Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [28]
Kathleen had often joked with her sister, Clare, that their mother liked Pat’s wife better than either of them because Ann Marie was an imposter, just like Alice.
Even in college, her sister-in-law was unabashedly square for the most part. Before he met her, Pat had a bit of a wild streak—smoking lots of dope, bed-hopping all around St. Mary’s. When he met Ann Marie, she gave him the full June Cleaver treatment. Pat was on the golf team, and Ann Marie actually organized bake sales so the team could get matching jackets, as if she were his mother. Pat bragged about this revolting fact when he came home that Christmas, and Alice had put a hand to her heart and said, “She sounds positively wonderful.”
Ann Marie came from a part of Southie that Alice had always referred to as “the wrong side of the tracks,” but like Alice herself, when asked where she grew up, Ann Marie would fudge it a bit. “Right on the Milton line,” she’d say, even though there was no line between Southie and Milton. When they met her, her brother was in trouble with the police and had recently disappeared. He was an underling in the Winter Hill Gang and he had dabbled in all kinds of crime—run drugs, trafficked guns to the IRA, and possibly even helped to murder a businessman in Oklahoma in the mid-seventies. It was Patrick who had told Kathleen all this. Ann Marie herself would never acknowledge such a scandal.
Ann Marie wanted so badly for everyone to think she was a goody-goody even though deep down she was no different from the rest of them. The only time Kathleen had ever seen her truly let loose was when she visited Pat and Ann Marie in South Bend after they had graduated college. Pat was killing time that summer, waiting for business school to start. Ann Marie was waitressing and making noise about getting a nursing degree, though she never actually did it. One night during her trip, Kathleen drunkenly watched from the backseat as a twenty-year-old Ann Marie pulled off her blouse and stuck her head out the car window, bellowing “Hey Jude” at the top of her lungs, hammered beyond comprehension. “Na-na-na-nananana!!!”
Pat was behind the wheel, probably ten beers into the night himself.
“Get your hot ass back in here,” he said, pulling at his then-girlfriend’s back pocket.
“No-no-no-nononono!!!” Ann Marie screamed, to the tune of, well, just guess. A few minutes later, she slid into her seat and then over to Patrick in only her bra and skirt, licking his ear as if Kathleen weren’t there. The next morning, Ann Marie said sheepishly, “I hope I didn’t do anything too disgraceful last night. I really have no memory of it. Pancakes?”
Kathleen would never forget it. Later, she wished that she had thought to take a picture. She dreamed of mailing it to Alice without a note or a return address.
Even back in college, Pat and Ann Marie acted like perfect angels around their elders, a practice that irked Kathleen to no end. As soon as they were married, Pat straightened up in earnest, and they turned into a couple of pod people. Once, in Cape Neddick, when the kids were small, Ann Marie had had one too many glasses of rum punch, and proudly divulged to Kathleen that Pat was the first and only man she had ever slept with. As if women who saved their virginity were somehow better than the rest; as if anyone was keeping score.
When Ann Marie addressed you now, she’d say, “How are you doing, good?” as if to direct you toward the correct answer: No negativity, please. It’s distasteful. Kathleen thought that if she would only show some sign of weakness, some signal of being human, then she might stop being so hard on her sister-in-law. But after thirty-something years, that