Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [44]
As a girl, she had watched the old women of Dorchester, with their thin hair and their housecoats, and vowed that she would never become such a frump. She hadn’t. But now she looked at her three granddaughters—none of them much older than thirty—and realized with alarm that she felt the same way about them. They were slobs. When they came to Maine later in the summer, they would trounce around the property in sweatpants and bikini tops, letting their little bellies flop out. They’d tie their hair back while it was still wet, and never put on so much as a coat of lipstick. Ann Marie said that it was the beach that brought this out in them. But Alice could never be sure. Maybe it was true of Ann Marie and Pat’s two daughters, Patty and Fiona, but if she came upon her granddaughter Maggie eating Sunday brunch at a café in Manhattan, she was willing to bet money on the same damp ponytail and cut-off jeans Maggie traipsed around in up here. Both Patty and Maggie had inherited the Dolan leg from Daniel’s mother’s side—thick, shapeless stumps that were as wide at the calf as they were at the knee. Fiona, the one who cared the least about her looks, had been Alice’s only lucky granddaughter, possessing the long, lean legs of a Brennan woman.
Through the open door that led into the house, she heard the dryer buzzing into the off position. Alice emptied her glass and then went to the laundry room.
The AM radio was playing, though she didn’t remember turning it on. A young-sounding fellow whose voice she rather liked was interviewing a professor about post-traumatic stress disorder among the soldiers coming back from Iraq.
“It’s more important than we can possibly say to get it out, to talk to someone,” the professor said. He cited a study.
Alice shook her head. It was all the rage now to talk, talk, talk, though she couldn’t see how talking about real tragedy did much good. What would her brothers have to say about it? Probably that those boys ought to man up and shut up, though now she’d never know for sure.
Her daughter Kathleen had once said that the fellas who came back from World War II might have been saved if only they had been allowed to tell a professional about what they had seen. But that’s not how they were making men back then, and so you ended up with an entire generation of sad secret-keepers and angry drunks. Alice thought that sounded more like Kathleen’s cohorts than her own. A cousin Kathleen was fond of from Daniel’s side, Bobby Kelly, had returned from Vietnam to a party full of balloons and ice cream, looking like Errol Flynn in uniform, and then, two days later, shot his wife and himself to death.
What Kathleen never seemed to understand was that World War II was a different sort of war. Everyone was a part of it, every last boy you knew. Now, when Alice asked her grandchildren if any of their old schoolmates were fighting in Iraq, they all said no in an incredulous sort of way, as if she were an idiot to even ask. When she was young, there was a sense of pride among so many of the boys, a sense of duty and honor. They wanted to serve their country. They wanted to fight.
When Alice’s brothers came home on leave, they were always trying to set her up with their buddies from the army and the navy. Alice went along with it, though she never took those boys seriously. She had no interest in settling down with any of them.
Back then, people said she was beautiful. They complimented her narrow waist and long legs. She had bright blue eyes, fair skin, and dark hair that reached halfway down her back. She wanted to be Veronica Lake—adored by all for her beauty, her art, her general joie de vivre. She believed that she deserved better. That she, Alice Brennan, was one of the most special young women out there, just waiting for someone to take notice.
The six Brennan children had grown up more or less poor, but they could always be certain of having a roof