Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  Maude sat again in the rocking chair and looked around at Rod’s not-bad charcoal drawings of nude models and landscapes, at the clumsy handmade pottery and amateur mosaics, and at the armchair covered by an Indian cotton bedspread. Her mother, with her eyes still shut, began speaking as if with the voice of the dead, droning and gravelly. Maude wished she’d clear her throat.

  “Did I tell you I’m taking chorus?” the strangled voice came.

  “What, you mean the madrigals group?” Maude could afford to hang her mouth open and shake her head in incredulity: Nina’s eyes remained closed. Maybe more like a frog’s than a bird’s.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You sing with Weesie?”

  “That girl can’t carry a tune. She’s very nice, your friend, but a voice she hasn’t got. Not that she cares. She’s like Milt.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know. Thinks she can do no wrong. She’s nice, but it’s, what’s the word, noblesse oblige.”

  Maude shook her head some more, but differently. Weesie was like a princess, but the Sarah Crewe kind, not a spoiled brat. Maude was glad Weesie was nice to Nina.

  “Did you know the speakers committee asked Daddy to address Friday Meeting?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Nina loosed the nugget of a laugh. “I think that was Rod’s idea, a thousand years ago.”

  “It hasn’t been that long.” Maude fiddled with her hair, soft and comforting, dangling on her thigh as she hunched forward.

  “You’re like a grown-up now. But it’s true, you always were. When you were three, you were.”

  “Why was it okay for Seth to go to Bay Farm and me not?” She had spoken the forbidden name. Nothing happened. The earth did not open up and swallow her.

  “Seth didn’t go to Bay Farm. What are you talking about?” Nina’s voice came alive, plaintive and irritable.

  “I mean you wanted him to. That’s why we visited, remember?”

  “You and your memory—a steel trap, you’ve got. He needed help. We thought it would help him, you know, academically.”

  “But how were you going to pay for it? He wasn’t going to get a scholarship. I mean—why won’t Daddy let me go there now, when he’s making all this money?”

  “First of all, it’s not all this money, Miss Know-it-All, and second of all—” Nina’s voice became dead and gravelly again, “he has expenses you know nothing about.”

  Ordinarily, Maude would not have questioned further. She knew her family too well. She knew it was a warning, not a statement, and that she wasn’t meant to ask. “What do you mean?”

  Nina shrugged, her eyes closed, still lying with the washcloth like an Indian band across her forehead.

  “Do you know where Seth is?”

  What made her ask? The words seemed written in lightning. “Is he in trouble? Are you paying for lawyers or bail or something?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “You do know where he is! You’re in touch with him. I always thought—”

  “Enough. Enough. Stop asking questions. He doesn’t want you to know.”

  “He who? He Milton?”

  “He ya brotha. He doesn’t want to see you.”

  It took a while for Maude to absorb this. The rest of her life. She absorbed enough to say, after an interval of whirling blankness, “Where’s he living?”

  “Don’t ask. I told you, I can’t tell you.”

  “Is he in New York?”

  “It’s none of your—”

  “Is he all right? Was he in trouble?”

  “He has an apartment. He’s fine.”

  “You see him.”

  “We talk.”

  They talked.

  “And that was all right with you. It was all right that I thought he might be dead.” After a little while she added, “I don’t know why I think I’m a member of this family.”

  “Don’t say that, Maudie.” Nina spoke in her dead voice, as if the battery were running down. Maude would get no more out of her. If she tried, Nina would say horrible things to her, about her. Maude felt she shouldn’t care what her mother thought of her, but she did. She couldn’t live with herself when Nina disapproved of her. Yet she spoke anyway; she risked a little more, so great was her bitterness.

  “I don’t know why you think I’m in this family. I’ve been outside the whole time.”

  “Maybe you wish you were. You have such contempt for us. You despise us for being poor.”

  “That is crazy! When have I despised you?”

  “You didn’t want to be seen with us. When you were at that school, God forbid anyone should know you had parents.”

  “No kid wants to be seen with their parents. Are you kidding?”

  “All you wanted was to get away from us.”

  “Well. How ironic.” She wiped her palms across her cheeks. “I don’t understand why you hate me,” she aspirated. “Why didn’t you ever stop Seth from hurting me? Why do you protect him and not me?”

  “We don’t hate you,” said Nina. Furiously.

  This was funny. Maude could see it was funny. Even if she failed to be amused.

  8.

  IN THE FAIRY tale, the condition that must be kept in order for the sister to break the spell on her brothers, which made them leave her and made them into flying fowl, is that she must be silent the whole time. She must not speak. She cannot explain why she is gathering nettles, why she is weaving them into thread, why she is weaving the thread into cloth and cutting the cloth into shirts, which she will sew, one for each brother. She cannot defend herself when she is accused of witchcraft; she cannot explain herself because, if she speaks, her brothers will remain under the spell of being swans forever. So she is just bad, too weird, and she is tied to the stake and the fire lit.

  Swans appear out of the sky as the fire burns. Handily, she has the magic shirts with her; handily, her hands are not tied, and she throws the shirts, one over each swan and, lo and behold, there are her brothers, restored. But she has not had time to finish the last sleeve on the last shirt. That brother forever after, where one arm should be, has a beautiful white swan’s wing.

  The fire was already lit. In all the versions of the story, the fire is already lit. Surely the sister was pretty burnt by the time those brothers metamorphosed. How did people even get to the sister to get her off that stake? Did they run for buckets and water? They’d be way too late. She’d at least be shriveled from the heat. Asphyxiated. Prospects for happily ever after just don’t seem that plausible at the end of that story.

  Fuck nettles. Not that she had anyone she could talk to anyway. Danny would listen. But she’d have to forgive him. Weesie would not listen to criticism of Milt. She should tell Stan Delaney, at least. For what that was worth.

  And another thing. The brothers and their sister, they are living in the woods when the boys get turned into swans. They are there because their father is afraid that his wife, their stepmother, wants to harm them, and he is right. She’s the witch who puts the spell on them. Later, when the sister is accused of witchcraft herself, it is by her husband’s mother, her mother-in-law. There’s a lot of bad family feeling in this story. There’s a lot of unmaternality and husbands being more loyal to malevolent women than they might be, which is much the same as being malevolent themselves. Bad family feeling. It is surely a story about loyalty and the rewards of loyalty. And the cost.

  Since her talk with her mother, Maude had served Milt three dinners. That night, she cooked chicken tarragon. She skinned and deboned chicken breasts, following instructions in a book, and braised them in cream. “So, how’s Seth?” she said as Milt put the first morsel in his mouth, wondering if her father would choke. No bones—too bad! Waiter, this chicken is deboned.

  Nina must have told him by this time. Milton stopped chewing. “You’re cruel,” he said, squinting right into her eyes.

  “Me? Me?” She got up from her place, her face as red as the chair. “Me?”
r />   This would never do. She sat back down. “I learned from masters,” she said coldly. Icily. Call me the Ice Princess, go ahead.

  Just the sounds of chewing, chinks of plates and knives and forks. Maude ate chicken and broccoli, did not allow cream or rice. She ate to disguise her starvation, to hide the rebelliousness of her hunger strike. Milt was not going to notice. Nina was not going to say “Darling, are you all right? You’re down to bone.” They wouldn’t care, they didn’t, it was proof. This was the only time she ate, sitting opposite Milt at dinnertime. If she actually starved—but it seemed you could survive on amazingly little—if she starved or collapsed, they’d just hate her more. The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. Still, she waited for them to notice. It was a test. She had the pleasure, every day, of knowing that, as parents, they flunked. No scholarships for them!

  She was so angry. She was going to burn herself up with it, tied to the stake of her own indignation, above the pyre of her fury.

  Milton pushed out his chair with an ugly scrape and lounged off. QXR went on, cigarette smoke furled from behind the white brick chimney, from the black living room. She got up and cleared the table; she left the dishes for Milt. That would surprise him! A daring act of disobedience, to leave dishes to clean! Oh, she was rotten.

  In her white room, still faintly antiseptic with housepaint smell, she picked up her expensive, extravagant white Princess phone, that she paid for, and dialed Stand.

  She got “Gram,” of course, who was able to summon Stand from his den of pot smoke and crashing music. Maude imagined stocky Stand next to his little Gram, patting her shoulder or something. She imagined them easy with each other. Accepting. It wasn’t that they were gooey-gummy lovey-dovey; it was that they didn’t judge each other. It was relaxing. It seemed to be connected to lack of ambition.

  Lack of ambition was not something Seth had shared. It would not be possible, from this house. He had wanted to matter. He had wanted to be first lead and to be chosen editor. He needed to prove himself as much as she did. Maybe he just couldn’t. A houseful of failures, each feeling terrible and trying to make the next one feel worse.

  Stand got on the line. “Hey, Pugh,” he greeted her. She envisioned him, in cutoffs and a sleeveless sweatshirt. The image of his balls dangling out intruded, as if he’d never be able to have them out of sight now that she’d seen them.

  “Hi, Stand. Guess what. You know how I didn’t know if my parents had ever gone to a detective or anything? They know where Seth is. My father pays rent on an apartment for him. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Jesus shit. Jesus shit. You must be feeling pretty burned.”

  Maude laughed. “I’m feeling pretty burned. And my parents are both pissed off at me.”

  “That is like nuts.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” This was pleasing. “So, anyway, if you want Seth, Seth is to be had. Somewhere.”

  “Jeez. You don’t want to see him?”

  “He doesn’t want to see me.”

  “Pugh. You give up too easy.”

  Easily she thought, correcting his grammar, as if she were Milton—as if it were her job to find fault. She winced with self-hatred. “But he would just be horrible. He’d slam the door in my face. I mean, I don’t even know how I’d find him. It’s not as if they gave me his address or anything. They won’t tell him he’s hurt me—they never have. You see? I’m evil because I even asked. I questioned them. I’m just supposed to roll over. Seth was supposed to too, really. That’s why he was always getting punished. He objected.”

  “Seems like it worked out pretty good for him. Maybe you shouldn’t try to be so good.“

  “Once, when I was like nine or ten, my mother said about this woman they knew, ‘She acts as if she has to apologize for living.’ And I was so amazed. Because that was how I felt. As if I should apologize for living. As if I’d committed a crime by being born or something. And Seth, who was bad all the time—who wouldn’t do his homework, who wouldn’t wear what he was supposed to to Thanksgiving dinner, who left the dishes when it was his turn, whose room was a pigsty—I would always be told he had a hard time, I should be understanding. Even though they did awful things to him, that’s what they would say and let him do awful things to me. They didn’t want to hear about it.

  “Maybe I do give up too easily. But, you know—if I ran away, they wouldn’t end up supporting me, you can be sure. They wouldn’t subsidize some New York apartment for me. They’d just disown me. Or maybe they’d send Seth to beat me up.” She laughed. Actually, the awful thing was, Milt would hurt her and cling to her. And not see why she didn’t like it. And she would be unable not to mind. Unable not to think in some way he was right

  “You know,” said Stand out of nowhere, “Seth’s not that smart.”

  “Really?” said Maude, though she realized it had half occurred to her, in a forbidden kind of way. He must be, she thought reflexively. He always knew about things. He was the one who told her about Milt, pouring poison in her ear really. Look at how he walks—and then she would notice the unevenness of Milt’s gait, the peculiar stiff-leggedness. That laugh, he would say, and suddenly Milt’s laugh would emerge as hyena-like and embarrassing. Or Milt would be putting down Nina—How could you do this? Huh? Huh?—about something trivial, like parking badly, and Seth would go Listen to him, listen to him. What a prick. What a shitheel. Whispering in her ear, gleeful. It was undeniably exciting. Shitheel. Prick. About their father! About a god.

  But almost in the same instant she saw his face, Seth’s, with a certain expression he had, a certain superior way of talking that she thought of as his “sacred” voice. His face would look the way it did before he flinched, with his chin pressed into his neck, looking straight at your eyes, only his lips moving, as if animation would invite insufficient seriousness, and if you looked away, you’d be a traitor. He could talk this way about Lightnin’ Hopkins, but also about the proper way to roll a joint or the deeper significance of Night of the Living Dead or the meaning of the worm in the bottle of mescal—in other words, become a blowhard of solemn credulousness and earnestness. Well, he didn’t want to be a failure any more than she did. Who could bear that, in front of Milt? Who treated even your best efforts as failures. Who always told you everything you did wrong.

  “They’re all jealous of you, Pugh.”

  “What is there to be jealous of?”

  “Ah, come on, kiddo. Ya talented like Picasso or something, and smaht. How’s that make your old man feel, when he’s supposed to be the big cheese? And he’s getting on. Your old lady, from what you say—well, forget it. Maybe they just don’t like it that anybody else should love you. Maybe they want you all to theirselves.”

  Who of them loves me, she thought; who can he be thinking of? And: He’s completely right.

  As she worked it out, it must have gone something like this: if Maude outshone Seth, she made Milt look bad—or Milt thought so—so he let, or encouraged, Seth to hammer her. And he must have felt bad about that, so he had to blame her, find something to justify the hammering. Maybe the better she did, the more she tried to be what she thought he wanted, the more he would hate her.

  This seemed true and yet impossible. “Oh, you think I’m better than I am. You do. But I’ll give you this much. I do think Seth was jealous. But I don’t think it’s what I am or anything I’ve done. Though probably trying to be perfect was the worst thing I could do.”

  “You’re right there, kid.”

  “Did they call you Stand for Stand by me?”

  “Nah. It’s just Stan D. You know, for Stan Delaney.”

  It was too bad she couldn’t fall in love with Stand. He was so reassuring—and smart! He was so good. He would protect her. Except that Milt would skewer him in seconds. She could imagine the mockery. Stand might not care, but Maude would.

  9.

  THE WALLS ARE black—the whole inside of the house. Even my bedroom was black. I wore black leotards
and tights—I took modern dance from the age of four. You know, those footless tights, so you can dance all Martha Graham and barefoot. So, even the bottoms of my feet were black.”

  Maude gleamed brilliantly up at Bruno Heim, the artist who had been pointed out to her as the teacher who taught the cool class at the art school that advertised night classes on groovy posters in the subway. She had taken a night course in sculpture for the sake of doing something different. It turned out not to be so different; it was depressingly reminiscent of the community college. Though the students were dentists and accountants or graphic designers, professions her day classmates could only aspire to, collectively they had a similar air of resignation and adult fixedness on these inertial Tuesday evenings, with their exhausted quality of work begun at too late an hour. The students had no swagger. They didn’t believe they had any special destiny. They seemed unmoved and immovable.

  But Concepts class, Bruno Heim’s class, was in the day curriculum. Day students were kids, as at a real college. And if the groovy art school selected purely on the basis of who could pay its fees, Bruno Heim’s elite workshop—in what, exactly, remained unclear—was selected purely on the basis of Bruno Heim. What was clear was that this was the thing to go for. The cool class. She’d talked to some day students, and this was obvious from eyebrow-raisings and private looks at each other.

  She didn’t have much swagger at that point herself. The black veil that had started separating her from things when she was four, around her brother’s eighth birthday—and which had grown transparent and almost lifted at Bay Farm—had been, since that winter, since the bad birthday of the bad bouquet, thicker and more encumbering than ever. She walked from Penn Station to the art school in the evenings, aware of the sky and the changing light as the season progressed and equally aware of how detached she felt. When the term of night classes started, it was dark for this walk; but by spring, the sky at the western end of each cross street was a parfait, indigo at the top, coral at the bottom, changing over the course of the journey to cobalt bordered by strips of pale yellow and lavender. She merely noted the change, and her own flatness. She thought with a kind of dull wonder of the person she used to be, for whom the colors would have melted into her core, thrilling in ecstatic yearning.