Elizabeth Strout - My Name Is Lucy Barton

Then I felt her squeeze my foot through the sheet.

“Mommy,” I said, bolting upright. “Mommy, please don’t go!”

“I’m not going anywhere, Wizzle,” she said. “I’m right here. You’re going to be all right. You’ll have a lot of stuff to face in your life, but people do. I’ve seen some of it in your case, I mean I’ve had some visions, but with you—”

I squeezed my eyes shut— Don’t you fucking cry you little idiot— and I squeezed my leg so hard I almost could not believe how much it hurt. Then it was over. I turned onto my side. “With me what?” I said. I could say it calmly now.

“With you, I’m never sure how accurate these things are. They used to be accurate with you.”

“Like when you knew I had Chrissie,” I said.

“Yes. But I didn’t—”

“Know her name.” We spoke this together, and in the dark it felt to me that we smiled together too. My mother said, “Sleep, Wizzle, you need your sleep. And if you can’t sleep, just rest.”

In the morning the doctor came and swooshed the curtain about me, and when he saw the red bruise on my thigh he didn’t touch it, but he stared at it, then he looked at me. He raised his eyebrows, and to my horror, tears slipped from the sides of my eyes. He nodded kindly, though it took him just a moment. He put his hand on my forehead, as though checking for a fever, and he left it there while the tears kept slipping from my eyes. He moved his thumb once, as though to brush away a tear. My God, he was kind. He was a kind, kind man. I gave a tiny smile to say thank you, a tiny grimace-smile to say that I was sorry.

He nodded and said, “You’ll see those kids soon. We’ll get you home with your husband. You’re not going to die on my watch, I promise you.” And then he made a fist and kissed it, and held it out toward me.

Sarah Payne was teaching a weeklong class in Arizona, and I was surprised when William offered to pay for me to go. This was a few months after I had seen her at the New York Public Library. I was not sure I wanted to be away from the children for that long, but William encouraged me. The class was called a “workshop,” and I don’t know why, but I have never liked that word: “workshop.” I went because it was taught by Sarah Payne. When I saw her in the classroom I gave a bright smile, thinking she would remember me from our meeting in the clothing store. But she only nodded back, and it took me some moments to realize she didn’t recognize me. Perhaps it is true that we wish for some tiny acknowledgment from someone famous, that they see us.

Our class met in an old building on the top of a hill, and it was warm and the windows were open, and I watched as Sarah Payne became exhausted almost immediately. I saw it in her face. By the end of one hour her face looked like it had fallen the way white clay loses its shape when it’s not cold enough, that is the image, that her face had dropped into a strange shape from fatigue, and at the end of three hours it seemed even more so, as though her white clay face was almost trembling. It took everything out of her to teach that class, is what I am saying. Her face was just ravaged with fatigue. Every day she would start with a little of the sparkle, and within minutes the fatigue set in. I don’t think I have seen before or since a face that showed its exhaustion so clearly.

There was a man in the class who had recently lost his wife to cancer, and Sarah was nice to him, I saw this. We all, I felt, saw this. We saw that this man fell in love with a student in the class who was a friend of Sarah’s. It was fine. The friend did not fall back in love with him, but she treated him decently, there was something decent in the way this woman and Sarah treated this man who was in pain from the death of his wife. There was also a woman who taught English. There was a Canadian man who had pink cheeks and a very pleasant way about him; the class teased him about being so Canadian, and he took it well. There was another woman who was a psychoanalyst from California.

And I want to report here what happened one day, which is that through the open window a cat suddenly jumped into the room, right onto the large table. The cat was huge, and long; in my memory he may as well have been a small tiger. I jumped up with terrible fear, and Sarah Payne jumped up as well; terribly she jumped, she had been that frightened. And then the cat ran out through the door of the classroom. The psychoanalyst woman from California, who usually said very little, said that day to Sarah Payne, in a voice that was — to my ears — almost snide, “How long have you suffered from post-traumatic stress?”

And what I remember is the look on Sarah’s face. She hated this woman for saying that. She hated her. There was a silence long enough that people saw this on Sarah’s face, this is how I think of it anyway. Then the man who had lost his wife said, “Well, hey, that was a really big cat.”

After that, Sarah talked a lot to the class about judging people, and about coming to the page without judgment.

We were promised a private conference in this workshop situation, and I am sure Sarah must have been very tired with the private conferences. People tend to go to these workshops because they want to be discovered and get published. For the workshop I had brought parts of the novel I was writing, but when I had my conference with Sarah I took instead sketches of scenes of my mother coming to visit me in the hospital, things I had started to write after I had seen Sarah at the library; I had slipped a copy of the pages to her the day before, in her mailbox. I remember mostly that she spoke to me as though I had known her a long time, even though she never mentioned our having met at the clothing store. “I’m sorry I’m so tired,” she said. “Jesus, I’m almost dizzy.” She leaned forward, touching my knee lightly before she sat back. “Honestly,” she said softly, “with that last person I thought I was going to be sick. Like really throw-up sick, I’m just not cut out for this.” Then she said, “Listen to me, and listen to me carefully. What you are writing, what you want to write,” and she leaned forward again and tapped with her finger the piece I had given her, “this is very good and it will be published. Now listen. People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. Such a stupid word, ‘abuse,’ such a conventional and stupid word, but people will say there’s poverty without abuse, and you will never say anything. Never ever defend your work. This is a story about love, you know that. This is a story of a man who has been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter’s hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone’s marriage going bad, she doesn’t even know it, doesn’t even know that’s what she’s doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.” She sat back then, and wrote down titles of books I should read, most of them classics, and when she stood and I stood to leave, she suddenly said, “Wait,” and then she hugged me, and made a kissing sound to her fingers, which she held by her lips, and it made me think of the kind doctor.

I said, “I was sorry that woman in class asked about PTSD. I jumped too.”

Sarah said, “I know you did, I saw that. And anyone who uses their training to put someone down that way — well, that person is just a big old piece of crap.” She winked at me, her face exhausted, and turned to go.