For a brief time, Mom and I lived in a comfortable little kingdom all our own. We belonged to each other, in a way that’s common to only daughters and single mothers, especially when both are young. These years later, I sit with a bag of letters and holiday cards that Mom collected, mostly ones I made her. They are always labeled FROM: SARAH. TO: MOM. I LOVE YOU! XOXOXO! My love for her was so strong that no expression ever seemed enough, prompting me to churn out these soft-leaved stacks of construction paper. Now there is no one left to cherish them but me. Young children are naturally effusive in their love for their mothers, but I had a fierce kind of love for her, an every-marker-in-the-box kind of love. A toddler’s sort of clinging that held on straight through to age twelve. Of course, no matter what might have happened, the outer world would have imposed itself; we could never have been everything to each other.
Mom, still a beautiful young woman, also wanted more. Soon her friend Ruth, our old downstairs neighbor, introduced her to a man named Tim. I have a flash memory of Tim kissing my mother in our house, standing between the kitchen and the living room. He was tall and thin and boyish, with thick, dark hair. He wore a button-down shirt, tucked in, and he had beautiful hands. When he kissed her, he placed one long palm on either side of her face, his fingers reaching into the soft hair behind her ears. He held her upturned face gently but firmly, like he was drinking from a bowl of water.
When Mom looked at Tim, I could see that she adored him, couldn’t believe her good luck. I had never seen her look at anyone like that before. I had never seen her so vulnerable, and it scared me, especially as I watched how he behaved. In his quiet way, he took and took, but did not give. He came over after sunset; he left with the sunrise. He’d disappear for a couple of weeks, and every day she’d get sadder and sadder, and then he’d call her up again.
They had an intense connection, but he wouldn’t commit. As she told her friends, he wouldn’t say he loved her, expressly told her that he could not say it. He’d been burned by an ex who had cheated on him. He was attending a community college nearly two hours away, training to be an electrician, and would not make pledges until he’d graduated and gotten a job; it’d be another year at least. Even though she wanted someone who would marry her, perhaps have another child with her, and he clearly didn’t want that, she kept right on hoping, and he kept right on coming over.
I could feel her tension and desperation; when she wasn’t on a high from Tim’s love and attention, she was anxious about keeping it. There were times when they would break up for a week or so and she would curl up, catatonic, on the couch, her thin torso looking bent and collapsed, her legs unshaven for days and days. I knew things were bad when I felt those prickly calves against my arm as she stared blankly at the TV, trying but mostly failing to hide how terrible she felt. But then she’d take Tim back, although he still lived far away, still seemed unwilling to alter his life in any way to make her happier. Each time they got back together, I wanted it to work out, for her sake. But each time, I got a little more frustrated.
Mom wanted Tim, but perhaps even more, she wanted a true partner, and all that a partner ideally provides. Companionship. Increased financial security. Protection. Our house on Route 93 was wonderful—peaceful, neat and tidy, and entirely ours. But the nervousness that she had felt upon moving in never really dissipated. She felt better with a man around.
Even then, I understood that although I was there with her, in a fundamental way she considered herself alone. I was a girl: no matter how much I wanted to make her feel safe, I could not. And so she was keeping an eye out for someone who could.
* * *
Meanwhile, I was edging into adolescence, pulled along by the tide of my classmates. My best friend in those days was a girl named Marie, with whom I’d been close since second grade. She was less of a nerd than me, more artistic than scholarly, blessed with an angelic drawing ability that I coveted. She wore thick, heavy glasses that shrank her pretty green eyes, her teeth were locked behind a heavy grille of braces, and she had hit puberty embarrassingly early. A lot of kids still called me Heifer; it didn’t help that in addition to being chubby, I was the sort of know-it-all, teacher’s-pet kid who didn’t know when to put her hand down in class. Marie and I were probably the only two girls who were allowed to get spiral perms at that age, which only made us stranger to the other kids. We were a perfect outcast match.
Every month or so, I’d sleep over at Marie’s, a big two-story home full of knickknacks and old couches. Her mother liked crafting—there were beads and yarn and wooden cutouts of animals scattered on every horizontal surface. I remember watching MTV at their house one of the first times I slept over; Mom and I never had cable. Marie and I caught our first glimpse of both Madonna and Michael Jackson in the same night, and started to sense how much magic there was out there in the world beyond Maine.
Marie lived in town, not far from Bridgton’s central intersection, on a narrow blacktop road that quickly ran into the thick woods down to the Plummers Landing beach. On long summer afternoons, we would barrel down that road together, two of us on one bike, headed to the lake to lay out in the sun on a square, floating dock. Marie would stand on the pedals while I clung to the seat, hiding my fear while we coasted through a steep tunnel of green. She was more independent than I was, and would often dare me to do things that I didn’t want my mother to know about. She helped propel me forward, her feet strong on the pedals while I peeked over her shoulder.