Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [29]
Ann Marie used the family’s place in Maine as a sort of status symbol to impress her vapid country club friends, which, Kathleen knew, was why she and Pat had built that showy house next door for Daniel and Alice. Ann Marie probably kept a file on which pieces of furniture to buy for which rooms in the Maine house the second Alice croaked.
She spoke mostly about numbers—volume, distance, temperature, price—having nothing more interesting to talk about than the fact that it was seventy-four degrees in April, or that her mother was turning eighty-one this year; or how absolutely insane it was that red bell peppers could be priced at four dollars a pound.
Ann Marie had her children believing they’d been born to a saint—a sexless, guiltless saint, who might need a bottle of white wine to get through a stressful day, as long as no one was watching, but hey, what was wrong with that? She cooked elaborate dinners for Pat every night, even if she was going out, as if he was incapable of using the stove. She took classes in flower arranging and cake decorating.
Kathleen worried about Ann Marie’s older daughter, Patty. It pained her to see the poor girl always in a state of panic, no doubt wondering how the hell she might ever measure up as a mother or a wife. Kathleen often thought of letting Patty in on the secret that many people thought her mother was insane. She had wanted to rescue her from that stifling home when she was a kid, but now Patty had gone the way of so many young women—she was trying to do it all. She was a lawyer and the mother of three small children by the time she turned thirty.
Kathleen’s brother and sister-in-law were grandparents! She tried not to think about it, since it was an uncomfortable reminder of how horrifyingly old they had all become. Her pulse quickened, and not in a good way, when she entertained the idea of her children bearing children of their own.
Kathleen had never liked the way Ann Marie treated kids, no matter how maternal everyone thought she was. She’d bake cookies with them after school and take them ice-skating and make clothes for their dolls, putting other mothers to shame in that way. (Some women were created to make other women feel like shit about themselves. Ann Marie was one of them.) But she also controlled every move her children made—she told them what to wear, which classes to take, who they should and should not date. She wouldn’t let them have so much as a goldfish in the house even though they begged for a puppy, because she couldn’t stand the mess associated with pets. Fiona, her youngest, had wanted to play the tuba in the high school band; Ann Marie insisted that the piccolo was more appropriate.
Who could say what Ann Marie’s children might have become if they’d been allowed to just be?
Kathleen remembered an afternoon when Chris was small—he couldn’t have been more than five. She had left him with Ann Marie while she took Maggie to a doctor’s appointment. Arriving to pick him up, Kathleen found her son curled up in a ball in Ann Marie’s front hall, crying.
“What happened?” she asked, and Chris uttered those unforgettable words: “Aunt Ann Marie hit me.”
Kathleen’s anger unleashed, she marched toward the kitchen, where Ann Marie stood at the counter, wiping it down with a sponge.
“You hit my child?” Kathleen shouted, startling Little Daniel, who was playing with his trucks on the floor.
Ann Marie smiled, and said, as if by way of explanation, “He was talking back. I kept telling him to be a good boy and sit down, and he kept throwing a fit. Then he hit Little Daniel with a Tonka truck, very hard. I think it’s going to leave a mark.”
Kathleen raised her voice even louder. “So you decided to hit him to teach him that hitting is wrong?”
“It was hardly a hit,” Ann Marie said faintly. “I spanked his bottom with an open hand. I’m sorry.”
Kathleen knew Ann Marie could not stand conflict. Already her eyes were welling up. Good.
“Let me make this clear,” Kathleen said. “Open hand, closed hand, whatever—you may never touch either of my children