Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Maggie enjoyed the job mostly, but some days when she sat around a table with those other bright, creative people, she thought for a moment or two of how they all dreamed of being somewhere else.

  Other than her mother, no one in her family mentioned it when she published a short story in a literary journal, even if she told them about it in advance. But when they saw her name in the credits for Till Death, they’d call her immediately.

  Her stepmother had been the last to call, breathless with excitement: “I just saw the one where the woman shoots the husband after she sees his Visa bill, and it turns out he wasn’t even cheating. He really was sending all those flowers to her, but the florist got the address wrong. The poor guy! Your father says to tell you that thanks to you he’s never buying me roses again.”

  On the weekends, Maggie worked from home, trying to finish her novel, and occasionally writing other people’s online dating profiles for extra money. She had written one for a friend as a favor a year earlier, and then that friend’s sister had asked her to do one, and then a co-worker of hers.

  “You could actually make some mad cash on this,” Gabe had said to her once, and she had told him to stop being crazy.

  But she kept getting offers, and had even been asked by a friend at New York magazine to write a step-by-step guide to the perfect profile. (She had declined, as few things seemed more mortifying than being known as an authority on online dating.)

  Maggie had briefly joined Match.com before meeting Gabe. She went on four or five dates, but every one of them felt artificial, as if she and the guy were two characters going out to dinner in a play. Maggie could never remember their real names and thought of them exclusively by their screen names—they were always WarmLover10 or BookNerdSeeksSame, instead of Alex or Dave. And she quickly tired of translating their profiles: A guy who said he was six foot two was most likely five foot eight. If a guy actually claimed to be five-eight, it meant he was four and a half feet tall.

  Now the door to the apartment opened and shut with a slam: the unmistakable sound of Cunningham arriving home. She cringed, wishing she had gone into the bedroom so she wouldn’t have to talk to him.

  Maggie heard Gabe turning off the water in the shower. She was grateful at least that she wouldn’t have to be alone with Cunningham for long.

  “Hey there,” he said. “What’s happening, lady?”

  “Just hanging out,” she said.

  “I thought you guys left for Maine already,” he said.

  “Nope. Tomorrow.”

  “Cool cool. So, what’s the word?”

  “Not much,” she said, always unsure of how to answer that particular question. “How’s Shauna?” Her reliable fallback.

  “She’s okay,” he said. “She took a new nursing job in Westport.”

  “But I thought she was moving here soon. She’s going to commute to Westport from New York?”

  He shook his head. “No ma’am, and thank God for that. I’m not ready to give up our bachelor pad yet.”

  She started to say more, but Gabe appeared then, wrapped in a towel from the waist down.

  “What up, my man!” he said, giving Cunningham a high five.

  “Honey, Ben says Shauna got a new job in Connecticut,” she said, feeling her words heavy with implication.

  “Yeah? Good for her.”

  She tried again. “Shauna’s not moving to New York then.”

  Gabe walked into the bedroom, and she followed behind. She closed the door. Her chest tightening, she said, “Gabe, please tell me that you’ve already told him I’m moving in.”

  “Keep your voice down,” he whispered.

  “You haven’t told him yet,” she said, weighing in her head whether this was simply bad or worse than that.

  “I wanted to wait until after Maine to talk to you about this whole living together idea,” he said. “Do you really think we’re ready?”

  She sat down on the bed. Heartburn rumbled up into her throat.

  She pulled a couple of Tums from her purse on the floor and chewed them slowly. She wanted to tell him she was pregnant, then and there, but she knew she could say it only once and the moment needed to be perfect. Instead she said, “You asked me to move in.”

  “Whoa,” he said. “All I said was I had been thinking about it, and then you ran with the idea.”

  She breathed in deeply. “Please tell me this isn’t happening,” she said.

  “Babe, chill out. You haven’t given your landlord notice yet, right?”

  “Right. But Jesus, Gabe, I was just about to.”

  She wished that she already had.

  “But you didn’t! So we live apart one more year. What’s the big deal?”

  The big deal is that I’ve already told everyone I know—every person at work, every friend, both my parents. I’ve already started redecorating this goddamn apartment in my head, and told Allegra’s cousin that she can have my place as of August first. The big deal is that in seven months, I’ll be giving birth to your child.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “We’ve been talking about it all the time.”

  “You’ve been talking,” he said. “I didn’t want to ruin our vacation, but when I talked to Cunningham about it, he said he wasn’t ready to move out yet, and I can’t abandon him. Hey, you’re always telling me to follow through on my commitments, right?”

  He could not follow through on finding steady work or taking care of her when she got sick as he had promised, but she was supposed to be dazzled by the fact that he felt compelled to keep living with Ben.

  “So Cunningham knew I wasn’t moving in before I knew it,” she said.

  Anger filled her, anger that she knew would turn to sadness and fear as soon as Gabe was out of her sight, and for that reason she wanted to fix this, to make some sense of it.

  “I have my own place. Maybe you should come live at my apartment. Or we can find a brand-new place, and Cunningham can get a roommate off Craigslist,” she said.

  “A total stranger?” Gabe said, as if most everyone in New York didn’t live with total strangers. “Why do you want to live together so bad anyway? What’s the difference between that and what we have now?”

  Because I’m thirty-two years old. Because my cousin Patty is the same age and already has three kids and a house. Because I want to know when you come in at night. Because I love you.

  “You’re the one who suggested it in the first place,” she said.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  “It was!”

  “But it’s not really what I want. I feel like a big part of the reason you want to live together is just to keep tabs.”

  She shook her head. Was this really happening?

  “Damn right,” she said. “I thought maybe the possibility of living together meant you’d stop being such a liar, but I guess I was wrong.”

  “Guess so,” he said. “Hey, this time you didn’t even need to go through my e-mail to find out.”

  She knew all her snooping was wrong, though it never felt wrong when she did it. It gave her a weird high, looking at his e-mails while he was in the shower or out for a run. Maggie told herself that she only wanted proof—just once—that Gabe wasn’t doing anything inappropriate. But she’d always find something: acknowledgment that he had lied about where he was, or an overly friendly e-mail exchange with an ex. And then she would be devastated and unable to explain her sudden sorrow to Gabe.

  “Like Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify,” she had told Allegra once to explain why she checked up on him this way, and Allegra had widened her eyes: “Jesus, we’re getting our moral relativism from Reagan now?”

  He was still wearing the towel. He let it drop to the floor and pulled on a pair of boxers and jeans.

  “We’re done,” he said. “I’m gonna go watch the game. Come out if you want.”

  “You’re gonna watch the game,” she said, feeling suddenly hysterical. “You’re going to watch the fuckin
g game? I don’t think so.”

  “I hate fighting like this,” he said. “I can’t stand it.”

  “We haven’t fought like this in a long time,” she said, getting to her feet.

  “Yeah, because you got what you wanted,” he said.

  “I thought it was what we both wanted.”

  “Look, you don’t trust me,” he said. “That’s what this living together thing is really about. Maybe this needs to be over. Maybe we should take a break.”

  “A break?” She felt desperate. She wondered if there was someone else. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope, starting now. So we’re not together at the moment, and I’m gonna go watch the Yankees.”

  “God, you’re horrible, Gabe. You’re so selfish.”

  “If I’m so horrible, why don’t you fucking leave?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not leaving. Jesus. Let’s calm down. We need to talk about this.”

  Sometimes this sort of fight—the sort where she accused him of lying, and he got all hot and indignant over the accusation, even though he had, in fact, lied—could fade quickly. But not today: He left the bedroom, and she trailed behind him into the kitchen. He screamed at her to go. She refused, and they were shouting louder and louder, until he actually grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her toward the door leading to the outside hall.

  “Gabe, let go of me,” she gasped, her heart pounding. She thought of the baby. She wondered where Cunningham was hiding, that coward. Gabe’s hands were too tight on her. She recalled the tender way he had touched her an hour before. Their most brutal fights always came on like this; quick, unexpected, and fierce.

  “I don’t want you here,” he said.

  “Too bad. There’s something I have to tell you. We need to talk.”

  “I don’t need to do anything. This is my place. Now go.”

  “Gabe—if you won’t talk to me now, then it’s over,” she said, terrified.

  “It’s over,” he said. He let the door close, and she stood alone in the hallway for a moment. Then he reemerged, and her heart soared pathetically until she noticed the suitcase in his hand, her aunt Ann Marie’s old Louis Vuitton. She thought of how all of this misery was their own construction—there was nothing stopping them from ending it now if they really wanted to, just going back inside and watching some baseball, and being happy, making a family together, making a life. And yet.

  “Have a great trip,” he said, putting the suitcase on the ground at her feet and letting the door slam.

  An old familiar feeling washed over her, the one she’d get every time they had a fight and she walked out of his apartment, slamming the door behind her; or every time she gave him an ultimatum that he brushed aside by telling her to leave. The act of leaving felt empowering.

  But then she’d stand in the lobby of his building for ten minutes, make circles around his block for twenty, hoping he’d come after her, feeling the weight of her gesture, her penchant for the proud and the dramatic screwing her as usual.

  “You’ve got moxie, butterfly,” her grandfather used to tell her when she was a teenager.

  Yeah, well. In the end, moxie always seemed to come back and bite you in the ass.

  Kathleen

  Kathleen woke to the synchronized impact of a fat, speckled tongue running over her nose and a heavy weight pressing down against her right thigh.

  “Get off me, you savages,” she said, opening her eyes. They kept at it, the tongue now slobbering across her chin, leaving behind a trail of drool. Kathleen wiped it away.

  “Okay, I’m up.”

  Mack and Mabel were full-grown German shepherds. He weighed eighty-two pounds, she weighed sixty-eight. But they danced about the bed like a couple of puppies, scratching her bare arms, mussing up the sheets.

  “Cool it, you two,” she said in a fake stern voice. When it came to business matters she could be tough, but she had never had a knack for discipline, not with Maggie and Chris, and not with her dogs.

  They calmed down after a bit, lying side by side in the now empty spot where Arlo slept. It was Sunday, but he had left at the crack of dawn to give an eight o’clock presentation to a town’s worth of Junior Girl Scouts in Paradise Pines, two and a half hours north.

  Mack and Mabel panted, despite the fact that the room was cool, a swivel fan aimed toward the bed. Kathleen felt momentarily sad. She had rescued them when they were days old, from a litter of pups someone found abandoned on the side of Route 128. What kind of person would do that? To this day, she couldn’t fathom it. Now her babies were somehow fourteen years old and completely worn out from a few minutes’ worth of play.

  She rolled over and burrowed into Mack, who burrowed into Mabel, for a sort of three-way spoon. This was how they had slept every night before she met Arlo. When he came along, he insisted the dogs sleep at the far end of the bed or, preferably, on the floor. Which explained why Mack still snubbed him, even ten years later.

  From the time she was a kid, she had had a fondness for strays and lost creatures. How many evenings had she taken home a dog she’d found wandering around, only to have Alice say she’d have to let the dog go? Kathleen would tell her mother fine, and then she would set him up in the shed out back anyway, with a bowl of water and the contents of her dinner plate and a soft blanket and the big flashlight they kept for hurricanes switched on to its highest setting. The next day, her father would help her post signs around town, and soon enough, someone would come along to claim their Toby or their Duke or their King.

  Arlo could take or leave the dogs, but they had a policy of indulging each other’s passions, no matter what. Hence the fact that she lived on a worm farm, and had once allowed herself to be filmed having sex while a concert recording of “Sugar Magnolia” played in the background.

  Her ex-husband, Paul, was allergic to dogs. That should have been a sign right there. After the divorce, she adopted a retired greyhound named Daisy, who nobody liked, poor thing. (“I know how you feel,” Kathleen would tell her when Alice came over and turned up her nose.) She had had at least one dog—more often two or three—ever since. The dogs were partly responsible for keeping her sane. The relationship she had with them was pure joy. No ulterior motives, no spite, just love and care and kindness, exactly the emotions she wanted to cultivate.

  Kathleen rose from her bed now and went into the bathroom to pee. On the other side of the closed door, two wide mouths hung open, eager to start their day. It was almost ten. Arlo always let her sleep as late as she wanted, perhaps for his own well-being more than hers. She was definitely not a morning person. Lately she had been having trouble getting to sleep at night. She was stressed about the farm and all the extra work they’d taken on. And, even more than usual, she was worried about Maggie and the way the Kellehers were treating her.

  Maggie and Gabe were driving to Maine to join Alice tomorrow. Kathleen often wondered why her daughter felt such a sense of belonging and trust when it came to their relatives. She herself felt nothing of the sort, especially now that her father was gone. She loved her family, in that way that you have to love your family. But it saddened her to see Maggie let down by them, over and over again. The latest was that obnoxious phone call from Ann Marie. Kathleen couldn’t get it out of her head.

  She made her way downstairs with the dogs underfoot. In the kitchen, she opened the back door, and they bolted out to begin their daily ritual of eating bluebells and terrorizing innocent butterflies. Kathleen stood in the doorway for a moment, as she did most mornings, taking it all in—the view of the mountains, the border of giant oak trees far off in the distance, their gorgeous flower beds (proof positive that their products really worked), the vegetable patch, and the two red barns separated by a swath of green, green grass. If you drove for a few minutes, you were in the heart of a vineyard, with grapevines in every direction.

  Two dry drunks in wine country! That was how Arlo had described them to the group at their first Sonoma Vall
ey AA meeting. Everyone laughed, since they too were part of that strange contradiction.

  They had met ten years back at a meeting in Cambridge. He invited her to go for coffee and she said yes, despite the fact that he wasn’t at all her type. Arlo was an aging hippie with shaggy silver hair who had spent his early thirties following the Grateful Dead. He had once revealed in a meeting that before he joined AA in 1990, it wasn’t uncommon for him to down a bottle of whiskey and smoke three joints in a single day. He had never really had a job, outside of coffee shops and bars. Despite having gone through her own ugly addiction to alcohol, Kathleen was still on some level judgmental of drug addicts. And her father had always hated hippies.

  But Arlo had been sober for four years when they first went out. He made her laugh. They both enjoyed meditation, though Kathleen thought he was more indulgent about it—it was all very let the sun shine in with him, whereas for her it was about staying rational and trying not to turn into her mother. She liked his passion for gardening, and the fact that he volunteered at a nursery. He told her he dreamed of running his own composting business one day, comprised of feeding trash to worms and making grade-A fertilizer from their droppings.

  Arlo was six foot four and lanky. He was sensitive and mellow and kind, and when he laughed, the sound could shake furniture. People always fell in love with him. Well, people other than her family, but that was no surprise. Kathleen thought (she hoped) that Maggie genuinely liked him, and her sister, Clare, too. The opinions held by the rest of the Kellehers were irrelevant.

  When people asked her what she did, Kathleen told them she and Arlo were in the vermiculture composting business and hoped they would not ask her to elaborate. In layman’s terms, they sold live worms and a spray fertilizer known in the trade as worm poop tea to small and medium-size nurseries all over California. They always had worms at each stage of the process: worms being born, worms just taking their first infinitesimal bites of banana peel, and worms that had finished composting, leaving them with a magnificent pile of fertilizer to sift through. Their three million worms made three thousand pounds of castings each month.