Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [6]
In Cape Neddick, Alice was distracted, surrounded by smiling people, all of them grateful for the invitation. The children ran in a pack with their cousins, demanding nothing. She watched the sky over the ocean turn pink in the evening, a reminder that God created beauty, every bit as much as He created pain. She became a different person there in summertime.
Back home in Massachusetts there were so many memories; left alone in the house with the children, she often felt like she was losing hold. Her thoughts took gloomy turns without warning, and she got terrible headaches that forced her into bed all afternoon. Her life there was by its very nature boring, and she could not stand to be bored. She never cottoned to gaily cooking dinners and folding laundry and scrubbing the kitchen floor, as if that were all the world had to offer, no matter how hard she tried. She had been meant for more. Her cottage in Maine was the only thing that set her apart from everyone else, the only unordinary thing about her.
When her older daughter, Kathleen, ever the wet blanket, turned twelve or thirteen, she declared that she hated going to Maine. The air was too buggy, she said, the water too cold. There was no television and nothing to do. From then on, from the moment they arrived each summer until the inevitable morning when they packed up the car to head back to Massachusetts, Kathleen would complain: “Can we go now? Can we?”
“It’s strange,” Daniel had said once.
“Oh I don’t think so,” Alice replied. “She must have picked up on how much I love this place and instinctually decided to hate it.”
Much later—it amazed her how time sped up more and more, the older she got—the grandkids came along. Daniel retired. Her children drove up to Maine whenever they liked, and no one bothered to call ahead. They’d just bring extra hot dogs and Heinekens, cookies, or a blueberry pie from Ruby’s Market. All summer, she and Daniel were the constant. Other bodies piled into the cottage and slept wherever they happened to drop: children under blankets on the hardwood floor in the living room, teenagers on inflatable mattresses up in the loft, her grandson Ryan’s playpen wedged into the narrow kitchen.
In the mornings while the rest of them slept, Alice would brew a pot of coffee, toast English muffins, and fry up a dozen eggs and bacon. She’d set a basin of warm water out on the porch for the children’s sandy feet, and later, maybe help Kathleen and Ann Marie slather the kids in SPF 50, which by then they understood was essential for Irish skin. Even so, they got burns. Red, painful, blistering burns that they spent long evenings dousing in Solarcaine. The grandchildren, like the children, mostly resembled Daniel’s side—a half hour in the sun and their faces were six pink little pools, covered in constellations of brown freckles.
A few years before Daniel passed, their son, Patrick, had offered them a gift. He was having a house of their own built for them on the property, he said. A real, modern house with high-end appliances and fixtures and a view of the ocean and no kids screaming, next to the cottage, but worlds better. They would have a big-screen TV with a sound system that was somehow wired through the walls. In the cottage there was only a small radio that picked up Red Sox games if you put it on the windowsill at the right angle.
“I think it’ll be wonderful,” Alice said to her husband after Pat told them his plan. “Our own hideaway, no squirrels in the rafters or mildew smell in the bathroom. No leaky old refrigerator.”
“But that’s what a summer place is,” Daniel said. “If we wanted to be alone in a souped-up house, we’d have stayed home in Canton. Why do I feel like this is a way to get rid of us?”
Alice had told him not to be ridiculous, even though she partly agreed. It was extravagant,