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

fingers, with a certain precision, touched the bottom of his microphone. She said that she did not answer them. She said, and her face was not as sparkling as it had been when I came across her in the clothing store, “It’s not my job to make readers know what’s a narrative voice and not the private view of the author,” and that alone made me glad I had come. The librarian seemed unable to understand. “What do you mean?” he kept saying, and she only repeated what she had said before. He said, “What
is
your job as a writer of fiction?” And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.
    A woman in the audience raised her hand and said, “But
do
you think that about the former president?”
    Sarah Payne waited for a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ll tell you this. If that woman I wrote about in a fictional way calls the man senile and old and says he has a wife who rules with her astrology charts, then I would say”—and she nodded her head tightly, and waited—“I, meaning me, Sarah Payne, citizen of this country, I would say, the woman I
made
up
lets him off quite easily.”
    New York audiences can be tough, but they understood what she meant, and heads nodded and people whispered things to one another. I looked behind me at the man in the back row, and he appeared to be without emotion. At the end of the night I heard him say to a woman who’d come to speak to him, “She’s always taken a stage well.” He did not say it nicely, is how I felt. And I took the subway home alone; it was not a night I loved the city I have lived in for so long. But I could not have said exactly why. Almost, I could have said why. But not exactly why.
    And so I began to record this story on that night. Parts of it.
    I began to try.

T he night in the hospital when I felt I had been unkind to my mother by saying that I did not think she ever cared what it was like to be famous, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was agitated; I wanted to cry. When my own children cried I fell to pieces, I would kiss them and see what was wrong. Maybe I did it too much. And when I had had an argument with William, I sometimes cried, and I learned early that he was not a man who hated to hear a woman cry, as many men are, but that it would break whatever coldness was in him, and he would almost always hold me if I cried very hard and say, “It’s okay, Button, we’ll work it out.” But with my mother I didn’t dare cry. Both my parents loathed the act of crying, and it’s difficult for a child who is crying to have to stop, knowing if she doesn’t stop everything will be made worse. This is not an easy position for any child. And my mother—that night in the hospital room—was the mother I had had all my life, no matter how different she seemed with her urgent quiet voice, her softer face. What I mean is, I tried not to cry. In the dark I felt she was awake.
    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