I wrote my mother a letter. I said I loved her, and I thanked her for coming to see me in the hospital. I said I would never forget that she did that. She wrote back to me on a card that showed the Chrysler Building at night. Where she got that card in Amgash, Illinois, I cannot imagine, but she sent it to me and said I will never forget either. She signed it M. I put the card on my table near the telephone by my bed and looked at it often. I would pick it up and hold it, looking at her handwriting, no longer familiar to me. I still have the card with the Chrysler Building at night that she sent to me.
When I was able to leave the hospital, my shoes did not fit. I had not thought that losing weight meant losing it everywhere, but it did—of course—and my shoes were too big on my feet. I packed the card in the bottom of the plastic bag they gave me to put my things in. My husband and I took a taxi home, and I remember that outside the hospital the world seemed very bright—frighteningly bright—and I did feel frightened by that. My children wanted to sleep with me on my first night home, and William said no, but they lay on the bed with me, my two girls. Dear God, I was happy to see my children, they had grown so. Becka had a terrible haircut; she had got gum in her hair, and the family friend who had no children of her own, who had brought them to me in the hospital, had cut her hair for her.
—
Jeremy.
I didn’t know he was gay. I didn’t know he was sick. No, said my husband, he never looked sick the way so many do. And now he was gone—he had died—while I was away. I wept steadily, a quiet weeping. On the front stoop I sat while Becka patted my head, Chrissie sometimes sat down next to me, putting her small arms around me, before the girls danced up and down the stairs again. Molla came by and said, Oh dear, you’ve heard about Jeremy. She said it was very bad, a terrible thing to happen to men. And women, she added. She sat with me while I wept.
I have thought so often—so often—about the man in the hospital with the yellow sticker on the door the day my mother left and I was parked in the hallway outside his room. How he looked at me with the dark of his burning eyes, begging, and with despair. Not letting me look away. It could have been Jeremy. Many times I have thought: I will look it up, it must be in the public records, the day he died and where he died. But I have never looked it up.
—
It was summer when I came home, and I wore sleeveless dresses, and I didn’t realize I was so skinny. But I saw people look at me with fear when I went down the street to get food for the children. I was furious that they looked at me with fear. It was not unlike how children on our school bus would look at me if they thought I might sit next to them.
The gaunt and bony men continued to walk by.
When I was a child, our family went to the Congregational church. We were outcasts there as much as anywhere; even the Sunday school teacher ignored us. Once I came late to the class, the chairs were all taken. The teacher said, “Just sit on the floor, Lucy.” Thanksgivings we went to the activities room in the church and we were given a Thanksgiving dinner. People were nicer to us on that day. Marilyn, whom my mother mentioned in the hospital, was there with her own mother sometimes, and she would serve us the string beans and the gravy and put the rolls on the table with their small plastic-covered butter pads. I think people even sat at a table with us, I don’t remember that we were scorned at those Thanksgiving meals. For many years William and I went to shelters in New York on Thanksgiving and served food we had brought. It never felt to me that I was giving back. It felt like the turkey or the ham we brought with us seemed suddenly very small in the shelters—even if they were not vast—that we went to. In New York, they were not Congregationalists we fed. They were often people of color and they were sometimes people with mental illness, and William said one year, “I can’t do this anymore,” and I said that was okay, and I stopped doing it too.
But people who are cold! This I cannot stand! I read an article in the newspaper about an elderly couple in the Bronx who could not pay their heating bills, and they sat in their kitchen with the oven on. Every year I have given money so that people won’t be cold. William gives money too. But to record that I give money for people to be warm is something that makes me feel uncomfortable. My mother would say, Stop your foolish bragging, Lucy Damn-dog Barton—
The kind doctor said it might take a long while for me to gain my weight back, and I remember that he was right, though I don’t remember how long the long was. I went to him for checkups, at first every two weeks, then once a month. I tried to look nice; I remember I would try on different outfits and look in the mirror to see what he would see. In his office he had people in his waiting room, people in his examining rooms, then in his own office, a sort of conveyor belt of many kinds of human material. I thought of how many people’s behinds he had seen, how different they all must be. I always felt safe with him, felt that he paid attention to my weight and to every detail of my health. One day I waited to go into his office; wearing a blue dress and black tights, I leaned against the wall just outside. He was speaking to a very old woman; she was carefully dressed—we had this in common, to be clean and carefully dressed for our doctor. She said, “I have flatulence. It’s so embarrassing. What can I do?”