—
When I told William about Charlene, and mentioned the bumper sticker, he said “Huh,” as though really considering it. “You don’t think about his supporters working at a food pantry, but of course they can—and do.” He looked at me. “Jesus, look at how small-minded I am.”
And I said, “Yes, exactly.” I said, “I think we don’t get it. I mean, obviously we don’t get it—their point of view.”
And he said, “I get it.”
I was surprised. “Tell me,” I said.
And William crossed one leg over the other and said, “They’re angry. Their lives have been hard. Look at your sister, Vicky. She’s working a dangerous job right now, because she has to. But she still can’t get ahead.” Then he said, “Lucy, people are in trouble. And those who aren’t in trouble, they just don’t get it. Look how I just didn’t get it—being surprised that this Charlene woman was working in a food pantry. And also, we make the people who are in trouble feel stupid. It’s not good.”
v
Along those lines, this is important, I think:
I need to tell you about one summer evening: William and I took a drive after we ate dinner—it was still light out—and we stopped at a roadside place that was selling ice cream. The place that sold the ice cream was a small blue shack with a lot of lawn around it, and a tree stood in the middle of the lawn. When we first got there, people—not many—were milling about on the lawn, and we got out of our car and stood in line, at a safe distance from the woman ahead of us, who wore no mask. The woman who was serving the ice cream was not a young woman and she wore a mask but she wore it below her nose, and I wondered if William would say we shouldn’t get ice cream from her, but he said nothing, and this is what I want to say:
An old man with a white beard was sitting on a stool beneath the tree, playing the guitar and singing a song, and there was another man, who had just gotten his ice cream, even I could tell immediately that he was from out of state, maybe even New York, and the car he got into was expensive-looking and slung low to the ground, but I could not see the license plates. This man wore dark pink shorts and a blue collared shirt tucked into them, and he wore loafers with no socks, and I heard behind me some people speaking of him. “Fucking out-of-stater.” And I turned and they were men who wore no masks who had said that, and they looked a little frightening to me. And then the woman ahead of me in line—who was not wearing a mask—saw another woman who got out of her car, and they threw their arms around each other and said, “Hi!”
What I am trying to say is that for a few minutes I had what almost felt like a vision: that there was deep, deep unrest in the country and that the whisperings of a civil war seemed to move around me like a breeze I could not quite feel but could sense. We got our ice cream and we left, and I told William what I had felt and he said, “I know.”
It has stayed with me. That feeling I had that evening.
* * *
In the toy chest one day we found beneath some rags two fire engines that were kind of incredible. I mean they were each about a foot long and made of metal, and had rubber tires; they seemed very old but in good shape because they had been made so well, and one had a metal ladder on the back that still worked. “Look at these,” William said. He was sort of blown away by them, and I did not blame him; it seemed they had been made back at a time when toys were taken really seriously. He cleaned them off and put them on the windowsills of the porch, these two old toy fire engines from days far gone by.
Four
i
One night as we ate our supper I said, “William, how’s your tower?” I said this sort of jokingly, but he responded with seriousness.
“My tower, as you put it,” he said, glancing at me with his eyebrows raised, “built to watch for German submarines, is there as a reminder to me every day of what this world went through, and how it can go through that again.” I waited, and he continued. “This country is in so much trouble, Lucy. The whole world is. It’s like—” William put his fork down. “It’s like some seizure is taking place around the world, and I’m just saying I think we’re headed for real trouble. We are just tearing each other up. I don’t know how long our democracy can work.”
And I slowly understood that William’s relationship to the tower was his relationship to our world as it was right now. He had connected the dots of history that I only vaguely, in my own way, was aware of.
He picked his fork up again and we ate in silence. Through the screens on the porch the sea stretched out before us, making its soft full sound so continuously, and there were the islands straight in front of us, with a lot more green on them now, and the water slapped against the rocks without stopping.
ii
Bob said that it was too hot for him to walk with me, but he still came over and we would sit on the lawn chairs, and sometimes Margaret came with him. If she was not with him he would have a cigarette, which he seemed to get such a kick out of. “Thank you, Lucy,” he would say each time, and wink at me, his mask pulled down below his chin so he could smoke. With Bob, I was always okay-feeling. Even when I could not remember what I was going to say, he would just shrug and tell me, “Don’t worry.” I told him what William had said about our country—the world—being in trouble, and Bob said, “He may be right.”
* * *
With William—he sometimes seemed so far away, and I remembered that this is how he had always been. But also, I noticed—as I said—that I felt an increasing sense of comfort from how familiar he was becoming to me again. Still, I could never really settle into myself. Not for very long. Although it helped to have my music back, and there were those times when I would lie on the couch and listen to classical music on my phone.
But what scared me was that I could not—except when I was listening to the music—remember David in really concrete ways. He slipped and slid in my mind, like he would not hold still. I could not understand it.
iii
The girls called me far less frequently than—in my memory—they used to. I felt them moving away from me, and I knew I was not wrong. I did not understand why. It caused me at times a terrible private anguish. When I spoke to William about it he would shrug and say, “Lucy, let them be.”
* * *
—
I remembered this: The last time I saw my mother, when I went to the hospital in Chicago where she was dying, I was on the phone with the girls at various points, they were in high school, and I worried about them, and my mother—who said almost nothing to me at all during the one night and the next morning that I was there—said this:
“You’re too bound up with those girls. Watch out, they will end up biting you in the back.”
She said that to me, my mother.
And the next morning she asked me quietly to leave. And I left.
* * *
—
But remembering this now, it frightened me. I thought: Did my mother have a vision? And I thought, No, she was only jealous of how much I loved my daughters. But maybe she had had a vision. And I was not the mother I thought I had been.
* * *
—
How will I ever know?
I think some people know. But I will never know.
* * *
But I missed them. Oh dear God did I miss those girls. I asked William when we could drive to Connecticut again and see them, and I said that Estelle and Bridget could drive over from Larchmont, and he said maybe one of these days, but not right now. So I let it go.
I had a memory of us standing in that driveway, and how we then sat around the pool, and it had been awkward. And as time went by, the idea of seeing the girls that way again was almost as bad as not seeing them at all.
* * *