I knew many families around us who were making do on far less. Even though Sally did complain that we always seemed to be counting pennies she finally got wise and started using her weekend babysitting money to buy all the iPods and funky earrings and the butterfly tattoo (don’t ask) that she came home with after a day out with some girlfriends in Portland. Ben, on the other hand, never asked us for a penny. He had a part-time job at the college, mixing paints and stretching canvases in the visual arts department. He refused anything more than the room and board we provided for him in addition to his annual tuition.
‘I’m living la vie de bohиme in Farmington,’ he said to me once when I tried to press $100 into his hand (I’d done a week’s worth of overtime). ‘I can live on air. And I don’t want you to lose the roof because you slipped me a hundred bucks.’
I laughed and said:
‘I doubt that is going to happen.’
Actually we decided to pay off part of the new roof loan with Dan’s severance. The basement was now dry. And Dan turned in his leased car and used $1,500 to buy a 1997 Honda Civic that never made it above 60 mph. But at least he had wheels while I was at the hospital. The one-salary situation meant that money was ferociously tight. We were just about making all our bills every month and had absolutely no cash to spare. Dan had knocked on every door possible within the state. Perhaps the most terrible irony of his story was that, around eighteen months after he’d lost his job at Bean’s, he discovered that they were readvertising his old post. Naturally he contacted the head of personnel. Naturally the guy spun some yarn about sales upturn allowing them to re-expand the department they had just reduced. Naturally the guy also told Dan he should reapply for the job. Then they went and hired someone else who was (again according to the head of personnel) ‘simply more qualified’. Shortly after that Dan also lost what seemed to be that shoo-in position in the State of Maine’s IT department in Augusta — and the outbreaks of rage really started, perhaps augmented by the fact that, just two days ago, the head of personnel at Bean’s called and said they did have an opening — but it was in the stockroom. Yes, it was an assistant supervisor’s position. And yes, after six months he would be back in their health insurance system. Yet it only paid $13 an hour — but, hey, that was almost twice the minimum wage — and just about $15K a year after taxes.
That extra $15K would give us just the necessary breathing room, and avoid debt (which I have been so damn determined to dodge, but which we are careening towards very quickly). It might even allow us to borrow Dan’s brother-in-law’s condo in Tampa for a week during Christmas and have a proper family vacation in the sun. Of course Dan knew all that. Just as I also so understood he hated the idea of going to work in the stockroom — and for half of what he used to be making within the same organization.
‘It’s like he’s throwing me a bone,’ he said to me on the evening it was offered to him. ‘A crappy consolation prize — and a way of soothing his conscience about having fired me.’
‘It wasn’t him who fired you. It was the boys upstairs. It was their decision to make the cutbacks.’
‘Yeah, but he carried out their dirty work for them.’
‘Unfortunately that’s his job.’
‘You sticking up for him?’
‘Hardly.’
‘But you want me to accept his offer.’
‘I don’t want you to take the job if it is something you absolutely don’t want to do.’
‘We need the money.’
‘Well, yes, we really do. Still, we would find a way to keep things somehow ticking over. ’
‘You want me to take the job.’
‘I’m not saying that, Dan. And I have asked the hospital if they would let me do ten extra hours of overtime a week — which would bring in around two hundred and fifty more dollars.’
‘And make me feel guilty as hell. ’
Now, as I was turning this all over in my mind, I headed down my road. It’s a country road, around a mile from the center of Damriscotta. A road that loops its way through slightly elevated countryside. though the realtor, when he first brought us to see it, referred to the surrounding landscape as ‘gently rolling’. When I mentioned this once to Ben (in a discussion we were having about the way salesmen inevitably pretty things up) he just shook his head and said:
‘Well, I suppose if you were a rabbit you’d think it was “gently rolling”.’
The fact is that, down towards the waterfront, the terrain is elevated, humpy. The town lawyers and doctors live on those wonderful prospects overlooking the Kennebec River. So does one rather successful painter, a reasonably well-known writer of children’s books, and two builders who have cornered the market in this part of mid-coast Maine. The houses there are venerable clapboard structures — usually white or deep red — beautifully maintained and landscaped, with recent SUVs in the driveways. Hand on heart I have never had a disagreeable thought about the people who are lucky enough to live in these elegant, refined homes. Hand on heart there is a moment every day when I drive by this stretch of waterfront houses and think: Wouldn’t it be nice if.
If what? If I had married a rich local doctor? Or, more to the point, had become that doctor? Is that a tiny little stab I always feel — and yes, it has been a constant silent prod recently — whenever I pass by this stretch of real estate, before turning upwards towards my far more modest home? Is midlife inevitably marked by the onset of regret? I always put on a positive face in front of my work colleagues, my children, my increasingly detached husband. Dr Harrild once referred to me (at a surprise fortieth birthday party two years ago) as ‘the most unflappable and affirmative person on our staff’. Everyone applauded this comment. I smiled shyly while simultaneously thinking: If only you knew how often I ask myself: ‘Is this it?’
My dad often sang a tune to me about ‘accentuating the positive’ when I was younger and getting into one of those rather serious moods I used to succumb to during the roller-coaster ride that was adolescence. But considering how often I caught him singing those upbeat words to himself I can’t help but think that he was also using the song as a way of bolstering his own lingering sense of regret. Dr Harrild actually heard me humming this once in the staff room and said:
‘Now you are about the last person who needs to be telling herself all that.’
Dr Harrild. He too always tries to accentuate the positive — and genuinely be kind. The trip I’m taking this weekend being an example of that. A radiography conference in Boston. OK, Boston’s just three hours down the road, so it’s not like being sent to somewhere really enviable like Honolulu or San Francisco (two places I so want to visit someday). Still, the last time I was in Boston. gosh, it must be two years ago. A Christmas shopping trip. An overnight with Sally and Ben. We even went to a touring production of The Lion King and stayed in an OK hotel off Copley Square. The city was under a fresh dusting of snow. The chic lights along Newbury Street looked magical. I was so happy that Ben and Sally were so happy. And I told myself then that I was going to find the money to start travelling a little every year; that life was roaring by and if I wanted to see Paris or Rome or.