AT THIS TIME of year the accordion sunroof of the van was sealed against a cold, colorless sky. Once they got past the attached pastel houses and litter of stores that was Queens, driving between the cement walls of the sunken roadway, the white sky began to be fretted with bare limbs of trees. Shallow hillsides and fields were torn open for new housing developments, a row of cement foundations appearing in formation, a scaffolding of two-by-fours on one of them, a few filled in with raw plywood, and, on a finished model, sod rolled out but stopping geometrically short to expose the gashed earth. These days the speculating builders varied the houses, so that every third had a gable or picture window or “traditional features,” though their asbestos-brick or asbestos-wood family resemblance couldn’t be disguised. The eye flicked away, seeking relief, again and again deflected by the same ugliness.
They passed into the more glaring clamor of the commercial strip that heralded the approach to their own manufactured town, one-story buildings you weren’t supposed to register as part of a landscape—to do so was as rude as looking up a girl’s dress when she was trying to smile into your face. Their smiles were in blinking, swooping letters made of ribbons of light, window displays. Or maybe the analogy was of looking at the whole girl when in fact she was flapping her crotch in your face—“3 for $5” or “all you can eat” or the painted statue of a grinning imbecilic boy in chef’s whites on a roof. The Big Boy. Sometimes Maude was exhilarated by the exuberant commercialism, as if it were a welcome and she were one with the people who disdained her and whose tastes she found oppressive; but under the opaque sky, where the streaking reflections along the sides of cars and store windows were the highest lights, and after burrowing into two lives of apparent futility and desperation, she felt nothing but dread at returning to that house from which the other half of her family was so stubbornly missing.
As if her own inattention were her father’s, the car lurched. A pain spread up Maude’s arm. It was her wrist bracing against the dashboard as the car pulled up short. Their snub-nosed van loomed over the car below. Maude looked for a bloody body. But the car in front was untouched. There was about an inch between them.
“We’re okay. We’re okay,” said Milt with a belying froggy catch in the middle.
Maude’s heart wouldn’t stop beating double-time. “Oh, Daddy.” She put her hands over her eyes. Her wrist throbbed.
“It’s all right. Nothing happened.”
At home, outside the glass wall of their living room, another redwinged blackbird had fallen onto the cracked patio. Maude went out the back door still feeling the sick dread that wouldn’t go away. As she went toward the bird, she thought of a picture she had loved and been moved by, unlike Immerman’s, though it too was of mournfulness and death. It was an etching, square, mostly blank. It hung on the wall of a friend of her parents who was paralyzed, and that might have been part of its pathos. Down on the lower right corner, as if forgotten and overlooked, was a small black bird, finely rendered—very black—its eyes curled tight, likewise its feet. It could be asleep, but you looked and knew it was a dead bird. And what happened was, you loved the bird. Some small part of your heart curled up. That felt painful—a small pain, like a sting—and the sting was pleasurable. You could look at the picture again and have it all over again. Unlike a real dead thing, the loved object had not gone away or changed, and nothing in your life had changed either. Unless it had deepened a little, or been clarified, a little.
Maude bent in her high suede boots and lifted the glossy creature. Its head dropped and one exquisite, scarlet-marked wing fell open like a fan. A bird’s eye, closed, has a look of illness and struggle, of inadequate defense. The body still had warmth, like a table on which a cup of tea has been sitting. She should bury it, she thought, surveying the matted grass that surrounded the garden. Her parents always just dropped the corpses in the garbage, which was collected from beneath a hinged metal lid set into the front lawn. But the dead bird was so beautiful. Maybe she would paint it. Not in the corner of the canvas, but whatever way it filled it, in its ringing scarlet and shiny black.
As she came back into the house, she could hear her father already at work upstairs, in his white, overlit studio, tapping and clanking with his brushes to opera oleaginously broadcast on QXR. How could he be so happy and unaffected? Did he not feel in danger? It might be that failure and desperation could rub off. (She had quietly left the cracked volume of dusty poems behind.) In the lifeless kitchen, she set the limp animal on the table, lurid against the light wood, and sat in one of the chairs as though, if she waited, her mother might come in and wonder what she should do for dinner.
When the music stopped and Milton Cross came on indistinctly, Maude, as if excusing herself from the table, got up and went into Seth’s light-blue room. She sat on the bed with her knees bunched up and the olive army blanket pulled up around her. The same pictures cut from magazines covered the walls—Bob Dylan looking surly and about fifteen, demonstrators being firehosed, an Indian miniature with a blue elephant head on a dancing man, a torn reproduction of a painting of Judith holding Holofernes’ head. (She hoped Seth didn’t think of Judith as date material, though she was beautiful; it was more likely that some Judy had turned him down and he thought of her that way, as a killer. He had not been a forgiving boy.) There was a picture of Georgia O’Keefe’s breasts from the Museum of Modern Art, and a picture of Lyndon Johnson wearing ass’s ears.
Seth had a piano in his room, an old upright someone had been giving away, on which he used to pound out blues progressions. She wondered if he got to play piano where he was now. She’d gone through his papers for some clue as to why or where, but they were just old math assignments and things like his satin-stitched Cub Scout merit badges in the drawers.
Because Nina couldn’t sew (and Milt, who could, wasn’t asked), Seth used to pin them to his uniform with safety pins. The pins were still stuck through the badges’ cloth, browning and spotted by corrosion. Maude ritually went through the embroidered circlets before huddling again on the bed, feeling, as always, that if she’d known how to sew then, she could have kept him from leaving, though he had left so many years later. He had grown raspberry-colored, screaming at Nina, screaming, when she admitted she couldn’t help him attach the badges, Maude looking on, an astonished four-year-old.
Sitting on the bed, she remembered lying on the black couch later that day, when she had started feeling there was a veil between her and everything. She had never been able to throw this feeling off, and she thought of it just that way, as an endless net of filmy dark chiffon over her face and body, transparent but interfering, that caught and clung when she tried to pull it away.
She was startled from these dreamy reflections and mysteries by a loud squawk from her father, come downstairs. Not, she hoped, where he would see that she emerged from Seth’s room rather than her own across the hall.
“What?”
Milt stood with a broom raised overhead, thrashing at the ceiling. There was a frenzied sound like towels being snapped. Then it stopped. Milt was breathing heavily. He pointed.
The redwinged blackbird, with a somehow baleful expression, huddled against the glass back wall, flatfooted, looking back over his shoulder at the giant and giantess.
“Oh, Daddy—I thought he was dead. The heat must have revived him!”
“Ugh! It’s disgusting, a bird in the house.”
Maude looked at her father in wonder that he felt disgust where she saw a miracle. The bird began fluttering along the window again, scratching against the glass with its spiny, futile feet, trapped within the modernistic square of the lowest pane. Milt came over, paddling with his broom. Maude cried, “Daddy, stop, no, you’re terrifying it.” She achieved a second time-out, and the bird once again settled, visibly palpitating, a picture of rumpled misery.
“Here—give me the broom. Give it to me, Daddy. Dammit. Now leave the room. Or at least stand back. Jesus. The poor thing could die of fright.”
“I could die. I thought the goddamn thing was a bat.”
Maude let her lids fall to slits over dead eyes. “Just stay still. All right? Promise?”
The bird flew to the highest corner and fluttered frantically along the join between window and ceiling. Maude took one step forward, then another. As she got near the left end of the window, farthest from the door (which Milt had propped open), the bird threw itself to the right. Slowly she took a small step to the right and stood still. The bird flapped rightward. She took another, and, again, the small creature moved on.
By slow steps and with some retreats, as if they were playing Mother May I, the bird made its unwitting way toward freedom, all the while thinking freedom was just where it was. The window looked like sky.
Then it found the place where it could get through. Bursting at last into a piece of this obdurate sky that gave way, it was gone.
Milt found the joy in his daughter’s face as she turned to him unbearable. He’d be the Partridge, the Immerman, whose book she would leave disdainfully in the dust. She would leave and be successful and have a better life. Because of that school. She would leave too.