She and Arlo had known each other for all of six months when they moved. Looking back on it now, Kathleen marveled at her willingness to take such a risk, but she might have jumped at any excuse to leave. Arlo had never been married. He had dated a woman named Flora for seven years, and she still called from time to time, to catch up and wish him well. They were that kind of people. Kathleen really wasn’t, but she tried to let it wash over her. She had even gone to dinner with Flora and Arlo once, to a quiet candlelit place up the mountain, and listened almost contentedly as Flora told them about her pottery studio in Portland, her life spent dating Dead Heads (“Even now, no one else does it for me”), her years with Arlo (“We thought we were soul mates because our names were almost anagrams”). It was worth it when Kathleen heard Arlo describe their life. It sounded peaceful, fulfilled. And it was.
She knew that for her it was at least partially about being away from the Kellehers. For the first time in her life, her chaotic family was at a distance. She didn’t have to be a part of all that anymore. Then again, she didn’t get to be a part of all that anymore. She’d hear crazy stories about gossip and arguments and misunderstandings—from her kids, from Clare, and from Alice, now that the hatchet was more or less buried between them—and once in a while she would find with some surprise that part of her missed it, in spite of everything.
And there was guilt, the trademark emotion of the faith they were born into. When Kathleen promised her dad that she would take care of Alice, she had forgotten how impossible that would be. She knew that women in her position weren’t supposed to roam so far. You were supposed to stick by your children and your aging parents, sacrificing your middle decades for their comfort, no matter what they had put you through. No matter what.
Maggie
Maggie and Rhiannon had arranged to drive to Maine on Tuesday morning. By the time she woke up, Gabe still hadn’t called. Her sharp disappointment made her realize how much she had been hoping, believing, he might come around. She felt weighted down with gloom, but somehow managed to drag herself toward the shower so that she’d be on time. Politeness above all else, she thought. Where the hell had she learned to be like that? By watching her mother, she realized, and then doing the exact opposite of what she saw. Or possibly it came from her aunt Ann Marie.
Maggie made her way next door with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, just half of what she had originally packed, since she’d be staying only a few days now.
She knocked, and Rhiannon appeared in a cotton sheath that ended at the midpoint of her thigh. (“Your knees should have a party and invite your skirt down,” Maggie’s grandfather had said whenever she wore a dress he deemed too short.)
Maggie had never had a knack for clothing. Women in New York amazed her with their perfectly chiseled bodies; their ability to wear stiletto heels in rain, sleet, or snow; and their innate resolve around bread baskets. Given the choice, she’d prefer that everyone walk around in a potato sack to level the playing field a bit.
Her size-eight jeans had felt snug when she put them on this morning. Now they felt as tight as snake skin, and she had to remind herself that she was pregnant, after all (while sparing herself the knowledge that the size eights were tight long before she was pregnant).
They were on the road at nine fifteen, and had already stopped for rations by nine thirty. Rhiannon pumped the gas while Maggie went inside to pay and get breakfast.
“Something very sugary with nine hundred grams of fat,” Rhiannon requested, surprising her.
“I like the way you think.”
Maggie walked the aisles as an instrumental version of Journey’s “Open Arms” played over the loudspeaker. Gabe had drunkenly belted out the song at the karaoke birthday party of one of his former co-workers a few weeks earlier.
She couldn’t quite say where they were now. Queens, maybe.
Her phone was in her pocket and set to vibrate. She pulled a bag of powdered mini doughnuts from a hook on a wall of processed desserts.
The man behind the counter wore a cross the size of a brick around his neck. She thought of the tiny silver crucifix she herself had worn as a child, the type her grandmother and Aunt Ann Marie still wore to this day. That sort of understated cross, always tucked into a sweater or blouse, said, “I love Jesus Christ.” A cross like the one this man wore seemed to say, “I want you to think I love Jesus Christ.”
“Nice day for driving,” he said as he rang up her purchases. “Lucky you’re not stuck in here.”
She considered pointing to her head and saying, “Well, you’re lucky you’re not stuck in here.”
Instead, she just smiled. “Have a good one,” she said.
Back in the car, Maggie opened the bag of doughnuts and handed one to Rhiannon.
“Onward, driver,” she said.
She was grateful to Rhiannon for the special treatment. But she couldn’t help thinking she should be with Gabe right now, driving fast, laughing and singing along to the radio. She suddenly wondered what the hell she had been thinking. She sucked on her bottom lip to keep from crying, feeling like a stupid little girl.
“So,” Rhiannon said cheerfully. “On a scale of one to ten, how much do you feel like killing yourself today?”
Maggie grinned. “No comment.”
“I know how you feel,” Rhiannon said. “I got pregnant when I was still married to Liam. I found out two days after the first time he shoved me. Which was also the day I knew I’d leave him. Though I probably knew long before that. I’m not actually the settling-down type, as it turns out.”
Maggie hadn’t heard any of this before.
“He shoved you?” she said now.
“Yeah, he used to like to push me around a bit.”
She said it so casually. Were Gabe’s crimes really anything compared to this?
“What did you do?” Maggie asked.
“I had an abortion. I never told him about it.”
Maggie inhaled deeply. “Wow.”
“Yeah. I was thinking about your situation after you left last night. You’re brave. I’m glad you told me. I never told anyone. It seems like the logical people to tell would be a best friend, your mother, your husband. Well, clearly my husband was out. My best friend was someone I hadn’t talked to in a year. And my mother and I have never once discussed anything more consequential than tennis results.”
Maggie didn’t know how to reply. She knew her relationship with her own mother stretched way too far in the other direction. Once, when she was an adolescent, away at her father’s place for the weekend, Kathleen had not only read Maggie’s diary, but actually made notes in the margins, such as These negative feelings about your body are very common, but you must learn to see them as side effects of our messed-up culture and This jackass is simply not worth your crush. Reminds me of someone I slept with in college, who turned out to be gay.
Twenty years of sobriety and a career in the mental health field hadn’t stopped Kathleen from oversharing: Maggie was thirty-two and still working on creating what her therapist called “the generational boundaries.” A few times, Kathleen had come to New York unannounced and stayed in Maggie’s cramped apartment, sleeping in the bed with her, for two, three weeks at a stretch. It drove Maggie insane, but she never had the heart to tell Kathleen to leave, or to check into a hotel like normal parents would do. And when it came time for her to go, they would both cry.
“I always wished there was a bit more distance between my mother and me. She’s told me much more than I ever wanted to know about her personal life,” Maggie said, and instantly felt guilty for saying so. “Sometimes I’d give my left arm for the kind of mother who only talks tennis.”
“Why haven’t you told her about the baby yet?” Rhiannon asked.
“Her opinion can completely color my judgment, and I wanted to make up my own mind first. Does that make sense?”
Rhiannon nodded. “In a way, I envy the connection you have. Before I left home, I really tried to ge
t my mother to talk,” she said. “I tried to cut out the falseness between us and get her to fight with me about what she resented. Those dark things that happen in every family. But she wouldn’t, or she couldn’t.”
Maggie wondered about the dark things, what that came down to in Rhiannon’s life. She wanted to hear more, but Rhiannon said, in a different tone, suggesting she didn’t want to go further: “Do you know anyone like that, or is this a Scottish trait?”
“My grandmother is the same way,” Maggie said. “She never wants to talk to me about anything more meaningful than the fact that Bounty paper towels are on sale.”
They drove on for a while without talking, NPR on in the background. Maggie thought about Gabe. She wondered whether she would ever wake up again with her head on his bare chest. She tried to imagine how she might go to any of their favorite places without him—the movie theater in Brooklyn Heights, which had only 150 seats and served egg creams, or the old Italian bakeries in Carroll Gardens where a black and white cookie the size of your head cost a dollar. She pictured herself pushing a stroller up Court Street in the cold, surrounded by strangers.
She turned to Rhiannon, and without thinking she asked, “Did you ever consider raising that baby alone?”
“Not for a second,” Rhiannon said. “That’s why I think you’re so amazing.”
“Or possibly insane,” Maggie said.
“Will you go back to Gabe if he asks?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said, though she was fairly sure she did. “I have a lot invested in him.”
“For what it’s worth, I know it’s a tough situation, but I think you can do much better. Marriage would only make it worse, believe me. You think it will sort of fill in the lines, cover over the splotchy bits. But in fact it does the opposite.”
“I know,” Maggie said, though sometimes she had believed that if they got married, the rest would work itself out. All around New York City—on the subway, in the cafeteria at work—were wedding bands on the fingers of men her age, the men who hadn’t been ready to commit back when she met Gabe, and had somehow gotten scooped up in the meantime, every last one of them a shiny reminder of what she didn’t have.
She knew it was strange, how badly she wanted to be married, despite what she had seen. The urge seemed hardwired, so that each time she heard of something bad happening to an adult—a co-worker of her dad’s got laid off, a friend of her mother’s had emphysema—the first question out of her mouth was always, “Is he married?” As if that guaranteed safety, someone who would tenderly care for you forever, instead of resenting you for losing your job or smoking all those years when she had begged you to quit.
It wasn’t a terribly liberated thought, but sometimes Maggie envied her grandmother and other women from her generation, for whom love and marriage and children seemed automatic, a given.
“Despite what he’s put me through, I really do love him,” she said now.
“Hmm.” Rhiannon nodded her head. “Love’s a bitch.”
“I have this theory about how the things we love destroy us,” Maggie said.
“Oh, I love theories like that. Go on,” Rhiannon said.
As far as she had seen, Maggie explained, what made people and pleased them, and threatened to ultimately ruin them, was love. Not romantic love necessarily, but the love of something, the thing that defined your life. Her mother was in love with booze. While other people might have a glass or two of wine with dinner because they liked it well enough, Kathleen loved the stuff, and so it destroyed her. Her uncle Patrick and aunt Ann Marie loved status, money, appearance—that would wreck them one day, if it hadn’t already.
Maggie herself did not love liquor, though she feared its power over her anyway, knowing how alcoholism ran through her veins like blood. She didn’t love money, either. If she had enough for a roof over her head and school loan payments, if she could find a way to afford to raise a child, that would be plenty.
Maggie’s ruinous love had always been men. She fell for someone, and desperation overtook her. She wanted him all to herself, to build a cocoon around the two of them, to keep him safe, but more so, to keep him near. She lost interest in her work and friends, though she tried to pretend otherwise. In every other way, she was controlled, sensible. But men brought out some crazy part of her. Gabe wasn’t the first. Before him there had been Martin, the fifty-two-year-old gallery owner who she had met during an informational interview in Manhattan her senior year of college. She had sent along some fiction samples with her résumé, and the first thing Martin said to her was what she most wanted to hear: “You’re no gallerist. You’re a writer.”
He was handsome, charming, knew all the most interesting people in the city. They had dinner that night in the West Village, at a dimly lit café that she was never able to find again. When they were leaving, his long fingers brushed her neck as he helped her into her coat. They went back to his apartment—surprisingly cramped for a man his age—and made love in his bed. He seemed to love her youth, running his hands over her thighs, her breasts, saying again and again that she had the smoothest skin he had ever touched. She thought his age—the slight wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled, the strength and assurance of his hands—suited her old soul much better than those shiny-faced college boys back at Kenyon.
After graduation, she moved into his place. He helped her get a job at a small literary journal run by a friend of his. The affair lasted a year. When it ended she felt empty and lonesome; she immediately met Chad Patterson, a kid from Wisconsin, two years her junior, who had come to New York to be an actor. He had been crashing on friends’ futons, and she offered to put him up in her new studio, mostly because she hated sleeping alone. The arrangement had all the makings of a perfect disaster, and it fell apart quickly, though three months after their official breakup, he was still staying on the couch. She could bear to throw him out only after she returned home late one night to find him wrapped up in the long legs of some blonde he’d met at a callback for Baby with the Bathwater.
She had attempted to work on it in therapy, read every book on co-dependence, but nothing ever seemed to change her feelings about men. Her behavior was who she was, who she had been. How could anyone ever alter that? Sometimes her shrink made her feel that self-improvement was untenable: her family, and by association she herself, were drunks, sour grudge-holders, emotional cripples who needed so desperately to change. Other times she thought self-improvement made sense only for the immortal. Improving yourself for what exactly?
They had lunch at a rest stop in Massachusetts. Maggie was almost positive she had been there with her family dozens of times, though all Massachusetts rest stops looked identical when you didn’t drive, so who knew? These places always had the same antiseptic smell, the same bored-looking employees, the same manicured parking lot and service station. They were ugly landmarks that seemed incongruous compared to New York City behind and Cape Neddick ahead.
They ate gigantic slices of pizza and watched the people streaming in and out. Maggie thought of the baby inside her, though it was hard to imagine as an actual person. She had visited a website that pregnant mothers were gaga about, on which, each week, you got to see what kind of fruit or vegetable your child most closely resembled: Your baby is a chickpea, she had read two weeks earlier, and then just a few days ago, Your baby is a walnut.
They finished eating, and Maggie promptly threw up for the fourth time in two days. She wondered why they called it morning sickness if it could hit you at any hour.
Back in the car, Rhiannon asked, “Will it just be you and your grandmother in the house in Maine?”
“Yes,” Maggie said. “Actually, each of us in a separate house, but on the same property.”
“That sounds cozy.”
Maggie grinned. “I know, right? We have a big Irish Catholic family, so I guess in theory we need a lot of room.”
“I like that you call yourselves Irish. Why do Americans always want so badly to
be from somewhere else?” Rhiannon asked.
Maybe she had a point. Maggie’s grandparents and Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat were particularly obsessed, but the whole Kelleher family was crazy about Ireland, including Maggie herself. The music, the history, the dancing, the sad stories from the past. Her mother had once been this way, too, but now she made fun of the rest of them for it.
They all wore claddagh rings instead of wedding bands. Ann Marie and Pat slept in a bed with a headboard that had the words HIMSELF and HERSELF carved in the soft wood above where they lay their respective heads, and a shamrock in between.
Her cousins Patty and Fiona had been forced to take step dancing lessons as kids. They competed at the Stonehill Irish Festival every summer. Patty wore her gillies around the cottage in Maine, laced halfway up her calves, an absurd bathing suit accompaniment that nonetheless made Maggie burn with jealousy.
Since she had grown up in the suburbs of Boston, Maggie’s friends from childhood were all Irish, too, so that it wasn’t until her first March in Ohio that she realized not everyone wore head-to-toe green and ate corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day.
Pat and Ann Marie and their kids made regular trips to Ireland—Patty always mailed Maggie Aero bars and other local candies, which had melted completely by the time they arrived in Massachusetts. On those visits, Uncle Pat had unearthed various distant cousins who lived in County Kerry. He gleefully showed them around Boston, letting them stay over in the guest room, sending them home with Red Sox jerseys and several pounds of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, which apparently they were crazy for.
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