Summer Friends

by Holly Chamberlin

  “The onion rings are killer here,” Delphine said. “But maybe you don’t eat onion rings.”

  “Not as a rule,” Maggie admitted. “But I suppose I could have one or two.”

  “One or two certainly won’t hurt you. My problem is stopping after five, six, and seven.”

  Kelly came by then and took their drink order. She asked after Delphine’s parents and Delphine asked after Kelly’s three boys. She brought Delphine’s beer and Maggie’s wine and moved off to serve a middle-aged couple at the far end of the bar.

  “Well,” Maggie said, “since you seem to know everyone and everything in the area, I should ask you to suggest a local church I could go to. I try to go every Sunday. Well, maybe every other Sunday. Okay, at least once a month.”

  “You might go to St. Peter’s By The Sea,” Delphine suggested. “It’s on Shore Road in Cape Neddick. It’s Episcopal, but I suppose anyone visiting on vacation can attend a service. It’s a beautiful old stone building, on top of a hill. It’s very picturesque.”

  “Oh, how could I have forgotten about St. Peter’s By The Sea? We passed it every time my parents took us out to dinner in Portsmouth. There was some Italian restaurant down there they were mad about. Anyway, yes, maybe I’ll go to a service next Sunday. Thanks, Delphine.”

  “Sure. What church do you belong to back home?” Delphine asked.

  “No one in particular, actually.” Maggie sighed. “I don’t know, I feel the need to go to church, but I don’t like to get involved in the community aspect. That’s why I’m always drifting from one place to another when things feel like they’re getting too close.” Which is strange, Maggie thought, given the fact that I feel so isolated these days.

  “I don’t remember your family going to church when we were kids, but maybe I just didn’t notice.”

  “They only went on the big holidays,” Maggie said. “Easter, Christmas, someone’s wedding or funeral. I half think my mother just wanted excuses to dress up.”

  “And when we were in college,” Delphine said. “You didn’t go to church then, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. It wasn’t until the girls were born that I went back. Well, there wasn’t much to go back to. I never had a religious education, so I was kind of floundering for a while. I guess I still am.”

  “Do you consider yourself a believer?” Delphine asked, thinking of Harry and his cross.

  Maggie frowned down at her drink and didn’t answer for some minutes. She couldn’t answer because she really didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t in the habit of asking herself such a question: Am I a believer? Maybe she never had been in the habit of self-reflection, at least about spiritual things. Finally, she looked up from her glass of wine and said, “I don’t know. Sorry. That’s a lame answer.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Delphine said. “It was a difficult question anyway.”

  “Gregory never goes to church and my daughters stopped going with me when they were old enough to say no. I didn’t really put up much of a fight. I can’t force my kids to believe something I’m not even sure I believe.”

  “Of course.”

  “What about you?” Maggie asked. “Do you go to church?”

  “No,” Delphine said, “I don’t. I haven’t been inside a church in—I can’t remember how long it’s been. No doubt it was for a funeral. It might even have been my mother’s cousin Veronique’s funeral. My parents go every Sunday without fail. The rest of the family goes on occasion.”

  “Do your parents pressure you to go with them?”

  Delphine laughed. “Maggie, I’m forty-nine. I think I’m a little too old to be pressured by my parents into doing or not doing something.”

  Maggie wondered about that. In her opinion, which, granted, might not be an entirely informed opinion, it seemed that her old friend was in some ways in thrall to her parents, as well as to her siblings and their kids. What she said was: “Parental pressure never really dies. I mean, even when the parents are dead, their influence lives on.”

  “Maybe. What sort of lasting influence do you think your parents have had on you?”

  “Me? Oh. Well, in my case I guess it would be the need to succeed. And the need to be independent, which is pretty much the same thing, I think. But that’s not a bad legacy, is it? Every time I achieve a goal in my career I automatically think of my father, and how proud of me he would be if he knew.” She laughed. “I guess on some level I still think of myself as his little girl. With my mother, it’s different. She was happy when I married and had my children. Any career success is, in her opinion, secondary to those achievements. For a woman, of course.”

  Delphine took a sip of her beer. She wondered if her parents were actively proud of her and why. Because she was dependable, reliable, because she hadn’t gone off and made a life of her own? Or were they proud of her because of her achievements? She thought about the ways in which she had helped grow the farm and improve business at the diner. She had made their lives a bit easier, maybe even a lot easier. But the Crandalls weren’t the sort of people who expressed their emotions in words. If Delphine ever asked her mother and father if they were proud of her, they would find the question absurd, unnecessary, and embarrassing.

  “Here’s Jackie,” she said, as her sister came into the bar from the lobby. She was thankful for the interruption of her thoughts. “I didn’t know she’d be here tonight.”

  “Hey! Look who’s here! Gosh, this must be Maggie!”

  Maggie found herself enveloped in Jackie’s arms. She laughed and hugged back.

  “It’s just like old times,” Jackie said. “The girls out together on a Saturday night.” Jackie took the stool on Maggie’s left, putting Maggie between the sisters.

  It was the first time that Maggie had seen Jackie since her college graduation party in Boston. And before that, the one time Jackie had come to visit when Maggie and Delphine were seniors. Jackie had bunked on the floor of their dorm room. They had brought a picnic to the Common and taken a ride on a Swan Boat. They had gone for dinner to the Union Oyster House and splurged on oysters and pigged out on fried clams. Some guy they met at an Irish pub had pestered Jackie for her number, until she told him she had a rare and very contagious disease she had picked up while working with a pack of wild boars in Borneo. Later, the three of them had met up with Robert and some friends and had gone to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It had been a memorable weekend of non-stop fun.

  Now, Jackie’s once dark brown hair was liberally streaked with grey and pulled back into a loose ponytail. That and the long crinkly cotton skirt she wore, with flat, brown leather sandals on her feet, and big silver hoop earrings gave her the look of an earth mother. Her face was slightly gaunt, though the too-tight shirt she wore revealed that she had gained some weight over the years. The skin around her eyes was deeply wrinkled, as if she had spent too much time squinting into the sun. Her smile, though, was still bright and welcoming. Maggie found that if she focused on that smile, she could still see the Jackie of twenty-seven years before, the girl-next-door-sexy Jackie. But she had to focus really, really hard.

  Jackie ordered a rum-and-Coke, the same drink she had been ordering since she was eighteen. She waved at someone she recognized across the bar. “That’s Raymond Collins. He’s a bagger at the Hannaford supermarket in York,” she told Maggie.

  “A bagger? But he must be at least seventy-five!”

  Jackie laughed. “At least.”

  Maggie suddenly felt highly self-conscious. She knew she was privileged. Her life—and the choices she had made to build and maintain that life—afforded her luxuries. She felt bad that Jackie and Delphine had so little. She realized that she felt annoyed with and puzzled by them, too. She couldn’t understand why two intelligent women had made the choices they had made, choices that prohibited the acquiring of the amenities, the niceties. And that poor man sitting across the bar, the bagger. What choices had he made that had led him to still be working a
t a job better suited for a high school kid? But maybe, unlike Maggie, he simply hadn’t had many choices, or opportunities. God, she thought, the shoes I’m wearing tonight could probably feed that old man for months. They could send Jackie to a spa for a facial and Delphine for a month of daily manicures.

  “Dave Senior’s at home glued to the television,” Jackie was saying. “There’s a Red Sox game on. He probably doesn’t even notice I’m not there.”

  “When he wants popcorn he’ll notice,” Maggie said. “At least, that would be Gregory.”

  “Oh, Dave Senior can manage the microwave by himself. Otherwise, he’s completely incapable in the kitchen.”

  “I’m not very good myself,” Maggie admitted. “When the girls were little we had a full-time nanny and she did most of the cooking. I mean, I could manage a box of macaroni and cheese, that sort of thing. But now that it’s just Gregory and I and neither of us are home much for dinner—and rarely on the same days—well . . . cooking just seems like a waste of time and effort.”

  “With two teenagers at home,” Jackie said, “I have to cook. Nothing fancy, but healthy stuff, for sure. And Dave Senior and I insist they eat dinner with us each night. It’s hard to maintain the family unit, but we believe it’s worth the effort. Even when the kids get whiny about it.”

  Maggie remembered lots of nights eating dinner without her father. She had assumed that most fathers came home after seven, had a cocktail, and ate a late dinner alone or with their wives. She and Gregory had been lax about their own family gathering around the table. Well, they had had to be. Their careers had demanded they be at their offices or on the road most days, rather than at home making dinner and helping with homework. At least the nanny had been there to make sure the girls were fed. Now, when the girls came home from college for vacations, they were rarely in the house other than to sleep.

  “Do you have pictures of your daughters?” Jackie asked.

  Maggie was startled. No one had asked her that question since the girls were babies. “Oh, sure,” she said, pulling her iPhone out of her bag. “Let me just . . . Here. Here’s Kim and Caitlin this past Christmas. We were in Colorado, skiing. One of my colleagues has a gorgeous chalet and couldn’t use it this past year, so we were able to rent it for a song.”

  Jackie widened her eyes in a gesture of disbelief. “An opera is more like it. It’s huge. Not for nothing, Maggie, but if this is the sort of place you can afford to rent for winter vacation, you must be doing all right. Good for you!”

  Maggie blushed. “The condo was nice,” she admitted. “Five bedrooms, media room, state-of-the-art kitchen—not that we used it much! There are some great restaurants out there.... Okay, here are the girls dressed up to go out one night without the parents.”

  Delphine looked at the two tall, slim young women on the screen. She felt bad that she hadn’t asked to see photos before now. People’s children were an integral part of their lives. She knew that. She remembered that Maggie had sent a birth announcement for each girl. She couldn’t recall now if she had responded to the announcements with a card or a call. She doubted that she had. She felt like a bit of a rat. “They’re both so pretty,” she said honestly. “They look so much like you.”

  “And Gregory,” Maggie said, “especially Kim, on the right. But then again, you only met him once, and that was so long ago. You probably wouldn’t see a resemblance.”

  No, Delphine thought. I wouldn’t. Of course Maggie would have wanted her to know Gregory, to deem him suitable, to give the thumbs-up when he proposed. A couple, even a couple who had been together for a long time, didn’t exist in a vacuum. Part of what gave validity to a couple was the acknowledgment and respect of the community—of their friends and family and neighbors. She hadn’t honored her friend’s marriage as she might have, partly, maybe, because she was upset about not being chosen maid of honor.

  But no, Delphine thought. I’m lying to myself. The reality was that being Maggie’s maid of honor—and she would have felt duty bound to accept—would have meant being dragged back to the world she had rejected with such difficulty. It would have meant a further commitment to a friendship she had come to find threatening—and too strong a reminder of her life with Robert Evans. Being with Maggie meant being in the larger world. Delphine had chosen a smaller world, her own world. The two, she had believed, would not easily mix. Maybe she had been mistaken in that belief. Maybe.

  Maggie was putting her iPhone back into her bag. “How is your niece, Kitty?” she asked. “I got the sense the other morning from Jemima that maybe she wasn’t feeling well.”

  Jackie flashed a look at her sister and said, “Jemima is a bit of a drama queen.”

  “Kitty’s fine,” Delphine said. “Thanks for asking. Let’s order. How about some steamers?”

  “And onion rings,” Jackie said.

  Maggie smiled. “I’m in.”

  17

  1979

  The tension, the suspense, was almost unbearable. Delphine stared at the phone on the hall table, as if she could will it to ring. She thought it had been bad while she was waiting to hear from Bartley College. But that was nothing compared to waiting to hear from Maggie, to learn if she, too, had been accepted. It had been three days now, three long days of making deals with a god she wasn’t even sure she believed in—“If you let Maggie get accepted, I promise I’ll be a better person”—and of wishing on the first star of the evening. “Star light, star bright . . .”

  The phone rang, startling Delphine so badly that she yelped. She snatched the phone from its cradle.

  “I got in!”

  It was Maggie. Delphine screamed. Maggie screamed. Delphine said, “Oh, my God!” Maggie said, “Oh, my God!”

  When the screaming stopped, Delphine said, “I swear I wouldn’t have gone if you hadn’t gotten in, too.” She meant it.

  “I know, and I wouldn’t have gone if you hadn’t gotten in. A whole new world is opening up for us, Delphine. We’re going to have so much fun; we’re going to have so many adventures!”

  “Yeah, but remember, I have to work between classes. It won’t be all fun and games. And I’m on a lot of academic scholarships. If I screw up, I’m out.”

  “Oh, please,” Maggie said, “you’ll be fine; you’re always getting As, right?”

  “Yeah, but college is going to be a lot harder than high school.”

  “Grrr! Can’t you just be thrilled for a minute without thinking about reality?”

  Delphine laughed. “I’ll try.”

  “Good. Now all we have to hope for is that we get to be roommates.”

  Delphine rolled her eyes at the wall. “There’s no way that’s going to happen. It would be way too much of a coincidence.”

  “You’re doing it again. Don’t be so negative. Wonderful things happen sometimes. Look, we both got into the school we wanted, right?”

  “Yeah. Okay, I’ll keep my fingers crossed about the roommate thing.”

  “Good,” Maggie said. “Man, I can’t wait to meet some college guys. Everyone in my class is so lame.”

  “Ugh, here, too.”

  “Speaking of ugh, did anyone ask you to the prom yet?”

  Delphine sighed, as if bored by the subject. “Yeah. But I said no.”

  “Who is he?” Maggie asked. “Is he really gross?”

  “No, he’s okay. I’m just not into going with someone just to go. I mean, why bother if the guy’s not my boyfriend? Besides, it’s a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, but you only have one senior prom,” Maggie argued. “This guy in my physics class asked me and I said yes. We’re not dating or anything, but we both want to go so we’re going as friends.”

  “That’s okay, I guess. But I’d rather pass.”

  “You’re a romantic.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a realist. I—” Delphine heard her mother calling to her from the kitchen. “Look,” she said. “I gotta go. My mom wants me to get off the phone. She needs me to help with
the baking for the diner. She does all the prep the night before. Well, you know that.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “I should go, too. I have this history paper to finish and my parents are taking us out to dinner to celebrate. Remember, start wishing for us to be roommates!”

  18

  Maggie got out of her car and looked up at the big, old house before her. Delphine had once told her that her ancestors had lived in the house since it was built in the 1850s. Since then, generations had come and gone, but the structure had remained and it had grown. It was what was known as a classic New England “telescope” house. The original house had consisted of two small rooms and a kitchen on the first floor, and a central staircase leading to four small bedrooms on the second. Above that, reachable by a pull-down set of stairs in the hallway ceiling, was an attic. Over time, two bathrooms had been added, as well as an extension behind the kitchen, one large room, now used mostly for storage, and connecting to a passageway that led directly into the main barn. On the outside, the house was simple white clapboard, with four-over-four windows and a steeply sloped roof.

  There were two other buildings on the property, a smaller barn, off of which Delphine’s office had been built, and a wooden shed that Maggie thought looked about to collapse in on itself. Cultivated fields of vegetables, fruits, and flowers stretched out behind and to the sides of the house. Chickens in a variety of breeds roamed freely, pecking at the ground for bugs and grass. A barn cat skulked in a stand of grasses, no doubt eyeing unsuspecting prey, like mice or chipmunks. From what Delphine had told her, the cats had learned long ago not to mess with the chickens.