by Mary F. Pols
“I’m not expecting him to be my boyfriend, Sam,” I said. “But he says he’s going to help take care of the baby, and that has been a factor in my decision. Maybe he’ll bail somewhere down the line, and if he does, I’ll cope.”
Sam was just gathering steam. “You have to expect him to bail. You should plan on him bailing,” he said.
I tried to shift the topic off Matt.
“Look Sam, almost all of my friends have already had children. They’re going to be able to help me. I’ll have a great support network. I have Kir. Kir knows everything about kids. I have Liza. I have Sara.”
“That’s true,” he said, in the tone of an expert debater softening up his opponent before going in for the kill. “But none of them have had children like this. Everyone was married. You are going to be alone in this emotional landscape.”
I started to cry. Alone in this emotional landscape. I pictured all the married mothers I knew standing under a peaceful, high canopy of redwood trees, cradling their babies and looking up, smiling. The towering height of the trees was reassuring; Things have always been this way, they seemed to say. Everybody in that landscape was wearing Patagonia. They looked comfortable and content.
Meanwhile over in my emotional landscape, I saw a lone figure, clutching a wailing baby on a blackened hillside. In my news reporting days, I covered a lot of wildfires. When the burn is fresh, but the immediate danger has passed, the firefighters often take reporters back into the fire zone. They drive you up into the hills, on roads that are the only man-made things that haven’t been destroyed, and then they park and invite you to get out and walk among gray ashes, ravaged trees, and patches of smoldering earth. Secretly, I loved the theatricality of being backstage at a disaster, with its eerie sense of disruption and eloquent reminder that we are all very small, but I certainly didn’t want to linger in this desolate landscape.
I was beyond being able to make Sam understand my point of view. If I even had one. I was so at sea that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure I had an opinion. I wept into the phone for another minute or two, figuring it wouldn’t hurt for him to see how wretched he was making me feel. He had three kids. He couldn’t just be happy for me, getting to have one?
“I’m sorry,” I said, between sobs. “I just don’t want to talk anymore.”
I tossed the phone to the end of the bed. It landed next to McGee, my tiger-striped gray cat. He put his ears back and looked at it, then looked at me, offended. “Come here, Mr. McGee,” I said, and put my hand out to him. He stood up to nuzzle me, and then plunked down next to my chest and started to purr. I tried to tell myself Sam was being ridiculous. Plenty of women had babies by themselves, and presumably they’d be in that emotional landscape with me.
But there was something in there I couldn’t shake: his supposition that I would construct a fantasy around this whole thing whereby I ended up part of a couple. Sam didn’t know me back when I was pining for Peter. But he did know the Mary who was capable of wanting the wrong things. As I lay there with my feline support network, I realized how much I craved my mother, wanted her to come and stroke my hair and tell me I’d never be alone in any stupid emotional landscape, because she would be there.
ALL THROUGH THOSE FIRST ELEVEN WEEKS of pregnancy, I couldn’t wait to get to the Cove. On real maps of the Maine coast, this inlet is too small and insignificant to have a name, but on the map of my life, it is the ultimate destination, a beacon beckoning me every summer. In my mind, it deserves capitalization, for it is my happiest landscape. All the way across the country, trying to breathe through my never-ending desire to puke, I imagined myself floating on my back in the Cove, looking up at the pine trees against a radiant blue sky. I’d finally get my mind to stop chewing on itself. I could be serene, the way pregnant women are supposed to be. At the Cove, I might even start to enjoy the idea of being pregnant.
The drive from Brunswick takes only about a half hour, but if you’re impatient, it seems a lot longer. The turnoff onto the dirt road that leads to the Cove comes up so suddenly you could blow right by it if you weren’t paying attention. Then you’d end up at the lodge where John and Liza and I had all met, barely a quarter mile past the turnoff. Its dock, the place where I’d first kissed Peter when he came back from Africa, was just a short paddle by kayak from the Cove. Benet and Beth had gotten married on the lawn next to the lodge’s saltwater pool. My oldest sister, Cynthia, had worked as a waitress there back in 1971. So much of my family’s history had been written in this place.
“Was the Boathouse as dirty as ever when you arrived?” I asked Wib, stretching my hand out her car window and letting the wind hold it up.
“The usual,” she answered. “Although it did seem as though someone might have passed a vacuum over the floor. No firewood, of course. There are some hideous new comforters on the upstairs beds. But otherwise, exactly the same.”
I sighed with pleasure and then inhaled the ocean air. Exactly the same was exactly what I wanted. Our summer rental, our home away from home for a few weeks every August for the last decade, was in many ways extraordinarily uncomfortable. The oven was so uneven it burned everything, and the plumbing backed up at least once a summer. The mattresses were miserable, thirty years old if a day. The interior was too dark, because of the thicket of pine trees that leaned in on either side of the house. But we loved the Boathouse. It was our place.
We bumped down the road, past the tree where all the residents have posted their names on painted wooden boards. Liza and John’s parents’ sign “Bigelow” was shiny and new, just as neat and trim as their house. The Boathouse was at the end of the road, and they were our next-door neighbors.
“Oh my God, I wonder what Mrs. Bigelow is going to think of my future as an unwed mother?” I said as we drove by their place. “She’s such a Catholic.”
“Well she already knows about it,” Wib said. “I believe one of her children already gave her a full report.”
Liza, no doubt. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to deflect some attention from her own difficulties. Her mother was of the opinion that Liza should just stay married, no matter how much Hugh annoyed her.
“Does she seem scandalized?”
“Less than I would have expected,” Wib said. “But she did wring her hands a little.”
We pulled into the turnout we used as a parking lot, and I climbed out of the car, shouldering my bag. A few yards down a pine-needle-strewn path, and there it was, the sliver of water and the rambling, wood-shingled building straddling it. It looks something like a pirate’s ship. Local legend paints the Boathouse as an old speakeasy and smuggler’s den. I believe the former and wish I could believe the latter, but both are certainly imaginable. It’s built on stilts over a stream that empties out into the salty Cove. At low tide, only a freshwater trickle runs under the house; at high tide, the waters of Casco Bay slap against the bottom steps on the lowest porch. For an hour or two a day, the Cove turns into our personal swimming pool, which obligingly ceases to be frigid for a few weeks in late July and into August.
Wib’s husband, Sean, walked out onto the footbridge to greet us. Three decades later, he still had the beard, although it was more gray than red now. It no longer disturbed me, but their teenaged son, Matthew, complained about it mightily. Sean was barefoot and, from the looks of his windblown hair, had just been sailing.
“Let me take that,” he said, lifting my bag off my shoulder. “A lady in your delicate condition shouldn’t be carrying anything.”
He snickered. I ignored him. There was no way I could declare my pregnancy a joke-free zone. Adrian would be here in a couple of days, and then I’d probably be longing for some subtle snickers.
“How’s the water?” I asked.
“Sublime,” Wib said. “Rough on entry of course, but then just perfect.”
“I’m going to get my suit on and get right out there,” I said, stepping inside.
The door opens onto an enormous living roo
m, with a galley kitchen, elevated just enough so that the cook can bark orders to the slackers on the couch who should be snipping green beans or piling logs into the great stone fireplace (even in August, the night breeze comes off the waters of Casco Bay with a chill). The biggest, heaviest picnic table I’ve ever seen sits adjacent to the kitchen, armed with two vicious benches that have left bruises on every shinbone in our family. Every year Wib brings more of her own china and kitchen equipment and leaves some of it there, as if by doing so, we could gain a claim on this place we fantasize about owning. I stepped out onto the screened-in porch, which overlooks the water. Because the bedrooms are so musty, we always sleep out here. Wib and Sean had already dragged out mattresses for themselves, Matthew, and me. Other family members would come and stay for a night here and there, and Benet might bring his older daughter, Isabella, down for a sleepover, but we were the main tenants.
I looked down at the water, which had a silvery glint. The sky was overcast, and the air was heavy. Swimming was nice on days like this; it made me feel more like a fish and the water could seem warmer. But my stomach was churning. I’d made Wib stop for fries at McDonald’s on the way down, assuring her that salty food was just what I needed. As she joined me at the rail, I let out an enormous burp. The seals in the harbor probably thought their long-lost sister was in town.
“Yikes,” she said. “Do you need a Tums?”
I bent over, resting my elbows on the railing, which was cut from a tree trunk. “Tums suck,” I said. “They do nothing for me.”
I tried to breathe. “I’ll be right back,” I said, running for the bathroom.
I DID SWIM THAT VACATION, between bouts of morning sickness, which in my case was really morning, noon, and night sickness. My father, who came down for dinner and a kayak ride most days, was completely distressed by how much throwing up I was doing.
“It’s perfectly normal,” I said, returning from the bathroom yet again, fish chowder safely out of my system, teeth brushed for the fifth time that day. They were all staring at me. Without insulation, sound carries easily at the Boathouse. Dad was shaking his head.
“Gross me out the door,” Adrian said, getting up to fill his soup bowl again. “Girl, you’ve got it bad.”
I was getting the feeling he was right. Not every pregnant woman throws up, but even the ones that do usually ease off around the twelfth week. I was at thirteen weeks, and there was no sign that it was easing up. I was trying not to take the Phenergan every day, because it seemed better to avoid drugs as much as possible. But surely, I asked my father, his own wife, who bore him six children, had done some vomiting?
“Never,” he said.
“Oh, I’d hear her in there every time she was pregnant,” Adrian said. “Wib. Alison, Benet, and then Mary. Don’t forget, my room was right next to the bathroom. She’d be in there, singing away to the porcelain throne. Blah. Bhleck. Barf.” He laughed. Matthew gazed at him with admiration. For a fifteen-year-old boy, having Adrian around must have been like having Evel Knievel in the house. Only instead of leaping rows of cars, he flew in the face of proper customs and conventions.
Dad, on the other hand, looked pained. “In any event,” he began, which meant, Will you all be quiet for a cursed minute? “You should watch what you eat, Mary. I think you’re making yourself sick by eating an inappropriate diet. Seafood! And those hot dogs, for heaven’s sake!”
Alison had already spoken to Wib about the hot dogs. I liked them steamed, on a steamed bun, with yellow mustard and ketchup and then a dollop of sauerkraut. It was a Boathouse tradition, and I didn’t want to stop, especially when there was so little else that I craved. “You’ve got to tell her to stop,” Alison told Wib, who dutifully passed it on. “There’s listeria in hot dogs.” “I cook them,” I’d said. “Well done.”
That night I didn’t feel like defending myself. The room felt fogged in with disapproval, so I went out to the porch and lay down on my mattress. Throwing up was not my fault, but being pregnant certainly was. My emotional landscape was crowded with people that evening, but I felt very alone in it.
I knew my father harbored suspicions about my pregnancy. That somehow, I planned it. We already had that conversation once, and I had assured him there was no way I would do this to myself on purpose.
“Not even accidentally on purpose?” he’d asked.
“I can see why you might think that,” I’d replied. “But would I choose Matt as the father?”
My niece Katy came out to the porch and knelt beside me. She stroked my hair. “I feel so alone,” I sobbed, and she patted me some more. “Don’t worry,” she crooned. “It’s going to be all right.”
Would it? I was reading Sister Carrie, one of those great American novels I’d always felt I should read, and I was horrified at the fate of the fictional George Hurstwood, who ran away with the beautiful young Carrie, fell on financial hard times, and never again found lasting or gainful employment. I began to fear Matt might be a modern-day Hurstwood, lacking the drive and self-confidence to get a job. I could be dragged down by him. I did not want to co-parent with George Hurstwood.
My tears subsided, not because I felt better, but because I’d simply run out of steam for the night.
“Can I get you anything?” Katy asked softly.
“Some Honey Nut Cheerios?” I said. “With milk?”
The next day my father handed me a small brown paper bag. “These might help, dearie,” he said. I opened it up and found a package of lemon drops and a box of German peppermints.
“Thanks, Babbo,” I said, smiling at him and using our other, kinder pet name for him.
He patted me on the shoulder. “Do try to lay off the lobster and hot dogs, though.”
I WENT TO SEE MY MOTHER at her nursing home. We sat together in the garden, she in her wheelchair, me in a folding chair next to her. All the other inmates, as my father called them, were inside, including the scary lady who liked to play wheelchair derby. Once she’d followed me into my mother’s room and trapped me in a corner, charging forward every time I tried to get around her. Still, I found her less disconcerting than the old woman who shrieked, “I love you” at anyone who came to visit.
My mother’s gray hair was hanging lankly in her face. She was wearing a Texas Longhorns’ shirt and sweatpants. It appeared that my father had started buying her shoes that were identical to his, blocky pieces of stiff leather that looked like something from the Gulag. She was slowly making her way through an ice cream cup, the kind we had in grade school, the kind that always tastes a little freezer burned.
“So Mumma,” I said to her. “I’m going to have a baby.”
She stared off into the distance. “Why would you want to do that?” she said.
I felt stung, although, of course, this is not what my mother would have said if her mind were intact. She would have cheered me on, told me that husbands were unnecessary. “Simply accoutrements,” she might have said.
She went back to waiting for something or someone she could no longer identify. Her whole existence was about waiting. She was waiting for the end of life, and for so long, I’d been waiting for the beginning. The one that had suddenly changed shape and was growing inside me now, nothing like any fantasy I’d ever had. I kissed my mother good-bye, dodged the old man who waited by the locked-down door, like a cat trying to make a surreptitious exit, and drove back to the Boathouse.
I went for a solitary swim, pulling myself up on the rocks on the far side of the Cove. The tide was on its way out, and I could see the remnants of the old boat ramp jutting out of the water in front of the Boathouse.
The house actually has a name, something quainter, but everyone we know calls it the Boathouse because that’s precisely what it is. Underneath the living room is a cavernous space, home now to bats rather than boats, a few old broken oars, and bags of charcoal from summers gone by. I’d gotten in the habit, every summer, of going downstairs to drag open the sliding door and indulge my romantic si
de. I have long had the idea that someday I will exchange wedding vows in front of this door just as dusk is falling. Vines and flowers will be wrapped around the supporting beams, candles will be flickering in the evening breeze, and across the water, turning navy blue now in the twilight, the lights of a nearby inn will appear, the windows shining a buttery yellow invitation out into the coming night. I’ll be clinking champagne glasses with my new husband, who will of course understand exactly why this place appeals to me so much.
My sisters never thought much of this scenario. “I don’t think they’d want us burning candles,” Wib said when I told her about it. “This whole place could go up in minutes. And where would everyone sit? What about getting Mum down those stairs?”
Alison shuddered. She is the lone member of the family who is immune to the Boathouse’s charms. “I like sun,” she always says, when we try to coax her to leave her house in town and drive down to see us, and we can’t argue. The Boathouse is surrounded by tall trees, and if you want the sun, you have to swim to it. When the water is brutally cold we lie on the Bigelows’ dock, getting warm enough to brave the swim back.
I could hear strange thumps coming from the lower floor of the Boathouse. Matthew must be down there. I hadn’t ventured into the room yet that summer. Nor would I. Any smell could set my stomach churning, but the truth was I did not want to visit the place I had always imagined would set the stage for the perfect life I knew I wasn’t going to have now.
The door slid open, and Matthew appeared in it, holding a hockey stick. He was indeed the source of the thumping.
“How’s the water?” he shouted across at me.
“A little colder than yesterday,” I yelled back. “But not too bad.”
“How many times have you puked today?” he said.
“Just once,” I said.
“We should have lobster then,” he said. “To celebrate.”
