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How easily they took this for granted, to be with one another, to be talking!
“Listen, Cassie,” Jack said, “I just wanted to say I know I’m a shit. I know that. Just so you know. I know that I’m a shit.”
He understood that he was a seventy-four-year-old man who looks back at life and marvels that it unfolded as it did, who feels unbearable regret for all the mistakes made. And then he thought: How does one live an honest life?
He wanted to say, Stop it! Tell me how it’s really been! He sat back, pushed his glass forward. It’s just the way it was, that’s all. People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.
When he had gone in for surgery many years back, to have his gallbladder out, his wife had stood at his side in recovery, and when he woke again later a patient near him said, “Your wife was gazing at you with such love, I was struck at how she was looking at you so lovingly.” Jack had believed this; it had, he remembered, made him a tiny bit uneasy, and then—years later—during an argument he brought it up and Betsy said, “I was hoping you would die.”
And then Jack thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience.
Olive, thinking of this as she sat in her own living room, looking out over the water, could not, even now, believe what a stupid baby shower that had been. She said out loud, “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.”
The truth is that Olive did not understand why age had brought with it a kind of hard-heartedness toward her husband. But it was something she had seemed unable to help, as though the stone wall that had rambled along between them during the course of their long marriage—a stone wall that separated them but also provided unexpected dips of moss-covered warm spots where sunshine would flicker between them in a sudden laugh of understanding—had become tall and unyielding, and not providing flowers in its crannies but some ice storm frozen along it instead.
Olive stood up now and walked through her house. It felt no longer a house but more a nest where a mouse lived. It had felt this way for a long time.
Because she saw that her life—her life, what a silly foolish notion, her life—that her life was different, might possibly be very different or might not be different at all, and both ideas were unspeakably awful to her, except for when the waves took her high and she felt such gladness, but it did not last long, and she was down again, deep under the waves, and it was like that—back and forth, up and down, she was exhausted and could not sleep.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Please, she thought. But she did not know what she meant by that. Please, she thought again. Please.
The Babcock house seemed to stink with a loneliness there would be no cure for.
Kayley could actually feel a small wave of pain go through her chest at times, and she would think: This is why they say a person’s feelings are hurt, because they do hurt.
Kayley watched as her mother screamed and screamed at her. And then a funny thing happened to Kayley. She stopped caring. Like a switch had gone off inside her. All the fear that had been escalating in her disappeared.
It seemed to Kayley that the history this woman had clung to was no longer important; it would be almost washed away, just a dot left—not just by the Irish, but by so many things that had happened since, the Civil Rights movement, the fact that the world was much smaller now, people connected in new ways Mrs. Ringrose had never imagined.
“Christopher,” she said. “Make yourself at home.” Then a look passed over her son’s face that let her know this was not his home anymore—this is what Olive thought she saw on his face—but he sat down at the kitchen table, his long legs stretched out.
“I didn’t have a Christmas tree,” Olive said. She said, “Why in the world would I have a Christmas tree?” Ann raised her eyebrows. “Because it was Christmas?” Olive didn’t care for that. “Not in this house it wasn’t,” she said.
“But I don’t understand,” Olive said, after waving to Little Henry. “I just don’t, Christopher. She’s my daughter-in-law, and I’d like to know what’s going on in her life.” Christopher glanced at her quickly, then back at the road; he drove with one arm draped across the wheel. “I really didn’t know you cared,” he said. He looked over at her again. “What?” he asked.
She got into bed and she did not expect to sleep, and she did not sleep.
“Stop it, Chris. Just stop it! Let the woman get married. What’s the matter with you? Jesus! You can’t even be polite to him? For crying out loud, Christopher, you are such a baby! You think I have four little kids? I have five little kids!”
It came to her then with a horrible whoosh of the crescendo of truth: She had failed on a colossal level. She must have been failing for years and not realized it. She did not have a family as other people did.
So there was this: Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.
But she saw behind her closed eyes the house, and inside her was a shiver that went through her bones. The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.
“You look like your mother used to,” said Bernie once he was standing in his office on the second floor of his house on River Road.
“Oh, I know, I know. But for him, you know, Mr. Investment Banker, something like working in the attorney general’s office, in child protection especially—I don’t know. But he was proud of me. I guess.” She looked at Bernie; he was looking down now. “I am sure he was, Suzanne.” “But did he ever say that to you? That he was proud of me?” Suzanne asked. “Oh, Suzanne,” said Bernie, raising his tired eyes. “I know he was proud of you.”
Suzanne had to wait a moment before she could continue; her brother’s story was carved into her deeply; it sat quietly tucked deep beneath her ribcage all the time.
Her father had said to Suzanne, “Please don’t come back here again, you have your life, and you must live it.” He had become a shell of a man, not even recognizable to her. Suzanne thought now that she—Suzanne—had not been quite right in the head since this had happened.
“Why do you act like this is so normal?” Suzanne squeezed her nose with her fingers. Bernie let out a sigh and said, “Because it is, Suzanne.” “Oh, man, not for me, it isn’t. I feel like I’ve set off a bomb in my life. For years I felt like I was safe on an— I don’t know, like an island. I had floated away from all those troubles that poor Doyle had, I was safe on my island with my own family, my husband and my boys, and now I’ve blown it up.”
These words rolled over Suzanne with a swiftness, as though something true had been said but she couldn’t catch it.
She wanted also to ask about his faith. She wondered if he had lost his faith, if that’s what he meant by being tired of the community.
Still, she had surprised him with her acuity about her father; Roger Larkin had not, in fact, respected the truth that she was a lawyer, he had told Bernie a number of times that she was “really just a social worker.”
Cindy lay down on the bed and looked through the window at the tops of the trees, the limbs bare, and yet there was that funny little soft sun that sneaks around on a cloud-filled afternoon in February—what was it? The bare branches seemed to reach out, reach out, the opposite of shrinking.
She almost had no preference for any kind of book, and she had sometimes thought that odd; she had read Shakespeare and the thrillers of Sharon McDonald, and biographies of Samuel Johnson and different playwrights, silly romance novels, and also—the poets. She thought, privately, that poets just about sat on the right hand of God.
The poetry was a lot about Andrea’s life, and Cindy understood, reading it, that she, Cindy, could never have done what Andrea did. She could never have written about her mother in such a way, could never have written down the revulsion she felt at the sight of her mother’s cheeks drawing in as she smoked, nor even could she have written anything about herself.
You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised.
Cindy sat up. “I said, let her in. Please, Tom.” “Are you crazy?” Tom asked. “Yes. Let her come in.”
At times these days—rarely, very rarely, but at times—I feel like I’ve become, oh, just a tiny—tiny—bit better as a person, and it makes me sick that Henry didn’t get any of that from me.”
Olive sat forward and said, “Cindy Coombs, there’s not one goddamn person in this world who doesn’t have a bad memory or two to take with them through life.”
“You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is—we’re all just a few steps behind you. Twenty minutes behind you, and that’s the truth.”
“But we’re both old enough to know things now, and that’s good.” “What things?” “When to shut up, mainly.” “What things do you shut up about?” Cindy asked, and Olive seemed to think about it, and then she said, “Well, for example, when he has his breakfast, I don’t say to him, Jack, why the hell do you have to scrape your bowl so hard.”
“But it’s never starting over, Cindy, it’s just continuing on.”
There were so many things that could not be said, and this had occurred to Cindy with more frequency and it made her heart ache.
“You’re an easy woman to please,” he had said to her. And she had said, “You may be the first person to think that.”
“Well, that’s great,” Jack said, and he meant it, although he didn’t care a whole lot. But she was making it interesting, as interesting as it could be to Jack, because she was Olive, and he knew they would start talking about something else soon; he was waiting.
From the corner of his eye he could see Elaine and her—whatever he was—leaning across the table and talking, and he understood that she would be telling the fellow who Jack was. Jack wanted to throw his napkin onto the table and go over and say, “But that’s not the story!”
And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.
What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing.
It seemed to him at such times that Olive talked only of herself—he knew that that was not (completely) true, but she was fascinated by herself in a way that was tiresome for Jack on those nights, and was this because he wanted to talk about himself instead? Yes.
But they had still squandered what they had, because they had not known.
“Oh, it’s so cozy,” Helen said, sitting down in a rocking chair whose upholstery had split open.
