* * *
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When I was a freshman in college I had an English professor who had the class—it was a small class—to his house on many occasions. And his wife was there. Later I became friendly with this professor and his wife, and she said to me one day—I was a senior by then—she said, “I always remember the first time I met you at the house and I thought: That girl has absolutely no sense of her own self-worth.”
* * *
—
My brother’s story is too painful for me to record. He is a kind man who has lived his life in the small house that we grew up in. To my knowledge he has never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend.
* * *
—
My sister’s life is also painful. She was feistier, and I think this may have helped her. But she has had five children, and the youngest did what I did: She won a full scholarship to a college. But after a year, she—my niece—came back home; now she works at the same nursing home as my sister.
* * *
—
My brother and my sister, I see it more and more clearly, as murky as it still is, these lives are not the lives of people who came fully from love from the moment they were born.
* * *
—
I am surprised—as my lovely woman psychiatrist was surprised—that I was able to love at all. She said, “Many people in your situation, Lucy, just don’t even try.” And so what was there in me that William had called joy?
* * *
—
It was joy.
Who knows why?
* * *
I think how when I was in college and I lived for a year off-campus—except that I was mostly at William’s apartment—how I would walk by a house on my way to school and I noticed that the woman of this house had children, and I would see her through the windows, and she was pretty—sort of, I think—and at holidays her dining room table would be filled with food, and the children, almost grown, would be sitting around the table, and her husband—I assumed it was her husband—would be sitting at one end of the table, and I would walk by these windows and think, That is what I will be. This is what I will have.
But I was a writer.
And that is a vocation. And I think how the only person who ever taught me anything about writing said, “Stay out of debt and don’t have children.”
But I wanted those children more than I wanted my work. And I had them. But I needed my work as well.
So I think sometimes these days how I wish it had been different—and this is a silly thing, and it is sentimental and foolish, but it still comes to my mind:
* * *
—
I would give it all up, all the success I have had as a writer, all of it I would give up—in a heartbeat I would give it up—for a family that was together and children who knew they were dearly loved by both their parents who had stayed together and who loved each other too.
* * *
—
This is what I think sometimes.
* * *
—
Recently I told this to a friend of mine here in the city, she is a writer too, and she has no children, and she listened, and then she said, “Lucy, I simply don’t believe you.”
A little bit, it made me sick that she said that. A secretion of loneliness came to me. Because what I had said was true.
* * *
I was not wrong about a possible Pam Carlson. William telephoned me more than a month after we had returned from Maine and he said, “Lucy, can you google this person?” And he gave me a woman’s name and I googled her and immediately I said to him, “Oh no, she’s not right—God, no.” And he said, “Oh Lucy, thank you.”
In the years when William and I were both single—between our various marriages—this is something that we would do for each other, give advice of this sort.
I cannot tell you exactly what it was about this woman he asked me to google that day that put me off, but it was a society kind of photograph, I mean she was in a long dress with other people, she was maybe ten years younger than I am, and the place she was in was well-appointed, but it was her face, her being—or something—that just put me right off, some entitlement I think I might mean, and William said, “I came on to her and now she’s really pushing things forward with me and she had me over the other night and I just could not get out fast enough.”
And I said, “Well, don’t go back, she’s not what you want,” and he said, “Thank you, Lucy.” He added, “She’ll hate me now, because I pursued her, but once I got her— Oh God, I can’t stand her,” and I said, “Who cares if she hates you,” and he said, “You’re right.”