“I know. That’s why I was asking about her. Lucy! I forgot to tell you. Olive Kitteridge gave me your first memoir to read. Last week when I cleaned for her. She said as I was going out the door, she said, Wait, you know Lucy Barton, right? Well, take her book. So she gave it to me.”
Charlene saw Lucy’s face turn pink, and Lucy said, “Charlene, you don’t have to read that.”
“I want to. You know, Olive Kitteridge is the only person I clean for who is nice to me.”
“I know. You’ve said.” Lucy pulled her coat tighter, squeezing herself with her arms.
“So there’s a new couple now I clean for. From Connecticut. She’s such a bitch. She doesn’t even see me, Lucy. I mean, I’m just the cleaning lady, what does she care. Except she keeps telling me I’m doing the bathroom wrong. She wants me to clean the toilet by hand and not with the toilet brush.” Charlene pulled her hat down closer onto her head. It was a red knit hat and not as warm as she always expected it to be. “No Christmas tip from her, either. They’re just awful people. Olive agrees with me. One of the rules of working there is to never discuss other clientele with people who live there, but Olive lets me rest, and sometimes we just sit there and talk. She hates those people too.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lucy said, looking at Charlene.
“Yeah. Well. As long as I don’t talk politics with Olive, we’re good.”
“You and I don’t talk politics either,” Lucy reminded her, and Charlene laughed and said, “I know that. That’s fine.”
“I used to clean house when I was in college. For a chemistry professor, I remember. She was nice. I guess.” Lucy was shivering as she said this. “She had an au pair, and in the mornings the au pair, she was from England, would say, Would you like a coffee? And so I would sit with her in the kitchen and she scared me, even though I think she was perfectly nice, I just didn’t know what to say to her.”
“What’s an au pair?” Charlene asked.
“Oh, it’s a person to just watch the kids.”
“This professor had you to clean and another person to watch the kids?” Charlene squinted at Lucy as she asked this.
“Yeah. I remember the au pair would say to me, Do you want milk and sugar?, but I was too shy, so I would just say no and sit there and drink black coffee.” Lucy shook her head. “I must have been very strange.” Lucy gazed at the river. “One day the woman asked me to clean the top shelf of her husband’s closet, and there was all this pornography. Like, weird Victorian stuff. All these old black-and-white drawings.”
“What did you do?” Charlene asked.
Lucy said, “I dusted it off and straightened them up, and left them right there.”
Charlene liked being with Lucy more than she thought Lucy knew. Almost as much as she liked being with Olive Kitteridge. But Lucy was shivering now, Charlene could see this, and so she stood up and said, “Well, let’s get going.”
—
Later that night, after watching the news on her favorite television channel, the only news show she ever watched, Charlene got into bed and started to read Lucy’s memoir, but within a few pages she put it down. It took place in New York City and mentioned Lucy’s kids when they were very young, and it made Charlene sad about her own childless state. She did not want to read about that. And she did not care about New York City. She put the book by the side of her bed, where it stayed unread.
*
When Bob saw Lucy for their walk the week after Christmas he asked her about the evening at his house with Margaret, if she had been all right. And Lucy took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know, Bob. Sometimes these days, I just—out of the blue—get so despondent.”
“It’s almost like Chrissy’s postpartum depression has become yours,” he said, walking along beside her. And she stopped and looked at him. “You’re so smart, Bob. That’s exactly what it is. That new baby—oh, I mean thank God she had him—but sometimes I am just stabbed with this sudden grief. And it is exactly like that, like I took on her postpartum stuff.” As they continued to walk she said quietly, “You know, Chrissy and Michael and Becka didn’t even ask us there for Christmas, and that’s fine, but somehow I thought it was going to be different, we asked them here, of course, but they have things they’re doing, and honestly, Bob, that’s fine, it really is, I just thought I would always have Christmas with them. Chrissy seems different with me, both girls do. Like I’ve become inconsequential to their lives. Oh, never mind. And Bridget—”—Bridget was the daughter that William had had with his third wife—“—I thought maybe she’d come up here for Christmas, and she didn’t. But she’s a teenager now and why would she want to hang out with old people?” Lucy let out a big sigh. “It’s just funny about life.”
“You mean how it doesn’t work the way you think it will?” Bob asked, and Lucy said, “Exactly.” Then Lucy said, “You know, when Chrissy was born, I got depressed. It felt to me that William and I had broken up, that’s exactly what form it took for me, as though we were no longer a couple.”
They kept on walking.
Bob said, glancing over at Lucy with a slight smile, “Don’t think about it”—their private joke—and Lucy said, “You’re right.” And then she said, “Oh Bob! I finally transplanted Little Annie and now I’m really worried about her.”
He listened while she described how she had put Little Annie in a bigger pot, but the soil had been from last year and it was very dry, and so she had googled it and found out you should never use old dried-out soil, and so she had pulled Little Annie out of her new pot and put in new, rich soil, but now Little Annie was in trouble, she was not soaking up the water, and Lucy was really worried about her. “I shouldn’t have transplanted her this time of year,” she said. And then she said, “Sorry to go on about her. I just love those plants so much.”
And Bob said, “Go on about anything you want to.”
“Nah, I’m done.” She gave him a smile.
They sat down on the granite bench while he had his cigarette. The day was a sunny one, and across the river the bare trees could be seen reflecting in the blue water, so it looked like they were twice as tall as they were. Lucy said, “Look at that,” pointing to the strip of trees. And Bob said, “I know, I was just thinking that. They’re something.” He smoked his cigarette, and when he was done with it he put the butt back into the pack, which is what he always did.
“Thanks, Lucy,” he said, and she said, “Of course.”
—
On their way back to the car Lucy said, “I think this country could be headed toward a civil war,” and Bob said, “Me too.” They had said this to each other before. And now Bob said, “It’s not just this country, though. The whole world seems to be going crazy. Russia invading Ukraine.”
“I know, I know, I know.” Lucy swept her hand through the air. “I saw Charlene the other day.”
“How is she?” Bob asked.
Lucy said, “Very lonely, I think. She spent Christmas alone, except the couple upstairs from her came down for a while. She hates the people she cleans for at the Maple Tree Apartments. She says they don’t see her, and I know she’s right.”
Bob said, “Oh, I suspect she is right.”
“Oh! So, I called my sister again, you know I call Vicky every week—”—Bob nodded—“—and she said she had to get going to help her son Donny pack for his trip, and I said, Where is he going? And she said he was going with some other fellows to a cabin in Belmont, Illinois, which is way out in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn’t help it, it just popped out of my mouth, Bob, I never should have said this, but I said, Vicky, is this some kind of militia thing? And God, she got mad. She said, Lucy, you make me very, very tired. And then we hung up.” Lucy turned to Bob and added, “I already know he has guns, she told me that before.”
“Man, Lucy. Well— Who knows? But Jesus. A lot of people have guns, though.”
“I know! I know.”
They walked along for a few minutes and then Lucy said, “I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot for some reason, I don’t know why. But I remembered this: One day when I was about eight years old, I asked her, Why does Row, row, row your boat end with the phrase Life is but a dream, what does that mean?, I asked her. And it was funny because she said, quietly, It means life isn’t real. And I said, how can it not be real? And what I remember is that she stopped doing the dishes and stared out the tiny window above the sink, and she said—again, quietly— It means that it isn’t real. And I always remembered that. It was as though she believed that, believed that life wasn’t real. And why wouldn’t she? Her life was so hard.” After another moment Lucy said, “I love to talk. And I think my mother loved to talk. And I just didn’t know it, Bob, I was too young, I didn’t really get it.”
“No one gets anything when they’re young,” Bob said.
