Maine (7 page)

She got through the rest of her children’s years at home by telling herself that once they were off at college she’d be free, and that had proven more or less true. In the meantime, she had focused on staying sober; she planted an organic garden in the backyard. She learned that yoga and long walks could help her relieve stress better than chardonnay, and that there was real value to knowing about herbs and vegetables and ways to heal oneself that didn’t come in tiny plastic vials. Her father lent her the money to go to night school and get her master’s degree, after which she worked as a guidance counselor in a private high school full of self-loathing overprivileged girls with eating disorders. She went on lots of dates, which Ann Marie and Alice thought made her the whore of Babylon. A mother shouldn’t be sexual, God forbid. She should have her vagina sealed over with plaster and declare herself closed for business, no matter if she was thirty-nine years old and only beginning to realize who she was.

No one had told Kathleen about the dark parts of motherhood. You gave birth and people brought over the sweetest little shoes and pale pink swaddling blankets. But then you were alone, your body trying to heal itself while your mind went numb. There was a mix of joy and the purest love, coupled with real boredom and occasional rage. It got easier as the kids got older, but it never got easy.

“After I had you, I understood for the first time why people shake their babies to death,” she had told Maggie on one of her long trips to New York.

“Thanks a lot,” Maggie had said.

“Oh no, that’s not what I meant,” Kathleen said. “It wasn’t you—you were the best baby I ever saw. It’s motherhood in general that makes a woman nuts. All those hormones rushing around inside you. You can’t sleep. You can’t reason with this little beast. Before I had kids, I thought those people who shook babies were monsters, with some sort of inorganic urge. Then I realized that the violent urge is totally natural. It’s the stopping yourself part that’s inorganic, that takes real work.”

She wanted her daughter to know this, to have all the information up front. If she herself could have had that, so much of life might have been easier.

Kathleen’s mother had never understood the value of sharing one’s pain. Not for her own good, or for anyone else’s. If Alice hadn’t covered up her drinking, but had talked about it instead—the way it consumed her, the fact that it had caused her to drive them straight into a tree when they were kids—perhaps Kathleen never would have gotten into the same mess years later.

Kathleen and Maggie had a completely open relationship; she had made sure of that. They were best friends. It had just about killed her when Maggie went off to college in Ohio, and she was an adult then, a mother. And it was still torturous now, each time she went to New York for a visit and then had to say good-bye. Kathleen told her daughter everything and Maggie in turn could confide in her. Kathleen took great pride in this, though she knew Alice saw it as a failing.

Her phone vibrated on the counter. A text from Arlo:
A success! Heading home!

He was always revved up after one of his presentations. He liked the school-aged kids the best, since there was no other segment of the population who appreciated conversation about feces and slimy worms quite so much. They called him Mister Worm Poop. On the occasions when Kathleen went with him, he’d introduce her to the crowd as Ms. Worm Poop. Arlo usually brought a couple thousand worms along each time he spoke to a crowd, which sounded like a lot, but amounted to only two pounds’ worth. The children screeched with delight as, one by one, they got to dig their hands into the bins full of slithering creatures.

Kathleen was terribly proud of him. How many people had a vision and actually saw it through? The business was the perfect reflection of their relationship. Arlo was a dreamer, an optimist, a big-picture guy. And Kathleen was a realist—she told it like it was. Together, they just worked.

She smiled now, and thought briefly of changing out of her drawstring pajama pants and Trinity T-shirt into something sort of sexy to surprise him, but what was the point? He had seen her naked a thousand times and she had seen him. She was pushing sixty, and he had passed it four years ago. The jig was up. That was what she appreciated about her sex life with Arlo—the refreshing feeling of not giving a damn. Not out of apathy but out of comfort. He was the easiest man she’d ever been with, sexually speaking. She knew it had lots to do with his warmth and kindness, but another part of it was a function of age. You stopped caring so much about every last lump and bump at some point, you just flat-out refused to suck in your gut while you were trying to have an orgasm. At least she did.

She had spent years worrying about what men thought of the way she looked. These days the only person whose opinion on the matter really touched her was her mother. Alice had a pathological need to discuss everyone’s weight.

Kathleen had last seen her at Christmas, five months earlier.

“You’re looking good, you’ve lost a few,” Alice had said then.

Kathleen hated the fact that she felt pleased by this. “We’ve been taking a lot of hikes in the mountains. Our place backs right onto the foothills. Remember those pictures I sent you?”

It irked her that her mother had never visited. The only ones who had were Maggie and Clare.

“That’s good,” Alice had replied. “Make sure to keep it up now. Winter always makes everyone want to stay inside and get fat.”

“I live in California,” Kathleen said.

“So? They don’t have winter there?”

“No, not really.”

“Anyway, keep hiking.”

It was a special kind of curse, having a beautiful mother, when you yourself were just average. Alice had gotten a reputation in the neighborhood when Kathleen and Pat and Clare were kids for being rather odd because she ran around the block several times every morning in a tennis dress and trench coat. Twenty years later, this would be called jogging. Alice was still careful about her figure, and she never let Kathleen forget those thirty pounds she’d gained after her own two kids. She had gotten more active when she met Arlo, but her love of sweets and cheeses kept her plump.

“You have such a pretty face,” Alice would say. Or, before Arlo came along, “I can say this because I’m your mother. You might find it easier to meet a nice fella without that enormous gut.”

   Kathleen had felt tremendous amounts of guilt for leaving Massachusetts, but most of the time she was glad to be free. Here, no one based their knowledge of her on what she had done thirty years ago. No one made her feel guilty for missing a family party, or tried to tell her that by declaring herself an alcoholic she was only looking for attention. People in the organic gardening world and at AA treated her with such respect and even admiration that she almost felt like an imposter.

Kathleen didn’t like the person she became when she was around the Kellehers. She reverted to that weaker version of herself, the bitter woman she had been in the past. She grew short-tempered and easily angry; she lashed out at the slightest provocation. There were things she was deeply ashamed of and they would not let her forget.

Arlo believed that life was short and you should interact only with people you enjoyed. He also believed that loyalty was earned—sharing a bloodline didn’t mean you had to be close. He saw his father and brother every few years, when one of them happened to pass through the town where another one lived. When Kathleen asked him, he said he felt no remorse about seeing them so rarely. “We have nothing in common,” he said. His brother was an accountant with three kids who had moved to Des Moines when he met his wife, a former Iowa beauty queen.

“What on earth would we talk about?” Arlo asked, as if most people interacted with their families for the riveting conversation.

The Kellehers considered it sacrilege that Kathleen went back East only twice a year. Whereas Arlo, when she told him she was planning another trip to Massachusetts, just said, “Why are you such a glutton for punishment?”

Needless to say, he had not been raised Catholic.

“You’re lucky there’s no such thing as Presbyterian guilt,” she had told him once when they were discussing it.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Never mind.”

“It would be a different story if you didn’t let them get under your skin like you do, but they seem to make you so stressed,” he’d said. “Around your family, you never act like yourself.”

“I know,” she replied, though sometimes she feared that the opposite was true, that her real self was that dark, angry one she had shoved in a box years ago, the one that emerged only when she was home.

   When Ann Marie called a few days earlier, she practically bit Kathleen’s head off about the fact that Maggie and Gabe were going to Maine for just two weeks this year. Ann Marie had apparently decided that Alice couldn’t be alone up there for the remainder of June, despite the fact that Alice was alone all fall, winter, and spring, and managed just fine.

Kathleen tried to take deep breaths and to channel Arlo’s calmness. Her sister-in-law was only a person, after all. Why shouldn’t they be able to talk rationally? But when it came to Ann Marie, Kathleen could never help it. Her temper flared. Did Ann Marie actually think she could drop her business, her dogs, and Arlo, because she said so?

When Ann Marie realized that Kathleen refused to entertain this ludicrous concern, she told her to forget it. Translation: it wasn’t a big deal in the first place; Ann Marie had just felt like making a fuss. This was typical of her sister-in-law, who might as well have had the word
MARTYR
stamped across her forehead.

Ann Marie called Alice Mom. Kathleen still found this jarring, more than thirty years after the first time she heard it. Who, if given the choice, would want to claim Alice for a mother?

Back in Massachusetts, Kathleen had occasionally pretended in her head that her AA sponsor, Eleanor, was her mother. When they sat in the coffee shop below Eleanor’s apartment in Harvard Square, Kathleen would drink tea and talk about her day—another fight with Paul over money for the kids, another meeting with Chris’s principal that had ended in tears.

Eleanor had always told Kathleen that a sober life didn’t mean a perfect life. You could do everything right, and still, things might not turn out the way you’d imagined. She herself had been married three times. The first two were booze-soaked, dramatic, passionate, stupid. Just like Kathleen’s marriage to Paul had been. Just like she feared Maggie and Gabe’s relationship might be, if Maggie didn’t end it soon. Eleanor’s third marriage was a sober one. Even so, it ended in divorce. Then she met a wonderful man, and two years later she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. You never knew where a day or a year would take you. Kathleen hoped Maggie understood that.

She also hoped that Ann Marie wouldn’t try to guilt her daughter into staying on in Maine any longer than she wanted to. She herself certainly wasn’t going to mention Ann Marie’s silly concern to Maggie, but who knew? Ann Marie might have already gone straight to the source. When it came to the Kellehers, Kathleen hated that Maggie was an adult now—someone they could call or advise whenever they wanted, independent of her.

“Technically, June is your month,” Ann Marie had said during that call a few days earlier, as if this was a prize that had been bestowed upon Kathleen, instead of what it really was: the raw end of the deal.

It hadn’t escaped Kathleen that when Patrick decided they should divvy up their time at the cottage, he had assigned the worst month to her. Who wanted to take their summer vacation in June, when it wasn’t even hot yet?

She had called him one night a few years ago after an AA meeting focused on standing up for yourself rather than internalizing your anger.

“You gave me the worst month for Maine,” she said into the phone.

“Excuse me?” Patrick said. “You haven’t even been there in years.”

It was true that she had avoided the place ever since her father died, wanting to forget both the good and the bad of it. With few exceptions, she had never really liked going there. The act of vacationing in beautiful surroundings always made her turn melancholy, as if in the absence of external annoyances to displease her, she suddenly realized her own inferiority—her fleshy upper arms, the sun spots that had worsened with age, and just how little she wanted to return to her day-to-day life. (No doubt, picturesque Sonoma Valley would be intolerable if not for the fact that her industry was worm shit.)

But this wasn’t about that. It was about fairness, about her children’s rights too.

“Anyway,” her brother went on, “I wasn’t aware that there was a bad month to take a free beach vacation.”

Oh, he had to add that word,
free
. As if she wasn’t well aware that he had been paying the property tax in Maine since Daniel died. (Only to stake his claim to the place, she assumed.) Never mind that he hadn’t offered her a penny after her divorce, when she and her children were practically on the verge of living on the street.

“It’s easy to be generous when you have cash coming out of your eyeballs,” she said, which was actually kinder than Patrick deserved. The truth was he wasn’t generous, not toward anyone who actually needed help. He never donated in a big way, or volunteered, or assisted anyone outside his immediate family. Patrick was the kind of person whose worldview made him think he was the whole, rather than a part of it.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he said in such a measured, almost jolly, tone that she wondered if he was standing among his rich yuppie friends, maybe in the middle of a cocktail party or a round of golf.

The Serenity Prayer floated through her head:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
.

Why was it so much easier to buy all that in an AA meeting full of strangers than when she was interacting with her own family? She had learned techniques for coping with almost anyone, but the Kellehers still aroused such anger in her, such terrible behavior.