My Name Is Lucy Barton (10 page)

W
hen Chrissie left for college, then Becka the next year, I thought—and it's not an expression, I'm saying the truth—I did think I would die. Nothing had prepared me for such a thing. And I have found this to be true: Certain women feel like this, that their hearts have been ripped from their chests, and other women find it very freeing to have their children gone. The doctor who makes me not look like my mother, she asked me what I did when my daughters went to college, and I said, “My marriage ended.” I added quickly, “But yours won't.” She said, “It might. It might.”

W
hen I left William, I did not take the money he offered me, or the money the law said was mine. In truth, I didn't feel I deserved it. I wanted only for my daughters to have enough and that was agreed upon right away, that they would have enough. I also felt uncomfortable about where the money came from. I could not stop thinking the word: Nazi. And for myself, I didn't care about having the money. Also I had made money—What writer makes money? But I had made money and I was making more, and so I didn't think I should have William's money. But when I say “And for myself, I didn't care,” I mean this: that to be raised the way I was, with so little—only the inside of my head to call my own—I did not require much. Someone else raised in my circumstances would have wanted more, and I didn't care—I say I didn't care—and yet I happened to get money because of the luck I had with my writing. I think of my mother in the hospital saying that money had not helped Elvis or Mississippi Mary. But I know that money is a big thing, in a marriage, in a life, money is power, I do know that. No matter what I say, or what anyone says, money is power.

This is not the story of my marriage; I have said that I cannot write the story of my marriage. But sometimes I think about what first husbands know. I married William when I was twenty years old. I wanted to cook him meals. I bought a magazine that had fancy recipes, and I gathered the ingredients. William passed through the kitchen one evening and looked at what was in the frying pan on the stove, then he came through the kitchen again. “Button,” he said, “what's this?” I said it was garlic. I said the recipe called for a clove of garlic to be sautéed in olive oil. With gentleness he explained that this was a bulb of garlic, and that it needed to be peeled and opened into the cloves. I can picture the unpeeled big bulb of garlic now—so clearly—sitting in the middle of the olive oil in the frying pan.

I stopped trying to cook once the girls came along. I could cook a chicken, get them a yellow vegetable every so often, but in truth, food never has held much appeal for me as it does for so many people in this city. My husband's wife loves to cook. My former husband, is what I mean. His wife loves to cook.

T
he husband I have now grew up outside of Chicago. He grew up in great poverty; at times their home was so cold they wore their coats inside. His mother was in and out of mental institutions. “She was crazy,” my husband tells me. “I don't think she loved any of us. I don't think she could.” When he was in the fourth grade he played a friend's cello, and he has played with brilliance since. All his adult life my husband has played the cello professionally, and he plays for the Philharmonic here in the city. His laugh is huge, walloping.

He is happy with anything I make for us to eat.

B
ut there is one more thing I would like to say about William: During those earlier years of my marriage he took me to see Yankee games; this was in the old stadium, of course. He took me—and a couple of times the children—to see the Yankees play, and I was surprised at the ease with which he spent the money on the tickets, I was surprised at how he said to go ahead and get a hotdog and beer, and I shouldn't have been surprised; William was generous with his money; I understand that my surprise was because of how it was when my father bought me a candied apple. But I watched those Yankee games with an awe I still remember. I had known nothing about baseball. The White Sox had meant little to me, although I felt a kind of allegiance to them. But after these Yankee games, I loved only the Yankees.

The diamond! I remember being amazed by it, and I remember watching the players hit and run, watching the men who came out to roll the dirt clean, and most of all I remember watching the sun as it set hitting the buildings nearby, the buildings of the Bronx, the sun would hit these buildings, and then different city lights would come on, and it was a thing of beauty. I felt I had been brought into the world, is what I am saying.

Many years later, after I had left my husband, I would walk to the East River by Seventy-second Street, where you can go right up to the river, and I would look up the river and think of the baseball games we had gone to long before and feel a sense of happiness, in a way that I could not feel about other memories of my marriage; the happy memories hurt me, is what I am saying. But the memories of the Yankee games were not like that: They made my heart swell with love for my former husband and New York, and to this day I am a Yankees fan, though I will never again go to a game, I know this. That was a different life.

I
think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn't want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can't bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don't want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.

My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: “Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and…did it.” Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don't know what my mother meant.

M
y brother and I speak every week on the telephone. He has stayed living in the house we grew up in. Like my father did, he works on farm machinery, but he does not seem to get fired or have my father's temper. I have never mentioned his sleeping with pigs before they are slaughtered. I have never asked him if he still reads the books of a child, those about people on the prairie. I don't know if he has a girlfriend or a boyfriend. I know almost nothing about him. But he speaks to me politely, though he never once has asked me about my children. I have asked him what he knew of my mother's childhood, if she had felt in danger. He says he doesn't know. I told him of her catnaps in the hospital. Again, he says he doesn't know.

When I speak on the phone to my sister, she is angry and complains about her husband. He doesn't help with the cleaning or the cooking or the kids. He leaves the toilet seat up. This she mentions every time. He is
selfish,
she says. She doesn't have enough money. I have given her money, and every few months she sends me a list of what she needs for the children, although three of them have moved out of her house by now. The last time she listed “yoga lessons.” I was surprised that the tiny town she lived in offered yoga lessons, and I was surprised that she—or perhaps it is her daughter—would take them, but I give her the money every time she sends me the list. I resented—privately—the yoga lessons. But I think she feels she is owed the money by me, and I think she may be right. Once in a while I find myself wondering about the man she married, why he never puts the toilet seat down? Angry, says my gracious woman doctor. And shrugs.

I
n college my roommate had a mother who had not been good to her; my roommate didn't especially like her. But one fall the mother sent my roommate a package of cheese, and neither of us liked cheese, but my roommate could not throw it away, or even stand to give it away. “Do you mind?” she asked. “If we keep this somehow? I mean, my mother gave it to me.” And I said I understood. She put the cheese on the outside windowsill and it stayed there, the snow falling on it eventually, and we both forgot about it, but there it was in the spring. In the end she arranged for me to dispose of it when she was in class, and I did.

L
et me say this about Bloomingdale's: At times I think of the artist, because he was proud of the shirt he had bought there, and how I remembered thinking that was shallow of him. But my daughters and I have gone there for years; we have our favorite place at the counter on the seventh floor. My daughters and I go first to the counter and have the frozen yogurt, and then we laugh about our stomachs, how much they ache, and then we walk through—so desultory are we—the shoe department, and the department for young women. Almost always I buy them what they want, and they are good and careful and never take advantage—they are wonderful girls. There were some years when they would not go with me, they were angry. I never went to Bloomingdale's without them. Time has gone by, and we go back now when they're in town. When I think of the artist, I think of him with fondness, and I hope that his life has gone well.

But Bloomingdale's—in so many ways—it is home to us, to my girls and me.

Bloomingdale's is home to us because of this: Every apartment I've lived in since I left the home my children grew up in, I have always made sure to have an extra bedroom so they could come and stay, and neither of them ever does or ever did. Kathie Nicely may have done the same, I'll never know. But I've known other women whose children did not visit them, and I've never blamed those children and I don't blame my own, although it breaks my heart. “My stepmother,” I've heard my daughters say. “My father's wife” would be sufficient. But they say “my stepmother,” or “my stepmom.” And I want to say, But she never washed your little faces when I was in the hospital, she never even brushed your hair, you poor little things looked like ragamuffins when you came to see me, and it broke my heart, that no one was caring for you! But I don't say that, and I should not. For I am the one who left their father, even though at the time I really thought I was just leaving
him.
But that was foolish thinking, because I left my girls as well, and I left their home. My thoughts became my own, or shared with others who were not my husband. I was distractible, distracted.

T
he rage of my girls during those years! There are moments I try to forget, but I will never forget. I worry about what it is they will never forget.

M
y more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, “Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that
is
the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!”

How did she know this, my dear, dear child? At such a young age she knew this. When she told me, I looked at her. I said, “You're right.”

T
here was a day late one summer when I was at their father's place. He had gone to work and I was there to see Becka, who was staying, as she always did, with him. He was not yet married to the woman who had brought the girls to the hospital and who had no children of her own. I went to the corner store—it was early morning—and saw on the small television above the counter that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Quickly I returned to the apartment and turned on the television, and Becka sat watching, and I went into the kitchen to drop off whatever I had bought, and I heard Becka cry out,
“Mommy!”
The second plane had gone into the second tower, and when I ran to answer her cry, her look was so stricken: I think always of that moment. I think: This was the end of her childhood. The deaths, the smoke, the fear throughout the city and the country, the horrendous things that have happened in the world since then: Privately I think only of my daughter on that day. Never have I heard before or since that particular cry of her voice.
Mommy.

And I think sometimes of Sarah Payne, how she could barely say her name that day when I met her in the clothing store. I have no idea if she still lives in New York; she has not written any new books. I have no idea about her life at all. But I think how exhausted she became, teaching. And I think how she spoke of the fact that we all have only one story, and I think I don't know what her story was or is. I like the books she wrote. But I can't stop the sense that she stays away from something.

W
hen I am alone in the apartment these days, not often, but sometimes, I will say softly out loud, “Mommy!” And I don't know what it is—if I am calling for my own mother, or if I am hearing Becka's cry to me that day when she saw the second plane go into the second tower. Both, I think.

But this is my story.

And yet it is the story of many. It is Molla's story, my college roommate's, it may be the story of the Pretty Nicely Girls.
Mommy
. Mom!

But this one is my story. This one. And my name is Lucy Barton.

C
hrissie said, not long ago, about the husband I have now: “I love him, Mom, but I hope he dies in his sleep and then my stepmom can die too, and you and Dad will get back together.” I kissed the top of her head. I thought: I did this to my child.

Do I understand that hurt my children feel? I think I do, though they might claim otherwise. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart:
This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.