Thought I heard somebody call my name—thought I heard somebody call my name; painting a picture, across the amber sky, of love, and lonely days gone by . . . The “Somebody’s Gonna Miss Me” song kept going through her head, the song from her brother’s record, stolen from his room to play at Bay Farm, the first time Danny smiled at her, in the pop hovel. She thought of how the list of graduates was called from the dais in the refectory for each senior to come up and get his or her diploma at graduation. My name will not be called. I will not hear someone call my name, she warned herself: don’t hope. Don’t kid yourself.
Painting a picture, across the amber sky, of love, and lonely days gone by. Bay Farm graduation was in three weeks. She was going to go. It was her graduation, her class. She wouldn’t miss it. She had had to ask someone when it was.
The drawing for Danny was rolled to go into a picture cylinder. With only its back showing, the rolled-up picture looked like a big, dirty diploma. She slid the dirty diploma that was her mirror image, her other self reflected and caught, into the mailing tube and taped on the label. Danny Stern, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. It wasn’t much of an address. She hoped it was enough to get the thing there.
If not, after all, it would come back.
He had it anyway, whether he knew it or not. Her real self, some essential aspect of herself, her loving self, what there was of it, had stayed with him. She dug her bare toes into the yellow rug from Africa that looked like sunshine on the floor. She had tried to wrench that self away for her own freedom, but she couldn’t, not with Bruno, anyway. She felt as if Danny watched her, even now as she sent him this coded message of herself, in a tube. She needed someone to see her.
If it were actually her graduation, she thought, she’d invite Stand. Who’d done a pretty good job of seeing who she was. Stand had gotten into a better college, a real one, but it turned out he wasn’t going to go. He was doing construction work with an uncle’s company and making huge amounts of money. More than Milt made at his most successful. He said he couldn’t be bothered with college.
Three weeks later, on the morning of Bay Farm graduation, Weesie called, “just to make sure you’re coming.”
“Of course I’m coming.” Not that it had been mentioned between them before.
Some things never change: Maude asked what Weesie would wear.
Just a summer dress, apparently. Maude planned to wear the white net antique thing from her first year—Miss Havisham in her wedding dress, carrying the torch for Bay Farm.
“It’s hot,” said Weesie, meaning the dress had sleeves (even if they were net, transparent, and as substantial as spider web) and that she disapproved. She had moved on. You wouldn’t catch her in that old Pucci, dated and embarrassing in 1970. Already an antique dress was hippieish in a discredited back-to-nature, back-to-the-old-ways way.
“It’s good hot, not bad hot,” said Maude, meaning not sticky oppressive heat but the kind that makes you want to lie in the sun.
“It has sleeves,” said Weesie, coming as close as she was going to to mentioning sweat.
Why, Maude wondered, was Weesie always so sure she was right, so that if you differed it meant you didn’t, in some crucial way, get it? She felt her usual helplessness and inferiority. Then she didn’t. She turned around and mentally looked at Weesie instead of feeling Weesie’s disapproving gaze on her. This was a weakness in Weesie, a blind spot. Weesie’s disapproval didn’t mean Maude should disqualify herself. Maude didn’t have to accept the rule of her judgments. It was possible that the tribe of better people could accommodate both of them. “Well, I’ll be the one who’s sweaty, not you,” said Maude finally, as if exempting Weesie from responsibility.
The dress, probably from the teens of the century, was a little tattered, a little yellowed. But still beautiful, Maude thought, examining the effect, that afternoon, in the Oz-y mirror, with the tan of her shoulders and upper chest dark through the white net, above thick white embroidered flowers. She pinned her hair up. She remembered how the girls had insisted she get the dress, because it was so her, and yet it had made a fence around her as being too special. Well, maybe it was like her—different after all and a little the worse for wear.
She had had to ask Milton to drive her. When they got to the car, he went to the passenger side. She had gotten her learner’s permit in Drivers’ Ed at the community college, but still had no license, from lack of practice. This was unexpected gracious-ness. He handed her the keys and faced forward. This is so normal, she thought, though really it wasn’t—her in her elderly costume, driving her father, who had pulled her from school, to her non-graduation. She wondered: by dragging him there, did he think she was trying to rub it in? She maneuvered the little stick-shift down the trafficless streets of once-identical houses, to the commercial strip and, nervously, onto the highway. “You can go faster,” said Milt in his imperturbable way. He certainly wasn’t hoping she would crash.
There was a big silence on the way. She wanted to ask about Seth, about what went on between them—Seth and Milt, Seth and Nina—about why they so totally left her out. But she couldn’t. It would make everything horrible again. Milt seemed, momentarily, almost to approve of her, and she knew he would consider it an attack if she asked any questions on that subject. She knew how precarious and provisional it was for him to accept any feelings in her that were independent of his wishes—to allow room for any of her desires at all.
At school, Milt did not get himself over to the driver’s side but got out with her.
“Are you staying?”
“Sure,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion—as if it really were Maude’s graduation. “I’ll find your mother.” Milt and Nina were on better terms with each other than Maude had managed with either of them. They were in it, so to speak, for the long haul. When Milt had his show, Nina had even helped with the invitations, addressing envelopes. Sometimes Maude heard him talking to Nina on the phone. Never Seth. She imagined Seth communicated with and through Nina. Seth had always hated Milt. He’d wanted Maude to. But she didn’t. Part of her did, but she didn’t. This was who they were. Maybe everyone’s family, if you scratched the surface, was as weird. Maybe this was normal.
She strolled with her father to the refectory very much as if it were. As he spied Nina with her Rod, he bent to peck Maude on the cheek and loped off toward them, as if embracing your estranged daughter and attending her non-graduation with your ex-wife and ex-wife’s lover were also the most ordinary thing in the world.
It was still sunny at this June evening hour, after Bay Farm dinner. The Pughs had come only for the climax of the day’s events, the handing out of diplomas. Milt seated himself with the faculty and staff, down one side of the refectory, next to Nina. Maude sat with the students, facing the dais, in the main body of the old barn, under its high, beamed vault. There were lots of unfamiliar faces—two years’ worth, all the freshmen and sophomores, though there was a certain generic Bay Farmness to them: a complacency about being there and, naturally, the Bay Farm look of long hair, cutoffs, or fabulous, fanciful versions of elegance and polished dress. Time might make new cultures, but this was still Bay Farm culture. The kids were the same blond and Nordic gene pool too—high WASP—with a smattering of Jews, Catholics, and black kids, the groups that got the preponderance of abundant scholarships the school prided itself on.
There were a few alumni around, as there always were at graduation, recent graduates who still missed the place, and possibly always would. She noticed a particularly attractive young man, dark, like Danny, but older. He must have felt her eyes on him, because he turned and looked at her quizzically, tilting his long head to one side. Her face heated as if she’d been caught in the act, and her eyes pricked as she smiled at him and almost instantly looked away. It was Danny. His smile was so exactly the same that she didn’t see how for a moment she’d mistaken him.
The commencement speech began—by the Senator uncle, from a liberal northern state. The headmaster came up afterward, shook the Senator’s hand and thanked him, leading some more clapping, and began the roll call. In Bay Farm’s egalitarian no-grades way, there were no valedictorians or any of that kind of thing, just Abbott, Beals, and so on through Wells and Zapan-dreou. Louisa Agatha Herrick. Weesie got up in her to-die-for simple French cotton frock. Maude watched to see Weesie’s expression when she unrolled her diploma. Meanwhile the names went on, mounting into the P’s. Steven Michael Pearl. Francine Shaughnessy Perkins. Now: Ellen Susanna Raines.
The person next to her made a joke. Maude took pride in turning and smiling, her eyes maybe suspiciously bright, but that could be just ordinary sentiment. Almost everyone was a little teary.
She’d kept hoping. She’d held on to the stupid fantasy that special dispensation would be made.
After Zapandreou, there was prolonged clapping, stamping, whistling, and shouting. The headmaster held up his hands for quiet, but finally shot his hands to the side in exasperation and gave up. As people around her stood, Maude looked for Wee-sie, to congratulate her and other old friends. At the borders of the crowd, seniors were shrieking and jumping up and down, embraced by family and classmates.
From the other direction, Maude heard Weesie’s voice say her name and turned. There were Philip and Isaac, holding their diplomas and advancing on her. “This is great!” said Weesie, brandishing her diploma. Maude started to explain, in her painstaking way, how she’d contacted the diploma committee and so on and so forth. She was interrupted by the sarcastic, self-mockingly pompous Philip, who had washed his hair but still needed to toss his bangs off his glasses and jab the glasses up his nose. “By virtue of the powers vested in me as head of the diploma committee—”
“Blow it out your heinie, Neuberger,” said a smirking bystander.
Philip ignored him, with the happy smile with which he always gave or took insults. “By the powers vested in me as head of the all-important diploma committee”—he shoved one of the parchment rolls toward Maude—“we thought you should have this.”
Weesie’s face was split by a wedge, her biggest to-the-back-teeth grin. “Open it,” she said.
Maude unfurled the parchment. It was just like a Bay Farm diploma only, instead of being signed by the headmaster, there were the signatures of Isaac, Philip, Weesie, and the other committee members, and there was no gold certifying school seal. There were four little pictures, arrayed in a square, like Milt’s picture families. One showed Maude so realistically, it was like an old-fashioned portrait miniature.
“You each did one,” she said, recognizing the styles. “But this . . .” she pointed to the beautifully rendered portrait, her finger wet from wiping her cheeks.
“My mother helped,” said Weesie. “And Milton helped her.”
“Oh, God,” said Maude, unable to pretend she wasn’t crying. What a sap, to cry like Miss America.
She felt a field of heat at her back. A hand reached over her shoulder, pointing at the miniature, and a tenor voice said, “I prefer the one you sent me.”
She whirled to face Danny but didn’t get to look, because he gripped her too tightly. She held out the diploma so it wouldn’t get crushed. But she was. For a while, she couldn’t speak.