My Name Is Lucy Barton

47

My brother and I speak every week on the telephone. He has stayed living in the house we grew up in. Like my father did, he works on farm machinery, but he does not seem to get fired or have my father’s temper. I have never mentioned his sleeping with pigs before they are slaughtered. I have never asked him if he still reads the books of a child, those about people on the prairie. I don’t know if he has a girlfriend or a boyfriend. I know almost nothing about him. But he speaks to me politely, though he never once has asked me about my children. I have asked him what he knew of my mother’s childhood, if she had felt in danger. He says he doesn’t know. I told him of her catnaps in the hospital. Again, he says he doesn’t know.

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When I speak on the phone to my sister, she is angry and complains about her husband. He doesn’t help with the cleaning or the cooking or the kids. He leaves the toilet seat up. This she mentions every time. He is selfish, she says. She doesn’t have enough money. I have given her money, and every few months she sends me a list of what she needs for the children, although three of them have moved out of her house by now. The last time she listed “yoga lessons.” I was surprised that the tiny town she lived in offered yoga lessons, and I was surprised that she — or perhaps it is her daughter — would take them, but I give her the money every time she sends me the list. I resented — privately — the yoga lessons. But I think she feels she is owed the money by me, and I think she may be right. Once in a while I find myself wondering about the man she married, why he never puts the toilet seat down? Angry, says my gracious woman doctor. And shrugs.