The Truth About Maine

“It wasn’t the beginning of the end, it was the end of the end. And he knew it and I knew it and only one of us was pretending we didn’t.”

This is how I start my story. I’m shotgun in Meg’s car, heading north on a girls’ trip to Maine. We’ve left behind our husbands and children, scratching the surface of our mom-and-wife warpaint to reveal something freer underneath. Maine is going to do this for us. A lifetime ago, Maine broke my heart. But this time, it’s going heal something in me.

“Tell me more,” Meg says, her eyes trained on the long road, nothing to do for hours but talk. We know each other’s stories, but I’ve never told her this one. I want to tell it right, this homage of the end of Vic and me. I want to immerse Meg into the sensation of one part of life ending without another part beginning. I open my mouth, watching the opulent green landscape fly by, a smear under summer blue skies. I don’t know how to start.

Vic and I drove to Maine in a red ‘82 Jetta with a rusty bumper and broken seatbelts. It was a stick shift, which I couldn’t handle, but when we hit long stretches of highway Vic would put me in the driver’s seat anyhow. He would shift when I popped the clutch, and when we were safely cruising along, he would settle into sleep on the cracked leather of the passenger side, his hand in my lap.

We drove to Maine because we had tickets to the LemonWheel. Because this had always been our end-of-summer-plan, before Vic left me—physically and otherwise. We still had to go to Maine, he said, as a farewell. A farewell to summer, I guess, and a farewell to us. Also, I had bought the tickets, and they were in my possession. Sometimes, I wonder if this hadn’t been case, would he have gone without me? Would my memories of those last days with him not exist, a nothingness void in my mind where Maine lies, fraught with longing?

I drove to Maine because I was not evolved enough at seventeen to voice my despair. When he said we should just be friends, I said okay. Passive-aggressive waves churned around me like passing smoke on that eighteen-hour drive, while he played bootlegs of Phish and sung along, already in mourning of his summer on the road, his eyes dreamy and forlorn. I was brooding, shaken by his desertion and his arrogance around enjoying a music festival together after he’d dumped me.

But I wore a smile, loose braids, and a handmade dress. I wanted him to remember why he loved me, not why he didn’t. We shared cigarettes as we drove, contentedly silent, passing lush fields and white houses and tall trees that evoked the word timber in my head. I wondered how anyone who felt this safe could be nearly gone.

The LemonWheel was the culmination of Phish’s 1998 summer tour, commencing on an air force base in Limestone, Maine. It was the tour Vic had been on relentlessly all summer, the one I was supposed to join him at towards the end, hitting shows in Pennsylvania and New York, rekindling our unbridled love that had wilted in the absence of being together.

Instead, he’d come home with a gaggle of tour friends, including a waiflike girl named Rebecca who’d confessed to me that being brok on tour meant very little food for her. She inhaled the burgers that Vic’s dad grilled for everyone, showing me how concave her stomach was, as if it was a crying shame. When Vic went back out for the last few shows, nothing was mentioned about me going along. It was unspoken between us—I didn’t fit into tour life. I wasn’t hardcore enough. I wasn’t enough of a Phan to survive on grilled cheese and washcloth baths like Rebecca. My feet were not meant to be permanently dirty from parking lot dust and gravel.

But the LemonWheel tickets had been tucked in my nightstand drawer all summer and he couldn’t ditch me for this, so here we were. He had changed our narrative from a crushing finale to a sweet little epilogue. But for me, the whole we should just be friends thing was too big. It was eating me alive. Rational Me said, find someone else and go without him. Irrational Me created a story that Maine was where Vic was going to fall back in love with me. In Maine he would remember the girl he kissed on snow days. He would remember sleeping with me and laying on rooftops on hot summer nights when we were sixteen, smoking Marlboros and talking about stars. He would remember me.

Maine would make him forget about Rebecca and the wild freedom he craved. It would remind him that I was special, not just another stray with a hemp necklace and dreadlocks. He would remember that real life was not following a band, barefoot and penniless. Even though the irony was: this barefoot and penniless adventure was exactly what I hoped would save us. Me, the tour, and Maine together.

Decades later, seated in the plush camel leather of a white Mercedes (with working seatbelts) Meg and I are traveling up the coast, nowhere even close to Limestone. This is a trip of lighthouses, of oceans and seal-spotting, of lobster and wine and beach walks in heavy sweaters. I start by telling Meg how different it was back then, initially leaving no detail spared as the hours stretch before us. I slide lazily into the past, but when I do, something in me cracks and I find I cannot articulate the story—as if saying the words aloud will re-slice the wounds.

Everything pulses inside me, suddenly, like a shot in the night. Vic and Phish. Maine. Love. I am aching for a moment in time that stirs in me, uncomfortable and unnamable.

As I speak to Meg, my story becomes one of simple teenage angst. I tell it with fond regret, the smoothing of fingertips over a long-healed scar. I tell her of the carefree spirit of music and love and drugs and freedom. I tell her about the people lined up on the road, holding signs asking for a miracle, show-code for a free ticket. I tell her about eating grilled cheese and ‘shrooms for three days straight. My tale is as wistful as the wind from the cracked car windows.

I can’t tell her the truth about Maine. Not of the wrenching way I clung to him. Not of the confusion around how this beautiful boy could know me so intimately yet decide to just be friends for one last show. How he held my hand as he drove, only breaking it to shift gears, and each time he took it again the knife slipped in deeper. How can he leave me if he still loves me, I wondered, obsessively, for days.

I don’t tell her how I remember the clouds forming a purple cross in the sky when Phish broke into Loving Cup. How he put his arms around me from behind, wrapping me up in love. The way no words were needed because our history was enough—as if he was my husband of fifty years and not just my boyfriend. Vic knew what it meant to me to hear Loving Cup live, here in Limestone, Maine, with him behind me, the culmination of summer and love and everything in between. Because Vic knew me, in ways no one else has ever since.

I tell her about the damp tent, but not how feverishly we slept, how desperately I clung his body heat and last slivers of affection. How our socks were forever wet and everything around us smelled like a putrid conglomeration of sweat and piss and weed but it didn’t matter because we were curled up together in a tent meant for one. I didn’t tell her how I broke down on the last night, how I groveled. Please, please don’t leave me, I begged him.

Just because we’re only friends doesn’t mean I’ll stop loving you, is what he said back.

But if Phish and Loving Cup and Maine felt like everything—then Vic and I in the tent, no longer an us, felt like nothing.

I tell Meg we took the scenic route home, but I don’t disclose the way that I distended the trip, how I orchestrated stretching it out until it snapped, frantic to avoid ending this last slice of togetherness. We were hungover from everything: from days of no sleep under freezing cold skies, from cheap beer, from mania. We were unwashed, our clothes harboring a stale smell of days-old perspiration and smoke and humanness. We were dejected: he because the tour was over, because it was time to go back to the real world of college and waiting tables.

Me, because my heart was broken into a million pieces. So, I frantically tried to hold it together as long as possible.

I pretended like my melancholy tent confession hadn’t happened and told Vic we should take our time driving home. I insisted on seeing the ocean and he, unable to resist me in every way except the one that mattered, added a detour to the coast. There, we ran on cold sand and ate damp fries on a deserted boardwalk, like children. There, we stood under misty skies and shivered even though it was August. I tell Meg I genuinely do not remember if the beach was in Maine or some other state, only that it was the edge of the continent and the edge of the end. It was the last time he would ever kiss me, softly and chastely, framed by steel gray skies and tasting like salt. I tell Meg this part, but I don’t tell her how tightly bound it remains in my heart.

“Aww,” she comments. “How sweet!”

I wrap up the rest quickly, because I can’t bear to think about those last dredges as I give Meg the smooth-coated version. I should have ended the trip after that kiss, should have let that be the final sentence, but I wanted more. I don’t tell Meg how I insisted on a hotel at the last minute instead of driving straight through, as we should have. It made no sense to stop when we only had seventy-some miles to go, when we had no money and only a half tank of gas in the rattling Jetta.

I can barely stand to remember how I wanted more. The last crumbs, the dying light. I told myself Vic wanted more too, but the truth was, I think he was just exhausted from driving.

Still, that is how we ended up in a hole in the wall motel in Port Jervis, New York. How our exhaustion turned into hysteria as we sat cross-legged on a dingy plaid bedspread after a scalding hot shower together, reminiscing about our romance as if it wasn’t about to come to a crashing halt in twelve hours. I don't have words to convey how I resisted falling asleep as the sun rose and he was wrapped around me, knowing there was nothing left to squeeze out of us.

I told Meg the way I loved him was like one loves a first boyfriend: generically. Foolishly.

The truth, which I knew in Maine, was that it ran so much deeper, a trench dug and worn and forever a gash in the ground. It would fill, over time, but it always remained. I went to Maine not because of the tickets, not because of Phish or because I wanted to see the ocean, but because of Vic. Because I wanted the last wisps of us.

The truth, also, is that while Vic was collecting moments like pieces of history that he would plop into a time capsule and maybe dig up one day to smile ruefully at, I was dying inside. The truth is, I knew in my bones that once we crossed the state line into Pennsylvania, everything was over.

The truth is, I knew I would never love someone quite like I loved Vic.

I would never think about Maine without thinking about him. This is the truth, even if I cannot say it out loud. Even if I can only tell Meg the shadow story of what really happened. The tale entertains her, makes her smile and she slides into her own first-boyfriend-breakup story and I settle in to listen. I tuck it away—Maine and the music and Vic and my broken heart—in that sheltered place where memory and truth converge, covered by protective layers and only accessible once in a great while.