One day I said, “William, aren’t you mad at Estelle?” It had been less than a year since she had walked out on him. William is a parasitologist, and she had left while he was delivering a paper at a parasitology conference in San Francisco. When William returned home he found a note from Estelle saying that she was gone. She had taken most of the rugs and some of the furniture too.
William looked at me with slight surprise. “Oh Lucy. She’s Estelle. How long can you be mad at Estelle.”
And I understood. Estelle was an actor by trade, though I had only seen her in one play. But I had met her many times over the years and she was a friendly person, and sort of plucky, this is how I perceived her.
I did not ask about Joanne, who had been William’s second wife. I assumed that Joanne was the one mad at William, since he was the one who had left her. I did not care about Joanne; she and William had been having an affair while we were married, and she had been a friend of mine. Her name never came up.
But William would tell me when Bridget was having a hard time about something—and it was usually Estelle’s boyfriend. “God, that poor kid,” William would say and shake his head. “The guy has no idea at all how to talk to a young girl, he never had children and he’s just a jerk.”
I felt bad for Bridget, and yet sometimes—not often, and I am not proud to say this—I was slightly irritated that William spoke to her and about her so often; we would be eating and he would be texting with her, and sometimes this irritated me. One time I said, “Would she rather be with you during this time?” And he looked surprised, then said, “I don’t know.” He added, “Even if she thinks she does, she wouldn’t want that, no. She’s her mother’s daughter, there is no doubt about that.”
* * *
—
If I had known what was in store for Becka, I would not have felt any resentment at all for Bridget.
Two
i
About my husband David: I thought—of course!—of him a great deal during this time. I thought how he had had a bad hip from a childhood accident, and so couldn’t exercise much, and I thought, Oh God, he would probably have died with this virus! Also, he had been a cellist with the Philharmonic, and they were closed down now. All Lincoln Center was closed down. This baffled me, I could not grasp it; I mean it made David seem even more gone to me somehow. When I went for my walks, I would think: David! Where are you? And also, I could not listen to the classical music he had played. I had the station on my phone, and once when I turned it on during a walk to listen to through my earphones, the music seemed to absolutely assault me with a screeching kind of vengeance.
* * *
I called my older brother each week, as I had done for years, and I called my sister each week, as I had also done.
My brother, Pete, had never left our tiny childhood house in that small town in Illinois, and he had lived in it alone since our parents died; he said his life was not much different with the pandemic. He said, “I’ve been socially distancing for sixty-six years.” But he was always kind to me—he is a sad and gentle soul—on the telephone, and he found it interesting that I was in Maine with William.
My sister, Vicky, worked at a nursing home one town away from where my brother lived. Vicky has five children and the youngest, born later in Vicky’s life, is a daughter who worked at the same nursing home as Vicky. I should just say here that when I was seventeen years old I won a full scholarship to a college outside of Chicago, and going there changed my life utterly. Completely, it changed my life. No one in our family had ever gone past high school. And so when Vicky’s youngest daughter, Lila, won a similar scholarship to the same school a few years ago, I had been terribly excited for her. But she had come home after a year.
I was worried about both of them working in a nursing home, and my sister said, “Well, I have to work, Lucy.” She said this grimly, she has been grim for years, and I understand why. Her life has not been easy. I still sent her money every month and she never acknowledged it and I did not blame her. Her husband had lost his job a few years earlier. In truth, it made me very sad to think of her, and to think of Lila, who had won that scholarship to college exactly as I had. I had wished so much that Lila’s life would become something new. But she had not been able to do it.
* * *
—
Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us.
ii
After a few weeks, William said to me one night, “Lucy, I’m going to take over the cooking. Please do not take any offense. It’s just something I’d like to do.”
“No offense taken,” I assured him. I have never been interested in food.
* * *
—
In my marriage to David he did most of the cooking, always making sure there was something for me to eat on the nights he was at the Philharmonic. Remembering now David’s poking his nose into the refrigerator and bringing out a covered dish, saying, “Here, Lucy, here is your dinner for tonight”—recalling this, as I sat watching William in the kitchen, made a shiver go through my soul. At times I would have to turn away for a few seconds and squeeze my eyes shut tightly.
* * *
—
Each night William made something different. He made pasta sauce and he made pork chops, he made meatloaf and he cooked salmon. But he also made a mess in the kitchen and it was my job to clean up, which I did. He wanted a lot of praise for every meal he made—I noticed that—and so I praised him to the skies. It felt to me like I praised him to the skies, but he always asked, even after I had praised him, “So you liked it, it was good?”
“It was more than good,” I would say. “It was wonderful.” And then I’d get up to clean the kitchen.
* * *
—
I understand that this may be hard to believe, but it is true:
When I was a child there was no salt or pepper shaker on our table. We were very poor, as I have said, and I realize that many people who are poor still have salt and pepper shakers in their house. But we did not. Many nights for supper we had molasses on a piece of white bread. I mention this because it was not until I was in college that I understood that food could taste good. There were a group of us who sat at the same table in the dining hall for dinner, and one night I noticed that the fellow who sat across from me—his name was John—I noticed that John picked up the salt and pepper shakers and shook both of them over the piece of meat on his plate. And so I did the same.
And I could not believe it!
I could not believe the difference that salt and pepper made.
(But I still have never been interested in food.)
iii
One day a man came up on the porch with packages; they were for me and they were from L.L.Bean. William was out walking, and when I opened the packages I saw that there was a winter coat in just my size, it was blue and fit me perfectly, and also two sweaters for me. And a pair of sneakers that were my size as well! “William!” I called out to him as he came up the driveway. “Look what you ordered for me!”
“Wash your hands,” he said. Because I had opened the packages. So I did. I washed my hands.
William put the packages back out on the porch. Then he came inside and washed his hands too.
* * *