Lucy by the Sea (35)

And I slowly understood that William’s relationship to the tower was his relationship to our world as it was right now. He had connected the dots of history that I only vaguely, in my own way, was aware of.

He picked his fork up again and we ate in silence. Through the screens on the porch the sea stretched out before us, making its soft full sound so continuously, and there were the islands straight in front of us, with a lot more green on them now, and the water slapped against the rocks without stopping.

ii

Bob said that it was too hot for him to walk with me, but he still came over and we would sit on the lawn chairs, and sometimes Margaret came with him. If she was not with him he would have a cigarette, which he seemed to get such a kick out of. “Thank you, Lucy,” he would say each time, and wink at me, his mask pulled down below his chin so he could smoke. With Bob, I was always okay-feeling. Even when I could not remember what I was going to say, he would just shrug and tell me, “Don’t worry.” I told him what William had said about our country—the world—being in trouble, and Bob said, “He may be right.”





With William—he sometimes seemed so far away, and I remembered that this is how he had always been. But also, I noticed—as I said—that I felt an increasing sense of comfort from how familiar he was becoming to me again. Still, I could never really settle into myself. Not for very long. Although it helped to have my music back, and there were those times when I would lie on the couch and listen to classical music on my phone.

But what scared me was that I could not—except when I was listening to the music—remember David in really concrete ways. He slipped and slid in my mind, like he would not hold still. I could not understand it.

iii

The girls called me far less frequently than—in my memory—they used to. I felt them moving away from me, and I knew I was not wrong. I did not understand why. It caused me at times a terrible private anguish. When I spoke to William about it he would shrug and say, “Lucy, let them be.”



—

I remembered this: The last time I saw my mother, when I went to the hospital in Chicago where she was dying, I was on the phone with the girls at various points, they were in high school, and I worried about them, and my mother—who said almost nothing to me at all during the one night and the next morning that I was there—said this:

“You’re too bound up with those girls. Watch out, they will end up biting you in the back.”

She said that to me, my mother.

And the next morning she asked me quietly to leave. And I left.



—

But remembering this now, it frightened me. I thought: Did my mother have a vision? And I thought, No, she was only jealous of how much I loved my daughters. But maybe she had had a vision. And I was not the mother I thought I had been.



—

How will I ever know?

I think some people know. But I will never know.





But I missed them. Oh dear God did I miss those girls. I asked William when we could drive to Connecticut again and see them, and I said that Estelle and Bridget could drive over from Larchmont, and he said maybe one of these days, but not right now. So I let it go.

I had a memory of us standing in that driveway, and how we then sat around the pool, and it had been awkward. And as time went by, the idea of seeing the girls that way again was almost as bad as not seeing them at all.



—

But I also wondered why they did not offer to come up and see us. Both girls and Michael had already had the virus, surely they could drive up and see us, safe-distancing. When I mentioned to people how much I missed my girls, sometimes a person would say, Why can’t they come up and see you? And I did not dare say: Because apparently they don’t want to. And I was not going to ask them to come. That is not the kind of mother I am, that much I know.

iv

William was finding a new calling.

Lois’s nephew—her brother Dave’s son, called Joe—ran the Trask potato farm these days with his father. The potato farm had had trouble with parasites. William got very interested. He told me that the first time he called Lois’s nephew, Joe referred to him as “Dr. Gerhardt.” Joe spoke at great length with William about the University of Maine at Presque Isle, which had a program that was trying to help with this stuff. William spent a lot of time on the phone with Joe—who William said sounded like “a great fellow”—and he also spent time on the phone with other parasitologists he had worked with over the years who knew more about these particular parasites than William did. And William also researched. At dinner he would tell me about these parasites and what he was doing to help; he would go on and on, and to be truthful I was often made tired by this. But I was glad he was so involved in something. He seemed younger to me.

I felt older every day.



—

My mother—my real mother, not the nice mother I had made up—once said, “Everyone needs to feel important.” And I thought of this as I listened to William go on about the potato parasites.





There was one night when Bob and Margaret invited us to a small gathering with one other couple at a place on the coast that was doing takeout. And so we went, and it was fine. Their friends were really nice, it seemed to me, and we had—I had—a pleasant enough time. But this is not the point.