Mae
At breakfast Nana is telling a story about a boy she dated when she was eighteen.
“His father was a prince,” she says as she ladles some sugar into her coffee, “and his mother was a debutante. He was very handsome, and he took me to the most fabulous parties all over New York City. Once, we danced until five in the morning. Then he kissed me on a street corner just as it started to rain. It was unbelievably romantic.”
“Mom,” Pop says, looking at her over his newspaper. “You didn’t date a prince.”
“Sounds like a swell guy, Mary,” Dad says with a completely straight face, and Nana throws a balled-up napkin in his direction. He catches it and throws it right back.
“Enough, you two,” Pop says with a weary look.
Ever since his mother came to live with them this spring, meals—at least on the days when she’s been up to joining them—have turned into sparring sessions, with Nana and Dad trading good-natured jabs across the table.
They’re so eerily well matched that one day, while they went back and forth about the merits of green tea, Pop leaned over to Mae and whispered, “I think I married my mother.”
Mae finishes her cereal and rinses the bowl in the sink. “Well,” she says, her voice light as she turns around again, “I’m off.”
“What about the gallery?” Pop asks with a frown.
She’s been working there a few days a week, packing boxes and answering the phone and talking to the more casual customers who come up from the city and act like they’re on the brink of buying a painting, before they move on to the antique shop next door and go through the same routine with an old lamp.
“Yeah, I was hoping I could come in later.” Mae does her best not to meet any of their eyes. “It’s just that Garrett is leaving this afternoon, so…”
To her surprise, they all look thrilled.
“Well, why didn’t you say so,” Dad says with a grin. “Please. Go. We certainly wouldn’t want to keep him. Not even a minute longer than—”
“Give him our best,” Pop says, ever the diplomat.
“I think it’s lovely,” Nana says with the same dreamy look she gets when they watch old movies together. “A dramatic send-off.”
“I’m not sure how dramatic it will be,” Mae tells her. “We always knew we were going our separate ways.”
“That doesn’t make it any less romantic,” she says, beaming.
She’s wearing a blue silk robe, and she looks tiny inside it, lost in the folds of fabric.
All the chemo she went through this spring—a course so intensive she was in the hospital for over a month—seems to have shrunk her.
But it worked, and now, whenever someone remarks on how much weight she’s lost, Nana only grins.
“Must’ve been a whole lot of cancer in there. ”
It rattles Mae sometimes to hear her joke about it; she knows how close they were to losing her.
When Mae was little, some of the kids at school used to ask whether she missed having a mother, and she was always quick to bite their heads off: “I have two dads,” she’d say, eyes blazing.
“And I bet they’re both better than yours. ”
But that was only half the truth. The other half was that she had Nana.
Every Sunday, they’d drive down to have brunch in her sunny brownstone on the Upper West Side.
The place was cluttered with a lifetime of knickknacks, but whenever Mae asked about anything in particular, Nana’s answers were always short on details.
“I’ve lived a big life on a small island,” she’d say.
“You can’t expect me to remember every piece of flotsam and jetsam. ”
It wasn’t the things you’d expect that made her so important to Mae.
Her dads were perfectly capable of helping her pick out clothes or teaching her about the birds and the bees.
It was more about drinking tea on Nana’s window seat and watching old black-and-white movies together and listening to stories about her past. It didn’t matter that they were sometimes hard to believe.
(“There’s no way she had cocktails with JFK,” Pop would say, exasperated.) That wasn’t the point.
The point was that she was there at all.
It was like having an extra sun in their orbit, an inexhaustible source of warmth and energy. They were a constellation of their own, Mae and Pop and Dad, but knowing Nana was there on the edges made their little universe feel complete.
Now Nana’s eyes are bright as she peers at Mae over a mug of coffee. “Go enjoy your date. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that a girl your age should be out having adventures.”
“But not too many adventures,” Dad chimes in as Mae grabs her bag and heads for the door. She gives them a wave over her shoulder.
“I’ll be back later.”
“But not too much later,” he calls out behind her.
Outside, she cuts through the neighbor’s yard and then winds her way through a few side streets until she reaches the edge of town.
She can see Garrett waiting outside the cheese shop, busy with his phone.
When he looks up, with his messy hair and thousand-watt smile, she feels a tug of regret that this will all be over soon.
It’s not like the way her best friend, Priyanka, described it when her boyfriend, Alex, left for Duke last week: like their souls were being ripped apart.
Mae’s summer with Garrett has been a mixture of arguing and making out, all of it passionate, but none of it having very much to do with souls.
“Hey,” he says, giving her a kiss as they begin to walk. “How’d it go?”
“What?”
“The film. I thought you were gonna watch it.”
“Oh,” she says flatly. “Yeah. It didn’t help.”
“Really? Still no idea what went wrong?”
“Nope. And the not knowing is basically killing me.”
Garrett stops and turns to her. “What if I watch?”
“No way,” Mae says, continuing past him. “Not a chance.”
“But I’m a film critic.”
She rolls her eyes. “Having a Twitter account doesn’t make you a film critic.”
“Fine, but I will be someday,” he says, jogging to catch up to her. “So I can give you an honest opinion. And you already trust my taste, so—”
Now it’s Mae’s turn to come to a stop. “I don’t, actually. You have terrible taste. Everything you like is overwrought and pretentious. Plus, all your favorite directors are men, which really sucks.”
“That’s not my fault,” he says, but there’s a spark in his eyes, because he loves a good debate. They both do. “It’s the industry’s. Besides, it could be a good thing that we have different tastes.” He pauses. “Obviously, the admissions board did.”
She glares at him, and he holds up both hands.
“All I’m saying is that you need answers, and I have opinions.”
They’re nearly to the river now, picking their way down the hill toward the maple tree where they’ve spent the better half of the summer bickering about movies and kissing until their lips were swollen.
When they get to the bottom, Garrett drops down in their usual spot, but Mae remains standing.
She fishes her phone out of her back pocket and pulls up the video file.
“Here,” she says, holding it out to him.
“Really?” he says as he takes it. To Mae, it feels like handing over a tiny piece of herself.
Be gentle, she wants to say, but she doesn’t, because she’s tougher than that.
The film is eighteen minutes long, and Mae can’t bear to sit there while he watches, so she walks along the edge of the muddy river until it’s time to circle back again. Garrett’s head is still bent over the phone, but he looks up when she sits beside him, his expression hard to read.
“Well?” she asks, sounding much too casual.
“Technically speaking,” he says, “I think it’s brilliant.”
Mae frowns at him. “Meaning?”
“You’re an awesome filmmaker,” he says, his face serious. “I don’t know how you managed some of those camera angles. And that transition near the end? You’re really, really talented, and this is really, really impressive.”
She can feel the next word coming as surely as if he’d already spoken it. “But?”
“You want me to be honest?”
“I do,” Mae says, her mouth dry.
Garrett’s forehead creases. “Well, it’s just…it’s kind of impersonal.”
“Impersonal?” she repeats, caught off guard. She’d been prepared for a thousand other criticisms. But impersonal definitely wasn’t one of them.
Of all the films she’s ever made, this one is closest to her own life. Someone else did the acting—a girl from school who’d been the star of every play and was eager to use it for her audition reel—but the rest of it was Mae, her story laid out for anyone who wanted to see.
“It’s about a girl with two dads who lives in the Hudson Valley,” she says to Garrett, an edge to her voice. “What could be more personal than that?”
“I know it’s about you,” he says. “That’s really obvious. The problem is that it doesn’t feel like you.”
“Well,” she says stiffly, “maybe you don’t actually know me.”
Garrett looks surprised. “Maybe I don’t. But that’s not really my fault, is it?”
Mae almost wants to laugh, but it gets stuck in her throat.
Nobody has ever accused her of being mysterious before.
In fact, she’s never had a problem speaking her mind.
When she was eight, she showed up at a town hall held by her congressman and gave an impassioned speech in defense of gay marriage.
When it was finally legalized in the state of New York, she sent him a postcard that read No thanks to you.
Once, she broke up a fight between two boys on the street and ended up with a black eye of her own.
And every so often, she likes to wander into the comments section of her favorite film channel and write impassioned rebuttals to all the idiots who feel threatened by female remakes of their childhood favorites.
She is not exactly a wallflower.
Garrett squints at her, trying to figure out his next move. “Come on, Mae. We both know you’re not the best at—”
“What?” she demands.
He hesitates, then shrugs. “Letting people in.”
“That’s not true.”
“See?” he says. “If you can’t even allow yourself to be introspective in this conversation, how are you ever gonna do it in your films?”
There’s a hint of arrogance in his face as he says this, and for a second, Mae can see what her dads have been talking about all summer.
But then his expression softens again, and he reaches for her hand, and she steels herself for whatever he’s going to say next, which is probably that she really shouldn’t be steeling herself against anything at all.
“You’re obviously super talented. But the difference between a good film and a great one has nothing to do with jump cuts and cool techniques. It’s about showing people who you are.”
Mae opens her mouth to argue with this, but he hurries on.
“We both know you have a lot to say,” he tells her, offering a smile even as she untangles her hand from his. “You just have to get out of your own way and actually say it.”
“I did,” she says.
Garrett shakes his head. “You didn’t. Not yet.”
“But—”
He holds up a hand. “Just think about it for a while before telling me I’m wrong, okay? The point of criticism is to help you get better, and that’s all I’m trying to do.”
“Fine,” Mae says with some amount of effort. “Then…thanks. I guess.”
“You’re welcome,” he says magnanimously. He glances down at her phone, which he’s still holding. “Oh, and Priyanka texted while I was watching. I tried to swipe it away and accidentally opened the link she sent.”
Mae’s head is still swimming with thoughts about the film, but she reaches for the phone and stares blankly at the screen, which is open to an unfamiliar social media platform.
“Apparently some kid is looking for a Margaret Campbell to go on a train with him,” Garrett says, leaning forward to look. “Crazy, right? That’s so close to your name.”
“It is my name,” she mutters, already skimming the message.
He shrugs. “I’m sure it’s just some creepy fifty-year-old trying to meet someone.”
Mae bristles at this, though she’s not sure why. He may be right. But there’s something about the tone of the message that makes her believe it.
“I wonder who’ll go,” he says. “It would be such a weird thing to do.”
“Would it?” she asks, looking up.
“To go off with a complete stranger?” he says, looking at her incredulously. “Yeah. Besides, the trains here are the worst. Eurail is really the way to do it. I think I’m gonna start with Amsterdam next month.”
“Cool,” Mae says, but she’s hardly listening. She’s too busy reading the post again. So if your name is Margaret Campbell and you’re interested in a bit of an adventure…
Garrett watches her for a moment, and something in his face shifts. “You’re not actually thinking about this,” he says, and though it started out as a question, it lands flat-footed and certain, a statement meant to convey how ridiculous that would be. “A week on a train with some random dude?”
“You’re not jealous, are you?” Mae teases, but the expression on his face tells her that she’s right. She inches forward so that their knees are touching and gives him a serious look. “I thought we decided—”
“We did,” he says quickly. “But now that I’m leaving, I just…”
“I know,” she says, though she doesn’t. Not really.
She thinks again of the way Priyanka had felt about Alex’s departure, the hours of crying and the constant texts flying between them, the two of them desperate to bridge the sudden distance.
Mae feels none of that with Garrett, and his words bob to the surface again: We both know you’re not the best at letting people in.
She feels a prickle of something unfamiliar, something a little like doubt.
“I guess you’re right,” he says, but he’s looking at her as if hoping she might disagree with him.
“I’m leaving for Paris next week, and you’ll be in California, and it’s not like we were ever…
” He fumbles for the right word, unable to find it, while the options scroll through Mae’s head: long-term, compatible, serious, in love.
She closes her eyes for a second, trying to muster up something bigger than what she’s feeling now, which is a mild sadness at the thought of saying goodbye. But when she peeks around it, there’s nothing more.
“It was a really great summer,” she says, taking his hand.
He nods. “I guess now it’s time for the next thing.”
They look at each other for a moment, and then Garrett’s eyes brighten a little.
“We still have a few hours, though,” he says with a grin, and when he leans in, Mae kisses him back automatically. But her mind is miles away, already busy thinking about the next thing.