Five Days (9 page)

Sleeping over at Brad's. Will come by early tomorrow for my school stuff.

‘Sleeping over'. What a clever use of an innocent, pre-college euphemism. No doubt Brad's parents knew that my daughter would be sharing his bed tonight and that they wouldn't be doing so as ‘just friends'. Then again, Sally turns eighteen in nine months. I was sleeping with my boyfriend when I was her age. So I can't exactly reproach her for ‘sleeping over' at Brad's. But this is the first time she has been direct and open about the fact that she is sexually active – and I can't help but figure that she decided, after all that went down tonight with her father, to be finally direct about her relationship with Brad. Or, at least, direct with me – as I doubted she texted Dan the same information. Like so many fathers he's rather queasy about the idea that she is no longer the innocent daddy's girl . . . not that she has been a daddy's girl for some time. I texted Sally back:

Leaving about nine for Boston, so will still be here to see you. Love – Mom.

Pressing ‘send'
I watched it disappear. Then I turned my attention to Ben's message:

Am wondering if true love really exists? Answers on a postcard to my new website: thesorrowsofyoungwertherinmaine.com. Trying to paint. Not having much luck. Don't call tonight – going to sit in my studio all night and force myself to do something with a brush. B xxx

Ben citing Goethe. I smiled and tapped out a reply:

Hope all goes well in the studio tonight. If not will go right eventually. Important thing is to go easy on yourself – I know easier said than done, but also absolutely crucial. You have been through a difficult time. Don't expect too much of yourself right now.

Immediately I deleted those last two sentences.
‘I know I've been through a difficult time,'
I could hear him saying, ‘
and I always have – and always will – expect a lot of myself . . . so don't tell me to short-change myself.'
It's one of the most complex aspects of parenting – knowing when
not
to say something or when to sidestep the sort of advice that sounds like a bromide or a band-aid applied to a major
wound. And even if, in time, Ben may look upon the loss of his first love as
a necessary rite of passage, the fact is that he still remains raw and fragile in its aftermath. To tell him that, five years from now, he might consider it all much ado about nothing would be so counterproductive. So I rephrased the end of the text to read:

Do know I am always here for you whenever you need me. Love – Mom

I wanted to add something about me hoping that he could still come home next week, but again applied the brakes, thinking that he doesn't want to feel pushed into anything right now. If I say nothing he'll probably show up.

I checked my watch. It was almost ten p.m. – and I needed to be on the road by seven tomorrow. I went inside. Dan had cleared away the dinner plates and turned on the dishwasher and left everything tidy. I shut off the hall light and went upstairs, hoping that Dan was already asleep and wouldn't question our daughter's whereabouts. I too needed rest. Today had been a particularly complex day. But aren't all days complex? Don't they all throw something in your path that upends the momentum of things, or simply reminds you that life never goes the way you want it?

Then again, what is it that any of us truly want out of life? When asked about this rather large, frequently troubling question people often talk in headlines: happiness, someone to love, a life without fear, money, sex, freedom, nothing terrible to happen to my family, recognition for what I am . . . All reasonable requests. Yet show me a life where anyone really ends up getting what they want. I see this all the time with the patients awaiting results from scans. The terror and hope etched in their eyes. The sense that fate may have just short-changed them. The need to believe that there is a way out of what might be a terminal situation . . .

Enough
.

Opening the bedroom door I saw that my husband was very much asleep – his arms clutching the pillow so tightly I couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't some sort of nocturnal life preserver keeping him afloat. Dan suddenly groaned, then let out a sharp cry – as if something had startled him. I rushed over to comfort him. But by the time I reached the bed he had turned over and was back in the unconscious world. I sat and stroked his head and thought:
In the best of all possible worlds he'd sit up and take me in his arms and tell me that we were golden.
No wonder we all love the fairy tales that don't end with the princess getting eaten by the dragon . . . or (worse yet) finding herself sad and alone.

I get a taste of the great outdoors tomorrow. A few days away from all this. A brief flirtation with escape.

But I don't want escape. I want . . .

Yet another question for which I don't have an answer.

Dan groaned again, seizing the pillow even tighter. I suddenly felt very tired.

Lights out now. Close the door on the day. Close it tight.

THE ROAD. HOW
I love the road. Or, at least, the idea of the road. The summer before our senior year at the University of Maine, Dan and I piled into the ancient (but still very serviceable) Chevy that he had throughout college and headed west. The car could do seventy-five miles an hour at a push. There was no air conditioning – and we were trailed by ninety-degree temperatures (at best) everywhere. We didn't care. We had $2,000 and three months before we were due back east for the start of classes. We stayed in cheap motels. We ate largely in diners. We left highways all the time to explore two-lane blacktops. We spent four days in Rapid City, South Dakota, because we simply liked that crazy Wild West town. We broke down on a stretch of Route 111 in the Wyoming badlands and (this being the days before the cellphone) had to wait three hours until a car showed up. It was a guy in a pickup with a gun rack. We hailed him down and he brought us the forty miles to the next outpost of civilization, and the mechanic there was around seventy and never without a Lucky Strike between his teeth. He insisted on putting us up in a room over his garage for the two days it took him to perform a valve job on the engine: a huge piece of work that should have cost over $1,000, but for which he only charged us $500. Through a lot of crazy budgeting – and the fact that gas back then was just over a dollar a gallon – we were able to carry on west to San Francisco, then head back east through the desert to Santa Fe, which we both fell for.

‘Let's move here after I finish med school,' I said, seeing us living in some adobe house (with a swimming pool) out in the mesa that surrounded the city, me having a thriving pediatrics practice in town, my patients the children of artists and New Age types who ate macrobiotically and wrote music for the gamelan and drank green tea with Georgia O'Keeffe and . . .

‘As long as you don't make me drink green tea or only eat lentils,' Dan said.

‘No – we'd be the weirdos out here. Meat-eaters, smokers –' (Dan was a two-pack a day man back then) ‘and decidedly not into crystals or the zodiac. But I bet we'd meet a lot of young types like us. Santa Fe strikes me as one of those places that attracts refugees from everywhere else in the country – people who want to escape from all the pressures of big-city life, big-city success. We could live really well here – and, hey, it's the West. Wide open spaces. Big skies. No traffic.'

Of course Dan agreed with me. Of course, within twelve months, all these pipe-dreamy plans were finished. And that big wonderful coast-to-coast drive – in which I truly fell in love with the scope and possibility and sheer insane vastness of my country – was to be our one and only romance of the road.

The road.

We all have our little patch of earth, don't we? Especially those of us who do the nine-to-five thing and rarely venture further than our home and our place of work. And this morning, on the way south, I was passing through my usual parameters.

Main Street Damariscotta. Tourists come here in the summer. An archetypal Maine fishing town. Lots of white clapboard. Austere historic churches. A few decent restaurants (we don't do fancy around here). A couple of places where you can buy three types of goat's cheese and the sort of fancy English biscuits that are way out of my budget. And small-town lawyers and insurers and doctors and our hospital and three schools and six houses of worship and one supermarket and a decent bookshop and a funky little cinema where they show the live relays from the Metropolitan Opera once a month (I always go with Lucy – even if it is $25 a ticket) and water everywhere you look. Then there's that ingrained Maine sense of independence that pervades so much of our life here, an attitude which can best be described as: ‘You stay out of my business, I stay out of yours, and we'll treat each other with courtesy and unspoken respect, and we won't pass judgment out loud.' What I like about life here is that, though we all know so much about each other, we still maintain the veneer of outward disinterest. It's the curious Maine dichotomy: we're as nosy about other people's mess as anyone else, but we also pride ourselves on keeping our own counsel.

From Damariscotta through the township of Newcastle then onto Route 1 and into Wiscasset. I hate that damn sign they put at their southern boundary:
Wiscasset: The Prettiest Village in Maine.
I suppose what annoys me most about it – once you sidestep the smugness of that claim – is the fact that it
is
the prettiest village in Maine. A virtually intact throwback to the colonial past, grouped around a sweeping Atlantic cove, the town's white clapboard angularity is so authentic, so visually striking – especially as the water too is everywhere. Outside the absurd vacation traffic that backs up the town every weekend during July and August, this is coastal Maine at its most ravishing. Yet like everything else to do with the state, Wiscasset is so low-key about its wondrousness . . . outside, that is, of that damn sign.

South of Wiscasset there are a couple of depressing strip malls and a supermarket and the requisite McDonald's which they only opened around a year ago. Then woods which eventually give way to encroaching water and the bridge into Bath. That bridge – across the wide expanse of the Kennebec River – always strikes me as spectacular. I must make two round-trips across it every week (that's over two thousand single trips in the last decade – have I ever considered that huge number before now?). Heading south, if you look to the left you see the shipyard of Bath Iron Works – one of the last true industrial centers in the state – with at least two half-finished battleships for the US Navy always under construction. But it only takes up a small lip of a shoreline otherwise pristine and expansive. Besides being such a key economic force in our region, I love the fact that ships are still built in our corner of the state. Just as I love looking right while crossing the bridge and seeing the sweep of the Kennebec, especially at this time of the year, the aptly named fall, when the foliage is a hallucinatory palette of crimsons and golds.

Were I a cartographer of the fifteenth century, the map of my flat earth would terminate at the town of Brunswick, as I so rarely venture beyond its boundaries. Brunswick is a college town. Bowdoin is there. It was also, until recently, the home of a naval air station. There used to be a paper mill on the banks of its river. It's now long closed. But as a kid passing through the town I can always remember the strange toxic whiff of glue that seemed to permeate the place. We were in Brunswick two or three times a year, as Dad's closest childhood friend – Arnold Soule – was a professor of mathematics at Bowdoin. Dad and Arnold grew up in the same small town and bonded at school over advanced calculus. But whereas Dad chose U Maine and a high-school teaching career, Soule got a full scholarship to MIT and followed that with a doctorate from Harvard. He was a tenured professor at Bowdoin by the time he was twenty-eight and wrote wildly theoretical books about binary number theory (his specialty) that, according to Dad, were hugely acclaimed ‘in the theoretical mathematics community'. Arnold also happened to be gay – something he confided to my father when they were much younger, and at a time when such a revelation could have destroyed his life. Dad, for his part, kept Arnold's secret just that – something that Arnold told me many years later when I was supposed to be coming down to the college with Lucy to hear a chamber music concert. When Lucy was flattened with flu and had to cancel at the last minute I called this great family friend and asked him if he'd like to join me. That was just over five years ago. Arnold had finally come out in the early nineties and was living with a graphics designer twenty years his junior named Andrew. When we met up that night Arnold was seventy and had just retired. He was a little rueful about giving up teaching, even though he was engaged in a massive ten-year writing project that was (as he told me) an accessible history of mathematical theory from Euclid onwards. I always liked Arnold, always felt that he was the interesting, understanding uncle I never had (I had rather judgmental aunts on both sides of the family). That evening five years ago – when we talked over a dinner in an Italian restaurant on Maine Street before hearing a visiting pianist from New York play a sublime program of Scarlatti, Ravel and Brahms at the college recital hall – he asked me a direct question:

‘Happy with your life, Laura?'

The question immediately unsettled me. Arnold saw that.

‘My life is fine,' I said, hearing the defensiveness behind my response.

‘Then why did you flinch when I posed the question?'

‘Because it took me by surprise, that's all.'

‘Your father tells me you're highly regarded in your field.'

‘My father is being far too kind. As you know I run scanning machinery in a small local hospital. It's hardly a great accomplishment.'