needs your approval, anine? Fuckhead.
Then she had a white room. A white room. Like blank canvas.It seemed to expand and pulsate around her. Even the thin first coat had. It was like night and day, you could say. Anything can be done on white. It asked to be filled, but it was beautiful in itself: it was pure possibility. It was possibility incarnate. It was every morning at Bay Farm, where the wonderful thing might happen that day, where the wonderful thing was expected.
She wondered if it was possible to paint linoleum tile. Red would be nice. White would be great. Off-white, “oyster” white, as the cans say. But she couldn’t face another trip back from the hardware store: not the handles cutting her palms, not the cost. Especially the non-money cost. She wouldn’t be able to go into her room, her wet-floored room. It would be like blocking the rear hole of your burrow while the hunter waits at the front.
The rug looked beautiful, if incongruous, on the black tiles with their uneven waves of white. The tiles had an unpleasant rubbery give and sheen. She thought about giving the rug back. She’d have to arrange it. She’d have to deal with Danny. The rug looked right with the Navajo blanket Nina and Milt had bought on their honeymoon. She’d removed the prim turquoise bed-spread Nina had once put there in one of her surprising reflexive bows to convention. Maude had made some plain white curtains, though nothing could be done about the squinty windows, high on each side of the corner, near the ceiling. Horrible.
Seth’s room across the hall had a glass door to the cracked patio out back and a big window facing the unbuilt-on field beyond. Seth’s room had always been light blue. It wasn’t as if she had never noticed. She had complained about it for years. She pointed out the unfairness, for which she got no explanation. She didn’t need one, really: Seth was Milton’s. Milton only had one child, only one that was visible to him, and Milt was the adult who counted.
But Maude would have liked to know why they thought they did it, or why there could be just one of anything in their family, as if it were the family rule, the Rule of One. That’s how she would structure it if she wrote a Pugh ethnography: In this rigidly binary system, members are either this or not-this. There can be only one man, one woman, one boy, one girl, one artist, one person who counts.
No one had ever tried to stop Seth from hurting her. Nina let him do whatever he wanted. Milt would say, “You two cut it out,” as if it involved two. Nina made Seth breakfast but expected Maude to fend for herself. She brushed Seth’s hair but left Maude’s tangled: she promised to do it when Maude got older. Seth got new clothes, and Maude got his never-fitting boy hand-me-downs.
Yet it was Seth who hated Milt. Seth who would whisper to her—“Watch—look how he walks. He looks like Mr. Machine.” Who would go into ecstasies over how stupid Milt was: “He thought Joan Baez was a guy. He thought it was a boy’s name!” And Maude would be careful not to say, “Maybe he was thinking of Joan Miro, or something.” Because then all the rage and disdain would turn on her.
You could never say anything bad about Seth to Milt. Milt would refuse it: I don’t want to hear, he’d say, holding up a hand.
Sometimes Milt would gang up on Maude with Seth. They came into her room and made fun of her dolls, of how her clothes didn’t fit, of how she’d covered the cracked paint of a hand-me-down night table with a towel. “It’s like a bathroom in here,” the two males had said, breaking up, clutching each other, weak with laughter. “Maude lives in the shitter. She lives in the john.”
When Seth disappeared, not even the good things or neutral things could be mentioned. His big room—built as the master bedroom before another was added upstairs, with the studio—sat there, inhabited by air. Aside from borrowing his records, Maude rarely went in. If he was dead, which was perfectly possible—she had no way of knowing—it was his mausoleum.
There was one other thing she went in for. She went in there to cry. It felt better to mourn Seth’s life than her own—she was still there. True, he had always done his best to hurt her, almost all the time. But he had been her hero too. He was cool before she knew what cool was.
Logic was no help to her. Logic was her enemy. She should hate Seth. She should be glad he was out of her life, and sometimes she was. But it wasn’t the same as not feeling a connection, the oldest part of herself, like the thick wood of an otherwise supple green vine, the green parts easily snapped off and regrown and hardly missed. Hard wood, central stem. You can’t justify it to yourself when you love people who are inimical to you. You can paint your room white and still be locked in the black house. It’s shaming, loving them, and no path is right. Because it wouldn’t be better, particularly, not to love them. It would be convenient. But it isn’t, really, an option.
4.
AT THE COMMUNITY college there was someone who hung around, who liked Maude and who she wished didn’t so much—more than the other merely reverent students. A guy. A young man about twenty, she guessed. A cute guy, some would say, if you like the beefy type so musclebound they walk as if they have a full diaper. Someone who clearly did not see the Do Not Touch sign. This was almost a relief, except that around him she really did feel like a glass object that might break. He kept asking her to come for a ride on his motorcycle.
What was it about guys and motorcycles? That had been such a thing at Bay Farm, the way boys talked about Harleys. They all wanted Harleys. That was how they said it, Harley. They didn’t say Harley Davidson. They were on more intimate terms. They said Harley and it was like saying orgasm, or having one, they looked so pleased. They discussed them. It was like locker-room talk. It would have been less offensive if they had talked about girls. At least girls were alive. These boys were so smart and so dumb. Even Danny let himself be pulled in. Motorcycles were a magnet. For boys. What Maude thought was: there is a total identity between motorcycle rider and idiot. What was the point of the damn things? Noise, speed, and danger—some of Maude’s least favorite things. Boys thought they were penises, that was what it was. Had to be. She thought, thank God they’re not: penises are so much nicer. Padded, pink. Satiny. Animal. At least the one she knew.
One vacation from Bay Farm—she would always look forward to vacations, count down the days and then, after a few museum visits or days spent sewing a new dress, the vacation would yawn: no Bay Farm society, no network that gave meaning to the stray remark or drawing or school paper, no teacher pat on the head or appreciative coolie look that made a whole day or week or year worthwhile, life once again on the shelf—on one of those vacations, she had bought a True Romance magazine. She was curious, never having read one, but with a sly edge to her curiosity, as if beyond it was something she could use to impress and, yet further, that aspect of American commercial silliness—the giant molded boy on top of Big Boy restaurants; the smiling, glittering earnestness of country music stars—that simply filled her with a pleasure like laughing gas, a pleasure fuller and happier than mockery.
And indeed it was that way. She read straight through its dull-colored rough newsprint pages, looking intently at the coarsely reproduced photographs as if for clues, as if they would augment the sparse and clichéed details of the stories—“sooty” lashes and eyes in code colors that signified trustworthiness (brown) and danger (green). She enjoyed these stories the way she had loved reading the stories in McCall’s when Nina subscribed to it. She used to grab it first thing the day it arrived, when she got home from third grade. The stories were about on that level in True Romance too. But there was one she loved.
As a story, it was as dopey and full of hackneyed conveniences of circumstance and authorial conniving as any of the others. It was its closeness to her own milieu, or something that passed for alternative or superior, that made it particularly piquant. “I Was a Motorcycle Mama.” That was the title. It never failed to make her laugh, however often she looked at it. The picture showed a girl who looked like, well, a Bay Farm girl. Like Maude, really. In all the other stories, the women were abjectly aspiring—they had th
eir one good dress (taffeta in one story, in which the romantic lead was blind; he liked its audible swish) and led threadbare lives the poor men were supposed to light up. They had hairdos. The motorcycle mama had long, straight, dark hair parted in the middle and slithering to her jeans. Her particular folly was Vince, of the sooty lashes and green eyes, who conformed to stereotypes of the high Romantic period, which meant, actually, that he was incompatible with the kind of romance True Romance considered true: he finally loved his motorcyle gang more than his girl.
“Motorcycle Mama” was, in a way, the Bay Farm girl translated into Levittown imagery, a vision of the street that the street could understand. Finding your own weird affine group, the subculture you recognized as yours, and trying to do well in it, by its terms. Maybe that was why Maude nearly wept with hilarity and why she brought the pages to school, hectoring everyone to look, no, but don’t you think it’s great? And maybe that was why they didn’t get it. They didn’t grow up in tract housing and they couldn’t see the weeping hilarity of it. Even Weesie just smiled faintly, with goodwill, until finally, fed up, she said, “I don’t really understand why you like it so much.”
And now here was a motorcycle, what, papa? Wanting her to be his motorcycle mama, anyway. It was only because those dopey coolie boys gave such cachet to motorcycles that she even considered it, as if they would see her and know about it and she would be a proxy coolie, preening for an audience that wasn’t there.
It was one of the first warm days, the meteorological rather than equinoctial beginning of spring, but optimistic all the same. She’d never been a spring person. She thought autumn was the beautiful time, the reawakening, the quickening and enlivening time after the torpor of summer, the true beginning of the year, when things stir again—when school starts. But she had never experienced a year like this. At one wintry point recently, she had gone into Seth’s room to look out the window. In her room, you had to stand on the bed to look out, and then what you saw was only all the other houses, like a row of posted bills where your eye keeps going to the next, seeking new information but finding only the same thing.