Tell Me Everything

This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.

[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.”

“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.

[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.

It came to Bob then that Larry had been born to the wrong father. He was a son that Helen would love—and she had—but he was not a son that Jim should have had. The girls were different, they were softer and warm, both with their father and with Bob. But Larry had always been different, and Bob thought: He should not have had Jim as a father.

Well.

There you are. A lot of people feel this way about their parents, and probably, thought Bob, a lot of parents feel this way about their kids. He thought then, briefly, of Mrs. Hasselbeck and how—to his knowledge—not one of her five sons ever came to visit her, they had all moved to the West Coast, and what was that about?

“I said to Amy, ‘Listen to me, Amy. I know you want me near you. But Maine is my home. It has been my home since you were a baby, it has been my home with my husband. And this is now—even here in this nursing home—my home. I have my friend Olive, who I will never be able to replace, and, Amy, I am not going. You will have to declare me incompetent—and maybe you can, but I will fight you on that—and I am telling you, I can’t go, and I am not going.’”

Olive said nothing.

“Did you hear me?” Isabelle said.

“Tell me again,” Olive said.

And Isabelle said, “Olive, I am exhausted, and you are telling me to tell you everything again? No, I’m not going to. But they just left. They left, Olive!”

And Olive said, “I will be right there.”

“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.

“Do you remember what the weather was when our father died? The weather?”

“Yeah, it was pouring. Absolutely pouring rain.” Then Jim added, “And it was windy. All the foliage was coming off the trees because of the wind and rain. Bright orange leaves falling to the ground, wet, wet, wet.” Bob waited a moment and then he said quietly, “But, Jimmy, our father died in February.”

[…] Bob left Katherine’s office believing that no one would ever know who was responsible for his father’s death.

“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.

“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.”