Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [171]
“Can I speak to your press office please?” she said, fairly sure what the response would be.
“Our what?”
“Your press office. Public affairs?”
“Hold, please.”
The hold music began. A country singer belted out that if given the chance, she hoped someone (her child?) would dance. It was some smarmy shit, but even so, Maggie felt a tickle in her throat. She sighed. She could not stand herself when she got like this, too cozy with her sorrow.
For the last several weeks she had thought about the horrors of giving birth, and all the terrible things that could happen to a baby, and how she could ever afford this, and whether maybe Gabe might show up in the final act and rescue her, having become another man entirely. But now she feared something else. It was about the way Alice and Kathleen and Ann Marie had all fussed over her and what she would do next. Maggie was still a blank slate—childless, unmarried, and therefore yet to begin it. After this baby was born, she would never be that way again. She would cross to the other half of life, in which you yourself are no longer watched over, not in the same way. She couldn’t take to her bed whenever she felt like it or allow herself to completely self-destruct.
That’s what her own mother had done from time to time, and Alice as well, but Maggie couldn’t; she wouldn’t.
Sometimes she thought she would have been better off procreating at twenty-two than thirty-two. Back then, she had thought she wanted four or five kids someday. She was still young and dumb enough to think it possible. Maybe that’s how mothers like Ann Marie were made—they plunged headlong into the whole endeavor before they knew any better. They weren’t selfish or greedy with their time because as adults they had never spent several Saturdays in a row lying in bed watching Meg Ryan movies on cable. They had never passed an entire weekend indoors, just because they felt like it.
From everything she read online, Maggie had gathered that it was sort of in vogue for mothers to complain about their kids—there were entire websites devoted to mourning the objects and body parts their children had destroyed; there were Mommies Who Drink groups that met weekly in Brooklyn bars; there were forums where women could record every last grievance—every drop of apple juice spilled on the carpet, every time the nanny showed up five minutes late, every hideous temper tantrum that made them consider running away. They claimed they were miserable, and seemed pleased with themselves for admitting it. But then why have children at all? Maybe this sort of oversharing was healthy set against generations of repressed American housewives, brightly smiling through the slog. But Maggie wondered if in some ways all the complaining only made matters worse.
She was still on hold. Now the country singer was telling her that living might mean taking chances but they’re worth takin’. Lovin’ might be a mistake but it’s worth makin’.
She hung up the phone and put her head down on her grandmother’s kitchen table. After a short while, she thought she heard footsteps out on the gravel path that led from the cottage. She felt certain it was Kathleen, so she picked up the phone again and held it to her ear, pretending to be mid-conversation.
Good Lord, had it come to this?
No one entered the house. When Maggie peeked out the window, she saw only two rabbits eating the grass.
“Thank you. Good-bye,” she said to the imaginary person at the other end of the line, just in case someone was watching.
Maggie breathed in the mix of pine trees and salty air through the screen. June was almost over. Soon she would have to leave.
She could hardly picture going back to Brooklyn, to that same old apartment on Cranberry Street. She imagined that in some ways her life would be exactly as it had been—each morning she would sit by the window, watching the early commuters hustle down into the subway with their paper cups of steaming