Tell Me Everything

[Lucy] shook her head and said, “Jesus Christ. All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them.” Then she looked at Olive and said, “Sorry for swearing.”

“Phooey, swear all you want.” Olive added, “Well, that’s the story. I always wanted to tell someone. But for whatever reasons I never did.”

Lucy said, contemplatively, “I wonder how many people in long marriages live with ghosts beside them.”

The real point here is—if we consider these things, and we should—that Lucy’s ancestors had been similar to Bob’s. They had come ashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then travelled to the Midwest, as—as her mother once told her—“the brave ones did.”

Margaret Estaver had been raised a Catholic before becoming the Unitarian minister that she now was, and William had been raised a Lutheran, as his father had come over from Germany after the war. We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.

After selling the house, [Charlene] moved into one of the big old windowed houses that had cheap apartments […] These old houses were very much in the town, tucked away a block or two over from the center of Crosby. And yet—oddly—it would be fair to say that the more affluent people of town, especially of course the newcomers, did not even see them. Partly this was location: you had to go down side streets you might not normally go down, but even if these well-off people happen to drive by these places, they still did not see them in a certain way.

Charlene understood this. Weariness moved through her all the time.

“But do you think she would do a Zoom for my book club? Oh my God, that would give me so much social stock if I got Lucy Barton to come to the book club!”

And then Bob realized that she was still who she was, Pam. He simply shook his head and said he would see her tomorrow before she left.

In his car driving back home, Bob kept shaking his head. Her book club! When they had just spent the entire afternoon talking about her—as she had said repeatedly—her insipid idiot friends. Oh Pam, Pam. Pam.

“Years ago, when I was small, I have a memory of reading a book, and it had those black-and-white drawings in it, so it was some kind of book of fables, I think. And all I remember is that there was a picture of a man, he was older, and every time you turned the page, he was a little more slumped. Because it was his job in the world to eat people’s sins, and I have—my whole life—remembered that. That’s what the story Olive told me yesterday was about, about a sin eater.” Lucy looked over at Bob thoughtfully. “And that’s what you are.”

[…] They sat quietly while Bob finished his cigarette, and then he stuck the butt back into its pack. Bob said, “Thank you, Lucy.”

“Of course,” she said.

“Man, this work I’m doing at the University of Maine—” and off [William] went on his parasites. In a certain way Bob could not believe it. And yet through his fog he understood this to be true, William liked his parasites and his work. His big white mustache moved as he spoke. Finally, William said, “So how are you?” And Bob said, “My sister-in-law is dying,” and then William’s face changed. […]

[Bob] thought now as he bought a jug of orange juice, that’s just how it is, that’s all. He thought: God, we are all so alone.

But—Lucy. She did not make him feel alone. He realized this as he walked to the register.

[Lucy] said, “Who is not lonely, Olive? Show me one person.”

Olive said, “Plenty of people. All the snot-wots who live here and gather every day in the lounge for their glass of wine with each other. They’re not lonely.”

“How do you know?” Lucy bit on her lower lip, and then she said, “How do you know what those people think about in the dark when they wake up in the middle of the night?”

Olive had no answer for her.

[…] And then to Olive’s amazement, Lucy said, smiling at her with a gentleness on her face, “And I feel that way about you. A connection. Love. So thank you.” She moved to the door.

Olive said, “Wait.” As Lucy turned, Olive said, “Well, phooey. I feel connected to you too. So there.” She stuck out her tongue.

Then [Lucy] said, “Bob, I think that we are all standing on shifting sand.” She did not look at him as she spoke. “I mean, we don't ever really know another person. And so we make them up according to when they came into our lives, and if you’re young, as many people are when they married, you have no idea who that person really is. And so you live with them for years, you have a house together, kids together […]

We’re all so complicated, and we match up for a moment—or maybe a lifetime—with somebody because we feel that we are connected to them. And we are. But we’re not in a certain way, because nobody can go into the crevices of another’s mind, even the person can’t go into the crevices of their own mind, and we live—all of us—as though we can.”

“Oh no, that would be great!” Matt said. “You are the only person in the world who cares where I am.” But he said it cheerfully. Then he said, “Can I see where you are too?”

“Sure,” Bob said. So he set that up for Matt as well. “Now you’re the only person who can track me,” Bob said. “I don’t even let my wife track me.”

“Why not?” Matt asked, and Bob said it was because he sometimes went off to have a cigarette.

She doesn’t know you smoke?” Matt asked. “Even I know you smoke.”

“How?” Bob asked, and Matt said, “Because I can smell it.”

“Oy,” said Bob, and Matt said, “I like how you say oy.”

Bob could not wait to tell Lucy all about it.

He took a drag of his cigarette and said, “Lucy, I’m so sorry about seeing you in the store and—” But she was already shaking her head, and she touched his arm lightly and said, “Bob, please don’t give it another thought, I was just being a jerk.”

They sat there looking at the river. There was enough of a wind to make small white caps appear in the middle of it, and also the wind blew the smoke over Bob as he sat. But he did not get up, as he would have in the past.

Lucy was restored to him.

On the shifting sand they stood on.

“Thanks, Lucy,” he said, as he put the cigarette butt back into the pack.

“Of course,” she said.

“So what is the point of this story? Pauline should have married the already married fisherman?”

Olive laughed. She really laughed at that. “Lucy Barton, the stories you told me—as far as I could tell—had very little point to them. Okay, okay maybe they had subtle points to them. I don’t know what the point is to this story!”

“People,” Lucy said quietly, leaning back. “People and the lives they lead. That's the point.”

“Exactly.” Olive nodded.

“She was his linchpin. He used that word once, as she was dying. Said Sally was his linchpin.”

“You know,” Lucy said slowly, raising her hand and sort of drawing a small circle with her finger, “This is what I wonder. I wonder how many people out there are able to be strong—or strong enough—because of the person they’re married to.”

“Ay-yuh, I’ve been wondering that too.” Olive crossed her legs and swung a foot again. “I’ve been thinking about Henry. One could say he was my linchpin, because he was. And yet—” Olive shook her head slowly. “And yet I was able to get remarried and live a fairly okay life with my second husband, Jack. He was never Henry, but my life went on.”

“Because you’re you,” Lucy said.

[Carl] asked her why she worked in the food pantry, and she told him about how when she was a kid there was sometimes not enough food in the house. Carl turned on his back and said he knew some people who didn’t really need the food and who had stolen from the food pantry in his town, people who just drove up and took it, and when he got done with the story, Charlene felt an uncertainty. “But it’s up to you if you want to keep working there,” he said, looking over at her.

As time went by, Charlene stopped volunteering at the food pantry in Crosby, and she gradually stopped taking Lucy’s phone calls.

And in this way the situation in the country divided itself further.

“So Bob, here’s the thing. Olive and I have been telling each other stories of unrecorded lives, but what do they mean? At least Diana Beach got to be a good guidance counselor. And yet still—I don’t know. I keep thinking these days about all these people, and people we don't even know, and their lives are unrecorded. But what does anyone’s life mean?” She added, “Please don’t laugh.”

The smoke [Bob] inhaled got stuck and he coughed—hard. He turned toward her as he coughed and coughed. When he was done coughing, he asked, “Did you just ask me what anyone’s life means?”

“What about the Addie story? What was that about?” Bob asked Olive, looking over at her.

“That was about the same thing that every story Lucy and I have shared is about. People suffer. They live, they have hope, they even have love, and they still suffer. Everyone does. Those who think they’ve not suffered are lying to themselves.”

Olive was silent for a long moment. Then she said, meditatively, “It's quite a world we live in, isn’t it. For years I thought: I will miss all this when I die. But the way the world is these days, I sometimes think I’ll be damned glad to be dead.” She sat quietly looking ahead through the windshield. “I’ll still miss it, though,” she said.

Bob was watching her. He said, “I like you, Olive.”

“Phooey. Now help me get out of this car,” Olive replied.

Standing up, he happened to glance at the window, and he saw a man and a woman walking on the sidewalk together. […] And the woman was laughing, and once or twice she bumped her hip against the man she was with, and then he realized that the man was Matt Beach.

Bob stood at the window and watched them; it was extraordinary. Their faces were happy as they walked side by side, and then Matt reached and held the woman’s hand. Bob watched until they were out of view.

Leaning against his desk, Bob thought then of Little Annie, the plant that Lucy had. How Lucy was afraid that the plant had died, but it had not. Every leaf had fallen off, but then it broke through, a tiny little new green leaf at the top of it.

What a thing this life force was, Bob thought.

“It’s odd, but he makes me feel safe. And Bob is with Margaret, which is right too. So it’s not the saddest story ever told. Love is love, Olive.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'll tell you what I mean. Years ago I read an article […] and in it the writer said that when she was in college and had her first boyfriend and was desperately in love with him, her great aunt, recently widowed, came to stay at her parents’ house, and the writer remembered standing in the bedroom with this tiny old woman who was frightened and had terrible breath and realizing: I love her the same way that I love my boyfriend! […] And I’ve always remembered that. Because I understood it. Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”