A New Mom Runs Away With a Stranger She Met on the Internet
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Author Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” With Sunday Shorts, OprahDaily.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.
Today we celebrate Mother's Day, and in addition to toasting the many-gendered maternal figures of our hearts, we should also recognize how exhausting, how claustrophobic, motherhood can sometimes be. Everyone dreams of getting away from it all at some point—and this probably goes double for moms, especially now.
Erin Somers's “Variations on the Same” takes that feeling to an extreme. At once caustic and droll, the story follows mother-of-four Samantha as she flees her responsibilities—and her (ex?)husbands—by hot-footing it to Maine, where she plays house with a stranger she met on the internet. The twist is that as she's still nursing, she has to bring her new baby along on the getaway. The question then becomes: can we ever, as Seinfeld once asked, take a vacation from ourselves?
Somers's debut novel, Stay Up With Hugo Best (published in 2019), was about a young woman who accepts an invitation to crash at the mansion of her idol—the stand-up comedian turned talk show host of the book's title. Here, as in that comic novel, Somers slyly suggests that the reality of escape is rarely, if ever, as good as the fantasy.
“Variations on the Same”
I had a romance with a man on the Internet. Things moved quickly and he asked me to come be with him in Maine. We would remake our lives together. He’d bought a house on the beach, a shack really, just for us. He’d been restoring it, he told me. He thought of me every time he laid down a board, every time he hammered a nail.
Every knob, every fixture: me.
I was in no position to move to Maine with a man I’d met a few months before. I had four kids and two husbands. One of the husbands was technically an ex. He was just with us until he put his life back together and because most of the kids were his. The newer husband made him sleep out in the shed. Husband one, Ted, claimed to like it out there. It was wired for electricity; he had a space heater. He peed in the yard and made coffee on a hot plate.
I thought it would do the two husbands good to try to get by without me. Plus, a beach shack sounded nice—all the stuff about knobs and boards—so I went to meet the man.
“Oh!” he said when I showed up at his store. He owned a small hardware store, one of five businesses on the town’s main street. “I guess I didn’t know you had one of those.”
He meant the kid I’d brought along, the baby.
“She’s still nursing,” I said. “Or I’d have left her with the others.”
He let that glide by him. The others. He wasn’t going to ask.
“Well, that’s great! She’s…” he trailed off, couldn’t decide exactly what she was.
He gave me a present he’d set aside for me, a hammer. It had a pink grip. A hammer for a woman. I picked it up and felt its weight. It felt top-heavy, perfect for doing just what it was made for. I was insulted. Why not a normal hammer? A neutral hammer for anyone? On the other hand: a gift. The implication was I’d use it to help with the shack.
We went back there and he cooked soup. The soup was creamy and full of sea creatures. Grey waves crashed outside. Scraggly bushes tossed themselves around. It was an interesting setting: I was interested in seeing whether the house would blow over.
The baby was scared so I nursed her for a while. The man eyed me, my bare breast.
“Earth mother,” he said, sipping his soup. “Aren’t you afraid of ruining your body?”
What I was supposed to be saving my body for I never knew. Maybe someone else’s pleasure.
“Ruining it for what?” I said.
“Good point. I guess you can’t take it with you.”
Wrong again. You did take it with you. It came with you into the casket. In fact, it was “you.” It was the you in the casket. We were getting off on the wrong foot so I put the baby to bed and asked to see his dick. He took it out and held it shyly, like a fish he’d caught.
You had to pity them. Their touching need for intimacy.
“This is why I keep having babies,” I said.
By that point I wanted to see how much he’d let glide. He pulled me down onto the bed and only afterward did he say, “What do you mean keep having babies?”
I told him about the four kids, the two husbands, the shed, and the space heater. We had a chore wheel no one obeyed, not even me. Our house was on a creek in a town outside New York City. There was nothing wild about the town, but our life was wild. A fence divided our yard from the creek and the fence had a hole no one knew how to fix. We piled lawn furniture in front of it so the kids wouldn’t climb through and drown.
“What are you, polygamists?” he said.
I was flattered he thought so, but that wasn’t it at all. We needed three incomes to support the kids. Life ran way up ahead of us and we could never catch up. Once we had almost caught up but then Ted bought a catamaran. Hence the divorce, hence the shed.
I wanted to teach the kids how to sail, he’d said.
These men and their maritime fantasies. Ted had gone to Harvard and the delusion lingered. He wanted to wear boat shoes and make martinis and pass down old editions of A Child’s Christmas In Wales to our kids, who could not care less.
Now the boat sat in the yard a short distance from the fence hole. Evenings, Ted sat on the deck and drank beers. The other husband, Charlie, sometimes sat up there with him. I didn’t know whether to find their friendship irksome or nice, so I went with irksome.
The man from Maine fell asleep. He smelled like soup and snored like a husband. The wind was loud, eerie. It screeched against the shingles of the house. I got up and checked on the baby. I began to feel a seed of regret. I was broke, fertile, possibly ovulating. I was in a house in Maine with a stranger. He was nice enough but there wasn’t much to him. I looked around at the fixtures, trying to remember why I’d come.
Ted once said I was on the vanguard of bad decision-making. It was meant as an insult, but I was happy to be on the vanguard of something. Most people weren’t. Anyway, he’d taken the getting ahead fund and bought a boat, so he too was a leader in the movement.
I slept, finally, next to the man, inhaling his briny scent. The baby woke at dawn and I took her out to the beach. The sun was breaking over the water, turning everything pink. We tried to console ourselves with the beauty. Or I did. The baby tried to eat sand.
When I got back, I had nine missed calls from Ted and nine missed calls from Charlie. My mother had called thirty-five times.
“Your phone’s been buzzing,” said the man.
He looked put out. What did he expect? A woman like me would be unencumbered? What did he think I’d been doing before he met me? Waiting around in some kind of bubble for him in particular? Keeping the world out so as not to risk making a mistake?
The messages were all variations on the same. Where are you? Where the fuck are you? Where are you? We won’t be mad. The last one from Charlie intimated that there was a “situation” and they could use my “help.”
I called him back and heard Ted yelling in the background, “Is it her? Is it her?”
“Come home, baby,” said Charlie.
He was the steady one. He had no skills or aptitudes but was absolutely consistent in this. He worked in kitchens or he worked construction or he worked entry level office jobs, and he always got fired. But he aspired to nothing more, which was a relief.
Charlie’s a dupe you brought in, Ted had said one night. A ringer.
We were fighting in the yard. I denied it, but he was mostly right. I was trying to teach Ted about work. About being a big, dumb animal with muscles. Loyal and true like Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel, a book the kids did not understand because we were too far removed from the steam age. I did love Charlie but I loved him like a shovel, like an example. And now I had a kid with him, oops. Oops.
“Let me talk to her,” I heard Ted say.
Then he was on the phone explaining that the ceiling was leaking. A three-bucket leak. They’d left an upstairs window open last night in the storm and water had gotten on the floor and now the living room ceiling had a crack. The crack looked obscene, anatomical. What’s more, the dog had gone through the fence and into the creek and gotten swept away. The children were inconsolable. They kept asking if the dog was in the city. Because they knew —angels—that the creek was a tributary of the Hudson.
“The toaster has been electrified,” said Ted.
“What does that mean?”
“It gives you a shock. It really gets you. Not every time. Maybe one in three times.”
“Unplug it,” I said.
“But then it will cease to make toast.”
A long silence stretched between us. A three-bucket silence.
“Samantha,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t know what he was apologizing for. It was either the ceiling or the dog or the boat or the fifteen years of disappointment.
“You have to figure it out yourself,” I said and hung up.
I knew if I stayed on the phone any longer, I’d get talked into returning. He’d put one of the kids on, probably the oldest. She’d be sweet, reasonable, self-possessed. Maybe she’d cry a little about the dog. The dog was named Murphy and she’d raised him from a puppy. She and I had.
The phone rang again and it was my mother.
“They’re looking for you,” she said.
“I know.”
“Where are you anyway?”
I wasn’t going to tell her. She was Ted’s mole. She was more smitten with Ted than even I had been. She liked his floppy hair. She liked the way he carried himself, like he knew a good restaurant nearby. The catamaran had not woken her up. The opposite — she thought it was great. She wanted the kids to have things I didn’t. She had the gall to question that I wanted that too.
“I’m taking a break,” I said.
“Do I hear the ocean?” she said, but I was already hanging up.
The man from Maine stood making eggs in boxer briefs.
“All good?” he said.
I remembered what I liked about him, which was that he had dark hair and blue eyes and knew almost nothing about me. We ate the breakfast he’d made. I nursed the baby to sleep and went back to bed with him. The window made a trapezoid of light on the bed. This time he smelled like an omelet. He takes on the smell of whatever he’s eaten, I thought. But what if we just fucked, and ate minimally. If we lay all day in the trapezoid of light. If I moved barely at all and made no mistakes.
***
I spent two more nights in Maine. The man got up in the morning and went to work. His work had been the topic of many of our conversations online. All the things he did to keep his store afloat. We’d talked mostly about him, actually. He’d built a perception of me based on the things I’d said back. When he said he’d had a hard day, I said, “oh no, poor guy.” He got to thinking I was this sainted person. This woman who lived to say “oh no, poor guy.”
It was easy to let him think that. In a new romance, the other person was mostly invention. So, he thought I was kind, a good listener. He liked the way my body looked, based on the two best pictures ever taken of it. I didn’t mind his version of me. If he thought I was that way, maybe I was. Maybe I was patient and interesting and funny. Lithe and understanding. After a while he wanted to describe the things he wished he could do to me. The places he’d put his mouth. It was all vaguely embarrassing, but wasn’t that love?
While he was at work, the baby and I stayed in the shack. I did the dishes. The baby played with the pink hammer, chewed on its flexible grip. Bits of it came off in her mouth and I called him to find out if it was toxic.
“What?” he said. “Why?”
Then he had to go sell someone an extension cord. I found a nail sticking out of the floor that was not hammered in all the way, and gave it a whack. I thought, This is my new life. We went out on the beach with a bowl and a ladle and I used them to build a sandcastle for the baby. When it was finished, I took her soft feet in my hands and made them stomp it out of existence. She looked at me with a glazed expression: boredom.
Hours passed and the man came back. He had food with him. For a moment I felt mildly kidnapped — him returning with supplies like that — but then I remembered I had my own car. I had driven there of my own volition. The man made another sea broth and we ate it with bread. His arms were tattooed. This provided contrast to the husbands, who disdained such things, in Ted’s case, or who had never considered them, in Charlie’s.
Lying on the bed afterward, he ran his hand up and down my side, over my ribcage and hip. He looked at me soulfully for a long time. The sex granted temporary deliverance. It fixed the fence and brought home the dog. The toaster functioned beautifully. It turned the babies into embryos, tucked them back up inside me. As for the catamaran, it was restored to its previous owner. I could see him out there on the high seas in his captain’s hat, smiling at me from the deck.
***
We woke to a knock on the door and the man from Maine sat up on one elbow.
“Who could that—” he said.
Then they were all spilling into the shack. The rest of the kids and both husbands. Charlie ostentatiously stretching his quads, Ted looking around with eyebrows raised. The kids saying, Mom, Mom, Mom! They had been driving all night. Some had slept and some hadn’t. Those who hadn’t had been allowed to rattle around loose in the trunk of the station wagon with no seatbelts.
The man from Maine turned to me slowly.
I couldn’t pay attention to him. There was a tidal wave of immediate needs. One of the kids had to pee and one was so thirsty she could die. The oldest had the fridge open, commenting on the contents. Mayonnaise, disgusting. Pickles, disgusting. Almond milk, disgusting.
“Ted said we could get a bird,” she said.
That was Ted’s style. He’d continue buying replacements, throwing good pets after bad, acquiring things to distract from the loss of other things, until the antecedent was forgotten and we’d all grown hazy on the original loss. Never mind where the money came from.
How had they found me?
“We hacked your accounts,” said one of the kids. He pointed at the oldest. “She did.”
Of course she had. My password was her name. I watched her extract a bag of tortilla chips from a cabinet and hand it to me to open. She was old enough to form permanent memories. She’d remember this, the chips, how I looked, my lover in his underwear, his savory smell. She’d remember what I’d written to him. It was easy to write things you meant or didn’t mean to a person on the Internet. You just filled the box and hit send. It was unreal, impermanent. It could be wiped away with one click. Until the moment you decided to get in your car and drive to Maine.
“I didn’t tell Ted anything you wrote,” she said.
Ted was her father. She’d started calling him Ted the day he’d brought home the boat. Whatever I thought and felt, she mirrored it back in miniature. She’d watched me as I absorbed the presence of the catamaran in our driveway, hardened her own face in the same way. Now she was watching me again, waiting for a cue about how to feel.
The man from Maine looked from Charlie to Ted. He was trying to get some pants on, hopping around
He said, “Is one of you going to fight me? Which one of you is the real husband?”
They both could have made a case. Maybe it should have been Charlie, but he was distracted by the tools he saw lying everywhere. Ted raised his fists, loose and jokey. Everything he did was something we’d have to have it out about years down the road.
“No one’s going to fight you,” I said.
The man straightened up, buttoned his pants. He looked disappointed.
“What is that, a sander?” asked Charlie.
Charlie got a sander demo in the corner while the kids told me more about the bird. They’d wanted a toucan but had been talked down to a cockatoo. A cockatoo was any of twenty-one species of parrot. They ate tubers, seeds, insects, fruits, and flowers. They mated for life, if you could believe it. Ted had read to them from the cockatoo Wikipedia page at five a.m., traversing the Piscataqua River.
“Education,” he said.
I was not too keen on the bird, but I pretended to be for them. I showed them my pink hammer and one of them managed to break off the handle. So much for womanhood. I wondered what the plan was, in terms of dragging me out of the shack and bringing me home.
“Will I be clubbed over the head?” I asked Ted.
“You’d like that,” he said.
The man from Maine was now in the kitchen area with Charlie. He’d gotten Charlie to take a look under the sink. Charlie had no knowledge of pipes or plumbing but had gamely slid under anyway. I heard him ask the man from Maine for a wrench.
“Don’t give him a wrench,” I said.
“Why not?” said the man.
Ted smirked and walked outside. The man from Maine gave Charlie a wrench and then we were dealing with a gusher. Charlie extracted himself from under the sink. He held a piece of pipe, the U-bend. His shirt was soaked to such an extent that his nipples showed through.
“What the fuck?” shouted the man from Maine.
Water sluiced out onto the kitchen floor. A small rug began drifting across the room. The kids had their shoes off, splashing around.
The thing was, I wanted a nice life, too. I wanted a stable career, money in savings accruing interest. I wanted it to be fine if one of the kids got hurt or sick or needed glasses. Better than fine. I wanted them to love their glasses. Love the sharp, new way they saw the edges of things. Each individual leaf.
The corner office, that was something I wanted. Something I’d heard of anyway. You could be so good at whatever you did that they gave you a special room to do it in. A room that was better than what other people got, with more windows, more light. You could close the door and put your feet up on the desk.
But there was no way to achieve any of this. Glasses would kill us. A broken arm. We’d swing it but it would push us closer to the pit. Possibly into the pit. Any day now we’d be in the pit, waving our arms for help.
I joined Ted outside. He’d walked a ways down the beach, toward the water.
He took the baby from me and we both sat down in the sand. It felt like it should be the end of the day, but it wasn’t. The sun was climbing the sky. Our troubles weren’t close to over. He put two hands on the baby’s bald head to keep it from burning. It was a tender gesture and it made me like Ted.
“What now?” he said. “Do we all live in Maine?”
We couldn’t live in Maine with the new man, the kids, the bird they’d been promised. The shack was flimsy. It was two rooms and the walls trembled like paper. We’d been there, all of us, twenty minutes and already ruined it. Another twenty and who knew what would happen? There’d be a boat in the yard, more babies on the way.
“You could sail here,” I said.
Ted pretended to consider this. He seemed almost ready to admit the catamaran was a mistake.
“I leave it up to you,” he said.
They always did. They yielded to me and I yielded to disorder. Let chaos carry me to the next checkpoint, like Murphy the dog swept off to the city. I pictured him bobbing along with his head just above the water. I hoped he’d kept his dignity. I knew it wasn’t easy.
“No,” I said. “We’ll go home.”
He had to move out or Charlie did. Something. We had to find a way to bow to convention. We heard laughter and turned. The kids were tumbling out of the house, down the beach. They’d found us. They brought Charlie with them, now shirtless. Charlie held hands with the oldest kid. He gave her a spin like they were dancing. It was a tender gesture and it made me like Charlie.
“We’ve been kicked out.” He laughed, unconcerned. “The guy said to tell you he’ll just find someone else.”
A parting shot. It stung. But all right, he could have it. Anyway, it was true. He could find someone new as easily as he’d found me. In a day, an hour. It wouldn’t make him new, though. He’d still be the same.
The oldest kid came up behind me and hung from my neck. She smelled like our house, like the shampoo I used on all the kids. She whispered in my ear that Murphy was fine, wherever he was.
“How do you know?” I asked her.
“Because he’s Murphy,” she said.
Charlie still held the U-bend and he wound up and threw it into the ocean. He got it way out there, that brute. It caught the light on the way down, and disappeared without a splash. Bravo, Charlie, everyone cheered. Bravo.
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