Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

by Ann Hood

  They laughed together.

  “Did you make that up, Mom?”

  “Oh, no. It’s Ogden Nash.”

  “When did you learn it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. A long time ago someone used to say it to me.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, even when you were a little girl, this big, you would ask a million questions. Who? Why? When?”

  “Who?” Sparrow asked again.

  “Nobody you know,” her mother said.

  IN BED THAT NIGHT, Sparrow listened to the drone of Ron and her mother’s voices. She couldn’t make out their words. The air that came in through the window was wet and vaguely familiar.

  Sparrow looked up at the ceiling. She could just make out the elaborate molding that bordered the edges, the blurred shape of acorns. Sometimes, like earlier tonight, she felt so close to her mother. Now Ron was with her, in the way. Once they were married, it would never be the same again. Sparrow closed her eyes. She thought about running away, going to Maine and finding her father. That would be her real family then. And everything would be all right.

  PART TWO

  Back Then

  Suzanne, Claudia, and Elizabeth, 1966•

  CLAUDIA WAS THE ONE who had come all the way from California with her clothes in a pack on her back. She was full of stories about San Francisco. That first night, she sat cross-legged on her bed in the dorm room dressed in faded jeans and a patchwork vest, her dark red hair frizzing out past her shoulders, and faced her new roommate, Suzanne, telling her about her adventures in Haight-Ashbury that summer.

  “Six of us lived in this great apartment right in the Haight,” Claudia said. “Above a head shop.”

  Suzanne frowned, afraid to ask exactly what one bought in a head shop. Wigs? Hats? Shrunken heads?

  “You know,” Claudia said, “they sell papers, pipes, stuff like that.”

  Suzanne nodded, but she had no idea what this girl was talking about. She should have roomed with someone from her high school, she thought. Her parents were wrong. “You must expand your horizons,” they had told her. “Meet new people.” She looked at the tall bony girl sitting across from her and knew that she did not want to meet anyone else. Her horizons were expanded enough, thank you.

  “Anyway,” Claudia continued, “I was sort of living with this one guy, Bo, but this is the really incredible thing—I was with Bo but with everyone else too. And every day was glorious. Have you ever been to California?”

  “Disneyland,” Suzanne said, thinking that perhaps it wasn’t too late to go to the housing office and request a room change.

  Claudia laughed. “Disneyland! Well, this was sort of like Disneyland. Like a whole summer spinning around in one of those giant pink teacups. Have you ever done mushrooms?”

  Suzanne smoothed the pleats on her skirts, thought of her mother’s dinner parties—beef Wellington, asparagus vinaigrette, sauteed mushrooms in white wine. “Do the mushrooms for me, will you, Suzanne?” Somehow, Suzanne knew that was not what Claudia meant, so she just moved her head vaguely, neither agreeing or disagreeing. When Claudia laughed, Suzanne thought briefly of a boy she knew at St. Michael’s. How far away was that? she wondered. He had liked her, taken her to his prom. Maybe he could help her now.

  “I’m not talking about B&B’s,” Claudia said. “I mean pcilicibin mushrooms. Bo and I ate some and then went over to Tilden Park in Berkeley and looked out at the bridge and the bay and the hills. The sky is different in California. It’s a high sky. Did you ever notice that?”

  Suzanne shook her head. She had heard about people who took LSD and things like that. A boy back home who worked at the Esso station had taken something and gone crazy. One day he was pumping gas and he put the nozzle in someone’s backseat, pouring gas all over the customer’s new Volvo.

  “That’s the real bummer,” Claudia said. “I was supposed to go to Berkeley. But my parents came to our apartment and dragged me out and shipped me off to this backwoods school so my grandparents can keep an eye on me.”

  “Maybe you can transfer in January?” Suzanne said hopefully.

  Claudia shrugged. “Who knows? I’m here now. I’ll just have to make the best of it.”

  SUZANNE WAS THE ONE who arrived first and took the bottom drawers and the bed near the radiator so her roommate wouldn’t think she was selfish. She had a jewelry box that played “Lara’s Theme” and a silver monogrammed brush and hand mirror.

  After they all got to be friends, she discovered she was the only one who was still a virgin. But she lied and told them she had gone to third base once.

  If she hadn’t met them and become their friend, she would have married Ken Farrel, the president of Phi Sigma Kappa, who wanted to be a lawyer and move to Washington, D.C. She had started on that path. She got bids from three sororities and went to the Fall Frolic with Ken. But sometimes, wearing the multi-colored ribbons that signified she was a sorority pledge and walking with a group of other pledges, she would pass Claudia and Elizabeth. And it always seemed that they were doing something—no matter what it was—that was more important, and she would feel guilty; the double blue and gold ribbons on her sweater seemed like an emblem of her shallowness.

  By the time the semester ended, she had met Abel and left the sorority. One day, as she was sitting with Claudia and Elizabeth, dressed in jeans and one of Abel’s sweaters, Ken Farrel passed. “My God, Suzanne!” he said. “What’s happened to you?”

  But for a while back then, it was right. She stayed up late drinking wine with Claudia and Elizabeth and the three of them told each other all of their secrets. It was Suzanne who said to them one night that she had never before known what it was really like to have a friend, and now she had two. They had toasted to their friendship then, clinking glasses of cheap wine, crying and promising they would be this way forever.

  ELIZABETH WAS THE ONE whose roommate never showed up and so she got to spend the entire year in a single. She taught them all to roll towels under the door so the smell of marijuana didn’t spread into the hallway. On the first day of classes, Elizabeth walked into Freshman Lit 101 and fell in love with the T.A., a tall man with blue eyes named Howard Morgan. At first, he spent every weekend with her in the dorm. By the time the semester ended, he spent almost every night there.

  Howard and Elizabeth had beliefs and causes right from the start. They didn’t idly paint peace signs on the walls or say “oink” as the campus police walked by. Instead, they organized and protested and spoke in front of the student union. They went to Washington to march. They got thrown in jail. And they were so in love that Claudia and Suzanne may not have gotten to know Elizabeth at all if it weren’t for the night the van of people from San Francisco arrived.

  It was November, the Thursday night before a long weekend and most students had gone home early. But Suzanne didn’t want to cut classes on Friday and Claudia wasn’t expected at her grandparents’ house until Saturday. So the two of them sat and watched TV and drank strong tea.

  “This needs sugar,” Suzanne said.

  “Let’s see if there’s anyone left who has some. I’m going stir crazy anyway.”

  They walked down the hall, listening for music or laughter to indicate someone else was still around.

  Elizabeth’s door was wide open and she was sitting on the floor making a poster for an anti-Vietnam march in Boston. She was drinking red wine. Red wine in a time when women drank rum and Coke or a sloe gin fizz, or, maybe, a beer.

  “What are you doing?” Claudia asked her.

  “There’s a war going on,” Elizabeth said.

  “Here? My God! And me out of my camouflage fatigues.”

  Suzanne cleared her throat uncomfortably.

  “I think you’re safe here,” Elizabeth said.

  “Good,” Claudia said, and walked in the room.

  Suzanne stayed in the doorway. It was rude to go into a room uninvited.

  “We wanted to borrow some sugar,” Suzanne expla
ined. “For tea.”

  “We have a hot plate,” Claudia said.

  Suzanne shot her a dirty look, then said to Elizabeth, “You won’t say anything, will you? You can have a cup of tea anytime you’d like.”

  Elizabeth smiled. She had a nice smile with large, even teeth. “I have a hot plate too. And I burn candles.”

  “I keep telling her everyone does but she can’t believe so many people break the rules,” Claudia said.

  “Anyway,” Elizabeth said, “I can’t loan you any sugar because I don’t use it. Or white flour. It makes you rot.”

  Suzanne’s eyes widened. “Rot?”

  “Animal fat too.”

  And then the noise began. First the horn honking. Then the shouting.

  “They’re calling Claudia,” Elizabeth said.

  The three women ran to the window. There was a van outside, painted in pink, black, and green psychedelic swirls.

  “It’s Bo!” Claudia shouted. “Come on!”

  And they ran down the stairs and out the door, not even stopping to sign out. That was how it started. They took off into the night with Claudia’s friends, who were driving around the country just to say hello to everyone they knew. After a while, Suzanne stopped saying that maybe they should go back and sign out properly. They drove a long way up the coast and slept on the beach, huddled together like kittens. The friends from California had hashish and they smoked it at dawn, then ran into the water, kicking up the sand, which glowed as if it were fluorescent, and fell at their feet like Roman candles.

  Claudia and Suzanne, 1966•

  MOST OF THEIR CONVERSATIONS were like this, in the dark, Suzanne in her twin bed against the wall near the radiator, Claudia in her bed under the window. Even on cold winter nights she kept the window open wide while Suzanne huddled under a thick white comforter covered with fat yellow roses.

  “I don’t think my brother even likes women, if you know what I mean,” Claudia was saying. “I mean, he never dates. Ever. He doesn’t even look at women. Sometimes I kid him about it. I’ll say, ‘Ben, do you like boys or girls? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?’ Are you listening to me, Suzanne?”

  “Animal, vegetable, or mineral,” Suzanne said without opening her eyes. Claudia talked more than anyone she’d known. She liked to close her eyes and drift off into near-sleep, Claudia’s voice droning on like a comfortable lullaby.

  “When I was in San Francisco last summer he’d take me to the Top of the Mark for drinks every other Friday. He would always have two Manhattans. Always. I’d say, ‘Come on, Ben, order a martini, just this once.’ But of course he never would. That’s what he’s like. So exact. Kind of like you. In fact, now that I think of it, you and Ben are a lot alike. When we were kids I’d have to beg him to do anything. Climb a tree, go into town, anything. Ben would always worry if we really should, if it was all right. Like you. Do you see what I mean, Suzie?” “Mmmm.”

  Claudia sat up, her threadbare secondhand quilt wrapped around her shoulders. Suzanne could smell mothballs from across the room.

  “That thing smells,” Suzanne mumbled. She pulled a strand of her hair across her face and sniffed in its clean, baby-shampoo smell, something she did to block out odors she found unpleasant—burning marijuana, incense, mothballs. She associated all of these smells with Claudia.

  “When I was little,” Claudia said, “I used to run away all the time. Really run, at full speed. Across the fields, down the road, all the way to town. My parents would have to come and find me and I’d cry the whole way home.”

  Suzanne opened her eyes. Claudia was looking out the window, her face tilted upward as if to absorb the moonlight.

  “I could do it now,” she said. “Run and run and run. Up the coast of Maine, all the way to Canada. Beyond Canada.” The quilt had slipped off one shoulder. Her white skin seemed translucent against the blackness of the night. Suzanne thought that if she looked hard enough, Claudia’s pale blue veins would be visible, even from the distance of the room, like the veins in fine marble.

  “Are you unhappy?” Suzanne asked her. “Is that it?”

  Claudia turned toward her.

  “It’s not a question of happy or unhappy. It’s a restlessness. A need. Don’t you have any needs, Suzanne?”

  “Of course I do. Lots.” But even saying that sounded fake to Suzanne. Needs? she thought. She had been raised to expect certain things—straight A’s and boys who opened doors for her, monogrammed silver and delicate crystal that pinged when it was tapped. These other things that Claudia always talked about seemed foreign, alien to her. Yearnings. Achings. Suzanne shook her head.

  “God,” Claudia said suddenly, “I almost fainted when that guy read that essay about you in class today. It was like a poem. He compared you to an angel.”

  Suzanne felt herself turning red and was thankful for the darkness of the room. His voice had been deep as he read it. “I see her,” Abel had recited, “a twinkle of diamond at each ear, wrapped in cashmere…” His eyes were turquoise, the color of the sea. They fixed on her as he spoke. Claudia had leaned over and scribbled on her notebook. It had taken all of Suzanne’s strength to look away from him and down at what she’d written.

  “Do you even know him?” Claudia asked her. She had gotten out of bed and loomed over Suzanne, her tangle of red hair falling forward so that Suzanne could feel its ends against her own.

  “I’ve never even talked to him,” she said.

  “He’s gorgeous.”

  “Gorgeous?” Suzanne laughed. “He’s so scruffy-looking. Like a construction worker or something.”

  “You’re crazy,” Claudia shrieked. “He is the sexiest guy in that class. And I’m sure,” she added in a teasing voice, “that he has a huge penis. He’s just that type.”

  “Stop!”

  “He does have one, you know.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to even think about him. He’s not my type at all.”

  “What is your type? That guy with the shiny shoes and the crew cut? He looks like he works for the FBI.”

  Suzanne didn’t answer. She closed her eyes again. Ken Farrel was her type. Like the boys back home. Lately it seemed like the whole world was going crazy, boys grew their hair long, everybody wore faded old dungarees. It was hard to find a boy like Ken amidst all of it. She tried to call his face to mind, but all she got was an image of Abel, with those incredible eyes.

  “You don’t even know your type,” Claudia said, moving away from Suzanne.

  Far off, down the long hallway outside their room, Suzanne heard the telephone ringing.

  “You should talk,” she said angrily. She was mad at Abel for intruding into her thoughts, mad at Claudia for making her question everything.

  There was a knock on their door.

  “Suzanne,” a voice said. “Telephone.”

  “What time is it?” Suzanne said, pulling on her bathrobe and slippers. “It’s after midnight, isn’t it?”

  “Probably Kenny boy got drunk at a fraternity party and he’s out of his mind with lust for you,” Claudia said.

  Suzanne opened the door. Elizabeth from down the hall was standing there, wrapped in a short red kimono with pale blue birds on it.

  “It’s a guy,” Elizabeth said.

  Suzanne could smell marijuana in Elizabeth’s hair. If someone had told her then that in a few weeks this woman would be her friend, she would never have believed it.

  “It’s after midnight,” Suzanne said.

  Elizabeth shrugged. When they reached her room, Howard opened the door.

  “I missed you,” he said, pulling her inside.

  Suzanne walked past them without looking. It wasn’t right to have a guy in your room, especially after curfew. Especially for the entire night. She stepped into the telephone booth. There was an empty bottle of Coke inside. The phone receiver dangled from a stiff silver cord.

  “Hello?” Suzanne said.

  “Hi.” The voice was deep, surprisingly male.


  She knew it was Abel.

  “Who is this?” she asked. Her mouth felt dry.

  “Abel,” he said. “From Lit 101.”

  “It’s very late.”

  “Is it? I had no idea.”

  Suzanne pushed her fingers into each circle on the dial.

  “I thought we could go for a beer or something.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now? Are you crazy?”

  Claudia squeezed into the phone booth. “Who is it?” she mouthed. Suzanne tried to push her out. “Who?”

  “Abel.” Suzanne formed the name slowly.

  “What room are you in?”

  “It’s after curfew,” Suzanne said.

  “Go. Go,” Claudia mouthed.

  “What room?” Abel said. “I can see in the freshman directory here that it’s Weldin Hall. Right?”

  Suzanne looked at Claudia. Her eyes were shining. “Go.” She made a shooing motion with her hands. For some reason, Suzanne thought of Ken’s red MG. Would you like the top up or down? he always asked her before she got in.

  “I’m sorry,” Suzanne said.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think so. But thank you. And thank you for that lovely essay. It was very sweet.”

  “Are you nuts?” Claudia screamed as they walked back to their room.

  “Quiet,” a sleepy voice called out to them from behind a closed door.

  Suzanne heard bed springs squeak rhythmically in Elizabeth’s room.

  “Are you nuts?” Claudia whispered fiercely.

  “I’d be nuts to go out with him,” Suzanne said. “Really nuts.”

  Suzanne and Elizabeth, 1966•

  “LET ME SEE,” SUZANNE said to Elizabeth.

  They were sitting on the floor in Suzanne’s room. Elizabeth had cut a potato in half and carved a peace sign into its flesh. She rubbed it in ink, then stamped the impression onto grainy white paper, folded in half, with PEACE IN ’67 written inside. She held a finished one up for Suzanne to see. Suzanne thought of the Christmas cards she’d sent, ornate Christmas trees flecked with gold sparkles, a shiny, fat star on top.