My Name Is Lucy Barton(26)

I have thought so often—so often—about the man in the hospital with the yellow sticker on the door the day my mother left and I was parked in the hallway outside his room. How he looked at me with the dark of his burning eyes, begging, and with despair. Not letting me look away. It could have been Jeremy. Many times I have thought: I will look it up, it must be in the public records, the day he died and where he died. But I have never looked it up.

—

It was summer when I came home, and I wore sleeveless dresses, and I didn’t realize I was so skinny. But I saw people look at me with fear when I went down the street to get food for the children. I was furious that they looked at me with fear. It was not unlike how children on our school bus would look at me if they thought I might sit next to them.

The gaunt and bony men continued to walk by.





When I was a child, our family went to the Congregational church. We were outcasts there as much as anywhere; even the Sunday school teacher ignored us. Once I came late to the class, the chairs were all taken. The teacher said, “Just sit on the floor, Lucy.” Thanksgivings we went to the activities room in the church and we were given a Thanksgiving dinner. People were nicer to us on that day. Marilyn, whom my mother mentioned in the hospital, was there with her own mother sometimes, and she would serve us the string beans and the gravy and put the rolls on the table with their small plastic-covered butter pads. I think people even sat at a table with us, I don’t remember that we were scorned at those Thanksgiving meals. For many years William and I went to shelters in New York on Thanksgiving and served food we had brought. It never felt to me that I was giving back. It felt like the turkey or the ham we brought with us seemed suddenly very small in the shelters—even if they were not vast—that we went to. In New York, they were not Congregationalists we fed. They were often people of color and they were sometimes people with mental illness, and William said one year, “I can’t do this anymore,” and I said that was okay, and I stopped doing it too.

But people who are cold! This I cannot stand! I read an article in the newspaper about an elderly couple in the Bronx who could not pay their heating bills, and they sat in their kitchen with the oven on. Every year I have given money so that people won’t be cold. William gives money too. But to record that I give money for people to be warm is something that makes me feel uncomfortable. My mother would say, Stop your foolish bragging, Lucy Damn-dog Barton—





The kind doctor said it might take a long while for me to gain my weight back, and I remember that he was right, though I don’t remember how long the long was. I went to him for checkups, at first every two weeks, then once a month. I tried to look nice; I remember I would try on different outfits and look in the mirror to see what he would see. In his office he had people in his waiting room, people in his examining rooms, then in his own office, a sort of conveyor belt of many kinds of human material. I thought of how many people’s behinds he had seen, how different they all must be. I always felt safe with him, felt that he paid attention to my weight and to every detail of my health. One day I waited to go into his office; wearing a blue dress and black tights, I leaned against the wall just outside. He was speaking to a very old woman; she was carefully dressed—we had this in common, to be clean and carefully dressed for our doctor. She said, “I have flatulence. It’s so embarrassing. What can I do?”

He shook his head sympathetically. “That’s a toughie,” he said.

For years, my girls would say “That’s a toughie” to something that was a pickle for them—they had heard me tell the story so many times.

I don’t know the last time I saw this doctor. I went a few times in the years after my hospital stay, and then once when I called for an appointment they said he had retired and I could see his associate. I could have written a letter to him to tell him what he meant to me, but there were problems in my life and my concentration was not good. I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.





When I was in Sarah Payne’s class, a student from another class came to see her. It was at the end of the class, and people sometimes lingered to speak with Sarah, and this student from the other class came in and said, “I really like your work,” and Sarah said thank you and, sitting at the table, began to pack up her things. “I like the stuff about New Hampshire,” the student said, and Sarah gave a quick smile and nodded her head. The student said, moving toward the door, as though she would follow Sarah from the room, “I knew someone from New Hampshire once.”

Sarah, to my eyes, looked bemused. “Did you,” she said.

“Yes, Janie Templeton. You never met Janie Templeton, did you?”

“I never did.”

“Her father was a pilot. For the airlines. Pan Am or something it was back then,” said this student, who was not young. “And he had a nervous breakdown, Janie’s father. He started to walk around their house masturbating. Someone told me that later, that Janie saw this—maybe she was in high school, I don’t know, but her father started walking around the house just masturbating compulsively.”

I became freezing cold in the Arizona heat. I had goosebumps all over me.

Sarah Payne stood up. “Hope he didn’t fly the plane much. Okay, then.” And she saw me, and nodded at me. “See you tomorrow,” she said.