Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(35)

* * *



—

And so I had gone to the place, it was a wooden building, not terribly large, and there were five of us volunteering. We were to pack the boxes and grocery bags, and we stood six feet apart with our masks on and put canned foods and toilet paper and diapers, and some frozen meat, into boxes, and then we put produce into paper bags: The produce had come mostly from the grocery store in town, and the lettuce and the celery looked a little worn out, but we did this, and the idea was that when the people arrived to get it—Margaret said that the pantry fed about fifty families—we would take it out to their cars.

I found myself toward the end of a table, and one woman pushed over a rolling cart with canned goods on it, and she stood next to me; the way the room was shaped we were almost in a separate area, and this woman said that her name was Charlene Bibber. I knew she was a volunteer because she wore the blue smock that all the volunteers wore. She started to talk to me quietly, almost without stopping. She had wavy hair with a little gray in it, and her nose was small, it turned up just slightly; I saw this when her mask slipped down. She told me right away that she was fifty-three years old. As she put the canned foods into the boxes she told me this part: She worked as a cleaner at the Maple Tree Apartments, a retirement place in town. She had been laid off for three weeks because of the virus, but then they let the cleaners go back. Charlene said, tugging her mask back up, that her husband had died years earlier, and that she had never been able to have children. As I glanced at her face above her mask, she told me that she had never got over the death of her husband. She said that she had gone to a minister—she did not say what church—and the minister had said to her, “You get up every day and you put a smile on your face. That’s what I do.”

Charlene looked over at me. “How dumb was that?” she asked, and I said it was dumb. Then Charlene said, speaking even more quietly, that she had had a “fling”—that’s how she put it—after her husband had died with a fellow in town named Fergie, and then he died and his wife had ended up living in the Maple Tree Apartments, and Charlene had stolen her shoe. One shoe. “I was going to give it back the next week, but then we got laid off for three weeks,” she said. No one else seemed to be listening to us speak, and she went on. “I lied about it too, because when I showed up the next week, they told me that the woman—Ethel MacPherson—had said I had stolen her shoe, and I said, Oh, she’s going batty, and they all had a laugh about it, I mean the women in the front office, and then they said I had to take a leave, I mean all the cleaners did—there are four of us—because of the virus. And when we went back after three weeks, Ethel had died.”

I thought about this. “Why one shoe?” I asked. I was really curious.

Charlene nodded and said, “Because the first woman I cleaned for that morning—her name is Olive Kitteridge, and she was just sitting in her chair like a big bullfrog—and then Olive said, ‘I’ve been sitting here thinking about a young woman that I stole one shoe from once.’ And I asked her why one shoe, and she turned and said to me, ‘I thought it might make her feel crazy.’ And I said, Did it? And Olive shrugged and said, ‘Dunno.’?”



* * *



—

I liked this woman, Charlene Bibber.



* * *



—

When we walked the bags and boxes out to the waiting cars, most of the people who were driving the cars were women. Some had children in their cars. And the children looked at me and then looked away. And I understood. Some of the women were very grateful, but most of them just took the food and said “Thanks” and drove away. And I understood that too.



* * *



—

As we left the place for the day, I saw that on Charlene’s car was a bumper sticker for the current president of our country. I thought that was fascinating, it intrigued me, really.



* * *



—

When I told William about Charlene, and mentioned the bumper sticker, he said “Huh,” as though really considering it. “You don’t think about his supporters working at a food pantry, but of course they can—and do.” He looked at me. “Jesus, look at how small-minded I am.”

And I said, “Yes, exactly.” I said, “I think we don’t get it. I mean, obviously we don’t get it—their point of view.”

And he said, “I get it.”

I was surprised. “Tell me,” I said.

And William crossed one leg over the other and said, “They’re angry. Their lives have been hard. Look at your sister, Vicky. She’s working a dangerous job right now, because she has to. But she still can’t get ahead.” Then he said, “Lucy, people are in trouble. And those who aren’t in trouble, they just don’t get it. Look how I just didn’t get it—being surprised that this Charlene woman was working in a food pantry. And also, we make the people who are in trouble feel stupid. It’s not good.”





v


Along those lines, this is important, I think:

I need to tell you about one summer evening: William and I took a drive after we ate dinner—it was still light out—and we stopped at a roadside place that was selling ice cream. The place that sold the ice cream was a small blue shack with a lot of lawn around it, and a tree stood in the middle of the lawn. When we first got there, people—not many—were milling about on the lawn, and we got out of our car and stood in line, at a safe distance from the woman ahead of us, who wore no mask. The woman who was serving the ice cream was not a young woman and she wore a mask but she wore it below her nose, and I wondered if William would say we shouldn’t get ice cream from her, but he said nothing, and this is what I want to say: