MR. PATRICK CAVORTED in the backyard with Mrs. Pugh. Rod and Nina. Maude watched with narrow eyes from where she had planted herself on the black couch. Milt couldn’t see what was going on. His big north window faced the street. She looked up from the book again—and there they unbelievably were—and back down at Margaret Meade, for history class. They were doing prehistory and anthropology. The teacher said history was anthropology. He said every era constituted a different culture. How would you mark them off, Maude wondered in an instant of fleeting concentration. Culture must be changing every minute. At this very minute, she could be living in a different culture from the last time she looked up. “Culture is no more nor less than the aggregate of customs, practices, and artifacts of a group.”
Mr. Patrick, that dopey art teacher, was definitely out there in her backyard. In the dual tracking at Bay Farm, he ran the farm program, which produced salad greens in spring term, up through the first peas, and more solid vegetables for autumn lunches. It was part of the student program to work the farm, their cultivation and harvesting chores an element of the utopian program intended to make the school a self-sufficient community. Before Mr. Patrick had taken over the year before, the gardening had declined to mere fields of potatoes. Upperclassmen talked about how awful the potato harvesting used to be, with machines and a conveyor belt. Though “Rod” had expanded the farm to include the full spectrum, Maude thought he must be too fond of potatoes, because what other vegetable could have made him such a tub? Somehow in sharing his gardening enthusiasm with her mother, he had elicited her offhand agreement that organic vegetables were better. Nina would have had to show off that she had read Rachel Carson; she hated for people to think she knew less than they did. As if her defensive display were the expression of desire, he had offered to help her start her own vegetable patch. And there he was.
Maude could imagine it: Nina not wanting to have this bear of a man over but not wanting him to think that as artists they were high-hatting him. What Maude wouldn’t have imagined was her mother bent over and jerking with laughter and clutching his hairy bowling pin of an arm to keep her balance. It was a silent movie from where Maude watched, and she couldn’t see that his arm was hairy. But she had noticed it when he showed the class how to soak etching plates in the acid bath. His workshirt had been rolled up—the hair was reddish and also gray; one side of the arm was freckled and brown from all his work in the sun, but the bottom was troutlike and pale, with blue traces. Bubbles of acid gathered in the lines of the zinc plates, digging in.
Their backyard was just a little patch of shaven weeds. Beyond it, the weeds were allowed to grow into wheatlike heads and wildflowers where the developer had left a square of unbuilt-on land onto which four streets backed. It was Maude’s favorite place in Levittown. You could half-close your eyes, to block out the backyards on the far side, and pretend you were in the country. Once every summer it got mowed, and she ran out to collect the fallen black-eyed susans and pinks from the cool, bouncy, mounded lines of grass.
Off on one side of the field was a desolate concrete court with a wall in the middle. It was intended for handball but always seemed eerie, a piece of city somehow broken off, alone in a wild field. As children, they had enjoyed scaring themselves with it. Maude remembered her brother hurling a hardball at it as if it were someone he wanted to kill. Well, as if it were Milt, probably.
There was plenty of sun for the vegetables Mr. Patrick was foisting on them, Maude thought, embarrassed for the one tree, which her parents had planted. Couldn’t they have found out first that weeping willows need tons of water? It had barely grown, a moping, twiglike sapling with its tongue out for the garden hose.
Aside from the dark square Mr. Patrick was creating with his pitchfork, the shaven weeds came right up to the cracked cement terrace at the back of the house, dandelions and crab-grass alike. Next door, the Lyonses pulled crabgrass, put down bulbs in rows every fall and took them up after they bloomed and wrapped them in newspaper. “Where do they have room for them?” Nina had asked, pulling at the skin on her hands. God knew where they found the room in those tiny houses, which didn’t even have basements, but that wasn’t Nina’s real concern; she was just hoping to fend off the expectation that she engage in such housewifery.
Even cooking scared her. She was happy to serve scrambled eggs for dinner, letting Maude add ketchup to her portion, a dish to which they had given the name “blushing bunny.” More often she left it to Milt to broil hamburgers and lower frozen vegetables into boiling water. They came out of their boxes in the shape of the boxes, pebbly rectangles of peas or criss-crossed nests of stringbeans beneath the opacity of ice in which they were embedded. When Maude saw her first Louise Nevelson sculpture, a mèlange of found objects glommed together in a rectangle coated overall in a unifying color, and also John Chamberlain’s briefly chic works, chrome car fenders compressed into cubes, they reminded her of that 1950s contact with nature, these industrial foods. The jolly chrome giant.
Here the rectangle gradually taking shape, sod by ripping sod, under Rod Patrick’s orange work boot, suggested nature might have more to offer. Nina picked up each square of sod and shook it like a mop. Despite her air of limp helplessness, a spray of earth was released from the grass roots. Unable finally not to be curious, Maude left her book facedown on the woven black of the couch and pushed open the back door. Aluminum, it offered a small symphony—a squealing upward note followed by whispery rattles, a wheeze, and then a whack as it pulled itself shut.
“Whoa, Maudie,” yelled Rod. All the boys at school yelled whoa. It was part of their big, excluding pleasure in themselves. From this, Maude had the sense that Rod too thought of himself as seventeen.
“Grab that and take it over to the corner by the fence.” He gestured to the wheelbarrow he’d brought along with the other garden tools. The barrow was piled with the discarded sods, on which the plants still surreally sprouted, heedless of their fates.
She squinted at him a long moment before complying. Hot in the October sun, he had removed his flannel shirt and glis-tened hairily, his belly looking Vaselined and pregnant over his low-slung jeans.
Nina beamed and excitedly began saying where everything would go in the spring, when the mulch was turned over. She explained mulch: “Hay, that is. It decomposes into the earth and feeds the plants. It’s this cycle—”
“I know, Ma. We learned it at school.” Her mother’s face puckered, looking for what she’d done wrong, like a toddler’s, mysti-fied but distressed at a cross word. Maude took the worn wooden handles of the wheelbarrow. “You making a compost heap?”
Nina looked hopeful again, loved again. “Yes!”
Maude loved her gardening job at school—liked her job assignments better than the required sports, even though she’d chosen the least gymlike sport, bicycling. The boys always managed to find hills to race up on their ten-speeds while she plodded behind with her ancient Schwinn, walking the second-hand three-speed as if it were a balky burro. By contrast, forking up potatoes was like finding treasure, like uncovering clutches of eggs hidden in the earth, offering themselves amid the rich smell of fecundity itself. Even stacking tomato frames or rubbing trowels with steel wool and oil had the appeal of establishing order. A raccoon preyed on the compost heap, waddling down its paw-wide track to pick at cabbage cores and squash pulp with polyplike black fingers. If Maude came too close, it looked testy, pausing like a teacher in black spectacles who’s been interrupted while pondering lecture notes.
“Where are you getting hay?”
Rod straightened his back and rubbed his beard. The school grew and baled its own. He looked at Nina, who shrugged and giggled. Maude had to look away from her. She offered to gather the long dried grasses from the field.
“Oh, could you?” said Nina.
“I just offered, Mom.”
“What would I do without you?” she cried. It was her catchphrase.
None of them realized what weeds the wild grasses would introduce into the virgin soil.