Maggie had been baptized as an infant, and she had made her First Communion. There were presents, mostly of a religious nature, and a few checks and twenty-dollar bills as well. There was a chocolate cake with rich buttercream frosting and pink sugar flowers in the shape of a cross. It was one of those nights when all the adults—her parents, Aunt Clare (not yet married then), Uncle Patrick and Aunt Ann Marie, and all the neighbors—got drunk and sang Irish songs, almost forgetting that the children existed, so that she and her cousin Patty got to stay up until midnight eating cake and honeyed ham with their fingers, playing Barbies on the sunporch.
As a kid, Maggie had been forced to go to church most Sundays, but after the divorce, after AA and an all-out war on tradition on her mother’s part, they never went anymore, except maybe on Christmas and Easter with her grandparents. The Catholic Church, like the family itself, was a strange blend of resentments and confusion and contradictions and love and comfort to her, even now. She was an atheist, and yet the one or two times a year she went to Mass, a familiar song would begin to play and she would find herself singing, caught up in its beauty: Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, Have mercy on us, grant us peace.
The previous Christmas, her cousin Patty’s kids had brought the gifts up to the altar, the crystal goblet of wine shaking in poor Foster’s hands. Maggie had a vague memory of being in that exact position at her great-grandmother’s funeral, the feeling of all eyes on you, and what sort of terrible fate might befall you if you spilled Jesus’ blood on your good white shoes.
When the priest blessed the bread and wine, half the congregants genuflected, including Kathleen and Maggie and the other Kellehers. The rest of them stood, and Alice whispered in a superior tone, “Those people don’t go to church.”
The family knew her to be lapsed, but that night Maggie had felt moved to take Communion, and so she followed her cousins to the altar, remembering precisely how to cup her hands, removing the host from the palm of the right with the fingers of the left, instinctively performing the sign of the cross before she headed back to her seat, and then feeling a bit silly about it. She could only imagine what Ann Marie must be thinking.
Later, she remembered why she had stopped taking Communion in the first place—when she was twelve, she had asked her mother why she didn’t rise for Communion like everyone else, and Kathleen had explained that divorcées were forbidden from doing so. After that, Maggie had stayed seated next to her mother in the pew on holidays, in a defiant show of solidarity.
It was pouring when she woke up around seven the next morning. Rain came through the window screens and puddled under the radiators. Somewhere outside, something was burning—tires, maybe. The smell made her stomach turn.
“Great,” Maggie said out loud.
She looked instinctively at her cell phone. He still hadn’t called. But there was a missed call from the house in Maine. Her grandmother hadn’t left a message, never did. When Alice and Daniel had gotten their first answering machine, sometime in the eighties, Daniel recorded the outgoing message, saying, “You’ve reached the Kellehers. Please leave your name, address, and phone number at the tone.”
Everyone made fun of him, and he changed it to a simpler greeting, which was even funnier, because after he said, in his most professional voice, “You’ve reached Daniel and Alice; please leave a message,” there was the fainter sound of him saying nervously, “Was that good? Okay,” before the beep sounded. Alice had never changed the message, and it was sad and somewhat sweet to hear his voice whenever Maggie called her grandmother all these years after his death.
She closed the windows. Outside, people in suits rushed toward the High Street subway stop, a sea of black umbrellas. It was a Monday, and all of New York was heading into work, everyone but her.
Maggie went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She felt dried out, husklike, from all the crying. And then, like a shove from behind, she saw it: the burner she had lit the night before for her macaroni, still on. The pot of water she had set there was now empty and burning all along the bottom. Black metal flakes dusted the stovetop. That smell, the tires.
Childishly, she let herself imagine him receiving the news: “She died in a fire a few hours after leaving your place, Gabe. She was carrying your baby.” He’d crumble to the ground, screaming, “No, no!” He’d never love again.
She took a pot holder from a hook on the wall and put the pan in the sink to cool off. She pushed the just-closed windows open and let the rain come in.
Smoke detector needs batteries, she thought. Brain needs transplant.
She retrieved The New York Times from its spot on her doormat and slipped it out of its blue plastic wrapping. Maggie sat on the couch and glanced at the front page: the CIA had sent an innocent man to Morocco to be tortured; a thirteen-year-old girl in Brownsville had been killed the night before, the victim of a stray gang member’s bullet, while she was eating cake on the front stoop, celebrating her mother’s college graduation.
What right did Maggie have to feel like shit about her own life when people were being extradited by the government for no good reason, and a child innocently eating cake in a party dress could be killed only a few miles from here? But still, she felt sorry for herself. She had just (narrowly? No, not really) escaped death. She missed Gabe. Right now she should be waking up in his bed, going to the market on East Eighth Street for snacks they could take along on the ride. She should be walking through the rain in her vacation bubble, impervious to weather and gang violence and bad hair, umbrella be damned.
She knew it was wrong to think one’s own problems were the most dire in the world, but that didn’t stop her from feeling like it anyway. She was pregnant and alone. She wasn’t sure she could do this.
Her phone rang. She reached for it, but it was just her friend Allegra. Maggie let it ring through.
The last time she and Gabe had had a big fight, Allegra had told her to leave him.
“Come on,” she had said. “You can’t tell me that deep down this really feels right, can you? I went through the same shit with Mike. And believe me, now with Jeff, it’s like—when it’s right, it’s right.”
Maggie hated when people said that, as if ultimate rightness between two human beings were as easy to recognize as a plastic thermometer popping up from out of a turkey’s bottom: perfect temperature achieved, you have now completed your mission, go forth and live in bliss. She was slightly suspicious that such certainty happened only to fairly simple people, nonthinkers.
Allegra was the last person she wanted to speak to right now.
Her stomach felt as though it were expanding outward, moving up toward her chest. She went into the bathroom and threw up.
Between the hours of eight and ten, Maggie took a shower, paid her cell phone and cable bills online, and scrubbed her already clean kitchen cabinets, all in the interest of keeping her hands in constant motion so she wouldn’t call Gabe. There was only one thing she could say to get his attention now, before he had had a chance to cool off, and she needed to be sure of him before she broke the news, if they stood any chance at all.
She checked her e-mail. He should be on the way to his morning photo shoot by now. In fact, he probably hadn’t even gone. There was nothing from him, only a short note from her brother (Hey, isn’t Mother’s Day coming up? Are we doing something, or … Mother’s Day had been two weeks earlier. She had sent nice flowers with both their names on the card, and now she wrote Chris back to tell him so.) There was a message from her boss, Mindy, with the subject line ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS WEEK.
Maggie signed out. She wished she hadn’t cleaned her apartment so thoroughly in advance of the trip to Maine, so that she might have some dishes to wash, or a bathroom floor that needed scouring. She kept her place spotless. Her shrink had once asked whether she thought this was a reaction to her mother’s choices, and Maggie laughed, because what behavior on earth wasn’t a reaction to some mother’s choice?
Even after her pare
nts’ divorce, after her mother got sober, Kathleen still could never manage to vacuum the carpets or take out the trash like all other mothers seemed to be able to do. Dishes lay grimy in the sink and on the countertop for days. A thick layer of dust and dog hair covered the bookshelves and tables and windowsills. Piles of magazines and cardboard boxes that Kathleen intended to recycle someday were stacked in the back hall. She was forever writing down phone numbers on scraps of paper and then losing them hours later. She kept doing this, even after Maggie bought her one of those whiteboards you could attach to the refrigerator door with magnets.
The farmhouse in California was even messier than the home Maggie had grown up in, with fruit flies buzzing all around the kitchen, landing in your tea or your breakfast cereal. Kathleen never changed the sheets in the guest room. Maggie might go there and not return for nine months, but the sheets would stay put. She didn’t enjoy visiting, especially with Gabe, who had never hidden his feelings about the place. And she wondered about Arlo—had he too lived in his own filth for years, so that the situation seemed completely normal?
Maggie dialed her shrink’s number at ten o’clock, the exact time she knew Dr. Rosen got to the office. She was always saying that Maggie should feel free to call and talk between sessions if she needed to, but Maggie had never thought of taking her up on the offer until now. It seemed like an option for suicide cases and manic-depressives, not women like her, suffering from a mix of romantic turmoil and white-girl blues.
Now she said, “Hi, it’s Maggie Doyle. Do you have a minute?”
She told Dr. Rosen about Gabe, their fight. She did not mention the baby.
“We were supposed to be heading to Maine today, and I’m feeling sort of adrift.”
“Have you thought of going by yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “I took the days off from work, and I really need to focus on writing my book. And maybe it would be good for me. But then I think about the spotty cell phone service and having no one around but my grandmother.”
The cottage was an isolated place, which could be cozy or smothering, depending. She had experienced it both ways over the years. She wished her mother could come along. It struck her then, as it often did, that Kathleen was no longer in Boston. She had moved across the country, and though Maggie still saw her almost as often as she had when they were both on the East Coast, there was something sad and lonely about this. She couldn’t just run home to her mom, a three-hour train ride away, even if she wanted to.
“It might feel really good to go alone,” Rosen went on. “Empowering! Time to work on your book, a change of scenery.”
“We were going to take Gabe’s car, and I don’t know how to drive, so—”
“Take a bus, gosh,” Rosen said. “At least think about it. Time off from Gabe seems advisable.”
Maggie’s heart sank. She tried to think of some way of mentioning the other part, without actually saying the words.
“You can always call me again if you need to,” Dr. Rosen said, apparently her way of ending the call. The woman who had taught Maggie about boundaries had a hyperawareness of them herself: she knew all about Maggie, while Maggie couldn’t ask her a simple personal question. “Where are you going on vacation?” was met with an uncomfortable smile and a reassuring, “Don’t worry, we’ll pick right up again the week after next,” as if Maggie had intended to trail her to the Berkshires and have a breakdown, when she had only been making conversation.
Maggie resented her for a split second, then resented herself for being completely incapable of having a fully functional and honest relationship with anyone, including a paid mental health professional.
“Thanks for everything,” she said politely.
They hung up. She glanced over at her suitcase, still packed. Maybe she should go alone. It might be good for her. If only Alice weren’t such a wild card, her behavior fluctuating from amiable to nightmarish in a flash.
Maggie had an embarrassing desire for Alice’s affection, which made her act strangely around her. She actually drank more in Alice’s presence in an attempt to win her grandmother’s approval. Dr. Rosen had had a field day with that one. Still, her real allegiance was always to Kathleen, and when she thought of what Alice had put her mother through, she almost wanted to break all ties with her grandmother.
It wasn’t just Kathleen—they had all been the recipients of Alice’s wrath at one time or another. She was strange: effervescent and charming, her presence taking up so much space. Yet she sometimes slipped into venomous moods without warning. Alice could say the cruelest thing, a comment you would carry with you for the rest of your life, and then a minute later, she’d be smiling, wondering why on earth you had to be so sensitive. A week before Maggie’s prom, she had been over at her grandparents’ house for dinner, and Alice and Daniel had her laughing all night, as they danced across the living room, teaching her the Charleston and the two-step. She had loved them deeply in that moment, vowed to visit more often. But then, on prom night, in front of her date and his parents, Alice had said, “Oh, Maggie, you couldn’t have laid off the ice cream for this? Darling, you are positively fat!”
Maggie knew her grandmother’s aversion to her branch of the family had to do with jealousy over how much her grandfather had loved them, especially Kathleen. Which was strange, really. Wouldn’t you want your husband to be devoted to his children and grandchildren? But that wasn’t the way Alice worked.
Right after her grandfather died, Maggie had made a real effort to call Alice two or three times a week. (She hid this fact from her mother, who had vowed never to speak to Alice again after what happened at the funeral.) But Alice didn’t want to talk. She always cut the call short, saying, “Shouldn’t you be working on your writing instead of jabbering on the phone with me?” or citing long-distance charges as if it were 1952. Maggie didn’t call much anymore. She occasionally thought to write a long letter, but she could never think of what to say. Alice didn’t call her very often either, and when she did, it was usually with some odd request. Would Maggie please go to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and light a candle for her cousin Ryan, who had an audition coming up, or for Fiona, who was serving the Lord through her Peace Corps work so far away? Maggie would always say yes, intending to follow through, but then she would forget, or reason her way out of it—the cathedral was all the way uptown, and did the God she didn’t believe in really care that much more about a five-dollar candle, lit among tourists drinking Starbucks coffee in the pews, than he did about a solemn prayer delivered in the diminutive chapel on Cranberry Street, right by her apartment?
Maggie always thought that family gatherings would be fun, great, loving times, but usually they were either boring or tense. The truly enjoyable get-togethers had gotten fewer and farther between since her grandfather died, but the memory of them kept the Kellehers coming back together, trying to re-create the magic. She knew all this, and yet she still craved it.
She especially missed childhood summers when the whole family would go up to Maine together. Alice was the hostess in those days, organizing group dinners and long car rides to new beaches, or instructing her husband to take all the grandkids out digging for clams in Kittery at low tide. They piled into his old Buick. At the shore, they stood in shallow water for hours, thrusting their rakes and their bare feet down deep into the oozing sand, screaming with delight and fear when they hit a clamshell. They filled buckets with the creatures, and by the time the sun set, Daniel would say, “Okay, let’s bring these fellas home so Grandma can cook them up.” Then Maggie and Fiona and Patty would yell out “No!” and the boys would yell “Yes!” while their grandfather stood there laughing. They always returned to the cottage without a single clam.
Every year since her uncle Patrick had created the cottage schedule, Maggie had gone to Cape Neddick for a few days in June, usually with Allegra or a couple of friends from high school, but it wasn’t the same. Her grandmother rarely invited them over or seemed
to want to spend time together. She acted like she was entirely too busy, though doing what, Maggie could never be sure. Besides the awkward hello and good-bye, and one or two rushed dinners, she hardly ever spoke to Alice on those trips. Alice seemed content to be shut up alone in the house next door.
But when she brought Gabe to Maine the previous summer, her grandmother suddenly brightened. The fun they had reminded Maggie of the old days. Alice played the piano in the cottage after dinner one night, and Gabe sang along, belting out show tunes, unbearably off-key. Maggie was shocked and touched that he knew the words. He asked Alice about her favorite books, her funniest memories of Maggie as a kid.
“You’re amazing,” he told her over and over, to Maggie’s slight agitation, for she had told Gabe of Alice’s unkindness toward her mother, and she almost wished his affections would be harder for Alice to win.
In a night, he somehow pulled from Alice what Maggie was always aiming for—real conversation, tales of the past that would die with her unless she told them now. Alice was in the middle of some story about babysitting for Maggie and Chris when they were kids, and how they had hidden from her at the zoo as a prank, throwing Chris’s baseball cap into the monkey cage. Gabe laughed, and Maggie did, too, though she was positive the story was made up.
She asked then, “So, Grandma, what was your childhood like? Tell us about that.”
Alice’s eyes changed quickly. “I was talking about something else,” she said. “You interrupted me. Anyway, I should be getting on with my evening. I’ll see you kids tomorrow.”
That night in bed, Maggie said, “What did I tell you? The woman hates my guts.”
“You know, she really does seem to,” Gabe said with a smile. Then he wrapped her up in his arms and said, “But I love your guts. I think you have the sexiest guts on the planet.”
“Honestly, though,” Maggie said. “I wish she liked me half as much as she likes you.”
“You two are family, it’s different,” he said. “I don’t understand why you need her approval so badly. You’re nothing alike.”
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