THE GARDEN WAS the best part of that summer. However, as Maude learned to love its sun-warmed earth sinking under her naked feet and the discovery of swelling zucchini in green light under umbrellalike leaves where, the day before, there had been only a nub, it became her main point of contact with Nina and then, as such, the unbearable embodiment of the summer’s events.
“Daddy? Where’s Mommy? She’s never around these days. What’s she doing?”
Milton looked at his fierce, wandlike daughter and had the fleeting thought that it was kind of too bad he didn’t do naturalistic work. She stood inside the screen door like a representation of bounty, but Ceres crossed pleasingly, if confusingly, with virginal Athena and, uncompromisingly, herself, her long hair scrolled at the back of her head and trapped with a barrette so that the ends of it flared upward, her skin brown, her cheeks pink from heat, her arms overflowing with silky lettuces of pale green tinged red at the edges and a pile of pea pods whose threadlike ends and stems coiled like the curls nature hadn’t given Maude, as if they wanted to decorate and soften her. Clutched against her radishy chest were also a handful of leafy radishes, the dirt turning pale and tan on their hard, white-streaked, rosy curves.
“I thought I’d make a salad for dinner.” She was doing most of the cooking.
“Yes,” he said as if he were answering a different question from the one she’d asked, “you look like a salon painting.”
“A salad painting?” Exasperated, she stepped around him where he stood at the foot of the stairs. “It’s not to look at, it’s to eat,” she said, as if to deny the vegetable beauty of which she herself had said to Weesie, “It’s so gorgeous, I want to roll in it. I want to, you know, fuck it.” They giggled, fuck still a forbidden mystery. “I go out there in the morning and I could practically cry. They’re like babies growing in there.” That was what she had said. But that couldn’t be shared with Milt.
Nina came in as Milt and Maude were at the blond wood table enjoying the salad—they did enjoy the salad. She was wearing a denim wraparound skirt and a dreamy smile. She seemed not to see them even as she said hello and wafted past, stopped, came back, sat and folded her arms on the table and laid her cheek on them.
“Mommy? Are you—are you stoned?”
Nina popped up from her ragdoll lassitude as if transformed into a jack-in-the-box, laughing, laughing. “I’m just, I’m just naturally high,” she gasped, wiping tears away. Milt joined in the laughter.
“I don’t see what’s so goddamned funny,” said Maude. That brought up new gusts. “You—shitheads,” she said, standing up.
“Oh.” Nina gulped. “You’re like a stern mo-mo-mo-mother.”
Pretending to ignore her mother, tossing the black satin curtain of her hair back with one hand as if she were flipping the bird, Maude flounced down the black hallway and slammed her unsatisfactory door: hollow-core, it barely made a thud. She opened it again to call, “And I’m painting my room. White,” and thudded it again, kicking it for good measure. She threw herself into her pillow. No one would come in to comfort her. She felt she’d already lost her parents, that her family had dissolved. She alone survived. I didn’t do anything, she thought, flipping over and staring at the ceiling, the only light surface, where she could sometimes picture faces and odd mutating tableaux. They don’t care about me. They only care about themselves.
“They don’t care about me” pricked a gush of tears, salty and slightly relieving the pressure that felt as if her chest and head were filled with saltwater. “They don’t love me” released a better torrent. It was strange how comforting the thought was, a relief.
In the past, if Maude was upset, Nina had made helpless mewing sounds and looked distressed, her hands dangling like rabbit paws. But Maude had often comforted her mother, cuddled to her as Milton cut into Seth with sarcasm or railed at the unfairness of life. And now Nina was running around at all hours and laughing at her and saying Maude was like a stern mother.
In the tiny box of a house, Maude could hear the kitchen sink running and the clank of the dishes being washed. She heard Nina’s giddy, oblivious laugh and felt a flash of hatred. She thought of something cruel she could say, about Seth. None of them ever said his name, as if they had agreed to the injunction without need for discussion. She clicked open her door: silence from the kitchen. It was easy to be noiseless as she padded over the linoleum tiles; underneath, the floor was a cement slab. In the kitchen, Milt had Nina clenched to him as she dangled dreamily, her new vague smile, less anxious but as evasive as ever, melting over her lips as his hand cupped one breast.
Maude dashed back to her room.
If anyone had been watching, it would have looked parodic, the way she grabbed brushes and hurled herself at the easel she had set up in the tiny black room. She was glad no one could see. She jabbed violent colors onto the canvas she had brought from school, impastoed strokes molded into expressive, expressionistic figures. As she slowed down, pausing, late in the night, long after her parents had gone to sleep—they at one point called good-night down from their room like obedient if mischievous children—she became aware that the picture was startlingly better than those she’d made with more care. It seemed a betrayal of her own sense of being betrayed to notice this, a mere aesthetic consequence. Once she’d had the thought, she couldn’t go on. She watched the bright, lurid picture a while as though it would tell her, now that she’d given it life, what she felt, who she was, what it all meant, stirring the stiff-bristled brushes against the bottom of the can, which still advertised Pomadori Pelati though filled with turpentine, in which color rose like mud.
Unwilling to go to bed, as if she wanted someone to tell her to, and uninterested, for once, in reading, she slid open her closet and sat on the floor in front of her improvised dollhouse, setting up the doll family in scenes of serene domesticity until the first piercing cheep promised dawn.