The State We're In: Maine Stories Read Online Free

container, which seemed to alarm it and make it tilt farther sideways. She was overstaying her welcome. Car plan: she scooped up her purse and bag, still wearing the cumbersome silver oven mitts. That was the way she looked as she emerged from under the bower of wisteria, making it a point not to torture herself by looking back, and greeted the man in the open-doored mail truck, only slightly surprised to have come upon her looking the way she did: rather frantic, breathing heavily, her hands like lobster claws immobilized by thick rubber bands.
    Regardless of her grandmother’s lessons and always gently delivered advice, she’d never made a pie in her life.

AUNT SOPHIE RENALDO BROWN
    Y ears ago, I saw two people at a summer party who arrived in grand style and departed to everyone’s protestations that they shouldn’t drive. The driver of the little MG was called Walrus, which I thought was the funniest name I’d ever heard, and his ladyfriend was called Star. She’d been an extra in a few movies but never managed to have a career in Hollywood. Someone at the party said she was a secretary at a recording studio, and someone else said she’d eloped with a much older man and never had the marriage annulled, and that he looked out for her. These people had hardly turned their backs when the gossip began. Someone said to me that it was like everyone lying and conjecturing at Gatsby’s parties, but I had not at that point read the book.
    Aunt Sophie Renaldo Brown was wearing red sling-back high heels and khaki shorts (hardly Gatsby attire, as I’d later learn) and a tight lavender blouse, under which she wore a push-up bra and, inside the bra, carefully placed, two metal wire champagne cork baskets to suggest hugely protruding nipples. As Sophie Renaldo, she’d been a teetotaler, but after getting her life together, divorcing Roy Renaldo, and eventually a subsequent marriage that lasted six months but gave her the name Brown, matriculating at NYU, she’d developed a taste for icy cold rosé. You know how it is: you get a cat; the cat needs toys; you get a bell so the cat won’t kill birds and also a cushion so the cat can rest comfortably somewhere other than on the sofa. A cat becomes a whole big deal. She did have such a cat, named Methuselah by her first ex-husband, who’d believed that the cat was eight or nine years old when they got it from the shelter (this is what they’d been told), and then it had lived another nineteen years and was still going strong except for a recent bout of hypergrooming in the tail area.
    Roy was happy to leave the animal behind with Sophie when he moved to York, Maine, to work at an accounting firm with an old Navy friend. He was not so happy to have to continue to pay his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s tuition, but the following year she graduated with a degree in sociology. She was currently a hostess at a busy, successful Upper West Side restaurant. She got up early in the morning to walk the cat on a leash (people stared), to buy a small bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice, then return home to sip it as she took her daily vitamins and wrote lengthy passages in her diary. Bryce, the new waiter, often stopped by to round her up for the three-block walk to Café Anywhere. He was the one who’d introduced her to rosé.
    My father called her a lush and would have nothing to do with her once she was divorced from his brother—when she became more of an exhibitionist than ever. At her first wedding, she’d constantly raised her wedding gown to show the garter with its thinly braided white ribbons whose little satin pigtail points were dusted with blue sparkles and tiny, dangling heart-shaped crystals. She told me they were edible! She had quite a sense of humor. I was seven years old, and absolutely mesmerized. Who could believe Uncle Roy would find such a prize? His other girlfriends had been heavier, and none had had such luxurious hair, and certainly none had giggled or offered to