Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)

by Elizabeth Strout

All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them.”

Lucy said, contemplatively, “I wonder how many people in long marriages live with ghosts beside them.”

BUT—OLIVE KITTERIDGE WAS wrong about Bob and Lucy. They were friends, and that was all. They were old enough to be grateful for this friendship that had arrived in their later years, and both Margaret and William were glad for the friendship of these two as well; it made their lives even more comfortable to have their partners have a friend to really talk with.

“Olive frightened?” Bob asked, and Lucy looked at him and said, “Yes, frightened, Bob. She’s a bully, and bullies are always frightened. I liked her, though, and she ended up liking me.”

“Yeah, it did. These four people, whose lives have never been recorded, living through such a—oh, I don’t know—such a true situation. Both couples living with a ghost in their marriage. That’s sad, Bob.”

He had told this story to Margaret when they first met, he had also told his first wife, Pam Carlson, and they were both kind about it, but it was one of Bob’s adult understandings: People did not care, except for maybe one minute. It was not their fault, most just could not really care past their own experiences.

She had a number of friends, many in East Hampton as well, and yet—this had felt rather sudden to her—she could barely stand them. They had become unbelievably insipid.

Pam took a deep breath and said, “Oh, the boys. Bob. They’ve left me.” Bob said, “That’s what kids do, I think.”

OLIVE KITTERIDGE HAD been thinking about all the unrecorded lives around her. Lucy Barton had used that phrase when she first met Olive and heard Olive’s story about her mother: unrecorded lives, she had said. And Olive thought about this. Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded, and this struck her now. She summoned Lucy Barton again.

That’s not my life. And I was always inside my head, and I remember thinking: I’m glad this is my head.”

AND WHO—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?

TO BE IN LOVE when the outcome is uncertain is an exquisite kind of agony.

Olive laughed. She really laughed at that. “Lucy Barton, the stories you told me—as far as I could tell—had very little point to them. Okay, okay, maybe they had subtle points to them. I don’t know what the point is to this story!”

And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those who do love us.

“That was about the same thing that every story Lucy and I have shared is about. People suffer. They live, they have hope, they even have love, and they still suffer. Everyone does. Those who think they’ve not suffered are lying to themselves.

Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”