HER MOTHER DID not look happy, but when had she, really? Nina’s face was puckered and defensive, as if expecting a blow, and yet she looked ready to administer one if Maude said the wrong thing. It was Maude’s first visit since Nina and Rod Patrick had moved from the geodesic dome: it had proven impossible to heat. The couple were now in an apartment in what looked like an old farmhouse. Maude found herself saying, “I have to admit, you’ve improved your living conditions.” To herself she sounded like Weesie—as if she had a secure, lofty perspective and weren’t subject to anyone.
Then Nina did look happy, as if she’d at last gotten the approval of her stern mother, seventeen-year-old Maude. Fleetingly she thought of Danny; her mother’s daughterliness raised the specter: how dare Danny be obedient to her spoken wishes! Like a good little boy. How could he do that to her, put her in charge?
Maude fielded Nina’s childishly naked “You like it!” with a stingy “It’s very nice.”
As soon as she was with her mother she wished she weren’t. Even more, she wished she didn’t wish this, didn’t wish Nina away. She set herself to give Nina what Nina wanted.
“We had such a time moving in here. The landlord did noth-ing, nothing. We discovered a leak in the bathroom wall and had to get a plumber in. You wouldn’t believe what these guys charge. He pulled at this, he potchkied with that, and what happens? Rod has to find the leak. No kidding, Rod just looks at some—pipe, I guess, and says, ‘What about this?’ And that was it! Unbelievable. Unbelievable, these guys. Isn’t Rod great? Isn’t he?” Nina’s look connected hotly. She nodded, to indicate to the unresponsive girl the correct reply. “Oh! Did I tell you I’m painting again? Rod thought it was criminal I gave it up, criminal, and look—” she gestured toward the wall over the sink, to a delicate rendering of the living room visible through a door—“a breakthrough,” Nina said. “Don’t you think?”
Nina was talented. It had been a shame she’d given up. “It’s really nice, Ma. Really good.” Not quite enough. “You’re talented.”
Nina nodded some more, her smile brightening.
“And look at what Rod’s doing.” Nina brought a picture in from another room, and another and another.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Oh, sorry, baby. We should go into the living room. Come into the living room.”
“Can’t we stay in here?” said Maude. She would be more committed farther in. But she was letting Nina see . . . “Or, but—”
She let Nina lead her in, as she knew she had to. “You have to see the furniture we’ve gotten. It’s amazing what people throw out. Perfectly good stuff, beautiful stuff.”
“You always said I shouldn’t buy clothes from thrift shops. You said they had germs. Aren’t you worried about germs?”
“Look at this, is that amazing? Is that a marvelous piece? Cottage Victorian, that’s called.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s much nicer than—”
“Oh, well. Bauhaus has its place too. Don’t you go knocking your father.”
“I don’t think I can give him worse criticism than you have,” Maude muttered. She looked up warily. Across Nina’s tired, soft face, guilt battled anger. “Do you know what we sacrificed for you to go to Bay Farm? Huh? Huh? Do you know what I’ve had to do without?”
Maude just looked at her. “You mean I’m the reason you left Daddy?”
“You wanted for nothing, nothing. Ya spoiled rotten, that’s what you are.”
“Spoiled!” Maude laughed miserably. “I wish.”
Nina, standing, was all helpless rabbit’s paws, and yet her face was menacing. She took a step toward where Maude had sat, in the instability of a rocking chair. Maude felt herself in danger of wincing. She froze her face. It didn’t matter that they lived apart, that weeks, months went by and they didn’t see each other. As soon as they were together, they were in the thick of it. They both wanted the selfless sympathy of a mother.
Nina stood over Maude, could almost be said to tower. Nina’s hand shot out. Maude couldn’t help flinching. “Oh, oh, oh,” Nina wailed. She bent over, tottering.
“What is it, Ma?”
Nina put the back of her hand to her forehead and rolled her eyes up. “Oh! Oh!” she yipped some more. “Get a wet cloth. I need to lie down.” She sank onto the studio couch, knuckles still to forehead.
Maude stood. “You mean like a maiden in a Victorian novel?”
“A cloth, a cloth,” Nina breathed, as if she could manage nothing more.
Maude quickly found the bathroom—indeed, panels of bulging melamine siding had been removed, revealing brown darkness and lengths of pipe—grabbed a washcloth, wet it, and brought it back to the living room. She could not bring herself to lay it on Nina’s forehead. “Here,” she said, flopping it onto Nina’s hand like a dead fish. Nina arranged it on her forehead and closed her eyes. They looked like the eyes of the redwinged blackbird Maude had wanted to draw and that Milt had tried to chase from the house—bulging and endangered, thin membranes over jelly.
Maude sat again in the rocking chair and looked around at Rod’s not-bad charcoal drawings of nude models and landscapes, at the clumsy handmade pottery and amateur mosaics, and at the armchair covered by an Indian cotton bedspread. Her mother, with her eyes still shut, began speaking as if with the voice of the dead, droning and gravelly. Maude wished she’d clear her throat.
“Did I tell you I’m taking chorus?” the strangled voice came.
“What, you mean the madrigals group?” Maude could afford to hang her mouth open and shake her head in incredulity: Nina’s eyes remained closed. Maybe more like a frog’s than a bird’s.
“That’s what I said.”
“You sing with Weesie?”
“That girl can’t carry a tune. She’s very nice, your friend, but a voice she hasn’t got. Not that she cares. She’s like Milt.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know. Thinks she can do no wrong. She’s nice, but it’s, what’s the word, noblesse oblige.”
Maude shook her head some more, but differently. Weesie was like a princess, but the Sarah Crewe kind, not a spoiled brat. Maude was glad Weesie was nice to Nina.
“Did you know the speakers committee asked Daddy to address Friday Meeting?”
“Oh, yeah.” Nina loosed the nugget of a laugh. “I think that was Rod’s idea, a thousand years ago.”
“It hasn’t been that long.” Maude fiddled with her hair, soft and comforting, dangling on her thigh as she hunched forward.
“You’re like a grown-up now. But it’s true, you always were. When you were three, you were.”
“Why was it okay for Seth to go to Bay Farm and me not?” She had spoken the forbidden name. Nothing happened. The earth did not open up and swallow her.
“Seth didn’t go to Bay Farm. What are you talking about?” Nina’s voice came alive, plaintive and irritable.
“I mean you wanted him to. That’s why we visited, remember?”
“You and your memory—a steel trap, you’ve got. He needed help. We thought it would help him, you know, academically.”
“But how were you going to pay for it? He wasn’t going to get a scholarship. I mean—why won’t Daddy let me go there now, when he’s making all this money?”
“First of all, it’s not all this money, Miss Know-it-All, and second of all—” Nina’s voice became dead and gravelly again, “he has expenses you know nothing about.”
Ordinarily, Maude would not have questioned further. She knew her family too well. She knew it was a warning, not a statement, and that she wasn’t meant to ask. “What do you mean?”
Nina shrugged, her eyes closed, still lying with the washcloth like an Indian band across her forehead.
“Do you know where Seth is?”
What made her ask? The words seemed written in lightning. “Is he in trouble? Are you paying for lawyers or bail or something?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“You do know where he is! You’re in touch with him. I always thought—”
“Enough. Enough. Stop asking questions. He doesn’t want you to know.”
“He who? He Milton?”
“He ya brotha. He doesn’t want to see you.”
It took a while for Maude to absorb this. The rest of her life. She absorbed enough to say, after an interval of whirling blankness, “Where’s he living?”
“Don’t ask. I told you, I can’t tell you.”
“Is he in New York?”
“It’s none of your—”
“Is he all right? Was he in trouble?”
“He has an apartment. He’s fine.”
“You see him.”
“We talk.”
They talked.
“And that was all right with you. It was all right that I thought he might be dead.” After a little while she added, “I don’t know why I think I’m a member of this family.”
“Don’t say that, Maudie.” Nina spoke in her dead voice, as if the battery were running down. Maude would get no more out of her. If she tried, Nina would say horrible things to her, about her. Maude felt she shouldn’t care what her mother thought of her, but she did. She couldn’t live with herself when Nina disapproved of her. Yet she spoke anyway; she risked a little more, so great was her bitterness.
“I don’t know why you think I’m in this family. I’ve been outside the whole time.”
“Maybe you wish you were. You have such contempt for us. You despise us for being poor.”
“That is crazy! When have I despised you?”
“You didn’t want to be seen with us. When you were at that school, God forbid anyone should know you had parents.”
“No kid wants to be seen with their parents. Are you kidding?”
“All you wanted was to get away from us.”
“Well. How ironic.” She wiped her palms across her cheeks. “I don’t understand why you hate me,” she aspirated. “Why didn’t you ever stop Seth from hurting me? Why do you protect him and not me?”
“We don’t hate you,” said Nina. Furiously.
This was funny. Maude could see it was funny. Even if she failed to be amused.