Lucy by the Sea (38)

And she said, “Hi, Lucy.”

So we spoke for a few minutes, she was still working at the food pantry and also at her job as a cleaner at the Maple Tree Apartments, and after a few minutes we sat on the ends of one of the benches there. We were both wearing our masks, although Charlene’s mask was below her nose, and I asked how her summer was going, and she said, looking straight ahead, “Eh—”

“Well, why don’t you walk with me?” I said.

So we agreed to take a walk by the river on Friday, which was her day off from work.

That Friday, Charlene was in the parking lot already when I got there, and we walked for a little and then she said, “Mind if we sit down on that bench? I’m on my feet all day cleaning and I’d like to sit.”

“Oh, of course!” I said, so we sat down on a long granite slab of a bench; we were not six feet apart, but her mask was over her nose. And as we sat there she told me about the Maple Tree Apartments, she mentioned again Ethel MacPherson, whose one shoe she had stolen, and how bad she felt when the woman died.

I said I understood.

I told Charlene I thought my mind was going, and she said, “In what way?” And I said, Well, I couldn’t remember things and I got confused a lot.

Charlene leaned her head a bit toward mine as though really listening, and then she nodded and said, “I feel that way too.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do. And because I live by myself and can’t really see anyone much, I get even more worried.”

So we talked about that, about losing our minds, and then she told me about this woman she cleaned for, Olive Kitteridge, at the Maple Tree Apartments. “I feel really bad for her,” Charlene said. “She has a friend, Isabelle, but Isabelle had to go over the bridge and now Olive seems depressed.”

“What do you mean, over the bridge?” I asked, and Charlene explained that it was the next level of care after the independent part of living there, and it was more like a nursing home and you had to go literally over a little bridge to get there. So it was called “going over the bridge.”

“Why did Isabelle have to go over the bridge?” I asked.

And Charlene said it was because Isabelle had fallen and broken her leg and when she got out of rehab she couldn’t live alone again. “It’s so sad,” Charlene said.

We sat in silence for a bit, and then Charlene said, “But Olive goes to see her every day. They say that Olive goes into her room and reads her the newspaper every day from front to back.”

“Oh man,” I said.

And Charlene said, “I know.”

We agreed to meet again two Fridays from now.

vii

A week or so later—how do you know the time in a pandemic—but at some point after this, William, when I came back from my afternoon walk, was lying on the couch, and he said to me, “Lucy, I’m dizzy. I’ve been lying here for an hour waiting for you to come back and I am really dizzy.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” I said, sitting on the couch by his feet.

“I don’t know.” He said again, “But I’m really dizzy.”

“Drink some water,” I said, but I saw that he had a glass near him, and he reached and finished it, and I was scared. I called Bob Burgess. And Bob said he would call his doctor on his cellphone, it was okay, he and his doctor were friends.

Within five minutes Bob called back and said that the doctor had said to drink a liter of water and that the doctor would call him in ten minutes. So I made William drink four more glasses of water, and slowly he stopped being dizzy. But it was as though I had become stuck inside a block of wood, that is the only way to describe it. I sat there and we waited. William finally sat up. He looked old to me. And he didn’t look at me, he just kept looking around the room. We waited more and William said he was far less dizzy, but then he lay down again and he fell asleep. I could not think, or feel, or anything, while we waited. An hour later William’s phone rang and it was Bob’s doctor, and after he talked to William for a while he said it was dehydration, that it was hot out, and people had to be careful.

So that happened. And then I made us scrambled eggs for supper and William seemed cheerful. But I was not cheerful.

The rest of the evening I felt quietly awful.



—

But after we went to bed that night and William had gone to sleep, I had a sudden memory: When I was very young they had shown us some movie in school. I have no memory at all what the movie was about, but I remember the anxiety of the teacher as she had to get the projector to work, and it did work, and this is all that I remember:



—

At the very beginning of the movie was a blue screen with many white ping-pong balls bouncing around on it, and every so often a ping-pong ball would bounce into another ping-pong ball and then bounce off again. This went on, the ping-pong balls bouncing around randomly and randomly hitting into one another. And in my memory I thought—even back then, so young—I thought: That is like people.

My point is, if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little.

And I thought of this that night, how my ping-pong ball had bumped into William’s, and yet always—a little bit even now—bounced away, and I thought of David, whose ping-pong ball had really gone away from me now, and I thought of how Bob Burgess was right now with Margaret, who did not know that he needed a smoke on occasion; he was alone in that need. Except for when his ping-pong ball briefly bumped into mine and I knew about his need for a cigarette. And our ping-pong balls had bumped into each other when he called the doctor for us. And when we were together.