Maud's House (2 page)

“What do you want me to say?” she says.

“Anything,” he says.

“Anything,” she says.

Anything used to drive George crazy.

Like I said, now it’s blah, blah, blah between George and me. So many nights I fall asleep hugging a Rolling Rock, my jaws tired from parleying with George. And when I wake, my mouth is dry, making me wonder if I even talk to George in my sleep.

I have no professional explanation for these dialogues. My friend Wynn Winchester, who is knowledgeable in most matters of the mind, says I’m still angry with George. Not because he left me, wrapped his car around a telephone pole, and had a secretary that made a
fool
of herself at the funeral. No, it has to do with the painting.

Wynn has an entire theory about what she calls my “George Period.” She counts off on her fingers: 1) My work got progressively smaller in size while living with George; scenes that once took the side of a barn began to fit nicely on a postcard. 2) My subject matter became increasingly non-human. (This is a reference to the cows I now paint.) 3) And why, she asks with the superiority of Sherlock Holmes, didn’t I ever paint the
things
George gave me? Like the microwave and pasta-making machine, for instance.

“No, Maud,” Wynn shakes her head, “this whole blocked artist business began way before George turned the fun house into the White House. It began the day you let him into your house.” Not to mention my heart.

Wynn is so smart because, as the owner of a beauty salon, she subscribes to several journals for the edification of her information-hungry clientele and the enjoyment of coupon clippers. Wynn doesn’t put much faith in that quack publication, as she calls it,
The New England Journal of Medicine
; she goes straight to the real source:
Cosmopolitan
. Wynn has time to read those authoritative studies because business is slow until her morning sickness subsides and she can face perming chemicals with a settled stomach.

In my experience, reading is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Take Odie Dorfmann, sheriff, town selectman, a politician with reelection on his mind and unkept campaign promises on his conscience. In short, a dangerous person. Last election Odie guaranteed to bring more art to Round Corners. Odie read in the
Burlington Free Press
about a town in the Midwest that built an entire tourist trade around an old fresco in a church and became obsessed with the idea of commissioning a work of art for the Round Corners Town Hall. It had to be big and powerful, something part King Kong and part Thomas Hart Benton. And it had to be about Round Corners. That is where I came in and how I ended up this crackling fall day, in a graveyard, ruining my favorite cowboy boots.

“Damn you to hell, George,” I whispered, kicking George’s headstone with all my might. Wynn’s magazines would diagnose that I have a lot of displaced anger. There was nothing displaced about it. George and Odie, the baseball buddies, refused to believe me when I said I couldn’t paint anymore. They thought I was just being “difficult.” They didn’t believe that, over the years, the spark had dried up and drifted away. The Georges and Odies of the world got a picture of you in their heads and, like snapping turtles, they never turned it loose. To them, I was, and always would be, Maud the artist. I was artist before I was friend or wife or lover.

I couldn’t imagine George or Odie studying one of my paintings, sighing with longing, and saying, as my father once did: “Damn, that musta been fun to do.” Neither one could distinguish between product and process. If you put in the time, you made the dime in their world.

T-Bone knew there was no such thing as art on demand. He was a farmer. He knew what it was like to work his spirit into the land, to knead his soul into the soil, and come up flat, empty-handed—stunted crops and stillborn calves. Too much sun, not enough. The right vitamins, the wrong feed. It didn’t matter in the end, T-Bone the dairy farmer used to tell me. What mattered was to feel the sunshine on your cheek, to gaze down a row of corn so neat and straight it looked like aliens had made it with their high-tech spaceships, to rub your cold hand against the warm neck of cow.

Since Odie believed my artistic impairment to be of a non-existent nature (not to mention psychological, temporary, and easy to fix if I “just stopped pampering myself and put my mind to it”), he proceeded to hound me about the Round Corners masterpiece night and day. Cornering me in Snowden’s Store, he bent my ear with questions: When was I going to start? How long did I think it would take? And did I think I’d be using any real-life characters from Round Corners? Perhaps a lawman?

I gave George’s headstone another whack; pain shot up my leg. I must have bought the hardest damn rock in Vermont. The granite deflected the toes of my western boots as if it were made of diamonds.

The grave is one year old. There is grass but it’s sparse; you can still make out the mound of dirt under the leaves. The grave is about six feet long. Although I bet if you stood George up against one of those criminal catchers in the bank, the height markers on the door jamb, he’d tick off at about five-ten. That’s standing straight, which George always did. And that’s with his blonde hair blow-dried to the correct fluff. When George went to the bank, or anywhere, his hair was styled and he wore a crisp suit.

Those damn suits. I was picking up George’s suits at the dry cleaners even after he died. That’ll be eight dollars, the clerk said. Eight dollars, I fumed, wishing I’d never found the damn laundry receipt.

Eight bucks. I booted the headstone.

“That’s not really going to help.” I turned to the man leaning against the maple, one leg crossed over the other, his hands casually shoved into the pockets of his suit pants. He was frowning. T-Bone is practical to a fault, something to do with his French Canadian farmer genes. And he is a true friend, another thing to do with genes, those passed down by some distant Canadian Mountie who married and had children when he wasn’t tracking criminals in the snow.

The wind whipped around me, stirring up the dead autumn leaves, sending them into the air with a clatter. They grabbed at my legs and hair, like a mother’s fingers, trying to soothe a child in tantrum.

The Round Corners Cemetery is as old as the invention of the shovel. It clutches a hillside north of town on land a goat would think twice about tackling. When we were children, Wynn and I used to pass the cemetery on the bus ride home from school. We argued: Were the dead really lying down or standing up? Were they clinging by their fingernails inside their coffins eternally fighting the force of gravity?

Round Corners Cemetery climbs the hill and stretches into a neighboring cow pasture. Plenty of room for expansion. For all it’s needed, George used to say. Round Corners has only five hundred
living
people. An earthquake could wipe out the entire town, suck it into the center of the earth, and the cemetery would still have room to spare. Such burial zoning and planning baffled George the real estate agent. He looked at that cow pasture waiting for Round Corners’ deceased and saw condos. The prospect of mansions among the mausoleums put a cold smile on the face of George the accountant.

Winter was as kind as George when it came to the cemetery. It wore at the headstones, each year shrinking them a little more, bone-colored slabs growing smaller and smaller, the way old people do. The tombstones were like popsicles. The Vermont weather constantly sucked and licked at them. Some were nothing but nubs, and nearly impossible to read.

If you strained your eyes, you could make out Snowden, Smith, Elder, Pratt; they came first and farthest on ships across the ocean. Then the less worn and easier to read were Desautels, LaBerge, Champlain, Soutiere, those who later rolled down from the North like a snowball. The clearest were Solomon, Goodsell, Martinez, Wysecki; they melted into the Vermont pot, either drawn here by the beauty of the Green Mountains or driven here by jobs they could no longer stand, by cities that smothered them and drained their heart, by bumper-to-bumper traffic and breathless crowds, by fear that kept them from dashing to the convenience store for a carton of milk in the middle of the night.

And now, there was George, expanding the cemetery. You could read his shiny new headstone a mile away.

Furious, I did a Mexican hat dance around George’s grave, kicking out at the granite.

It always disturbed T-Bone to see me like that—out of control, letting George make me crazy, kicking dead people.

Tomorrow I would wake up, full of guilt, not about George, but about T-Bone. I would remember the sadness in his eyes and hate myself. I always wanted to tell him: I’m not really like this, please don’t think less of me, it’s just George. But he knew that. T-Bone knew me better than I knew myself.

T-Bone was so gentle; he wouldn’t last a minute in the real world, a world where the most important things were not milking cows and tap-dancing. He was forty last birthday. I have known him since he immigrated to Vermont from Canada with his Uncle Andre at the age of thirteen. I was eight. They bought the farm next to ours. T-Bone took over at the age of nineteen when a drunken cow fell on Uncle Andre and killed him. The cow didn’t get soused on purpose. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging its head over a fence when some kids, out to be wild and wondering about a cow’s capacity for Rolling Rock, happened upon it.

Some mornings I get up early, before the sun, and drive over to T-Bone’s. I watch him dance as he milks the cows. Something about his body swaying, circling cows and milking machines, lifts my spirits. The sound of the taps on the bottom of his L.L. Bean boots clipping the concrete fills the barn with rhythm and steals into my soul. I close my eyes… and it’s as if I were painting again.

T-Bone interrupted the hat dance. “Have you had breakfast?” he asked. I shrugged. “You know you get testy when you haven’t eaten. A nutritious breakfast is important. I should have brought the cinnamon rolls. I made them with raisins, your favorite.” T-Bone nibbled on his bottom lip. “Yes, I should have brought the rolls.”

T-Bone’s a worrier. His mind runs a thousand “what if” scenarios a day, like a computer calculating contingency plans for the government. Nuclear holocaust, milk subsidies, tomorrow’s forecast, anything is fodder for his overactive imagination. He worried when I was painting and when I stopped. He worried when I married George and when I buried him. He worries when no birds come to the feeder and when he can’t keep it in sunflower seeds. He is a tall, lean, anxious man. He burns calories like autumn leaves; his insides—every organ, muscle, and ligament—must chug and churn twenty-four hours a day.

T-Bone stopped pacing, glared at me, growled something to the effect that I “needed something in that beautiful body besides beer,” and resumed marching up and down the cemetery.

Unlike T-Bone, I don’t exhaust my metabolism. I also don’t smoke or chew my fingernails or crack my knuckles. I meditate and wait. I sit on the hard porch step of my house, my legs wrapped around me like a flowing robe, and study the faded painting of Milky Way on the side of the barn. I listen. I hear the busy chatter of the leaves, the voice of autumn, the whisper of my breath echoing through the passages of lungs and heart and time. Some days I hear T-Bone pacing over at his farm a mile away.

But the meditation stopped working. And the painting went wrong. I tried harder, and George tried harder. Our beer budget grew. George died. But the painting didn’t come back. The beer budget doubled. Odie decided to turn Round Corners into the Louvre of Vermont (no telling what
that’s
going to do to the beer budget). And I ended up in a graveyard on a cold October morning, a thirty-five-year-old artistic has-been acting like a two-year-old tantrum queen.

Some might say I put too much store in the inner self. Artists will. We’re always reaching for the unseen mystery on the top shelf, our bodies stretched heavenward, ready to fly off the common chair of reality. So, it can be disorienting when we feel too old to reach, can’t even find the energy to drag the chair over to the shelf.

I learned how to meditate from a little man who called himself Raj. He had a huge self, yet hardly one at all. He liked Jackie Kennedy, spy thrillers, and my house. I was thirteen when Raj passed through on a whiff of Eastern mysticism.

My husband George wafted into my life on the last gasping fumes of an aging Volvo. Could I use your phone? he asked. Sure, I said, and let him into my life. I don’t want this to sound too romantic, like love at first sight. I prefer to think it was pure timing. Not that George couldn’t be charming, occasionally. But there I was nineteen and never before left to my own devices. We married fourteen days after we met, two weeks after I buried my father. I learned how to drink Rolling Rock beer while living with George. He liked Richard Nixon, baseball books, and taxes. George was an accountant and a real estate agent.

I watched T-Bone till up the cemetery’s leaves. He paced like a machine. Back and forth. Plowing a furrow through the leaves. I closed my eyes and listened. He was plowing his way to China. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised I could still see him. I expected there to be only his head sticking up from the pacing excavation, floating above the hole bodiless, back and forth like a duck at a carnival shooting gallery.

“It is especially important to eat at a time like this…” he said. I tuned out the rest of the lecture.

Across the cemetery, under a balsam fir, is my father’s grave, next to the grave of my mother, who I have never met. It is a pretty spot, not so steep that they have to cling to anything but each other. My father said they were the perfect couple. They could send each other’s hearts racing with just a smile. My mother looked like me, and my father called her his Wild Gypsy Rose. Her name was Rose. She never painted a picture. She did, however, draw caricatures to make my father laugh. He kept them in a shoe box in the closet. At night I’d hear him in his room, chuckling, and I’d know he had broken out the shoe box again. She died two days after I was born, asking for paper and pencil to draw “the scrunched-up face” of her daughter. The nurse promised the paper after she rested. My mother never awakened from her nap.