Lucy by the Sea (15)

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You can imagine how taken up I was with everything that was going on with Becka, but as time went by Becka sounded fairly good each time I spoke to her, increasingly so. She told me she had not been happy for a long time, and I said, How long? And she said she couldn’t even remember, but she said that she didn’t like Trey, and I said, “Okay, honey.” She said she had been on the phone to her therapist twice a week; William was paying for that, and Becka sometimes quoted the therapist; she had seen this woman, this therapist, before, and had now started back up with her. I suddenly remembered how when Becka had seen this woman years earlier—after her father and I had split up—Becka had said to me one day, “Lauren says that you let Dad manipulate you.” I never understood that, but I had not said anything about it.

One of these days in Maine when I was talking on the phone to Becka she said, “Mom, Trey was jealous of you,” and I said, What in the world do you mean? And she said, “Your career.” Then Becka added, “You know, his poetry sucks.” And I remembered how awkward I’d always felt when I had gone with William and Estelle and David to a few of Trey’s poetry readings, because privately I thought his poetry was so bad, and so now I said, “Let him go, Becka. Good riddance.” And Becka said, “He thought you were just an older white woman writing about older white women.” And I have to tell you, that stung me a bit. And I said, “And he is a young white guy writing about— Oh, never mind.” But it distressed me; I was embarrassed.



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“He’s just an asswipe,” said William when I told him this. “She’s had her life saved by this, I’m telling you.”



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And it seemed maybe she had. Chrissy and Michael were clearly being good to her. But as I spoke to her she seemed increasingly distant from me, and one night she said, “Mom, this whole thing is exactly what I needed.”

iii

And then one morning when I went out for my walk I saw a bright yellow dandelion growing by the edge of the driveway near the bottom of the hill. I stared at it; I could not stop staring at it. I leaned over and touched the top of its soft head. I thought: Oh my God! After that I began to see more and more dandelions on my walks. Dandelions had grown along the edge of the long dirt road we had lived on when I was a child, and I had picked a small bouquet of them for my mother one day when I was really little, and she was furious because they had stained the top of a new dress she had just made for me. But they still—after all these years—made my heart open with wonder.





Bob Burgess showed up again, this time with his wife, Margaret, and she made me nervous at first, I think because she was nervous. It was still cold, but there was a slice of sun that fell across the grass our lawn chairs were on. Margaret and Bob, both wearing homemade masks, had come over right after lunch, and so William was there, and the four of us sat on the small lawn—I was freezing, even in my new winter coat—far away from each other in lawn chairs. Margaret was a shapeless woman—I mean she seemed to be shapeless in her coat—but she had amazing eyes, very lively behind her glasses, and even with her mask on you could see her energy streaming out at you. It was the beginning of May by now, but still so cold. She asked if I needed anything, and I said, No, thank you.

And then she suddenly said, “I’m intimidated to meet you.”

I was so surprised. I said, “Intimidated? By me? Oh Margaret. I’m just…just me.”

“Yes, I can see that now,” she said, and that confused me. I wanted to be talking to Bob, as William was, I did not want to be stuck with Margaret. But she asked about my girls, her eyes were very sparkly as she asked about them, so I told her about Becka’s husband and how Becka and Chrissy and Michael were all in Connecticut together, and she seemed to really listen, I could see her listening, and she responded exactly right somehow. I cannot remember what she said, but I remember thinking, Oh, she is right here with me.

She told me that she was a Unitarian minister, and I asked her what that was like, and she told me all the things she did, the Alcoholics Anonymous group that had to stop meeting on Tuesday nights, they Zoomed the meetings now, she was afraid it was not as effective, and she told me how she Zoomed her services. It was interesting to think of her life, although I could not get a real sense of it.

They stayed an hour and then stood up to go. Bob said, “Hey, Lucy, how’d you like our little snowstorm?” And I said I hadn’t liked it at all. “Can’t stand it,” Bob said. “Just can’t stand that stuff when it comes in May, for crying out loud.”

Margaret said, “Bob has a tendency to be negative.” But she said it cheerfully, touching him lightly on his shoulder. I said I probably had that tendency too.





That night I could not sleep. I did not take a sleeping tablet because it did not matter if I slept or not, and I was not especially uncomfortable as I lay awake, I was thinking about Becka, and also about Bob Burgess, and I heard William get up and I thought he would go downstairs to read as he did sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, but instead he stopped at my door—our bedroom doors were always open—and he whispered, “Lucy? Are you awake?”

I sat up in the dark and said, Yeah, I am.

And William came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed; there was just a little moonlight and so I could not see his face clearly, but I understood immediately that he was distressed. “Lucy,” he said. And then nothing more. So I finally said, “What is it, Pill?”