Summer Friends

by Holly Chamberlin

  “Charity!” Maggie laughed in disbelief. “This isn’t charity!”

  “Then what would you call it?”

  “One friend helping another.”

  Delphine crossed her arms across her chest. It was not a usual gesture. “No. Thank you, Maggie, but it’s impossible.”

  “I don’t understand,” Maggie said, with another small, frustrated laugh. “Is it because I offered to help with money? I can explain that. I’ll be leaving before long. I don’t live here. I can’t be making casseroles for the parents. I can’t be around to take turns sitting with Kitty or driving her to and from the hospital. Money is what I can offer, and if it’s not as good as being a good neighbor I’m sorry; I am.”

  “Money,” Delphine said tightly, “is only part of why I don’t need your help.”

  Maggie shook her head. “You think money is somehow evil or wrong, don’t you?”

  “It’s not good,” Delphine replied, “not usually.”

  “Delphine, money is amoral. It has no meaning in and of itself. None. It only has meaning through its use. If you take this money you can help relieve your family’s suffering. Then, the money becomes good. You’ve made it good.”

  “No, Maggie. That’s my final word on the subject. We don’t need or want your money.”

  Maggie felt her anger rising. “But you’ll take someone else’s money? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “The subject is closed.”

  “It’s like all those years ago,” Maggie cried. “And it’s like when Dave Junior got in trouble. You’re shutting me out again when I’m trying to help you.”

  Delphine felt a slight tingling in her head, her blood pressure rising. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Of course you know what I’m talking about,” Maggie said fiercely. “It’s become a pattern with you. Something troublesome happens in your life and you run away from me. Maybe you run away from everybody, I don’t know. But I don’t care about everybody; I only care about me. Do you have any idea how I feel when you turn me away? All I’m trying to do is help. You’re my friend. You owe me the right to offer my help. You owe me—”

  “Nothing!” Delphine shouted, her arms dropping to her sides. And in a slightly quieter voice she said, “I owe you nothing.”

  Maggie felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. Tears flooded her eyes. She felt nauseous.

  “I really have to get back to work,” Delphine said, turning toward her desk, her back to Maggie. “So why don’t you just go.”

  51

  It was Sunday afternoon and Maggie was miserable. She had wandered aimlessly in town, then, annoyed by the press of vacationers, walked down to the beach, hoping to find a small, quiet spot where she could be alone. It was difficult, but she found a place about halfway down to Wells, up against the dunes. She sat directly on the sand, heedless of her expensive linen pants. The water was silvery in the sun. Seagulls cawed madly, circling above a scattering of beached clams.

  She sighed heavily. To think she had been stupid enough to want to present Delphine with that aquamarine necklace on their trip to Boston. That necklace had become a tainted reminder of past joy, a macabre relic of a once-revered living thing. What had she been thinking, that she would give Delphine the necklace as a prize for good behavior, as a reward for being her best friend again? She supposed that if she really cared about Delphine and not more about her own need for the friendship she should give her the necklace anyway, for old times’ sake, for the sake of selflessness. And then, she should walk away for good.

  A shout of laughter brought Maggie’s attention to the moment. A group of about six young people were setting up chairs and laying out blankets a few yards to her right. So much for peace and quiet, she thought. She got up, brushed off her pants, and walked back to Main Street, intending to go directly back to the hotel, by trolley if one came by.

  As she reached the corner of Beach and Main Streets, she saw Jemima Larkin parking her car outside the Village Food Market. She didn’t like Jemima and she strongly suspected that Jemima didn’t like her, but she was feeling close to desperate. She had to make some connection with Delphine, no matter how tenuous.

  “Jemima,” she called when the woman had gotten out of her car. “Wait.”

  Jemima looked up to see Maggie hurrying toward her. “Yes?” she said when Maggie was a few feet away.

  Maggie attempted a smile but couldn’t muster one. “I want to ask you something,” she said. “I want to know if you can explain to me why Delphine won’t accept my help for her family.”

  Jemima smiled blandly. “Why don’t you ask her that?”

  “I have asked her. Of course I have. But she won’t give me an answer.” That was a bit of a lie. Delphine had given Maggie a firm and strongly worded answer. But it wasn’t an answer she wanted to accept.

  Jemima folded her arms across her ample chest. “You need to understand something,” she said. “You’re not one of us. You don’t belong here. It means nothing that your parents rented a house here thirty years ago or however long ago it was. That doesn’t make you belong.”

  Maggie laughed. She felt helpless. “That’s crazy,” she said.

  “That’s the way it is.”

  Jemima’s smug smile was maddening. “You weren’t born here,” Maggie said, ashamed at engaging this horrid person in an argument but unable to keep silent. “Delphine told me so.”

  “I married a native,” Jemima spit. “And this is not about me.”

  Maggie shook her head. “Why do you dislike me so much?”

  “I have no opinion about you either way,” Jemima lied. “But I do know that you’re not good for Delphine.”

  “That’s even crazier! I’ve known Delphine for almost all of my life!”

  “You used to know her. But whoever it was you once knew is gone. Long gone.”

  Maggie felt Jemima’s words like a slap. She suspected that this awful woman might be right. Maybe she had been supremely foolish, seeing what she wanted to see, imagining a Delphine who didn’t really exist.

  “Delphine is not a child,” she said finally, her voice shaky. “I think she can decide for herself who’s good and who’s bad for her.”

  Jemima worked to hold back another smug smile of triumph. “I think,” she said, “that she already has.” She turned and walked off in the direction of the bakery.

  After leaving Jemima, Maggie found herself on Shore Road. She had been driving aimlessly for over an hour, largely unaffected by the beautiful old homes with their gardens lush with flowers, by the vistas of the silver blue Atlantic, by the marshes with their dense clumps of wild grasses. She didn’t want to go back to her hotel. She didn’t want to walk through town. She felt, alone in her beautiful car, like more of a stranger to Ogunquit than ever. This place, with all its contradictions and quirks, with its fiercely independent locals and its wealth of natural splendor, was not hers. Maggie Weldon Wilkes was an interloper.

  Jemima Larkin had said as much earlier that day. Her words continued to taunt Maggie as she wandered. “You don’t belong here.” “You’re not good for Delphine.” Maybe she was right, Delphine’s ornery neighbor. At that moment Maggie felt that everybody was right, everybody but her. At that moment Maggie felt that everybody belonged somewhere specific and special, everybody but her. She was brimming with self-pity. She was bitter with self-recrimination.

  She passed a big old pile of a house that Delphine had pointed out to her the week before. It had been in the same family for generations, Delphine had told her, as had the Crandalls’ farmhouse. Vaguely she noted the elaborate nineteenth-century carriage mounted in the front yard. Last week she had exclaimed over its pristine quality. Now, it seemed just useless and forlorn. She turned on the radio and almost immediately turned it off again. She wasn’t in the mood for music or for the learned opinions of pundits. She felt fidgety, and then lethargic, and in the next moment fidgety again.

  Her mind re
turned to the awful encounter with Jemima. The most hurtful thing Jemima had said to her—also perhaps the most truthful—was that the person Maggie had once known was no longer. That the Delphine Maggie had remembered or imagined was a phantom, a chimera, a myth. Whatever she was, she wasn’t real. Maggie had been laboring under a delusion. How had she come to this point in her life, a point where her need for companionship was so great she had created a fantasy and then proceeded to believe in it as real? Stick to financial futures, Maggie, she told herself sternly, and leave the world of interpersonal relationships to people more qualified to make and keep friendships.

  A tour bus passing way too fast in the opposite lane startled Maggie back to the moment and she became aware that she was now coming up on a lovely sprawling hotel, more of a resort really. “The Shoreman,” a sign proclaimed. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and then she remembered it was where the man she’d met at the Old Village Inn said he was staying. Funny, that she should be passing it just now, when she was feeling so low and almost despairing, when only weeks ago really Dan—yes, that was his name—with his chat and offer of a drink had made her feel so good, so . . . noticed.

  Maggie turned abruptly into the long driveway of the hotel, causing the driver in the car behind her to lean on his horn. She winced. She’d given no notice of her intention to turn off the road and should have waved an apology but didn’t, and drove on toward an empty parking space. When she turned off the engine she sat there, her hands still on the wheel, as if stunned. What am I doing here? she asked herself, while at the same time justifying her last-minute decision—if it could even be called a decision—to . . . To what? She reached for the key, which was still in the ignition, intending to start the car and drive off again, but instead she removed the key, on its Tiffany silver key chain, and dropped it into her bag. I’ll just peek in at the bar, she told herself, stepping out of the car, adjusting her sunglasses, smoothing her slacks. I’ll just peek in—Dan said it was a nice place—and maybe if he’s there I’ll say hello and have one drink and then I’ll go back to my hotel. And if he’s not there, I certainly won’t stay. Either way, Maggie thought as the automatic doors slid open to admit her to the lobby, I’ll be in my bed before long and this horrible day will be over.

  A hotel employee in a navy and white uniform pointed her in the direction of the bar. Maggie thanked her with a smile. She peered into the room—dark, but not overly so, decorated with the requisite amount of nautical accoutrements, including a large anchor hung on the back wall—and saw that aside from the bartender and an older couple at a small table in a corner there was no one there. I’ll just leave now, she thought. And she walked into the room and over to the bar, where she slid onto a bar stool upholstered in red leather.

  The bartender, a tall man in his twenties with a shaved head, placed a cocktail napkin on the bar in front of her. “What’ll it be?” he asked pleasantly.

  “A martini,” Maggie said. “Gin.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.” Maggie rose quickly from the couch and began to button her blouse.

  The handsome man from the Old Village Inn, Dan, lay back on the couch, his own shirt untucked and partially unbuttoned. They were in his room at the Shoreman. It was close to midnight. “Hey, come on,” he said. “I thought we were having a good time.”

  Maggie ran her hand through her hair and scanned the room for her bag. “No. I mean . . . I just have to go.”

  Dan—she hadn’t asked for his last name—laughed in disbelief. “So you’re just a tease, is that it? I spend the whole evening buying you drinks for this? Nice.”

  “No.” Maggie grabbed her bag from the top of the dresser and turned toward the door. “I’ll give you money. You don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want your money. What I want is—”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “You know,” Dan called out as she tore open the door, “you’re too old to be playing games.”

  Maggie ran down the hall, through the lobby, and out through the hotel’s automatic doors. She got into her car—she was vaguely aware that she shouldn’t be driving after all she’d had to drink—and fumblingly inserted the key in the ignition. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she drove off in the direction of her hotel. She felt self-loathing and fear and panic. She half wished she would be pulled over by a policeman, that her career would be destroyed, her life ruined. “God,” she muttered as she drove, her hands gripping the steering wheel, “what has become of me?”

  52

  “I thought you’d be at the farm.” It was late Monday morning. Jemima stood at Delphine’s front door, a plate covered loosely with aluminum foil in her hands. “I was just going to leave these in the kitchen.”

  “I was at the farm earlier,” Delphine said, gesturing Jemima inside. “I came home for a bit. Bad headache.”

  “You’re not eating enough. I understand why, but you can’t afford to make yourself sick. There are too many people relying on you, Delphine.”

  “I know.” Of course she knew. She was never unaware of her responsibilities to her family.

  “I brought you these nice cinnamon rolls. They’re still warm. Do you want one now?”

  “Maybe later,” Delphine said. “Thanks, Jemima. I do need some coffee, though. The ibuprofen didn’t help much.”

  The two women went into the kitchen. Jemima directed Delphine to sit and she brought her a cup of coffee from the pot warming on the stove.

  “I ran into your friend Maggie in town yesterday,” she said, sitting across from Delphine. “She started questioning me about you.”

  Delphine took a sip of her coffee before answering. “Questioning you about me? What do you mean?”

  “She wanted to know why you wouldn’t accept her help. By which I assume she meant money.”

  “What did you tell her?” Delphine asked warily.

  Jemima shrugged. “I told her that she should ask you that. She said that she had.”

  “What else did you say to her?”

  “Nothing. What would I have to say to her?”

  Plenty, Delphine thought. Jemima wasn’t known to hold back her opinions, even when she should. And there were times, not often but on occasion, when Delphine felt smothered by Jemima’s friendship. She was a possessive woman. As far as Delphine knew, Jemima didn’t have any other close friends, not in the Ogunquit area, anyway. But she was also a reliable person and that wasn’t to be discounted.

  “I think I’ll have a cinnamon roll after all,” Delphine said.

  Jemima beamed. Soon after serving a roll to Delphine, she took her leave, satisfied that she had done her duty.

  When she had gone, Delphine poured another cup of coffee and sat back at the table. She was a little bit angry that Maggie had interfered by questioning Jemima, but at the same time she acknowledged a small feeling of gratitude for her persistent concern.

  Delphine sipped at the coffee and thought again about Maggie’s two recent and generous offers of help. She wondered if she had ever cared as much for Maggie as Maggie claimed to care for her. She wondered if there was something about her that made her recoil from real, messy intimacy. And if there was something . . . wrong, then why? She had backed away from marriage to Robert. Maybe there were more reasons for that decision than wanting to return to Ogunquit. She had let go of, neglected, the friendship with Maggie. She was with a man who would not marry her. She lived alone. She was not in the habit of asking anyone for help. She wasn’t sure she could even recognize a situation in which asking for help would be a smart thing. She often felt oddly removed from her current relationships with Maggie, Jackie, and Jemima, even when they were enjoying each other’s company. She often felt as if she were a spectator and not a participant in her own life.

  Delphine put the piece of foil back over the plate of cinnamon rolls. It was nice of Jemima to have brought them. Nice and typical. Her friendship with Jemima, though strong and consistent, didn’t have much to do with shared feelings
and dreams. It was a serviceable, workaday kind of thing. They did favors for each other. Jemima passed along coupons for cat food and Delphine picked Jemima up from the car repair shop when her old car broke down, which it routinely did. Jemima made chicken soup for Delphine when she got her annual winter cold. Delphine mowed Jemima’s lawn when Jim couldn’t get to it. It was all good stuff, very neighborly, but not necessarily intimate. At least, it didn’t feel intimate to Delphine. Not that she knew what intimacy was, she reminded herself, not anymore. Maybe, she never had. Not even with Robert, because she had never been entirely truthful with him. And intimacy was about nothing if it wasn’t about being truthful.

  Maybe, she thought irritably, I’m just not cut out for intimacy. And if intimacy was what Maggie was really looking for, well, she wasn’t going to find it with Delphine. Maggie might be a good person, but she was also a problem. She had caused Delphine to spend too much time away from her work, from her responsibilities, from her family.

  Delphine didn’t believe in divine retribution—she didn’t believe that some unnamable all-powerful being had struck down her niece as punishment for Delphine’s neglect of her family duties—but at the same time she couldn’t help but feel that she had tempted fate by planning to go away. And for what? To have “fun”? What did “fun” mean, anyway? Who, other than children, deserved to have fun?

  Well, she thought, now that I’m not available to be Maggie’s playmate, she should just go home where she’s actually wanted. Assuming Maggie was wanted at home, and from what she’d told Delphine about the current state of her marriage, maybe she wasn’t wanted there, either.

  Delphine felt an unwelcome rush of guilt. Just the other night, just before she had learned of Kitty’s diagnosis, she had sworn never to leave Maggie behind again. What had happened to that vow? What had happened to that promise she had made to herself as well as to Maggie? Had she made it lightly, falsely?