We spoke of old friends that we had known as a family, we spoke of how Becka had dyed strips of the front of her hair purple for a year when she was a teenager. We told the story, as we had so many times, of how Chrissy, sitting in her car seat one day in the summer—she was three years old—listened to her father, who had pulled the car over because she would not stop fussing, and he had pointed a finger at her and said, “Now you listen to me, you are starting to piss me off,” and then Chrissy leaned forward and she said to her father, “No, you listen to me. You are starting to piss me off.” We all loved that story, and I added, as I always had when it was told, “Your father looked at me, and I looked at him, and then he just started to drive again. We knew who had the power after that.” Chrissy, so grown-up now, seemed to blush with the pleasure of this. We spoke of how when they were little we had taken them to Disney World in Florida and Chrissy choked with laughter as she remembered how scared Becka had been at Captain Hook when during the parade he’d stopped and thrust his sword at her. “I was not,” Becka said, and we all told her yes, she was. “You were nine years old,” Chrissy said, “and you acted like you were three!” And Becka laughed, tears coming into her eyes.
“She was eight,” William corrected Chrissy. “She was eight years old.”
* * *
—
We stayed in the kitchen, and we laughed and we were happy. Then Becka glanced at the time and she said, “Oh, I have to go—”—her face falling with sudden sadness—and then Chrissy said she had to go too; I glanced at William, and he looked at me and he said, “You go too, Lucy. Now.” He stood up. “All of you, out, I’ll clean up. Go.” And he smiled in a way that made me feel he knew he would be okay and I think the girls felt that as well, and so as we started out of the kitchen Becka suddenly turned and said, “Family hug?” And William and I glanced at each other briefly, a little bit I think like we had been stabbed, because when the girls were very little we would sometimes say “Family hug?” and the four of us would squeeze together in a hug. And we did that now, only the girls were grown, and Chrissy is taller than I am, but we all hugged and then I turned and said, “Okay, everyone, come on,” and we went then, the three of us down in the elevator, and when we got to the street Becka had tears seeping from her eyes, and I put my arm around her, and she began to really cry for a minute, and Chrissy looked serious, and then I said, “Take that cab right there, girls, go—”
And then when I got into my own cab a few minutes later I began to cry. The cabdriver said, “Are you okay?” And I told him no, I had lost my husband.
“So sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “So very sorry,” he said.
* * *
There is this about my own mother:
* * *
—
I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy. When I took William to meet my parents she took me outside right away and said, “Get that man out of here, he is upsetting your father!” And so we left. It had to do, she said, with the fact that William was German, and apparently to my father’s eyes William looked German, and it brought back to him many memories of the war and how bad it had been for him. So William and I got into William’s car and we drove away.
That day, as we drove, I told William about a few of the things that had happened to me in that tiny house—and earlier in the garage, which William did not know about until that day—and he stayed silent and just kept looking at the road ahead of him. Over the next few years I told him more; he is the only person who has ever known about everything that went on in that tiny house, and the garage before that, that I was raised in.
My mother—because William paid for her to come—came to New York City a number of years later when I was in the hospital for an appendectomy that had made me sicker than it should have and she stayed with me for five nights and it was extraordinary that she did that. It was unbelievable. It made me understand that she loved me. But she never, before the visit or after the visit, would accept a collect telephone call from me, which I sometimes tried to do when I missed her. She would tell the operator, “That girl has money now and she can spend it.” But I did not have money then, we were young and just starting out and William only had a postdoctoral.