Anything Is Possible

by Elizabeth Strout

  “Mom, you’re still smoking?”

  “My one cigarette a day, yes.”

  “I used to love it when people said I looked like you,” Angelina said. “Are you sure the one cigarette a day is okay?”

  “I’m not dead yet.” Mary was about to say: I’m very surprised I’m not dead yet. But she had warned herself not to speak of her death to Angelina.

  Angelina tucked her arm into her mother’s and her mother pulled her out of the way of a woman on a bicycle. “Mom,” Angelina said, turning to look, “that woman is your age, and she’s smoking, and she has her pearls tossed over her neck, and she’s wearing high heels, and she’s pedaling her bike with a basket of stuff in the back.”

  “Oh, I know, honey. It just amazed me when I came here. Then I figured it out—the women are just versions of people pulling up to Walmart in their cars. Only they’re on a bike.”

  Angelina yawned hugely. Finally she said, “Everything’s always amazed you, Mom.”

  Inside the apartment, Mary lay down on her bed, this was her afternoon rest, and Angelina said she’d email her kids. Through the window Mary could see the sea. “Bring your computer in here,” she called to her daughter, but Angelina called back, “You rest, Mom, I’m okay. We’ll skype with them later.”

  Please, Mary thought. Please come in here and be with me. Because the fact that her youngest daughter—her favorite, the only one of her children who had not seen her for four years, who had refused to see her!, although the girl had said she would come a year ago—the fact that this girl (woman) was now in the next room of the apartment gave a feel of naturalness to Mary’s life, and yet it was not natural to have this child here, at all. Please, Mary thought. But she was tired, and the Please could also be for Paolo to have a good time with his kids, whom he was visiting right now in Genoa, or a Please that her other girls would stay healthy, oh there were many things Mary could say Please for—

  Kathie Nicely.

  Mary edged up onto an elbow. The woman who had walked out on her family. A flash of heat shot through Mary, even as she remembered the woman: petite, pleasing-looking. “Huh,” Mary said quietly, and lay back down. Kathie Nicely, behind her smile, had not cared for Mary, and only now did Mary understand that it was because Mary had come from such humble beginnings. “Humble beginnings” is what Mary’s mother-in-law had said of Mary’s background. It was true. They didn’t have two nickels to rub together. But Mary had been a cute little thing, a cheerleader, when she caught the eye of the Mumford boy, whose father had that huge business in farm machinery. What had she known? Lying on her bed, Mary shook her head. Less than nothing she had known.

  Well, she thought, turning on her side, she knew some things now: the fact that Kathie Nicely had never really acknowledged her. Mary waved a hand dismissively. But they had gone to one of the girls’ weddings. The oldest girl? It must have been. Years ago.

  Wait. Wait. Wait.

  It came to Mary now. Kathie Nicely had already moved out, and people at the wedding were whispering that she’d had an affair. And somehow—why would this be the case?—it was this, the whisperings, that had caused Mary to understand that her own husband had been having an affair—with that dreadful fat Aileen, his secretary. It had taken a few days to get the confession from him, then Mary had her heart attack— Well, of course she hadn’t remembered Kathie Nicely when her own world had tumbled down around her so.

  —

  She reached across the bed and tugged her yellow leather pocketbook toward her, found her phone, and put her earbuds in; Elvis sang “I’ve Lost You.” Two years older than Mary, and from the same little town in Mississippi that Mary had been born in, Elvis Presley had always been her secret friend, though she had never once seen him, whisked off as she was to the farmlands of Illinois when she was just a baby so that her father could take a job in a filling station owned by his cousin in a town called Carlisle. One time, Elvis performed two hours from where she lived, but with the children so little she could not go to see him. Oh, Mary had spent more time thinking about Elvis than anyone could have imagined, and in this way the pleasure of her mind—because it was her mind and could not be known by others—had developed early in her marriage. In her mind, she had been backstage with Elvis; she had looked into his lonely eyes and let him see that she understood him. In her mind, she had consoled him about the “fat and forty” remark that the stupid comedian had made on national television; in her mind, they had spent time alone while he talked to her of his hometown and his mama. When he died, she wept quietly for days.

  But Paolo—she had told Paolo of her fantastical life with Elvis, and Paolo had watched her, one eye partially closed, then he opened his arms and hugged her. The freedom. Oh God, the freedom of being loved—!

  She woke to see her daughter in the doorway. Mary patted the bed beside her. “Come, honey. That’s not his side, I’m on his side.”

  Angelina placed her shiny little computer on the dresser top and went and lay down beside her mother. Mary said, “Look at that ocean. It goes all the way to Spain.” Angelina closed her eyes. Mary sat up a bit. “Say, how’s your father’s brain?” She belched softly, the apricot filling of her earlier cornetto returning on her.

  “He’s not demented,” Angelina said, “though I watch out for it.”

  “Good,” Mary answered. She found a tissue in her large yellow pocketbook and touched it to her lips. “I meant his cancer, though.”

  Angelina opened her eyes and sat up herself now. “There’s no recurrence of the cancer. Don’t you think we’d have told you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary answered truthfully.

  “We’re not mean, Mom. We’d tell you if Dad got sick again. Come on, Mom.”

  “Angel, of course you’re not mean. No one said you were mean. I was just asking.” Mary thought: I am a fool. This clarity of belief made her feel sorry for her daughter and weepy again. She sat up farther. “Come on, let’s not think about it.” From her yellow leather pocketbook she pulled out a plastic bag of used tissues and dropped them into a wastebasket beneath the table by her bed.

  Angelina laughed. “You’re so funny. Your constant collection of used tissues.”

  And this made Mary laugh—to hear her sweet child laughing. “I’ve told you, when you have five girls and they’re all home sick with colds, you have to just keep walking around picking up tissues—”

  “I know, Mom. I know.” Angelina put her head on her mother’s arm, and her mother, with her other hand, briefly touched her daughter’s face.

  Who leaves a marriage after fifty-one years? Not Mary Mumford, that’s for sure. She shook her head. Angelina asked, “What, Mom?” Mary shook her head again. They were still lying on the bed. Who leaves a marriage after fifty-one years?

  Well—Mary did. She waited until all five girls were grown, she waited until she recovered from the heart attack she’d had when she found out about the secretary her husband had been having an affair with for thirteen years—thirteen years with that woman who was so fat—then she waited while she recovered from the stroke she had after her husband found the letters from Paolo—almost ten years ago now—oh, he had yelled, red in his face, that awful vein on the side of his head just about to burst, but it burst in her instead, she supposed that was part of the marriage, she took on his bursting veins, and then she waited until he did not die of the brain cancer he seemed to get right after she told him she was leaving him; so she waited and waited and dear Paolo waited as well—and so—here she was.

  How did you ever know? You never knew anything, and anyone who thought they knew anything—well, they were in for a great big surprise.

  “You were so good to me.” Angelina slipped off her flat black shoes while still lying down; they fell to the floor with soft sounds.

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  “You were so good to me, Mom. You put me to bed until I was eighteen.”

  “I loved you,” Mary said. “I still love you.�
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  “This is your side of the bed, right?” Angelina sat up.

  “Yes, honey, I promise.”

  Angelina sighed and lay down next to her mother again. “I’m sorry. I’ll be nice to him when he’s back tomorrow. I know he’s nice, Mom. I’m being a baby.”

  Mary said, “I’d feel the same way if I were you,” but she thought this was not true. She glanced at the clock and said, “Come on. It’s time for my swim.”

  Angelina got off the bed, smoothed her hair over one shoulder. “You’re so brown,” she said to her mother. “It’s funny to see you so brown.”

  “Well, it’s the seaside.” Mary went into the bathroom and put her bathing suit on, and put a dress on over it. “Let’s go. Now, you don’t have to do anything in the water but sit. It just holds you up, I swear.”

  At four o’clock the sun was vastly bright and the houses built up high on the hills were lit by it, the pale colors, the bright yellow flowers, the palm trees. Mary walked in her plastic shoes across the rocks and down to the beach. She pulled her dress off, put it on her towel, found her goggles.

  “Mom, you’re wearing a bikini.”

  “A two-piece, honey. Look around. Do you see one person wearing a one-piece? Except for you?” Mary put her goggles on and walked into the water, in just a moment she pushed off and paddled along, seeing the small fish below her. Every day when she swam, that was her favorite part of the day, and it was now, even with her daughter here to visit. Splashing made her stop. Angelina was there, her hair wet. “Mom, you’re so funny. In your yellow bikini. And your goggles. Oh my God, Mom!” So they swam and laughed and the sun sliced down on them.

  Sitting on a sun-warmed rock, Angelina said, “Do you have friends?”

  “I do.” Mary nodded. “Valeria is my main friend. Didn’t I write to you about her? Oh, I love her. I met her in the square. I’d seen her sitting by an old lady—why, she, Valeria, has the sweetest face, Angelina, the sweetest face I’ve ever seen. Other than your own. She was sitting by the sea with an old woman who had legs that were dark with about one hundred years of sun. I just stared at that woman’s legs, the veins were purple inside these dark, dark encasings, like sausages, really, and I thought: What a miracle life is! These old legs still pumping up blood. I was thinking this, and then I glanced at the woman who was talking to her. Tiny little thing, Valeria is, almost sitting on her lap, and the sweetness of her face— Why—” Mary shook her head. “And then by the church two days later, this tiny lady walked right up to me. She knows some English, I know a little Italian. Yes, I have a friend. You can meet her; she’d love to meet you.”

  “Okay,” said Angelina. “Maybe in a few days. I don’t know.”

  “Whenever you want.”

  Four ships were in front of them, one a cruise ship headed toward Genoa, the others tankers.

  “Is he nice to you, Mom?”

  Mary said, “He’s very good to me.”

  “Okay, then. All right.” In a moment Angelina added, “And his sons? And their wives? Are they nice to you too?”

  “Perfectly fine.” Mary waved a hand dismissively. “Look what Paolo’s done for me, honey. He downloaded all of Elvis’s songs onto my phone.” Mary reached for her phone, looked at it, then put it back into her big yellow pocketbook.

  “You told me,” Angelina said. And then, in a nicer tone, Angelina added, “You’ve always liked yellow.” She touched her mother’s pocketbook. “And this is yellow.”

  “I have always loved yellow.”

  “And your yellow bikini. You crack me up, Mom.”

  Another ship, far out on the horizon, appeared. Mary pointed to it, and Angelina nodded slowly.

  She ran a bath for Angelina, like she had done for years, and she almost wondered if the girl would let her stay and talk, as she often did when she was little. But Angelina said, “Okay, Mom. I’ll be out soon.”

  Lying on her bed—where she spent much of her days—Mary looked at the high ceiling and thought that what her daughter could not understand was what it had been like to be so famished. Almost fifty years of being parched. At her husband’s forty-first birthday surprise party—and Mary had been so proud to make it for his forty-first so he’d be really surprised, and boy he was really surprised—she had noticed how he did not dance with her, not once. Later she realized he was just not in love with her. And at the fiftieth wedding anniversary party the girls threw them, he did not ask her to dance either.

  Later that year her girls had given her the birthday gift, she was sixty-nine, of going to Italy with a group. And when the group went to the little village of Bogliasco she became lost in the rain, and Paolo found her, and he spoke English, and she did not really think too much about his age. She fell in love. She did. He’d been married for twenty years, it had seemed like fifty to him, and now he was alone—they were both parched.

  But she thought of her husband, her ex-husband, more often these days. She worried about him. You could not live with someone for fifty years and not worry about him. And miss him. At times she felt gutted with her missing of him. Angelina had not yet mentioned her own marriage, and Mary was waiting with real apprehension for her to do so. Angelina’s husband was a good man; who knew? Who knew.

  In the bathtub, Angelina put her head back and smeared her hair with shampoo. She had been happy, swimming with her mother. But now, sitting in this horrible old tub on its clawed feet, trying to hold the odd little shower hose so water didn’t get everywhere, now Angelina felt the worst feeling of all, that of not being able to believe things. She could not believe that her mother looked so different. She could not believe that her mother no longer lived ten miles from her, from her grandchildren. She could not believe that her mother was married to a boring Italian man as young as Tammy. No, she wanted to cry, soaping her hair, No no no! Oh, she had missed her mother terribly. Day after day, week after week, she had talked of her mother incessantly, and Jack had listened, but then Jack had finally and suddenly left, saying, You’re in love with your mother, Angie, you’re not in love with me. And so she had come here to see her mother now, to tell her about her marriage: this woman—her mother—that she was in love with.

  To have the pleasant-faced Paolo pick her up at the airport, standing next to this small, old, brown woman, her mother (!), driving them here along these crazy roads, so what if he went to spend a few nights with his son in Genoa so Angelina could have time alone with her mother? Angelina hated everything about this place, the beauty of the dumb village, the high ceilings of this awful apartment, the arrogance of the Italians. In her mind now she pictured her youth, the long stretches of acres of corn beside their home in Illinois. Her father was a yeller, true. And he’d had that stupid relationship with that stupid fat woman for thirteen years, true too. But that was just pathetic, in Angelina’s eyes—painful, of course, but pathetic. Why couldn’t her mother see what she had done by leaving? Why couldn’t she see it? There could be only one reason: that her mother was, behind her daffiness, a little bit dumb; she lacked imagination.

  Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo. This is what her father used to say to any of them when he found them crying, putting his face right up to theirs. He really was a mean snake of a man (but he was her father, and she loved him), in favor of guns and shooting anyone who came into your house; he’d been raised that way, and had he had sons instead of daughters they might have been like that too. Angelina hoped he never got himself to Italy, to this awful little village, to find this nothing of a man Paolo who had taken her mother’s affections away from them so very late in life. If her father was sick again, really and truly going to die this time, he’d somehow get himself to this village, find this nothing of a Paolo, and shoot him in public and then shoot himself.

  It sounded almost Italian, the craziness of it.

  “Why did you think Daddy would help me with the money to get here?” She asked her mother this as she sat on the bed and toweled her hair dry.

  “He’s your father. I s
tand by what I said.” Mary gave one nod.

  “Why would he help me come see his ex-wife who left him in the middle of brain cancer?”

  Inside her head, Mary felt the kind of electrical twang that meant she was suddenly very angry. She sat up straight, her back against the bed’s headboard. “I did not leave him when he had his brain cancer. That was the whole point. Good God, did you kids not know that? I stayed and took care of him, and when he got better I went on with my life.” She thought: I’m going to have another stroke, young lady, if you don’t stop this nonsense. But Angelina was not a young lady, she had two children almost ready to leave home, and she’d be sensitive because of whatever was happening to her— But Mary was very angry. She had never liked being angry; she didn’t know what to do with it. “What’s the story with Jack?” she asked. “You haven’t mentioned him once.”

  Angelina looked at the floor. After a moment she said, “We’ve had a hard time. We’re working on things. We never learned how to fight.” She glanced unpleasantly at her mother, then looked at the floor again. “You and Daddy never fought. Well, Daddy yelled and you let him. But I wouldn’t call that constructive fighting.”

  Mary waited. Her anger did not leave her; it had sharpened her wits. She felt coherent, strong. “Constructive fighting,” she said. “Your father and I did not fight constructively. I see, go on.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Angelina was still looking at the floor, absolutely moping. The child could have been twelve years old, sulking, yet Angelina had never been a sulker.

  “Angelina.” Mary felt her voice shake with anger. “You listen to me. I have not seen you in four years. The other kids have all come to see me, and you have not. Tammy even came here twice. Now, I know you’re angry with me. I don’t blame you.” Mary sat up so her feet were on the floor. “Wait. I do blame you.”