Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  The painful memory of her grandfather’s funeral returned to Maggie then. Her uncle Patrick had given the eulogy. Chris and Little Daniel said the Prayers of the Faithful from the altar, reading aloud sheepishly like schoolkids. Chris’s voice cracked as he said, “That we might console one another in our time of grief, just as Jesus needed consoling upon the death of Lazarus.”

  “Lord, hear our prayer,” the congregation replied robotically, and Maggie thought of how Chris had pronounced the word console like he meant a cabinet where you store electronics, as if Jesus were a fifty-inch TV requiring a place to sit and collect dust.

  They always turned to the men for strength in these moments, perhaps because they looked so invincible in their suits. The men pulled the cars around to the front of the church and dropped their wives and daughters off so they didn’t have to walk from the parking lot; the men carried the casket up the stairs from the hearse. But in the end, it always fell to the women to do the hard work of putting everything back together again.

  The choir sang “Ave Maria” as the gifts were brought up to the altar. Everyone wept. It was the sort of song that made you remember it all, your whole life a movie montage full of people who moved you deeply, and then were gone. She thought her mother must be crying to think of herself as a sort of orphan now.

  Maggie cried for Daniel. She cried for the fear of ever losing Kathleen, and the fact that they would probably never have a perfect understanding between them, though there was love so strong it suffocated.

  At the cemetery, there was an American flag draped over the coffin. The crowd of mourners stood still and silent as two young servicemen in uniform played a recording of “Taps” on a boom box, and then folded the flag into smaller and smaller triangles, snapping it taut with each turn. One of them presented the flag to Alice and said, “On behalf of a grateful nation, I present this flag as a token of our appreciation for the faithful and selfless service of your loved one for this country.”

  Maggie realized that she had never heard Daniel talk about the war.

  She looked out into the swarm of faces as a priest led them in prayer, and thought that these Catholic customs, which were morbid in a way, served their purpose even so: let no one leave this world alone. There was still the question of who would come later. Who would visit Daniel’s grave when it was bitter cold, or when his birthday arrived each year. One noticed in these cemeteries that certain graves were more tended to than others, that some were always heaped with fresh flowers. Maggie wondered whether these were the people who had been the most beloved in life, or the least. She imagined it could go either way.

  Now, here in the cottage with her mother and aunt, she thought of the baby in her belly. She would have a life—a childhood, an awkward adolescence, a marriage and kids, like anyone—and then this baby too would die, and her grandchildren sitting in the church pews would probably not know Maggie, at least not as anything more than their feeble old great-grandmother. Kathleen would be someone they’d heard about in a story once, maybe.

  Maggie heard tires on the road, and she craned her neck to see the plain brown top of a delivery truck coming toward the cottage. A moment later there was a knock from the screen porch, and all three of them went out to investigate. This was the sort of thing that happened when you were at the beach. There was something quaint about it. Back home, where televisions and cell phones and computers were all going at once, who would care enough to even get off the couch and answer the door to see what the UPS man had brought if someone else was already up?

  All they could see was a pair of legs in brown shorts and hiked-up socks. The rest of him was obscured by an enormous cardboard box. His arms stretched out as far as they would reach.

  “A delivery for Ann Marie Kelleher,” he said from behind the box.

  Ann Marie scurried toward him, opening the porch door.

  “Oh, thank you! Please put it down right here. Gently, please!”

  Kathleen rolled her eyes.

  Ann Marie signed a piece of paper he held forth, attached to a clipboard.

  “Have a nice day, ladies,” he said, and was gone.

  The three of them stood there for a moment, staring at the box.

  “Is it a pony?” Kathleen asked.

  “It’s my dollhouse,” Ann Marie said. She could not hide her joy, even if she wanted to. Maggie thought it was sweet. Her mother was into worms, for God’s sake; couldn’t she understand what it meant to have a silly passion?

  “I’ll just run to the kitchen to get a knife,” Ann Marie continued, and then disappeared into the cottage.

  “Oh God,” Kathleen said. “A knife? I hope she’s not planning to injure herself, having just realized how pathetic it is to be a grown woman with a dollhouse.”

  “Mom—”

  “What?”

  Ann Marie returned and sliced through the thick brown packing tape before pulling back the box flaps. They all gazed inside, where a miniature brick house was nestled in a sea of green foam peanuts. Maggie held the box down as her aunt slid the house out and rested it on the floor.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful,” Ann Marie said. “It’s even prettier than the picture.”

  It was rather lovely, the kind of thing that could stoke your imagination and make you believe that you belonged on an English hillside somewhere, raising sheep and reading poetry and permanently deleting your e-mail account. Maybe Maggie would get into dollhouses too after the baby came. She and Ann Marie could open a shop in Brooklyn. After all, it was every New Yorker’s dream to own a home and most of them never would—perhaps this was the next best thing.

  “I have to take a photo to send to Patty!” Ann Marie said. “My camera’s in the car.”

  When she left to retrieve it, Kathleen leaned inquisitively over the dollhouse, tipping her mug until a thin stream of clear yellow tea poured onto the roof.

  “Whoops,” she said in a singsongy voice.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Maggie asked. She quickly wiped up the spill with the bottom of her T-shirt.

  “Oh, relax, it’s herbal. It won’t stain.”

  Maggie shook her head.

  “Why are you so mad at me?” Kathleen asked. “Look, I’m sorry for getting us off on the wrong foot yesterday. It’s just that I was worried about you for all those days and I couldn’t get through. As soon as we were alone together, I just went for it.”

  There was really no sense in Kathleen apologizing, since she would only do the same thing again and again. There was an elasticity to their bond. Its limits were often stretched beyond comfort, but it always returned, unbroken.

  I came here to stop you from making a huge mistake. That’s how she had put it, and the words had crushed Maggie. She was annoyed at herself over the fact that she still wanted to please her mother so much. This had only gotten harder as she became an adult with a totally different set of values from Kathleen’s.

  “It’s fine,” Maggie said.

  “Why don’t we get away from this toxic environment? We could go to Boston and check into a hotel and have a mother-daughter getaway,” Kathleen said.

  “Nah. I need to get some work done. I’m officially back on the clock with Till Death.”

  “Oh,” Kathleen said, clearly hurt.

  “Not to mention, I have to write an online dating profile for a fairly unattractive woman with two toy poodles, whose interests include manicures, Pilates, and the Bee Gees. And she wants me to work in the fact that she has problems around jealousy.”

  She had said it to make Kathleen smile, but her mother said flatly, “Sounds like a real catch.”

  “Obviously I need to save my pennies,” Maggie said.

  “Right. Unless you take me up on my offer and come to the farm.”

  Maggie ignored the comment. “I think I’ll go next door to Grandma’s house, since it’s just sitting there empty.”

  Kathleen didn’t answer. Instead she said, “You and I have always told each other everythi
ng.”

  It was true. While Maggie knew that it wasn’t the healthiest way to be, it was the only way they had ever been, and she believed it came from a place of love.

  “I know.”

  “So how could you not tell me this?”

  “I did tell you. You’re the first person I told, other than Gabe.”

  Maggie decided to leave Rhiannon out of it.

  “But how long have you known?”

  “A month and a half.”

  “Oh, Maggie. The thought of you having to keep it to yourself. I wish you had come out to California right away. I’d like to think that’s what you would have done in a situation like this. Not come here, to Maine, with all the family drama.”

  Maggie felt a mix of frustration and pity. Before she could stop herself, she said, “Until yesterday, there really wasn’t much drama.”

  “So it’s my fault.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You know how proud I am of you, and how much I love you, no matter what,” Kathleen said. “Sometimes I wonder why you feel such a sense of loyalty to this family. None of these people give a crap about us. It makes me so sad to see you let down by them, over and over again. Just like I’ve always been. When I think of what Alice said to you yesterday—”

  Maggie had forgotten her mother’s ability to turn every conversation about their extended family back to herself, and the ways in which she had been slighted by them. She had begun to make inroads with Alice and Ann Marie these past few weeks, and maybe it was stupid, but she felt happy about that. She knew her mother wanted the best for her. But she also knew this was one thing Kathleen could never let her have.

  “No one’s letting me down,” Maggie said. She straightened up and lifted her computer bag off the table, carefully placing the strap on her shoulder. She muttered, “My boobs are killing me.”

  Kathleen nodded. “Right on schedule. They’re getting bigger, too, you know.”

  “They are?”

  “Yeah. I thought you’d had implants for a second when I saw you yesterday.”

  “Well, maybe that’s what I’ll tell people,” Maggie said. “I’ll be back.”

  And with that, she carried her laptop next door.

  Each time she had opened her e-mail for the past four days, she told herself not to read the message from Gabe. And each time, she read it anyway.

  When it arrived in her in-box and she saw his name there, just reflexively she got goose bumps, as if they had been out on one magnificent date and she was waiting to see if he would call her again.

  But by then, she was already certain about what was to come. She was going to raise this child on her own. It was scary and sometimes sad, but she could do it. Women did it all the time. In some vague way, she had always pictured herself as a single mother. Maybe just because she had grown up with one.

  Mags, I’m sorry to have taken this long to reply. Ever since I read your e-mail, I’ve been thinking about you and the baby and what I should do. I even went out one afternoon and looked at engagement rings in a panic. I was literally sweating on the jewelry case. But if I’m being honest with us both, the simple fact is I can’t do this right now, at this point in my life. I don’t know what the future holds—maybe I’ll grow up one of these days. When you’re back in the city, let’s have coffee. I’m sorry. Love, Gabe

  It was classic Gabe, exactly what she should have expected: Sorry I can’t be a man and a father to our child, but hey, let me buy you a latte.

  Maggie understood why he couldn’t do it. Still, she felt like she was mourning the loss of something she had never had in the first place. In a different world, she might have been more trusting and he might have been trustworthy. She got that. But part of her missed him. She would never understand why logic couldn’t conquer something as simple and commonplace as love.

  Maggie sat down in Alice’s kitchen now and decided not to turn on her computer just yet. She put in a call to the police department in a town called Tulip, Texas, where a bitter former prom queen had shot her cheating husband to death. It said a lot that this was a more soothing activity than going to breakfast with her mother.

  “Can I speak to your press office please?” she said, fairly sure what the response would be.

  “Our what?”

  “Your press office. Public affairs?”

  “Hold, please.”

  The hold music began. A country singer belted out that if given the chance, she hoped someone (her child?) would dance. It was some smarmy shit, but even so, Maggie felt a tickle in her throat. She sighed. She could not stand herself when she got like this, too cozy with her sorrow.

  For the last several weeks she had thought about the horrors of giving birth, and all the terrible things that could happen to a baby, and how she could ever afford this, and whether maybe Gabe might show up in the final act and rescue her, having become another man entirely. But now she feared something else. It was about the way Alice and Kathleen and Ann Marie had all fussed over her and what she would do next. Maggie was still a blank slate—childless, unmarried, and therefore yet to begin it. After this baby was born, she would never be that way again. She would cross to the other half of life, in which you yourself are no longer watched over, not in the same way. She couldn’t take to her bed whenever she felt like it or allow herself to completely self-destruct.

  That’s what her own mother had done from time to time, and Alice as well, but Maggie couldn’t; she wouldn’t.

  Sometimes she thought she would have been better off procreating at twenty-two than thirty-two. Back then, she had thought she wanted four or five kids someday. She was still young and dumb enough to think it possible. Maybe that’s how mothers like Ann Marie were made—they plunged headlong into the whole endeavor before they knew any better. They weren’t selfish or greedy with their time because as adults they had never spent several Saturdays in a row lying in bed watching Meg Ryan movies on cable. They had never passed an entire weekend indoors, just because they felt like it.

  From everything she read online, Maggie had gathered that it was sort of in vogue for mothers to complain about their kids—there were entire websites devoted to mourning the objects and body parts their children had destroyed; there were Mommies Who Drink groups that met weekly in Brooklyn bars; there were forums where women could record every last grievance—every drop of apple juice spilled on the carpet, every time the nanny showed up five minutes late, every hideous temper tantrum that made them consider running away. They claimed they were miserable, and seemed pleased with themselves for admitting it. But then why have children at all? Maybe this sort of oversharing was healthy set against generations of repressed American housewives, brightly smiling through the slog. But Maggie wondered if in some ways all the complaining only made matters worse.

  She was still on hold. Now the country singer was telling her that living might mean taking chances but they’re worth takin’. Lovin’ might be a mistake but it’s worth makin’.

  She hung up the phone and put her head down on her grandmother’s kitchen table. After a short while, she thought she heard footsteps out on the gravel path that led from the cottage. She felt certain it was Kathleen, so she picked up the phone again and held it to her ear, pretending to be mid-conversation.

  Good Lord, had it come to this?

  No one entered the house. When Maggie peeked out the window, she saw only two rabbits eating the grass.

  “Thank you. Good-bye,” she said to the imaginary person at the other end of the line, just in case someone was watching.

  Maggie breathed in the mix of pine trees and salty air through the screen. June was almost over. Soon she would have to leave.

  She could hardly picture going back to Brooklyn, to that same old apartment on Cranberry Street. She imagined that in some ways her life would be exactly as it had been—each morning she would sit by the window, watching the early commuters hustle down into the subway with their paper cups of steaming coffee.
She’d admire the buff and energetic woman in spandex who always did her push-ups and step-ups on the bench across the road while she waited for the bus. But in other ways, everything would be different, unimaginably so.

  Here in Cape Neddick, her life had quickly taken on a new rhythm—Gabe and Rhiannon and Allegra and her officemates had been replaced by Alice and Ann Marie and Connor. Less than a month had passed since she left, and already she felt like her city muscles were gone. In Maine, there was enough space to spread out. But in New York, you were surrounded by strangers all the time, living right on top of them. On the subway, the odors of their perfume and their sweat and their piss and their lunch all mingled together. They read over your shoulder, and while you might find this annoying, you couldn’t say much, because the truth was you were likely to do the same to them—you were all curious creatures.

  Every day the city broke her heart: each morning she saw homelessness, illness, cruelty, right there in front of her. The brutality would sometimes spring forth from nowhere. Standing on the platform at Grand Central Terminal, waiting for the 6 train to arrive, she had once watched a young black man punch an old white man in the face, knocking him to the ground. The old man had said a hateful word that Maggie herself had never uttered, never would, but she still saw the young one as the coward.

  She had watched mothers yank their children hard by the arm and yell at them to quit dropping crumbs or to hurry up. On other mornings, she watched the same mothers play twelve rounds of pat-a-cake with real delight in their eyes.

  When she found herself crying on an East Village street after midnight, several people she had never met stopped to ask, “Are you okay?” as concerned as if they were her blood. When a guy grabbed her purse uptown one cloudy afternoon, she screamed for help, but no one turned and looked.

  Everything, good and bad, was so much more predictable here. She wished she could stay. She imagined scenarios: Perhaps she could get a job cleaning at St. Michael’s, picking up the rice in the church after a wedding, Eleanor Rigby style. Or she could write a best seller and become one of those novelists whose bio makes you swell with jealousy—The author splits her time between Maine and Bruges.