Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  They had bought the farm ten years earlier, site unseen, six months after they met. The house sat on five acres in Glen Ellen, a tiny farming town outside of Sonoma. They sold both their homes in Massachusetts to buy it, and with the addition of the money Kathleen had inherited after her father died, they could almost afford the place. Almost. Maggie had been alarmed when Kathleen first told her about the idea all those years ago, but after considering several hours of conversation and a thick folder’s worth of research, even Kathleen’s worrywart daughter had agreed that Arlo’s plan had potential. He needed only the financing to get it off the ground, and someone to believe in him.

  This year, the company was thriving. Arlo’s special orchid tea had been written up in a national magazine about organic living and orders were through the roof. Best of all, they had been profiled in the Los Angeles Times and the Sonoma Index-Tribune that spring, leading to an account with a chain of gardening stores that had operations in three states.

  Kathleen had surprised them both with her business savvy. It was her outreach that had earned them all the press. It had been her idea to work with local schools to get the steady supply of garbage necessary to run their company. She was even able to channel the pushy, Alice-like parts of herself into getting nurseries to take more product than they might have, or securing Arlo a better deal on bottling fees.

  Her mother and her brother, Pat, made it clear that they still thought the whole endeavor was goofy and extravagant, never mind that Kathleen had turned a profit of more than two hundred thousand last year. She understood how they might have thought the idea was suspect in the beginning, but she wished that just once they could give her credit for her success.

  She’d show them this coming year, anyway.

  In the early winter, she was taking their business to the next level. The tenth anniversary of the farm was in November, and she planned to present Arlo with a surprise: a worm gin, which would potentially triple their monthly output. The gin cost twenty thousand—most small farms like theirs couldn’t afford that. But she had carefully saved two hundred dollars every month since they had arrived here, no matter what.

  She knew Arlo would be overjoyed, and when she pictured his reaction, she felt elated. Kathleen imagined car commercials from the eighties—a man gives his wife a Lincoln wrapped up in a big red ribbon for Christmas. Perhaps she’d be the first person to ever tie an oversize bow around a machine designed to mass-produce poop.

  She stood in the middle of the kitchen for a moment, and then called the office in town where the orders were processed to make sure that a bunch of invoices had been sent out on Friday. She spoke to Jerry, their faithful assistant, who was there seven mornings a week. When she hung up, she glanced around at the room and sighed. The windows were streaked and the dishes stacked up. The trash was overflowing.

  The entire house was a mess. She and Arlo could never manage to get the dirt out from under their fingernails, no matter how much they scrubbed. They left smudges on clothes and walls and book covers. There was dog hair everywhere. The bathroom probably hadn’t been cleaned in months. She blamed it on the business, but really she had never been one for housekeeping. In theory she’d love a tidy home like Ann Marie’s, but when she set that desire against all the other possibilities for what she could be doing if she weren’t inside with a mop, well …

  Kathleen put two pots of water on the stove to boil—a small one for her ginger tea and a large lobster pot for steaming the worms’ food. One of many facts she had learned about worms along the way was that just because they ate garbage didn’t mean they weren’t discerning. They loathed orange peels, and weren’t fond of citrus in general. They preferred their food soft and mushy, so when she had the time she over-steamed banana peels and vegetable scraps and hunks of carrot tops and apple cores before loading them into the worm bins.

  She pulled a ginger root from the cupboard and set to peeling it in front of the window. Outside, the dogs were lying side by side in the grass. She chopped the ginger into cubes and dumped them into the pot, leaving them there to simmer. Then she returned to her spot at the table, soaking in the quiet.

  She opened the newspaper, which Arlo had set out for her. She flipped past the front-page news and the Arts section, landing finally on the Sunday circular. She didn’t clip coupons, but the women in her family had always been so obsessed with them that she could never shake the habit of looking them over, just in case there was something amazing to be found, though of course there never was. One ad offered free floss with the purchase of five tubes of toothpaste. As if floss had ever broken the bank for anyone. Human beings were strange about free stuff. Her mother was the queen of it—I got four bottles of ketchup for the price of one, Alice had bragged over the phone a few weeks earlier. Who needed four bottles of ketchup?

  Kathleen made a point of speaking to Alice once a week, even though when she did this she often felt as though she had been roughly awakened from an exquisite dream. From this distance, it was easy enough to pretend her mother and the rest of the family didn’t exist. Well, all of them except for her children, who she missed every minute.

  Kathleen worried about her son, Chris, about what kind of person he really was. He didn’t seem to have much ambition or enthusiasm: he drank a lot of beer and got into fights with his girlfriend, after which she ended up in tears and he ended up out at a bar with friends. In short, he was terrifyingly like his father.

  She had to admit, at least to herself, that she felt jealous watching Pat and Ann Marie bask in all of Little Daniel’s professional success. That kid seemed to get a promotion every year, while Chris could barely find work. Maybe if he had had a real father, it would be different. She wished she had seen it sooner, done more for her son. But Kathleen’s attention had always been drawn more naturally toward Maggie.

  Her daughter had turned out so well, despite Kathleen and Paul’s best efforts at completely fucking up her life.

  Kathleen had taught her to be her own person. When Maggie was a kid, wanting desperately to fit in, Kathleen repeated a single phrase to her, over and over: “Don’t be a sheep.” She wished someone had said it to her when she was young. She couldn’t stand the thought of her remarkable daughter living out some ho-hum life like everyone else. And Maggie had taken this advice. She had made it as a writer in New York City, the sort of big, bold, independent existence Kathleen had realized too late that she herself wanted.

  By the time she figured out that she was no Kelleher, not really, that she didn’t want to spend her entire life watching college football at Patrick and Ann Marie’s every Saturday while the kids played outside and the women made pasta salad and talked about laundry detergent—by then, it was too late. She was married with two children. Discovering that you craved independence when you were a young mother was about as convenient and feasible as shooting a man in cold blood and then deciding you didn’t feel like being a murderer after all. So she drank far too much and fought with her husband, and fought with Alice, and was generally an absolute mess. Once, she had stumbled drunk into Chris’s first-grade classroom for a parent-teacher conference, scaring his teacher half to death. Most days, she had started drinking at lunchtime. She carried on like this until the spring she took her kids to Maine and really hit rock bottom. She knew now that sometimes a person needed to sink that low to be able to get up again, and she didn’t regret it. She had changed after all that, and somehow become a woman she actually liked.

  She got through the rest of her children’s years at home by telling herself that once they were off at college she’d be free, and that had proven more or less true. In the meantime, she had focused on staying sober; she planted an organic garden in the backyard. She learned that yoga and long walks could help her relieve stress better than chardonnay, and that there was real value to knowing about herbs and vegetables and ways to heal oneself that didn’t come in tiny plastic vials. Her father lent her the money to go to night school and get her master’s degr
ee, after which she worked as a guidance counselor in a private high school full of self-loathing overprivileged girls with eating disorders. She went on lots of dates, which Ann Marie and Alice thought made her the whore of Babylon. A mother shouldn’t be sexual, God forbid. She should have her vagina sealed over with plaster and declare herself closed for business, no matter if she was thirty-nine years old and only beginning to realize who she was.

  No one had told Kathleen about the dark parts of motherhood. You gave birth and people brought over the sweetest little shoes and pale pink swaddling blankets. But then you were alone, your body trying to heal itself while your mind went numb. There was a mix of joy and the purest love, coupled with real boredom and occasional rage. It got easier as the kids got older, but it never got easy.

  “After I had you, I understood for the first time why people shake their babies to death,” she had told Maggie on one of her long trips to New York.

  “Thanks a lot,” Maggie had said.

  “Oh no, that’s not what I meant,” Kathleen said. “It wasn’t you—you were the best baby I ever saw. It’s motherhood in general that makes a woman nuts. All those hormones rushing around inside you. You can’t sleep. You can’t reason with this little beast. Before I had kids, I thought those people who shook babies were monsters, with some sort of inorganic urge. Then I realized that the violent urge is totally natural. It’s the stopping yourself part that’s inorganic, that takes real work.”

  She wanted her daughter to know this, to have all the information up front. If she herself could have had that, so much of life might have been easier.

  Kathleen’s mother had never understood the value of sharing one’s pain. Not for her own good, or for anyone else’s. If Alice hadn’t covered up her drinking, but had talked about it instead—the way it consumed her, the fact that it had caused her to drive them straight into a tree when they were kids—perhaps Kathleen never would have gotten into the same mess years later.

  Kathleen and Maggie had a completely open relationship; she had made sure of that. They were best friends. It had just about killed her when Maggie went off to college in Ohio, and she was an adult then, a mother. And it was still torturous now, each time she went to New York for a visit and then had to say good-bye. Kathleen told her daughter everything and Maggie in turn could confide in her. Kathleen took great pride in this, though she knew Alice saw it as a failing.

  Her phone vibrated on the counter. A text from Arlo: A success! Heading home!

  He was always revved up after one of his presentations. He liked the school-aged kids the best, since there was no other segment of the population who appreciated conversation about feces and slimy worms quite so much. They called him Mister Worm Poop. On the occasions when Kathleen went with him, he’d introduce her to the crowd as Ms. Worm Poop. Arlo usually brought a couple thousand worms along each time he spoke to a crowd, which sounded like a lot, but amounted to only two pounds’ worth. The children screeched with delight as, one by one, they got to dig their hands into the bins full of slithering creatures.

  Kathleen was terribly proud of him. How many people had a vision and actually saw it through? The business was the perfect reflection of their relationship. Arlo was a dreamer, an optimist, a big-picture guy. And Kathleen was a realist—she told it like it was. Together, they just worked.

  She smiled now, and thought briefly of changing out of her drawstring pajama pants and Trinity T-shirt into something sort of sexy to surprise him, but what was the point? He had seen her naked a thousand times and she had seen him. She was pushing sixty, and he had passed it four years ago. The jig was up. That was what she appreciated about her sex life with Arlo—the refreshing feeling of not giving a damn. Not out of apathy but out of comfort. He was the easiest man she’d ever been with, sexually speaking. She knew it had lots to do with his warmth and kindness, but another part of it was a function of age. You stopped caring so much about every last lump and bump at some point, you just flat-out refused to suck in your gut while you were trying to have an orgasm. At least she did.

  She had spent years worrying about what men thought of the way she looked. These days the only person whose opinion on the matter really touched her was her mother. Alice had a pathological need to discuss everyone’s weight.

  Kathleen had last seen her at Christmas, five months earlier.

  “You’re looking good, you’ve lost a few,” Alice had said then.

  Kathleen hated the fact that she felt pleased by this. “We’ve been taking a lot of hikes in the mountains. Our place backs right onto the foothills. Remember those pictures I sent you?”

  It irked her that her mother had never visited. The only ones who had were Maggie and Clare.

  “That’s good,” Alice had replied. “Make sure to keep it up now. Winter always makes everyone want to stay inside and get fat.”

  “I live in California,” Kathleen said.

  “So? They don’t have winter there?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Anyway, keep hiking.”

  It was a special kind of curse, having a beautiful mother, when you yourself were just average. Alice had gotten a reputation in the neighborhood when Kathleen and Pat and Clare were kids for being rather odd because she ran around the block several times every morning in a tennis dress and trench coat. Twenty years later, this would be called jogging. Alice was still careful about her figure, and she never let Kathleen forget those thirty pounds she’d gained after her own two kids. She had gotten more active when she met Arlo, but her love of sweets and cheeses kept her plump.

  “You have such a pretty face,” Alice would say. Or, before Arlo came along, “I can say this because I’m your mother. You might find it easier to meet a nice fella without that enormous gut.”

  Kathleen had felt tremendous amounts of guilt for leaving Massachusetts, but most of the time she was glad to be free. Here, no one based their knowledge of her on what she had done thirty years ago. No one made her feel guilty for missing a family party, or tried to tell her that by declaring herself an alcoholic she was only looking for attention. People in the organic gardening world and at AA treated her with such respect and even admiration that she almost felt like an imposter.

  Kathleen didn’t like the person she became when she was around the Kellehers. She reverted to that weaker version of herself, the bitter woman she had been in the past. She grew short-tempered and easily angry; she lashed out at the slightest provocation. There were things she was deeply ashamed of and they would not let her forget.

  Arlo believed that life was short and you should interact only with people you enjoyed. He also believed that loyalty was earned—sharing a bloodline didn’t mean you had to be close. He saw his father and brother every few years, when one of them happened to pass through the town where another one lived. When Kathleen asked him, he said he felt no remorse about seeing them so rarely. “We have nothing in common,” he said. His brother was an accountant with three kids who had moved to Des Moines when he met his wife, a former Iowa beauty queen.

  “What on earth would we talk about?” Arlo asked, as if most people interacted with their families for the riveting conversation.

  The Kellehers considered it sacrilege that Kathleen went back East only twice a year. Whereas Arlo, when she told him she was planning another trip to Massachusetts, just said, “Why are you such a glutton for punishment?”

  Needless to say, he had not been raised Catholic.

  “You’re lucky there’s no such thing as Presbyterian guilt,” she had told him once when they were discussing it.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Never mind.”

  “It would be a different story if you didn’t let them get under your skin like you do, but they seem to make you so stressed,” he’d said. “Around your family, you never act like yourself.”

  “I know,” she replied, though sometimes she feared that the opposite was true, that her real self was that dark, a
ngry one she had shoved in a box years ago, the one that emerged only when she was home.

  When Ann Marie called a few days earlier, she practically bit Kathleen’s head off about the fact that Maggie and Gabe were going to Maine for just two weeks this year. Ann Marie had apparently decided that Alice couldn’t be alone up there for the remainder of June, despite the fact that Alice was alone all fall, winter, and spring, and managed just fine.

  Kathleen tried to take deep breaths and to channel Arlo’s calmness. Her sister-in-law was only a person, after all. Why shouldn’t they be able to talk rationally? But when it came to Ann Marie, Kathleen could never help it. Her temper flared. Did Ann Marie actually think she could drop her business, her dogs, and Arlo, because she said so?

  When Ann Marie realized that Kathleen refused to entertain this ludicrous concern, she told her to forget it. Translation: it wasn’t a big deal in the first place; Ann Marie had just felt like making a fuss. This was typical of her sister-in-law, who might as well have had the word MARTYR stamped across her forehead.

  Ann Marie called Alice Mom. Kathleen still found this jarring, more than thirty years after the first time she heard it. Who, if given the choice, would want to claim Alice for a mother?

  Back in Massachusetts, Kathleen had occasionally pretended in her head that her AA sponsor, Eleanor, was her mother. When they sat in the coffee shop below Eleanor’s apartment in Harvard Square, Kathleen would drink tea and talk about her day—another fight with Paul over money for the kids, another meeting with Chris’s principal that had ended in tears.

  Eleanor had always told Kathleen that a sober life didn’t mean a perfect life. You could do everything right, and still, things might not turn out the way you’d imagined. She herself had been married three times. The first two were booze-soaked, dramatic, passionate, stupid. Just like Kathleen’s marriage to Paul had been. Just like she feared Maggie and Gabe’s relationship might be, if Maggie didn’t end it soon. Eleanor’s third marriage was a sober one. Even so, it ended in divorce. Then she met a wonderful man, and two years later she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. You never knew where a day or a year would take you. Kathleen hoped Maggie understood that.