When Reality Was Upon Her (a short story)

They called her Mags or Maggie or Mamma or just plain Peg, but hope was the name she’d have chosen if she could. At Saint Leos she was baptized in faith and she liked to believe that a vein of optimism flowed through her, trickling confidence that arrived on the day she was born and that went all the way back through her mother’s wide hips into a family of depression era aunts and immigrant virgin grandmothers who disembarked to settle this certain patch of womanhood. From an early age, Maggie had heard that it was women who held up the children, the home and the family - that when a woman fell all fell around her. So Maggie learned to push her head up high and hard and she used her strength to endeavor to stay afloat in the world, well above its pain. On Tuesdays Maggie shopped at the Foodliner and, even as she waited at the long checkout surrounded by the humble sagginess of people’s faces, the mothers and children clutching food stamps, the rattled carts being pushed by old men who were themselves being pushed by their wives - the overwhelming routine of life all around her - she tried never to let these blunt and disappointed edges of reality enter into the picture of her life.

There was a cat that showed up one day at Maggie’s sun porch door. The cat was a male and Maggie knew that he was sweet on her from the moment he first pushed his way into her knuckles licking at her hand cream. She liked to pretend the cat was a long lost boyfriend – sometimes even her late husband come back to whisper jittery purrs into her pillow. She fed the cat tuna she got on sale and when it rained she let him crawl up under the edge of her skirt and wedge himself between her folded knees while she read whatever the library was recommending that week. The fact is that Maggie didn’t like the rain herself. But she never let on. Not even to the cat. Sometimes at night in bed when it rained she would shove the cat out into the hallway and let the rain get the better of her. It’s not that the rain scared her, more that she seemed to actually drain emotionally as it ran off the roof down her gutters. This was a rare time when the residual emptying out of her confidence was something she could no more stop then she might stop the sky from dropping its water in the first place.

Still, in the morning she would be fine. She’d get a check in call from her daughter Eileen on the West Coast, let the cat back into the room, go down to the kitchen to eat a soft boiled egg with a bowl of instant oatmeal. All that and the wetness on the grass would bring her back to herself. She’d go outside and kneel on the patio blocks, lean into the blades and remember how when she was a child fairies danced within this forest, the beads of rain big enough to fill the buckets from which they drank before smiling up at her and disappearing.

On most Friday nights Maggie ate hamburgers with a group of women at a shabby old place in Hamden called Butchy’s. It was a low rent ritual that Maggie took part in not for the food – of which she ate very little anyway – nor for the aggregate company of her girlfriends who as a group mercilessly tried to cheer each other up, something Maggie felt she needed no part of. Maggie really went because there was something about the restaurant and even Butchy himself that pulled her in, though she couldn’t have told you exactly what that was. Butchy was a short, fat, perhaps once nice-looking Greek man who had the blistering veined cheeks of man who spent his days sweating the grease of a kitchen and who wore a different threadbare vest every Friday and Saturday night when he was not in that kitchen. Without realizing it, Butchy had created a place in his image – all well-sat, fabric covered booths and lumpy votive candles flickering through the red netting of round jars. Once when Butchy came over to check on their table before they ordered, Maggie asked him if he could make a Salisbury steak. Butchy told her that he wouldn’t trust his kitchen help to make this for her, but if she came back on one of the nights when he cooked, he’d make it for her himself. Maggie took this as flirting and she smiled politely at Butchy and ordered a cheeseburger. She may not have known what attracted her to Butchy or his place – but confident as she was - she knew this was not it.


It was a week before Christmas now and Maggie’s kids would be coming for the holiday. Secretly, she found she sometimes had to steady herself to be with them these days. She longed for their company, but for some reason they could be like the rain to her– they emptied her out and this had been happening ever since they themselves had emptied out of the house where she and Ed had raised them. It was the third of four times in her life when she felt hope slipping completely from her and she was entirely surprised by what was happening to her – not so much that it was happening but by how much it dug a core of the unexpected out of her. Ed, on the contrary, never even missed a beat. More than that, he’d started to prepare for it as soon as the kids finished college. “You gonna need these old high-school science posters?” No, and he’d throw them out. “Hope you kids don’t mind, but I was thinking I’d sell the third car unless one of you wants to take it wherever you’ll be living next year.” Maggie stood by shivering each time Ed did this and on the night Teddy took the last of his sheet music, his CDs, books and clothes to move in with a divorced woman he’d met at his first job out of college, Maggie found herself driving around alone in the car eating through a box of Whitman’s she bought at the Walgreens. Maggie was not a shiverer. She was not a woman who sat alone in a car eating chocolates. Ed couldn’t figure out who she had become after the kids left and he starting slamming things down to wake her up whenever he saw her mooning around. She must have known that, sooner or later, these kids would no longer be with them. Ed’s voice was as hard as the tumbler he’d bang empty on the Formica table. How could this have come as such a surprise to her? But then Ed died at his work table two years after Teddy left home and that was the fourth and last time in her life that Maggie had let herself be surprised and emptied so completely by life.

On the Friday before her kids were due to arrive for the holidays, Sue - one of the women she dined with - called Maggie to ask if she was going to meet them at Butchy’s or would she like one of them to pick her up. Maggie stretched the cord on the wall phone all the way out to its limit trying to ignore the fact that she badly wanted to go even though she told Sue she couldn’t. “I’ve got the kids coming the day after tomorrow and they’ll be here for all of next week.” Sue wheedled her a little, made a wise crack about the idea that Maggie’s kids should get in the way of Maggie’s good time, but Maggie held firm. She didn’t like to be coaxed into something that she said she didn’t want to do (even if she really wanted to do it) and when she hung up the phone after an abrupt goodbye, she left behind a static whiff of bitterness. There had always been some resentment among Maggie’s friends over the hallowed detachment Maggie could call up at will, and she knew that Sue would be reporting this conversation to the girls at their line of tables in the middle of Butchy’s. Maggie could see each woman picking up on it and adding her own slant as they dribbled their judgment on the subject quietly from the left corner of one’s mouth to right corner of another’s ear.

Maggie didn’t linger on any of it though, using most of that night to get ready for the arrival of her kids, the cat following her from room to room as she stripped beds and stacked her great aunt’s plates into the dishwasher. Alone in the house, picturing how it would look in six days after three adults and two children had piled their needs into each room she was cleaning for them, Maggie was elated as much from the purpose of the activities as by the chance she would have to put the house back into order after they left. By 9 p.m. she was done but not a bit tired. Not a bit tired and nothing left to do. She tried to read but the house was too clean and she couldn’t sit still; even the cat seemed on edge, preferring not to sit with her but to guard the kitchen from something he felt was living in the dishwasher, pouncing to the base of the machine every time it bumped and stuttered into its next cycle.

At 9:30 Maggie put on her coat and got into the car, the cat now asleep on the warm tile floor in front of the steaming dishwasher. She had taken her book and her purse and her glasses and she thought she’d find a quiet coffee shop where she might try to read. This was something she did every once is a great while after Ed died, preferring to leave the quiet of her house for the noise that could surround her anonymity on its way to becoming another kind of silence for her. She never thought much of women who were afraid to sit alone in cafes or restaurant – for Maggie being comfortable enough to be alone with yourself was a sign of real strength, the kind of peace with your existence that showed you accepted that you were really on your own no matter how the movies or glamour magazines pushed you to believe otherwise. Sometimes in these places she would be able to read and sometimes she would just sit pretending to read, feeling the thrill of being free of everything that held her to life. But either way she was always grateful for the odd times when her twitchiness at home pushed her to stray into a place where no one knew her.

And this was why, contrary to what she might have done otherwise, she avoided Butchy’s and who she might bump into there, preferring to go to one of the younger cafés that dotted Chapel Street and where no one knew her. The street was well lit, relatively safe and with a little luck she could park across from one of these places and wouldn’t have to walk more than 30 feet to get in or out. So there was the Atticus Book store café, the Cellar Grill and even the Starbucks that had replaced the ancient luncheonette she had gone into as a teenage girl. All of which she could choose from. And any would do. But tonight it was the Atticus Café that had empty tables she could see from the street and a space for her car where she could park right outside the front door.

It didn’t take long, however, for her to regret the table she’d chosen when she got inside. It looked like a good table, not too far from the counter to get faster service, but off by itself away from the stacks of mixed new and used books where students lingered for hours sitting on the floor reading through what they could not afford to buy. But once Maggie sat for a while she realized that the couple nearest her at the counter – they couldn’t have been more than 18 or 19 – were holding up two sides of a heated love triangle. She could hear the boy pleading softly for reason and see that the girl was completely staggered by the surrealistic picture of another girl that had been painted for her. Maggie just knew it was the first time this had ever happened to the girl. And how did Maggie know? She knew because when the girl got up, leaving the boy with a pile of green napkins that had been stained with her mascara along with all the rest that had run from her nose and eyes, the boy looked at Maggie briefly, and in that second he became Maggie’s first real love.

The boy was beautiful – just as Maggie’s Sam had been beautiful. The dark tips of his lashes drooped languidly, and from the angle of his shoulders to his shiny eyes he oozed the confusion and stupidity of a young man feeling the power of having two women love him and he thinking he could love them both in return. When the boy dropped his head away from Maggie’s gaze to look into his pockets for the bills to attach to this failed date, Maggie fell into a dark place where the front passenger door of a ‘42 Buick stood open while the motor idled as she decided whether she would scream and pound her fists into Sam’s face or summon the grace to simply tilt her nose toward the night sky and follow it onward toward home. It had been a magic spring and summer, the war over by many years, high school behind her, her father on his feet again, and the promise of Sam slowly entering her one smile at a time. She believed Sam would be the one, as every girl early on believes she has found the one. But then she found out - through the cursive figure of some other female’s handwriting sticking out one of Sam’s books - that she was not the only one for Sam. And it took her down. Hard. When it happened she remembered what her uncles and older cousins used to say about some of the men that died beside them in the Philippines and the Argonne - “they never saw it coming.” These relatives stated this as if it were a blessing, owing to all the other men who had seen it coming, who had suffered the organic hell of knowing that the life in their exploded bodies was about to cease to be. Maggie too never saw it coming but it was not a blessing for her. Sam’s infidelity was a bullet that hit Maggie when she least expected it, but once it hit she’d had to live on to watch it gut her of her confidence. Maggie did walk home that night, her hope emptying into the dirt along with her tears and snot, just as this girl at the counter had left her hope behind on that napkin. How, god, could he who was so beautiful and so kind and so warm inside me do this to me? But Sam did and that was the second time in Maggie’s life when reality had truly prevailed.

Maggie went home that night as quickly as she had arrived at the coffee house. Once home she fell into a deep sleep where she did not dream and she did not wake until morning. She reminded herself that it was a blessing to sleep this deeply – even though she dreamed almost every night - and by the time her children and grandchildren arrived two days later she had loosened herself of the little scene at the coffee house and what it had triggered for her.

The three days leading up to Christmas went rather slowly once Maggie’s children and grandchildren had shown up and had that first meal together where everyone shakes off their ever-happy faces and best behavior. Maggie understood that small children acted up and made noise but during that first dinner Maggie’s grandkids once again surpassed her understanding. Eileen and her husband made flailing gestures to get the kids simmered down, but as usual the couple drank too much and it was Teddy, of all people, who was finally able to get his niece and nephew focused by taking them into the den and having them make up new words for Christmas carols which he played on the upright his dad had dragged home and rebuilt. Teddy told them stories about the burn marks their grandfather had left in the ivory of the keys during those times when he got so distracted with his playing that he would prop his cigarettes filter end down on the wood above the keyboard and the ash would finally tip over to singe yet another place in the piano’s upper register. Hearing Teddy in there with the kids, Maggie still believed that Teddy was going to right himself – that this was on its way to happening any day now.

By the next day Maggie had made a deal with herself that she was not going to judge her kids and grandkids for whom they were presenting themselves to be but for whom she knew them to be. Or at least for whom she believed they could become. This made it easier for Maggie to keep the dinners, and breakfasts and lunches moving along through aggressive, unforgiving appetites, easier to steer them all through the Christmas morning chaos of kids exploding with despair soon after they couldn’t find any more gifts to open and adults no longer able to hide the fact that they wanted to be somewhere else once strong coffee ceased to elevate their moods. By the day after Christmas, when she knew her family would be leaving that evening, Maggie finally found a few minutes to sit alone on the unheated sun porch to consider if all this had truly been worth the trouble for any of them. She concluded that it was the only trouble worth having in life, that of a noisy, somewhat disrespectful family who, nonetheless, decide to be with you no matter what they seemed to be saying otherwise.

Pulling her big sweater around her to get up and walk back through the morning chill of the porch into her house, Maggie had found a way to ground herself in the sweet emptiness that would come with saying goodbye in a few hours. But when Teddy walked onto the porch before she could rise from her chair there was something about his entrance that took away the warm, self pity she had worked herself into. She let herself feel the chill again and she let herself swell with affirmation. Teddy opened the sun porch storm door leading to the back yard and stood across the jamb where he lit a cigarette and tried to blow the smoke out into the gentle December wind which only blew it back toward his mother’s averted face. “You need to quit that habit,” Maggie told him foregoing what might have been a stronger remark. “The doctor said it killed your father.”

“Living killed dad. The doctor was just earning a paycheck.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” is all Maggie said before adjusting her small frame in the love seat. As a boy and now as a man, Teddy was always dissatisfied and always on the run. There was always something better wherever Teddy was not. His mother knew this but she preferred to support him in his wanderings, believing her boy was ultimately on his way to a steadier place that had more promise, a home with a sturdier foundation that could hold his outsized dreams long enough to make them real. Maggie knew why Teddy was on the porch with her before he even came to the point. That’s why she swelled up when he walked out there - she was ready to say yes to Teddy before he even asked the question.
“Mom, I gotta go a little early. I’m supposed to meet a producer in the city.” Maggie nodded and patted the cushion beside her. Teddy threw his cigarette out into the yard and joined her on the love seat.

“I don’t really want to have to ask you this . . . not again . . . but I have a good feeling about this project.”

“Just tell me what you need, Teddy. Your father worked hard and I have it and you know I’m never one to give up on anybody in this house."

Teddy arched his shoulders back into the love seat and closed his eyes.

“Jesus, mom, you don’t even know how much I’m asking for and you’re going to give it to me? I mean I’m grateful, but there are times when I honestly wonder why you don’t give up on me. ”

“Because I choose not too Teddy, that’s why.”

From out of an elm tree in the backyard, a bird screeched feverishly into the conversation. It distracted Teddy and he looked away from his mother never realizing that she was not going to stop looking at him until he looked away first. Though it didn’t matter, because even if he had realized it, it would have only told Teddy what he already knew, that his mother really had no idea how much the stern hopefulness she carried inside her had taken out of those she labored to carry it for.

Maggie left the porch immediately after that and she kept marching tight-jawed through to her purse and onward to the check she wrote and tore out for Teddy, pacing time and the breaches of her family to force her way smiling into a gang of sloppy hugs and guilty goodbyes, all the way through the next morning and afternoon and on to the final evening of that week when she found herself sitting amongst a group of crow-eyed girls across a table at Butchy’s.

Hamburgers served and cleared and each woman totaling her portion of the flimsy diner check, Maggie had nearly forgotten about the week that just transpired. Her son was just another spirit she held aloft: her family a group of problems she could solve with the will of God. Maggie had even found the good grace to allow her friends to minister to her that night, pretending not to mind that they thought themselves superior in the advice they forced on her even after she told them again and again that she was just a little quiet tonight and not a bit unhappy. Maggie was pleased with herself for having found this equilibrium after such a long week. And this made it all the more surprising for her when Butchy crossed the dining room toward their table and Maggie slowly felt a growing sense of uneasiness that constricted her throat and heightened her cheekbones into something between a giggle and sob.

By the time Butchy reached the table with his unfortunate face blazing, Maggie was staring back into something she had not looked at for a long, long time. She tried to shift her position to look away from Butchy who was attempting to catch her eye, but having turned this way and that she could not shake the hopeless face which came in at the edges of her memory. There was no longer any doubt for Maggie about what had attracted her to Butchy or to this place where she knew he would likely go crazy with sadness when he finally realized that his world was slowly dying all around him. There was no longer any doubt of what Maggie had really known all along.

The first time reality was upon her, it was Maggie’s father who brought it with him back from the war. He was a short man, who as a young father was as tough as a city street in the old suit vests he always wore over open collared shirts and rolled cuffs. Ruddy in complexion, his cheeks popped with the red roses of a skin condition he’d had ever since he was a boy, but when Maggie the girl kissed him it wasn’t a heated skin rash she felt under her lips but the warmth of God. Before he’d shipped for Italy, Maggie had built her father into a tree of life that sheltered her inside the big shabby home where they lived. As it is for all very young girls with all good fathers, the man was immutable. Where he walked, hope shined for Maggie. But then came the morning two weeks after he had been discharged when Maggie, just 10 years old, found her father weeping at the foot of her bed.

Waking in the shadows of the rainy dawn, Maggie wasn’t sure what she was hearing, so she groped along the beside wall until she came upon her father with his head damp and lolling around the point of his spine. At first Maggie thought he was physically hurt . . . Daddy, did you fall? But he did not answer and would not answer for many weeks and months to come. And with her father’s fall, Maggie was pierced for the first time by the lies her mother and grandmothers and aunts had told her. The light of a rainy day once so beautiful and soft for her now became unbearable; the shelter of her father’s arms, and the home he built with the work of his hands, were now nothing more than wood and skin and bones which could burn and die. During those months, every other human being Maggie ever loved became truly human and weak and the best she could ever do hereafter was to continue to pray hard enough to fool herself into thinking that something else might be true.

Every time for the rest of her life that Maggie kept hope alive for her family when the jaws of misery were snapping around them she had to turn her back on her father to do it. Each time she rose above the desolation of life or the failings she found in yet another man or woman, her father wept alone at the foot of her bed. And in those one, two and three times when Maggie had completely lost her way and let the cold-bloodedness of loss win her over, it was her father that rose from that floor to ultimately remind her that this was a broken and ignorant world in which we lived and it could either drain us of our hope or give us pause to consider that hope was all we had.

Bit by bit, the somewhat artificial voices of old women trying to sound like girls filtered Maggie back into her seat at the table and the night at hand. Butchy had walked away by that point and soon after Maggie had paid her share and she too walked away to get in her car and drive home. Pulling into her garage and pushing the button on the visor to shut the overhead door behind her, there was a moment before she turned off the ignition that Maggie wondered if it might not just be better to leave it running for a while. Just for a little while so she could rest. But the moment passed quickly – as these moments will - and she shut off the car and moved to go inside to pick up where she had left off.

When she opened the door of the breezeway the cat ran out into the garage. He’d heard the ticks of the still warm car and felt that perhaps there was something out there he was missing. Maggie thought for a second about rooting around through the junk in the garage which the cat had run under in order to find him and shoo him back into the house. Then she decided against it and closed the door behind her to leave him out there for a while. Maggie knew that, one way or the other, he would always find his way back in.