Maine (21 page)

She checked her e-mail. He should be on the way to his morning photo shoot by now. In fact, he probably hadn’t even gone. There was nothing from him, only a short note from her brother (
Hey, isn’t Mother’s Day coming up? Are we doing something, or
 … Mother’s Day had been two weeks earlier. She had sent nice flowers with both their names on the card, and now she wrote Chris back to tell him so.) There was a message from her boss, Mindy, with the subject line ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS WEEK.

Maggie signed out. She wished she hadn’t cleaned her apartment so thoroughly in advance of the trip to Maine, so that she might have some dishes to wash, or a bathroom floor that needed scouring. She kept her place spotless. Her shrink had once asked whether she thought this was a reaction to her mother’s choices, and Maggie laughed, because what behavior on earth wasn’t a reaction to some mother’s choice?

Even after her parents’ divorce, after her mother got sober, Kathleen still could never manage to vacuum the carpets or take out the trash like all other mothers seemed to be able to do. Dishes lay grimy in the sink and on the countertop for days. A thick layer of dust and dog hair covered the bookshelves and tables and windowsills. Piles of magazines and cardboard boxes that Kathleen intended to recycle someday were stacked in the back hall. She was forever writing down phone numbers on scraps of paper and then losing them hours later. She kept doing this, even after Maggie bought her one of those whiteboards you could attach to the refrigerator door with magnets.

The farmhouse in California was even messier than the home Maggie had grown up in, with fruit flies buzzing all around the kitchen, landing in your tea or your breakfast cereal. Kathleen never changed the sheets in the guest room. Maggie might go there and not return for nine months, but the sheets would stay put. She didn’t enjoy visiting, especially with Gabe, who had never hidden his feelings about the place. And she wondered about Arlo—had he too lived in his own filth for years, so that the situation seemed completely normal?

   Maggie dialed her shrink’s number at ten o’clock, the exact time she knew Dr. Rosen got to the office. She was always saying that Maggie should feel free to call and talk between sessions if she needed to, but Maggie had never thought of taking her up on the offer until now. It seemed like an option for suicide cases and manic-depressives, not women like her, suffering from a mix of romantic turmoil and white-girl blues.

Now she said, “Hi, it’s Maggie Doyle. Do you have a minute?”

She told Dr. Rosen about Gabe, their fight. She did not mention the baby.

“We were supposed to be heading to Maine today, and I’m feeling sort of adrift.”

“Have you thought of going by yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “I took the days off from work, and I really need to focus on writing my book. And maybe it would be good for me. But then I think about the spotty cell phone service and having no one around but my grandmother.”

The cottage was an isolated place, which could be cozy or smothering, depending. She had experienced it both ways over the years. She wished her mother could come along. It struck her then, as it often did, that Kathleen was no longer in Boston. She had moved across the country, and though Maggie still saw her almost as often as she had when they were both on the East Coast, there was something sad and lonely about this. She couldn’t just run home to her mom, a three-hour train ride away, even if she wanted to.

“It might feel really good to go alone,” Rosen went on. “Empowering! Time to work on your book, a change of scenery.”

“We were going to take Gabe’s car, and I don’t know how to drive, so—”

“Take a bus, gosh,” Rosen said. “At least think about it. Time off from Gabe seems advisable.”

Maggie’s heart sank. She tried to think of some way of mentioning the other part, without actually saying the words.

“You can always call me again if you need to,” Dr. Rosen said, apparently her way of ending the call. The woman who had taught Maggie about boundaries had a hyperawareness of them herself: she knew all about Maggie, while Maggie couldn’t ask her a simple personal question. “Where are you going on vacation?” was met with an uncomfortable smile and a reassuring, “Don’t worry, we’ll pick right up again the week after next,” as if Maggie had intended to trail her to the Berkshires and have a breakdown, when she had only been making conversation.

Maggie resented her for a split second, then resented herself for being completely incapable of having a fully functional and honest relationship with anyone, including a paid mental health professional.

“Thanks for everything,” she said politely.

They hung up. She glanced over at her suitcase, still packed. Maybe she should go alone. It might be good for her. If only Alice weren’t such a wild card, her behavior fluctuating from amiable to nightmarish in a flash.

Maggie had an embarrassing desire for Alice’s affection, which made her act strangely around her. She actually drank more in Alice’s presence in an attempt to win her grandmother’s approval. Dr. Rosen had had a field day with that one. Still, her real allegiance was always to Kathleen, and when she thought of what Alice had put her mother through, she almost wanted to break all ties with her grandmother.

It wasn’t just Kathleen—they had all been the recipients of Alice’s wrath at one time or another. She was strange: effervescent and charming, her presence taking up so much space. Yet she sometimes slipped into venomous moods without warning. Alice could say the cruelest thing, a comment you would carry with you for the rest of your life, and then a minute later, she’d be smiling, wondering why on earth you had to be so sensitive. A week before Maggie’s prom, she had been over at her grandparents’ house for dinner, and Alice and Daniel had her laughing all night, as they danced across the living room, teaching her the Charleston and the two-step. She had loved them deeply in that moment, vowed to visit more often. But then, on prom night, in front of her date and his parents, Alice had said, “Oh, Maggie, you couldn’t have laid off the ice cream for this? Darling, you are positively fat!”

Maggie knew her grandmother’s aversion to her branch of the family had to do with jealousy over how much her grandfather had loved them, especially Kathleen. Which was strange, really. Wouldn’t you want your husband to be devoted to his children and grandchildren? But that wasn’t the way Alice worked.

Right after her grandfather died, Maggie had made a real effort to call Alice two or three times a week. (She hid this fact from her mother, who had vowed never to speak to Alice again after what happened at the funeral.) But Alice didn’t want to talk. She always cut the call short, saying, “Shouldn’t you be working on your writing instead of jabbering on the phone with me?” or citing long-distance charges as if it were 1952. Maggie didn’t call much anymore. She occasionally thought to write a long letter, but she could never think of what to say. Alice didn’t call her very often either, and when she did, it was usually with some odd request. Would Maggie please go to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and light a candle for her cousin Ryan, who had an audition coming up, or for Fiona, who was serving the Lord through her Peace Corps work so far away? Maggie would always say yes, intending to follow through, but then she would forget, or reason her way out of it—the cathedral was all the way uptown, and did the God she didn’t believe in really care that much more about a five-dollar candle, lit among tourists drinking Starbucks coffee in the pews, than he did about a solemn prayer delivered in the diminutive chapel on Cranberry Street, right by her apartment?

   Maggie always thought that family gatherings would be fun, great, loving times, but usually they were either boring or tense. The truly enjoyable get-togethers had gotten fewer and farther between since her grandfather died, but the memory of them kept the Kellehers coming back together, trying to re-create the magic. She knew all this, and yet she still craved it.

She especially missed childhood summers when the whole family would go up to Maine together. Alice was the hostess in those days, organizing group dinners and long car rides to new beaches, or instructing her husband to take all the grandkids out digging for clams in Kittery at low tide. They piled into his old Buick. At the shore, they stood in shallow water for hours, thrusting their rakes and their bare feet down deep into the oozing sand, screaming with delight and fear when they hit a clamshell. They filled buckets with the creatures, and by the time the sun set, Daniel would say, “Okay, let’s bring these fellas home so Grandma can cook them up.” Then Maggie and Fiona and Patty would yell out “No!” and the boys would yell “Yes!” while their grandfather stood there laughing. They always returned to the cottage without a single clam.

Every year since her uncle Patrick had created the cottage schedule, Maggie had gone to Cape Neddick for a few days in June, usually with Allegra or a couple of friends from high school, but it wasn’t the same. Her grandmother rarely invited them over or seemed to want to spend time together. She acted like she was entirely too busy, though doing what, Maggie could never be sure. Besides the awkward hello and good-bye, and one or two rushed dinners, she hardly ever spoke to Alice on those trips. Alice seemed content to be shut up alone in the house next door.

But when she brought Gabe to Maine the previous summer, her grandmother suddenly brightened. The fun they had reminded Maggie of the old days. Alice played the piano in the cottage after dinner one night, and Gabe sang along, belting out show tunes, unbearably off-key. Maggie was shocked and touched that he knew the words. He asked Alice about her favorite books, her funniest memories of Maggie as a kid.

“You’re amazing,” he told her over and over, to Maggie’s slight agitation, for she had told Gabe of Alice’s unkindness toward her mother, and she almost wished his affections would be harder for Alice to win.

In a night, he somehow pulled from Alice what Maggie was always aiming for—real conversation, tales of the past that would die with her unless she told them now. Alice was in the middle of some story about babysitting for Maggie and Chris when they were kids, and how they had hidden from her at the zoo as a prank, throwing Chris’s baseball cap into the monkey cage. Gabe laughed, and Maggie did, too, though she was positive the story was made up.

She asked then, “So, Grandma, what was your childhood like? Tell us about that.”

Alice’s eyes changed quickly. “I was talking about something else,” she said. “You interrupted me. Anyway, I should be getting on with my evening. I’ll see you kids tomorrow.”

That night in bed, Maggie said, “What did I tell you? The woman hates my guts.”

“You know, she really does seem to,” Gabe said with a smile. Then he wrapped her up in his arms and said, “But I love your guts. I think you have the sexiest guts on the planet.”

“Honestly, though,” Maggie said. “I wish she liked me half as much as she likes you.”

“You two are family, it’s different,” he said. “I don’t understand why you need her approval so badly. You’re nothing alike.”

Now she tried to imagine what she and Alice would say to each other if they were forced to spend two weeks together. She couldn’t quite picture it, but she wanted to. She thought of Alice, alone up at the beach house. She was slipping a bit mentally, maybe; she seemed confused sometimes. Kathleen always said Alice was as healthy as a horse, but how many good summers did she have left?

Maggie thought of the cottage itself, and how much she loved the place. Dr. Rosen was right—how hard was it to take a bus? The ocean would restore her. And if she was having a miserable time, she could always turn around and come home.

She would go alone.

But she’d give it a day, in case Gabe changed his mind and decided to come too.

   Around noon, Maggie dialed the number of her grandparents’ house in Maine. Alice answered after four rings, sounding sort of tipsy. Maggie had never seen her grandmother drink until after her grandfather died. But since then, it was rare to see Alice without a glass in her hand, even at this time of day.

“Grandma, it’s Maggie,” she said.

“Hold on, let me stick a thingamajig into my book to save the page,” Alice said. She came back onto the line a moment later. “How are you, darling?”

“Good. You?”

“Marvelous. I called you earlier.”

“I know, that’s why I’m calling.”

“How on earth do you know? I didn’t leave a message.” Her words were soaked in suspicion, as if Maggie were either lying or working for the CIA.

“What’s going on there?” Maggie asked.

“I just put a chicken into the oven for dinner later, and now I’m sitting here on the porch with my feet up. They have been absolutely killing me. Circulation, I guess. Have you seen the new adaptation of
David Copperfield
on PBS? I think you’d really like it. They’re airing it in five parts this week. I watched the second part last night. A woman from church told me about it, and there’s that actress with the enormous eyes, oh, what’s her name, what’s her name? Ann Marie would know it, I’ll have to ask her. She was in
Bleak House
also. Anyway, when are you coming?”

The way Alice rambled made Maggie wonder how long it had been since she had spoken to anyone. Sometimes Maggie would picture what an average day might look like for Alice, and the thought of her grandmother’s lonesomeness was like a punch in the gut. She felt happy about her decision to visit.

“I’ll be there tomorrow. So maybe we can watch the rest of the show together.”

“Okay, well, tell Gabe I’ve got a new book of sheet music from the library—
Broadway: The Patriot Songs.
”

“Actually, it’s just going to be me,” Maggie said.

Perhaps Alice hadn’t heard her, because she only responded, “I need to get to the Shop ’n Save before they run out of the good muffins that he likes. And they’ve got hamburger meat on sale, so we can do burgers on the grill tomorrow night if you want. Or I could do a meatloaf. Let’s do that, because it might rain.”