I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn’t want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.
My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: “Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and…did it.” Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don’t know what my mother meant.
My brother and I speak every week on the telephone. He has stayed living in the house we grew up in. Like my father did, he works on farm machinery, but he does not seem to get fired or have my father’s temper. I have never mentioned his sleeping with pigs before they are slaughtered. I have never asked him if he still reads the books of a child, those about people on the prairie. I don’t know if he has a girlfriend or a boyfriend. I know almost nothing about him. But he speaks to me politely, though he never once has asked me about my children. I have asked him what he knew of my mother’s childhood, if she had felt in danger. He says he doesn’t know. I told him of her catnaps in the hospital. Again, he says he doesn’t know.
—
When I speak on the phone to my sister, she is angry and complains about her husband. He doesn’t help with the cleaning or the cooking or the kids. He leaves the toilet seat up. This she mentions every time. He is selfish, she says. She doesn’t have enough money. I have given her money, and every few months she sends me a list of what she needs for the children, although three of them have moved out of her house by now. The last time she listed “yoga lessons.” I was surprised that the tiny town she lived in offered yoga lessons, and I was surprised that she—or perhaps it is her daughter—would take them, but I give her the money every time she sends me the list. I resented—privately—the yoga lessons. But I think she feels she is owed the money by me, and I think she may be right. Once in a while I find myself wondering about the man she married, why he never puts the toilet seat down? Angry, says my gracious woman doctor. And shrugs.
In college my roommate had a mother who had not been good to her; my roommate didn’t especially like her. But one fall the mother sent my roommate a package of cheese, and neither of us liked cheese, but my roommate could not throw it away, or even stand to give it away. “Do you mind?” she asked. “If we keep this somehow? I mean, my mother gave it to me.” And I said I understood. She put the cheese on the outside windowsill and it stayed there, the snow falling on it eventually, and we both forgot about it, but there it was in the spring. In the end she arranged for me to dispose of it when she was in class, and I did.
Let me say this about Bloomingdale’s: At times I think of the artist, because he was proud of the shirt he had bought there, and how I remembered thinking that was shallow of him. But my daughters and I have gone there for years; we have our favorite place at the counter on the seventh floor. My daughters and I go first to the counter and have the frozen yogurt, and then we laugh about our stomachs, how much they ache, and then we walk through—so desultory are we—the shoe department, and the department for young women. Almost always I buy them what they want, and they are good and careful and never take advantage—they are wonderful girls. There were some years when they would not go with me, they were angry. I never went to Bloomingdale’s without them. Time has gone by, and we go back now when they’re in town. When I think of the artist, I think of him with fondness, and I hope that his life has gone well.
But Bloomingdale’s—in so many ways—it is home to us, to my girls and me.
—
Bloomingdale’s is home to us because of this: Every apartment I’ve lived in since I left the home my children grew up in, I have always made sure to have an extra bedroom so they could come and stay, and neither of them ever does or ever did. Kathie Nicely may have done the same, I’ll never know. But I’ve known other women whose children did not visit them, and I’ve never blamed those children and I don’t blame my own, although it breaks my heart. “My stepmother,” I’ve heard my daughters say. “My father’s wife” would be sufficient. But they say “my stepmother,” or “my stepmom.” And I want to say, But she never washed your little faces when I was in the hospital, she never even brushed your hair, you poor little things looked like ragamuffins when you came to see me, and it broke my heart, that no one was caring for you! But I don’t say that, and I should not. For I am the one who left their father, even though at the time I really thought I was just leaving him. But that was foolish thinking, because I left my girls as well, and I left their home. My thoughts became my own, or shared with others who were not my husband. I was distractible, distracted.
The rage of my girls during those years! There are moments I try to forget, but I will never forget. I worry about what it is they will never forget.
My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, “Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!”
How did she know this, my dear, dear child? At such a young age she knew this. When she told me, I looked at her. I said, “You’re right.”
There was a day late one summer when I was at their father’s place. He had gone to work and I was there to see Becka, who was staying, as she always did, with him. He was not yet married to the woman who had brought the girls to the hospital and who had no children of her own. I went to the corner store—it was early morning—and saw on the small television above the counter that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Quickly I returned to the apartment and turned on the television, and Becka sat watching, and I went into the kitchen to drop off whatever I had bought, and I heard Becka cry out, “Mommy!” The second plane had gone into the second tower, and when I ran to answer her cry, her look was so stricken: I think always of that moment. I think: This was the end of her childhood. The deaths, the smoke, the fear throughout the city and the country, the horrendous things that have happened in the world since then: Privately I think only of my daughter on that day. Never have I heard before or since that particular cry of her voice. Mommy.
—
And I think sometimes of Sarah Payne, how she could barely say her name that day when I met her in the clothing store. I have no idea if she still lives in New York; she has not written any new books. I have no idea about her life at all. But I think how exhausted she became, teaching. And I think how she spoke of the fact that we all have only one story, and I think I don’t know what her story was or is. I like the books she wrote. But I can’t stop the sense that she stays away from something.
When I am alone in the apartment these days, not often, but sometimes, I will say softly out loud, “Mommy!” And I don’t know what it is—if I am calling for my own mother, or if I am hearing Becka’s cry to me that day when she saw the second plane go into the second tower. Both, I think.
But this is my story.
And yet it is the story of many. It is Molla’s story, my college roommate’s, it may be the story of the Pretty Nicely Girls. Mommy. Mom!
But this one is my story. This one. And my name is Lucy Barton.
Chrissie said, not long ago, about the husband I have now: “I love him, Mom, but I hope he dies in his sleep and then my stepmom can die too, and you and Dad will get back together.” I kissed the top of her head. I thought: I did this to my child.
Do I understand that hurt my children feel? I think I do, though they might claim otherwise. But I
think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.
At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn. A view of the horizon, the whole entire circle of it, if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments.
All life amazes me.
For my friend
Kathy Chamberlain
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to acknowledge the following for their help with this book: Jim Tierney, Zarina Shea, Minna Fyer, Susan Kamil, Molly Friedrich, Lucy Carson, the Bogliasco Foundation, and Benjamin Dreyer.
BY ELIZABETH STROUT
My Name Is Lucy Barton
The Burgess Boys
Olive Kitteridge
Abide with Me
Amy and Isabelle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH STROUT is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, as well as The Burgess Boys, a New York Times bestseller; Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick; and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth Strout lives in New York City.
To inquire about booking Elizabeth Strout for a speaking engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at [email protected].
elizabethstrout.com
@LizStrout
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My Name Is Lucy Barton Page 10