Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)

by Elizabeth Strout

Then he told me that his old friend Jerry had the virus and was on a ventilator. Jerry’s wife also had the virus, but she was at home. “Oh Pill, I’m so sorry!” I said, yet I still did not get it, the importance of what was happening. — It’s odd how the mind does not take in anything until it can.

Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us.

I did not speak of this to William. William likes to fix things, and this could not be fixed. — And I also understood: Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing.

“Lucy,” he said. He said it with difficulty. “Lucy, yours is the life I wanted to save.”

I need to say: Even as all of this went on, even with the knowledge that my doctor had said it would be a year, I still did not…I don’t know how to say it, but my mind was having trouble taking things in. It was as though each day was like a huge stretch of ice I had to walk over. And in the ice were small trees stuck there and twigs, this is the only way I can describe it, as though the world had become a different landscape and I had to make it through each day without knowing when it would stop, and it seemed it would not stop, and so I felt a great uneasiness.

And then I remembered that when I was young, my mother had said—about some woman in our town who had adopted a child, and the child had not turned out all right—my mother had said, “When a woman can’t have a baby, there’s a reason.” She meant because the woman would not be a good mother. And it horrified me as I recalled this, because I had sort of believed it.

My mother, because she was my mother, had great gravity in my young life. In my whole life. I did not know who she was, and I did not like who she had been. But she was my mother, and so some part of me had continued to believe things she had said.

And the ocean was immense; we could hear it at night now with the windows open. I learned this about the sound of the sea: There were two levels to it, there was a deep ongoing sound that was quietly massive, and there was also the sound of the water hitting the rocks; always this was thrilling to me.

“They’re angry. Their lives have been hard. Look at your sister, Vicky. She’s working a dangerous job right now, because she has to. But she still can’t get ahead.” Then he said, “Lucy, people are in trouble. And those who aren’t in trouble, they just don’t get it. Look how I just didn’t get it—being surprised that this Charlene woman was working in a food pantry. And also, we make the people who are in trouble feel stupid. It’s not good.”

What I am trying to say is that for a few minutes I had what almost felt like a vision: that there was deep, deep unrest in the country and that the whisperings of a civil war seemed to move around me like a breeze I could not quite feel but could sense. We got our ice cream and we left, and I told William what I had felt and he said, “I know.” It has stayed with me. That feeling I had that evening.

But what scared me was that I could not—except when I was listening to the music—remember David in really concrete ways. He slipped and slid in my mind, like he would not hold still. I could not understand it.

My mother—my real mother, not the nice mother I had made up—once said, “Everyone needs to feel important.” And I thought of this as I listened to William go on about the potato parasites.

The woman’s face was a pretty-enough face, but it was a sad face, and as I watched she had four white wines, one after the other. They brought the wine in a plastic cup, I think because of the pandemic, and that woman sat there, and I watched her drink four cups of white wine while her husband—or whoever he was—never spoke to her, nor she to him. I have finally seen enough of the world to know that they were well-off, or certainly much better off than the people who came from this town, and yet there they were. And I am only telling you that I understood—which of course I have understood before—that money makes no difference in these kinds of things. You may say: Well, she was an alcoholic. But I saw her differently, even if she was an alcoholic.

I wrote these sentences: “But there was an exhaustion Arms felt these days; it left him too tired to fight with his wife—he had not liked her for a number of years—and it left him too tired to think of the election. And yet there was an anxiety he felt as well. He did not see the connection between his anxiety and his fatigue; he was not a reflective man.”

I got up quietly and went downstairs. And I kept thinking about this. I thought: For one hour that day outside of Chicago, I had felt my childhood humiliation so deeply again. And what if I had continued to feel that my entire life, what if all the jobs I had taken in my life were not enough to really make a living, what if I felt looked down upon all the time by the wealthier people in this country, who made fun of my religion and my guns. I did not have religion and I did not have guns, but I suddenly felt that I saw what these people were feeling; they were like my sister, Vicky, and I understood them. They had been made to feel poorly about themselves, they were looked at with disdain, and they could no longer stand it. I sat for a long time on the couch in the dark; there was a half moon that shone over the ocean. And then I thought, No, those were Nazis and racists at the Capitol. And so my understanding—my imagining of the breaking of the windows—stopped there.

I drove so that he could look at his iPad for directions. It was dark, and one of our car’s front lights was not working. William told me to put the lights on high because that way they both worked. So I did that, but every so often a car coming toward us would flash its lights at me and I felt terrible, I have always been frightened of doing something wrong, of being inconsiderate; it is a real fear I have.