"Tell Me Everything"

[fiefoe]

Elizabeth Strout

Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.
* And then in October the foliage exploded, shattering the world with a goldenness. The sun shone down, and yellow leaves fluttered everywhere; it was a thing of beauty. The days were cold and at night it rained, but in the morning there was the sun again, and all the glory of the natural world twinkled and nestled itself around the town of Crosby.
* A thought had taken hold of Olive Kitteridge on one of these days in October, and she pondered it for almost a week before she called Bob Burgess. “I have a story to tell that writer Lucy Barton.
“Because some professional photographer took it. And also my hair isn’t really blond anymore. That photo was taken years ago.” Lucy put her hand through her hair, which was chin-length and pale brown. <> “Well, it was too blond in the photo,” Olive said.
Olive turned back to the window. “He was a man of very few words. He came from a dreadful background. His father beat him, and his father would try and beat the smaller children, but Father always intervened and took the beatings for those younger kids.”

Then Lucy said, “Oh my God.” And Olive nodded her head. Lucy began tapping her knees together, and she looked around the room, her hands on the sofa. “Oh my God,” she repeated, looking at Olive now, and again Olive gave a small nod.
“Ay-yuh,” Olive said.
“So your mother kept that clipping her whole life.”
“She did.”
“And his kids had the same names as you and your sister.”

“Well, it’s an interesting story. At least to me.” <> “Mrs. Kitteridge, this is a sad story.”
So both these couples lived their entire lives with these ghosts in the room. And that is sad. Sad for everybody, but especially for your father and Ruth, who didn’t even know they were living with these ghosts.”
“But it’s a sad story. Carrying that clipping with her all her life.” She shook her head and said, “Jesus Christ. All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them.”
Here is an example of their friendship: Bob had become a (secret) smoker again. After having smoked for much of his life, he had quit when he met Margaret, now almost fifteen years ago, but during the pandemic he started to smoke (secretly) one cigarette a day, and then it went to two. Lucy knew this about him, Margaret did not. That’s all. It was innocent, because both Bob and Lucy were—in a strange, indefinable way—innocent people.
Her mother never touched her children except in violence, and her father had an anxiety left from World War II that manifested itself in frequent sexual urges, although he never approached his children in this manner. And yet Lucy had loved both her parents in an achingly poignant way. But her childhood had been challenging.
* “Yes, frightened, Bob. She’s a bully, and bullies are always frightened. I liked her, though, and she ended up liking me.”
in November there can be a stark beauty as you drive along these places because the trees are bare and the trunks and the branches of these trees stand out against the sky, and if the sun is out it can sink with a sharp display of yellow on the deep blue horizon. It might be fair to say that people who have lived there for years take this beauty internally; it enters them without their fully knowing it... a small bit of the foliage was still clinging to the trees, but mostly that golden shattering of color was gone.
he found a disquiet to the heroin addicts who were facing prison instead of getting the help they needed. When Bob thought about the state of the country these days, he sometimes had the image of a huge tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.
Margaret had many things going on with her church now that the pandemic— Well, it was not over, but it was maybe as over as it was ever going to be.

And then Jim called a week later and asked Bob not to come to New York after all. When Bob asked why, his brother paused and said, “Helen and I are going on a trip. Not sure where.”
Bob felt his insides drop in a way that was familiar to him. “Why?” he asked again.
Jim said, “Why? Because we are. That’s why.”

“No, but she is childlike.” Margaret added, turning onto her back, “She’s an artist, that’s how they are.”... Lucy, this came to Margaret as a crack of light opening on a horizon, Lucy had a loneliness to her that she usually covered well, but it was a loneliness—and this was the crack widening on the horizon—that Margaret now understood about herself, that Margaret had devoted her life to the service of others because she desired—deeply, almost without knowing until right now—to connect with another person.
* He told her then about how when he was little he had spoken to his mother about not liking Christmas and how she had become angry and started to cry and he had walked away. “I think of that a lot, Lucy, and it just kills me every time. But I was a kid. I didn’t really get how hard her life was.” <> Lucy stopped walking and looked at him. “Oh Bob,” she said softly. And then Bob understood. She had heard him. She had absorbed this from him in a way that neither one of his wives ever could.
Pam: these were the words she thought of as she tipped the wine bottle to her mouth in her dressing room. Drinking with a vengeance.
Pam had worked at a lab at Albert Einstein College, she was a scientist, she worked with parasitologists there (this was where she met William Gerhardt for the first time, Lucy’s now ex-husband; Pam had had an affair with him eventually), and Bob, after he finished law school, had worked for Legal Aid,
It wasn’t until he remembered Pam living with him and Susan and also their mother one summer in Maine after their junior year in college, living together in Bob’s small childhood home in Shirley Falls—it was not until he remembered this that Pam became herself to him again. Her long brown hair that she and Susan had ironed one day on the ironing board, the way she would laugh with his mother…
* But they were her underpants. “Do you mind writing on the back of these a big B so when I put them on I know which is the back and which is the front?” ... As he got into his car, he felt a weight so heavy inside he had to sit for a moment behind the wheel, and then he drove away.
‘Olive, I think my husband likes men.’ And I said, What do you mean, he likes men? And she said, ‘You know: that he likes men.’ ”... “I said, Hell, he likes you, everyone knows that. And as long as he is with you in that certain way, who cares if he’s thinking about…horses?”
“Jesus, of course they did!” Lucy said, sitting forward. “We just got back from Florida yesterday. I would hate to be there alone.” <> Olive did not want to ask about Lucy’s trip, she did not care. So she continued,
“And then Janice said that she finally realized her husband liked that time alone because of this guy—kid, almost—that worked with him, called Grunt. That it gave him time to be with Grunt alone.”... Then Olive sat up straighter in her chair and said, “Anyway, Janice’s husband died suddenly. Heart thing. And Janice took in Grunt. He lived with her like a son.”
* “Some people on this earth eat other people’s sins, and that’s what Janice did her entire life, starting with her father and her stepmother and then with that professor creep—who, had he behaved that way now, would be outed and fired—and then crazy Oliver that she got involved with after dropping out. She just kept eating people’s sins.”
As he walked over to her, he thought how small she was seen from this distance, but how when he was with her he did not think of her as small.
“Remember I told you that Olive was a bully and that bullies are just frightened people? Well, that’s Jim right there.”
After they parted, Bob thought again of how he had told both his wives his memory of saying to his mother that he had never really liked Christmas and how both of them had been kind but not—to Bob’s mind—really been able to care. And he thought now as he bought a jug of orange juice, That’s just how it is, that’s all. He thought: God, we are all so alone. <> But—Lucy. She did not make him feel alone. He realized this as he walked to the register.
He was not sure why he had agreed to represent the man, but—again, only partly consciously—it seemed to have something to do with the fact that Bob had for most of his life thought he had killed his father, and this man had perhaps killed his mother.
The house held a weariness within it, and Bob felt a shudder go through him; he did not want to be here.

when I got back, I could just tell he was thinking: That’s all she’s going to eat? But of course we couldn’t talk because we were in the quiet car.
“But it felt like we were talking, it’s hard to explain. I mean, when I looked out the window and saw how swollen the rivers and inlets were with all the rain, I felt that he was noticing this too, and it was sort of like we commented on these swollen waters together. That kind of thing.
“And then, Olive— It was so strange. I thought: I love him!

* And then to Olive’s amazement, Lucy said, smiling at her with a gentleness on her face, “And I feel that way about you. A connection. Love. So thank you.” She moved toward the door.
Olive said, “Wait.” As Lucy turned, Olive said, “Well, phooey. I feel connected to you too. So there.” She stuck out her tongue.

It may be that not enough is said about this sort of thing, older people and how much they might appreciate the touch of another human being. Mrs. Hasselbeck, for example: How did she live without any human touch to her skin? Charlene Bibber? Somehow they existed without it, many people do. Yet one has to wonder about the toll it takes, the lack of being touched or held. So many people are not.
But when the priest described how Helen had planned every detail of the funeral, Bob felt deeply sad for Helen; he could not feel her presence in the church. The organ played and there were white roses everywhere, especially all over her casket, and Bob could not stop himself from thinking: Oh Helen! It’s your funeral, and yet— He did not know how to finish his thought.
* “Oh,” she said, with a sigh big enough to make her mask move slightly.

* Olive wrote down on a piece of paper: LUCY BARTON SAYS— And then Olive stopped. She didn’t really know what Lucy had said. But she picked up the paper again and continued: THERE ARE VERY FEW PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WE FEEL CONNECTED TO. I FEEL CONNECTED TO YOU. LOVE, OLIVE
She put the piece of paper into an envelope and walked over the bridge to the nurses’ station without passing by Isabelle’s room. “Will you please make sure you deliver this to Isabelle Goodrow before she leaves?” Olive asked, and the aide looked surprised and said, “She’s leaving?”
And then Olive walked back to her own apartment. It was like waiting for a death.

And then Johnny Tibbetts said, “Something about naked pregnant women. He liked them. Was always wanting to paint their picture.” Johnny Tibbetts opened his mouth and laughed,
So he said, “When did you first know that you were lonely?” <> And she became deflated then, he saw her energy leave her, and she said, “When I found out about William’s affairs. It was as though some bubble I had lived in my whole life just burst, and I realized: Oh.”.. She turned again to him and said with a sense of acceptance, “I’m so good at being lonely, though. I’m just so good at it.”
* To be in love when the outcome is uncertain is an exquisite kind of agony. This is how it was for Bob. At times he felt he was living his very largest life, as though his soul were billowing before him like a huge and rippling sail. For the next few days after that last walk with Lucy, Bob slept profoundly well; he felt in the darkness as though Lucy were lying next to him, close against him, and this was extraordinary for Bob. When he woke, the world seemed magical to him, and he felt that he was experiencing some Large Awareness. But then he would crave Lucy, just to see her, just to be with her, and to really crave anything one might not ever get in this world is a difficult thing.
Many people in town would not have cared so much about Charlene Bibber, because her political views were very different from most people in this mostly liberal town. But Lucy, who had essentially snubbed Arlene Cleary, was hugging poor Charlene as the woman wept. This part did not surprise Bob, but he had been shaken by Lucy’s response to Arlene Cleary. <> Bob was aware—as Lucy herself had said—that he did not know her as well as he thought he did. Isn’t that what she had said? We are all standing on shifting sand.

They sat there looking at the river. There was enough of a wind to make small whitecaps appear in the middle of it, and also the wind blew the smoke over Bob as he sat. But he did not get up, as he would have in the past.
Lucy was restored to him.
On the shifting sand they stood on.

Jim: he opened it and read the lines “Because his wife had died in summer, he waited for winter to come. And when it came, he saw that it made no difference.” <> Jim thought: How did the writer know this? And he understood then that this was a private club, and a quiet one, and no stranger passing him on the street would know that he was a member, just as he would not know if they were a member.
He realized that he had never heard her sobbing before. She said, “Bob, I might be losing my job! Right after I gave that fucking sermon in Boston! Oh Bob, Bob…” And she began to sob again. <> He saw Lucy ahead of him, sunlight was on her, and she stood looking away. Wrapped in goldenness went through his head.
* And Margaret herself looked terrible, her face splotched and puffy, the poor, poor thing. <> And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those who do love us.
Larry had been hit by a car as he was crossing Park Avenue. He was in a coma at the hospital. <> And this began a new odyssey in the life of Jim Burgess.
* Bob was in a quiet state of bliss. He was going to New York with Lucy. And she had asked him if he would come to her little apartment once they got there—Jim was not expecting him until tomorrow, so Bob had a free night—and Bob had said yes. He pictured it as he had seen it in her photos: the white fluffy quilt, the white couch, the blue round tablecloth. He had no idea at all what would happen between them, if anything, but that morning he had stuck a pack of matches into his pocket in case—oh Jesus—he had to take a dump when he was there. But the possibilities filled his mind. Would he finally be able to hold her? Impossible—but maybe not.
He listened to Matt talking for over six hours. He listened as Matt spoke of the sexual abuse Diana had endured as a girl by her father since she was young. He listened as Matt described how their mother knew about this, and not only had she done nothing but she had seemed to resent Diana more as time went on.
Bob stretched his legs out to one side. “I know I did.” He added, “I’ve never called anyone son in my life.” <> “I liked it. But I’m way too old to be your son.” Then Matt said—he had said this before—“Diana wanted me to go to the hotel to protect me, right?”
“You mean she looked beatific?” Lucy asked... “Oh, sometimes a person, it doesn’t have to be a woman, but they just have some sort of natural glow. I met a man years ago who just glowed, he beamed a certain glow,.. This irritated Olive. <> She thought the heaven part was stupid, and also—Lucy was spoiling her story. She blew out breath from her mouth. “Anyway, the woman did indeed have a glow. Every second she looked like that.
Another silence stayed in the room, and then Olive said, “She was his linchpin. He used that word once, as she was dying. Said Sally was his linchpin.” <> “You know,” Lucy said slowly, raising her hand and sort of drawing a small circle with her finger, “this is what I wonder. I wonder how many people out there are able to be strong—or strong enough—because of the person they’re married to.”
And so, in this way, with Larry in a hospital bed as Helen had been only a few months before, Jim felt the multitude of gifts being given to him in a manner that previously would have seemed unimaginable. <> In short, he felt transported into another world, a world where all he felt was love and sorrow, and yet the love was stronger than the sorrow. It was strong, and when his girls came to visit, he felt as though the country he had been living in had shifted abruptly, and for whatever reasons—was it a gift from God?—he was now in an altogether different country, and it was a country of purity.
“No. That’s not evil, Larry. These are broken people. Big difference between being a broken person and being evil. In case you don’t know. And if you don’t think everyone is broken in some way, you’re wrong. I’m telling you this because you have been so fortunate in your life, you probably don’t even know such broken people exist.”

* Carl turned on his back and said he knew some people who didn’t really need the food and who had stolen from the food pantry in his town, people who just drove up and took it, and when he got done with the story, Charlene felt an uncertainty....
As time went by, Charlene stopped volunteering at the food pantry in Crosby, and she gradually stopped taking Lucy’s phone calls.
—
And in this way the situation in the country divided itself further.

And inside these scrapbooks were newspaper articles about Addie since she was barely two years old. She had been Miss Maple Tree, Miss June Bug, Miss Moxie, oh she’d been everything you could be,
“Is that why you took my case? Because you thought maybe I had killed my mother and you’d spent almost your whole life thinking you had killed your father?” <> Bob’s face broke into delight. “Matthew Beach. You are so smart. You’re smart and you’re a brilliant painter. Matt, Matt, Matt.” He pointed a finger at him. “Go see Katherine Caskey.”
Something about getting Matt to go see Katherine made Bob miss Lucy in a more clearheaded way. And so he texted her

Lucy stood up and put her sunglasses back on. She was shivering in the wind. “Solzhenitsyn said the point of life is the maturity of the soul. Jesus, Addie didn’t have time for her soul to mature. Oh, never mind. Can we go back now?”
He dropped his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it and left it there—he had never done this before. “Of course,” he said, and they walked. “What about all the people getting blown up in the Ukraine right now? What do their lives mean?” He asked this with belligerence.
She said, without looking at him, “It’s Ukraine, Bob. Jesus. Not the Ukraine,” and Bob felt his face becoming hot once again.

* he had the thought now that her response to Addie was somewhat arrogant, even as he understood that this made little sense. And yet the crack of anger inside him did not go away. And with it there was some odd sense of relief, as though he had been carrying a large burden for a long time, and perhaps did not have to carry it anymore... If Bob had had children, he might have recognized the incident as a kind of pulling away that an adolescent does to be free of their parent, but he had not had children and—as we know—he had always been good to his mother during his own adolescence. Also, Lucy was not his parent, nor was he hers.
they sat at a public table a few towns away by an inlet of water and he felt an unhurried gladness move through him.
Surprise birthday party: Bob felt Lucy’s presence as soon as he stepped inside the room—and then he saw her, far off, standing on the first step of the staircase in the living room, and they looked at each other for a moment. To Bob, for the rest of his life, it was one of the most intimate moments he had ever experienced, because in the glance he was saying to her pained face: You’re here, and that is all that matters, and her glance said, Bob, I’m right here, do not ever worry about that. And there was a finality in their glance as well, he saw that in her. That whatever they had shared was not over but would be different from now on.

“We also discussed that day a crush without consequences that a person can have in a marriage and how that’s very different from living with a ghost in the marriage. Now, I have thought all along that you and Lucy lived each with the ghost of the other, but I saw tonight that I was wrong. What you had was a crush.”
Bob turned his head to look at her. He did not say anything.
“And I also saw tonight that Margaret is your linchpin. The story of Muddy Wilson and his wife being his linchpin.”

Olive was silent for a long moment. Then she said, meditatively, “It’s quite a world we live in, isn’t it. For years I thought: I will miss all this when I die. But the way the world is these days, I sometimes think I’ll be damned glad to be dead.” She sat quietly looking ahead through the windshield. “I’ll still miss it, though,” she said.
* The heart wants what the heart wants. This is true, and Bob’s heart still wanted Lucy. But there is another thing to consider, which is that the heart is only one part of an organism, and the organism’s job is to survive. This desire to survive was already in ascendance with Bob, and this desire grew, and the desire of his heart— It did not shrink, but it did not continue to grow. And there was discomfort, of course, as there is in such things, but Bob held on to the new sense of hope he felt in living his life with Margaret.

And Bob said slowly as he stood up, “It’s life, Mrs. Hasselbeck, it’s just called life.”
And Mrs. Hasselbeck said, “I had an affair once.”
Bob thought: I am not going to sit down again. So he stood there as Mrs. Hasselbeck looked up at him and told him how she had had an affair for almost a year when her boys were in high school, and they had found out.

And we are talking about his feelings for Lucy. His sense of loss ebbed and flowed but remained manageable... As he was walking back to the parking lot one day, he had a sensation of the air around him being not just air but something full and wonderful. And that’s when he wondered about God, and whether there was a personal God who cared about every living thing on Earth or a much more generalized God who had created the universe, and he thought: It doesn’t matter, it is the same. He understood that this would not make sense to people, and so he did not even tell Margaret about it. But this understanding came to him with great clarity one day. And he remembered it.
The story that Lucy had told her was this: Lucy’s love affair with Bob Burgess, which had never happened. The part that made Lucy and Olive cry was when Lucy told of meeting Bob after his haircut, and how Lucy had loved him even more as soon as she had seen him... I wanted to take him in my arms and say: Bob! You are you! But at that very moment I somehow realized: We will never run away together, because you are Bob. And I got so mad at him for that, Olive, I was just so mad at him, because I loved him more than anyone except my daughters and David, but Bob was not available.