Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

Once, when she was still so young, he had walked into a classroom after school and found her sitting there reading, and she had jumped—he saw her really jump with fear—when the door opened. He had said to her quickly, “No, no, you’re fine.” But it was that day, seeing the way she jumped, seeing the terror that crossed her face, when he guessed that she must have been beaten at home. She would have to have been, in order to be so scared at the opening of a door.

Tommy felt his scalp break out into goosebumps. It continued, he felt the bumps crawling across his head.

Patty was aware of how much Angelina wanted to talk about herself, and yet this didn’t disturb Patty, she merely noticed it. And she understood. Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves. Except Sibby had been interested in her, and she had been terribly interested in him. This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

Those days seemed like ancient times, back when character was thought to mean everything, as though character were the altar before which all decency bowed. That science now showed genetics to be determinative just threw all that character stuff right over the waterfall. That anxiety was wired, or became wired after events of trauma, that one was not strong or weak, only made a certain way— Yes, he missed character! The nobility of it.

Why, it was like being forced to give up religion once you’d been confronted with its base and primitive aspects, like having to view the Catholic Church with its nest of pedophilia and endless cover-ups and popes that worked with Hitler or Mussolini—Charlie was not Catholic, and the few Catholics he knew did continue to go to mass, but he could not see how, faced as they were with the chipping away of the brilliant façade; of course the Church was failing. But so was the Protestant concept of hard work and decency and character. Character! Who ever used that word anymore?

Inside her head, Mary felt the kind of electrical twang that meant she was suddenly very angry.

“A physician,” she imagined him saying at breakfast, because this is what all male doctors said when they didn’t want you to think they were academics, to whom, Dottie had come to understand, physicians seemed to feel very superior. Dottie didn’t care one way or another, anymore, whom anyone felt superior to, but in this business you did notice things; even if you kept your eyes squeezed shut, you would still notice things in this business. And the time of Dr. Small, Dottie thought, his own personal history in time, his own career, had passed, and he couldn’t stand it. She was sure he made huge fusses about computerized records, the cost of the practice, the fact that he no longer made as much money. Well, she did not feel sorry for him.

When Dottie saw couples like Mr. and Mrs. Small, she was sometimes comforted that her painful divorce years earlier had at least prevented her from becoming a Mrs. Small—in other words, a nervous, slightly whiny woman whose husband ignored her and so naturally made her more anxious. This you saw all the time. And when Dottie saw it, she was reminded that almost always—oddly, she thought it was odd—she seemed a stronger person without her husband, even though she missed him every day.

Shelly paused and chewed on her lip. Her hair, which was the pale strawberry blond of someone who had once been a redhead, was thinning the way older women’s hair is apt to do, and she had it cut—“appropriately” is the word that came into Dottie’s mind—right above her chin; there was probably nothing very daring about Shelly, there probably never had been.

Dottie raised her eyebrows, although she did think that Easterners tended to go on without the need of encouragement; this would not be the case with anyone from the Midwest. Incontinence was not valued in the Midwest.

so naïve in spite of what she had already learned about life, or rather what she had already absorbed about life, because people absorb first and learn later, if they learn at all,

As Dottie thought about this, going back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she saw Shelly Small as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be.

Her grandmother said, “Don’t come back. Don’t get married. Don’t have children. All those things will bring you heartache.”

At Christmastime she sent home boxes of gifts until her mother sighed over the telephone and said, “Your father wants to know what we’re to do with all this rubbish.” This hurt her feelings, but not lastingly, because those she lived with and knew from the theater were so warm and kind and outraged on her behalf.

She had recently, though, had fantasies of what they called “going normal.” Having a house and a husband and children and a garden. The quietness of all that. But what would she do with all the feelings that streamed down her like small rivers? It was not the sound of applause Annie liked—in fact, she often barely heard it—it was the moment onstage when she knew she had left the world and fully joined another.

Perhaps Zoe, as grown children so frequently did, found fault with her parents’ marriage, had glimpsed the waning of tenderness over the years, felt for them a deep aversion: My marriage will never be like yours, Dad. Fine, he would have said, that’s fine, honey.

“Oh, I can see the question hurt your feelings,” Scrooge said. “I can be awfully insensitive. And then I get pissed off at people because I myself am sensitive. I don’t like sensitive people who only feel sensitive for themselves.”

When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. That astonishment had to do with death, with the wiping out of a person, with the puzzlement that the man was simply gone.

He felt the chill of a fluid filling his veins, and so perhaps they had hooked him up to something and given him a drug, he couldn’t find the words to ask— And then later, as the ambulance went faster, Abel felt not fear but a strange exquisite joy, the bliss of things finally and irretrievably out of his control, unpeeled, unpeeling now. Yet there was a streak of something else, as though just outside his reach was the twinkle of a light, as though a Christmas window was there; this puzzled him and pleased him, and in his state of tired ecstasy it seemed almost to come to him. Linck McKenzie’s voice: “You’re a good man.” This made Abel smile even as his chest felt as if rocks were piled upon it.

The calm voice of that wonderful big woman told him, “Mr. Blaine, you hold right on,” and he thought perhaps his smile appeared to them as a grimace of pain, but what did it matter, he was moving very quickly and easily away now, leaving them, flying—how fast he was going!—past fields of green soybeans, with the most exquisite understanding: He had a friend. He would have said this if he could, he would have said it, but there was no need: Like his sweet Sophia who loved her Snowball, Abel had a friend. And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything—dear girl from Rockford dressed up for her meeting, rushing above the Rock River—he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was possible for anyone.

That has always been my driving force: What does it feel like to be another person?