SHE READ THE letter three times, in case her eye had skipped over something, some crucial “not” or “no,” in case she’d misunderstood, still standing by the pink front door where the mail had slopped through the slot, fanning onto the black seafoam linoleum. Milton was filling the percolator for a pot of coffee, careful not to let water touch the electrical prongs.
“Daddy?”
“Mmm.”
“I got into Sarah Lawrence.”
“Good.”
He continued his task rather than turn toward her. His back appeared to sizzle, though the tension might all be hers. “It’s four thousand dollars.”
“You could commute,” he said to the cabinet above the sink.
Then it would just be tuition. “I really couldn’t.” A rescue came from a phrase remembered from the college handbook. “You have to live on campus the first year.”
He sighed, skinny and tall in the doll-like kitchen, in jeans that bagged around his storky legs. His white hair came down over the collar of his corduroy shirt. She could see how soft it was, like feathers. She could see, from his back, his struggle.
“I’ll get a college loan.” She was old enough to sign for one.
“No.” He turned around. “You’ll do no such thing. Don’t be ridiculous.”
She looked at him. Her face ached with not showing fear.
“I’m paying.”
You are? she wanted to say—Why now, when all this time . . . But she knew better than to set off such a process of fission in the mystery uranium. His face was deeply disappointed, some-how. Was he going to say he’d be glad to be rid of her? But he just walked into the next room, lighting a cigarette, leaving the white ceramic percolator to begin its long, sucking gurgle and pop. He’d done everything he could to hold on to her, if only as a captive and slave.
She too retreated, to the white cell of her room, to fill in the forms and send them off before he changed his mind. Not that he would be able to stop her now. Maybe that was why he’d given in. She’d never believed he’d pulled her out of Bay Farm because of the money. It was to keep her from getting away. It was to keep her.
Maybe she’d become a person for whom it was too easy to leave, to leave people behind, to leave men. Maybe she’d lost her own meaning, become an abstraction of herself, become her own exquisite corpse, something someone else started and finished. Maybe she couldn’t love, or believe in it, or it just seemed too damaging. Milt’s love took the form of enslaving—who wanted that? And she was like him. She was not unlike him. Danny had loved her but she had proposed for him Didi Bates and Weesie, of the tribe of better people: people who knew how to love, who would stay with it. Anyone would be better at loving than a Pugh.
As she was getting ready for bed, she caught sight of herself in the big round mirror that was a hand-me-down from Nana Resnikov. There was something Oz-like about its shape and the blond, decoish crescents that held it top and bottom. It made a picture, that flattened circle, with her in semi-dimness, her naked torso, her hair. That was the picture she would give Danny. Looking at herself, she felt herself to be him, seeing her. Danny looking at someone he cared about. Someone he forgave. She would capture her own reality, for someone else.
She got out the wooden box of pastels Milton had given her one day, at random—“Here. Want these?”—three tiers of chalk, almost all the gradations of color.
She would be the model and the artist. It would not look like a bunch of sticks.
A week or so later, Bay Farm’s spring break, Maude talked to Weesie. It had been a very long time. They hadn’t seen each other since the Father Penleigh and blue hydrangea day the past August, and now it was spring again. There had been a postcard from a skiing vacation, with amusing descriptions of Swiss people and, before that, in September, a discussion of their respective courses. (“Concepts class! Oi-oi- oi.” As Maude had described some of the artwork involved, Weesie said, sounding both humorous and as if she thoroughly expected her implied command to be obeyed, “I think that’s a little too far out.”)
Then, radio silence. In the first year, Maude had made the mistake of calling Weesie and catching her distracted, preoc-cupied, and uninterested. It was better to wait. When Weesie called, Maude told her news.
“So it looks as if I’ll be going to like a regular college next year.”
“What? No more”—and Weesie put on the spooky voice kids used if they were saying The Twiiliight Zone—“Concepts class.”
“No more Concepts class. I hope there’ll still be concepts.”
“So where?”
“Sarah Lawrence.”
“Sarah Lawrence!” Weesie screamed. “Sarah Lawrence!” she screamed some more.
“What?” said Maude.
“Guess where I’m going.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
They had to spend a while screaming together.
When they had calmed down enough, Maude said, “We can be roommates.”
“Roommates!” said Weesie in her excitable way, as if room-mates were a high-camp notion.
“I mean, if you want. I don’t think I have to have a roommate. As a junior.”
“Junior! Oh-my-God. Life is so incredible. Life is so incredible. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? A junior.” As an afterthought, Weesie remembered to say, “Of course we’ll room together.”
“Oh, great. I’ll fill that in on the”—Maude adopted Weesie’s intonation—“housing form.” They giggled. “I’d rather be a freshman, really . . .”
Still, freshman or not—fresh or slightly spoiled—when Maude hung up the little white Princess phone that she would soon be returning to the phone company, she hardly knew what to do with her happiness.