{"id":15783,"date":"2019-02-22T10:23:15","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T15:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=15783"},"modified":"2019-03-28T16:13:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T20:13:00","slug":"maybe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/maybe\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"issuuembed\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 600px;\" data-configid=\"37604829\/68738008\"><\/div>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"\/\/e.issuu.com\/embed.js\" async=\"true\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">By Joan Connor<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">M<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-15875\" src=\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/FM19-FicFla-1.jpg\" alt=\"FM19-FicFla\" width=\"400\" height=\"267\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/FM19-FicFla-1.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/FM19-FicFla-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/FM19-FicFla-1-200x134.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/>aybe wrinkles crimp the corners of her eyes, star-shaped like the feet of an opossum, and maybe she has crinkly hair like ramen noodles without the broth, eyes like empty lockets.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Maybe she walks with the grace of a claw-footed bathtub, as obsolete as a phone booth or a mailbox, as she works the breakfast counter of the Eggery in this little ski town, the Eggery which used to be Walter Pierre\u2019s where she worked the morning hours beginning at five a.m. as the graveyard shift men used to stumble in from the G.E. plant across the street and where once a drunk jumped the counter and chased her down its length until Walter grabbed him.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">But she was younger then, still beautiful. Once a couple of college boys came in. As she poured their coffee, they discussed her plight as if she were deaf, not even minimum wage, working for tips, criminal really\u2014as if there were tips at Walter Pierre\u2019s before this little ski town became a ski town. The only tip she recalls ever coming from the car salesman who always ordered an English with peanut butter and left her a dime. Always the same\u2014an English muffin and coffee. Back when coffee was still coffee and not aspiring to be a milkshake. The college boys drank cup after cup, discussing her as if she were a homework assignment in their Economics class somewhere at one of those haughty colleges nearby.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Economics. Back then a dime bought something. Not much but something, a phone call at least. And those college boys presuming to know her, assuming about her\u2013they didn\u2019t know this was just a summer job among other summer jobs as she worked her way through Economics class (the actual version, the prerequisite for life) to pay for college. Which maybe made it more humiliating. Her first summer job at the Big N, she waited tables in the cafeteria in a college town far from this little ski town, where the manager taught her how to water the catsup, how to scoop hollow balls of ice cream. How much money could that really save?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Pennies? Surely not dimes, even when dimes meant something. That was part of her education too\u2014how to cheat people. But you cannot cheat time. Now there were no Big N\u2019s or Ameses, or Caldors. It was all Walmart. If she stood still for just a flicker, the universe would be Walmart and even then not for long. That was how time worked.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">You are no longer what you will become or you are what you will become, time arrested or not, just an inky fluid moving with or without you. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><em><span class=\"s1\"> Outlook not so good<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><em><span class=\"s1\"> Cannot predict now<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">When she was younger, she believed in future tense, she believed in her daily horoscope, fortune tellers, card readers, dice throwers. So much to look forward to. This will happen. But no one ever went to a psychic to foresee she would marry a sheet-rocker (the best French Canadian sheet-rocker in the state, as he used to say), have two kids\u2014which brought its own sort of joy maybe. But still. Her husband, gone now, but who for years would happily read his blood tests like he had achieved something, like he had crammed for his HDL, his LDL. Nonetheless, heart attack. And, yes, she loved him. She loved him like she loved her kids.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Her kids, scattered now\u2014like her thoughts, like her hair. Scattershot like the days eventually comprising a life, a life a scatteration of minutes. When you are running out of future, a fortune teller doesn\u2019t pertain. And looking back, she knows the Magic 8 Ball never really tells you anything useful, even something time-worn like \u201cDon\u2019t put all your eggs in one basket.\u201d Like \u201cDon\u2019t count your chickens before they\u2019re hatched.\u201d Once, when she still had a future, she kept a Magic 8 Ball on her desk, back when she was still teaching, back when she had questions like: will we buy a house, will my son make the team, will my daughter make honor roll.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Maybe she always knew the Magic 8 Ball was useless, that it could never warn her <i>you will end your days working at the Eggery which once was Walter Pierre\u2019s<\/i>, that even randomness might have a pattern, that maybe twenty answers on twenty faces floating in inky alcohol are all the answers you really need as you bump up spang against the edge of time. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><em><span class=\"s1\"> Maybe<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><em><span class=\"s1\"> Signs point to yes\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>February\/March 2019 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[316,23,320,319],"class_list":["post-15783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-februarymarch-2019","tag-fiction","tag-maine-authors","tag-maine-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15783"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16063,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15783\/revisions\/16063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}