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

Magic Marker. It took forever to fade, and I had to make sure my mother never saw me naked. My father would have killed him, and that’s not an exaggeration. Anyway—this gets me back to where I began, more or less: Aunt Sophie and the little wire champagne baskets.
    She did this at the garden party, which was held at a big house in Maine nearly five hours from New York, on a river. She told us she’d called ahead to make absolutely sure that Roy, her first ex-husband, wouldn’t be there, but I thought that, secretly, she would have liked running into him. The couple giving the party had told her that she was “fun” and that they hadn’t kept up with Roy, let alone invited him to the party. She remembered these people only slightly, from a dinner she’d had with them at a restaurant when they’d all been offered a room at the hotel across the street if they’d leave. She loved to tell people how scandalously she and her friends acted, though you could never press her and get details.
    Inside, I saw something I thought was a piece of sculpture. Closer inspection revealed it to be a great quantity of cooked lobsters stacked on the shelves of a tall metal stand surrounded not by devotional candles but by open jars of mayonnaise. At that point, I don’t think I even knew lobsters existed; I was fascinated by their bright red shells. Wasn’t this more of an adventure than going on another pointless coffee date with Les Allan? Sure—everything I did with Aunt Sophie was exciting and new, though getting up at six in the morning in order to set out before seven had made me feel a little faint. I rode in the back of the car with Bryce’s boyfriend, Nathaniel, and the cat, who was stretched out in a cage with one of Sophie’s old bed pillows for a cushion and a cone around its head so it couldn’t overgroom its tail. Aunt Sophie rode in the passenger seat, map in hand, her eyes shadowed in silvery green powder, the lashes thick with mascara, even though you could see dark raccoon circles under her eyes. She turned around often to talk to us. I was so excited to be going to a garden party—whatever that was. For one thing, they were rich people who had a big lawn—this much I figured out from what Sophie said about them. The Boyfriend kept saying that so much driving wasn’t his idea of a good Sunday, and Bryce and Sophie both said, almost in unison, that the words good and Sunday were an oxymoron. Sundays were boring; they signified the last-minute desperation of having a good weekend. The two of them were united in their scorn of Sunday. To them, the day meant nothing but newsprint on their fingertips and eggs prepared with glutinous, highly caloric sauces. Sundays were always straining after fun, like a horse being whipped to win the race, when fun came naturally during the rest of the week. Sundays carried a burden too heavy to bear.
    Bryce was wearing a white shirt and tight jeans with a few little slashes on the thighs (and this was way before anyone did such a thing). He wore sandals a friend had brought him from Morocco. The Boyfriend had on madras Bermuda shorts and a navy blue Lacoste shirt and leather sneakers with tan colored laces and tan socks folded over at the ankle. He had very hairy legs. He worked at another restaurant—more like a bar—in Chelsea. He’d graduated from Juilliard but had some sort of breakdown and couldn’t play music or listen to any female vocalists. No one dared to turn on the car radio. Methuselah kept trying to stand in the cage, although all the turns in the road kept knocking him down, making his bell ring, and sometimes provoking long, weak cries of protest. I was wearing a wrap dress in a nice shade of gray that I’d bought at a flea market on Amsterdam Avenue for next to nothing and black patent-leather ankle-strap inch-high heels. It seemed pretty radical not to wear any jewelry, so I didn’t. The rumor was that Leo Lerman (who apparently wrote about the arts) was