MAUDE HAD THE impression that people went wild around graduation, that all the hierarchies and divi- sions that ruled the rest of the year dissolved and anything could happen.
For the last ten days of school, classes were suspended and students undertook self- assigned tasks that ranged from studying all available sources on Aztec culture to living in and off a local marsh with no resources but a poncho, matches, and an ax. (It was rumored that the boy who did this, though he may have boiled marsh grass and roasted frogs, was in fact hitchhiking into town and getting candy bars and beer—which was going to do little for the weight problem that, many suspected, had led him to design the project in the first place.)
The school still had Meeting every day, but the days of Selected Work Week were loose and unpredictable. The sculpture studio was full morning to night, theater students appeared at meals with lavender circles under their eyes from rehearsals that ended at dawn and spoke lines while they ate together, their real world the one of the play; the lawns were dotted with readers whose shoulders were growing pink in the sun, someone finishing off the ends of a piece of weaving, a trio of long- haired girls twin- ing through the intricacies of creating and learning a piece of choreography; the library rustled as if with cockroaches, and classrooms were empty.
Maude was consolidating her study of Bay Farm culture, which she was illustrating with line drawings of cultural artifacts as if it were a real ethnological monograph. She was copying it, in her maniacally neat Edgar Allan Poe typefacelike printing, into a black- bound artist’s notebook that looked like a book. She used an old- fashioned pen that had to be dipped, but the professional effect was undercut by the fact that she dipped into India ink of psychedelic purple. Luckily the pictures to be pasted in were more conventional black and white, except a drawing of shirts colored in purple, one a carefully rendered fine European crinkle cotton, the other a tie- dyed T- shirt, together labeled “cool.” Next to a wigglily outlined pair of harlequin glasses, the maniacal printing read: “Also known as‘cat’s- eye’ glasses, uncool in any color.” A freshman who’d been so uncool as to enter the school wearing a pair—plaid, admittedly—had been unable to recover any social standing even, after returning in acceptable oval tortoiseshell frames.
She was copying out the summation, with which she was pleased. She loved it when her thoughts seemed to bite into some- thing and actually raise her, as if she were striking into rock and inching up an otherwise inaccessible peak. First she demolished the possibility the school’s charter held out, of utopia, saying there were more cultural variables (as Malinowski called it, in the text she had taken in only in its broadest outlines) than anyone could isolate or account for and that no planned society could possibly coordinate them all, much less in a smoothly ideal way. Among the variables beyond Bay Farm’s realm, to start with, were students’ families, the culture at large, and the school’s nonexistence as an economic unit except for faculty and staff. But while it failed as a realization of a promised or implied utopia, it had evolved its own culture. Subculture.
A shadow fell over her half- empurpled page. She was sitting in the orchard, where when she looked up she could half con- vince herself that the trees were covered in snow, while the scented air felt like bathwater, and bees buzzed like fuzzy little machines. For whole seconds she had achieved this deliciously paradoxical winter- spring effect, fooling herself. But this time when she looked up, Danny Stern’s head was silhouetted against the blushing blossoms. He was smiling at her, but his face was upside- down, so this too had a paradoxical effect: if she let go of what she knew and just let herself look, then he was frowning or, going a perceptual step further, a weird flopping lesion had developed in his forehead.
“Hey. How’s it going?”
Danny Stern was the olive- skinned juvenile boy from the pop hovel. She squinted up at the flopping lesion.
“What?”
He dropped onto the grass beside her, his smile righting itself. It seemed that there should be a boy beside her in such a place. It always seemed as if there should be a boy beside her, sharing her feelings, offering meaningful looks, holding her hand or putting a protecting arm around her shoulders. But not Danny Stern, who, though he had grown over the year, just looked like a longer, more stretched- out eleven- year- old. Even his head was long and thin, oblong from crown to chin so that the genial way he had of angling it as he smiled at a person was exaggerated.
“The skewering of Bay Farm pretensions and social iniquity,” he said.
“Skewering? Is that what people think?” She held a hand in a visor as though it would stop the treacherous prick of tears she could feel inside her sinuses. She hadn’t meant to be judgmental, just realistic.
“Hey.” He almost touched her raised hand with his own but stopped just short. “People feel like you’re doing a service.”
“Which people? Not the coolies.”
At Bay Farm School, coolies were not Chinese peasants in conical straw hats but the most sought- after students. It was in her glossary with the sentence, “He thinks he’s such a ~,” the way the dictionary did it.
“Of course coolies, are you kidding? Nobody wants to think they’re the, you know, hypocrites or snobs.”
Maude remembered why she wanted to be accepted by them. They were admirable. They were better at being people. She remembered seeing the circle of them the first day of school, laughing together, regal.
Danny asked if he could see. Instead of handing him the neatly copied artist’s book, Maude rifled through her sheaf of unlined notebook paper mixed with torn- off corners on which she’d scribbled phrases. She held up one of these. “This is what they’re going to find when I die. Thousands of scraps of paper with these—cryptic messages.” She had just learned cryptic. It was a test. But he evidently passed, since there was that smile and the exaggerated, easy, oblong tilt.
Instead of making a comment on the page she handed him, he made a mark on it. He was the kind of boy who used a car- tridge pen and carried it in his breast pocket. Neat, as she was, but in a squarer style. She looked at what he’d written. Even though it was on a messy page, she felt encroached upon, slightly violated, but her face lit when she took in the meaning. He’d written just “m.”
“Girls can be coolies,” she nevertheless objected.
“Name a girl who’s a coolie.”
She pictured the coolie table in the refectory, where the queen of the coolies reigned with her crinkle- cotton shirt, leather vest, and big guffaws like a boy. She pictured the other faces at the table under their scrolls of hair. They were almost all boys.
“Dale Handler.”
He shook his head. “Not really.”
“Linda Haverstyk.”
“Maybe. Maybe Linda Haverstyk.” Then he wrote, in graceful, easy script that was as far from her maniacal print as you could get and still be in the neat spectrum, “No female variety known. The closest an f. can come is to be a ~ girlfriend. For f.’s, such transferred status may in some cases outlast the relationship.”
“Linda Haverstyk,” said Maude. Linda Haverstyk was known even to freshmen as having been the girlfriend of a legendary graduate of the year before, and it was as if his coolness, never glimpsed, lingered like a purple aura around her Mexican embroidered muslin smock- dresses and center- parted hair. She’d had boyfriends this past year, but they were like the emascu- lated second and third husbands of a professional widow. They derived status from her, mere consorts.
Danny’s head tilted to read the rest of the glossary. Newie. That was any new student, freshman or sophomore or the rare new junior, though new juniors were so rare and unpacklike that no one bothered putting them in their place but accorded them the dignity of upperclassmen. Daisy chain . . .
“You can’t put daisy chain in here!” said Danny.
The definition was only “Something that supposedly goes on in the boys’ day room that no one will tell me about.”
“Does it really happen?”
“We- ell . . .”
“What is it, homos? Are they all—like one behind the other behind the—? Yech. Ugh.” Maude shook her hands as if she were trying to get peanut butter off.
“All teenage boys are homosexual. I mean, they’ll stick it in anything.”
“All? All?” She looked at him pointedly.
“Okay, not all. But—let’s put it this way. Your daisy- chain participants are pretty much your same subset as your coolies.”
He had that ability Weesie had of making fun of the very thing he was saying, disowning it, putting it in quotes, as if only repeating the words of some fool, that was partly the choice of words (your), partly inflection (an unnecessary, nasal emphasis on set, on coolies)—and of course the “your” was just the opposite of the case: he knew they weren’t her coolies, and she wasn’t theirs. Maude could have entered irony on her list of what made people cool. Yet Danny seemed to be able to exercise irony—as Weesie did—while inviting you in. It was warm irony. He made it a private joke that included you. If coolies thought you were getting too friendly, they excluded by making allusive jokes that you had to be one of them to get. Exclusion should be on her list. Danny’s kind of irony, and Weesie’s, was really too appealing.
But Maude couldn’t afford to admit that anything was more appealing. She felt it was necessary to be accepted by the group that was accepted. Everybody, more or less, wanted to be, but she felt damned by her exclusion, as if it specially branded her, as though the exclusion weren’t shared by people all around her, people she liked. She had intended to crack the code by her study, as though by observation and deduction she could argue her way into inclusion or acquire what was needed.
At the same time, the study was an argument against hierar- chy, a protest against status, and she took pleasure in this with a spiteful sense of strength.
Far from this spite, Danny’s interested, intelligent questions, the concentrated way he listened to the answers, the astonishing perceptiveness of his responses were like a forbidden pleasure. Forbidden because it would not further the project of being in with the in crowd. So even though Maude left the orchard with Danny when they heard the bell that was tugged by a long rope from the barn every hour, and even though they walked up to the refectory together, she managed to wander off vaguely, as if to look in her message box, so as not to be seen with someone uncool.
He sat at one of the nondescript tables of miscellaneous too- young- looking boys. Maude always sat with Weesie. The arrangement approached the security and protection of having a boyfriend. But Weesie was already seated at a table where every place was taken—and was in animated conversation. Maude looked desperately around. The tables were mostly full. Still remaining were places at an outer post where the absolute greasy- haired rejects sat. She spied an empty seat between two very cool boys not sitting at the coolie table. She took it and was punished with an uncomfortable lunch period of being ignored and talked across.
“You anine,” said one boy, leaning in front of her to punch the other boy’s shoulder.
The other boy dripped milk through his nostrils, laughing, and found that so funny he gave up his mouthful of chewed cake to his plate. “You douchebag,” he replied.
Maude made a note to include these in the glossary. “Noun form of asinine.” It was small recompense for the reminder of her nonentity and presumption.
The night before graduation, everyone was staying at school late to finish their projects, and a special van was scheduled for midnight to take the last stragglers home. Maude had finished her Bay Farm ethnography well before time but pretended not to have. For a while she sat in the barn studio, doodling, in purple, pictures of dreamy longhaired boys. Around her, less dreamy- looking creatures rubbed at woodcuts and sanded carvings and cursed at slashes and thumped thumbs from impatiently wielded razors and hammers.
Outside, the sky was indigo, with a last band of paleness at the edge of the western horizon. The outlines of bushes were visible in spilled light from windows, and trees were solid and rustling against the dark sky. The pale, pompom- like blossoms of a bush outside the library smelled intensely of cinnamon. Maude felt that love must be very near, just waiting for her to fall into it.
From the pop hut she could hear “Eleanor Rigby,” which had reconciled her to the Beatles. It was about something. She strolled toward the muted tune, which died suddenly, leaving the sound of crickets. It had been hot earlier, and the night air moved at exactly the temperature of another body against her. She felt her naked breasts inside the thin cotton of the little dress she had made, the coolness of grass along her sandaled feet. Two cigarette ends glowed illicitly. Why isn’t it me, she wondered.
Inside the scruffy shack, boys were passing a pint bottle that could get them expelled on the spot. Maude pretended not to see, turning toward the propped- open window, where she met her reflection in the angled glass. She had taken to parting her hair along the center. I’m beautiful, she thought, amazed. Her arms rested on the declivity above her hips, and she imagined a man’s hands there, discovering that sharp inward curve that no one else had touched, recognizing her in her most private self.
This was what she’d always wanted: recognition of who she was.
A tall senior with deep sideburns and twinkly John Lennon- ish wire- rims shambled in. Seeing Maude, the only female, he went to her corner and stood an inch from her.
“Wanna go for a smoke?”
She could smell the sour, suggestive scent of liquor in his breathy undertone, and pungent, almost tasty marijuana. They walked in silence a long way into a rustling field, far enough so that when they stopped and turned, the yellow lights and the silhouetted school buildings looked like a postcard, Maxfield Parrish, innocently unaware of them. She accepted the illicit cigarette, grounds for expulsion, struggling to appear to inhale, putting up with the acridness on her palate. Looking at the boy, looking away when he looked back. Under their feet the crushed grasses released a flowery essence.
Nothing had prepared her. For all the fantasizing, observing, and imagining, nothing had prepared her. Not for the wet slip- periness of kissing or, even less, for the current it generated in unrelated spots, leaping in her womb and licking at her crotch and burning there like honey, making her want to push against the knob offered behind the cloth of his pants. His hands on her breasts intensified the surge. When he met no resistence, he inserted his warm hands up through her dress and she felt the softness of her own breasts as fire between her legs, and when he sucked her nipples, felt she would do anything to satisfy the surge of yearning that erupted and made her have to suppress something in her throat. She didn’t know what satisfaction could be, so surprising, so flabbergasting was each subterranean tug on her parts.
To lie down he had to let go a moment, and she felt a chill where his hands had been, where his mouth had been. The dis- appointment, momentary, was nevertheless so sharp she could have hit him. When his hand wandered into her underwear she felt, first, the astounding shock of being naked to someone. Like being in one of those dreams where you are in public and realize you have no clothes on. Only, in this dream, the next realization was that the public approved. It was all right.
That was before something of keening sweetness—but, yet, with a tang of salt akin to tears coming or the urgency of a full bladder—led to her inner vision’s being engulfed in spattering sparks and sparkles. Some part of her knew this was his fingers on her, but that wasn’t where her mind was. She let it go dark, absent, a backdrop for the sparkles the touch of him on her generated.
She didn’t think of touching him except to clasp him to her. He was just the opacity between her and the sky, the wandering warmness between her ass and the cool, silky grass. He was the fur of his sideburns, and horse breaths. She didn’t think of his penis or its state inside his jeans, where he kept it; she did not consider his satisfaction, which he may or may not have had. It was sheerly the new wonder of touching skin, of her skin being touched, of its being allowed, of its being exciting to someone else.
Surprise gradually yielded to a softer stroking and bumping pleasure and then amazement all over again, on the surface of her skin, in tingling, in a sticky pressure her tongue demanded. Time disappeared.
In later life, when satisfaction is available and availed of, nothing would be as exciting as this mere touching, this limited exposure that feels more naked than literal nakedness, more dangerous, even, than the far more intimate embrace of wet inner flesh.
They heard the muted bell like a distant cry, like their own complaint at stopping. They stood up, leaning together, brush- ing themselves down, flicking off strands of scattered hay, and walked toward the lights. At the edge of the field they glued themselves together a last time.
With startling swiftness, like a safety curtain shooting down at a cry of fire, Maude was suddenly bored. She would never see him again after tomorrow. She let him hold her waist, the very spot she’d longed to have known, as they walked into the light. She felt companionable—grateful. She let him kiss her lightly on the lips in front of everyone. He was driving home, but she told him it was better for her to take the van. “See you tomorrow, babe,” he said hotly into her ear.
Maude had been correct in feeling she was about to fall in love. But it wasn’t with Mr. Sideburns. It wasn’t with a person. It was with the place. She had wanted the place, welcomed it, had a kind of crush on it, but it was only in the lush, teary, piercingly lovely scenes that were its final embrace for those departing that she encountered the rich solidity of this feeling that left its possessor more vulnerable.
The girls fluttered over the green lawns in long dresses. The daughter of a diplomat who’d served in India appeared in a shocking- pink sari that looked at home with her straight blonde hair and pink cheeks. Weesie wore a gown in wild purple and turquoise. “Is that a real Pucci?” girls kept asking, giving her the opportunity to reply, “Yes. A real Pucci nightgown.” Her hilar- ity was self- mocking. But no one joined in the mockery—they admired her cleverness and her thinness swathed in curlicues. Maude wished she had been so clever—and yet she didn’t like Pucci and loved what she herself was wearing, wasp- waisted gauze from an antique shop a bunch of them had gone to together.
It was such a drag not having mainstream tastes—not even elite mainstream tastes! It wasn’t a matter of feeling different, inappropriate, left out—or of feeling jealous. It wasn’t so simple as approval or its absence. The bunch of girls had insisted on her buying this dress, because it so suited her. But she could see how at home they felt with Weesie’s choice, as if it better expressed themselves than their own choices did, while Maude they built a fence around, like an exhibit, exhaling as if she were holy.
But this was only a moment in a day that, for once, tended to obliterate the tensions of being separate people, people with skewed visions and disparate destinies. The sheer prettiness of everything, of themselves, made them each feel a movie- starrish sense of being adored through every eye. They all felt daring. They dared show themselves as desirable young women. Maude’s peach slip was visible through the lace- trimmed web; another girl wore a yellow empire nightgown she had also decided could pass for a dress; a couple glittered or shone in old evening gowns of their mothers’. The very atmosphere seemed to be of that naked- in- public dream where it was strangely all right, as if the school really were a lover.
“Like butterflies,” said Mr. Patrick, passing a group of them. “You’ve come out of your winter cocoons and you’re butterflies.”
They waited for him to pass before they rolled their eyes at one another. Feeling beautiful but as if they needed to brush something off.
Weesie flew away for the a cappella performance by the madrigal group she’d joined, a chiffon shawl trailing from her thin arms. The chorus assembled in two rows before the flock of parents on folding chairs and underclassmen cross- legged or leaning back on their elbows on the grass. All attention was on the two rows of singers, who might have been chosen for their Pre- Raphaelite beauties: hair wafting in the soft breeze off the plashing Sound, an armload of golden frizz next to Weesie’s sparkling pale orange next to swirling black and a satin curtain of chestnut; the fluttering Easter- egg- colored dresses, the boys’ earnest, concentrating faces under swept- aside bangs, the sheet music like bird wings—all were a decorative display whose only purpose was pleasure.
But a pleasure so transitory, as ephemeral as the girls’ dresses were ethereal, that it was a melancholy pleasure, melting like the harmonies that went swiftly from major to minor, lingering in inexplicably tragic tones over phrases like “Rejoice in our happy, happy loves” and dying on the moist air.
Maude was crying as one by one the graduating seniors stood up, tall and jerky, swift and confident, dimpling, diffident, to accept their diplomas and a hug in their ribbons or flounces or, among the boys, in the first dashikis any of the audience had seen or wearing the occasional muslin peasant shirt with their jeans instead of the standard oxford. As she furtively ran her finger under her eyes, she saw Weesie doing the same—yet grinning.
Weesie shrieked as the ceremony ended, “Here it is! The rehearsal for the Big One. The first of the long goodbyes!”
“It’s not a funeral,” said Maude, scandalized. She wanted things to be the way they were supposed to be. She wanted to believe. She was not the same person as the author of her scath- ing study. “It’s called commencement, for God’s sake.”
“They get to commence: fucking, LSD—”
Weesie’s welcoming mockery was irresistible. “Living away from home,” Maude joined in.
“But we alone survive.” Weesie’s lit class had done Moby Dick a year early. “It is a funeral. It’s the first harbinger.”
This felt as piercing as the day’s beauty and as undeniable. “How can you know that?” She looked sidelong at Weesie’s comical expression—eyebrows lifted, freckled lips smacking as if it were satisfying to know all life’s losses in advance. This was what she was keyed up for. And Maude, who hated the holy fence other people built around her, couldn’t help adding a rail to the one she had set up around Weesie’s specialness, which seemed to her greater.
The rest of the day and evening passed in a jumble of tears and hugs, of coq au vin eaten while parents made polite conversation in the refectory and their children tried to pretend not to know these living embarrassments, of shrieks and kisses as people who would never get in touch with one another exchanged addresses, and a general breaking up into groups as parents were urged to go home, go away. But the students were being made to go away too as the campus was closed up, so that the groups gravitated to different houses, cramming in with whomever had a car to take them there. As faces streamed by in the dark, Danny Stern’s, smiling garishly, cried, “C’mon. Come over. A bunch of us are going.” He grabbed Maude’s mesh- covered arm.
His father drove them, in a stoic or apathetic silence, in his Cadillac, and vanished upon arrival.
Danny, like the largest proportion of the students, lived not on a socialites’ estate but in a rich suburb, where one large, land- scaped house followed another down muted, tree- lined streets. Each house was like a Hollywood set for a costume drama. There was mock tudor, “colonial,” Spanish- inflected stucco with wrought iron, a front porch from Tara. They presented history in a manner so tamed it was the same as being forgotten. It obliter- ated the real history that was there, the thirty years over which the houses had been built in incarnation of families’ American Dreams. Danny’s was brick, with white shutters.
The students shuffled up a graveled driveway where a lawnboy (black) held a lantern (electric), past azalea bushes rounded by pruning. The last blossoms, stickily fallen onto the gravel, adhered to the visitors’ sandaled soles. The Bay Farmers trooped into an entrance hall too small for its grandiose double staircase and chandelier, which was endangered by the head of one of the taller boys.
They proceeded on, sinking into the dense wall- to- wall car- peting that exactly matched an excess of squarish upholstered couches, chairs, ottomans, loveseats, and an immense TV. Someone flicked it on. “Turn the sound off,” said someone else. Unnatural colors blared and were replaced by the black and white of an old movie, though with magenta and acid green vibrating at the edges, as if the technology could not help showing off, being expensive and new. Someone switched the channel to a show Maude had not known was in color. There was a chorus of no’s, and it was switched back.
As people goofed on the old movie, providing lines for the silenced action, Maude found a bathroom. The sink’s faucet was a giant swan, wings spread, the water gushing from its brass beak. The walls were covered in metallic patterned paper. A brass bowl made to look like a shell held soaps also neatly molded into shells, the same aqua and peach as the rank of terrycloth “guest towels” monogrammed in metallic thread. Poor Danny! She cringed inwardly, embarrassed for him, as if Milt were over her shoulder, viewing it all with contempt.
But she might have saved the humiliation for herself. As she crossed the thick carpeting, she heard, “He made out with Maude Pugh? You’re kidding. How’d he have the nerve? Weesie Herrick I could see. She’s funny. But Maude Pugh is scary.”
She didn’t want to be scary. She didn’t think of herself as scary. She didn’t recognize the voice, but it seemed to be saying she should keep to herself.