Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  But Gabe! Last summer, he told jokes and thanked her again and again for inviting him, and sang old songs with her late into the night. He reminded her of different times, when her brothers and Daniel’s would come up to the cottage for long weekends, singing and drinking, everyone merry.

  And if she was really being honest, she liked him most of all because one night after dinner, while Maggie was in the bathroom and the two of them—Alice and Gabe—had each had about a bottle of cabernet, Gabe took Alice’s hand and said, “You’re beautiful, you know that? I mean, one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen. I want to photograph you.”

  He was flirting with her! No one had flirted with her in years. Her pulse sped up, and she felt a certain degree of regret when she heard the toilet flushing in the other room. She let him take her picture the next afternoon while Maggie was on the beach. He sent her the finished copy, and Alice cried to see how wrinkly she looked, how goddamn old. When he had snapped her in the bright sun, she had felt eighteen again.

  Life had been so dreary the past several months. She hoped Gabe might put a spring in her step.

  He was a charmer, but still Alice had her doubts about the relationship: generally speaking, Maggie had her mother’s bad taste in men. Kathleen had said once that Maggie was intent on settling down, but Gabe certainly didn’t seem like the marrying type. Kathleen had told Alice that he drank too much, though Kathleen thought everyone drank too much. She had also reported that he and Maggie fought all the time. “He reminds me a lot of Paul,” Kathleen had said, her ex-husband’s name a kind of shorthand for everything that was wrong with men.

  Maggie and Gabe would be here any day now, Kathleen said.

  “Well, when exactly will they turn up?” Alice had asked her daughter over the phone a few days earlier.

  “I think it depends on Gabe’s work schedule. Don’t sweat it, Mom,” Kathleen said, in that faux-calm tone that could make Alice’s blood pressure soar twenty points. “They’ll get there when they get there.”

  “I’d like some advance warning so I can get the cottage ready is all,” Alice said.

  “Then call Maggie’s cell and tell her that,” Kathleen said.

  “She’s your daughter,” Alice said.

  “Yeah, well, she’s your granddaughter.”

  “Oh Jesus, Kathleen, forget it,” Alice said.

  “It’s forgotten,” Kathleen replied tersely.

  And that was that. Typical.

  The previous winter, after one of her many therapeutic retreats, Kathleen had returned home to Massachusetts for Christmas to tell Alice that she had tried hypnosis and had recalled painful memories from her childhood: Alice making her stay inside the cottage while the other kids played on the beach, because she had been sneaking cookies and had gotten too fat for her bathing suit. Alice leaving her behind at a carnival when she was eight to teach her a lesson after she had thrown a tantrum, coming back to get her hours later, her face streaked with dirt and tears.

  “You were emotionally and verbally abusive to me,” Kathleen had said.

  Alice wanted to slap her, the way her own father would have if spoken to like that.

  “Shut the hell up,” she said finally.

  “See? You’re doing it now. Why can’t you ever apologize for what you did, so we can move forward?”

  “I have nothing to be sorry for,” Alice said. “You’re the one who should be sorry, Kathleen. You should be thanking me for all I’ve done, not tearing me apart for your own problems.”

  She had always been strict with her girls, but what was the alternative? Look at the sort of mothers they had become, in an effort to be soft, to be supportive, and, in Kathleen’s case, to turn her daughter into her best friend. It was pathetic.

  The problem with her children and grandchildren was simply that they wanted too terribly to be happy. They were always in search of it, trying to better themselves, improve upon their current situation so that they might feel no pain. They thought every problem on earth could be solved by turning inward.

  Alice knew where this came from. It was perhaps her greatest failing as a mother that all of these children—her own, and her children’s children, and probably the great-grandchildren, too—were godless. Patrick and Ann Marie were the only ones who even went to Mass. Little Daniel had been an altar boy, and his sisters had sung in the choir, but now none of them seemed to have any involvement at all. Clare said she was still a Catholic in her heart and so was Joe, but they couldn’t stand by and be part of the Church after what had happened in Boston these past few years. Alice thought this was just an excuse to sleep in on Sundays, nothing more. They certainly didn’t stop selling those Catholic artifacts of theirs, so how offended were they, really? The “priest scandal,” as Clare insisted on calling it, was merely a case of a few bad apples. Everyone knew that.

  “How can you believe, when the world is such a horrible place?” Kathleen had asked her once, and that was when she realized that she had somehow failed to teach them about the true meaning of faith.

  She felt that the Catholic Church had made a horrendous mistake with Vatican II in the sixties. They had tried to make religion palatable, doing away with Latin Mass and head coverings and no meat on Fridays. Her grandchildren had grown up calling priests by their first names, as if they were waiters—Father Jim and Father Bob, and so on. It turned her stomach. The Church had taken the fear and the awe out of the whole equation, so that now her children and grandchildren and millions of others like them felt not even a hint of guilt for going out for breakfast on Sunday mornings instead of to church.

  Kathleen called herself spiritual, one of those New Age words that Alice could never quite take seriously. Kathleen had picked it up, along with a whole host of other annoying and ridiculous beliefs, at Alcoholics Anonymous sometime in the late eighties, right after her divorce.

  Daniel had made it far too easy for Kathleen to end her marriage. He had advised her to leave Paul as soon as she told them he had cheated. Daniel gave her eight thousand dollars and told her she and the kids could come live with them. When Kathleen said no to that offer, he came up with the plan that she should live in the cottage rent-free for as long as she wanted. No matter that Alice had been planning to have contractors come in and fix the warped floors that spring. No matter that he hadn’t even consulted her, for surely she would have insisted that Kathleen get a job, get herself together. It couldn’t be good for her to be cooped up in the cottage with the children and her depressive thoughts for months on end.

  If Daniel had stayed out of it, Kathleen might have found a way to forgive Paul and move forward. Paul Doyle was an excellent son-in-law: he adored Alice. Maybe that’s what bothered Kathleen most about him. He made a decent father and a good provider, and he was a hell of a lot more fun than the AA guys Kathleen brought around later.

  The drinking was something else her daughter blamed her for, the most preposterous of all her allegations over the years. Kathleen had become an alcoholic, she said, because of what she had internalized from watching Alice drink.

  This made Alice laugh. From the time Kathleen was eleven years old until the day Daniel died thirty-three years later, Alice hadn’t had a single sip of alcohol, even in the moments when she wanted one so badly she could have burst, when she felt herself coming undone and thought perhaps it would be worth it to lose Daniel and the kids just for one measly sip of whiskey. In fact, it was quite possible that she had made it through her first decade of motherhood without killing them all thanks only to Canadian Club.

  After a church trip to County Kerry when the children were young, Daniel became obsessed with the idea of ancestry and getting back in touch with their roots. Neither his parents nor Alice’s had ever been attached to Ireland—her mother had once said that her own mother died trying to flee the place, so she didn’t see much purpose in ever going back. But sometime in the mid-fifties, couples they knew from St. Agnes and the children’s school began making noise about
returning to the homeland. And so the parish organized a trip, and they all flew to Shannon and helped build a Catholic orphanage and toured the lush countryside in a rented bus. They photographed ruins and streets that were overrun with sheep. They ate boiled dinners and sang old songs in damp, dark pubs.

  When they arrived back in Boston, Daniel bought a book of Irish names and meanings, and cracked it open over dinner.

  “We are Kellehers,” he said proudly. “And that means—hold on here—wait a minute, I know you’re all on the edge of your seats.”

  He flipped to the page, pretending to consult it with amazement until Alice said, “Oh Jesus, get on with it.”

  “Kelleher,” he read, “is the Anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Céileachair, ‘son of Céileachair,’ a personal name meaning ‘companion dear,’ i.e., ‘lover of company.’ Hey, does that sound like your dad or what?”

  “Do more!” Clare shouted, for she too was excited by ghosts of the past. “Do Mom’s maiden name,” she said. “Do Brennan.”

  Daniel tapped her on the head with the book. “One step ahead of you, little lady. I’ve got it right here. Brennan!” he said loudly, then, reading it over, “One of Ireland’s most common surnames, Brennan derives from one of three Irish personal names: Ó Braonáin, from braon, probably meaning ‘sorrow,’ and Mac Branáin and Ó Branáin, both from bran, meaning ‘raven.’ ”

  “So Mom is a sorrowful raven?” Clare asked. “A sad bird?”

  Daniel smiled. “Precisely,” he said. “Mom is my lovely sad bird. What do you think of that, sad bird?”

  Alice hated him in that moment. She looked at her three children sitting there, staring and demanding more—more food from the icebox, more time, more love—as if they owned her. She added an extra dash of whiskey to her drink and took a long sip.

  “It’s time for your baths,” she said, to a chorus of groans that made Daniel chuckle.

  “You head upstairs,” she told the kids. “I will be there in a minute.”

  She went out to the back porch, glass in hand. She drank down what remained, hoping to soothe her nerves. It wasn’t working tonight. Alice sat on the top step and put her fist in her mouth, biting down so hard that a few minutes later, when she bent to shampoo Clare’s hair in the bathroom, her daughter balked and said, “Mommy, your fingers are bleeding.”

  Alice wiped them on a pink bath towel hanging from the doorknob.

  “Be quiet and close your eyes,” she said harshly.

  She thought of how she had never really liked children, though her friends always said positively everyone fell in love with their own once they had them. She felt as though her body was full of something bigger than itself, pushing against every inch of her, trying to get out. She wanted to say that she was here by some strange accident, that in reality she should be in a Paris apartment right now, painting in solitude.

  She wanted to scream, but instead she inhaled deeply and said a quick prayer.

  She tried to lighten her voice: “That’s it, darling. You don’t want the soap to get in, now do you?”

  Maggie

  Maggie got out of bed and went to the cupboard. It was almost ten thirty at night. She’d probably be up until dawn now.

  She looked at her cell phone and checked her e-mail, but Gabe had made no contact. It had been eight hours since she left his door. Maggie wished he were here.

  She also wished that she had been born the sort of person who lost her appetite when in crisis. She pulled a box of macaroni and cheese from the top shelf and set a pot of water on the stove to boil.

  You’re eating for two, she thought, to make herself feel better, though this made her want to start crying all over again. She went and sat down on the couch, turned on the television. Grease was on. It seemed like Grease was always on. Did Grease have its own channel?

  Maggie realized that it might really be over. Preposterous how many times she had said that to herself, a sign that it should be over, probably. But the thought of that made her feel ill; each of them going on, living a full life without the other. Or staying together, but without this child. What if that was his final answer: Work on the relationship, but no baby? She couldn’t imagine what she’d do.

  In college, she had taken the bus to Toledo with a roommate who needed an abortion. Monica Randolph was only nineteen and she had gotten pregnant after an ill-advised drunken hookup with a friend.

  She told Maggie this in a whisper after they had turned out the lights one night. In the darkness, Maggie couldn’t make out the girl’s face, and she was reminded of confession—stepping into the booth, telling your deepest sins to a priest who was usually a stranger to you. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. The act of it had frightened her as a young girl.

  At her first penance at age seven, Maggie had grown so terrified that she blanked on her prepared list of sins (she stole some of Chris’s Halloween candy, she talked back to her mother). And so she defaulted to reciting the Ten Commandments, assuming she must have violated most of those: “I coveted my neighbor’s possessions,” she said slowly to the priest, who was no doubt bored out of his skull at hearing the deepest sins of fifty second-graders in one night. “I didn’t honor my mother and father. I committed adultery.”

  On the other side of the screen, Father Nick jumped up in his seat. “You what?”

  Now in her dorm room, which seemed a million miles from there, Maggie switched on the light and said, “Oh, Monica, I’m so sorry. What do you want to do?”

  Monica was lying under a floral bedspread in a She-Ra: Princess of Power T-shirt and a pair of cotton underpants. She looked about ten years old.

  “Well, I can’t keep it,” she said.

  “No,” Maggie agreed.

  “I made an appointment at a clinic in Toledo for Saturday,” Monica said. “I was wondering if you would come with me.”

  Maggie said she would.

  “And please don’t mention it to anyone,” Monica said.

  “Of course.”

  She didn’t think much about the thing itself, only that she and Monica weren’t really all that close. Monica was on the soccer team and had plenty of friends. But maybe, Maggie reasoned, she had asked her precisely because they weren’t so invested in each other.

  On the ride to Toledo, they ate fast food. They talked about the latest gossip from their dorm, and about their families back home. It was at this point that Monica said, “I hope you don’t think I’m going to Hell or something.”

  Maggie was confused. “For what?”

  Monica pointed awkwardly at her stomach, then gestured around to the rest of the bus. “You’re Catholic, right?”

  Non-Catholics Maggie had met at Kenyon seemed to think that all Catholics spent 90 percent of their time decrying abortion, when in fact no one in her family had ever so much as mentioned the word. She assumed her grandparents and Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat were staunchly pro-life. She wondered then what her mother thought of it—Kathleen was progressive for a Kelleher, but even she had retained some of her childhood beliefs, and it sometimes surprised Maggie to find out which ones lingered on.

  “I think you’re doing the best thing,” Maggie said.

  “Maybe I should wait and think it over some more,” Monica said. Then, “Well, no. It’s not going to be that bad, right?”

  “Right,” Maggie said. “I’ll be with you. Don’t worry.”

  “It’s not like we’re going to put a crib in our dorm room,” Monica said.

  “Only maybe as a place to store beer bottles,” Maggie said, trying to sound light.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Monica said. “You’re really good at taking care of people; I’ve noticed that about you.”

  “Thanks,” Maggie said.

  They lived together for another six months, but they never discussed Monica’s abortion except once, during a weeklong pro-choice demonstration, when people hung hundreds of coat hangers from the trees in the freshman quad, with personal stories attache
d.

  “I can’t bear to look at them,” Monica said. “I know what they’re trying to say, but it’s just too raw.”

  The following year she moved off campus. They never really talked again.

  A few minutes earlier, Maggie had feared that she’d be up all night. Now she sat on the couch while John Travolta sang “Grease Lighting” in the background, and felt as though she hadn’t slept in days. She got back into bed. Was this a pregnancy thing or a depression thing? Possibly both.

  Before she drifted off to sleep, she thought of how, if life had turned out differently, Monica would have a thirteen-year-old child today, instead of living with her boyfriend and four cocker spaniels in San Francisco, performing in a bluegrass band, as Maggie had read about her in the alumni magazine.

  She wondered if she had given the girl the right advice, but back then at Kenyon, an abortion had seemed like a reasonable step for dealing with an unfortunate situation.

  Now that she herself was in the same position, it seemed less obvious. She was older, that was part of it. She wasn’t some college kid who couldn’t afford a child, couldn’t somehow figure it out. But she also wasn’t ready, the way she thought a mother ought to be: married, stable, living in more than two rooms.

  You’re Catholic, right? Monica had asked all those years ago, and Maggie had shrugged the comment off. But maybe that was part of it too. She wasn’t religious in any formal way, but she still felt Catholicism coming through her pores so many years later. She still wanted terribly to be good, even if no one was watching. Out of habit, she prayed to Saint Anthony when she lost something, or said a Hail Mary whenever she heard an ambulance siren outside her apartment window. She didn’t go to church on Ash Wednesday anymore, but when she saw ashes on the foreheads of strangers in the street, she would realize with a start that Lent was coming and decide to give something up, just for the heck of it. No sugar, gossip, or snooping for forty days.