Free More Than Allies by Sandra Scofield Page A

down to Maggie’s door. She tried the handle and couldn’t turn it, then began whimpering.
    Maggie lay on Gretchen’s bed in a haze of resentment. Now she was going to have to tend to Stevie!
    Polly, on the other side of the door, was already doing so. Maggie heard her as she carried Stevie away again. In a moment she heard Stevie giggling. Polly switched on the TV. Maggie put her head under a pillow, and hid from her life.

“Sometimes they’re just too much.” As soon as Maggie settled onto Rachel’s wonderful stuffed chair, the tears sprang from her eyes and her throat was choked. At least Rachel would understand. She had two kids, too, Mason, who was Jay’s age, and Leah, who was four. Suddenly there were a thousand things Maggie wanted to say. She wanted to tell Rachel how bad the week was going—and it was only Tuesday! She wanted to ask her what she did when Mason was sassy and sour and sad. She wanted to ask if Leah had outgrown that terrible baby neediness yet.
    Rachel put her palm against her own chest. “You have to find the place—in here—where you are the truest you. You have to protect it. Children—oh, they need you, of course they do, and you want to give them what they need, but if you aren’t nurturing your self , what kind of mother can you be, anyway? If you are an artist and you put away your paints? A writer and you close the drawer on your manuscript? Children need parents who are whole and authentic.”
    Maggie didn’t think she and Rachel were talking about the same things at all.
    â€œOf course you don’t write,” Rachel said.
    â€œOr paint.” Maggie smiled, thinking it was better if she made light of her lack of talent.
    Rachel settled onto a chaise lounge across from Maggie. “Once you have a child, everyone sees you as part of a unit. I had to change therapists two times to get away from the family systems bias. Kids or not, I want to be an individual. My work doesn’t have anything to do with the kids. The writing, I mean.” She crossed her legs and settled down deeper in the cushions. “I’m thinking about taking a leave from teaching. We don’t really need the money. I’ve hit a plateau with this manuscript. There’s something deeper evading me, and I don’t think I can dig down to it when I have so many distractions. Actually, it may not be a matter of digging. It may be a matter of soaring, of finding the overarching theme, the ultimate story. You know what I mean?”
    Maggie nodded yes, but she felt dizzy with bafflement. She also felt intimidated. It was Rachel who had asked her to join their splinter group when the larger book group broke up. Right away it was obvious she wasn’t as well-read, as knowledgeable as Nora or Rachel, but neither was Gretchen (whom Maggie had immediately suggested), and they were never unkind. Rachel was in some way the group’s spirit: she chided them to probe inside, to think harder, to relate everything, ultimately, to the deepest part of themselves. Maggie often felt a mistiness in her own thinking, as if Rachel’s concepts were just out of reach, obscured, but attainable, if she made the effort. She had always felt she should try.
    Rachel gazed beyond Maggie, at the wall behind, where there were a dozen or more photographs of herself at various ages. “When I began this novel, I thought it was a journey story. Daphne moves out from the house—at night, I told you this before, didn’t I—in circles, widening the territory, exploring the night of her neighborhood, her town, even as she is exploring her own dark side—and the circles widen, and I thought, well, eventually she’ll go out far enough that she won’t come back. She’ll be free, she’ll be somewhere she hasn’t been before. Then I realized there had to be something more objective than that, something tangible, a desire, and I