The Latecomers Fan Club

by Diane V. Mulligan

  What a fool he’d been in high school to have kept her at arm’s length. And now maybe it was too late. He wasn’t a hopeful kid on his way to an exciting life anymore. He was a balding adjunct professor with a beer belly who could barely pay his rent. He had nothing to offer a beautiful, talented woman like Maggie.

  As he opened the second beer, he heard footsteps on the snow behind him and turned.

  “Hey,” Maggie said. She pulled her jacket tight around her middle and sat beside him on the bench. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Too hot in there.”

  “Well, it’s not too hot out here.”

  “Come here,” Nathaniel said, putting an arm around Maggie’s shoulder. At last. He’d been waiting for this moment all night.

  She nestled in against him and sighed.

  “So here we are,” he said. Her hair smelled like coconut. He had never wanted to kiss anyone so badly in his life.

  “If it weren’t for the fact that we’re not worried the cops are going to bust us, I’d say we’d stepped back in time,” Maggie said.

  He gave her a little squeeze, a small gesture of agreement. He felt like he was floating. If he didn’t hold on to her, he might drift away.

  They sat and watched the fire spark and bloom.

  “You look amazing,” he said after a few minutes.

  “Thanks. It’s really great to see you.”

  Nathaniel laughed a little. “Yeah, but I don’t look so hot,” he said. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror, he saw his father staring back him. He didn’t feel old, but when he saw the gray in his thinning hair and the lines at the edges of his eyes, he wondered if he was thirty-four or fifty-four.

  Maggie pulled away from him a little and turned her face towards his. “You look like you,” she said. Then she cuddled against him again.

  “You know I think of you every time I hear a Neil Young song,” he said.

  “Man. I haven’t listened to Neil since college. I used to play ‘After the Gold Rush’ on repeat for hours.”

  “I still have that tape you made me.”

  “Teenagers are dorks, aren’t they?” Maggie said.

  “Never were truer words spoken. Sometimes I think about some of the stupid ideas I had stuck in my head back then and I wish I could go back and give myself a kick in the ass,” Nathaniel said. He really had been a hopeless romantic, dreaming of adventure and love at first sight. Sometimes, thinking about the kid he was, he understood why his father had been so hard on him.

  “Right about now I sure wish I could take back all the times I swore I’d never end up back here.”

  “I’m glad you came back,” Nathaniel said.

  “Yeah, I guess it’s not the worst thing.”

  They heard the door to the house open behind them and the party spilled out on the lawn. Zack was busy handing out sparklers and getting helpers to set off the illegal fireworks he’d procured for the occasion.

  “Should we go up there?” Maggie asked, looking up the slope at the revelers.

  “Nah.”

  Then they heard the count down, “Five, four, three, two, one!” And Nathaniel brought his face down to Maggie’s and kissed her.

  Maggie

  Maggie eyed the battered plastic snowman on Claire’s front porch and rang the doorbell. A few moments later, the door opened and Claire greeted her with an apologetic smile. Gene and Timmy were going to be gone all day snowmobiling in New Hampshire, so she had invited Maggie to come over for a cup of tea. Claire the tea drinker. This was hard for Maggie to picture. Claire of old drank little other than diet coke (and beer). Still, Maggie was happy for a chance to get out of her mother’s house for a while. Gloria and her new husband Frank had been home all weekend, working together on the new master bath they were putting in. Frank apparently had watched a lot of “This Old House” or something, and from the moment he had moved in, he’d been constantly renovating, taking care of all the things Gloria had let go of for so long—sagging porches, peeling wallpaper, loose floor tiles. He’d taken care of all the basics, and now they were on to upgrades. They were so cute, blasting classic rock and cheerfully wielding hammers and paintbrushes. Maggie could only hide out in her room and try to ignore them. Twitterpated sixty-year-olds. It was ridiculous.

  Maggie followed Claire into the front room. The floor was a sea of toys. Legos, action figures, and various Nerf guns and balls. Maggie stepped carefully, trying to avoid falling or squashing any prized possessions.

  “Sit! Sit!” Claire said.

  Maggie did as instructed. Claire grabbed a small, dirty sock from the floor and nudged a video game controller out of the way as she continued to the kitchen. Maggie looked around the room, taking in the messes: the toys, the half-smudged-out drawings just above the baseboard on the wall by the TV, the stack of apparently unread newspapers on the coffee table—the only tidy thing in the room. Above the TV were several family portraits. Claire and Gene on their wedding day, Timmy’s recent school picture with his cowlick sticking up despite obvious efforts to glue it down, Timmy as a toddler holding a stuffed dog, and as a baby, red-faced as if caught in a brief moment between sobs. Maggie was startled to catch herself touching the base of her left ring finger with her right hand, the old habit of twirling her wedding band, but of course, there was nothing there.

  “Tea?” Claire called from the kitchen.

  “Sure,” Maggie said.

  In a way, it was a relief to see Claire’s chaotic life. A couple of years ago when she visited a college friend who had two young children, Maggie was astonished by the military-precision that governed her life. God forbid routine be shaken, even when guests visited. The woman was a tiger mom in the making. Maggie knew Andrew’s idea of proper child-rearing required similar intense devotion. How else could you ensure the child turned out exactly as you wanted?

  Maggie was so tired of people who were always trying to be perfect. A perfect, stylish home with not a trace of dust in the corner or a single thing out of place, a perfect size-two figure just months after giving birth, picture-perfect, homemade, organic family dinners every night. If Maggie heard one more lecture from her friends about the evils of disposable diapers, she was likely to explode. And what were they lecturing her for, anyway? She had no babies, no opinion on cloth versus disposable diapers. Claire’s down-to-earth disorderliness was a heavenly change of pace.

  “So,” Claire said, returning with a steaming cup of tea in one hand and a basket of laundry balanced against her other hip.

  “Sorry,” Maggie said, jumping up. “I should have helped.”

  “Are you kidding? Guests are not allowed to see the state of my kitchen. You’d never come back.” Claire handed Maggie the tea and then settled onto the love seat to fold laundry.

  “You don’t want any?” Maggie asked.

  “It’d be cold before I had a sip. Must make the most of my day off.”

  “You didn’t have to—”

  Claire waved off her protests and plucked a small sweatshirt from the basket of laundry to fold. “So. You and Nathaniel.”

  Maggie felt her face color.

  “You two were always so great together.”

  “But we never were together,” Maggie said.

  “What do you mean? You were always together! Didn’t you go to prom together?”

  Maggie shook her head. She and Nathaniel had been friends and nothing more—his choice, not hers. She’d have thought her sister of all people would remember that. “He went with some sophomore, remember?”

  “But you were inseparable,” Claire said, scrunching up her face as if squinting would help her see the past more clearly.

  “Sure, we were friends, but he didn’t think I was ‘the one.’”

  “Oh my God, that’s so Nathaniel! He would have been looking for ‘the one’ in high schoo
l.”

  Maggie nodded and sipped her tea. Even though Maggie and Claire had been in very different circles of friends in high school, Claire and Nathaniel had been friends because both were on the track team. Nathaniel was the sort of theater nerd who could get along with jocks.

  “Well, looks like he came to his senses on New Year’s,” Claire said.

  “Yeah, drunk people are known for their sensible decisions,” Maggie said.

  “You weren’t that drunk,” Claire said.

  “Yeah, but how drunk was he?” Maggie asked. It wasn’t like drunken hookups between her and Nathaniel were unprecedented, either: There was that incident during Senior week in high school, and then Christmas Break during her first year of grad school, which was the last time she had seen him until New Year’s.

  “I heard he quit drinking,” Claire said.

  “I guess he unquit.”

  “I also heard,” Claire said, pausing to rummage for a match for a little green sock, “he had a girlfriend, but I’ve never met her.”

  Maggie hadn’t even considered the possibility. Nathaniel, in her mind, was perpetually single, if for no other reason than because no woman would ever live up to the image he had of the perfect, star-crossed romance. “If he had a girlfriend, they would have spent New Year’s together right?”

  “True. It is a sort of lover’s holiday.”

  Maggie thought so. Who wouldn’t want to kiss their sweetheart at the stroke of midnight? She sipped her tea.

  “So are you going to call him?” Claire asked.

  Maggie shrugged. They had exchanged numbers, but she thought she’d wait for him to call her.

  “You have to call him! Are you nuts?”

  “I don’t want to seem too eager.”

  “What are you, fifteen? You’re going to play games with him?”

  When she thought about it that way, Maggie felt foolish, but she didn’t want to admit it. “All we really did last night was talk.”

  “Likely story.”

  “That’s all we ever did. Why would it be any different now?”

  “But you kissed.”

  Maggie nodded.

  “You should call him,” Claire said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you have to lose?”

  My heart, Maggie thought. She had heard rumors about Nathaniel, that he’d developed a drinking habit that brought with it a mean streak. She wasn’t going down that road again. Andrew’s drinking had been enough for her. “I don’t need to get involved with another alcoholic,” she said.

  Andrew’s drinking wasn’t exactly the reason Maggie left him, but it didn’t help matters. He was the sort of drinker who has a few glasses of wine or beer every night, and a dozen every Friday and Saturday. After living with him for a while, Maggie herself quit drinking out of simple necessity—she was always the designated driver.

  “I think that was just a rough patch after his dad died,” Claire said.

  Without quite intending to, Maggie started telling Claire about Andrew. She had hardly talked about him or why she had left him at all. Who was she going to tell? Her life with him was so caught up in his family and his friends that when she finally found the nerve to leave him, she felt completely isolated. She didn’t want to talk to her own mother about it. She didn’t need her mother’s advice or judgment. She just wanted someone to listen. She never would have guessed that person would be her sister, but here she was.

  So Maggie explained to Claire about Andrew’s drinking and his constant justifications of it, about his insistence that he’d cut back when they had a kid, about his ability to prove himself right and her wrong in every conversation, even eventually getting her to agree to try to have a baby, something she knew she did not want.

  It felt good to talk to Claire about Andrew. She knew her family had been shocked by her divorce. They didn’t especially like Andrew, but Maggie had never even hinted that they were having problems. It’s easy to act happy when there’s a continent between you and the people you need to fool.

  “Do you think you really don’t want kids, or was it just that you didn’t want kids with him?” Claire asked.

  “I don’t know.” She had asked herself that same question so many times. “Sometimes I think if I met the right guy, I would want to. Then other times I think I’m just too selfish.”

  “Being a mom knocks the selfishness right out of you,” Claire said, neatly stacking the laundry back in the basket.

  “Maybe for you, but I think you’re a rare case,” Maggie said. She’d seen plenty of moms whose idea of motherhood was selfishly controlling the child to mold him or her into the mother’s ideal. Until she’d sat in Claire’s messy house that afternoon, she would have guessed Claire, with her new religious zeal, was one of those mothers, but maybe she was wrong. She hoped so. She liked messy Claire better than evangelical Claire, that was for sure.

  Claire smiled. “I’d better try to put this stuff away so I can tackle the kitchen and bathroom before the boys get back,” she said.

  Maggie showed herself out, drawing her jacket tight against the cold. It was so strange to be back, to be with the stranger who was her sister. Seeing Claire’s domestic life was bizarre and baffling, but also encouraging. She thought of all the times she and Andrew had argued about whether or not people can change, his insistence that people could, that he had to believe they could, given his chosen profession, and Maggie’s rebuttals about relapsed drug addicts and Oprah’s yo-yoing weight. If Oprah couldn’t make lasting changes in her diet, how could anyone change? But look at Claire—wild child gone good. Look at their mother—newlywed at sixty. Maybe, Maggie thought, recalling the feeling of Nathaniel’s lips on hers, maybe people really can change.

  Abby

  Abby sat on the edge of the bathtub holding the pregnancy test in her hands. As she watched the countdown timer on her cell phone, she thought about Linda, her college roommate during her doomed first year. One night Linda came back from dinner with the gossip that a girl down the hall had had an abortion earlier that day. When Abby, fresh from twelve years of Catholic school, said that she was pro-life and couldn’t imagine taking such a drastic action, Linda had gone into a rage. Abby still remembered what she had said: “Women like you are the reason men still dominate Congress and Fortune 500 companies.” Abby had had no counterargument. She had no words to soothe red-faced Linda, her tiny body—barely five feet tall, just scraping ninety pounds—as tense as a spring under pressure. All Abby could do was repeat that she couldn’t imagine killing her baby. When she said that, the fight went out of Linda. She unclenched her fists and ran her hands through her short, spiky pixie cut. She spoke with resignation.

  “No one’s talking about you killing your baby. No one’s pro-abortion. I’m talking about the right to choose.”

  When Abby didn’t answer, Linda grabbed some things from her desk and left. They hardly spoke after that. Sometimes, when she was talking on the phone, Linda would refer to Abby as her “crypto-fascist” roommate, as if Abby either couldn’t hear or was too dumb to know what a crypto-fascist was.

  Abby wondered whatever happened to Linda. She had probably joined the Peace Corps or something. Abby pictured her in Africa preaching the Gospel of Abortion Rights to tribal women. Had Linda’s beliefs ever been tested, Abby wondered, or had they remained abstract concepts for her to intellectualize? Because at that moment, Abby was sure of only one thing: If she was pregnant, she was having a baby. As far as she could see, there was no other choice.

  The timer on her phone went off and she looked at the stick in her hands.

  “What’s up?” Breanna called from the hallway where she sat waiting.

  “Give me the other one,” Abby said, opening the door.

  Breanna handed Abby a second home pregnancy test and a glass of water.