DANNY WAS PICKING her up in his parents’ giant Caddie. He’d been back a whole day before he called, a black mark against him already. She wanted just to be glad, but resentment dragged at her.
He got out of the car to watch her walk the path to him. He’d changed. The preparations of her imagination left too much out; they had changed or reduced him, so that the reality of him was a shock. It was as if everything she had thought or remembered was a little wrong, and everything about him was not only subtly different but a little contradictory, so that he looked at once thinner and broader, older and younger. His face wouldn’t coalesce. It was both handsome and weirdly stretched and rubbery.
It seemed even stranger that he was unaware of this and responded to her just as always, his words spaced out by laughter. His arms opened to wrap around her in a huge clasp. Danny never made declarations, and his measured, gentle affection never suggested the kind of desperate passion that could give Maude the reassurance she craved—of being the unique entity that could satisfy a bottomless need. This hug delighted her with its enthusiasm.
She disengaged herself quickly, however. They were still at the curb, the studio window above them like Milton’s jealous, baleful eye. She got herself into the big, heavy car, its hot seat not uncomfortable in the air-conditioning. Air-conditioning! As he drove, Danny took his hand off the wheel and put it on her thigh, where she covered it with both her own. She was letting out only the good feeling and hiding the resentment. Maybe the resentment would go away. On a shady street where the houses were set far back, he pulled over and kissed her until they were both gasping.
At his parents’ tomblike house, they ran up the pretentious curved staircase and shut themselves into his room, giggling and shushing. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I have to show you. I brought you something.” He rummaged next to the head of his bed and whirled to unroll a rug over the beige carpeting.
“Oh, my God, Danny! It’s beautiful.”
“It’s East African.” He had traveled a little at the end of his medical stint.
The rug was mostly a deep orangey-yellow, with small squares of red and cobalt, stair-stepping to make a diamond and two triangles. Square-headed lions marched across a darker orange in the mosaic of the border. The rug was like panels of sun on the floor. It made her think of Greenwich Village apartments she had visited. She thought of a song she’d heard that summer, high-voiced, that evoked such a life—music with an acoustic guitar (Seth would approve). It suggested, as Maude had always wanted to believe, that if you had the material things right—sunshine, a bowl of oranges, a farm house—happiness followed. Better living through design.
They lay on the rug. It scratched their bare skin as they writhed, reasserting their claims on each other. They wouldn’t feel able to talk until this was accomplished. “Oh, oh,” came deeply out of Danny as he rolled them both to their sides. “Now I’ve really come home.”
“Dann-nee?” They heard his mother’s creaking footsteps approach down the hall.
“Just a minute, Ma. I’ll be right out.”
He jumped into his cutoffs and T-shirt no more quickly than Maude pulled on her scrap of a calico dress and the bikini underpants, which now stuck to her.
As soon as he came back, holding a Dannon yogurt his mother had given him—she was afraid he was too thin—and rolling his eyes, Maude announced, “I’m not going back to Bay Farm this year.”
“What do you mean?” he said, licking off some yogurt that had gotten onto his finger. He handed the full carton to her. Raspberry, her favorite. It seemed a wonder to her, nourishment produced like that, by a mother, unasked for, as by magical hands in a fairy tale, or Mrs. O’Donnell. She looked into the little round cup, swirled with deep pink.
“Milt won’t pay my tuition. My scholarship got reduced because he had more money, but he says it’s really because I’m not smart enough, and he says he can’t afford it anyway, that he’s had to struggle and do without the whole time. He said he hasn’t paid the phone bill in three months.”
Danny immediately said, “I have savings. Use my money. That’s ridiculous. The man should be shot. What’s his problem?”
If a stranger had seen Maude at that moment, they might have laughed. Her mouth was a perfect O of stunned surprise. She couldn’t believe she’d just gotten what she’d hoped for, for much longer back than she had wanted even Bay Farm.
“Danny! Can you? Do you really think you should? That’s—I mean, your savings. I’ll pay you back, of course.” Surely he would hate her for it if she accepted and, after a while, wish he hadn’t done it. “Do you know how much money it is?”
He swaggered across the room, picked something up off his young-suburbanite teak desk and tossed it to her. She fumbled but caught it with her elbow against her ribs. It was a passbook, in its plastic envelope.
“Go ahead. Open it.”
She had to turn a number of pages to get to the current balance, but she got the idea. It was a lot of money. Six figures. It could pay full tuition for years at Bay Farm, more years than anyone could go there.
She hadn’t known how exposed generosity—or charity—could make you feel. This might be the most personal act that anyone had ever committed with her. When that hairy senior had tingled her nipples and she had felt the shock of someone else’s fingers in her labia, it was almost impersonal. This was the closest anyone had ever been willing to come. Money was private. It was unmentionable. It was bad form not to have it, because then you had to say things like, “I don’t have the money for that.” You had to have money to be able to afford not talking about it.
And her father had been venomous about it—as if she had set out to deprive him. She had always known better, before, not to ask for things, and she’d been right.
Milt would say the Sterns were vulgar and nouveau riche and that this was a typically vulgar nouveau riche thing to do.
She thought: I should be happier.
Because what she wanted was for Milt to want to make her happy, even if he couldn’t. For him to say, I’m sorry, baby, I’d love for you to have Bay Farm.
And she wanted Bay Farm to want her. To value her enough to help her over this hump.
It felt surreal and furtive for it to be Danny, and when she still felt far away from him. She had always had reservations about Danny—secret, guilty, critical thoughts. She felt very guilty for them at that moment. Even for the reservations that were, so to speak, on his side: she would envision him with various girls, the ones she thought of as the “good girls,” the ones who did well in unconnotative work like algebra and French grammar and took things like having eventual husbands and children as their right, just like their skiing vacations and Easter in Barbados; girls who had sunny, even expectations of life, who embraced it with cheerful enthusiasm rather than Maude’s crablike wariness.
She would probe him now and then—didn’t he think Didi Bates was a dish? Or someone else of his own healthy disposition. And he would surprise her by saying, “She’s boring.” The surprise was as much at her own lack of gratification by this as at the sentiment itself. Couldn’t he see how wrong for him she, Maude, was? She had allowed herself to feel contempt for his lack of perception, as if loving her made him a fool (the voice of Seth she carried around in her, especially since his death-like disappearance, that said loving her made anyone a fool). She had taken it for granted that when Danny got to Harvard there would be some suave, confident Cliffie, and that would be that.
She had even suggested Weesie—she could imagine their sparky jokiness together. “Weesie? Are you kidding? Never!” he had said, as mystified that she could propose it as she was that he didn’t see the beauty. She would take Weesie over her.
But anyway she was saved, saved for the time being, and Danny was her hero, though she inwardly squirmed to imagine how it would take place—would he hand her a check? How could she even bring it up?
Impatiently, Maude waited for Monday so that she could call the school. She didn’t know if it was even possible for her to re-enter the class of ’70. School started in a matter of days. Levittown Memorial High School started a day sooner than that. She had gone to the fortresslike brick building in June, to register. It felt like being drafted for the Army, to put her name down there, or like joining some list where an experiment was to be done on your body, where you were to be subjected to a disfiguring, possibly fatal disease, and this was wanted of you, wanted for you.
By Monday morning she was so anxious that she misdialed the school’s number twice before getting the placid ringing. She listened to the tinkling trills as if they were the knells of fate. “Come on.” The secretary put her through to the headmaster. It was all first names.
They had accepted a couple of new juniors, the headmaster told her. The class was full. Since she’d been a student in good standing, however—she could hear his discomfort in saying this; she knew he disliked her, and she felt hyperintellectual and Jewish in his presence—they could probably make room for her, he said, as they would not for an outsider.
She wasn’t an outsider!“Re-prie-v ed,” she thought, in the tune from The Threepenny Opera.
That was the good thing about having parents like Milt and Nina, the very good thing: you were filled with the world’s riches. You could have La Primavera as your favorite painting as a kid, because you sat around looking at your father’s art books; you knew all the Brecht-Weill songs; you could think of a poem when you needed one, at least some of the time. You knew about Bay Farm and how to go there.
That morning, Milt looked at her as if for explanation. They were having toast and coffee, as always, over the Times. Maude was waiting for the front section. “Danny invited me on a bike trip,” she said, so happy that it felt like a substance inside her that would come out, as she spoke, like light.
It was true that Danny had invited her—the night before. She was determined to let Milt know nothing until it was absolutely locked up. She smiled at him. She laughed. What she’d been given made her feel dangerously generous.
Milton grimaced, as if she were laughing at him. “What?” he said. She continued laughing. “What?”
She said she couldn’t explain.
Then, as she went out the door: “I think I’m going to be going back to Bay Farm.”
It was an extraordinary day, perfect for their bike expedition, golden sun and just a hint of chill in the shade, like mint. What can he do? He can’t do anything, she assured herself. He can’t stop me. The bolt of fear through her chest made her eyes tear. “Danny!” She ran down the walk to her savior and, in the big car’s front seat, clung to him like a little girl.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad to see you.” She twisted to peer behind her. Milt stood in the pink doorway, looking grim. But he also looked bewildered. He looked abandoned.
Danny followed Maude’s glance, saw Milt and offered his cheery wave. Milton started as if he thought he might have been invisible. He jerked his hand in a tentative wave back, a forced, self-conscious expression on his face.
Danny had picked their bikes up from school.
Maude thought Long Island the ugliest place, all commercial strips and “developments,” as her parents called the grids of identical houses Levittown had spawned, spreading like mold across the landscape. It was always an amazement to come into the range of the estates. Almost surreally, you could turn off of the clogged ugliness that was Northern Boulevard and be on a shady lane with horses grazing, ponds glimpsed through willow fronds, lush fields.
They left the car off, at the entry to a track with a chain across it. Their destination was an estate that had recently been opened to the public. Here and there along their way, a twig of maple was precociously showing color.
“Are you sure you know the way?” said Maude. The car, left at the private road, looked like a friend they were deserting. She was well aware that what to her was a long, difficult ride was to Danny the merest little one-hand-behind-his-back exercise. She was the kind of rider who kept the handlebars in a death grip. Only with keyed-up, always-on-the-alert-for-fatality Weesie did Maude feel okay about her own relation to physical risk or exertion: Weesie was so anxious and nervous that Maude could almost be the normal one. “There won’t be too many hills, will there?” Most of Long Island is flat as the landing strips, but there are hills on the North Shore. They had learned it in school: the terminal moraine.
Danny smiled. “Think I’d do that to you on this old junker?” He shook his head as he lifted out her beatup Schwinn. “There are a couple of hills, but they’re not too bad.”
“Oh, great. Sure.” She knew Danny’s idea of “not too bad.”
“Really.” He was laughing—as well he might, she thought, looking at the gears and levers on his bladelike ten-speed racer.
She got her crotch over the boy-bike bar. “You should at least have a bike that’s the right size,” said Danny, not for the first time.
It was Seth’s bike. Her previous bike, a tiny two-wheeler, had also been Seth’s, at first too big for her and then too little. Before that, the tricycle. Nana Resnikov had given her that tricycle. It was red and shiny and new. Milt gave it away, to her best friend, who lived across the street. That was what he did: he made sure she didn’t have what she wanted.
As if willful deprivation had enforced in her a need to do without, Maude shrugged: she wasn’t wasting tuition money on a bike
As she suspected, the way was longer and harder than Danny made it sound. He waited for her at the top of one long hill, at the end of which she wanted to pound him.
“It’ll be great on the way back,” he said, seeing her face.
“I hate downhill,” she said through her teeth. “You know that.” She braked all the way down hills.
They arrived hot and sweaty, Maude not speaking, not even willing to look at Danny. He followed after her like a well-trained dog that’s been spoken to.
“I don’t know why I agreed to come with you,” she said, thunking down the canvas pack that held their lunch, without asking if he liked the spot. It was just such an outing when he’d told her about going away.
“Don’t say that. Please, Maude. Don’t ruin it.”
“Me ruin it,” she said, flashing ire at him out of those black-olive eyes.
Then she remembered what he was doing for her. “Sorry. Never mind.” She began pulling packages out of Seth’s old camp pack. She looked Danny in the face at last, at his melting eyes (baby seal eyes, she didn’t stop herself thinking). She saw the muscles under his skin relax as he sensed forgiveness.
“Where’s the blanket?” He was supposed to have brought the blanket. He wasn’t carrying anything. “Jesus, Danny.”
“And you’ve made such a beautiful lunch,” he said mournfully, watching her lay it out. She tried not to make too great a show of distaste at having to lay plates in the grass.
It was the Pugh Picnic. Though it had been the dearest wish of the juvenile Maude and Seth to eat at every passing diner when on long drives, and they were clamorous in favor of Dunkin’ Donuts and Jolly Roger, Pughs did not go in for such things. Too expensive, the children were sensibly told, and at the appropriate time, in the desirable spot, they would stop and have hard-boiled eggs, seasoned with salt from a twist of aluminum foil; tomatoes, and sometimes cucumber, that they would cut up on the spot; bread of solid character, buttered (not the Wonderbread the children craved); and a variety of cheeses, cut into slabs and wrapped in cellophane. There would be juice and milk in cartons, frozen the night before and still retaining jagged slivers, delicious to suck. Fresh fruit was to be cut into wedges, followed by cookies, disgorged from a ridged cylinder of foil wrapping.
At sixteen, Maude no longer saw any need for improvement in this except to add pieces of roast chicken, each preserved separately in tin foil, and the pretty enameled plates and cups Nina had once been given.
She herself felt pleased by this lovely plenty and her own providentiality, despite the missing refinement of a cloth to spread it on. It wasn’t as if she could forget that; it irked her every second; she had to work at her enjoyment. But, gradually, the flame-throwing aspect of her irritation died away. Instead of irritation at Danny, there was merely something small but inconsolable in her at the lack of perfection in what so easily could have been perfect.
With a sigh of repleteness at the end of his feast, Danny lay back on the flawless grass with his hands behind his head. Maude felt free then to admire him. His gorgeous olive skin looked bronzed against the grass, the llama-lashes furring the tender lighter skin beneath his closed eyes, and a swag of black hair over a forehead that seemed to her now unequivocally manly. She didn’t feel like a jerk for loving him.
Leaf shadows artistically dappled this prospect. Maude tried to imagine how she would paint him dappled by shadow. She could feel which colors she would use—she felt this in her fingers, as if she were squeezing the tubes. This was accompanied by an urgent feeling that had the savor of anxiety or despair, over whether there was any way she could get the arrangement of colors to communicate how it felt to be there and see him—that would make someone her, there, at that moment. It would always be another moment. She herself would never again be who she was at that moment. Customs, communication, culture would change.
She put a hand on his chest, its warm rising and falling. He loosed one of his hands from his head and placed it on top of hers, big, warm, and dry. He didn’t open his eyes. “It’s so nice to be in a place with grass and trees,” he murmured.
“That’s just about the most interesting thing you’ve told me about Africa,” said Maude, who had found his letters frustratingly abstract, after the first one.
“Really? I thought I told you everything in my letters.”
There was something about the way he said this. “It didn’t seem like everything, Danny.” She wasn’t looking for anything in particular—just a filling out of experience. She’d wanted his letters to be like a novel or the kind of paintings she wished to make, so that she could feel what it was like to be there, at that moment. But then she knew there was something particular. Still as he was, he became stiller. He froze. His hand on hers was like dough. She slid hers out from under. “Danny?”
He heaved a sigh from the pit of himself, opened his eyes as if to check on the degree of danger in her face, and closed his eyes again.
Oh, don’t let it be that, Maude thought. Let it be anything else. Let it be something he thinks is a big deal but I really don’t. Something I don’t care about, something bourgeois, conventionally ambitious, some stupid nitpick over scientific ethics.
“It really wasn’t anything, Maudlin. It was just a stupid—I didn’t even like her.”
Maude drew away. “Someone forced herself on you, did she?” she said. She was always self-possessed. She always had this horrible poise
He let out air as if deflating and told her both more and less than she wanted to know. It was stupid. He described the girl well enough so that Maude could see it was true, that she had been the instigator, not that there was anything stopping Danny from holding her off. He had, at first. “But I just—I felt stupid.”
“Yeah. You are.”
Buxom. Blonde. Snappy as a firecracker. Johns Hopkins, not Radcliffe. There was that.
“I was going to tell you. Really.”
She had plucked two blades of grass and was engaged in tying them together without breaking them. There. She plucked out two more. “Are you writing to her?”
“No. I was just—summer entertainment. She has a boyfriend.”
“That seems to have been mutual.”
“Maude. It really, really didn’t matter. You’re what matters.”
“Well, if it really, really didn’t matter, why do it?” She waited. In the face of his undenial, she added, “It matters. It. Matters. To me.” She thumped her thorax.
Oddly, it was Danny who cried. But she could hardly spare him sympathy. First, there was that knife, or whatever it was, splitting her. It started in her chest and slashed down right through bone. It made it hard to breathe, but breathing was the least of her problems. Her problem was hurting so much, at his hands, and still wanting him to put his arms around her.
She began packing up instantly.
“Don’t, Maude. Don’t.”
She wasn’t moving with angry swiftness. She felt almost too weak to lift the trifling items. Nevertheless, she continued. Danny took the pack from her. Silently, she let him.
So urgently did Maude wish to get away and contemplate her hurt and confusion without distraction that for once she didn’t brake all the way down the hill. She didn’t remember the sudden turn at the bottom either.
Out of control, the bike swerved into a low stone wall, sending her somersaulting over the handlebars to land on the far side.
It was hard to convince Danny she was okay. The skin on one shoulder felt raw, but there wasn’t any bleeding. Oddly, there would be a freckling of discoloration on the spot for the rest of her life; it would always look like a new abrasion.
The bike was mangled. It was still rideable, just, with the pincer of one brake squealing against the rear tire, its other half uselessly dangling.