Maud's House (3 page)

“Dance for me,” I said to T-Bone.

“What?” That stopped him.

“Dance for me, T-Bone.”

How many times have I said those words? I have loved his body for as long as I can remember. From the beginning I have been fascinated by the way T-Bone’s body flows. It is slender and neat and slides through space. He’s at ease in the tug and pull, a part of moon and tide and gravity. That was something I knew nothing about; I was born a klutz. I envied his ease in the cosmos. He interested me, and so, I spent half my childhood following him around. I studied him. I wanted to feel that motion. When I was twelve, I began to make sketches, which embarrassed him at first. Probably no teen-age boy likes to be sketched. But T-Bone was especially shy. I’ve never known anyone so bashful. It took years, and constant nagging on my part, to get him to open up and talk to me.

I remember once when he was fifteen and I was ten. We were sitting on a bale of hay in the barn. The light streamed in over T-Bone’s shoulder and cut through his profile like a chisel. He was telling me that his real name was Jacques Leon Thibeault and that Thibeault was a proud name in his home in the Laurentians.

“Why do you let them call you T-Bone then?” I asked.

T-Bone shrugged. “My uncle says kids will be kids. They will soon tire of it.” But they never did and the name stuck like meat to the ribs.

“Well,” I said, “I like it.”

“You do?”

“Sure, it has personality. You wouldn’t want to be any old Tom, Dick, or Harry. You’re special.”

That embarrassed him. But, I noticed, from that day on, he never had any trouble talking to me.

T-Bone was dressed for talking that morning in the cemetery. He had an appointment at the bank and was outfitted in a marvelous double-breasted suit that some Montreal tailor whipped up for him. The suit was cut and sewn for a man accustomed to the feel of leather briefcases, elevators, and clean, climate-controlled offices. It made T-Bone look long and polished and sure of himself.

He has always been a handsome man with thick dark hair, blue eyes, and a smile that has a warm effect on everyone, even strangers. In the suit, he looked capable of flirting with a pretty woman or flipping a credit card at a clerk. I knew he didn’t own a credit card and that, except for me, he was tongue-tied around most women. Women found him attractive though. Like me, they loved his smile. It was a charismatic crinkling of facial muscles, something you’d expect on a Kennedy, totally wasted on such a shy person as T-Bone.

Tap-dancing T-Bone, everyone called him. Dance for me, I silently begged. Let me lose myself in you.

“Remember the time I asked you to pose in the nude?”

T-Bone blushed. “You were a precocious child, Maud.”

“Even at the age of fourteen, I knew a good body when I saw one.”

T-Bone muttered in French, shifted uneasily, and tugged at his silk tie. He glanced at the watch I gave him on his last birthday. It was one of those new Swiss ones, fine parts in a plastic case, incredibly light. He says he can’t even feel it on his wrist. I wanted to buy the one with polka dots on the face and a purple and yellow checkered band. Or how about the one that smelled like bananas? He said the gray pin-striped would be fine.

I have never worn a watch. Until I met George, I was not aware of the passage of time, of years that escaped and hours that dragged. All the clocks I knew were on canvas and, for awhile during my surreal period, drippy and melted. During my “George Period,” clocks and everything else I painted became precise little things on a Maud Calhoun greeting card—sold winter, summer, spring, and fall at the cash register at Round Corners Restaurant. In recent years, that has been my only art, greeting cards, with tiny pictures that couldn’t possibly matter in the great scheme.

“So, how am I to do Odie’s painting, George?” My boot hit the gravestone with a clunk. “This is all your fault. I should have shot you before you had a chance to leave me. Saved the car.”

T-Bone sighed. “George couldn’t help it that Odie Dorfmann was his best friend.”

“Don’t defend him. He knew Odie was running for reelection on a cultural platform. To nail the arts vote, Odie said. George encouraged him. He thought they could build it up into a tourist attraction, give the local economy a shot in the arm. Fine, I told George and Odie, just don’t involve me. But Maud, George said, you’re the one with experience in tourist attractions.”

“It was bad luck that Odie won the election,” T-Bone said.

“He was running unopposed.”

Sure things. George liked sure things, situations he could control. He was good at that sort of thing, organizing the world, taking action, solving problems, putting things right. I’ve often thought George would have done wonders in the Middle East. He believed in new beginnings. If one idea didn’t work, he tried another. He refused to let himself get bogged down by historical baggage, negative attitudes, insecurities. Those are children of the past, and George was a child of the present.

When I first married George, I desperately needed someone with that quality. I have never been any good at taking care of myself—logistically. I could have a headache for days and never think about walking five steps to the medicine cabinet and a bottle of aspirin. I used the dishes until there weren’t anymore and then I was surprised when I couldn’t find a clean plate. All through grade school Wynn the appearance conscious was the one who noticed when I needed new shoes.

But I didn’t marry George just for his domestic skills. In his own way, George believed in me, “Maud, you can do anything you set your mind to. I know you’ll be a great artist someday.” In fact, I think George believed in me too much. He could never leave my art alone. He always wanted to help me “make it better.” It was his idea to go into the greeting card business—“Money is how our culture measures success, Maud. You don’t want to be one of these artists that don’t make a dime off your work until after you’re dead, do you?” And it was George’s idea “to centralize, and thus, focus” my work by containing it in a studio “that would have been the envy of Picasso.”

I gave George’s stone several more smacks with my boot, rubbed my eyes, gazed out over the other graves. Across the cemetery, an old woman was taking a rubbing from an ancient stone. On her knees, she scrubbed furiously at the headstone, transferring the impressions of the gravestone to paper with a piece of charcoal, while the wind buffeted her and the leaves rubbed against her legs. She pushed away a lock of thin, gray hair blown into her eyes. The sheet of white paper she was bent over fluttered, and she hurried to grab it.

When I was young, before I got mixed up with husbands and politicians, I made rubbings of leaves with crayons—red, orange, brown, yellow, blue, purple, pink. I stacked them together and stapled them into a book. And, although I made the book in summer when the leaves were green and supple, I called it my autumn book.

I love color. I have no interest in vast amounts of knowledge. George could never understand the way I could pass up the chance at facts, figures, and dates. I like to eat breakfast cereals full of shapes and colors, red balls, pink hearts, yellow stars, purple dinosaurs. George was a Cornflakes man. He liked numbers, sure things. You could always count on a spreadsheet. When we sat in Olympic Stadium watching the Montreal Expos play, I was the one who screamed and yelled and demolished hotdogs smothered in mustard and relish. George kept statistics. What looked to me to be a hard-hit grounder through the clumsy third baseman’s legs into the green Astroturf of left field was to George a ground ball to seven with an error on five.

The old woman returned the charcoal to a small fishing tackle box, then carefully rolled the paper and slid it into a cardboard tube. She nodded as she passed us, then began to whistle, something that sounded like the wind, lonely.

I was tired. Granite is harder than the human toe. I slipped to the ground and leaned my head against George’s stone. It was hard and perfect and new. I hadn’t fazed it, just as I hadn’t fazed George in thirteen years of marriage.

Without a word, T-Bone picked me up and carried me to the truck. He settled me gently on the passenger seat. As he drove me home, I swore I’d never speak to George again.

Why do we speak to the dead? Because in death they seem a million times more sympathetic than they were in life. Because we left something unsaid. Because they had filled a hole we didn’t even realize was there.

Or maybe just because they still piss us off.

It’s over, George. Are you there? George?

Maybe it’s because they never let us get the last word in.

B
eaver Road dead-ends at my barn. There the front yard, the drive, and the road all blend together into a part grass, part gravel common area. A gathering place for vehicles and equipment and lawn chairs. My house looks down a valley, a tunnel of ever-changing color. Full and green in summer. Skeleton black and white in winter. Cider warm brown, gold, and red in autumn. The valley roller coasters up hills and down all the way to Lake Champlain some thirty miles away.

A writer would say the day was a perfect specimen of Indian summer. The sun has burnt off the early morning haze, leaving air so clear and trees so bright—that it sends tourists scrambling for their cameras and artists for their easels. I have not broken any records to get to the paints. Standing in my front yard, I watched T-Bone speed to his appointment. He hates being late for anything. He waved as his voice flew out of a cloud of dust and dried leaves: “Get something to eat.”

I entered the house and flicked on the radio, navigating through the maze of newspapers, uneaten meals, and discarded clothes. I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and returned to the front porch, turning up the volume on the radio as I passed. I settled on the sweet spot on the front step, a worn place of music, beer, and sun.

George’s funeral was one year ago today.

God, do you remember that day, George? Of course, you do. It was your big day. You were the star of the show. Reverend Swan said a lot of nice things about you. It was not an entirely accurate report, but I didn’t want to make a scene. Unlike some people I know.

George and I hadn’t had time to get a divorce, at least, I didn’t think we had. But the way George’s secretary carried on at the funeral, I wasn’t sure who was wife and who was just coworker. I had to admit her grief was wholehearted, and the mortician’s nephew gave it his all trying to console the wailing woman. I really don’t think, like some have whispered, that George had been headed for her when he left me and wrecked himself and our car. To this day, I don’t believe it, despite all the clothes and baseball shoes strewn across the road. George loved me; he just couldn’t live with me.

The day of the funeral the wind rushed down the mountain and shook the graveside. I shivered and T-Bone put his arm around me. George’s secretary wailed louder.

“Why don’t you pop that ridiculously bereaved woman in the eye and throw her into the hole with George?” my best friend Freda Lee whispered. “Cynthia Sands on
‘The Hourglass of Our Lives’
would.”

I shrugged.

Freda sniffed. “Some secretary. Everyone knew she had the hots for George. Sometimes you are a deep disappointment to me, Maud, a deep disappointment in the romantically aware department.” Freda is almost primitive about territorial rights; her husband Lewis Lee is definitely off limits to every other female on the planet.

“Are you eating? You don’t look like you’re eating.” Freda turned to T-Bone. “Is she eating?”

He shrugged.

I said, “I’m trying to get as skinny as Cynthia Sands.”

“Very funny,” Freda said.

In towns the size of Round Corners, where people practically live inside each other’s heads, neighbors don’t wonder so much at a wife who doesn’t cry for her dead husband. Instead, they worry. I should have had George cremated and avoided all the commotion. In all fairness, that’s what I should have done after thirteen years of marriage, in which I got burned plenty. When I die, I told Freda, I don’t want a funeral, not even a memorial service. I want two lines at the bottom of my obituary: “Friends are welcome at the Round Corners Restaurant between 2 and 4 p.m. Coffee’s on Maud.”

George the accountant would have liked that. Such a financially sensible thing to do. George knew everything there is to know about money. I’m rather helpless about all that budget stuff. I’m still paying off George’s coffin, a box I don’t even remember choosing. I can’t even begin to count how many Maud Calhoun greeting cards I’ve had to sell to send George off into the hereafter.

The day of the funeral was windy. And when one huge gust hit the graveside, the legs under the casket trembled, swayed, then to everyone’s horror, splayed like a collapsed giraffe. The coffin dropped three feet in an instant, forcing the air below it to evict with a big burp. Everyone froze, except the mortician’s nephew who was slinking toward the hearse.

I would have giggled if it hadn’t been for the honor guard. They’d arrived that morning, out of the blue, arranged by Odie probably, to carry a fellow veteran on their broad shoulders.

The honor guard, soldiers accustomed to loud noises and surprise attacks, recovered first from the coffin incident. The leader stepped forward and began to fold the flag. End over end, triangle into triangle, until the coffin was bare, civilian again. He marched a geometric path, stopped, and presented the bundle to me. I stared at him. I thought of the flag in the downstairs closet, the flag George flew every holiday. I never flew flags. And now, I had two. T-Bone nudged me. I hesitantly accepted the flag, jumping when the soldier doll snapped to a salute.

For the finale, Reverend Swan carefully removed a saxophone from an old leather case propped against a tree and played “Taps.” The Reverend is sixty years old and does all the yard work himself on the town’s white clapboard church. It keeps him limber for the real exercise in his life: music. Reverend Swan played the horn as if he were auditioning for St. Peter himself. He arched backwards, catering to the music, coaxing it softly from his soul. Before our eyes, he seemed to grow younger, a lithe spirit. His body hunched and folded over the instrument until he and the horn were one, giving birth to the notes, to the music inside him. All he needed was a pair of sunglasses perched above those ballooned cheeks.