I have thought so often—so often—about the man in the hospital with the yellow sticker on the door the day my mother left and I was parked in the hallway outside his room. How he looked at me with the dark of his burning eyes, begging, and with despair. Not letting me look away. It could have been Jeremy. Many times I have thought: I will look it up, it must be in the public records, the day he died and where he died. But I have never looked it up.
—
It was summer when I came home, and I wore sleeveless dresses, and I didn’t realize I was so skinny. But I saw people look at me with fear when I went down the street to get food for the children. I was furious that they looked at me with fear. It was not unlike how children on our school bus would look at me if they thought I might sit next to them.
The gaunt and bony men continued to walk by.
When I was a child, our family went to the Congregational church. We were outcasts there as much as anywhere; even the Sunday school teacher ignored us. Once I came late to the class, the chairs were all taken. The teacher said, “Just sit on the floor, Lucy.” Thanksgivings we went to the activities room in the church and we were given a Thanksgiving dinner. People were nicer to us on that day. Marilyn, whom my mother mentioned in the hospital, was there with her own mother sometimes, and she would serve us the string beans and the gravy and put the rolls on the table with their small plastic-covered butter pads. I think people even sat at a table with us, I don’t remember that we were scorned at those Thanksgiving meals. For many years William and I went to shelters in New York on Thanksgiving and served food we had brought. It never felt to me that I was giving back. It felt like the turkey or the ham we brought with us seemed suddenly very small in the shelters—even if they were not vast—that we went to. In New York, they were not Congregationalists we fed. They were often people of color and they were sometimes people with mental illness, and William said one year, “I can’t do this anymore,” and I said that was okay, and I stopped doing it too.
But people who are cold! This I cannot stand! I read an article in the newspaper about an elderly couple in the Bronx who could not pay their heating bills, and they sat in their kitchen with the oven on. Every year I have given money so that people won’t be cold. William gives money too. But to record that I give money for people to be warm is something that makes me feel uncomfortable. My mother would say, Stop your foolish bragging, Lucy Damn-dog Barton—
The kind doctor said it might take a long while for me to gain my weight back, and I remember that he was right, though I don’t remember how long the long was. I went to him for checkups, at first every two weeks, then once a month. I tried to look nice; I remember I would try on different outfits and look in the mirror to see what he would see. In his office he had people in his waiting room, people in his examining rooms, then in his own office, a sort of conveyor belt of many kinds of human material. I thought of how many people’s behinds he had seen, how different they all must be. I always felt safe with him, felt that he paid attention to my weight and to every detail of my health. One day I waited to go into his office; wearing a blue dress and black tights, I leaned against the wall just outside. He was speaking to a very old woman; she was carefully dressed—we had this in common, to be clean and carefully dressed for our doctor. She said, “I have flatulence. It’s so embarrassing. What can I do?”
He shook his head sympathetically. “That’s a toughie,” he said.
For years, my girls would say “That’s a toughie” to something that was a pickle for them—they had heard me tell the story so many times.
I don’t know the last time I saw this doctor. I went a few times in the years after my hospital stay, and then once when I called for an appointment they said he had retired and I could see his associate. I could have written a letter to him to tell him what he meant to me, but there were problems in my life and my concentration was not good. I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.
When I was in Sarah Payne’s class, a student from another class came to see her. It was at the end of the class, and people sometimes lingered to speak with Sarah, and this student from the other class came in and said, “I really like your work,” and Sarah said thank you and, sitting at the table, began to pack up her things. “I like the stuff about New Hampshire,” the student said, and Sarah gave a quick smile and nodded her head. The student said, moving toward the door, as though she would follow Sarah from the room, “I knew someone from New Hampshire once.”
Sarah, to my eyes, looked bemused. “Did you,” she said.
“Yes, Janie Templeton. You never met Janie Templeton, did you?”
“I never did.”
“Her father was a pilot. For the airlines. Pan Am or something it was back then,” said this student, who was not young. “And he had a nervous breakdown, Janie’s father. He started to walk around their house masturbating. Someone told me that later, that Janie saw this—maybe she was in high school, I don’t know, but her father started walking around the house just masturbating compulsively.”
I became freezing cold in the Arizona heat. I had goosebumps all over me.
Sarah Payne stood up. “Hope he didn’t fly the plane much. Okay, then.” And she saw me, and nodded at me. “See you tomorrow,” she said.
I had never before heard, nor have I heard since, of this Thing—as I had called it to myself—happening as it had happened in our home.
I think it was the next day that Sarah Payne spoke to us about going to the page with a heart as open as the heart of God.
—
Later, after my first book was published, I went to a doctor who is the most gracious woman I have ever met. I wrote down on a piece of paper what the student said about the person from New Hampshire named Janie Templeton. I wrote down things that had happened in my childhood home. I wrote down things I’d found out in my marriage. I wrote down things I could not say. She read them all and said, Thank you, Lucy. It will be okay.
I saw my mother only one time after she came to see me in the hospital. It was almost nine years later. Why didn’t I go there to visit her? To visit my father, and my brother and sister? To see the nieces and nephews I had never seen? I think—to say it simply—it was easier not to go. My husband would not come with me, and I didn’t blame him. And—I know the defensiveness in this sentence—my parents and my sister and my brother never wrote me, or called me, and when I called them it was always hard; I felt I heard in their voices anger, a habitual resentment, as though they were silently saying You are not one of us, as though I had betrayed them by leaving them. I suppose I had. My children were growing, they needed something all the time. My two or three hours a day in which to write were terribly important to me. And then my first book was being readied to publish.
—
But my mother became ill, and so I was the one, then, who went to her hospital room in Chicago, to sit at the foot of her bed. I wanted to give her what she had given me, the kind of wide-awake constancy of attentiveness of those days she had been with me.
My father greeted me when I stepped off the elevator in the hospital, and I would not have known who he was except for the gratitude I saw in the eyes of this stranger, that I had come to help him. He looked so much older than I had ever thought he could be, and any anger I felt—or that he felt—did not seem connected to us anymore. The disgust I had had for him most of my life was not there. He was an old man in a hospital who had a wife who was going to die. “Daddy,” I said, staring at him. He wore a wrinkled collared shirt and jeans. I think he was too shy at first to hug me, so I hugged him, and imagined the warmth of his hand against the back of my head. But in the hospital, that day, he did not, in fact, put his hand across the back of my head, and something inside me—deep, deep inside—heard the whisper Gone.
My mother was in pain; she was going to die. This was not something I seemed a
ble to believe. My children were by then teenagers and I was worried especially about Chrissie, whether she was smoking too much weed. So I was on the phone to them frequently, and the second evening as I sat near my mother she said to me quietly, “Lucy, I need you to do something.”
I stood and went to her. “Yes,” I said. “Tell me.”
“I need you to leave.” She said this quietly, and I heard no anger in her voice. I heard her decisiveness. But truly, I felt panic.
I wanted to say: If I leave, I will never see you again. Things have been hard with us, but don’t make me leave, I can’t bear to never see you again!
I said, “Okay, Mom. Okay. Tomorrow?”
She looked at me, and tears pooled in her eyes. Her lips twitched. She whispered, “Now, please. Honey, please.”
“Oh, Mommy—”
She whispered, “Wizzle, please.”
“I’ll miss you,” I said, but I was starting to cry, and I knew she could not stand that, and I heard her say, “Yes, you will.”
I bent and kissed her hair, which was matted from her being sick and in bed. And then I turned and took my things, and I did not look back, but when I stepped through the door, I could not keep walking. I backed up without turning around. “Mommy, I love you!” I called out. I was facing the hallway, but her bed was the closest to me, and she would have heard me, I am sure. I waited. There was no answer, no sound. I tell myself she heard me. I tell myself—I’ve told myself—this many times.
Immediately I went to the nurses’ station. I said, begging, Please don’t let her suffer, and they told me they would not let her suffer. I didn’t believe them. There had been the woman in the room dying when I was first having my appendix out, and that woman had been suffering. Please, I begged these nurses, and I saw in their eyes the deepest fatigue of people who cannot do any more about anything.
In the waiting room was my father, and when he saw my tears he shook his head quickly. I sat by him and whispered what my mother had said, that she needed me to leave. “When will the service be?” I asked. “Oh, please, tell me when it is, Daddy, I will come right back.”
He said there would be no service.
I understood. I felt I understood. “People would come, though,” I said. “She’s had those sewing customers, and people would come.”
My father shook his head. No service, he said.
And there was no service for her.
Or for him, the next year, when he died from pneumonia; he would not let my brother take him to a doctor. I flew to see him only days before he died, staying in the house I had not seen for so many years. It frightened me, the house, its smells and its smallness, and the fact that my father was so ill and my mother gone. Gone! “Daddy,” I said, sitting on the bed by him. “Daddy, oh, Daddy, I’m sorry.” I said that again and again: “Daddy, Daddy, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, Daddy.” And he squeezed my hand, his eyes were so watery, his skin so thin, and he said, “Lucy, you’ve always been a good girl. What a good girl you’ve always been.” I am quite certain he said this to me. I believe, though I am not sure, that my sister left the room then. My father died that night, or rather very early the next morning, at three o’clock. I was alone with him, and when I heard the sudden silence I stood and looked at him and said, “Daddy, stop it! Stop it, Daddy!”
When I got back to New York after seeing my father—and my mother, the year before—after seeing them for the last time, the world began to look different to me. My husband seemed a stranger, my children in their adolescence seemed indifferent to much of my world. I was really lost. I could not stop feeling panic, as if the Barton family, the five of us—off-kilter as we had been—was a structure over me I had not even known about until it ended. I kept thinking of my brother and my sister and the bewilderment in their faces when my father died. I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another’s hearts. My husband said, “But you didn’t even like them.” And I felt especially frightened after that.
—
My book received good reviews, and suddenly I had to travel. People said, How crazy—such an overnight success! I was on a national morning news show. My publicist said, Act happy. You are what these women who are getting dressed for work want to be, so you get on that show and you act happy. I have always liked that publicist. She had authority. The news show was in New York, and I was not as scared as people assumed I would be. The business of fear is a funny business. I was in my chair, with my microphone attached to my lapel, and I looked out the window and I saw a yellow taxi and I thought, I am in New York, I love New York, I am home. But when I traveled to other cities, as I had to do, I was terrified almost constantly. A hotel room is a lonely place. Oh God it is a lonely place.
—
This was right before email became the common way for people to write one another. And when my book came out I received many letters from people telling me what the book had meant to them. I received a letter from the artist of my youth telling me how much he liked the book. Every letter I received I answered, but I never answered his.
When 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.”
When 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.
The 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.
But 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.