Free My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout Page B

at me one day when she passed me in the empty hall after school, and it was a nice smile, like she was sorry for me, but I felt she did not want her smile to seem condescending. That was why I always remembered her.
    “
Why
would you remember her?” my mother said to me. “If she was older like that. Because of the Thanksgiving dinners?”
    “Why would
you
remember her?” I said to my mother. “What happened to her? And why would you know?”
    “Oh.” My mother let out a great sigh and shook her head. “A woman came into the library the other day—I go to the library in Hanston some days now—and this woman looked like her, like Marilyn. I said, ‘You look like someone I knew, who was about the age of my kids.’ And she didn’t answer, and that—that makes me very angry, you know.”
    I did know. I had lived my life with that feeling. That people did not want to acknowledge us, be friends with us. “Oh, Mom,” I said tiredly. “Screw ’em.”
    “
Screw
them?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “I see you’ve learned lots living in the big city.”
    I smiled at the ceiling. I didn’t know a person in the world who would have believed this conversation, yet it was as true as any can be. “Mom, I didn’t have to move to the big city to learn to say ‘screw.’ ”
    There was a silence, as though my mother was considering this. Then she said, “No, you probably only had to walk to the Pedersons’ barn and hear their hired hands.”
    “The hired hands said a lot more than the word ‘screw,’ ” I told her.
    “I imagine they did,” my mother said.
    And this is when—recording this—I think once more, Why did I not just ask her then? Why did I not just say, Mom, I learned all the words I needed to right in that
fucking
garage we called home? I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don’t know they have embarrassed themselves. I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time. I know faintly, even now, that I have embarrassed myself, and it always comes back to the feeling of childhood, that huge pieces of knowledge about the world were missing that can never be replaced. But still— I do it for others, even as I sense that others do it for me. And I can only think I did it for my mother that day. Who else would not have sat up and said, Mom, do you not remember?
    I have asked experts. Kind ones, like the doctor who was kind; not unkind people, like the woman who spoke so meanly to Sarah Payne when she jumped at the cat. Their answers have been thoughtful, and almost always the same: I don’t know what your mother remembered. I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered.
    I don’t know what my mother remembered either.
    “But it did get me thinking about Marilyn,” my mother continued in her breathy voice, “and so I asked later in the week when I saw that so-and-so person from the—oh, you know, Wizzle, the place—”
    “Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe.”
    “That place,” my mother said. “Yes, the woman who still works there—she knows everything.”
    “Evelyn.”
    “Evelyn. So I sat down and had a piece of cake and a cup of coffee and I said to her, ‘You know, I thought I saw Marilyn what’s-her-name the other day,’ and this Evelyn, I always liked her—”
    “I loved her,” I said. I did not say I loved her because she was good to my cousin Abel, good to me, that she never said a word when she saw us going through the dumpster. And my mother did not ask why I loved her.
    My mother said, “Well, she stopped wiping the counter and she said to me, ‘Poor Marilyn married that Charlie Macauley from Carlisle, I think they still live nearby now, but she married him back when they were in college, and he was a smart fellow. So of course they take the smart ones right