Lucy by the Sea (45)
The river walk was beautiful now, so many oranges and yellows, and that day there were many yellow leaves on the ground because it had been windy the night before, it was like a carpet of yellow we walked on. And the sun streamed down on it.
We sat on one of the granite slab benches, and Charlene told me she was glad she had the job cleaning at the Maple Tree Retirement Home.
She told me again about Olive Kitteridge. “She’s very liberal, she talks about the president all the time, she just hates him. But it’s okay, because she’s nice to me. Well, not nice, Olive isn’t exactly nice to anyone, but I can tell she likes me, and she’s really lonely. Sometimes I just sit and we talk for a long time. She loves birds. And she talks about her first husband, Henry, that’s her favorite subject, and I talk about my husband.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
Charlene put her hand on her chin.
“It is,” she said.
When we parted she said, “Lucy, you’ve got to tell me if you think I’m losing my mind.”
“All right,” I said. “You have to tell me the same thing.”
And we waved goodbye.
As I drove home from the river that day, this thought arrived: There was a faint odor of loneliness that came from Charlene. And the awful truth is this: It had made me draw back just slightly inside myself. And I knew this was because I had always been afraid of giving off that odor myself.
William was really excited about the potato parasites. He was on the phone a great deal with Dave and other members of Lois’s family, and he was also on the phone with Lois herself—they were planning one more get-together in Orono before the weather got too cold, and Dave was going to come with her. The climate change issue was becoming more interesting to William, and he was trying to help them develop a new kind of potato, one that could survive wet and warmth. He spoke about all this to me, and the people he had come to know, and I found myself getting interested. I thought how when a person is really excited about something, it can be contagious.
I first noticed this years ago when I was very young and taught at that community college in Manhattan. I was so enthusiastic about the books I had read that I could see my students watching me and getting interested in these books too—just because I was so excited about these books that I had recently read.
viii
Toward the end of October it was supposed to rain straight through one weekend, and I noticed, but only vaguely, that William seemed to be checking the weather a lot, and he seemed disturbed by the rain that was supposed to come. I had asked him again if we could please put the plexiglass back up on the porch—we were no longer eating out there, it was too cold, although the porch had a heater—and he again said, “We’ll do it soon.”
But on Friday it was not yet raining, and he said, “Come on, Lucy, let’s drive to Freeport, to L.L.Bean. We don’t have to go in, let’s just drive there.”
So we did. I was always willing to go anywhere, because there was so little to do.
I was surprised by all the people that were going in and out of the store. “Let’s just sit here,” William said. There were iron rod tables and chairs spread out at safe distances, and because the weather looked like it would rain at any minute they were empty. But we sat at one of the tables, there was a roof over it, and William said, “Perfect.” He kept checking his phone.
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “I mean, I’m fine, I’m just surprised that—”
—
And then—oh dear God!!—our daughters were walking over to us, both of them waving their arms wildly. “Mom!” they called; they almost screamed it: “Mom!” And people turned to look at me. “Dad!” They yelled this and walked toward us, waving their arms over their heads, and I could not believe it.
I could not believe it.
Chrissy and Becka walked to the table—William and I were now standing up—and they put their arms out and made hugging motions; even with their masks on, I could see their happiness just beaming forth.
I have never seen anything as beautiful as those girls. These women. My daughters!
They were laughing and laughing—and William was beaming behind his mask as well, as he glanced at me. I said, “William! You planned this?”
“We all did,” Chrissy said. “We wanted to surprise you, so we did.”
They sat down at the table, and William and I sat down, and we began to talk, oh, we talked and talked and talked. They had flown from New York to Boston and then rented a car and driven up from there. Becka said, “We didn’t trust our driving skills to drive all the way from Connecticut,” and I understood. Both girls had been raised in the city and had learned to drive late in their lives. They had reservations at the hotel in Crosby, William had helped arrange all of this. “We had to come now, before the numbers start going back up,” Chrissy said. “So we did!”
“Oh my God,” I kept saying, “Oh my God.”
Then I said, “Becka, why do you look so tall?” And she said, “Oh, it must be my sneakers, you haven’t seen these,” and she stuck her foot forward to me and I saw that the sole of her red sneaker was very thick.
She had bought them online. Then Becka said, “Mom, I have to tell you about these pajamas I ordered online. They came from a really reputable place, and made in the U.S.” But, she told me, when they arrived they looked like what people in concentration camps had to wear; they were really wide-striped, and every time she put them on, or even when they were just lying over a chair, she could not get it out of her head how they looked like concentration camp uniforms, and so she had written the place and told them, and they couldn’t have been nicer, and they even took them off their website, and then they sent her a different pair of pajamas, solid dark blue.