"Lucy by the Sea"

[fiefoe]

Elizabeth Strout's Lucy still has the same voice as in the previous novel, "Lucy Barton". It's a compassionate, honest voice with no artifice, (and therefore utterly endearing).

• A dark green water curled up over the rocks, and seaweed that was a brown-gold color, almost deep copper, lay wavy-like on the rocks as the dark green water splashed up. The rest of the ocean was dark gray and there were very small white waves farther from the coast, just a huge expanse of water and sky. We drove around a turn and right there was a little cove where many lobster boats were; and there seemed to be so much air, with these boats sitting in this little cove all pointing in the same direction and the open ocean behind them
• I watched it, believing it, I mean I knew it was happening is what I mean, but to describe my mind as I watched this is difficult. It was as though there was a distance between the television and myself. And of course there was. But my mind felt like it had stepped back and was watching it from a real distance, even as I felt the sense of horror. Even now, many months later, I have a memory of watching a pale yellow image on the television, it must have been the nurses in their garb
• I thought of a blind man I sometimes helped off the bus near the bus stop by my apartment, and I was worried about him, would he now dare take anyone’s arm? And the bus drivers too! All those people they came into contact with—!
• And also I noticed something about myself as I watched the news during this time. Which is that my eyes would drop to the floor, I mean I could not look at it all the time. I thought: It is as though somebody is lying to me, and I cannot look at someone who is lying to me.
• When we hung up I walked around and around the house. I did not know where to put my mind. <> There was a feeling of mutedness.
• Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us.
• He wanted a lot of praise for every meal he made—I noticed that—and so I praised him to the skies. It felt to me like I praised him to the skies, but he always asked, even after I had praised him, “So you liked it, it was good?”
• Half of me was in Maine with William. And half of me was back in New York in my apartment. But I couldn’t go back, and so that half of me was like a shadow—that’s the only way I can put it.
• Mom, I cried inside myself to the nice mother I had made up, Mom, I can’t do this!
• He said it with difficulty. “Lucy, yours is the life I wanted to save.” He walked over toward me but he did not sit down. “My own life I care very little about these days, except I know the girls still depend on me, especially Bridget; she’s still just a kid. But, Lucy, if you should die from this, it would—” He shook his head with weariness. “I only wanted to save your life, and so what if some woman yelled at you.”
• I need to say: Even as all of this went on, even with the knowledge that my doctor had said it would be a year, I still did not…I don’t know how to say it, but my mind was having trouble taking things in. It was as though each day was like a huge stretch of ice I had to walk over. And in the ice were small trees stuck there and twigs, this is the only way I can describe it, as though the world had become a different landscape and I had to make it through each day without knowing when it would stop, and it seemed it would not stop, and so I felt a great uneasiness.
• “Can you put Dad on?” And I did. I was struck by this, and it made me feel more warmly toward William, that his daughter wanted to speak to him as much as she did to me, during this time of her enormous distress.
• the leaves had finally started to come out and there was a sense of green and bright light; I thought the trees looked like young girls, tentative in their beauty.
• I could not sleep that night. I kept thinking of William and how he had had cancer and had his prostate out and how he had never told anyone.
• And thinking of this now made me think of something I had often thought before: that there had been a last time—when they were little—that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child... And living with this pandemic was like that. You did not know.
• how hard that had been for Bob, because he had—all his life—thought he was the one responsible for it. Katherine watched him with her green eyes. Then she said simply, “I’m so sorry about that, Bob. But I cannot believe it was you that I saw in the backseat of that car so many years ago. I found you.” She shook her head slowly.
  Bob bit into his lobster roll. “I know,” he said, his mouth full. “I know.”
  — So there was that kind of thing that happened. There were these times, is what I am saying, where the people I met were interesting. And their stories interwove!
• But we went exploring, is what I am saying, and the weather grew increasingly better. There was a sense of the physical world opening its hand to us, and it was beautiful. And it helped.
• After a moment I said, “You know, I read a book a few years ago, and some character in it said something like, It’s our duty to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”
• Charlene nodded and said, “Because the first woman I cleaned for that morning—her name is Olive Kitteridge, and she was just sitting in her chair like a big bullfrog—and then Olive said, ‘I’ve been sitting here thinking about a young woman that I stole one shoe from once.’ And I asked her why one shoe, and she turned and said to me, ‘I thought it might make her feel crazy.’
• “My tower, as you put it,” he said, glancing at me with his eyebrows raised, “built to watch for German submarines, is there as a reminder to me every day of what this world went through, and how it can go through that again.” I waited, and he continued. “This country is in so much trouble, Lucy. The whole world is. It’s like—” William put his fork down. “It’s like some seizure is taking place around the world, and I’m just saying I think we’re headed for real trouble. We are just tearing each other up. I don’t know how long our democracy can work.”
  And I slowly understood that William’s relationship to the tower was his relationship to our world as it was right now.
• I understood—as I have understood at different points in my life—that the childhood isolation of fear and loneliness would never leave me. <> My childhood had been a lockdown.
• Oh dear God! I had made up everything in my life, I thought! Except for my girls, and maybe even them I had made up, I mean their graciousness to me and to each other, how did I know?
• this is what I remembered: I was put off by them, the way their shape so clearly fit the feet of my husband, how the right one went slightly to the side. I was put off by them, by my husband’s shoes. <> Oh, the poor man!
• This went on, the ping-pong balls bouncing around randomly and randomly hitting into one another. And in my memory I thought—even back then, so young—I thought: That is like people. <> My point is, if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little.
• We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.
• “That’s a line from Chekhov,” I said. “How do you know that? I’m surprised you know that. It’s from The Seagull.”
  He shrugged. “Estelle and her endless auditions.” And then William repeated, “I am in mourning for my life.”
• I’ve always had a theory about people who have losses and then think they are owed something.” I gave him examples: of people who had lost a child and then embezzled from the church they had been a secretary at for years, or people who shoplifted after finding out their husband was going to die…. And then I said, “You lost your father when you were fourteen, William. And so I think you thought you were owed.”...
  But this is what had been eating away at William. That he had taken money from that man—his horrible grandfather with his glittering eyes—and that William had increasingly hated himself for doing this
• my real mother told me one day that the great landscape painters understood one thing: that everything in nature started from the same color. And I thought of this as I watched the leaves changing.
• There was a faint odor of loneliness that came from Charlene. And the awful truth is this: It had made me draw back just slightly inside myself. And I knew this was because I had always been afraid of giving off that odor myself.
• But in truth, I have no sense that they do. Even if someone writes to me and says, Your books have helped me—while I am always glad to get the note—I have never really been able to believe it. I mean, praise seems unable to enter me.
• for an entire hour we sat in that classroom almost in silence, and I thought: It is like my entire life’s work has turned into a small pile of ashes on this table. My humiliation was so deep, it seemed to go straight through all of me into my feet.
• I remembered how when one of the young women—she had red hair and small eyes—had mentioned her favorite book being that one on the bestseller list, I had looked at her and I had thought: You will become nothing of worth before climate change kills you.
  I had thought that!!!
• And when I found out I had been living a parallel life, a dishonest life, it crushed me. But I have often thought that it made me a nicer person, I really do. When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, this is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger. Because I understood then how a woman could not know. It had happened, and it had happened to me.
• Because I would never have had an affair, I thought William would not either.
  I had been thinking like myself.