Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

Until.

Bing.

Staring out at the water from Pemaquid Point, my brain awash with so many thoughts, I dug out my cellphone and found myself reading:

Hey Mom. Want to finally get out of Dodge this weekend. Thinking maybe we could meet somewhere like Portland. A couple of good movies in town. We could also catch dinner somewhere. You up for this?

Damn. Damn. Damn. This would have to be the one weekend in literally nine years that I am going out of town. I texted back:

Hey Ben. Would love to do dinner and a movie Saturday. but I have that professional conference this weekend in Boston. I could try to get out of it.

His immediate reply:

Don’t do that for me.

My immediate reply:

It’s just a work thing. But you are more important than that.

And you never go anywhere — so let’s push the night out to next weekend.

Now I’m feeling guilty.

You’re always feeling guilty about something, Mom. Go run away for a few days — and try not to feel bad about it.

I stared at this last text long and hard. Thinking of a phrase my poor father invoked time and time again whenever considering the limitations he’d placed on his own life:

Easier said than done.

And considering my own personal condition, Ben’s admonition genuinely unsettled me. Because the only response that came to mind was:

Easier said than done.

Three

. YOU NEVER GO anywhere.

Ouch.

Though I know Ben didn’t mean that comment to hurt it still did. Because it articulated an uncomfortable truth.

Walking back to my car, putting the key in the ignition, pulling out of the parking lot, the ocean now behind me, I turned left and followed the spindly, narrow road left, knowing it would curve its way past the summer homes now largely empty with autumn edging closer to winter’s dark harshness, before veering right again and ascending a gentle hill lined with the homes of the peninsula’s full-time residents. Outside the occasional artist or New Age reflexologist, the majority of the houses here are owned by people who teach school or sell insurance or work for the local fire brigade or have retired from the navy or the shipyard in Bath and are trying to get by on a pension and social security. These houses — many of which (like my own) could use several licks of paint — soon give way to open fields and the main route back west towards town. I mention all this because I have driven this stretch of road three, four times a week ever since Dan and I moved here years ago. Bar the two weeks a year when we have been out of town on vacation, the town of Damariscotta, Maine, has been the centre of everything in my life. Just recently the thought struck me: I don’t have a passport. And the last time I left the country was way back in l989, my senior year at the University of Maine, when I talked my then-boyfriend Dan to drive with me up to Quebec City for a long weekend. Back then you could still cross into Canada with an American driver’s license. It was the Winter Carnival in Quebec City. Snow was everywhere. The streets of the Old City were cobbled. The architecture was gingerbread house. Everyone spoke French. I’d never seen anything so magical and foreign before. Even Dan — who was initially a little unnerved by the different language, the weird accent — became charmed by it all. Though the little hotel in which we spent those four happy days was a bit run-down and had a narrow double bed that creaked loudly every time we made love, it was a sublimely romantic time for us — and, I am pretty certain, the moment when I became pregnant with Ben. But before we knew that we were about to become parents — a discovery that changed the course of everything in our lives — Dan told me that we’d always go back to Quebec City. Just as we’d also visit Paris and London and Rio and.

One of the many naive pleasures of being young is telling yourself that life is an open construct; that your possibilities are limitless. Until you conspire to limit them.

I have rooted myself to one spot. This thought has been on my mind considerably. But, honestly, there is no anger towards Dan underlying this realization. Whatever about the other problems in our marriage, I don’t blame him for the way my life has panned out. After all I was the co-conspirator in all this. It was my choice to marry him. I now see that I made certain huge decisions at a moment when my judgment was, at best, clouded. Is that how life so often works? Can your entire trajectory shift thanks to one hastily made resolution?

I hear these sorts of ruminative regrets frequently from patients. The smokers who are now ruing the day they took their first puff. The morbidly obese who wonder out loud why they have always needed to compulsively eat. Then there are the truly sad souls who are wondering if some chance tumor — with no direct link to what doctors like to refer as ‘lifestyle’ — is some sort of retribution (divine or otherwise) for bad behavior, accumulated sins, or an inability to find simple happiness in this one and only life that has been granted to them.

There was a time when these scan-room confessions — usually blurted out in moments of mortal terror, shadowed by the great fear of the unknown — were all in a day’s work for me. Are they beginning to unnerve me because, in their own direct way, they are now forcing me to reflect on the ever-accelerating passage of time? For here we are again in October. And I am now in my forty-third year and still can’t totally figure out how a year has simply vanished. My dad — who taught calculus at a high school in Waterville — once explained this to me with elegant simplicity a few years back, when I mentioned how one of the stranger aspects of impending middle age was the way a year was over in three blinks.

‘And when you get to my age. ’ he said.

‘If I get to your age.’ (He was seventy-two back then.)

‘Always the pessimist. But I guess it comes with your professional territory. OK, I will rephrase. If you get to my age. you will discover that a year passes in two blinks. And if I make it to, say, eighty-five, it will be, at best, a blink. And the reason is a simple mathematical formula — which has nothing to do with Euclidian precepts, and more with the law of diminishing returns. Remember when you were four years old and a year appeared huge and so slow. ’

‘Sure. I also remember thinking how, every time Christmas had come and gone, the wait until next year would be endless.’

‘Exactly. But the thing was — a year back then was just one quarter of your life. Whereas now. ’

‘One thirty-ninth.’

‘Or, in my case, one seventy-second. This means that time shrinks with the accumulation of years. Or, at least, that’s the perception. And all perception is, by its own nature, open to individual interpretation. The empirical fact is that time doesn’t elongate or shrink. A day will always have twenty-four hours, a week seven days, a year three-hundred and sixty-five days. What does change is our awareness of its speed — and its increasing preciousness as a commodity.’

Dad. He died last year after a slow, cruel descent into the fog that is Alzheimer’s. Twelve months earlier he had still been so mentally sharp. As sharp as my mother before the pancreatic cancer that came out of nowhere and killed her just four summers ago. Was it the love story of the past and present century? I can certainly remember moments when I was younger — especially during my adolescence — when there was a decided chill between them. I recall Dad dropping hints that teaching calculus in one of Maine’s smaller cities wasn’t the career stretch he had envisaged for himself when he was an undergraduate and the star of the U Maine math department. But it was Dad who had elderly parents in Bangor and felt beholden after college to turn down a doctoral scholarship at MIT in favor of one at U Maine in order to be on standby for his aging mother and father. And it was Dad who took the job in Waterville when he couldn’t find a college post in-state.