Read Online My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout - Free Book Online

The guard said he was upstairs in a special exhibit and I felt insulted by the whole thing, that others wanted to see him that much!
    Pity us.
    I thought those words later, as I thought of my response when the guard told me the statue was upstairs. I thought, Pity us. We don’t mean to be so small. Pity us—it goes through my head a lot—Pity us all.

“W ho
are
these people?” my mother asked.
    I was lying on my back facing the window; it was evening, and the lights of the city were starting to come on. I asked my mother what she meant. She answered, “These foolish people in this foolish magazine, I don’t know one name of any of them. They all seem to like to have their picture taken getting coffee or shopping, or—” I stopped listening. It was the sound of my mother’s voice I most wanted; what she said didn’t matter. And so I listened to the sound of her voice; until these past three days it had been a long time since I had heard it, and it was different. Perhaps my memory was different, for the sound of her voice used to grate my nerves. This sound was the opposite of that—always the sense of compression, the urgency.
    “Look at this,” my mother said. “Wizzle, look at this. My goodness,” she said.
    And so I sat up.
    She handed me the gossip magazine. “Did you see this?”
    I took it from her. “No,” I said. “I mean, I saw it, but I didn’t care.”
    “No, but my goodness,
I
care. Her father was a friend of your father’s from a long, long time ago. Elgin Appleby. It says it right here, look at this. ‘Her parents, Nora and Elgin Appleby.’ Oh, he was a funny man. He could make the Devil laugh.”
    “Well, the Devil laughs easily,” I said, and my mother looked at me. “How did Daddy know him?” It was the only time during her stay with me in the hospital that I remember being angry with her, and this was because she casually spoke of my father that way, after not speaking of him at all, except to mention his truck.
    She said, “When they were young. Who knows, but Elgin moved to Maine and worked on a farm there, I don’t know why he moved. But look at her, this child, Annie Appleby. Look at her, Wizzle.” My mother pointed at the magazine she had handed me. “I think she looks— I don’t know.” My mother sat back. “What does she look like?”
    “Nice?” I didn’t think she looked nice; she looked something, but I would not have said “nice.”
    “No, not nice,” said my mother. “Something. She looks something.”
    I stared at the picture again. She was next to her new boyfriend, an actor from a television series my husband watched some nights. “She looks like she’s seen stuff,” I finally said.
    “That’s it,” my mother nodded. “You’re right, Wizzle. That’s what I thought too.”
    The article was a long one, and it was more about Annie Appleby than the fellow she was with. It said that she’d grown up on a potato farm in the St. John Valley in Aroostook County in Maine, that she had not finished high school, that she had left to join a theater company, and that she missed her home. “Of course I do,” Annie Appleby was quoted as saying, “I miss the beauty every day.” When asked if she wanted to go into movies instead of staying on the stage, she answered, “Not a bit. I love the audience being right there, although I don’t think about them when I’m onstage, I just know what they need, which is for me to be good at my job of acting for them.”
    I put the magazine down. “She’s pretty,” I said.
    “I didn’t think she was pretty,” my mother said. It seemed a while before she added, “I think she’s more than pretty. She’s beautiful. I wonder what it’s like for her to be famous.” My mother seemed to be pondering this.
    Maybe it was because for the first time since she had been here she had mentioned my father, and not just his truck, or maybe it was because she had called someone else’s daughter beautiful, but I said with