Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  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.

  “What was I thinking?” she said, unable to stop herself. “Questioning the boy king, Jesus Christ himself. Apologies.”

  She hung up. There was a pull from inside her then, which she recognized as the urge to have a drink. She sat with the feeling for a moment, letting it be, observing where it manifested itself in her body: smack in the middle of her chest.

  The resentments had piled one on top of another over so many years, so that Kathleen couldn’t think of her adult brother’s arrogance without remembering in anger how her parents had sent him to an expensive Catholic boys’ school while she and Clare went to public school, how Alice had always bent over backward to tell him how gifted and smart he was, though she had never done this for her daughters.

  Alice had grown up poor, and though she had raised her children middle-class, she always let it be known that she still thought she deserved better. Not the rest of them, necessarily. Only her. She put on airs and was ridiculously vain about her appearance. She thought of herself as some sort of sophisticate trapped in a world that wasn’t her own, even though in fact she was a Dorchester girl from a working-class Irish family, who knew hardly anything about the way life worked.

  Kathleen had often joked with her sister, Clare, that their mother liked Pat’s wife better than either of them because Ann Marie was an imposter, just like Alice.

  Even in college, her sister-in-law was unabashedly square for the most part. Before he met her, Pat had a bit of a wild streak—smoking lots of dope, bed-hopping all around St. Mary’s. When he met Ann Marie, she gave him the full June Cleaver treatment. Pat was on the golf team, and Ann Marie actually organized bake sales so the team could get matching jackets, as if she were his mother. Pat bragged about this revolting fact when he came home that Christmas, and Alice had put a hand to her heart and said, “She sounds positively wonderful.”

  Ann Marie came from a part of Southie that Alice had always referred to as “the wrong side of the tracks,” but like Alice herself, when asked where she grew up, Ann Marie would fudge it a bit. “Right on the Milton line,” she’d say, even though there was no line between Southie and Milton. When they met her, her brother was in trouble with the police and had recently disappeared. He was an underling in the Winter Hill Gang and he had dabbled in all kinds of crime—run drugs, trafficked guns to the IRA, and possibly even helped to murder a businessman in Oklahoma in the mid-seventies. It was Patrick who had told Kathleen all this. Ann Marie herself would never acknowledge such a scandal.

  Ann Marie wanted so badly for everyone to think she was a goody-goody even though deep down she was no different from the rest of them. The only time Kathleen had ever seen her truly let loose was when she visited Pat and Ann Marie in South Bend after they had graduated college. Pat was killing time that summer, waiting for business school to start. Ann Marie was waitressing and making noise about getting a nursing degree, though she never actually did it. One night during her trip, Kathleen drunkenly watched from the backseat as a twenty-year-old Ann Marie pulled off her blouse and stuck her head out the car window, bellowing “Hey Jude” at the top of her lungs, hammered beyond comprehension. “Na-na-na-nananana!!!”

  Pat was behind the wheel, probably ten beers into the night himself.

  “Get your hot ass back in here,” he said, pulling at his then-girlfriend’s back pocket.

  “No-no-no-nononono!!!” Ann Marie screamed, to the tune of, well, just guess. A few minutes later, she slid into her seat and then over to Patrick in only her bra and skirt, licking his ear as if Kathleen weren’t there. The next morning, Ann Marie said sheepishly, “I hope I didn’t do anything too disgraceful last night. I really have no memory of it. Pancakes?”

  Kathleen would never forget it. Later, she wished that she had thought to take a picture. She dreamed of mailing it to Alice without a note or a return address.

  Even back in college, Pat and Ann Marie acted like perfect angels around their elders, a practice that irked Kathleen to no end. As soon as they were married, Pat straightened up in earnest, and they turned into a couple of pod people. Once, in Cape Neddick, when the kids were small, Ann Marie had had one too many glasses of rum punch, and proudly divulged to Kathleen that Pat was the first and only man she had ever slept with. As if women who saved their virginity were somehow better than the rest; as if anyone was keeping score.

  When Ann Marie addressed you now, she’d say, “How are you doing, good?” as if to direct you toward the correct answer: No negativity, please. It’s distasteful. Kathleen thought that if she would only show some sign of weakness, some signal of being human, then she might stop being so hard on her sister-in-law. But after thirty-something years, that seemed unlikely.

  Ann Marie used the family
’s place in Maine as a sort of status symbol to impress her vapid country club friends, which, Kathleen knew, was why she and Pat had built that showy house next door for Daniel and Alice. Ann Marie probably kept a file on which pieces of furniture to buy for which rooms in the Maine house the second Alice croaked.

  She spoke mostly about numbers—volume, distance, temperature, price—having nothing more interesting to talk about than the fact that it was seventy-four degrees in April, or that her mother was turning eighty-one this year; or how absolutely insane it was that red bell peppers could be priced at four dollars a pound.

  Ann Marie had her children believing they’d been born to a saint—a sexless, guiltless saint, who might need a bottle of white wine to get through a stressful day, as long as no one was watching, but hey, what was wrong with that? She cooked elaborate dinners for Pat every night, even if she was going out, as if he was incapable of using the stove. She took classes in flower arranging and cake decorating.

  Kathleen worried about Ann Marie’s older daughter, Patty. It pained her to see the poor girl always in a state of panic, no doubt wondering how the hell she might ever measure up as a mother or a wife. Kathleen often thought of letting Patty in on the secret that many people thought her mother was insane. She had wanted to rescue her from that stifling home when she was a kid, but now Patty had gone the way of so many young women—she was trying to do it all. She was a lawyer and the mother of three small children by the time she turned thirty.

  Kathleen’s brother and sister-in-law were grandparents! She tried not to think about it, since it was an uncomfortable reminder of how horrifyingly old they had all become. Her pulse quickened, and not in a good way, when she entertained the idea of her children bearing children of their own.

  Kathleen had never liked the way Ann Marie treated kids, no matter how maternal everyone thought she was. She’d bake cookies with them after school and take them ice-skating and make clothes for their dolls, putting other mothers to shame in that way. (Some women were created to make other women feel like shit about themselves. Ann Marie was one of them.) But she also controlled every move her children made—she told them what to wear, which classes to take, who they should and should not date. She wouldn’t let them have so much as a goldfish in the house even though they begged for a puppy, because she couldn’t stand the mess associated with pets. Fiona, her youngest, had wanted to play the tuba in the high school band; Ann Marie insisted that the piccolo was more appropriate.

  Who could say what Ann Marie’s children might have become if they’d been allowed to just be?

  Kathleen remembered an afternoon when Chris was small—he couldn’t have been more than five. She had left him with Ann Marie while she took Maggie to a doctor’s appointment. Arriving to pick him up, Kathleen found her son curled up in a ball in Ann Marie’s front hall, crying.

  “What happened?” she asked, and Chris uttered those unforgettable words: “Aunt Ann Marie hit me.”

  Kathleen’s anger unleashed, she marched toward the kitchen, where Ann Marie stood at the counter, wiping it down with a sponge.

  “You hit my child?” Kathleen shouted, startling Little Daniel, who was playing with his trucks on the floor.

  Ann Marie smiled, and said, as if by way of explanation, “He was talking back. I kept telling him to be a good boy and sit down, and he kept throwing a fit. Then he hit Little Daniel with a Tonka truck, very hard. I think it’s going to leave a mark.”

  Kathleen raised her voice even louder. “So you decided to hit him to teach him that hitting is wrong?”

  “It was hardly a hit,” Ann Marie said faintly. “I spanked his bottom with an open hand. I’m sorry.”

  Kathleen knew Ann Marie could not stand conflict. Already her eyes were welling up. Good.

  “Let me make this clear,” Kathleen said. “Open hand, closed hand, whatever—you may never touch either of my children for any reason, ever again. Got that? If you do, I’ll report you to the authorities.”

  Later that night, her sister, Clare, called. “I heard you’re considering turning Ann Marie in to Social Services,” she said. “Apparently at this very moment she’s trying to pick out the right potpourri for her prison cell.”

  “Who told you about it?” Kathleen said. “Oh, let me guess.”

  “Indeed. Alice told me to tell you to apologize.”

  “Apologize!”

  “You’re too hotheaded. No one knows where you get it. And apparently you take Ann Marie for granted. She’s the best babysitter you’ll ever get, as far as our mother can tell. You leave your kids with her all the time, but don’t accept that she’s their aunt, not some sort of hired help. Oh, and also, according to Alice, kids need a slap every now and again. It’s good for them.”

  “Well, take it from the mother of the year.”

  “Why I’m now in on this, I have no idea.”

  “Why the hell does Ann Marie always run to Mom?”

  “Because she’s the daughter Alice never had.”

  Kathleen had forgiven Ann Marie or, if not forgiven her exactly, she had not mentioned the incident again. They were a foursome back then—Patrick and Ann Marie, Kathleen and her husband, Paul, frequently going to outdoor concerts at the Hatch Shell together, driving up to Maine, taking the kids to the Marshfield Fair, or out to dinner at Legal Sea Foods. And much as she hated to admit it, it was true that Ann Marie sat for her kids often, probably two or three times a week, while Kathleen was never asked to reciprocate. (Ann Marie had her own sisters for that, and anyway, she didn’t have a job.) Even though Kathleen didn’t find Ann Marie particularly interesting, smart, or enlightened, they were family. It was impossible to stay distant for long.

  A few years later, it was this sort of closeness that Patrick used as an excuse for why he had helped Paul cover up his affair.

  Two nights a week for a year, the two of them, her husband and her brother, had claimed they were together—Tuesday night poker, Friday night Kiwanis meetings. Paul was gone other nights, too, inexplicably coming home after midnight, never bothering to give Kathleen an explanation. She sensed that something was happening, but she stuffed the feeling down deep, wanting and not wanting to know.

  One Friday night after she put the kids to bed and downed half a bottle of red wine, she called Ann Marie, to ask if they’d be going to Alice and Daniel’s for a barbecue the next day.

  Ann Marie turned her mouth away from the phone and said, “Honey, are we going over to your mom’s tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” came Patrick’s unmistakable voice.

  “What’s Pat doing there?” Kathleen had said. “I thought he was at Kiwanis.”

  Ann Marie might have said something convincing if she wasn’t such a dimwit—He has a cold, or Patty had a ballet recital so he skipped the meeting—but instead, she was silent for a moment, before saying, “What do you mean? Pat’s not here. I was talking to Little Daniel.”

  Kathleen took a deep breath. “You’re full of shit, Ann Marie. Now do you want to tell me what’s going on, or do you want to put Pat on?”

  Ann Marie’s voice quavered. “I think you’d better take it up with your husband,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Kathleen was still awake when he came in, the rest of the wine gone. She sat at the kitchen table, watching Letterman on the black-and-white set, waiting for the back door to swing open.

  “You’re up late,” he said when he saw her.

  “How was Kiwanis?” she asked calmly, though her heart was racing.

  “Eh, dull,” he said. “But we went for a few beers after and had a pretty good time.”

  “Did my brother mention a party at my parents’ house tomorrow?” she asked.

  “He might have,” Paul said tentatively. “I honestly can’t remember now. I love the guy, but he never shuts up, you know? He rambled on so much tonight, I can’t remember half of it.”

  Kathleen drummed her fingers on the table. “Don’t lie to me,” she said.


  “What?” he said, taking a beer from the fridge.

  “I know where you were,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My brother told me everything,” she lied. “He told me all about her.”

  Paul squinted. “Lower your voice,” he said. “The kids are sleeping.”

  “Oh! The kids. The kids!” she yelled. “Now you’re worried about the kids?”

  “You’re drunk,” he said. “I can’t talk to you like this.”

  “You’re pathetic!” she said. She could tell from his face that she had rubbed him raw with that.

  “Fine,” he said. “There’s someone else. Is that what you want to hear? Pat and Ann Marie saw us out once—a million years ago. It was his idea, you know, the Kiwanis crap, the poker. I wanted to tell you, flat out.”

  Kathleen was stunned. “Well, aren’t you a sweetheart?” she said.

  He had been looking straight at her, practically glaring, but now he turned his eyes to a spot behind her, and his face broke into a big fake smile. Kathleen followed his gaze. Maggie stood there in the doorway in her cotton nightgown, her eyelids still heavy from sleep.

  A string of painful revelations followed, and Kathleen drank more with each one: Paul had been seeing the other woman for over a year. During that time he had loaned her ten grand, but he hadn’t paid his own mortgage in nine months and now the bank was ready to foreclose. Kathleen might have suspected an affair, but she’d had no idea about the money. Her father offered to help, but there was nothing to be done. In March, they lost the house.

  At her father’s urging, Kathleen took the kids and went to the cottage in Maine.

  She fell into a fog that spring. She would forget to feed Maggie and Chris their dinner, or she’d lock up the cottage and climb into bed early, only to realize a while later that her children were still outside playing on the beach.