* * *
I waited a week and then I called William at work and he sounded distracted. I said, “What more have you learned?” And he said, “Oh Lucy, it’s just crap. There is nothing more to learn.” I asked him what Estelle had said, and he hesitated and then said, “About what?”
“About your mother having another kid,” I said, and he said, “Lucy, we don’t know that she had another kid,” and I still asked him what Estelle had said, and after a moment he said, “She understands it didn’t happen.”
When we hung up, I realized that William was lying. About what, I was not sure. But there was in his voice something dishonest, is what I thought I heard. I decided I would not call him again about any of it.
* * *
—
Oh I missed David! I missed him dreadfully. Unbelievably I missed him. I thought how he knew I loved tulips, and how he always—always—brought tulips to the apartment; even when they were out of season he would go to a florist nearby and bring me home tulips.
* * *
When I was a young child, if I or my sister or my brother told a lie, or even if we had not but our parents thought we had told a lie, we had our mouths washed out with soap. This is not at all the worst thing that happened to us in that house, and that is why I will mention it here. We would have to lie down on our backs on the floor of the small living room, and whoever it was that had told the lie—let’s say for this example it was my sister, Vicky—then the other two kids, my brother and I, one of us was instructed to hold down her arms, and the other of us held down her legs. And then my mother would go into the kitchen and get the dishcloth and then she would go into the bathroom and scrub the dishcloth with the cake of soap and Vicky would have to stick her tongue out and my mother would shove the rag in and keep moving it until Vicky gagged.
As I have gotten older I think that it was unconsciously brilliant of my parents to involve the other kids in this activity; it kept us apart, as all the things that happened in that house kept us apart.
When it was my turn to lie on the floor I never struggled as my poor brother—who was always terrified at such moments—and my poor sister—who was always furious at such moments—did. I lay there and closed my eyes.
* * *
Please try to understand this:
I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.
I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say—oh, I don’t know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world. It could be as simple as the fact that we had no mirrors in our house when I was growing up except for a very small one high above the bathroom sink. I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.
That couple who let me take the train back to New York with them that night I was stuck in the Washington, D.C., airport: Not too long afterward, they saw my picture in the newspaper and they came to a reading I gave in Connecticut. The woman was all bright smiles; she was really very nice to me, so much nicer than she had been when I was with them in the airport, and it was—I think—because now she thought that I was someone. The night in the airport I had just been a scared person who tagged along behind her. I have always remembered that, how different she was to me the night of my reading. My book had done very well, and the library I read in was packed with people. And I guess she must have been impressed with that.
What she could not possibly have known was that even as I stood before all those people and read and answered questions, I still felt oddly—but very truly—invisible.
* * *
For the months of July and August, Estelle and William have always rented a house in Montauk, on the very eastern tip of Long Island.
* * *
—
For a number of years after Catherine died, William and I and the girls would go to Montauk for a week in August; we would stay at a small hotel, and we would walk through the tall grass along a tiny path that led to the beach across the street. We would put large beach towels down and stick an umbrella into the sand. I liked the beach; I loved the ocean; I would stare at it and think how it was like Lake Michigan, but not at all. It was the ocean! Though, in truth, I have mixed feelings about our times there.
William very much liked Montauk, but in my memory he was often distant from me there, and from the children as well. One time when the girls were young we had to wait a very long time while William finished a huge bowl of steamed clams in a restaurant. I remember watching him as he peeled the black from the clams’ necks and then soaked them in the gray cup of water on the table; he did not speak, and the girls got restless, climbing onto my lap, and then moving around the place, walking close to other tables. “Take the girls outside,” he said to me, and so I did. But it still took him forever to finish the clams. I also remember one time when we drove back from Montauk to the city he did not speak to me once.