AT THE COMMUNITY college there was someone who hung around, who liked Maude and who she wished didn’t so much—more than the other merely reverent students. A guy. A young man about twenty, she guessed. A cute guy, some would say, if you like the beefy type so musclebound they walk as if they have a full diaper. Someone who clearly did not see the Do Not Touch sign. This was almost a relief, except that around him she really did feel like a glass object that might break. He kept asking her to come for a ride on his motorcycle.
What was it about guys and motorcycles? That had been such a thing at Bay Farm, the way boys talked about Harleys. They all wanted Harleys. That was how they said it, Harley. They didn’t say Harley Davidson. They were on more intimate terms. They said Harley and it was like saying orgasm, or having one, they looked so pleased. They discussed them. It was like locker-room talk. It would have been less offensive if they had talked about girls. At least girls were alive. These boys were so smart and so dumb. Even Danny let himself be pulled in. Motorcycles were a magnet. For boys. What Maude thought was: there is a total identity between motorcycle rider and idiot. What was the point of the damn things? Noise, speed, and danger—some of Maude’s least favorite things. Boys thought they were penises, that was what it was. Had to be. She thought, thank God they’re not: penises are so much nicer. Padded, pink. Satiny. Animal. At least the one she knew.
One vacation from Bay Farm—she would always look forward to vacations, count down the days and then, after a few museum visits or days spent sewing a new dress, the vacation would yawn: no Bay Farm society, no network that gave meaning to the stray remark or drawing or school paper, no teacher pat on the head or appreciative coolie look that made a whole day or week or year worthwhile, life once again on the shelf—on one of those vacations, she had bought a True Romance magazine. She was curious, never having read one, but with a sly edge to her curiosity, as if beyond it was something she could use to impress and, yet further, that aspect of American commercial silliness—the giant molded boy on top of Big Boy restaurants; the smiling, glittering earnestness of country music stars—that simply filled her with a pleasure like laughing gas, a pleasure fuller and happier than mockery.
And indeed it was that way. She read straight through its dull-colored rough newsprint pages, looking intently at the coarsely reproduced photographs as if for clues, as if they would augment the sparse and clichéed details of the stories—“sooty” lashes and eyes in code colors that signified trustworthiness (brown) and danger (green). She enjoyed these stories the way she had loved reading the stories in McCall’s when Nina subscribed to it. She used to grab it first thing the day it arrived, when she got home from third grade. The stories were about on that level in True Romance too. But there was one she loved.
As a story, it was as dopey and full of hackneyed conveniences of circumstance and authorial conniving as any of the others. It was its closeness to her own milieu, or something that passed for alternative or superior, that made it particularly piquant. “I Was a Motorcycle Mama.” That was the title. It never failed to make her laugh, however often she looked at it. The picture showed a girl who looked like, well, a Bay Farm girl. Like Maude, really. In all the other stories, the women were abjectly aspiring—they had their one good dress (taffeta in one story, in which the romantic lead was blind; he liked its audible swish) and led threadbare lives the poor men were supposed to light up. They had hairdos. The motorcycle mama had long, straight, dark hair parted in the middle and slithering to her jeans. Her particular folly was Vince, of the sooty lashes and green eyes, who conformed to stereotypes of the high Romantic period, which meant, actually, that he was incompatible with the kind of romance True Romance considered true: he finally loved his motorcyle gang more than his girl.
“Motorcycle Mama” was, in a way, the Bay Farm girl translated into Levittown imagery, a vision of the street that the street could understand. Finding your own weird affine group, the subculture you recognized as yours, and trying to do well in it, by its terms. Maybe that was why Maude nearly wept with hilarity and why she brought the pages to school, hectoring everyone to look, no, but don’t you think it’s great? And maybe that was why they didn’t get it. They didn’t grow up in tract housing and they couldn’t see the weeping hilarity of it. Even Weesie just smiled faintly, with goodwill, until finally, fed up, she said, “I don’t really understand why you like it so much.”
And now here was a motorcycle, what, papa? Wanting her to be his motorcycle mama, anyway. It was only because those dopey coolie boys gave such cachet to motorcycles that she even considered it, as if they would see her and know about it and she would be a proxy coolie, preening for an audience that wasn’t there.
It was one of the first warm days, the meteorological rather than equinoctial beginning of spring, but optimistic all the same. She’d never been a spring person. She thought autumn was the beautiful time, the reawakening, the quickening and enlivening time after the torpor of summer, the true beginning of the year, when things stir again—when school starts. But she had never experienced a year like this. At one wintry point recently, she had gone into Seth’s room to look out the window. In her room, you had to stand on the bed to look out, and then what you saw was only all the other houses, like a row of posted bills where your eye keeps going to the next, seeking new information but finding only the same thing.
She had sat on Seth’s bed and looked at the pitiful twigs of skeletelized winter saplings cutting the white sky like the frailest black lace, the stiff stalks of the field with its creepy wall in the middle, meant for handball but now decrepit, and of course the houses edging the field like plastic monopoly houses, with their roofs slanting at her like turned backs. She looked out and didn’t feel anything. Not anger or impatience, not yearning for something better, not even sorrow. Just nothing. What was left was barely a pilot light, just enough vitality to experience this as not a good thing. She had sat long enough for a star to appear. I wish, she thought—I wish I may, I wish I might—. Nothing came up. I wish I could want again.
Something clutched at her when this formulated itself, a swirl of horror at her own nullity. It was hardly even an effort anymore not to eat. What was the last thing she had wanted? She had to think. The lack of calories must be affecting her brain, though schoolwork continued to be easily mastered, even physics, even calculus, which she had expected to be trouble, taking the extra tutoring sessions offered in anticipation. The last thing she had wanted . . . Milton had asked what she wanted for her birthday. Number seventeen. It seemed the age of ruination. He looked sour and impatient when he asked. I don’t know, she had said. Can I think about it?
And the image that insistently presented itself, when she did think about it, was flowers. She imagined pressing her face into the fragrant embrace of a silky bunch of lilies, roses, narcissi, stock—the soft-petaled flowers with deep, nourishing scents.
When she told Milt, he had looked at her suspiciously. “Flowers? That’s all?” He couldn’t stand it; he couldn’t stand anything about her; he could hardly stand to look at her; and he was furious at her for not demanding something exorbitant, the expense of which he could hold against her.
When she came home from school on her birthday, a sheaf of stalks was stuck into a pitcher on one of her yellow dressers. The stems were wide, flat, and ridged like cactus, and along them were papery, rattling, narrow furls of purple—a fingernail paring’s width of color. It was something called statice, apparently. Florists used it to fill out bouquets of real flowers. This wasn’t from a florist. Florists would have added baby’s breath and ferns. It was one of those bunches commuters could get for a dollar at the station, with a rubberband at the bottom, along with daisies dyed unnatural colors or rosebuds that drooped the next day and never opened.
Maude felt like such a sucker. How could she have set her-self up like that? And she would have to thank him. He would know she had to, and he would know she was thanking him for a slap in the face.
She did also get a card (All best wishes for birthday cheer, To a girl who’s sweet and dear) and a ten-dollar check from Nana Resnikov, a card (airbrushed kittens, a sprinkle of glitter) and a smaller check from a great-aunt, and nothing from Nina, who forgot. (“Oh, well, you don’t really care about that sort of thing, teehee.”)
She had thought she’d buy herself the bouquet she wanted. She would wait a couple of weeks, so it wouldn’t be so obvious and inflame Milt, and then she’d go to the florist—she knew just the one, where flowers were like a misty rainforest behind the glass—and get those giant lilies with raised pink spots, with that deep, sweet scent, and pale roses, and cinnamony white stock; baby’s breath and ferns all around; maybe white iris, because she loved irises. They’d wrap it in tissue. They’d tie it with a ribbon.
However, by the time two weeks had passed, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It wasn’t the money. She’d spent ten times that on Christmas presents. She just felt a kind of limpness about it, as if her muscles couldn’t manage it.
That was the last thing she could remember really, really wanting as she sat on Seth’s bed, her seventeen-year-old hands useless in her lap.
Every morning she tried to imagine how she’d feel if she were waking up about to go to Bay Farm. Every night, she missed Danny. Every day she thought about hearing from Weesie, but didn’t expect to. Sometimes she did. But it was as if Maude had used up her wanting muscles.
So spring this year had an altogether different feel from what it had in any year she could remember. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t always thought it beautiful. La Primavera. But this year she was grateful for it. She felt her inward self had locked and that, like underground shoots pushing from kernels, and fiddleheads unfurling, she too might strengthen, lift up, and, in a creeping manner, imperceptible except to stop-action photography, feel the snap of life.
On this first warm day, she was wearing a dress she hadn’t had on since junior high. It fit her again. Sturdy cotton in ridged pink stripes, with an empire waist and straight, narrow skirt. When she wore it at thirteen, it had made her feel fashionable and grown-up. Now it felt more like a memory of safety. Sometimes she thought she would have been better off if she’d never gone to Bay Farm. Then that would scare her. Even though she could get into the pre-Bay Farm dress, it was constricting. If she stretched her arms out, the cuffs would pop. By the time Stanley Delaney stood in front of her again, in all his burly beefiness, her muscles were stiff by force of involuntary demureness.
He had a round head and shiny face wreathed in ripples of smile and squint as he stood before her, in front of the Quonset hut and trailer, with a motorcycle helmet in each hand. He was squat, not really much taller than she was, but twice as broad. “So, is today the day?” His grin might not have been a grin, just part of the squint.
She had told him “sometime.” She shrugged, squinting back, thin and weak as an invalid. “Sure. Why not?” she said, feeling not unlike the girl in the motorcycle mama story—she’d be doing something really different, that none of her friends had done, with the kind of guy they’d never even talk to. She wouldn’t do it either, though, if she had more congenial options. She was doing something none of them ever did, that she could almost make herself believe in as racy, except that it still seemed pretty stupid and pointless.
He handed her the helmet and adjusted it on her. She adjusted the helmet after him, as if to erase his touch. It was clearer suddenly, the antipathetic nature of the venture. It wasn’t just the speed, noise, and idiocy; this involved bodies. She would have to embrace the huge bike with her thighs; she would have to touch Stanley Delaney.
They would think this was so cool—that got her through it. Climbing onto the damn thing, having to let the narrow skirt wrinkle right up to her white panties—they would think this was so cool. “No, you have to put your arms—what’s the matter? I don’t bite.” They would think this was so cool. It was an actual Harley, which he had to tell her. She never would have noticed. Boy, was the noise unpleasant. The thing started off with the stench of gasoline, a clobbering machine fart, and then she was being shaken the way babies get killed, like a balky saltshaker in humid weather, no rice grains. Her back teeth knocked together. The noise and vibration were mind-annhilating, but somehow she did have enough brain function left to feel angry at what was being done to her and what she’d allowed.
At the same time, she still felt: hey, look at me. She tried to enjoy it. Holding his large, too intimately sweaty middle. And suddenly feeling, as they veered along the old runways where he took his joyrides, as if she were falling off. “Lean, lean!”
“What?”
“LEAN. Lean into it,” he shouted. “Like bike riding.”
She leaned, a little. Now she really felt as if she were falling off. “Don’t go too fast!”
The old runways were riddled with zigzags of burgeoning weeds through widening cracks. The motorcycle bumped and hiccupped over them. The scenery was comically minimal. There was no scenery. Just flat to the horizon, scraggly grass, cracked runway, and in the direction of the Quonset huts, to which they were at last heading, two saplings in bandages that looked like sticks a child had jammed into the ground and called trees.
They came to a gravel-scattering, shuddering halt. He put out his squat legs on each side, steadying the bike for her to get off. The shaking stopped—there was a sudden, dramatic silence—but her legs still shook. She stood up like a wobbly fawn, removing the bowling-ball helmet and rolling it through her palms toward him, to take back.
“So?” He peered into her face. He had a deferential, almost courtly air, like that sports director at Bay Farm who’d had a soft spot for her and given her the easy jobs. “Not going to be a biker chick, huh?” he said—so disappointed, and working so hard to be good-humored about it. He had to turn his head away and summon a smile before he could look back at her with his round, shiny face.
“I’m sorry. I guess it’s just not my thing.” She pulled at the pink-striped skirt, trying to get it uncaught and hanging.
He asked if he could take her to a movie sometime. “Not on a bike,” she started to say, but he got there first: Not on a bike. As it happened, there was something crucial he hadn’t told her about himself. She guessed what it was when he called her up on her new number, though that in itself turned out to make the guessing almost superfluous.
“I thought you might have the same number as this old buddy of mine who had the same last name as yours.” That’s what he said when he called.
She looked at the lit-up, translucent dial of the phone that bloomed around the label with her number on it. “You’re not Stand, are you?” Stand and Deliver. Big joke nickname among the big, rowdy boys.
“You are Seth’s sister,” said Stan Delaney. “Man, what the hell happened to that guy? He like really did a vanishing act, didn’t he?”
No one who knew Seth mentioned Seth to her. It was the first time anyone had even by implication allowed that she had a right to care about him.