The Latecomers Fan Club

by Diane V. Mulligan

  So far, though, her homecoming had been more surprising than depressing. The two biggest changes: First, that her mother’s new husband Frank, who had happily agreed to move into the crumbling old farmhouse that had been in Maggie’s family for three generations, had usurped her old bedroom for his home office, so she had to use Claire’s old room; and second, that her sister, her former nemesis, was actually excited that she was home. Growing up, Maggie and Claire’s relationship had been the sort in which each sister would defend the other’s honor and well-being against assholes and miscreants, but in the absence of any external threat, the two were likely to antagonize one another. As Maggie and Claire had gotten older, their treatment of one another had become more passive aggressive and less prone to the physical violence young siblings inflict on one another, but maturity hadn’t provided either with the ability (or willingness) to see the other’s perspective.

  But weirdly Claire seemed to be genuinely glad that Maggie was back in town. Claire dragged her Christmas shopping and rescued her from half-drunk aunts and their interrogations on Christmas Eve. When she proposed Maggie come with her to Zack’s New Year’s party, Maggie couldn’t say no. She was in no position to turn down any offer of friendship, and maybe, just maybe, she and Claire were finally adult enough to put aside their sisterly differences. Maybe Claire’s disposition had softened along with her midsection. She was tall and had always been a solid girl. She played basketball and softball growing up and was athletic and sturdy. But with competitive sports behind her, her face was round, and she was thick through the middle. Her hair, which she had always worn long, was cut in a chin length bob, her long bangs swept to one side. On Christmas Eve, in her baggy striped sweater and Dockers, she was the perfect picture of a mom, which Maggie thought was funny because Claire had always been so untamed.

  Her second marriage had calmed her. She hadn’t been ready to be a mother or a grown up when she’d had Timmy at twenty years old, but when she met Gene, it was like a switch was flipped her brain. She started going to church with him. At his urging, she finished the associate’s degree she had abandoned when Timmy was born. She took the earrings out of her nose and belly button. She asked their mother, Gloria, to teach her to cook. Maggie liked to point out the irony of Claire, the family wild child, ending up with a cop, but Claire never thought it was funny.

  “God forgives the mistakes of youth,” she’d say whenever Maggie tried to regale Gene with some ribald tale of Claire’s teen years.

  At their wedding, Maggie watched Claire walk down the aisle in a simple white dress and wondered if she considered herself a born-again virgin, despite the incontrovertible evidence in the form of her son, who was serving as ring bearer.

  Maggie was trying to squelch those mean thoughts now, though. She was trying to befriend this adult version of Claire instead of seeing her as the child she used to be. The thing was, Maggie doubted she and Claire would become friends now if they weren’t sisters. They had nothing in common but genetics.

  Claire picked Maggie up at seven o’clock for the party. Gene had to work, and his mother agreed to watch Timmy so Claire could have a night out. Maggie would have preferred to drive herself, but Claire insisted. Zack’s was hard to find, she said, and besides, this way Maggie could have a few drinks and not worry about having to drive home. This gesture made Maggie suspicious. Claire was never this nice, and since she herself had quit drinking, she had gotten very preachy about other people’s consumption of alcohol. Still, Maggie went along with it. Maybe even Claire could see that Maggie would need a few drinks to face her old friends and explain the circumstances of her homecoming.

  “I haven’t had a girls’ night out since I don’t know when,” Claire said.

  “How’d you start hanging around with these guys anyway?” Maggie asked, looking out the window at the reservoir through the bare trees that whipped past.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sue Hanley’s kid is in the same class as Timmy, so I guess that’s how it started. Usually Zack’s parties are overrun with kids. In the summer, they swim in the lake and make s’mores and stuff. It’s like good old-fashioned fun.”

  Being a parent creates strange alliances, Maggie thought. “But Zack doesn’t have kids, right?”

  Claire shook her head. She took a series of turns down rural roads, finally stopping in the driveway of a small cottage. The house, Claire explained, had been someone’s summer camp, a little retreat from the city on the shore of the small lake beyond. Zack had bought it for practically nothing and had renovated it himself into his year-round home. They crossed the snow-crusted lawn and climbed the steps to the wrap-around porch. Maggie took a deep breath and prepared herself to greet people she had not seen or spoken to in fifteen years, people who undoubtedly recalled her cocky insistence that she was getting out of Worcester and they could all kiss her ass.

  Inside, in the small, low-ceilinged kitchen, Maggie felt suffocated. It was hot and crowded, and obviously Claire had foretold her arrival, because several women swarmed Maggie before she’d even taken off her coat. The faces were familiar. They hadn’t aged so much as to be unrecognizable, even if Maggie felt like she was a completely different person than she used to be. Some were fatter. Some were thinner. Some had cut or dyed their hair. They all want to hug her and ask her questions. Maggie tried to smile, to look pleased to be there, to answer politely but evasively, to make her way slowly from the door to a cold beverage.

  She had finally managed to get her hands on a drink and was scanning the room for Claire when a guy with tortoise-shell glasses and a scruffy beard stepped in front of her, blocking her view.

  “Holy crap, it’s Maggie Monahan,” he said, grinning.

  “Dave,” she said, returning his smile. Good old Dave. He had always been eccentric, even among the self-proclaimed misunderstood artists she hung around with. Apparently, given his attire, he was into steampunk now.

  “So. Where’s your husband? I heard you gave in to the patriarchy and got hitched.”

  So it began. The women who’d rushed her hadn’t asked—undoubtedly because Claire had already told them. For once Maggie was happy her sister liked to gossip. In this case, it saved her from at least half a dozen unpleasant conversations. But word hadn’t gotten to Dave.

  “I realized the error of my ways,” Maggie said, trying to laugh Dave off, because how could she explain why her marriage had fallen apart? People seem to believe—and Maggie herself once thought—that divorce was the result of some cataclysmic event, that a marriage in trouble reached its end like a pot boiling over. But her experience taught her otherwise. It was more like a pot set on a burner to simmer and then forgotten until the contents evaporated and all that was left was a blackened pot. No one ever told you that an argument over how to load the dishwasher could be the end of your marriage. And, Maggie wondered, in cases like hers—the slow simmer and burn of her six years of marriage—how do two reasonable, responsible adults who are clearly incompatible in fundamental ways make the decision to get married in the first place? How in the world had she and Andrew ever thought marriage was a good idea? One night shortly after she filed for divorce, Maggie had called her mother and asked her that very question.

  “You married him because you were in love,” her mother had said, but that wasn’t it at all and Maggie knew it. She had never been in love with Andrew. She had been attracted to him. She had been attracted to the lifestyle he could provide for her. But she hadn’t been in love. No, she believed that romantic love was a myth, a fairytale, a childish notion, and she had told herself to be practical. What everyone wants is companionship and financial security, and Andrew could provide those things. She thought Andrew was similarly pragmatic. They were not the sort of couple who said “I love you” a dozen times a day.

  And even now, even though it hadn’t worked out, Maggie didn’t think the failure of their marriage was due to a lack of love. She thought she
could survive that if other parts of it were okay, but Andrew hadn’t been the companion Maggie needed, nor had she been what he needed. How do you explain any of that at a New Year’s party to someone you haven’t spoken to in fifteen years? How do you explain that you wept in front of the TV during the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton because you couldn’t warn her that she was making a terrible mistake, that she wasn’t going to have a fairytale life as a princess, that the only life she was going to have was the one he said she could have from now on?

  When pressed by someone to give a more specific answer, Maggie always chose the shortest version of the story: he wanted children, she didn’t.

  “Good for you,” Dave said. Thankfully, instead of asking her for details, he launched into a diatribe about the evils of marriage, particularly for women, stating that he was a feminist and would never even consider asking a woman to get married. Maggie waited patiently, hoping he’d pause long enough for her to excuse herself. She glanced over Dave’s shoulder and her heart leaped. Nathaniel Harte was walking across the room towards them. He halted next to Dave as if waiting for entry into their conversation, but when Dave did not acknowledge him, he started making faces, expressions of mock thoughtfulness at Dave’s lecture, until Maggie laughed.

  She could not believe Claire had left out the information that Nathaniel would be at the party. She hadn’t seen him since the Christmas of her first year of grad school when they’d met up for a drink and wound up making out in his car. His hair was thinning and he had a little beer belly, but his dimples were as charming as ever when he smiled. Maybe she’d have a good time at the party after all.

  Nathaniel

  Of all the possibilities Nathaniel had imagined for New Year’s Eve, he never could have predicted that he’d be kissing Maggie Monahan next to a fire pit in his friend’s backyard at midnight. When he had told Abby that no one interesting would be at the party, he believed it. He thought he would go, hang out with kids he’d known since infancy, get shit faced, and pray the New Year would be better than the old one. He knew Abby was pissed that he had chosen his friends over her, and he had to admit, the scene at Zack’s was likely to be pathetic, hardly a step up from the Watering Hole. But his friends were there, his real friends who looked up to him, who were impressed by his stories about teaching college in Boston, who still believed he was someone special even though his big, starry-eyed dreams had not come true.

  At least Abby had to work so he didn’t have to fight with her about his plans. She always wanted to come with him to these things, but he never let her. His friends joked that he must be embarrassed by them. Either that or she was imaginary. The truth: He was embarrassed by her. If they met her, they’d know that however great his stories about his awesome metropolitan life, he was just like them—stuck. Sure, he got out of Worcester, but he wasn’t living his dream, and Abby was proof. It wasn’t that she was awful—she was cute enough, nice enough—but she was so ordinary, so boring. She had no ambition. She was perfectly happy buying clothes at J.C. Penney, and her dream vacation was a week at Disney World. She wasn’t the love of his life. She was the one he settled for. And thank God she wasn’t with him tonight, because he couldn’t take his eyes off of Maggie.

  The last time he saw Maggie had been Christmas the year after college. She hadn’t come to their tenth high school reunion. He always hoped her name would pop up in the “People You Might Know” box on Facebook, but it never did. That was just like Maggie—to be the last hold out against online social networking. When she walked into the party with Claire, Nathaniel almost choked on his beer.

  He wanted to play it cool, let her find him. He let all the hens rush her with their exclamations of surprise. Amazing how quickly girls could fall back into the squealing, excitable creatures they had been as teenagers, he thought.

  “Ohmygod, Maggie! I can’t believe you’re here!”

  “Weren’t you in California?”

  “It’s so great to see you! You look amazing!”

  She did look amazing. It seemed like all the other girls—women, they liked to remind him—were chopping off their hair into matronly, shoulder-length styles, but Maggie had kept her blond hair long. Nathaniel watched her slip off her winter coat and smooth her hands over her hair, which was straight and shiny and didn’t really need smoothing. She wore skinny jeans and a black top that was covered in a pattern of sequins that caught the light. She smiled and gave soft replies to everyone’s greetings and questions, her cheeks red with the attention. She was like a slightly embarrassed princess in the midst of dazzled commoners.

  It seemed like hours that Maggie stood near the doorway, trapped in conversation with one person after another. Nathaniel’s beer was empty, but he didn’t want to get up. He wanted Maggie to find him. He let the party buzz on around him, but he realized he was being stupid. It was Maggie, good old Maggie. He didn’t have to play games with Maggie. She had probably spotted him by now and was wondering why he hadn’t bothered to say hello. He was being ridiculous. Finally he pushed himself up off the couch and crossed the room. Dave was lecturing her on something-or-other, like he always did with anyone who would listen, when she noticed him walking towards her. My chance to come to the rescue, Nathaniel thought, stopping beside Dave.

  Unbothered by Nathaniel’s presence, Dave kept talking, so Nathaniel started making faces at Maggie, who tried to be polite and keep a straight face but failed and burst out laughing. Dave turned to Nathaniel and frowned.

  “Dude, not cool. We were having a serious discussion,” he said.

  “What was the topic this time? Welfare reform? Space tourism? The Palestinian conflict?”

  Dave crossed his arms. “Actually we were talking about the outdated nature of the institution of marriage.”

  Nathaniel wouldn’t have minded hearing Maggie’s views on that subject, but he knew that Maggie hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise.

  “Good to see you,” Maggie said, looking amused.

  Dave, obviously annoyed at the intrusion muttered something and wandered off.

  “You really gave the little people a thrill by showing up tonight,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” She brushed her hair away from her face and Nathaniel noticed that her left hand was bare.

  “You’re like a legend around here. Someone who actually escaped. For years people have gotten to sit around speculating about the awesome adventures you were having, and since you are terrible at keeping in touch, they could let their imaginations run wild and live vicariously through you.”

  “I doubt anyone thought about me at all.”

  “I know that’s not true. I’ve thought about you.” He had, in fact, thought about her all too often. Throughout high school, she was his most trusted confidante, the sort of friend he could tell anything, the sort of friend another guy could never be, and he had yet to meet anyone else with whom he could feel so free and easy.

  Maggie blushed and looked away. When she looked back, she said, “I don’t know about you, but I could use a drink.”

  In the kitchen, Nathaniel grabbed a beer for himself and one for Maggie. He was just about to start pumping her for information—how long she’d be in town, where was she was living, etc.—when Claire came in, grabbed her by the arm, and whisked her off to see someone who just had to talk to her.

  As the night wore on, the house started to feel too hot and crowded for Nathaniel. Usually at Zack’s parties, the people with kids left pretty early, and by the end of the night, it would just be a handful of night owls sitting around playing a board game or relaxing around the fire. That was always the best part of the party. But this was New Year’s. The kids were at home with babysitters and all the revelers would stay until midnight. Around eleven o’clock, Nathaniel couldn’t take it anymore. Maggie was busy talking to everyone but him, and he was drunk and hot and irritated. He got up, found hi
s coat, snagged two beers, and went out into the yard.

  Zack always made sure there was a roaring bonfire for his parties, even if most people were inside. Tonight was no exception. Nathaniel’s footsteps crunched over the thin layer of snow that had fallen a couple of days earlier. He settled onto a bench near the fire and opened his beer. He knew Zack intended to herd everyone outside just before midnight to ring in the New Year under the stars. Until then, he would enjoy the cool air on his back and the warm fire on his face.

  He didn’t know why he was so irritated. Here he was, with his friends, on a beautiful night. He couldn’t blame Maggie for wanting to catch up with everyone. It wasn’t like he had any claim to her. Sure, they had been friends in high school, but Maggie had had lots of friends. It wasn’t like they had ever dated. But the minute he saw her tonight, the past fifteen years fell away and everything felt just right. Here was the one person who had always understood him, the one person he could talk to about anything. He may have been just another friend to her, but she had been his best friend.

  And then there was senior week. Everyone went to Hampton Beach the week after graduation. They all stayed at a dumpy hotel and brought with them as much booze as they could get their hands on. It was early June, so it wasn’t beach season yet. The beach was totally beside the point. The point was to party like there was no tomorrow because they were all about to scatter into amazing, unknown futures. The last night, when everyone else was doing tequila shots in somebody’s hotel room, Maggie found him. All week, he had avoided her, purposefully, perhaps even cruelly. It was just that he knew what she wanted, and he was afraid. She was going to college in upstate New York. He was going to school in Boston. They couldn’t get involved now, only to be torn apart in a few months, and besides, he couldn’t risk ruining her. She was the most perfect girl he’d ever met. Beautiful, smart, kind, talented, she was ideal in every way. But if they started dating, he’d find something wrong with her. That was what always happened. He’d seen it over and over again. He needed her to stay perfect. So he avoided her. But when she sought him out, her pretty eyes glassy with alcohol, he had already had a few beers and shots. He took her hand and they went outside and down to the beach. The moon was full. They took off their shoes and walked where the water lapped the sand, not talking. And then somehow they were kissing. He didn’t know who started it or how, just that her warm, soft lips were against his, and her hands were on his neck, her fingers in his hair, and he wanted to keep kissing her forever. They lay on the beach and fooled around until their clothes were damp and covered in sand. Looking back now, it all seemed so innocent, touching each other over their clothes, experimentally, unsure what to do or how. They were both virgins, and destined to stay that way until college. The furthest they went that night was putting their cold hands on each other’s bare stomachs and backs under their shirts, and then they just lay still in each other’s arms, keeping warm, because the night was chilly and they weren’t dressed for it. They fell asleep like that, waking when dawn came over the horizon, too bright and too early for two teenagers who’d had far too much to drink the night before. They walked back to the hotel in silence, and Nathaniel kissed Maggie’s cheek when he left her at her hotel room. He avoided her for the rest of the summer. The few times they ran into each other at parties, he felt awkward and shy. He was ashamed to recall that a couple of times he actually hooked up with other girls just to push Maggie away.