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Harry & Maude
Maude Clemmons is angry. She stands, blue-veined and shaking, before Harry Pearson. She is waving a skillet, threatening violence. Harry is unabashed. Standing in his stained boxers with a beer in his hand, he's heard it all before. He wonders why she carries on so. It's undignified behavior, he thinks, in a woman of her advanced age. "And don't think I gotta take this crap. If you can't be faithful anymore, you cheatin' old bastard, I know somebody who'd take me in right now! We ain't married, and 'ere ain't nobody forcin' me to stay! I don't have to stay with you, old man!" Harry had to duck, because Maude swung the skillet. If he had not moved quickly, he would have had a headache. This served to anger the usually implacable Harry. "All right, then!" he roared. "If you think somebody else can take care of you - put up with you - any better than I can..." He was so mad that he sputtered. "Then get your sorry ass outa my house, woman!" Maude brandished the skillet, looking for an opening. "I will! And you're gonna be sorry when I'm gone. Who's gonna slave away for you?" She swung, arm at full extension, and Harry leaped away. He picked up a sofa cushion. The old broad was clearly irrational, he thought. Maude swung again. "And do ya think," she cried, "that old woman's gonna give you anything I can't?" Harry blocked with the cushion. "Something you can't?" he hollered. "There ain't enough Vaseline in the world to make lovin' with you even tolerable, you dried-out old bitch!" "Oh!" screamed Maude, and she threw the skillet. "You bastard!" Harry felt relieved that his common law wife no longer had the kitchen implement, and he was also proud that he had not spilt his beer. She was standing splay-footed, red-faced, radiating hatred. Her tired breasts drooped nearly to her belly button. He wondered what he had ever seen in her. Suddenly she lunged toward the chifforobe. Harry backed up. He knew she was going for the gun. He screamed, "Noooo!" Then he saw her reaching into the drawer, and he saw the glint of gunmetal grey. Still screaming, he ran for the door and groped for the handle. She was raising the pistol, and the door was stuck. He cursed as he kicked the bottom of the door: Oh, why hadn't he fixed the damn thing? Maude was crying so furiously that her sight was obscured. The image of Harry frantically pounding on the mobile home door wavered in her vision, so she tried to compensate for this instability by waving the gun around in an arc. Harry pulled up on the door handle with both hands, and the door opened explosively. He tumbled out with his head vacating the exact spot where the bullet would have landed a second later when Maude decided she didn't have to be that precise. Harry looked on in horror, and then he began to push away on his heels and hands. The report of the pistol resounded in the trailer, and Maude's ears rang. She was dazed. Harry scuttled onto his belly in a maneuver that would be impressive for a man half his age, arose and ran to hide behind their van. He crouched there, his heart pounding, in a cold sweat. Maude lowered the gun to her side. She padded to the doorway and blearily looked outside. A trailer door opened, and a gray head peeked out. Ed Maghum surveyed the scene: Maude in the doorway; Harry hiding behind the van... in his drawers. He saw the gun, now held loosely in Maude's hands, threatening to fall from her grasp. Harry was trying to figure his chances if he made a break for it, but the palpitations were interfering with his calculations. "By damn," said Ed, stepping out into the sunlight. He was fifty feet away from the couple. He called, "She's finally done it, ain't she? Thrown your sorry ass out, Harry." "She still got the gun?" asked Harry. "Ha-yup!" said Ed, "But she don't look like she aims to use it." Maude wiped her nose on one sleeve and then the other. Her anger was collapsing, and in its place sorrow arose. There would be no turning back. Now, when she should be enjoying the fruits of her labor and the stability and wisdom of her years, everything had changed in a moment, all the hell gone topsy-turvy on her, and this stage of her life was over. Harry cautiously peered around the hood of the van. "Sweetie?" he said. "Put the gun down, hon." Maude felt exhausted. "Don't you 'hon' me, you lyin' scoundrel," she said. "I ain't loved you in a long time, but today I learned that I can't trust you either. Without one or the other, I can't live with you. I'm movin' out. We're through." Harry took a half-step away from the van. "Aw, honey, I don't want you to leave." He held one hand up in a conciliatory gesture, but the other hand was still pressed to his chest, monitoring the thunder within. "I mean, we been together so long..." He tried a beseeching expression. "Go to hell, Harry," said Maude. "You just go on down to Wylie's and drown your sorrows, or go to that whore of yours. I won't be here when you get back." She wearily turned her back on the man. "At least throw me some pants and a shirt, Maude," he pleaded. "Borrow something from Ed," said Maude, and she pulled the door closed behind her.
Ed came through with a pair of Levi's that were tight, but serviceable, and an ancient Izod-Lacoste polo shirt with an alligator on it. Harry remembered his flip-flops in the back of the van, and he excused himself from Ed. Indeed, he was planning on going to Wylie's to down some brewskies and tell everybody what crazy old Maude had done now. Ed waited about ten minutes after Harry left, and then he crossed over to Maude and Harry's trailer. He started to knock on the door, and then he reconsidered. He moved beside the door, reached out, and rapped on it with his knuckles. When no warning shots answered, he called, "Maude?" "That you, Ed?" "Yeah." "Come on in. Oh, you got to pull up on that door." Ed pulled up on the door handle, swung it open, and cautiously stepped inside. Maude had put a folded kerchief over her gray hair, but strands dangled loosely at each side. She was perspiring despite the trailer's laboring air conditioner, and she wiped her forehead on the same sleeves that she used to wipe her nose. Ed's eyes were bright. He looked at the woman, admiring her strength, her toughness. His hands were open at his sides. After fantasizing about Maude for years and years, his moment had arrived -- and he was suddenly too bashful to talk. Maude let out a low chuckle. "You got somethin' to say, Ed?" She knew he had pined after her. Ed looked down, and he nervously swayed from side to side. He pretended to be interested in something on the floor. The moment stretched. "I... uh..." Ed tried, but whatever he meant to say became stuck in this throat. Maude cocked a fist on her hip, enjoying Ed's discomfiture. She padded over to face him, and she thought about taking her fingertips and tilting his chin upward. Ed looked at Maude's feet. They were long and lean, like her. They were very attractive feet, and they were attached to an attractive, smart lady. The weight of his fantasies tingled in his groin. He looked up, into her laughing wide eyes, and he was surprised. The surprise jolted the words out of him. "You're gonna do it, Maude?" he asked. "Gonna move out?" "Sure am, Ed." Still the barely repressed laughter, the twinkle. "Whuh... where will you go, Maude?" Ed shivered as he felt the cold, ephemeral wind of possibilities brush against his spine. Maude's amusement was threatening to break out. "You got any suggestions, Ed?" She grinned, exposing the exquisitely perfect form of her dentures. Ed took a deep breath. He looked into her eyes, looked back at her feet and reached out to her. Gently, he took her upper arm. Oh please, oh please, oh please... was a litany sweeping across the back of his brain. He was trembling. He took a shaky breath. "Move in with me, Maude." The laughter bubbled out of her. "Oh, Ed. You're so sweet." She touched his face and stepped closer to him. Ed smelled her sweat. He was frightened, hopeful, and horny in equal measure. Maude studied his face, his eyes which were looking at everything except her. They had had a brief fling forty years before. She thought the years had been kind to him, and later middle age had moderated the streak of wildness and impetuousness in him that had troubled her before. "Why not?" she said, and then she kissed him. It was more than a sisterly peck. At first Ed took it passively, and then he was reaching for her hips, to draw her in, to suck her in, to bond her to him, and make her his. Easy, boy, thought Maude. She grinned around the kiss, because she had just discovered that even old girls enjoy getting pawed by an enthusiastic guy. She pushed on his shoulders, and the long kiss became a series of quick nips. Maude, to her great surprise, found herself giggling like a school girl. "I'll help you move," promised Ed. "You got room for my water bed?" laughed Maude. "I'll make room!" "Okay!"
It was later that night. Ed and Maude both realized that they would be sore in the morning, but they had ferried all of Maude's belongings across the road. Maude made one more sweep of the trailer. In the bedroom, on a small dresser beside where her water bed had previously been placed, her eyes fell upon the container of Vaseline. She scooped it up, and on the way out through the door for the last time, she stopped to smear petroleum jelly over the outside doorknob. And even later that night, the couple failed to hear Harry's fumbling attempts to open the trailer door when he came home drunk. Unlike Harry, Ed did not think that Maude's breasts were droopy at all. With Maude flat on her back on the gently rocking water bed, her breasts were a fascinating, pliable mass of female mystery that Ed was determined to treat with respect and tenderness. With each touch of his fingertips and tongue, Maude felt her body respond and she beheld it in childlike wonder. Copyright © 2002
Lamar Stonecypher
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