One month after she graduated college, Leah and her mother took a vacation to Maine. Originally, Leah had intended to go backpacking across the country with her boyfriend, who she had been dating since freshman year, and who she later married, then divorced. After he broke up with her the first time, she found herself at loose ends, sleeping past noon, awaking to boredom, fatigue, and creeping tendrils of depression rooted inside her like weeds. To help her get over him, she tried meditation, journaling, Reiki, even some low-cost cognitive therapy. Nothing worked. Finally she bought a book called The Happy Mind, which promised to help people stop obsessing about things they had no control over. But although she agreed with the book’s central thesis – You can’t change people. Live in the present moment. Be grateful – she had a hard time following the advice. She was sitting on the deck of the two-bedroom apartment she’d grown up in, going over his break-up speech for the umpteenth time, when her mother slid the screen door open and plopped down on the other chaise lounge. Her mother had brought her sewing with her. She was embroidering tiny palm trees onto new linen napkins.“What do you think?” she asked, holding up a finished one.

The fronds sagged too much, but the stitches were clean. Her mother had thrown out the old monogrammed napkins right after the divorce was finalized.

“It’s nice,” Leah said.

“I don’t know.” Her mother squinted at the napkin. “Maybe I should have gone with bougainvillea. Anyway, how would you like to come to Acadia with me?”

Her parents had planned the trip a year ago when they were still together. It was paid for and her mother insisted on going anyway. Leah had been looking forward to the alone time. She was about to decline when she caught sight of the cautiously hopeful expression on her mother’s face.

At least Maine would be cooler than Florida. Graduate school didn’t start until September. She couldn’t find a summer job and all her college friends lived elsewhere.

“Sure. I’ll go,” she said, although the prospect of spending a week alone with her mother was distinctly unappealing.

 

“Isn’t this glorious?” her mother said, marveling at the scenic views.

The ocean looked different in Maine than in Florida. Tougher, a more elastic shade of blue. Pine trees crowded the edge of the road. The air smelled cleaner. They had checked into the motel and were walking along the loop trail at the top of Cadillac Mountain, on Mt. Desert Island.

Leah was surprised to see how the trees thinned out at the summit, becoming squat and gnarled, amid pink granite boulders.

Her mother rattled off facts from their guidebook: Tallest mountain on the eastern seaboard! First place in the country to see the sun rise! Home to moose, bear and whales!

“Let me take your picture,” her mother said.

“Okay.”

Leah backed up, positioning herself near a scrubby pitch pine.

“Stop!” her mother called out. “You’re too close to the edge. You’ll fall.”

Did that happen, Leah wondered. People lurching backward unexpectedly, tumbling to the bottom of the mountain. What would her ex think if she plummeted off the side? Would he blame himself? Whatever he felt, she wouldn’t be around to see it, she thought, moving several steps closer to her mother, who was fussing with the camera lens.

“Say Maine,” her mother sang out.

 

Leah had been an English major at college. While her friends were studying accounting and spending long hours in chemistry lab, she could be found under a tree, reading. The novels she liked best were by lesser-known Victorian women writers – Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Ouida, Ellen Wood. Most of them wrote about strong female heroines who rebelled against the patriarchy but got married in the end. Her senior thesis, “Representations of The Marriage Plot in Non-Canonical Sensation Fiction,” had won a prize. She had applied to ten graduate schools and gotten into six, including Yale, where she was headed in ten weeks. Yale! Their placement record was impressive, all but guaranteeing she would obtain a tenure track position, like her favorite professors, who showed up to campus twice a week and inhabited sprawling houses, overflowing with cats and plants, where she was often invited to tea. And yet . . . .  this obsession with Howard threatened to derail her plans. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. I want . . . I want . . . I want . . . Why hadn’t he loved her enough? What had he thought was missing?

She flipped through the self-help book, searching for answers. Angry at herself for letting this take up so much space. She was behaving like a secondary character in the novels she studied: The heroine’s sister-in-law or close friend. A maid servant who doubled as a confidante. Nothing important ever happened to those women. They never accomplished anything.

 

There was a gift shop at the top, next to the restrooms, selling magnets, hats, T-shirts, books about the national parks, blueberry jam.

Leah held up a purple shirt with a drawing of a moose on it, under the words I Climbed Cadillac Mountain.

“This is kind of cute,” she said to her mother, before moving on to one that depicted the sun rising over a humped back mountain surrounded by small oddly shaped islands, mirroring the views they’d just seen.

She had shared a sunrise with him once, junior year. They’d woken up early and climbed the tallest hill on campus. She remembered how she’d wanted to freeze time, like a photograph – the sky awash with pink smudges, the quad limned in inky shadow, her head resting comfortably on his shoulder.

You’re in a gift shop in Maine, she told herself. He’s not here. College is over.

The book had said to concentrate on each moment as it happened, so she stared at a bottle of blueberry jam, picturing how it would taste smeared on toast. No, she wasn’t doing it right. Toast and jam were in the future, not the present. A lone tear emerged from the corner of her eye, and she wiped it away before it could slip down her cheek.

She heard her mother’s voice, angry and insistent,

“My daughter wants this shirt,” her mother was yelling.

“I saw it first.”

Leah wheeled around to see her mother and another lady holding opposite ends of the purple T-shirt. Apparently, it was the only moose one left. She felt her face blush crimson, like a Victorian heroine.

“Mom, it’s okay. I don’t need the shirt. Let’s go.”

“You said you liked it. I was just about to buy it for you.”

Mothers behaved badly in the novels Leah loved. They thwarted plans, scolded their offspring, locked their daughters in madhouses. Or they died before the story began. That way the leading female character could make her way in the world unencumbered by maternal naysaying.

“You heard her,” the lady said, tugging on a sleeve. “She doesn’t want it.”

“Yes . . . she . . . does.”

The sound the shirt made when it ripped in two was surprisingly satisfying.

“Well, it’s yours now,” her mother said, flinging the torn half at the lady.

“Ma’am,” said the saleswoman. “You’re going to have to pay for that.”

“Fine.” Her mother pulled out two bills, threw them down on the counter.

To Leah she said, “We’ll make matching bandannas.”

 

Chapter Three of Leah’s book was about how to feel happier. The author, Dr. Wanda Gemunder, outlined the process in detail, and Leah was so excited after she read it that she explained it to her mother while they were hiking Jordan Pond.

“There are two states of being. Wanting and not Wanting.”

Her mother regarded her warily. “What do you mean?”

“Think about it. Everyone goes through life wanting something: more money, a better job, to fall in love. Or not wanting various things.”

“Like not wanting to get sick?”

“Yeah. But other stuff too. Not wanting your kids to grow up and move on. My not wanting Howard to break up with me. Not wanting to feel lonely. So, the key to feeling good is to stop desiring things. We need to try and un-attach.”

“That’s called Buddhism,” her mother said.

Leah stopped walking. They were in one of the prettiest spots she’d ever been to. On one side of the trail was a tangle of lush forest. On the other was the pond, an impossible shade of blue, reflecting a sky cluttered with wispy clouds. They had followed a raised wooden boardwalk, crossed log bridges, and arrived at what looked like a long stretch of uneven rocks and boulders, blocking the path. In the distance, she heard the faint cry of a loon.

“The book says all the wanting/not wanting we experience is an ‘unquenchable thirst.’  It’s endless. And useless. Since most of the time what we want or don’t want isn’t in our control.”

Her mother scratched at a mosquito bite.

“Then why bother doing anything? We might as well stay home and pull the covers over our heads. Life is all about wanting, Lee. It’s the most important thing, what motivates us and makes us feel alive.”

Pointless to try and make her mother understand. They didn’t see eye to eye on anything anymore.

“What do you want, Mom?” Leah asked.

And why are you so angry, she added silently, in her head.

“Right now, I want to get over this scramble.”

“Scramble?”

“Yeah. The guidebook says we have to use our hands, as well as our feet, to get to the other side.”

It took half an hour. Leah forgot about the stunning view and concentrated on keeping her balance so she wouldn’t tumble to the ground and sprain her ankle. Sometimes her feet got wedged in crevices, or she was unsure of where her next foothold should be. Once, she looked over at her mother only to see her creeping across the sand-colored rocks on all fours, like a hermit crab. When she copied the motion, it was surprisingly effective.

After they had crossed the last rock and were back on the dirt path, they high fived one another.

“That was tough,” her mother gasped.

She was breathing heavily, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. Bending down, she placed a large pink rock at the end of the scramble.

“To mark our accomplishment,” she said, smiling.

Leah found a pale gray rock, the color of a pigeon’s wing, and put it on top of the pink one.

She knew she should feel proud, too. Should enjoy this moment – the postcard-pretty lake, the fact that she and her mother were getting along. But all she could think about was telling Howard. It didn’t count if she couldn’t tell him.

“What?” her mother said, reaching into her backpack to pull out more sunscreen.

“I miss him is all.”

“Men are like taxis.” Her mother patted Leah’s arm gingerly, as if it might break. “There’s always another one right around the corner.”

 

More than 20 years later, after her divorce, after the stroke that left her mother in a vegetative state, Leah remembered the vacation to Maine with startling clarity. Cadillac Mountain. Pitch pines. The purple moose shirt. Jordan Pond. The Happy Mind. So much time had passed. Her father dead, her ex re-married with children of his own, children with no connection to her. Loss upon loss, which the self-help book had pointed out was the price one had to pay for living in this world. If she concentrated, she could go back to her teenage self. As though the past was a doll she could take out and dress up when she felt like it. She had kept the book. But all these years later, she still couldn’t get the hang of  what it was trying to tell her. Most of the time, she found it impossible to stop wanting and not wanting. Sometimes they were even the same thing: Not wanting her mother to suffer. Wanting her to recover when the doctors said that was medically impossible. Wanting her to live. Wanting her to die. It was more complicated than Dr. Gemunder made it out to be.

She’d thrown away the purple bandana her mother had made for her years ago but found its twin in the top of her mother’s dresser, when she was selling the apartment. After the stroke, Leah cut it in two, fashioned matching bracelets for each of them. You could still see traces of the moose, its flowing, chocolate antlers, its glazed, pensive stare.

Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Portland Review, Blue Mountain Review, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Her work will be featured in The Best Microfictions 2024 and in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology 2024. She’s also a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and multiple Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached at @bsherm36 or https://www.bethsherman.site/