IT WAS A geodesic dome, its many faces made of old car doors welded together, their original colors intact, some shiny, some dull: orangey, turquoise, pale green, flat gray—colors no one was making cars in anymore. The welds looked like bluish, shiny, badly healed scars. Maude ran her finger along one as she hesitated in a yard messy with pottery wind chimes, a picnic table improvised from an electric-company spool, planters made from the giant cans army-surplus peanut butter came in, and a large vegetable garden that bore little relation to the one from which Maude was taking the final orderly harvest. This one had no rows; it was sprawled with zinnias and other random flowers, and guarded by several inventive scarecrows that tended to be taken as lurking people at first glance. One wore, or was, a suit, with Clark Kentish black glasses—a sarcastic scarecrow. Her mother, who thought that to be around rich people your clothes had to match, was living here? Maude knocked on the metal, which, by itself, already ticked in the October sun. Cornstalks grew to either side of the ugly scrap-wood door.
Annoyingly, the song that had been a hit that summer, which Weesie and Maude had sung along to in the car, collapsing in giggles, would not stop going through Maude’s head: it said to put flowers in your hair, to be a part of the Summer of Love, in a voice so syrupy it had to be cynical. Maude had loved maidenish flowers in long hair before they were a hippie cliché or, anyway, before hippies were a cliché.
It had certainly been a summer of love, for some people.
Nina burst through the door. “Oh, Maudie, Maudie. Thank you for coming.”
Inside, the dome was oddly dark—odd because plexiglass hexagons appeared at intervals among the metal ones, overhead and at every height, one so low it showed scrubby grass and insects, next to which a cat sat poised, twitching. The effect of the curving walls and small, unpredictable windows was unsettling and unhomelike, outerspacy yet claustrophobic, no doubt a perfect illustration of the unheimlischbecause reminiscent of the original home, the womb. It was as hot as an attic.
Nina, her hair in two gray-streaked braids, shyly indicated a shadowy corner—if anything could be called a corner—near the mattress on the floor. “Rod built it all himself, just this year.”
Rod Patrick came forward, aggressive belly first, his face red above the beard, though only from heat. “Hi, Maudie.”
“Only my father calls me Maudie.”
Nina swiveled away. She got something out of another dark niche and placed it on a tray she had ready to take outside. “I make my own yogurt,” she announced. So pleased to have made something herself.
“That’s great, Mom. Did someone give you a culture or you just start with Dannon?”
“Oh,” she said sadly, “you know all about it.”
“Well,” Maude said, helplessly apologetic, “some kids in evening rec were making it. They’re even trying cheese. They had to get rennet. Did you know there was stuff in cheese from a cow’s stomach?”
“Your mother was thinking of trying cheese,” said Rod Patrick.
Maude ignored this, taking the tray from her mother’s hands and stepping into the breathable air outside. “You want it here?” she said, setting it on the electrical spool. It had been spread with an old tablecloth Maude recognized. That cloth had always been folded in a trunk in her parents’ closet, full of stuff no one used. The pattern showed a trellis covered with nasturtium, like a message about a neat, decorative world.
The yogurt, just made, was in a big mayonnaise jar, still warm, with little bubbles that had jelled at the top. Fresh pickling cucumbers were sliced into a bowl of the kind that was becoming an icon of the nation of hippiedom, hand-thrown in a less than perfect round, with an external surface like a day-old beard, its thick sides glazed in unshiny earth tones. A similar bowl held applesauce. “I made it,” said Nina, seeing Maude’s gaze.
“What’s come over you, Mommy?” She narrowed the range of her query: “I thought you hated cooking.”
“Maybe your mother just needed someone to believe she could do something,” said Rod, swaggering out and planting himself near the table. “Maybe she needed to know something was worth doing besides trying to be an artist in terms The New York Times can understand.”
“Don’t you mention my father. Don’t allude to him. If you want Nina to have the—. I won’t see her. Do you understand?”
She muttered to the side, but audibly, “Anine.”
Nina twisted on her seat, knuckles against her cheek, Bernini updated. Rod touched her averted shoulder and left his big hand there as though to protect her from Maude. “It’s all right,” Nina choked out. She swallowed ostentatiously, demonstratively. Then she pulled herself together. All dignity, a little stern, the braids over the front of her blue scoop-necked leotard giving her the look of a member of a Plains tribe in a painting by Remington, Nina held a bowl toward Maude, who sat and took it. Despite Nina’s display in rising above hurt, rising above the hurt was about the most grown-up thing Maude had seen her mother ever do.
“I see,” said Rod, sitting heavily. “Business as usual.”
Maude raked him up and down with her black-olive eyes. It was exhilarating to be able to hate someone without reservation, without obligations. She enjoyed hating Rod Patrick.
“The applesauce is great, Ma.”
Nina told her about the apples, too lumpy and bug-bitten to eat uncooked but more delicious than any that could be bought once made into a sauce, from an ancient tree, an artifact of a defunct farm, discovered in some scrubby eastern Long Island woods.