Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine by Ann Hood

Author:Ann Hood [Hood, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1987-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

THERE HAD BEEN NO question of going to Claudia with this. When it had happened to her, Peter had done the noble thing. They had gotten married and moved to a little apartment over the garage at a friend’s farm. It had seemed to Suzanne that Claudia, who was always wildly searching for something, had found it with Simon. She had another baby, Henry, almost right away. Claudia strapped them to her back and brought them everywhere—classes, hiking, even to Abel and Suzanne’s, where they climbed on the furniture and pulled Abel’s moustache.

How could she ever tell Claudia that Abel didn’t want their baby? Didn’t even really want her. Claudia would tell her to have it and the hell with Abel. “I would have had Simon on my own,” she had said often enough. And then she would pick up her son and bask in his very existence.

But the fact was, she did marry Peter. She hadn’t had to have Simon on her own. And she could go ahead with all her plans. In the fall they were moving the whole family to Amherst and she would go to graduate school in ancient Greek history. She talked about going to a Greek island for a year or so, to study. They would eat fresh fish from the sea and swim in the Aegean, and she and Peter would drink ouzo and maybe, she laughed, make more babies. What a wonderful place to make a baby, she said.

Suzanne wondered where this baby, her baby, had begun. She liked to think it was on a night on the beach, under the stars. There had been nights like that. And afterward, Abel would whisper love poetry to her, softly in her ear, brushing the sand from her hair as he spoke. If she did have the baby, that’s the story she would tell it of its beginnings. The sand in her hair and the poetry and the love. How could she tell a child that its own father hadn’t wanted it? Or her? No, this child’s beginnings would have to be a secret. Suzanne would have to be silent, and the thought began a new wave of sobs. Howard brought tea and the night wore on.

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