THE WALLS ARE black—the whole inside of the house. Even my bedroom was black. I wore black leotards and tights—I took modern dance from the age of four. You know, those footless tights, so you can dance all Martha Graham and barefoot. So, even the bottoms of my feet were black.”
Maude gleamed brilliantly up at Bruno Heim, the artist who had been pointed out to her as the teacher who taught the cool class at the art school that advertised night classes on groovy posters in the subway. She had taken a night course in sculpture for the sake of doing something different. It turned out not to be so different; it was depressingly reminiscent of the community college. Though the students were dentists and accountants or graphic designers, professions her day classmates could only aspire to, collectively they had a similar air of resignation and adult fixedness on these inertial Tuesday evenings, with their exhausted quality of work begun at too late an hour. The students had no swagger. They didn’t believe they had any special destiny. They seemed unmoved and immovable.
But Concepts class, Bruno Heim’s class, was in the day curriculum. Day students were kids, as at a real college. And if the groovy art school selected purely on the basis of who could pay its fees, Bruno Heim’s elite workshop—in what, exactly, remained unclear—was selected purely on the basis of Bruno Heim. What was clear was that this was the thing to go for. The cool class. She’d talked to some day students, and this was obvious from eyebrow-raisings and private looks at each other.
She didn’t have much swagger at that point herself. The black veil that had started separating her from things when she was four, around her brother’s eighth birthday—and which had grown transparent and almost lifted at Bay Farm—had been, since that winter, since the bad birthday of the bad bouquet, thicker and more encumbering than ever. She walked from Penn Station to the art school in the evenings, aware of the sky and the changing light as the season progressed and equally aware of how detached she felt. When the term of night classes started, it was dark for this walk; but by spring, the sky at the western end of each cross street was a parfait, indigo at the top, coral at the bottom, changing over the course of the journey to cobalt bordered by strips of pale yellow and lavender. She merely noted the change, and her own flatness. She thought with a kind of dull wonder of the person she used to be, for whom the colors would have melted into her core, thrilling in ecstatic yearning.
Having to tell the potential new teacher about herself—needing to charm him—awakened something. Describing her life in that disowning, ironic way—it was like making a picture or tabulating an ethnography. It put it to one side as an object, apart from her. This put her, strangely, in a place where she could begin to experience again. It almost willfully pushed aside the black veil.
Bruno grinned back at the prospective student, exposing a gap between his front teeth. His cheeks glinted with pale stubble. His blond hair fell to one side and covered his collar. He looked both dangerous but—if you were careful—strong and powerful enough to be benign. Above his hard and knowing grin, his eyes gave the impression of being round openings that revealed, inside his head or behind it, like a Magritte, cloud and sky. “You look likely,” he said, and laughed and laughed. “Yeah. You’d be good in the class.”
She took her high school equivalency exam on the first day that promised summer heat. As a Nassau County resident, she was assigned to a school just over the border in Queens. This was fine on a map. Or by car. But to get to it, she had to go away from it, taking a commuter train into the city, then the subway almost the same distance in almost the same direction she’d come from. Two hours.
As she held a strap, swaying, looking from the elevated subway into the walled backyards of Queens, crossed with laundry lines and pocked with raised swimming pools, it struck her that this would be the first day of Selected Work Week. She felt Bay Farm tug on that shoulder, the one poking east.
The test was held in one of those city high schools for several thousand, vast and aspirational, built of brown stone, with a wide staircase intended to be magnificent, over which the disaffected student populace sprawled. Some of the black kids sprouted Afros, and there was a straw-haired hippie in a Hawaiian shirt, but most of these kids were of the Add-a-Pearl type and their consorts, still teased and, amazingly, greased. Their hair seemed like an emblem of a sad premise, that nothing in their lives would be better than this, their adolescence.
She made her way up the many steps through this army, through glass doors and down wide, brown hallways echoey with mad shouts and clatter, to an office where she was directed back outside to the glare and around to a quiet side entrance at street level. A piece of paper was taped to the door: GED candidates, with an up-arrow colored in with magenta Magic Marker.
General Education Diploma? Maude was never enlightened as to what the initials signified. Gutted Edification Drivel. Gelid Energy Derivatives. Geriatric Enemas Divided. They used to play this, she and Danny, she and Isaac and sarcastic Phil; passing a VFW hall on their bikes, it was Vaginitis for Winifred. Vicious Flying Worms.
The Gelid Energy Derivatives or Geriatric Enema aspirants were exactly the community college population: parents and grandparents, overworked immigrants for whom English was a second language, a swaggering dropout in his twenties, people who looked anxious, as if they might not pass.
Since this was the period of her life when she looked into everyone as into a mirror, it occurred to Maude that maybe she wouldn’t, herself. She had no idea what you were supposed to know at the end of high school. She was years younger than anyone there. It was reprehensible for her to think she was different; she was a snob, just as Milton said.
It was just a few hours, this test, but they were to stay in her mind forever, hours utterly, almost brutally, prosaic—the stubby, mendicant diploma candidates, the unnecessarily stern yet robotic proctor, a school librarian who noticed that Maude carried a paperback of I And Thou and, with a meltingly indulgent, embracing look, remarked that a reader of Buber seemed an unlikely candidate for a GED; the teeming front steps wall-to-wall with strangers her own age, the unexpectedly quiet, tree-lined street in which she found an empty luncheonette during the break.
The test questions were grievously easy, with their sets of four answers, of which only one was to be selected by filling in with No. 2 pencil between the dotted lines. With outrage hardly distinguishable from resignation, she thought, I could have passed this test in seventh grade.
It was administered in sections, verbal and math, morning and afternoon, three hours each. Which was short for all of high school. Maude finished the first, even with checking her answers, with more than an hour and a half to spare. Everybody looked at her as she stood with her test form. There was almost a gasp. Maude looked through the pages again, just in case: every sheet, every numbered question had its dully shiny graphite mark. She proceeded apologetically to lay the form on the proctor’s metal desk. The heads went down, their glances reapplied to the test, with expressions painful to see.
As she did to the classes that made her feel déclassé, Maude wore a dress too proper for the occasion, one of her carefully sewn A-lines of rough Mexican cotton in eye-popping shades, and eyeliner all around her eyes. She never developed a repulsive starved look, a Rosette look, but her movements were careful, conscious, almost prim. She was always aware of being looked at. She carried a picture in her head, like a tiny television monitor, of how she must appear, as if, by imagining what people saw, she could remember who she was.
At the luncheonette, she sat on an old-fashioned steel revolving stool and ordered coffee. That was her usual lunch. She was very hungry. She counseled herself to wait for the deeper hunger, a booming, thudding set of pangs like the ringing of the big schoolbell at Bay Farm. On the counter was a metal cakestand holding, under its suave glass cover, twisted crullers or beignets, dusted with sugar. She indicated she’d have one of these.
The cruller was of the puffy, light school of fried dough rather than on the crusty-solid end of the spectrum. It was celestial; mythical. Nothing had ever tasted this good. Nothing ever would again. She’d never be this hungry again. Every cell called out for sustenance; every cell cooed with delight over the morsel.
The counterman, an old fellow in a white cap like an envelope, like an army cap, leaned back, in his white apron and white short sleeves, and relished her pleasure, his arms crossed over the bib.