Each morning William took a walk before I got up; he was an early riser, and he got in his first five thousand steps. Even when it was overcast, as it often was, the light would wake me from the skylight, and I mentioned that to him each morning. When he got back I would have the cereal bowls set out; we had Cheerios, and we sat at the table and had our breakfast, and I—in a strange way—liked this; it was maybe my favorite part of each day. It had always been my favorite time of the day with my husband David. But I liked it now because William was—sort of, mostly—familiar to me, and there was always a small, but for me very real, sense of hope that maybe today would bring something different, that the pandemic would pass and we could go home. After we finished breakfast we would move into the living room, where we looked out at the water. It was very cold outside, and the sun did not shine much at all; the ocean stayed gray. After finishing my coffee, I would put on my new winter coat and I would take my walk.
* * *
—
The only place we could walk to was back down the road that led to the point. I walked without seeing people, though I sensed a person sometimes at a window watching me. The road was very narrow. The trees were bare, and I thought again how in New York there were already flowering trees, and tulips in front of the buildings. It seemed strange to me that the world of New York would remain so beautiful as all those people were dying.
* * *
—
One day as I walked I remembered this: Near where one of my New York friends lives—in the Village—was an old woman that my friend and I sometimes saw when it was very warm outside. The old woman lived in a sixth-floor walkup, and she would bring a folding chair out to the sidewalk and sit on it there; she said her apartment was too hot to be in. We had chatted with her a few times; she often was holding a blue paper cup of coffee that the man at the deli would give to her. Where was she now? She could not come sit on the sidewalk in New York! And how did she get her groceries? Was she still alive?
* * *
—
I thought then that William had been right to bring me up here, where I could walk freely even if I didn’t see many people. The question of why some people are luckier than others—I have no answer for this.
* * *
On this narrow road that I walked, with the cold air coming at me, and the trees all so bare, were small houses close to the road. Some looked like summer cottages, others looked as though people lived in them all year round. In the front yard of one place were yellow metal lobster traps stacked up and a board leaning against them that had red painted buoys draping over it. Another place had many, many old boats off to the side—it was like a garbage dump for old boats—and near it was a trailer where I saw a man once, I waved to him and he did not wave back; I felt very self-conscious, partly because of how often I was walking this road. I walked until I got to the small cove we had driven past the first day we came here that had thrilled me so quietly; it still gave me a quiet sense of awe, and I would sit on a bench there and look at all those boats, some with tall things that went upward toward the sky, but they were not masts, they were metal and must have had something to do with fishing; others were lobster boats, and there were buoys in the water. At times there would be seagulls screeching as they swooped down toward the docks. There were two old wooden docks, and according to what the tide was, either they showed their high skinny legs—which were tall wooden poles—or they looked as though they sat almost on the water. And then I would walk back again.
* * *
—
One morning an old man was sitting on the front steps of a small house; he was smoking a cigarette; the steps were not even, they leaned slightly to one side. And the house was white but had not been painted in some time. The man waved with his cigarette, a small wave. I stopped walking and I said, “Hello, how are you?” And the old man said, “Oh, I’m doin’ okay. How you doin’?” And I said, “Oh, okay.” He inhaled on his cigarette. He said, “You stayin’ at the Winterbourne place?” And I said that was right. “What’s your name?” I asked, and he said, “Tom, what’s yours?” And I said “Lucy,” and he smiled a big smile and he said, “Now, that’s an awful pretty name, dear.” Only he said it “de-ah.” His teeth looked as though they were dentures that were too large for him. We waved again and I continued on.
A few cars went by, and the road was so narrow that they had to slow down for me even as I tried to stay way over on the side of the road.
* * *
As I came back up the steep driveway that day I saw a big piece of cardboard stuck to the back window of William’s car and in big letters someone had written on it: GET OUT OF HERE NEW YORKERS! GO HOME!!
I was really frightened, and when William came out to see it he was not happy, but he just ripped it up and put it into the recycling bin.
Three
i
It has been said that the second year of widowhood is worse than the first—the idea being, I think, that the shock has worn off and now one has to simply live with the loss, and I had been finding that to be true, even before I came to Maine with William. But now there were times I felt that I was just learning of David’s death again for the first time. And I would be privately staggered by grief. And to be in this place where David had never been (!)—I was really dislocated is what I mean.
* * *
—
I did not speak of this to William.
William likes to fix things, and this could not be fixed.
* * *
—
And I also understood: Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing.
* * *
William tried to work online with his lab, but his assistant was no longer able to come into the lab, and they had phone calls about some experiment they had been trying to do, and he kept telling her not to worry. Then he said to me one day, “Screw it. The experiment was a stupid one anyway. I’m going to retire soon.”
“You’re really going to retire?” I asked. And he shrugged and said, Yeah, pretty soon, but he didn’t feel like talking about it; this is what he said.
But William was able to read. I was surprised at how quickly he read the books he had brought with him—novels, and also biographies of the presidents and other people in history—and also books he found in the bedroom upstairs. But I could not read. I could not concentrate.
Those first weeks I often took a nap in the afternoon and I was surprised when I woke up; I had no sense of falling asleep. And when I woke I did not know where I was.
* * *
—
William went out for his second walk in the afternoon, and when he came back I often went for my second walk. I would sometimes see the old man sitting on his front steps smoking, and he always said, “Hello, de-ah!” And I would wave and say, “Hello, Tom!” And then I walked back to the house, up the long driveway that was so rocky and where branches were like large spiders arched over it.
This is how we lived.
It was strange.
ii
What kept bothering me in particular was this:
When I pictured my apartment in New York it seemed unreal to me. In some odd—indefinable—way, I did not like it. I mean I did not like to think of my apartment there; it unsettled me. But there was a sense that I was split in half. Half of me was in Maine with William. And half of me was back in New York in my apartment. But I couldn’t go back, and so that half of me was like a shadow—that’s the only way I can put it. When I thought of David’s cello leaning against the wall in our bedroom there, it hurt me—but more than that, I turned away from it, and this nagged at me more and more, this feeling. It made me very anxious, is what I am saying.
* * *