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.”

As a young boy [Bob] had said to his mother one day, with innocence, “I don't really like Christmas,” and his mother had looked at him with abrupt anger, and then she’d started to cry. The child-Bob was puzzled by this, and worried, and he had walked away but he never forgot it […] That Bob had spoken those words to her remained a thumbprint pressed deeply into his soul of real sorrow and regret.

He had told this story to Margaret when they first met, he had also told his first wife, Pam Carlson, and they were both kind about it, but it was one of Bob’s adult understandings: people did not care, except for maybe one minute. It was not their fault, most just could not really care past their own experiences.

“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.

But in terms of holding each other: No, they did not do that much anymore. And this is one reason that Bob was grateful to Katherine Caskey, to feel her arms around him. He was just appreciative of those moments.

It may be that not enough is said about this sort of thing, older people and how much they might appreciate the touch of another human being. Mrs. Hasselbeck, for example: How did she live without any human touch to her skin? Charlene Bibber? Somehow they existed without it, many people do. Yet one has to wonder about the toll it takes, the lack of being touched or held. So many people are not.

Bob was thinking about this as he drove back to Crosby.

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.

“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.

“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.”