Maggie
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
Maggie pours cheerios and skim milk into Moana-themed plastic bowls. She cuts some of the fresh strawberries the twins and Maggie’s mother picked over the weekend. The berries are scarred and bug-eaten, in the way that only berries that come from your garden ever get to be; Maggie sculpts them carefully with a kitchen knife until they are clean and perfect. Christina knocks her half-full bowl onto the floor and looks at Maggie confused, like it just happened on its own. There are more cheerios, but the milk is out. Maggie texts her mother to see if she’ll bring milk when she comes to watch the twins that afternoon. She looks at the clock on the stove: it is already impossibly late.
Girls, go watch Doc McStuffins, proclaims Maggie, beneficent monarch of the kitchen. The girls scamper out of the kitchen and into the living room, where Michaela gets the television on. They are peripherally observed by their mother while she stacks dishes in the sink. The water comes brown out of the tap, and Maggie starts a text to Stephen, to see if he can fix the rust in the water heater. She’s furious, but can’t remember if she asked him to fix it the last time she noticed the water went bad, and anyway, after a minute, the water runs clear.
Maggie works dough with her hands before she gets the hand mixer. The butter makes her hands soft, but scrubbing will dry them out again. Maggie flattens the dough with her palm and works the edges with a plastic crinkle cookie-cutter, until each brown-green flower shape is nearly identical. Only the constellations of black sesame seeds tell them apart, like fingerprints. The twins come in on a commercial break to eat dough off the eggbeaters like ice cream cones, one beater per daughter. Maggie knows they’ll need a new system for when the new girl comes.
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She posts on Instagram, plays with the filters so that the cookies look just as golden and brown as anyone could hope. People pay cash for cookies. They exchange on the side porch; no one’s been inside the house since March. The twins are four, their mother is pregnant—it’s dangerous enough at the warehouse, but she works second shift when it’s pretty empty, and everyone is okay about distancing. Cookie money has so far only covered the cost of the next batch, but if she can build a decent following on social media, then there might be money enough for things to stay okay when she has to take time off work. If her pregnancy goes like last time, she’s not sure she’ll be able to go back to work at all.
Maggie posts pictures of her swelling belly, myspace-angled in the bedroom mirror. Clinically underweight all her life, she’s showing dramatically two months in. She doesn’t want to use the pregnancy to get people to buy more cookies but, on the other hand, she is pregnant, and she does make cookies. She is notified that someone messaged her, but it’s not someone trying to buy. It’s an acquaintance from High School who saw her post about how hard it is, sometimes, to get out of bed from two days ago, and he wants to see if she’s okay, if she needs to talk.
What I need is for someone to buy my fucking cookies, she types, then deletes.
When her mother comes, Maggie tells her to expect two customers that afternoon, but hopefully more. Maggie’s annoyed because her mom forgot about the milk; the girls are ecstatic because their grandmother is a break from the rules. Maggie begs her mother to remember about the masks if she takes the girls to get milk from Country Market.
When Maggie moved back to Adrian she got good at making rules—rules for her daughters, for Stephen, for herself and her mother. Especially her mother. Her mother is A: not allowed to criticize Maggie for working unless she suddenly wins the lottery and gives Maggie enough to retire and B: not allowed to criticize Stephen for working late and staying over in Jackson at his Uncle’s because he sometimes gets overtime at TAC, unless she wins the lottery and gives Stephen enough money to retire. And C: she can spoil the girls with anything they want as long as long as she can pay for it, and if she helps with some of the regular groceries too.
Maggie’s rusted Focus starts eventually. It gets Maggie out of the driveway, to Broad Street, to Oakwood and Sutton, and then onto Ridge, the arterial highway that runs fast and twisting from Adrian to Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti, along the shore of the dry, ancient lake. Maggie listens to Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet for My Valentine, Escape the Fate: bands that were new when Maggie bought the car, loud enough to drown out whatever’s wrong with the engine. The Focus was purchased outright from Jerry Moore’s with money she made working stockroom at Hot Topic. That last summer before the end of High School: when the cash went to Everclear, illustrators’ gel pens and heavy-grain drawing paper, black and red striped tube-tops, oxblood Dr. Martens, and her car, already beginning to rust when she bought it.
The Hot Topic closed down a long time ago. When Maggie got pregnant, she and Stephen moved to Cleveland where they tried to settle down before money got tight. They moved back to Adrian and found work, agreed to separate when they could afford to, made rules, broke them, and now another girl’s on the way; but her daughters are bright and curious, and her mother tries to help out, and her car still runs.
