Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [100]
Maggie hadn’t heard any of this before.
“He shoved you?” she said now.
“Yeah, he used to like to push me around a bit.”
She said it so casually. Were Gabe’s crimes really anything compared to this?
“What did you do?” Maggie asked.
“I had an abortion. I never told him about it.”
Maggie inhaled deeply. “Wow.”
“Yeah. I was thinking about your situation after you left last night. You’re brave. I’m glad you told me. I never told anyone. It seems like the logical people to tell would be a best friend, your mother, your husband. Well, clearly my husband was out. My best friend was someone I hadn’t talked to in a year. And my mother and I have never once discussed anything more consequential than tennis results.”
Maggie didn’t know how to reply. She knew her relationship with her own mother stretched way too far in the other direction. Once, when she was an adolescent, away at her father’s place for the weekend, Kathleen had not only read Maggie’s diary, but actually made notes in the margins, such as These negative feelings about your body are very common, but you must learn to see them as side effects of our messed-up culture and This jackass is simply not worth your crush. Reminds me of someone I slept with in college, who turned out to be gay.
Twenty years of sobriety and a career in the mental health field hadn’t stopped Kathleen from oversharing: Maggie was thirty-two and still working on creating what her therapist called “the generational boundaries.” A few times, Kathleen had come to New York unannounced and stayed in Maggie’s cramped apartment, sleeping in the bed with her, for two, three weeks at a stretch. It drove Maggie insane, but she never had the heart to tell Kathleen to leave, or to check into a hotel like normal parents would do. And when it came time for her to go, they would both cry.
“I always wished there was a bit more distance between my mother and me. She’s told me much more than I ever wanted to know about her personal life,” Maggie said, and instantly felt guilty for saying so. “Sometimes I’d give my left arm for the kind of mother who only talks tennis.”
“Why haven’t you told her about the baby yet?” Rhiannon asked.
“Her opinion can completely color my judgment, and I wanted to make up my own mind first. Does that make sense?”
Rhiannon nodded. “In a way, I envy the connection you have. Before I left home, I really tried to get my mother to talk,” she said. “I tried to cut out the falseness between us and get her to fight with me about what she resented. Those dark things that happen in every family. But she wouldn’t, or she couldn’t.”
Maggie wondered about the dark things, what that came down to in Rhiannon’s life. She wanted to hear more, but Rhiannon said, in a different tone, suggesting she didn’t want to go further: “Do you know anyone like that, or is this a Scottish trait?”
“My grandmother is the same way,” Maggie said. “She never wants to talk to me about anything more meaningful than the fact that Bounty paper towels are on sale.”
They drove on for a while without talking, NPR on in the background. Maggie thought about Gabe. She wondered whether she would ever wake up again with her head on his bare chest. She tried to imagine how she might go to any of their favorite places without him—the movie theater in Brooklyn Heights, which had only 150 seats and served egg creams, or the old Italian bakeries in Carroll Gardens where a black and white cookie the size of your head cost a dollar. She pictured herself pushing a stroller up Court Street in the cold, surrounded by strangers.
She turned to Rhiannon, and without thinking she asked, “Did you ever consider raising that baby alone?”
“Not for a second,” Rhiannon said. “That’s why I think you’re so amazing.”
“Or possibly insane,” Maggie said.
“Will you go back to Gabe if he asks?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said, though she was fairly sure she did. “I have a lot invested in him.”
“For what it’s worth, I know it’s a tough situation, but I think you can do much better.