Oh William!

by Elizabeth Strout

Grief is such a—oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think.

A little bit, the sight of him then broke my heart. But I was used to that feeling—I had it almost every time after I saw him.

he blamed me, I felt this often; he was blaming me for something that had nothing to do with our present lives, and he blamed me even as he called me “Sweetheart,” making my coffee—back then he never drank coffee but he made me a cup each morning—setting it down before me martyr-like.

This was the William who was tiresome to me, the petulant boy beneath his distinguished and pleasant demeanor.

William is the only person I ever felt safe with. He is the only home I ever had.

She loved me, my daughter! Even knowing this, I was surprised. In truth, I was amazed.

but if one of us did cry they both became almost insane in their anger toward us.

Crying, for me, has often been difficult. What I mean is I will cry, but I will feel very scared by my crying.

with David I never cried as I had in my first marriage, not the gasping sobs of a child. But since David has died there are times when I will sit on the floor near my bed—between the bed and the window—and weep with the utter and horrifying urgency of a child.

my parents and siblings did not attend; in fact they sent nothing and wrote me nothing after I told them about my upcoming wedding—I began to feel a weird sense of something, it is very hard to describe, but it felt a little bit like things were not entirely real,

And I could not describe it to him or even to myself, but it was a private quiet horror that sat beside me often, and at night in bed I could not be quite as I had once been with him, and I tried to not let him know this, but he knew of course, and when I think how I had felt such despair those nights he did not reach for me before we were married, I can understand how he must have felt during our marriage; he must have felt humiliated and bewildered. And there seemed nothing to be done about it. And nothing was done about it. Because I could not speak of it and William became less happy and he closed down in small ways, I could see that happen. And we lived our lives on top of this.

Wow. This is so interesting to me and something I have been thinking about a lot- people grow up, move away from their families and settle down in unknown places. Is it normal to feel a longing for the people and places you’ve left? Everyone seems to carry on like it’s nothing, and you never really know what’s going on in their hearts. Here she’s describing the longing and separation from her mother and family and perhaps the isolation that comes from leaving behind a significant portion of your life to start a new one.

But we had these surprises and disappointments with each other, is what I mean.

As I have gotten older I think that it was unconsciously brilliant of my parents to involve the other kids in this activity; it kept us apart, as all the things that happened in that house kept us apart.

I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.

I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way.

I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.

Lucy, what scares me is the feeling of unreality I’ve had. It’s been five days and I just can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t real. But it is. And it scares me. I mean the sense of unreality scares me.”

He looked at me then, and the pain on his face was estimable. It broke my heart, and somewhere I faintly understood that he must have felt that his mother had betrayed him as two of his wives had done.

I had told him I wanted to move out. I had told him that I had an image of myself as a bird, folded up in a box, living with him.

A tulip stem inside me snapped. This is what I felt. It has stayed snapped, it never grew back.

I said he would most certainly be okay. I emphasized this, because I did not know myself—except what choice did he have, what choice do most of us have, except to be okay?

But we—both of us felt this way—we felt that we were perched like birds on a telephone wire in New York City.

I am only saying: I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this.

And I was happy because of William’s laughter. Everything was all right after that.

People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.

This authority was why I had fallen in love with William. We crave authority. We do. No matter what anyone says, we crave that sense of authority. Of believing that in the presence of this person we are safe.

As we drove I suddenly had a visceral memory of what a hideous thing marriage was for me at times those years with William: a familiarity so dense it filled up the room, your throat almost clogged with knowledge of the other so that it seemed to practically press into your nostrils—the odor of the other’s thoughts, the self-consciousness of every spoken word, the slight flicker of an eyebrow slightly raised, the barely perceptible tilting of the chin; no one but the other would know what it meant; but you could not be free living like that, not ever. Intimacy became a ghastly thing.

I am not invisible no matter how deeply I feel that I am.

She is reflecting on the ways she’s hurt William. It’s easy to think that you’re invisible so there’s no way of hurting people if you are unseen or unknown or unimportant. But none of those things are actually true. And since we are seen and known and important, and hold significant roles in the lives of others, we are capable of doing harm to them even if it’s not our intention. Was it really Lucy’s fault that her daughter became ill? No. But now she’s reflecting and taking on the blame because of the blame William has now placed on her. Everyone’s a little responsible and that’s just the truth.

“Whenever I don’t know what to do, I watch what I am doing.” And what I was doing that year was leaving, even though I had not yet left.

What is it that William knew about me and that I knew about him that caused us to get married?

Riding over the bridge—in the back of my own taxi that evening—I suddenly remembered times early in our marriage in our Village apartment when I had felt terrible. It was about my parents, and the feeling that I had left them behind—as I had—and I would sometimes sit in our small bedroom and weep with a kind of horrendous inner pain, and William would come to me and say, “Lucy, talk to me, what is it?” And I would just shake my head until he went away. What a really awful thing I had done. I had not thought of this until now. To deny my husband any chance of comforting me—oh, it was an unspeakably awful thing. And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

In my memory, there is a sense of my rejecting her, a sense that she had been too much in our marriage.

“I always remember the first time I met you at the house and I thought: That girl has absolutely no sense of her own self-worth.”

these lives are not the lives of people who came fully from love from the moment they were born.

But I wanted those children more than I wanted my work. And I had them. But I needed my work as well.

I would give it all up, all the success I have had as a writer, all of it I would give up—in a heartbeat I would give it up—for a family that was together and children who knew they were dearly loved by both their parents who had stayed together and who loved each other too.

William was just—quite simply—not the person who made me feel safe any longer.

Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. — This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.