My Name Is Lucy Barton

26

I have used the word “trash,” as my mother did that day in the hospital as she spoke of Elvis Presley. I used it with a good friend I made not long after I left the hospital — she is the best woman friend I have made in my life — and she told me, after I met her, after my mother came to see me in the hospital, that she and her mother would fight and they hit each other, and I said to her: “That’s so trashy.”

And she, my friend, said, “Well, we were trash.”

In my memory her voice was defensive and angry; why would it not have been? I’ve never told her how I felt, that it was so wrong of me to have said it. My friend is older than I am, she knows more than I do, and perhaps she knows — and she was raised a Congregationalist too — that we won’t speak of it. Perhaps she forgot. I don’t think she has.

—

This too:

Right after I found out about my college admission, I showed my high school English teacher a story I had written. I can remember very little of it, but I remember this: He had circled the word “cheap.” The sentence was something like “The woman wore a cheap dress.” Don’t use that word, he said, it is not nice and it is not accurate. I don’t know if he said that exactly — but he had circled the word and gently told me something about it that was not nice or good, and I have remembered that always.