I spoke to my friends in New York on the phone. An older woman I knew had the virus, but she seemed okay; she had no sense of smell or taste and had a lot of body aches, but that was it. Another woman’s father had died of it. A couple I knew both had it and seemed to be recovering. One woman I knew did not leave her apartment at all.
* * *
The sadness on my chest seemed to rise and fall according to— To what? I did not know.
* * *
—
And the weather remained cold, bleak.
* * *
—
About my work I thought: I will never write another word again.
* * *
There was an old washing machine and a dryer in a back room and we took turns doing the laundry, there was not much to do, but I noticed that William washed his jeans every two days. I could not remember if he had done that when we were married; I did not think he had.
Four
i
Poking around in a back closet one day I found an old tablecloth and brought it out. It was round and it had faded flowers on it, and around the bottom of it were faded pink pompoms. “Oh, this is perfect,” I said, and I put it on the dining room table.
“Are you kidding?” William asked, and I said No, I was not.
ii
At times when I thought of my husband David, I noticed it made me angry to think of him. You have no idea what we are going through! I thought, angrily. I did not want to be angry with him, even though I know that is a normal part of grieving. But I did not want it. There was also this about David: He had not come to me in a dream and he had now been dead for almost a year and a half. When anyone else I knew had died, they always came to me in a dream, often more than one, and they arrived within a month or two of dying. It is always the same dream, they are in a hurry to get back to dead-land, but they want to know if I am all right, or sometimes they have a message for me to give to someone. This has happened to me so frequently that I stopped mentioning it to people—a friend of mine said once when I told her, “Oh, the mind does interesting things”—but I have always taken comfort in these dreams. Even my mother, in spite of how difficult she had been during my life, even she—years ago she had died—had come to me in a dream, twice she had come, and she was sort of anxious, as I said, to return to her place of being dead, but she had asked me if I was okay.
The same was true when Catherine—William’s mother—died.
But David—he was gone. It was as though he had just disappeared down a dark hole, and now I thought: Jesus, David! Come on!
iii
One night as we watched the news from New York City we saw the trenches that had been dug on Hart Island—this is in the western part of Long Island Sound, just off the Bronx—and we saw the many, many wooden boxes that were piled up in them: all the people from the city who had died of the virus and had no one to claim their bodies. I looked at the floor again, but I could not stop seeing the image in my head, the red clay dirt and the long pale wooden boxes one on top of another, unevenly placed in these deep, uneven graves. With the yellow excavators nearby.
* * *
—
Almost always, there was that sense of being underwater; of things not being real.
* * *
In the morning William said we needed more groceries and he would go to the store, did I want to come; he had gone a few times without me, and he had gone to the drugstore to get my pills. Each time he went to the grocery store he came home with stories of how depleted the shelves were: There was no toilet paper, or paper towels, or cleaning materials, or even chicken. This frightened me; I thought: We are in trouble! But William still carried on, and he had found two rolls of toilet paper in a small store on a back road.
That morning I said Yes, I wanted to go with him. And he said, “Okay, but you stay in the car. No reason to put us both at risk.” So we drove into town and parked in the parking lot of the grocery store, and William put on his mask and gloves and went inside. I did not mind staying in the car. And there were many people to watch! There was a faint reverberation in my heart as I watched them. Most of them were wearing handmade masks, and by that I mean the kind Bob Burgess wore, not the kind that William wore, which was paper and blue and looked surgical. But then I saw a mother speaking harshly to her son as they were loading their car, the kid must have been nine years old at the most, and that woman, I hated her; the son looked so unhappy; he had large dark eyes.
Everyone else was intriguing to me. Mostly women, but some men, and their lives were mysteries to me. They wore clothes I would not have worn; many women wore leggings—even in this cold!—going right to their waist, not being covered by any of the sweatshirts they had on. No one—that I could see—wore any makeup at all.
* * *
—
And then a woman started to yell. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but she seemed to be looking at me, and she came closer to our car; she was middle-aged and skinny and her hair was half white but sort of orangey and she looked at me with fury. She wore no mask. I couldn’t get the window down, because I would have had to start the car, and I was too mixed up by this woman who was yelling at me, and then I heard her say, “You goddamn New Yorkers! Get the hell out of our state!” She kept thrusting her arm out to the side. People were looking at her and she kept standing there yelling, and finally someone—a man—said, “Hey, leave her alone—”
And the woman went away, but I was so embarrassed because people were looking at me, and I looked down at my hands until William came out. He put the groceries in the back of the car; he did it as though he was irritated, and so it wasn’t until we drove away that I told him what had happened, and he shook his head and said nothing. I said, “William, I hated getting yelled at!”
He said, not nicely, “Nobody likes getting yelled at, Lucy.”
He said nothing else the whole ride home.
* * *
—
When we got back to the house William cut an orange into four pieces and ate them, and the sound he made, slurping them, made me go upstairs to the bedroom I was staying in. “They had toilet paper,” he called out to me.
* * *
—
Mom, I cried inside myself to the nice mother I had made up, Mom, I can’t do this! And the nice mother I had made up said, You are really doing so well, honey. But, Mom, I hate this! And she said, I know, honey. Just hang in there and it will end.
But it did not seem like it would end.
* * *
I should say this:
It was during this time that I noticed that I hated William each night after dinner. It was usually because I felt that he was not really listening to me. His eyes—when he glanced at me as I spoke—seemed to not really be looking at me, and it made me remember how much he could not listen. Or listen well. I would think: He is not David! And then I would think: He’s not Bob Burgess! Sometimes I would have to leave the house in the dark and walk down by the water, swearing out loud.
* * *