Excerpts from Chapter 4. A Love Worth Fighting For

Munjoy Hill

A miracle, off dialysis. We drove from Georgia to Maine in four days, arriving in Portland on July 3rd, back on Munjoy Hill, where Carol lived as a little girl.

At 4 a.m., a full moon outside. Carol, seeing I was awake, she started talking, her voice as soft and sweet as when she was a young girl.

“Janice did everything,” she said, lost in time. Carol was much younger than her cousin Janice. This must have been when Janice was a teenager. Carol idolized her and followed her around. Janice had died years ago, after a tragic life.

“Like what,” I asked.

“There was a photo of her in her cheerleader’s uniform. Janice would bring her gang of friends home. One day she had a new recipe for a facial—egg-whites—and they were looking in the mirror and wanted to laugh but they couldn’t, or their faces would crack up.”

Carol was quiet, thinking to herself. I was wide awake now. I could see Janice and her friends, their faces caked in egg-whites, and I laughed. “What else?”

“Janice was a lifeguard at the beach.” She meant the East End Beach at the bottom of the hill. “And I’d go there every day with her. We played games on the sidewalk—hopscotch, Mother May I—you had to ask ‘Mother, may I?’ and if you didn’t you were out, like ‘take two steps backwards, ‘Mother may I?’ ‘Yes, you may.’ And marbles.”

This time, I don’t need to prompt her.

“Her mistake was she married Marty. He was an alcoholic.”

She lapsed into silence. I wanted more of Munjoy Hill’s past, before today’s gentrification. “Tell me more,” I said.

“We used to just go outside, and we could go anywhere, no one cared. I’d say, ‘Can I have twenty-five cents?’ And I always got it. We’d go to the corner store and see what they had. I had a lollipop every day, they were bigger then.”

“Do you remember Herm Segal?” I asked. Herm’s father owned the corner store. Herm was my fellow classmate at Bowdoin College.

“Oh, yes, he once told me he never told his kids where he grew up—he was too ashamed. There was a boy named Punsky, another Jewish kid who married an Irish Catholic girl, and his parents mourned him for a week.” They sat Shiva for him.

Carol grew up on Portland’s Munjoy Hill, a vibrant, diverse neighborhood, heavily Italian and Irish, all Roman Catholic, and a strong Jewish community.

I grew up in the nearby wealthy suburb of Cape Elizabeth, and remember walking home from grammar school through mossy woods to lunch—peanut butter and jam sandwiches, milk, and chocolate-chip cookies fresh from the oven; dinner table conversations with my dad, the banker, and my mom, the socialite—an only child, I heard everything and it never occurred to me that we weren’t rich.