I don’t remember COVID. Not really. I remember COVID in the way that I remember the 2016 election, from the faces of the adults around me and a vague sense of the world shifting beyond the confines of my life.
In Lucy By the Sea (2022), Elizabeth Strout, a Maine author and Pulitzer Prize winner, continues with the life story of Lucy Barton, the main character of five of her novels. In her characteristic bare prose, Strout recounts Lucy’s experience moving to a house in Maine during lockdown. Lucy, an author in her mid-sixties living in New York City, is persuaded by her ex-husband William to leave the city in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pair retreat to a weather-worn wooden house on a point jutting out into Maine’s rocky shore.
Time in the novel ebbs with the “dark water swirling” over the rocks beneath the house as Lucy learns to live with the now-stranger whom she once knew so well. The novel is full of the mundane rituals of a life on hold—Lucy walks slowly up and down the snaking dirt driveway each day and volunteers at the local food bank; she watches the gray waves pounding the shore and comes to recognize the tides with an earned familiarity; and she calls her children from the porch overlooking the water.
Lucy’s voice is sensitive and raw, fear and distance mingling in the salty ocean spray. She writes, “This will end, I kept on thinking. This will have to end. And every night it did not end, or indicate in any way that it would ever end.” She cannot face the television showing bodies being loaded into trucks on the streets of the city that was her home—she has to look away. Detached from her home in New York, Lucy follows the realities of the U.S. in 2020 as a stranger in a new state. A neighbor leaves a sign on her car telling the New Yorkers to go back where they came from, and her ex-husband takes off their New York license plates. She loses a friend and a family member to COVID. She grieves her inability to be with her children and the loss of her life as it had been.
Lucy’s fictional life during COVID unfolded merely dozens of miles from my own. At once parallel and opposite, I saw in Lucy’s experience a way to rethink mine, and all that I missed.
* * *
In March of 2020, my family was living in southern Mexico, in a house in the hills of Oaxaca de Juárez. Cement walls enclosed our temporary home, red paint flaking off of their sun-warmed sides. Real home lay 3,202 miles north and east. We’d left Maine in December, driving steadily south, watching banks of snow become little mounds become slush become spiky brown grass become leafy green.
Our new house lay in an L-shape of dark red walls. Scraggly bushes and cacti grew out of parched grass beside a pool sunk into the ground, its bottom a chipped sky blue. Behind the house, a tree draped its purple flowers over the roof, filling me with wonder at the color of Oaxaca. It was a far cry from the white and gray of New England winter.
I’d walk barefoot around the open-air house, reveling in the terra cotta tiles warm beneath my feet as I crossed the patio, so different from the creaking wood floors of home. It was louder in Oaxaca, and with my windows open all the time, the city flowed into my room perched at the corner of the house. I could see the tops of houses scattered down the hills and their colorful cement peeking over the top of the tall walls that surrounded them. Street dogs barked and old cars revved and jangled, music thumped in heavy bass, and El Panadero con el Pan blasted from the bakery truck making its rounds. I got used to it quickly.
We were there for my mom’s sabbatical and planned to stay six months. I was going to finish eighth grade in Oaxaca and my brother fifth. On the weekends we explored the city, losing ourselves in its colorful streets. We’d coax our battered minivan up Oaxaca’s steep hills, driving into neighboring towns to visit the mountains and the artisan villages where alebrijes are deftly carved and painted.
Three months in, on March 15, my parents turned to my brother and I and told us that the schools back home in Maine were closing because of COVID. My heart leapt, and I remember falling back onto the bed and kicking my legs in the air, ecstatic. The comforter was soft beneath me. I don’t think it was joy so much as the sense that something big was happening. I didn’t—I couldn’t—comprehend what was happening, so I expressed that fear the only way I knew how. It was like watching it all happen on TV, standing there thousands of miles away from my hometown. The surreality of immense distance removed me, preventing me from grasping the implications of what was happening.
For the next few days I heard worry seeping from behind my parents’ closed doors. My dad wanted to stay. My mom said absolutely not. She understood that what we needed was people—our home, our community. She knew this wouldn’t blow over. When we drove through the hills of Oaxaca to school on March 19, the gate was closed, the lights off and the parking lot empty. We knew we had to leave. We had moved to Oaxaca de Juárez in the first place for my brother and I to go to school there and for us to learn Spanish. Now, our school was closed. Early the next morning we left for Maine, peeling out of the steep dusty driveway in our gray dented minivan.
We had made the trip down in two weeks, stopping along the way in Philadelphia and Williamsburg, Birmingham and San Antonio, Monterrey and Mexico City. We made it home in five days, flying down the road, crushing twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours in the car. Stores were empty. Roads were empty. Hotels were empty. It was a race to the border, with the U.S. government announcing it would close in the next few days.
Our first night we stopped in Tampico, a coastal city in the state of Tamaulipas, and stayed in a vast, vacant hotel facing the beach. As we drove into town, the Mexican military stopped us and asked us why we were on the road. Going home, we said. They were setting up road blocks. It was a gray day, and wind whipped the palm trees, churning the slate ocean into a froth of waves and spray. Behind us, oil rigs burned brightly and columns of flames jutted ravenously into the sky. It was otherworldly. We were the only ones there. I watched the flares burning from the hotel balcony, salty wind buffeting my face.
We entered the U.S. the next day at Brownsville, a major border crossing that thousands of cars pass through every day. That day, it was completely empty. Our minivan was the only car. We started driving down the international bridge the wrong way, down the lane for cargo trucks—there was no flow of traffic to follow. When we finally found the correct crossing site, the lone U.S. border agent took one look at the piles of stuff silhouetted through the windows of our car. He asked if it would fall out if we opened it, and we grimaced. He waved us through.
* * *
As we sped our way north, we began to follow Lucy’s own journey from New York City to the cottage on the coast. She was leaving home and we were returning; she was escaping to an unfamiliar place while we were taking refuge from one. But we were driving the same highway, crossing the green arching Piscataqua River Bridge into Maine and passing by the same “many different shades of brown in the grasses.” We may have even crossed the bridge on the same nondescript, gray Maine day in late March of 2020.
When we turned the corner to home, it was as if we had never left. The music teacher at the Waterville schools was walking down the street, and she stopped and said hello as we pulled up. A large cloud hung behind our house, its red metal roof standing in bright contrast. The yard was blanketed in a thin layer of pocked snow, its once-pristine surface marred by squirrel footprints and clumps that had slid off the porch roof. It was a structure in limbo, and in entering the door we too entered limbo, a liminal space between before and after COVID.
We began to move as if in a vacuum, merging the patterns we had developed in Oaxaca with our lives from before. I still walked barefoot through the house and sat outside on the porch, but now I saw flaky porch paint and dripping icicles overlayed with the hummingbirds that would visit my favorite red geranium at the Oaxaca house. In some ways, I felt as though I didn’t lose any time at all. I had already planned to miss the rest of eighth grade—now everybody else was missing it too. I would start high school in the fall as planned, only masked and distanced. It was all I knew, and I couldn’t feel the loss of what I hadn’t experienced.
Lucy paced the driveway of her new Maine home over and over, and I paced the streets of Waterville, running the same route every day, again and again. I rarely saw people, at least in the early days when late spring frosts kept the air biting at my cheeks. But unlike Lucy, I didn’t watch the news every night. I didn’t look away as bodies were piled up. I didn’t look at all. I just remember running—running, and the slanting of sunlight across my keyboard as we fumbled our way through school online. I was immensely lucky, sheltered from the need to comprehend the immensity of COVID’s devastation. No one I knew died. My family and friends remained safe, and I thus remained ignorant. Not entirely, of course. I wore a mask to school every day until June of 2022, months after my school lifted its requirements, out of stubbornness and a concern that remained abstract.
In the end, Lucy decided to stay in Maine for good with William, selling her New York apartment without ever seeing it again. Maine became her home as it was mine, but our lives moved in different directions. Lucy was closer to the end of her life than the beginning, I closer to the beginning of mine than the end. I was in high school during COVID, and she was living with an ex-husband of twenty years who had ended their marriage with his affair. And yet, I see myself in Lucy’s words, the quiet distance that separates her from what she sees happening in the world beyond her. Of her daughters, Lucy narrates, “I told myself: There is nothing you can do about it… But in truth, I felt afraid for my child.” She speaks of her life with an understanding that cohabitates with fear. I recognize that way of moving through the world in myself, as if perpetually outside, or looking out from inside myself. But I also see in her the fear that I escaped through luck and through circumstance, through the compounded isolation of a life in lockdown, without social media and through the naivete of youth.
Lucy By the Sea is a novel of muted blues and grays swirling together to paint the smallness of one woman’s life and the mundane intensity of her pain. In feeling the simultaneous closeness and distance between our experiences, Elizabeth Strout has given me through Lucy an access for my unrecognized horror of life during COVID.
At one point, Lucy’s hair starts falling out because of stress, and she writes, “At first it was hard to look at myself in the mirror. But I got used to it.” I had gotten used to my reflection; I had grown accustomed to my reality, which consists of the stories I tell about my experience. But Lucy has unsettled this reflection, causing ripples in what had been a still image. Feeling her fear, I have been opened.
