The story was this: Janice Tucker’s mother had died when Janice was three years old. Janice could not remember her mother except, vaguely, being picked up out of a crib one time. Her father, who was a plumber, married a woman soon after Janice’s mother died, and they had three more babies, and Janice’s stepmother was never unkind to her particularly, but Janice understood that this woman did not love her. She loved her own kids. For example, one day when Janice was about thirteen years old, Janice didn’t like what they were having for supper and said, “I’d rather have dog food,” and so her stepmother made her eat dog food for her supper that night. It didn’t bother Janice; she sat there and ate it—it didn’t taste as bad as you might think, she told Olive—and she felt—though she knew she might be making this up—a kind of quiet pride coming from her father as she sat there eating the dog food.
“Now. When Janice was a senior in high school, she won a full scholarship to a very fancy college in upstate New York,” Olive said. “Janice went off to this college very naïve, and her sophomore year there was a philosophy professor who took a liking to her, his name was Jacques Remerin. Well, you know what happened, one thing led to another, and that poor child had no idea what was happening, but of course Janice fell in love with him, and then—poof!—he was done with her. She walked into his office one afternoon and saw that he was done with her, and she was right. Eight weeks the affair had lasted. Except she wouldn’t even call it an affair.
“So. She was devastated. So young and stupid, as she said herself. And of course he was ten years older and seemed very worldly. But the point is this: She had been doing very well academically, and that semester she flunked out. She could not concentrate, so she flunked out of college—lost her scholarship, of course—and she said she felt that she could not come home. The college had told her she could try again the next year, but she knew she would never go back. She told me there were very few women professors there at that time, but one woman, a Latin professor who Janice had had, really looked at her, I mean, looked at her—according to Janice—when Janice went to return all her library books; Janice did not care for the look that the woman gave her. Janice told me that she could not face her father and try and tell him what had happened, and so she stayed in that little town where the college was—got a small apartment and a job at the bookstore—and took up with some man called Oliver, who had also gone to that college and had also dropped out.
“Oliver was a genius, it turned out, and he was very peculiar, and one day as they were walking back to his apartment, he just started slamming his head against a tree. It bled—his head, I mean—and he said she was making him crazy.”
“Why?” Lucy asked, sitting forward on the couch.
“Because—it turned out he was crazy. He had a full-blown nervous breakdown; his parents had to come and get him, and when they took him home to the Midwest he had to go to a hospital, and years later Janice figured out that he may have been schizophrenic. Apparently some of these things don’t become full-blown until the early twenties when the brain takes its final shape—” Olive swirled a finger about her ear.
So poor Janice came home, and she ended up marrying the nicest man she had gone to high school with; he had no higher education, but he was very kind to her. Olive said, “And he was a nice man. Everyone in town thought so. He was in the antique business.”
Olive looked out the window and then back at Lucy. “But this is what Janice told me that day after Nutty Woman left. Janice said to me, ‘Olive, I think my husband likes men.’ And I said, What do you mean, he likes men? And she said, ‘You know: that he likes men.’ ”
Lucy said, after a moment, “What did you say to her?”
“I said, Hell, he likes you, everyone knows that. And as long as he is with you in that certain way, who cares if he’s thinking about…horses?”
“Huh.” Lucy made a small gesture with her face that indicated she did not think this was a bad answer. After a moment Lucy said, “Okay, but get back to Nutty Woman. How does she fit into this story?”
“Right.” Olive nodded. “It turns out that when Nutty Woman showed up, Janice asked her where she came from, and she said she came from upstate New York and ran the development office at that same school Janice had gone to. And Nutty Woman had apparently gone there as a student as well. And Nutty Woman told Janice she was in Maine to go see her son at Parents Visiting Day at a nearby college.
“And when Janice looked at the credit card, it said ‘Emily Remerin.’ So slowly Janice understood that this woman had probably married that same professor who had gone after Janice, and Janice’s theory was that he had left her for a younger woman, and that he and his new girlfriend would probably be at the son’s thing that day and it was somehow making Nutty Woman crazy.”
Lucy took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “She was probably right. I mean that Nutty Woman’s ex-husband was probably going to be there with his new girlfriend.”
Olive said, “Who knows. But I suspect she was right.”
“So what happened to Janice?” Lucy asked.
Olive nodded and swung her foot. “Janice told me that day that every year she would take a trip to Miami alone. She said her husband hated the place, and yet Janice would go there every year alone. For ten days, she said. He encouraged her to do this, said she deserved the break. And Janice said she would watch the families in the pool, and she would watch the really big ships out on the horizon, and they would make her think of her father, since he had been in the Navy before he had her. He had, apparently, loved being in the Navy, and so Janice would watch those ships and think of her father. And watch all the families with their kids. She said she never read magazines, that she had too many magazines in her hair-cutting place, and so she would just sit and watch. And she finally realized that these trips made her lonely.”
“Jesus, of course they did!” Lucy said, sitting forward. “We just got back from Florida yesterday. I would hate to be there alone.”
Olive did not want to ask about Lucy’s trip, she did not care. So she continued, “And then Janice said that she finally realized her husband liked that time alone because of this guy—kid, almost—that worked with him, called Grunt. That it gave him time to be with Grunt alone.”
“Grunt?”
Olive shrugged. “Some nickname he had, I don’t think anyone ever heard a sound come out of him. But the kid—according to Janice, who did not know the specifics—had been terribly abused, and I will tell you, he seemed that way to me. Poor little dark-haired guy—maybe twenty-five years old—”
“Wait, so you knew him?” Lucy asked.
“Oh, I don’t think anybody knew him—” Olive paused and then said, “But I will tell you this, when I moved out of my second husband’s home I called Janice’s husband because there were some antiques I thought he’d like, and he came over with Grunt, and he was a lovely guy—Janice’s husband, that is—and as he and Grunt took a sofa down the staircase I saw Janice’s husband stop and give Grunt a very sweet hug. And poor Grunt’s face stayed just the same. I’m just saying, that’s all.
“Anyway.” For a moment Olive seemed to have lost her steam in telling this, and she and Lucy stayed quiet. Then Olive sat up straighter in her chair and said, “Anyway, Janice’s husband died suddenly. Heart thing. And Janice took in Grunt. He lived with her like a son.”
“He did?” Lucy asked.
“Yuh. And then she gave up her hair-cutting thing and a few years later she died, but it turned out she had left the house to Grunt, and he lives there now, and he works at Walmart. I saw him a few years ago working there, and I stopped and asked him to help me find something, can’t remember what, but that place is such a barn you could walk forever, and he walked me right over to what I needed, such a sweet guy—who still looked abused, I must say—and I thanked him, and he just nodded. And he still lives there in Janice’s house, keeps it up.”
“God,” Lucy said, slowly. “My God, the lives people live.”
“Yuh. So that’s the story of Janice Tucker.”
Lucy was silent for quite a while. And then she said, “She was a sin-eater.”
“What did you say?” Olive spoke this loudly.
“I said, she was a sin-eater.”
“What in hell is a sin-eater?”
Lucy shook her head slowly. “Some people on this earth eat other people’s sins, and that’s what Janice did her entire life, starting with her father and her stepmother and then with that professor creep—who, had he behaved that way now, would be outed and fired—and then crazy Oliver that she got involved with after dropping out. She just kept eating people’s sins.”
They did not speak for a while. This was not interesting to Olive, and after a moment or so she sensed that Lucy realized this, because Lucy said, “That was a great story, Olive. Jesus, what a story.”
“I thought you might appreciate it,” Olive said. She was tired now.
They sat together in a companionable silence for a while before Lucy finally got up to leave. “Please tell me a story anytime you want to,” Lucy said. And Olive said, “I will.”
*
But Bob!
Poor, poor Bob. The man’s heart was breaking.
Ever since he had heard from Pam that his brother’s wife was dying and that his brother did not want him to know (!), Bob’s heart had been absolutely breaking. He could not understand, and he kept walking around murmuring, Why, why?
