From Nashville to Maine With Love
Everything in Maine was blissfully damp, from the sheets to the mornings to the paperbacks. Blueberries, by the time they made it into our pancakes, were still wet. Ponytails remained lake-stained all the livelong day. It was only when we laid our heads on the moist flannel pillowcases that we felt something akin to dry. Even then, one good squeeze and we could have wrung juice from the blankets.
“Get in!” I was always calling dockward, my goggled head bobbing to the surface.
“In a minute,” an unbothered adult was always hollering lazily back.
They congregated in chatty circles, the grownups. In folding chairs and beach towels, with hot tubes of sunblock and moist magazines. The lake was a cheap and engaging babysitter, which freed them up to be people. As we dove for clams, they released whatever they held back the rest of the year, laughing like gulls with their newfound Maine chums. They never told us what they were laughing about.
Around camp, cabins jutted out willy nilly from the white pined forest. I remember lumbering up the path with my mother to do laundry and scampering around the unlit campfire in search of kindling. I’d fight my sisters for turns on the porch swing and, later, elbow them for dibs on the shower. Maine shouldn’t have felt all that different from home—it was the same five characters as usual, plus the same car, which we’d painstakingly driven up from Nashville—but it did. Life was a hair more magical. Problems, a foggy white morning less noticeable. All it took was being fifteen hundred miles away from our stuff.
By stuff I mean the house, the heat, and the pile of plush poodles on my bed. The only toys I had to contend with in Maine were those which came from my Happy Meals. I’d string them with fishing line and toss them into the lake, reeling and dipping and wiping the algae from their plastic, cartoon noggins. If a character came unstuck from its line, I conducted a rescue mission. Deep breath, flippers. You never saw such reunions. I’m not sure what my older sisters’ abandoned stuff was—the clunky home computer, perhaps? The landline?—only that, devoid of teenage distractions, they agreed to fish with me.
Mom and Dad’s equivalent of the Happy Meal was the red clay tennis court. Bills didn’t come to Maine, so neither did fights. The black eyed Susans looked on as they batted balls back and forth, back and forth. To me, they were pancake makers and souvenir deniers, givers of life and proctors of time-out, but on the court they were something else. Two people who’d picked each other long before the rest of us came around. They were teammates. Buddies, even. I wondered if, after we fell asleep, they snuggled in their damp camp bed.
At some point in the summer, our family would organize a ping pong tournament in the mess hall, where strangers-turned-dock-pals would duke it out for trophies I fashioned out of hot glue and popsicle sticks. White balls snapped through the air. Sizzlers shot into dusty corners. We, the barefoot children of camp, played referee as barnacled Vermonters and slick Bostonians took seriously this thing we’d made up. I loved that about Maine. You could always drum up a hokey neighbor for a game, be it kickball or flashlight tag, ping pong or a swimming race. The “why not?” attitude permeated every pinecone. Accordingly, our parents let us canoe to the general store alone. They may have even given us cash for candy. We were joyriding, my sisters and I. Half bathing suit, half shorts. We shucked off our life vests the moment we were out of eyeshot and, free at last, let the heavy orange foamsters go clunk at the bottom of the boat.
Maybe we should have kept an eye on the dock. Before we knew it, our summers in Maine came to an end. My sisters grew up. My parents’ marriage rafted for deep water and never returned to shore. But I don’t want to end things there. I’d rather rewind to the night when we spread our pizza boxes across the dock and let the grease soak through the paper plates. We, who only ever ordered one pizza at home, ordered three in Maine. Something with mushrooms, something pineappley. With only the stars to light us, we could have been another family entirely. The kind who flies to Maine instead of driving, for example. The kind that is impossible to cleave.
-Mary Liza Hartong
Mary Liza Hartong lives and writes in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has been published in Country Living, the Saturday Evening Post, the Nashville Scene, Writer’s Digest, and many more outlets. She is a Dartmouth grad and a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, which sent her to Ireland for a year to write, frolic, and complete a master’s degree. Her first novel (Love and Hot Chicken) is out now from HarperCollins.