And then my hair began to fall out.
The bathtub drain became plugged up, and I would stand in water above my ankles, and it would take hours for the water to drain. It was an old bathtub, and the drain was one that could not be removed. It could only open—about half an inch—and close. Each time I took a shower the water took longer to drain out of the tub, and after it did the tub was filthy.
And my hair! I kept tying it up, but it was so thin it was ghastly. A friend in New York suggested pills to order online to make it grow, and so I did, but the pills upset my stomach terrifically. After a while it stopped falling out, and it just lay limply against my neck.
I finally told William that we had to get a plumber in, and he said no plumber was coming into the house because of the virus. So he looked online and read that if you put half a box of baking soda into the drain and then a cup of white vinegar, it would solve the problem.
The next morning William lay half crunched up inside that bathtub on a dirty towel, trying to slip baking powder into the little half-inch opening. He kept swearing, and finally he was sticking the baking powder in with a knife down the little slit. It took him a really long time, and when he climbed out of the tub he said, wiping himself off, “It’s all yours now, Lucy.” So I poured in a cup of vinegar and it sort of sizzled a bit, but the water still did not go down.
William was disgusted and went for his walk.
I poured a gallon of the white vinegar down the drain then and listened to it gurgle more, and then I looked online and I poured a gallon of bleach in as well—
And it worked! I could not wait for William to get home, so I called him and said, “It worked.”
“It did?” he said, and when he came home, honestly we were as excited as kids who had succeeded in starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together. The drain worked perfectly and I was glad then to clean the tub.
My hair remained blond but very, very thin.
* * *
—
As time went by my hair became brown again and I told myself: Well, at least it is growing out, but it grew back in odd ways and wouldn’t lie flat on my head. Mom, I said silently to the nice mother I had made up, Mom, I look awful! And the nice mother I had made up said, It’s okay, Lucy. Your hair has gone through a shock.
And I understood that to be true. At first it was hard to look at myself in the mirror. But I got used to it. I thought: Who cares.
(But I cared.)
iv
We took the plexiglass off the porch and put up the screens that were leaning against the inside wall. We ate out there—the porch was large enough for the round dining room table with its flowered tablecloth and the pompoms on it, if we put one leaf down. And the ocean was immense; we could hear it at night now with the windows open. I learned this about the sound of the sea: There were two levels to it, there was a deep ongoing sound that was quietly massive, and there was also the sound of the water hitting the rocks; always this was thrilling to me. The light was astonishing, it would come every morning and it would be a pale white and then almost smash into a yellow, and then it seemed to get even more yellow as the day went by. When it rained it was not a really cold rain, although most nights the air would get colder.
* * *
A strange compatibility was taking place gradually between William and me. I had even forgotten about how I used to have to go down to the water and swear because he wasn’t listening to me when we had supper. I mean, we were essentially stuck together, and we sort of adapted to it. We would talk about the different people we met, and I told him one evening about a woman named Charlene Bibber that I had met that day at the food pantry—Margaret had asked me to fill in for a day when a volunteer couldn’t make it.
* * *
—
And so I had gone to the place, it was a wooden building, not terribly large, and there were five of us volunteering. We were to pack the boxes and grocery bags, and we stood six feet apart with our masks on and put canned foods and toilet paper and diapers, and some frozen meat, into boxes, and then we put produce into paper bags: The produce had come mostly from the grocery store in town, and the lettuce and the celery looked a little worn out, but we did this, and the idea was that when the people arrived to get it—Margaret said that the pantry fed about fifty families—we would take it out to their cars.
I found myself toward the end of a table, and one woman pushed over a rolling cart with canned goods on it, and she stood next to me; the way the room was shaped we were almost in a separate area, and this woman said that her name was Charlene Bibber. I knew she was a volunteer because she wore the blue smock that all the volunteers wore. She started to talk to me quietly, almost without stopping. She had wavy hair with a little gray in it, and her nose was small, it turned up just slightly; I saw this when her mask slipped down. She told me right away that she was fifty-three years old. As she put the canned foods into the boxes she told me this part: She worked as a cleaner at the Maple Tree Apartments, a retirement place in town. She had been laid off for three weeks because of the virus, but then they let the cleaners go back. Charlene said, tugging her mask back up, that her husband had died years earlier, and that she had never been able to have children. As I glanced at her face above her mask, she told me that she had never got over the death of her husband. She said that she had gone to a minister—she did not say what church—and the minister had said to her, “You get up every day and you put a smile on your face. That’s what I do.”
Charlene looked over at me. “How dumb was that?” she asked, and I said it was dumb. Then Charlene said, speaking even more quietly, that she had had a “fling”—that’s how she put it—after her husband had died with a fellow in town named Fergie, and then he died and his wife had ended up living in the Maple Tree Apartments, and Charlene had stolen her shoe. One shoe. “I was going to give it back the next week, but then we got laid off for three weeks,” she said. No one else seemed to be listening to us speak, and she went on. “I lied about it too, because when I showed up the next week, they told me that the woman—Ethel MacPherson—had said I had stolen her shoe, and I said, Oh, she’s going batty, and they all had a laugh about it, I mean the women in the front office, and then they said I had to take a leave, I mean all the cleaners did—there are four of us—because of the virus. And when we went back after three weeks, Ethel had died.”
I thought about this. “Why one shoe?” I asked. I was really curious.
Charlene nodded and said, “Because the first woman I cleaned for that morning—her name is Olive Kitteridge, and she was just sitting in her chair like a big bullfrog—and then Olive said, ‘I’ve been sitting here thinking about a young woman that I stole one shoe from once.’ And I asked her why one shoe, and she turned and said to me, ‘I thought it might make her feel crazy.’ And I said, Did it? And Olive shrugged and said, ‘Dunno.’?”
* * *
—
I liked this woman, Charlene Bibber.
* * *
—
When we walked the bags and boxes out to the waiting cars, most of the people who were driving the cars were women. Some had children in their cars. And the children looked at me and then looked away. And I understood. Some of the women were very grateful, but most of them just took the food and said “Thanks” and drove away. And I understood that too.
* * *
—
As we left the place for the day, I saw that on Charlene’s car was a bumper sticker for the current president of our country. I thought that was fascinating, it intrigued me, really.
* * *