“Maine? Beal is a Maine name. Where in Maine?” Olive asked.
Lucy looked slightly bewildered. “Oh, I don’t really know.”
Olive was irritated by that, as though all of Maine was just one big place to Lucy, and what part of it you came from didn’t matter. Well, Lucy wouldn’t know the different parts, but it still irritated Olive. “Go on,” Olive said.
“But when she got that scholarship, her mother moved out to Illinois and rented a little apartment a few towns away from our school; the town was sad, not unlike Amgash, where I had grown up. But Addie would go see her mother every couple of weeks, and sometimes I went with her.”
“How would you two get there, did the mother have a car?”
Lucy looked appreciatively at Olive. “No, we’d take a bus. A Greyhound bus. Up and back. And because I didn’t like to go home myself at all, I remember one time I went and spent New Year’s Eve with them. It was strange, because of course my parents never drank and never celebrated New Year’s Eve—”
“Stupid holiday,” Olive interjected, and Lucy said, Yeah, it was.
And then Lucy went on. “So Lindsay and Addie drank beer out of champagne glasses, oh they had a wonderful time. It was a really little apartment, tiny, but they seemed to love it.” Lucy gazed off to the side, out the window, but she did not seem to be looking out the window, she seemed to be far away. “It was just interesting to me, I think now, because they had very little, but they had each other, and that sort of seemed enough for them.” She looked back at Olive. “The apartment was dark. And Lindsay slept on the couch and Addie had a little bedroom.”
“Was Lindsay pretty like Addie?” Olive crossed her ankles and sank back in her chair.
“Lindsay was attractive, I’d say. Perfectly attractive, big brown eyes. But not pretty the way Addie was.” Lucy sort of shrugged and then said, “But here’s the thing. So one time I was there, one of the first times, maybe it was the first time, and Addie went into her tiny bedroom and brought back a stack—and I mean a really huge stack—of scrapbooks. And inside these scrapbooks were newspaper articles about Addie since she was barely two years old. She had been Miss Maple Tree, Miss June Bug, Miss Moxie, oh she’d been everything you could be, and as the photos progressed there she was with her baton and little boots, she’d been a mascot at some college in Maine—maybe it was the university, because they had a band, I don’t know—but this whole huge stack of scrapbooks contained everything she’d ever done, and Lindsay watched with such happiness as I looked at each clipping, and Addie herself was so excited to show me.”
Lucy stopped. Then she said, “So there was that.”
“And what else?” asked Olive. She thought this was a far better story than the one about Lucy meeting that man on the train.
“Oh, one time Addie read to me a quiz from a women’s magazine. She and her mother had these magazines, I’d never really seen them, I mean my mother had never had them, but some women’s magazine had a quiz, and Addie said, all excited, sitting with her legs up on the couch, ‘Lucy, I want you to take this quiz.’ ”
Lucy held up her hand. “Hold on. I left out a detail.”
“Tell me the detail.” Olive tugged her cotton vest together.
“It must have been near my birthday or something, because Addie had given me a present not long before this quiz. I mean at the apartment the same day. And the present was a knit thing, I can’t even remember, but she had knit a circle or something, with a design to it, and it sort of confused me, but she was very happy as she watched me unwrap it, so I made a big deal out of it and said, Oh, I love this, I just love this. That sort of thing.”
“Ay-yuh. Go on,” Olive said.
“So then she made me take this quiz. She read me the questions and I would answer them. I can’t even remember the point of the quiz. I only remember this: that one of the questions was: A friend gives you a gift and you don’t care for it. You (a) say thank you, but this is not really me, or you (b) say oh this is nice, but I’m going to give it to my sister, or you (c) say I love this so much, oh thank you.
“Which of course is what I had just done. So I said: c. And Addie just continued on, I don’t think she even knew that I had just done that, and then she added up my score, and I can’t remember the rest of it, except Addie was so happy and excited.”
Lucy stopped talking, and after a moment Olive said, “That’s it?”
Lucy looked at her quickly. “No. Oh no, there’s more.”
“Well, let’s hear it.”
“Okay.” Lucy plucked at the center of her dress, looking down at it as she did. “You sure this dress works?”
Olive said, “I already told you that. It reminds me of a seersucker suit Henry had years ago.”
Lucy said, “So Addie had a father.”
“You didn’t mention a father in the picture.”
“Well, he wasn’t in the picture. Not by the time I knew her. But she had a father who was an alcoholic, and the mother—Lindsay—oh, she’d divorced him years ago, but back when Addie was little, she’d go and spend weekends at her father’s house. She never said much about it. But he still wrote her letters, even when I knew her. Because she read me a letter from him one time and it said, ‘I would kill myself except I lack the intestinal fortitude.’ ” Lucy bit the inside of her lip and then said, “That was the first time I’d heard that. The intestinal fortitude thing.”
Olive just watched her.
“Anyway.” Lucy raised a hand and dropped it back onto her lap. “Two more things. No, three more things.”
“All right,” said Olive. She found this interesting.
“So the first thing is that Addie, it became clear to me by the time I graduated, she was an alcoholic too. She’d get really drunk at parties, and very slowly I thought: She drinks a lot. Only later did I realize that she was probably already an alcoholic. And then there was this: She slept with everybody. One time I saw her come out of this guy’s room—”
Olive interrupted her. “Lucy, I don’t need to hear about this girl’s promiscuity. I don’t care to.”
Lucy looked surprised. “Okay, but she got syphilis once, she had these sores on her mouth and—”
Olive held up her hand. “I get the point. Now, you said there were three things, and so far that’s only two, what is the third thing?”
“Right.” Lucy nodded vehemently. “This. Near the college, down one of the side streets, was a woman who read fortunes, and Addie went to her, sophomore year, she goes to this woman, and she came to see me after, and her eyes were just shining with excitement. The woman had told Addie that she was going to die young. And somehow—in her youthful way—Addie found this romantic, I suppose. She really was excited about that, and she kept saying ‘Lucy, you should go to her!’ And I said Absolutely not.”
“So she died young?”
“She did.” Lucy nodded her head slowly and looked out the window. “I think when she was in college, she felt she was really someone. You know, people liked her, and as I said she starred in every show the theater department did, and she was just so excited—and drunk, I think—about her life. Full of life.”
Olive rearranged herself on her chair. “So when did she die?”
“About the age of thirty. After she left college, her life went nowhere. She took a job at the local mall selling clothes and she married the maintenance man there, but that ended within a few years, and then she lived with her mother. Still in Illinois in that tiny apartment.”
“What did she die of?”
