He meant the kid I’d brought along, the baby. “I guess I didn’t know you had one of those.” He owned a small hardware store, one of five businesses on the town’s main street. “Oh!” he said when I showed up at his store. Plus, a beach shack sounded nice-all the stuff about knobs and boards-so I went to meet the man. I thought it would do the two husbands good to try to get by without me. He peed in the yard and made coffee on a hot plate. It was wired for electricity he had a space heater. Husband one, Ted, claimed to like it out there. The newer husband made him sleep out in the shed. He was just with us until he put his life back together and because most of the kids were his. One of the husbands was technically an ex. I was in no position to move to Maine with a man I’d met a few months before. He thought of me every time he laid down a board, every time he hammered a nail. He’d bought a house on the beach, a shack really, just for us.
Things moved quickly and he asked me to come be with him in Maine. I had a romance with a man on the Internet. Here, as in that comic novel, Somers slyly suggests that the reality of escape is rarely, if ever, as good as the fantasy. 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. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
The question then becomes: can we ever, as Seinfeld once asked, take a vacation from ourselves? The twist is that as she's still nursing, she has to bring her new baby along on the getaway.
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.
Everyone dreams of getting away from it all at some point-and this probably goes double for moms, especially now.Įrin Somers's “Variations on the Same” takes that feeling to an extreme. 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. Author Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” With Sunday Shorts, invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.
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