My Name Is Lucy Barton (6 page)

I
saw the artist I had known in college a few years after I left the hospital, at an opening for another artist. It was a bad time in my marriage. Things had occurred that humiliated me; my husband had become very close to the woman who had brought my girls to the hospital and who had no children of her own. I had asked that she no longer come to our home, and he agreed. But I am quite sure we had an argument that night we went to the opening. And I remember that I did not change my top. It was a purple knit top, and I wore it with a skirt and I put on my husband's long blue coat at the last minute; my husband must have worn his leather jacket. I remember I was surprised to see the artist there. He seemed nervous to see me, and his eyes went over my purple knit top and the navy blue coat—they both fit me poorly, and the colors didn't go together; I did not see this until I got home and looked in the mirror and saw what he had seen. It didn't matter. My marriage mattered. But seeing the artist that night mattered enough that so many years later I can still picture the long blue coat and my garish purple top. He was still the only person who made me self-conscious about my clothes, and that—to me—was curious.

I have said before: It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.

T
he writer Sarah Payne, whom I had come across in the clothing store, was to speak on a panel at the New York Public Library. I read this in the newspaper a few months after I had seen her. I was surprised by it; she seldom appeared publicly, and I assumed she must be very private. When I mentioned this to someone who was said to know her peripherally, that person said, “She's not so private, New York just doesn't like her.” And it reminded me of the man who had spoken of her as a good writer except for her tendency toward the compassionate. I went to see her on this panel; William did not go with me, he said he would rather stay at home with the children. It was in the summer, and there were not nearly as many people as I had thought there might be. The man who had said that about her—the compassion business—was sitting alone in the back row. The panel was about the idea of fiction: what it was, and that sort of thing. A character Sarah Payne had written about in one of her books had referred to a former American president as a “senile old man whose wife ruled the country with her astrology charts.” Apparently Sarah Payne had received hate mail from people who said they had liked her book until they reached the part where this character referred to one of our presidents in this way. The moderator seemed surprised to hear this. “Really?” He was a librarian from the library. She said, “Really.” “And do you answer such letters?” The librarian asked this while his fingers, with a certain precision, touched the bottom of his microphone. She said that she did not answer them. She said, and her face was not as sparkling as it had been when I came across her in the clothing store, “It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author,” and that alone made me glad I had come. The librarian seemed unable to understand. “What do you mean?” he kept saying, and she only repeated what she had said before. He said, “What
is
your job as a writer of fiction?” And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.

A woman in the audience raised her hand and said, “But
do
you think that about the former president?”

Sarah Payne waited for a moment, then said, “Okay, I'll tell you this. If that woman I wrote about in a fictional way calls the man senile and old and says he has a wife who rules with her astrology charts, then I would say”—and she nodded her head tightly, and waited—“I, meaning me, Sarah Payne, citizen of this country, I would say, the woman I
made
up
lets him off quite easily.”

New York audiences can be tough, but they understood what she meant, and heads nodded and people whispered things to one another. I looked behind me at the man in the back row, and he appeared to be without emotion. At the end of the night I heard him say to a woman who'd come to speak to him, “She's always taken a stage well.” He did not say it nicely, is how I felt. And I took the subway home alone; it was not a night I loved the city I have lived in for so long. But I could not have said exactly why. Almost, I could have said why. But not exactly why.

And so I began to record this story on that night. Parts of it.

I began to try.

T
he night in the hospital when I felt I had been unkind to my mother by saying that I did not think she ever cared what it was like to be famous, I couldn't fall asleep. I was agitated; I wanted to cry. When my own children cried I fell to pieces, I would kiss them and see what was wrong. Maybe I did it too much. And when I had had an argument with William, I sometimes cried, and I learned early that he was not a man who hated to hear a woman cry, as many men are, but that it would break whatever coldness was in him, and he would almost always hold me if I cried very hard and say, “It's okay, Button, we'll work it out.” But with my mother I didn't dare cry. Both my parents loathed the act of crying, and it's difficult for a child who is crying to have to stop, knowing if she doesn't stop everything will be made worse. This is not an easy position for any child. And my mother—that night in the hospital room—was the mother I had had all my life, no matter how different she seemed with her urgent quiet voice, her softer face. What I mean is, I tried not to cry. In the dark I felt she was awake.

Then I felt her squeeze my foot through the sheet.

“Mommy,” I said, bolting upright. “Mommy, please don't go!”

“I'm not going anywhere, Wizzle,” she said. “I'm right here. You're going to be all right. You'll have a lot of stuff to face in your life, but people do. I've seen some of it in your case, I mean I've had some visions, but with you—”

I squeezed my eyes shut—
Don't you fucking cry you little idiot—
and I squeezed my leg so hard I almost could not believe how much it hurt. Then it was over. I turned onto my side. “With me what?” I said. I could say it calmly now.

“With you, I'm never sure how accurate these things are. They used to be accurate with you.”

“Like when you knew I had Chrissie,” I said.

“Yes. But I didn't—”

“Know her name.” We spoke this together, and in the dark it felt to me that we smiled together too. My mother said, “Sleep, Wizzle, you need your sleep. And if you can't sleep, just rest.”

In the morning the doctor came and swooshed the curtain about me, and when he saw the red bruise on my thigh he didn't touch it, but he stared at it, then he looked at me. He raised his eyebrows, and to my horror, tears slipped from the sides of my eyes. He nodded kindly, though it took him just a moment. He put his hand on my forehead, as though checking for a fever, and he left it there while the tears kept slipping from my eyes. He moved his thumb once, as though to brush away a tear. My God, he was kind. He was a kind, kind man. I gave a tiny smile to say thank you, a tiny grimace-smile to say that I was sorry.

He nodded and said, “You'll see those kids soon. We'll get you home with your husband. You're not going to die on my watch, I promise you.” And then he made a fist and kissed it, and held it out toward me.

S
arah Payne was teaching a weeklong class in Arizona, and I was surprised when William offered to pay for me to go. This was a few months after I had seen her at the New York Public Library. I was not sure I wanted to be away from the children for that long, but William encouraged me. The class was called a “workshop,” and I don't know why, but I have never liked that word: “workshop.” I went because it was taught by Sarah Payne. When I saw her in the classroom I gave a bright smile, thinking she would remember me from our meeting in the clothing store. But she only nodded back, and it took me some moments to realize she didn't recognize me. Perhaps it is true that we wish for some tiny acknowledgment from someone famous, that they see us.

Our class met in an old building on the top of a hill, and it was warm and the windows were open, and I watched as Sarah Payne became exhausted almost immediately. I saw it in her face. By the end of one hour her face looked like it had fallen the way white clay loses its shape when it's not cold enough, that is the image, that her face had dropped into a strange shape from fatigue, and at the end of three hours it seemed even more so, as though her white clay face was almost trembling. It took everything out of her to teach that class, is what I am saying. Her face was just ravaged with fatigue. Every day she would start with a little of the sparkle, and within minutes the fatigue set in. I don't think I have seen before or since a face that showed its exhaustion so clearly.

There was a man in the class who had recently lost his wife to cancer, and Sarah was nice to him, I saw this. We all, I felt, saw this. We saw that this man fell in love with a student in the class who was a friend of Sarah's. It was fine. The friend did not fall back in love with him, but she treated him decently, there was something decent in the way this woman and Sarah treated this man who was in pain from the death of his wife. There was also a woman who taught English. There was a Canadian man who had pink cheeks and a very pleasant way about him; the class teased him about being so Canadian, and he took it well. There was another woman who was a psychoanalyst from California.

And I want to report here what happened one day, which is that through the open window a cat suddenly jumped into the room, right onto the large table. The cat was huge, and long; in my memory he may as well have been a small tiger. I jumped up with terrible fear, and Sarah Payne jumped up as well; terribly she jumped, she had been that frightened. And then the cat ran out through the door of the classroom. The psychoanalyst woman from California, who usually said very little, said that day to Sarah Payne, in a voice that was—to my ears—almost snide, “How long have you suffered from post-traumatic stress?”

And what I remember is the look on Sarah's face. She hated this woman for saying that. She hated her. There was a silence long enough that people saw this on Sarah's face, this is how I think of it anyway. Then the man who had lost his wife said, “Well, hey, that was a really big cat.”

After that, Sarah talked a lot to the class about judging people, and about coming to the page without judgment.

We were promised a private conference in this workshop situation, and I am sure Sarah must have been very tired with the private conferences. People tend to go to these workshops because they want to be discovered and get published. For the workshop I had brought parts of the novel I was writing, but when I had my conference with Sarah I took instead sketches of scenes of my mother coming to visit me in the hospital, things I had started to write after I had seen Sarah at the library; I had slipped a copy of the pages to her the day before, in her mailbox. I remember mostly that she spoke to me as though I had known her a long time, even though she never mentioned our having met at the clothing store. “I'm sorry I'm so tired,” she said. “Jesus, I'm almost dizzy.” She leaned forward, touching my knee lightly before she sat back. “Honestly,” she said softly, “with that last person I thought I was going to be sick. Like really throw-up sick, I'm just not cut out for this.” Then she said, “Listen to me, and listen to me carefully. What you are writing, what you want to write,” and she leaned forward again and tapped with her finger the piece I had given her, “this is very good and it will be published. Now listen. People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse.
Such
a stupid word, ‘abuse,' such a conventional and stupid word, but people will say there's poverty without abuse, and you will never say anything. Never ever defend your work. This is a story about love, you know that. This is a story of a man who has been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter's hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone's marriage going bad, she doesn't even know it, doesn't even know that's what she's doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we
all
love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You're not doing it right.” She sat back then, and wrote down titles of books I should read, most of them classics, and when she stood and I stood to leave, she suddenly said, “Wait,” and then she hugged me, and made a kissing sound to her fingers, which she held by her lips, and it made me think of the kind doctor.

I said, “I was sorry that woman in class asked about PTSD. I jumped too.”

Sarah said, “I know you did, I saw that. And anyone who uses their training to put someone down that way—well, that person is just a big old piece of crap.” She winked at me, her face exhausted, and turned to go.

I have never seen her since.

“S
ay,” my mother said. This was the fourth day my mother had been sitting at the foot of my bed. “You remember that Marilyn girl—what was her name, Marilyn Mathews, I don't know what her name was. Marilyn Somebody. Do you remember her?”

“I remember her. Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“What was her name?” my mother asked.

“Marilyn Somebody,” I said.

“She married Charlie Macauley. Do you remember him? Sure you do. You don't? He was from Carlisle, and—well, I guess he was more your brother's age. They didn't go out in high school, he and Marilyn. But they got married, they both went to college—in Wisconsin I think, at Madison—and—”

I said, “Charlie Macauley. Wait. He was tall. They were in high school when I was still in junior high. Marilyn went to our church and she helped her mother serve the food for Thanksgiving dinners.”

“Oh, of course. That's right.” My mother nodded. “You're right. Marilyn was a very nice person. And I told you that already—that she was more your brother's age.”

I suddenly had a clear memory of Marilyn smiling at me one day when she passed me in the empty hall after school, and it was a nice smile, like she was sorry for me, but I felt she did not want her smile to seem condescending. That was why I always remembered her.

“
Why
would you remember her?” my mother said to me. “If she was older like that. Because of the Thanksgiving dinners?”

“Why would
you
remember her?” I said to my mother. “What happened to her? And why would you know?”

“Oh.” My mother let out a great sigh and shook her head. “A woman came into the library the other day—I go to the library in Hanston some days now—and this woman looked like her, like Marilyn. I said, ‘You look like someone I knew, who was about the age of my kids.' And she didn't answer, and that—that makes me very angry, you know.”

I did know. I had lived my life with that feeling. That people did not want to acknowledge us, be friends with us. “Oh, Mom,” I said tiredly. “Screw 'em.”

“
Screw
them?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I see you've learned lots living in the big city.”

I smiled at the ceiling. I didn't know a person in the world who would have believed this conversation, yet it was as true as any can be. “Mom, I didn't have to move to the big city to learn to say ‘screw.' ”

There was a silence, as though my mother was considering this. Then she said, “No, you probably only had to walk to the Pedersons' barn and hear their hired hands.”

“The hired hands said a lot more than the word ‘screw,' ” I told her.

“I imagine they did,” my mother said.

And this is when—recording this—I think once more, Why did I not just ask her then? Why did I not just say, Mom, I learned all the words I needed to right in that
fucking
garage we called home? I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don't know they have embarrassed themselves. I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time. I know faintly, even now, that I have embarrassed myself, and it always comes back to the feeling of childhood, that huge pieces of knowledge about the world were missing that can never be replaced. But still— I do it for others, even as I sense that others do it for me. And I can only think I did it for my mother that day. Who else would not have sat up and said, Mom, do you not remember?

I have asked experts. Kind ones, like the doctor who was kind; not unkind people, like the woman who spoke so meanly to Sarah Payne when she jumped at the cat. Their answers have been thoughtful, and almost always the same: I don't know what your mother remembered. I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered.

I don't know what my mother remembered either.

“But it did get me thinking about Marilyn,” my mother continued in her breathy voice, “and so I asked later in the week when I saw that so-and-so person from the—oh, you know, Wizzle, the place—”

“Chatwin's Cake Shoppe.”

“That place,” my mother said. “Yes, the woman who still works there—she knows everything.”

“Evelyn.”

“Evelyn. So I sat down and had a piece of cake and a cup of coffee and I said to her, ‘You know, I thought I saw Marilyn what's-her-name the other day,' and this Evelyn, I always liked her—”

“I loved her,” I said. I did not say I loved her because she was good to my cousin Abel, good to me, that she never said a word when she saw us going through the dumpster. And my mother did not ask why I loved her.

My mother said, “Well, she stopped wiping the counter and she said to me, ‘Poor Marilyn married that Charlie Macauley from Carlisle, I think they still live nearby now, but she married him back when they were in college, and he was a smart fellow. So of course they take the smart ones right away.' ”

“Who takes them?” I asked.

“Why, our dirty rotten government, of course,” my mother answered.

I said nothing, just looked up at the ceiling. It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government. I understand this in a way.

“What did they take Marilyn's smart husband for?” I asked.

“Well, they made him an officer, of course. During those Vietnam years. And I guess he had to do some terrible stuff, and from what Evelyn was telling me, he's never been the same. So early in their marriage this happened, very sad. Very, very sad,” my mother said.

I waited quite a while, quite a while I waited, lying there with my heart thumping, I can remember even now the thumping, the banging of my heart, and I thought of what I had—to myself—always called the
Thing,
the most horrifying part of my childhood. I was very frightened lying there, I was frightened that my mother would mention it after all these years, after never mentioning it ever, and I finally said, “But what does he do—as a result of this experience? Is he mean to Marilyn?”

“I don't know,” my mother said. Her voice seemed suddenly tired. “I don't know what it is he does. Maybe there's help these days. At least there's a name. It's not like they were the first people to be trauma—whatever the word is—by a war.”

In my memory of this, I was the one to get us away as fast as we could now, as fast as we could, from where my mother may—or may not—have known she was headed.

“I hate to think of anyone being mean to Marilyn,” I said, then I added that the doctor hadn't yet come in to see me.

“It's Saturday,” my mother said.

“He'll come anyway. He always does.”

“He won't work on a Saturday,” my mother said. “He told you yesterday to have a good weekend. To me that doesn't sound like he works on a Saturday.”

Then I became afraid. I became afraid that she was right. “Oh, Mommy,” I said, “I'm so tired. I want to get better.”

“You'll get better,” she said. “I've seen it clearly. You'll get better, and you'll have some problems in your life. But what matters is, you'll get better.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure.”

“What problems?” I asked this in a way that tried to sound joking, as though what did I care about a few problems?

“Problems.” My mother was quiet for a while. “Like most people have, or some people. Marriage problems. Your kids will be all right.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know? I don't know how I know. I've never known how I know.”

“I know,” I said.

“You rest, Lucy.”

It was still the beginning of June, and the days were very long. It was not until the lights were just starting to show in the dusk through the window that gave us the magnificent view of the city that I heard the voice at my door. “Girls,” he said.