Chapter 1

Only once, when she was very little, he asked her to pose for him --- asked her to be a part of that endless source of their pride and distinction, his art. She stayed in the specified spot on the studio floor, where she sat listening to the scratching of his brush against the canvas and watching his legs in a color-splotched chinoed dance as he leaned to this or that part of the easel, stepped to the side for a more piercing look at her, stepped forward, back.

The rough plywood of the floor made her shiver with aversion. Through the plain sheet of glass that formed the north wall, she could see the neighborhood children below --- her best friend wheeling on a tricycle; a toddler in dumb amazement watching two boys in striped tee shirts tussling on the grass --- and hear their faint calls and taunts. Then the twelve o'clock whistle blew and they threw down their bikes and toys and disappeared, the toddler dragged off by his puffy fist. The scritch-scratching of the brush went on, as did Maude's high sense of mission. A symphony began playing dimly on the classical music station.

"Can I look?"

"Just a minute. Just another minute. Sit still."

It was more than a minute before she was allowed to stand to see herself revealed.

But the image on the canvas was indecipherable, as in all his pictures --- not an image at all. A bunch of bristly black lines.

Seeing the disorder of her face, he pulled out of his customary dreamy, helpless self-absorption. Years later, he would recognize this expression of hers when he stopped on a country road and called to some cattle grazing by its side: rolling their heads away to look at him as if the sight were too horrible to bear head-on. It was a look of pure distrust. He should have explained to her he just needed her perpendiculars; he just needed a human proportion: she was simply the one available. She should have known, he felt. She knew his work.

Even if she were capable of knowing, however, there was a picture he had done in art school that looked exactly like him, and there were shaded renderings of naked ladies carefully referred to as models or nudes, as if it made them less naked, tossed on the dustheap of history under the studio eaves, where she played. "It doesn't look like me, Daddy."

"It's an abstraction, sweetie."

She was three.

That look. It was the end of something. Neither of them knew what. Within a year, she had decided she would be an artist; she would deliver what Milt so rejectingly refused. In the meantime they stood, the half irascible, half indifferent 1950s daddy, the mollusk-like little girl --- not in being happy as a clam but in her self-protectiveness and knowledge that whatever she felt, short of cheerful acquiescence, was unwelcome where Daddy was concerned --- as, she felt, was she. Her big dark eyes fixed on him as some kind of danger to herself, as if he canceled her out. If she moved just as casually as she'd stayed still to pose, she'd be okay.