by Ann Patchett
On the bus back into town Lucy kept her arms around my neck, her face against my shoulder, while I kissed the top of her head repeatedly. She did not acknowledge the gawkers, who were brazen in a way the Iowans never dreamed of being. No matter how aggressively I stared them down, they simply held my eye.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. She said it over and over again.
EVEN IF LUCY could barely remember the first four years of her childhood, she was still an Irish citizen and carried a large green passport. Back in the world of socialized medicine she was for the first time free of endless insurance forms, justifications, and debt. She also received free rent and a reasonable stipend to keep her going while she had her surgeries. She was living at the time in a desolate modern building that reminded me of a YWCA. Every suite had a kitchen, a living room, and six tiny bedrooms with a shared bath on a straight hall. Lucy’s room had a twin bed pushed up against the window, which looked down on the street. She’d fixed postcards to the walls with pushpins and kept her books lined up along the baseboard. She had a narrow dresser, a tiny desk, and a twelve-inch color television that she rented by the month. An extra cot was brought up from the basement for my visit and when we unfolded it, we could barely open the door. We had to walk across it to get to her bed. The whole room became a giant floating mattress.
“It kinda makes you think how good we really had it back on Governor Street,” Lucy said.
“Not to mention how nice the dorm rooms were in college.”
“Oh,” she said. “This is the state penitentiary compared to college.”
The other girls who lived on the hall seemed years younger than we were. They wore heavy makeup and high heels to their jobs in shops, and while everyone was polite, each girl tried hard to pretend it was her flat and all these other people were merely passing through. Everyone wrote her name on her milk bottle and put it in her own section of the refrigerator. I had filled my suitcase with boxes of Cream of Wheat and jars of soy mayonnaise, two staples of Lucy-food that Lucy couldn’t find in Scotland. We unloaded the goods into the third shelf of the cupboard, which was hers.
The November days in Aberdeen were short enough to be an afterthought of night, a poorly executed attempt at sunlight. Nearly every building was made from the plentiful Scottish limestone, so that even the most beautiful structures looked vaguely like prisons. The streets, the walls, the buildings, the sky, everything in Aberdeen was gray. We watched the weather reports on the news with rapt fascination. “They’ve got eighteen ways to say it’s going to rain.” Lucy got out of bed to act out the forecast along with the weatherman, sweeping her arms in wide circles over an imaginary map. “Watch for afternoon showers followed by a light mist in the early evening,” she said in a perky voice. “Then there will be a heavy downpour with intermittent sprinkles.”
Sad-looking women pushed their baby carriages through the crowds, the carriages covered in clear plastic sheeting that turned every pram into a little oxygen tent. In the morning we went to the Nile, a large, open restaurant that played nothing but Enya. All the waitresses greeted Lucy by name, but that was no surprise. We made our coffee last for hours while men in kilts trudged down the street in one joyless parade after another. I have never seen so much rain or so many parades. After the Nile we took the bus to the Royal Infirmary, where Lucy would have her tissue expander checked and filled with the day’s injection of saline. I could see why she was happier there than she was in her flat. The building was huge and rambling with tiled hallways and a soft orangish light. Despite the size, it felt old-fashioned and strangely homey. Everyone at the hospital was glad to see Lucy. When she introduced me to the nurses, they seemed to be delighted to see me as well. “Ann!” they said. “We’ve loved your letters!” Lucy brought in all her mail to share, even the letters that came while she wasn’t in the hospital.
After we finished up at the Royal Infirmary, we had just enough time to make it home to see Neighbours, an Australian soap opera starring Kylie Minogue that the whole city was enslaved to. The streets emptied out when Neighbours was on. It was completely spellbinding because, unlike America soap operas with their split-personality amnesiacs, this program showed a world in which nothing happened at all, a world not unlike Aberdeen. In the two weeks I was there a character brought a guest into the boardinghouse where she lived and the guest spilled a little nail polish on the living room carpet, where she had absolutely no business painting her nails in the first place. That drop of polish reached the level of Greek tragedy. Men discussed it in the pubs. Lucy and I talked about it for years.
It was dark by four o’clock and the rain would clump together to form a wet, heavy snow. Lucy and I would go to the gym and jump around in an aerobics class. The room was so packed that the wooden floor had an enormous bounce to it and I always ended the class feeling seasick. Lucy worked diligently to stay in shape. She wanted to bulk up, get some substance, but she was forever getting knocked off her routine by surgery. As soon as she felt she was as strong as all the other girls, she would be out again for six weeks.
At the end of the day we’d always wind up at Café Drummond, buy a pack of Silk Cuts, and tuck in for the night. Lucy would lean forward and take hold of my wrist. “Tell me the absolute honest truth.” She stretched back her head as much as she could, which wasn’t much. “How does it look?”
“How does it look right now?”
“Right now.”
It looked like two loaves worth of unbaked bread dough hanging from the bottom of her face, but without the shine. I told her that it looked pretty bad. “But it isn’t going to stay like this for long.”
“Does it look like I have a balloon in my face?”
I studied her carefully, wanting to come up with another answer, then I told her, sadly, that it did.
Lucy nodded and sighed. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
As a child Lucy had been terrorized in the stairwells of her junior high and high school and had suffered relentless teasing and sundry cruelties about her appearance. But once she got to college, that pretty much stopped. People would gawk, but they weren’t aggressive. No one ever bothered her in Berlin. But in London, little things kept happening: schoolboys followed her, calling her names; a man would make a face when he passed her. By the time she got to Aberdeen, it was junior high all over again. Children chased her from a bus stop. A handsome young man came up to her in broad daylight to say that his friend over there wanted to ask her out on a date while the friend screamed, “No, stop!” Packs of drunks would howl and bark at her as she walked home at night. Once, after she had gotten an apartment by herself, she had called me to say that she had run out of food and was too afraid to go to the grocery store because she was so relentlessly taunted. She was hungry. How does anyone on that day decide that instead of eating they will read fifty pages of a book on the history of French cinema, or write four pages of a novel, or type up a cover letter for a poetry competition that will almost certainly be lost? How does anyone pull themselves up over and over again?
Coming home late from Drummond arm in arm, a pack of laughing, stumbling men swayed towards us in the darkness, a half dozen voices arguing drunkenly, each one trying to raise itself above the others. We were on a bridge, and though we automatically pressed close to the railing, they were coming straight at us, like a car that crosses over the center line to barrel its headlights into yours. They wouldn’t have let any two girls pass without a bit of friendly hassling. But when they actually saw us in the intermittent pools of light, the thick fog of beer they lived in lifted for a minute and we thrilled them. They barked and screamed to be helped, rescued, saved. “Save me from the dog girl,” they cried. It wasn’t the first time it had happened since I’d been there, but it was the time I had had enough. I let go of Lucy’s arm and ran into them screaming, smacking, shoving blindly into all there was to hate, which gave them the biggest laugh of all. One of them grabbed me by the shoulders and touched his nose to
mine. “Boo!” he said. Dying of laughter now, they tripped away while I screamed after them, “Assholes! Fucking assholes!”
Lucy came over and took my arm again and we walked home, both of us looking straight ahead, neither of us saying a word.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Everything in the world seemed cruel and the taunting voices of drunks stayed in my head like a bad song. I had a cough and at two in the morning I went to sit in the little living room so I wouldn’t wake Lucy. Usually one of the girls from the flat was there smoking and making out with her boyfriend, but on this night I was lucky and everything was dark. I turned on the little electric heater and the television and curled up on the sofa, hacking. There had been too much smoking, too much drizzly rain, and it had all caught up with me. All I wanted was to be entertained, to think of nothing. There on Scottish TV in the dead of night was Allan Gurganus, talking about the publication of his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Allan had been my most important teacher in college. He was the person who had taught me to write. Now he was there in the living room in Aberdeen, handsome in his bow tie, calmly discussing his life as a writer. I was exhausted and running a fever. By the orange coiled light of the electric heater I felt like I was having a visitation from the Angel of Fiction. I decided then and there that I would be like Lucy. I would be like Allan. I vowed that I would write my way into another life. I, too, would try for everything.
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE my plane ticket said I had to go home, I gathered up all the one-pound coins we had and called my mother from a phone box. Lucy wanted to see if there had been any word from the latest round of fellowships she had applied to. Since I was gone, my mother, whom Lucy loved, was in charge of all her mail. What she told me was that she had come back from Alaska the night before. She had flown up for two nights on no notice because my sister had decided to get married.
“Heather’s married?”
Lucy, tucked into the box with me, looked as surprised as I did. My sister had recently gotten a new job and left Tennessee for Alaska. I knew she had been dating someone, but married? “She wouldn’t get married without me even knowing about it,” I said.
“She’s married,” my mother said again.
I was divorced and now my sister was married and I had missed it completely. After I got a few details, her husband’s name and what her name was now, Lucy took the phone and talked to my mother for the few minutes we had left. When she hung up, I looked at her, stunned. “I would have gone,” I said.
“You don’t have any money,” she reminded me. “You never would have made it in time.”
The whole business made me impossibly sad. I felt like my sister had just left on a slow trip around the world and I hadn’t been at the dock to say good-bye. Shouldn’t I have been there to wish her luck? Then again, what right did I have to be wishing anyone luck in marriage?
Lucy and I went back to Drummond for a drink. She started in on all our regular subjects: writing, how much longer the surgeries might take, how hard it was to find appropriate men when you have a tissue expander. I was having the conversation, but I was distracted, thinking about my sister married to someone I had never even seen a picture of. When we left the bar and started walking up the hill in the freezing damp wind, I was struck by the terrible mess I had made of my life. In the darkness I complained to Lucy: I was divorced, I’d quit my teaching job to get away from my husband, I was broke, and I felt impossibly far away from writing. I had missed my own sister’s wedding.
“Oh, you’ll be fine,” she said lightly, wanting to move ahead to another topic.
I stopped walking, and after five steps or so she stopped too to find out where I’d gone. “I’ll be fine?” I said. “That’s it? I’ve wrecked my life, come to Scotland, and all you have to say is that I’ll be fine?” I had spent plenty of time on her sadness and now I wanted a minute for my own.
Lucy came back to me and smiled. She looped her arm through mine and pulled me forward into the cold night wind. “It’s true,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “It’s your blessing and your curse. You’re always going to be fine.”
Chapter Six
THE DAY THAT I LEFT ABERDEEN WAS SUNNY AND bright, as if to show me such a thing were possible. Lucy and I took the bus to the airport and cried all the way through the wide rolling fields of green grass. The road leading out to the airport provided some of the prettiest views around. The same gray rock that had made up every ugly building in the city could now be seen in its natural habitat, poking up roughly in the landscape and wrapped tight in moss. It was nearly picturesque. Five minutes into the ride I started wondering if the place really was as bad as it seemed, but I knew it was actually worse. I had seen the boredom and the loneliness and I could not understand how I was leaving her there. So I could go home to waitressing? Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise very dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.
We stopped at the airport gift shop and I bought a scarf in a red tartan with the money I had left. “Write to me all the time,” she said as we walked to the gate, her head back on my shoulder.
“I always do.”
“Write to me more often now. I’m going to miss you more.”
And so I left her there, knowing she would take the bus back to town alone and go back to that little room and curl up in a ball on the bed. I thought, What she wouldn’t give to go home to my mother’s house and work at Friday’s. There was nothing glamorous about the plane ride home. It was only exhausting, lonely, and long.
Dearest Angora,
So I went to see Mr. Fenton this afternoon, and now here I lie on my bed—he decided to admit me after he saw how swollen I was. Take a few drugs, have a few x-rays, I’m into it. Who knows if I’ll get better, but at least I have the feeling something is being done. Unfortunately it’s a Friday, which means I have a very boring weekend ahead of me. At least during the week there is always some sort of flurry to watch, but weekends are deathly, if you’ll excuse such a word being used in such close proximity to the word hospital (or infirmary, as the case may). I was going to bring my computer but it’s absolutely pouring outside and I didn’t want to risk it.
I had to stop writing for a short while as I sensed I was about to get terribly boring. Shouldn’t I say something deep or something? I mean, I am supposed to be a poet, aren’t I? One day I want to get a job as Poet in Residence, if only because I think it’s such a hilarious title. The only better job title I can think of would be Triumph of the Human Spirit in Residence. You could have the Cruel Yet Compassionate Chair in Writing. Nothing wrong with being patronized, I say, just so long as you’re well patronized.
For the most part Lucy and I applied for the same things. The places offering fellowships and prizes had some for fiction and some for poetry, and even though Lucy was working on a novel, she only considered herself a poet in those days. In this way we could overlap without actually competing. It was our greatest dream that we would both get a spot at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and be together. The Fine Arts Work Center admitted ten writers and ten visual artists yearly for seven-month fellowships. You lived in housing they provided and they gave you just enough money to keep you going. I had applied for a similar though considerably more upscale program as well, the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, something that Lucy wouldn’t do until the following year. I had made the cut at the Bunting and now was in the top three finalists for the fiction position. I was all but packed and ready to go. Since I had quit my last teaching job a few days before classes began, I could hardly ask for references in order to get a new teaching job. I needed to prove myself in another way entirely if I was ever going to clear my name in academia.
The thought that I might be going to Radcliffe made me place the parsley sprig on th
e cheeseburger plate with a little more flair than I had before. I was working on a couple of short stories, but most of my time was spent dreaming up a novel about a woman who sought refuge in a home for unwed mothers in rural Kentucky. Each morning before the restaurant opened every member of the waitstaff took a number that assigned his or her cleaning task for the day. One draw was to climb a high ladder and wipe down the antiques and bric-a-brac that lined a perilous shelf near the ceiling, including lugging up a little handheld vacuum and sucking the dust off the vast collection of taxi-dermy that gave the restaurant its character. Because I seemed to be the only person who was afraid of neither heights nor dead animals, whoever drew that number would invariably ask to trade assignments with me. Day after day I could be found scooting along the crown molding, hoovering off the stuffed foxes and wolverines, all the time thinking about my characters, a group of lost girls waiting to have their babies at St. Elizabeth’s. I polished up the foxes’ bright glass eyes with the soft hem of my shirt and thought of Lucy. We were all better off living in the worlds inside our heads.
That afternoon during the lunch rush one of the other girls asked me to run two pans of fajitas out to a table for her. Fajitas are a mess. They sizzle and pop, inevitably leaving little pinprick burns on your arms, the smoke nearly blinding you by the time you reach your destination. I stuffed the two plastic flats of tortillas in my apron, picked up the two iron skillets with attached pot holders, and shot out to table 23, trying to move fast enough to leave the smoke behind me. “Who gets the chicken?” I said brightly.
