The Way Life Should Be, page 2
After the divorce, Hannah would occasionally slip in a question about Abbie’s father, querying her about whom he was dating, and later—when she found out about Matt, and the fact that he had also been married to a woman and had children—she would ask about that “whole situation” too. Hannah acted like these were casual questions, as if it had just occurred to her to ask Abbie what Matt looked like while she was opening the refrigerator door, her back to Abbie, searching for some phantom ingredient. Parents always think they’re acting so normal. But Abbie fell for it, glancing at the back of her mother’s head, wondering when she’d last washed her brown hair. She searched for some innocuous description and then settled on saying that Matt had nice teeth. That night at the dinner table, when Abbie asked if she could go out with her friends, her mother, finger circling the rim of her third pour of red wine, told her it was a school night. When Abbie protested, saying that she had already finished her homework, Hannah shouted, “Go to your room,” and as Abbie stomped up the steps, Hannah gulped the remainder of the wine in the glass and then yelled after her, “And don’t forget to brush. No one wants a girl with bad teeth!”
Children bear the punishment for their parents’ insecurities. She would never mention Matt again. Abbie was a fast learner.
Now, in the car, Abbie looks at the back of her father’s head, at the swirl of hair that forms a bull’s-eye near the crown and the longer salt-and-pepper hair on top, the whiter bristles that fade on the sides. She would have said it was a nice, fresh cut if they were in a different situation. There are many things she would have said in a different situation. Thomas shifts a bit in the car seat. “Sweetie.”
“Don’t call me that,” Abbie replies. “I hate it when you call me that.”
“Abbie,” he says. “We only have two bedrooms. You know that. Brian and Bex both love the bunkroom.”
“Bex?”
“Rebecca. She prefers to go by Bex now.”
“I’m sharing a room with both of them?”
“Only every other weekend. Bex is finishing up her senior year of high school.”
Abbie inhales, her pulse racing. How old would Rebecca, or whatever her name is, be now, seventeen? She probably uses they/them or ze/zir pronouns. At the wedding, Abbie recalls, her new stepsister sat there with pale skin, big brown eyes, and dark hair pulled back into a French braid. She was eleven or twelve, but she moved like a brittle sixty-year-old woman. When Abbie complimented her dress, Bex shrugged her shoulders and replied that it was itchy. Abbie’s new roommates are Pugsley and Wednesday Addams.
“So you’re saying you don’t have space for me.”
Thomas tightens his fingers around the steering wheel.
“We do have space for you! More than anything in the world, I want you to know that we will always have space for you. Maine is your home too.”
“What about the city?”
She’s referring to the one-bedroom basement apartment that Matt and Thomas keep in Boston—if you can call the hinterland of Brighton the city. It’s a basement apartment, euphemistically called garden level, which makes it sound pleasant. It is not. It is a shithole, but, true to form, Matt and Thomas have made it fashionable, in an economical European IKEA way. Thomas works in the city for a technology firm, and Matt works from home, “selling stuff,” he says about his job as a sales engineer for a Swiss automation firm. Maine has been their escape hatch on the weekends for a year now, a place where, unlike in the bowels of a crumbling brick midcentury building in Boston, the sun exists and the air smells of the sea, instead of rotting garbage.
“There’s only one bedroom there and . . .”
“So, you don’t have space for me?”
Thomas realizes this is a losing battle, as all of his arguments with Abbie have been in the past.
His daughter had been incredibly shy until she turned four, and then it was as if God remembered he had forgotten to flip a switch in her soul. In Thomas’s mind, though, she is still there, four-year-old Abbie with glasses in a floral shift dress, blond tangle of hair, small for her age, standing on the trampoline in the leafy green backyard in North Carolina, her hands on her hips.
And here she is in the back seat, a nineteen-year-old young woman with features so fine and a beauty that terrifies him. He wonders how he could have produced something so perfect, then dropped it, like a fragile porcelain vase.
As they drive from state to state, the conversation moves from one of space to one of necessities: stopping for fuel, food, or a restroom, racing ahead of the angry storm clouds in the rearview mirror. The light shifts from one side of the car to the other, taking on the orange-pink-sepia glow of nostalgia. Miles pass without Thomas being aware of these surroundings, too engulfed in a review of a lifetime’s worth of memories, settling on the day he and Matt walked through the skeleton of the cottage in New Guernsey, Maine.
It is a second home for their second-chance marriage. A weekend getaway where they can spend the second half of their lives together. Nestled between Kennebunkport and Ogunquit, New Guernsey is similar to the way Matt and Thomas exist: in the margins. They are not the dual-income gays without children who live three miles to the south in Ogunquit, and they are not the wealthy political families who summer three miles north in Kennebunkport. New Guernsey’s charm is more rustic, more commercial, more liminal, and more affordable. The two of them, sitting on their orange knockoff plastic Vespa named Summer, can ride to wide, sandy New Guernsey Beach during the day. In the evening, windows open, cool ocean air washing over their bare skin, they make love. With all three of their kids approaching adulthood, the house only needs two bedrooms, they reason. They figure the bunkroom will suffice for those every-other-weekend visits, and so they have lived as late-bloomer newlyweds, coming of age in middle age, through five years of marriage.
Their neighborhood, Quiet Cove Cottages, is a world within a world, where couples with young children and those nearing retirement gather on the weekends in identical cottages, two per building, one stacked on top of the other. They have come to know their neighbors and their quirks in a way in which they have never known any of their fellow city dwellers. But on the southern coast of Maine, happiness begs to be shared. Beneath the pines on a summer afternoon in a collection of Adirondack chairs, around the crackling neighborhood firepit sending up glowing embers when the autumn air turns cool, and along the beach-rose-scented path, they share stories with neighbors who have become like family. And like most family, they have peccadilloes that Matt and Thomas have decided to find charming. Like Betty, their seventy-year-old neighbor who occasionally stops taking her meds and speaks to people only she can hear and see; or DJ, the homeowners-association president, who wants to Make Quiet Cove Great Again, perhaps build a wall to protect its borders from intruders; and the Rays, who, after thirty years of roughing it in the campground next door, upgraded and finally bought their slice of heaven, and have turned the patch of grass next to their unit into the neighborhood happy hour, jokes becoming bawdier and laughter more boisterous with each tip of the glass. The one reminder of the city, sirens, is a frequent sound of summer. The small-town machismo of the ambulance and police officers requires them to blare their sirens the moment the tires hit the street. The only crime in New Guernsey seems to be that of unwitting tourists who walk the jetty and trip on the rocks, but that doesn’t matter to the officers.
Thomas thought he knew Matt when they first married. We think we know our spouses better than they know themselves, because in a way we create them, as if before us they were waiting to be brought to life. But Maine had a hand in revealing a side of Matt that Thomas had not seen before: the extrovert, the unofficial governor of Quiet Cove Cottages sauntering through the development, his laughter ringing out with the gulls and the sirens. Matt and Maine have become synonymous in Thomas’s mind, both states of wonder and beauty he had previously found imaginable. The two of them, Thomas thought, were a tonic that could soothe any ill, and so he has brought Abbie to the healing waters of Maine, not exactly kicking and screaming, but the summer has not yet begun, and the waters are still frigid.
When they cross the Piscataqua River Bridge, a thin ribbon of orange stretches across the horizon above the dark silhouettes of pines, and fast-moving clouds race across the sky ahead of the storm. Home. Thomas inhales deeply for the first time in thirteen hours. He drives gingerly into the twilight, cognizant that he is entering the shadowlands. He glances again at the band around Abbie’s wrist and his brow wrinkles. He sighs, and the volume of his voice lowers to that space between a whisper and silence.
“Abbie, what happened?”
It is a question as vast as the universe, and just as impossible to navigate. Abbie uncrosses her arms and looks through the car window. She brushes a hand through her hair, and when she catches sight of the band around her wrist, the swimming pupils come to a rest; the sloshing tears spill over and trickle down her cheeks. She rips the band off.
She thinks back to all those mornings in high school, when her mother couldn’t drag her own ass out of bed. Abbie had to be the caretaker then. Counting the pills to make certain her mother didn’t overdose. No one asked Abbie what she wanted for breakfast or whether she had money for lunch. When she came home, there her mother would be, sitting in that chair with the stained arms, wearing what passed for her pajamas: an oversized T-shirt with a hole in the armpit, no bra, and a vacant look in her eyes. There was always a rerun of some black-and-white TV show in the background, the laugh track of dead people mocking her. Mom, maybe you should try to find something to do during the day, a part-time job or something? Her job was to be a mother, Hannah always responded. Then be one! Abbie would run to her room, and her mother would take another pill.
And then, remarkably, Hannah met someone new, and she sprang back to life. She put on clothes every morning, applied makeup. Why couldn’t she have done that for Abbie? Why couldn’t her mother be a living, breathing person without a man by her side? Jim was OK, but when he spoke about Thomas, using the F-word—and her mother did not correct him—it pierced a heart Abbie had forgotten was still tender. At dinner, bald-headed Jim would tell them that if he ever saw Thomas, he was going to have a word with him about what he’d done to them, probably kick his ass. Her mother would smile and pat Abbie’s hand, as if everything was all better now.
Abbie’s feelings were twisted into a Gordian knot, which she could not untie, so she soaked it in alcohol and late nights with friends, or those popular kids who called themselves friends, and boys with sweaty hands, drenched in their fathers’ cologne. Boys who told her she was beautiful, hoping they might help her untangle the knot. Rick took her virginity, and in return, she allowed him to see what others did not: the pain, the hurt, the disposable child. He gave her what she was so desperately seeking: someone who would abandon her again and again as she hoped each time she might alter the trajectory of her past and be reclaimed.
“Abbie?”
Thomas is still looking at her expectantly.
She looks down at the fading yellowish-purple marks on her arm and pulls her shirtsleeve over them. She glances through the window at the Welcome to Maine sign, at the sky reflecting the color of the finger marks on her arm, at the approaching storm clouds. The only way to survive had been to imagine that her father had not. The image of a red lobster painted on the side of a large white gas tank, rusted around the edges, comes into focus.
“I was boiled alive,” she replies, stone cold.
THE COTTAGE RULES
If the dishwasher is full but clean, CONGRATULATIONS! You just won the dishwasher lottery and get to empty it! Not sure where something goes? Figure it out.
CHAPTER 2
Escape from New Hampshire
Bex stands at the stove, head down, long raven hair pulled into a bun, dressed in black, as her stepfather, Sven, lumbers into the kitchen. She stirs diced onions, red peppers, zucchini, and spiced ground beef in a cast-iron skillet, the curling steam misting her face. Pâté chinois, just like her mother cooks when she is not wrapped up in the cocoon of the green quilt on her bed. In her other arm Bex holds a small brown-and-white Chihuahua who begs for scraps. She does not look up when Sven stops midstride and stares at her. The dog trembles.
“I better not find a dog hair in my dinner,” he warns her.
Bex looks up then, not at him but at the wall in front of her. She decides not to reply.
Sven steps onto the small wooden kitchen porch and slams the door closed, but a gust of wind blows it back open. Bex shivers and places Zelda on the floor, listening to Sven’s boots as they crunch through the late-April snow. Why use an indoor toilet when the great outdoors is available to do your business? She closes the door, and when she turns around, Zelda, squatting, looks up at Bex with round, dark, shameful eyes. She is trembling. Bex can’t blame her. It is freezing. Zelda seems to have more sense than her stepfather.
Bex uses a paper towel to wipe up after the dog, and returns to the preparation of dinner, staring again at the wall in front of her. How many layers of paint have been applied over the past two centuries? She used to be able to count on two hands the number of layers she and her brother, Brian, helped her mother apply, usually late at night when her mother was manic. Over the years, they’ve painted the kitchen County Kerry green, French-country blue, Tuscan terracotta, Yucatan adobe. All exotic places where they might escape and start their lives over again. The most recent color, Texas Rose, went up overnight a month ago during one of her mother’s manic monologues.
“For once in my life, I’m going to do something for myself,” her mother, Leslie, had said, holding a hand to her heart. “God as my witness, I mean it, Rebecca. The tryouts are next month. This color is perfect, don’t you think? Oh, do you still prefer Bex? But Rebecca is such a beautiful name! Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, that was my favorite book. I could sing your name, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. I used to sing you to sleep when you were a baby. Do you remember? Of course you don’t. How silly of me. Oh my God, Rebecca, you were such a beautiful baby! I mean you’re beautiful now, but as a baby, you were angelic, before you entered this phase, this ‘Bex from Black Brook Farm’ phase. Do you see what I did there? Ha, ha, ha. I need to lose a few pounds before the auditions. I don’t want to look like a beached whale. What? You weigh more than me? That’s not possible. I’m huge! Well, you don’t look like it. I mean it, Rebecca. For once in my life, I’m doing something just for me.”
Bex listened, adding an affirmative “Uh-huh” here and there, brush slopping pink on the walls. She wondered what color would go up next, Asylum Gray? Hellscape Red? She knew her mother would never make the American Idol auditions, not because she didn’t possess a beautiful singing voice. It would simply be forgotten, or most likely she would forget to take her meds and return to the cocoon of her bed, muttering a barely audible “I’m exhausted.”
Bex’s mother gives her whiplash.
Bex longed to be as gone as the horses who donated their tails and manes to the walls of this house. To be covered over in cool plaster. How many layers of paint would it take before the walls grew together, sealing them into this two-hundred-year-old home?
She pours the savory ground-beef mixture into a glass casserole and covers it with freshly grated potatoes. The heat blasts her face as she places the dish in the oven. She and Zelda jump at the sound of a backfiring car outside. Perhaps Sven will wander into the street and put him out of her misery.
On the day they were to move in, when Bex was only four years old, her father drove up to see them at the old house, which was 190 years younger than this house. That house had more than one electrical outlet per room. That house was where her father had meticulously mowed the lawn. That house was where her father had set up the sprinkler for her and Brian to run through in the summer. That house did not have plastic children in the front yard, one of them headless, chained to a tree to prevent their theft, warning speeders, Slow down! Children at play! On the day they moved, that house had all the furniture her father had paid for sitting in the front yard, because the new owners showed up while Sven and her mother were still sleeping. That house had rules.
Somehow, her father, Matt, had put a smile on his face and made a game of organizing Brian’s and Bex’s bedroom furniture, renting a truck himself and moving it into this slowly rotting home, so that on their first night there, his children might feel somewhat settled. Sven had disappeared and returned after their father left.
The kitchen door opens, and without looking up Bex says, “Dinner is in a few minutes.” When there is no response, she glances at the wall and whispers, “OK, thanks for nothing, bitch.” She hears a sniffling and recognizes in an instant that it is not Sven. She turns around. Her brother Brian, eighteen years old, is standing silently, his eyeglasses fogged and his head hanging. He is wearing a winter trapper hat—a fur-lined cap with ear flaps. In his hand he holds, by its talons, a lifeless pigeon, its metallic-green-and-purple neck dripping red onto the floor.
