DOES YOUR MOTHER—? Has she ever—? I mean, it’s like, it’s as if Nina isn’t here even when she’s here.”
“God—I wish. My mother, it doesn’t matter what she’s doing; it’s, like, she’s on me.”
“Really? She seems so—polite.”
“Yeah. She does it in a polite way.”
“I always think you have all this, like, great privacy.”
“Mm.”
“I don’t know.” Maude exhaled from deep within. “I mean, who cares; it’s, like, my mother, right? I should be glad.”
“No. I know what you mean. I think. I mean, my father. I mean, he’s Mr. Absent While Present.”
Maude was too polite, herself, to agree.
“Not that he’s present all that often.”
“Your father scares me,” said Maude, thinking of the gray-suited figure she had seldom seen. Once, when looking for Mary Jane, she had peered into the wing that contained the master-bedroom suite, and Mr. Herrick had been standing there, silvery and forbidding, and had asked her what she wanted with an air that told her she had no right to be there.
“Yeah, well.”
“Also.” Maude had dragged the heavy black phone from the kitchen counter as far as it would stretch into the hall and pulled the curly cord of the receiver taut to get it into her room. She checked to make sure the door was really closed over the obstruction of the vinyl wire. “There have been these hangups. Like, I pick up the phone and I can hear, like—”
“Breathing?”
“No, it’s not like that. I mean, someone’s there but not, you know, panting and—gross, or anything. Just someone there, and then he hangs up. There’s a click and, like, I’m saying ‘Hello?
Hello?’ Like a fool.”
“He?”
“That’s the thing. Once he said my mother’s name. Like ‘Neen?’
You know, hopeful but not really sure.”
“Jesus. And we were worried about—” Milt and Mary Jane. “Please. I feel awful enough.”
“I’m sorry. Jesus, Maude, I’m really sorry. Oh, God. That’s really—well, can you—?”
They offered a moment of silence to the potential gravity of the situation.
“You didn’t recognize the voice or anything, did you?” Weesie went on.
Long silence. “It did sound familiar. But I can’t, you know, figure out why.”
“You really could use a vacation. It’s a good thing you’re coming with us to Deer Isle.”
But as the time approached, it didn’t feel like a good thing. It felt like a bad thing, full of disquiet and apprehension, as if, if Maude let go of anything she was doing, everything would fall apart. She told Weesie, “I’m like obsessed with, you know, weeding the garden. Nina hasn’t been around and there are like new weeds every time I go out there.” She was hoping Weesie would say she couldn’t possibly abandon so important, so critical, a responsibility, as if it were a magical task in one of the fairy tales they both cooed over and were as precious about as if they were babysitting their own infant selves.
But Weesie could not imagine Maude pulling the sprouts as a girl in a fairy tale—the one with the girl who has to collect nettles and spin them into thread to weave into cloth to sew into shirts to throw over the wings of her brothers to turn them back from swans into men, keeping silent the whole time or the magic won’t work. That was the way it was with magic, you couldn’t speak of it. So Weesie did not say in awed tones that of course Maude mustn’t let the weeds grow in the face of Nina’s dereliction—which would have been to say, really, that of course Maude had to keep her family together, bring back Seth, hold it all in herself for her own sanity and that this could, obviously, be accomplished by pulling weeds, by keeping up with them, keeping the black earth immaculate. She said, “So what?” And Maude could only, helplessly, agree; fighting down that physical sensation that yanked at her stomach and twisted her diaphragm, shameful fear.
“And there’s, you know, my job.” Maude was working at a subminimum wage part-time at the local library, which was in a shopping center, between a cobbler’s and the five-and-dime.
There was nothing Weesie could say to that. Maude was poor. Her income for the weeks away would be less than what other girls got for a month’s clothing allowance, and she would use it for textbooks and the school studio fee. Theoretically, Weesie was in love with such real-world constraints. But when it came down to it, she didn’t believe them: Maude couldn’t really have to work. It was a sort of game that made you more romantic, like walking around carrying a hardbound black notebook of unlined pages or outlining your eyes in kohl. Both of which, after all, Maude also did.
“You don’t want to come.”
“Of course I want to come.”
“You’d rather pull weeds and shelve library books.”
And Maude could feel it. The satisfying instant of release when you tugged a cluster of green to get at the thin pale roots gripping the soil beneath, which cling as the feet of mice will grip and cling if you try to lift them by the tail, the moment the whole plant top and bottom came free. She felt her fingers in the soil, warm for an inch or two, cool and secret beneath, delicious to the touch like anything warm and yielding, but also gritty, irritating beneath the nails and yet, again, satisfying to scrape away. The earth, at first cluttered with spikes and dots and bead-like clusters, cleared to yield a backdrop as color-enhancing as a black wall, highlighting the pattern of tomato plant or lettuce, the growing pile of intruders limp and then shriveling on the grass next to the garden bed. The pop and caress of the smells. You were goodness, doing this. You were the queen of creation. You were taken care of; you were mother. Early in the morning, sun on your arms, not too warm, a fearless nearby robin pulling up worms. Twilight, a cool current like water, fireflies. It seemed far too much to give up.
And the library, so quiet, the only sounds for long stretches the standing fan’s throat-clearing and creak as it lurched to the far side of its half-rotation and started back the other way, lifting the same page, with the same barely audible rustle, on each pass. Maude felt the abstraction of pushing the wooden cart, scanning the soothingly orderly shelves, plunking a volume into its home slot, with a pleasure that was like sinking under water and discovering that you could still breathe. Yes, there too, you were taking care of things, you were putting the universe in order, and all would be the way it was supposed to be. It was a good magic.
At the end of the story, the last shirt wasn’t finished, and one brother was left with a swan’s wing.
“No, I don’t. I want to go to Maine.”
“Just a minute. My mother wants to say something.”
Maude heard some shuffling on the other end of the line. “Now, you’re coming with us,” said Mary Jane’s cool, plummy tones, “or you’ve got me to answer to. And that’s that.”
Maude knew she was sunk then; there was no retreat. Mary Jane thought that she was a poor person being too embarrassed to accept bounty—and that was there too.
“I’m looking forward to it, Mary Jane.”
Sometimes Maude sounded like Mary Jane when she talked to her.
The day before she was to leave, Maude complained to Nina that she didn’t know what to pack, that nothing she had was right. She never appealed to her mother in this way. Nina lit with delight, so that Maude felt almost ashamed of her ruse, guilty of not seeing her mother as a source of help.
“It is dark in here,” said Nina as they stood leaning over Maude’s narrow bed, where clothes folded into smooth, flat squares were stacked by type, everything she would need.
Nina made her rabbit paws of helplessness and distress and then chewed on a finger, looking harried and scared. Maude, lifting her hair off the back of her neck in the heat, thought: I shouldn’t have taken care of everything; I should have left something for Mommy to do.
“Where’s your bathing suit?” said Nina, peering as though she might have overlooked it on the flat surface.
“Oh, I’ll swim in cutoffs and a tank top.”
“You have to have a bathing suit. What did you do to your old one?”
“I outgrew it, Ma. I haven’t had one for a year.”
Nina sank to the bed and put her face in her hands. At that moment, Milt came to the open door. In the second before his face changed he had a familiar look that expressed his satisfaction at having arranged his life so intelligently: a worshipful, eternally young wife; a clever, talented daughter; a house and land of their own; means to do his own work . . . Then he took in Nina’s abject posture. “What are you doing to her?” he growled at Maude and shoved her as if her proximity to Nina represented threat.
“No—oh,” said Nina. “She doesn’t have anything decent. She’ll look like a ragamuffin. They’ll think we don’t take care of her.”
Milton plucked up Maude’s tattered jeans and tossed them across the bed, toppling the piles. “Why didn’t you tell your mother you needed clothes? Hm? Why did you wait till the last minute?”
Maude was crying. “I don’t need them. We can’t afford them. I just wanted—”
“Don’t you treat your mother this way! Don’t you do this to her!” He shook his finger in Maude’s face. “Always think you’re smarter than everybody else! You’re not so smart. You don’t know what you do or don’t need.”
They heard students arriving at the front door. Milt shot Maude a threatening look and went out.
Maude let herself be taken shopping, not at Roosevelt Field, festival of bad taste and cheapness that was familiar and safe, but at the Fifth Avenue department stores and boutiques of the North Shore’s Miracle Mile, where she finally had to choose something just to forestall purchases of the inappropriate things her mother seemed to want to see her in. Nina held up one crisp, perky matching outfit after another, urging her horrified daughter to try them on. Yet even as Maude reluctantly accepted the hanger from which dangled a lime green piqué shorts set, Nina moaned about the price. The forbidding prices let Maude off the hook of her mother’s desires, but she didn’t dare look at the things she really wanted, which cost just as much. She just hoped that Nina would somehow insist on those very things. They did come away with a rather opulently sexy bikini fashioned out of purple velveteen. What she most needed was socks, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She would wear Weesie’s clothes.
“Forgive me?” said Nina, pulling up in front of their mass-produced house and stopping the little car with a jerk.
“Ma.”
Nina’s face puckered, hurt and uncomprehending. “Kiss and make up,” she whimpered.
Maude leaned across the seat and brushed her mother’s cheek. It was soft, with a new slackness. Maude immediately got out of the car.
“Don’t forget your suit,” Nina moaned, brandishing the bag with its arched handles, restrained logo, susurrus of tissue.
There was another fight over the suitcase. There was no suit-case. Then Milt got out a heavy, boxy thing with his father’s initials on it. Maude liked its ruched satin pockets inside, the leather stitched around the awkward handle, and the fact that it looked like a prop from a 1930s movie. “Exactly,” Nina said. But they let her take it. They had nothing better to offer.
“Thank you, Mommy,” Maude said, clinging a little too hard and too long, so that Nina pulled away with a girlish laugh, holding her hands free.
“Have a nice time, dear,” she said coldly, as if to lower the emotional temperature.
Maude looked hard into her mother’s face, trying to fix her evasive eyes. “Don’t forget to weed the garden. Okay, Ma? Don’t forget.”
Nina laughed unhappily.