Spying on Lucy
I have the “nosy gene,” so my mother says. She suspects I got it from my Aunt Rose. When I first read Harriet the Spy during the summer of my eighth year, I knew it would be my favorite book for a long time. I felt a kinship with Harriet. Harriet possessed an intrinsic need to know about the secret lives of her loved ones. I did, too. For my next birthday I was given a spy kit, complete with a magnifying glass, notepad, fingerprint powder, an invisible marker, a flashlight and binoculars.
I put this kit to good use. I started bringing it to school to investigate the ghosts that made their homes in the ceiling vents of the girls’ bathrooms. I got a bunch of my friends on board to ghost hunt. But as my friends experienced more and more ghost sightings, I became less and less convinced. Ghost-hunting felt like too childish of a game, and we weren’t making much progress. It was time for me and my spy kit to move on to more serious affairs. Not unlike Harriet’s quest to learn about the inner life of her nanny, Ole Golly, I sought to understand Lucy: the old lady who lived in the basement apartment of my house. I had known Lucy for my whole life, as she had first worked for my grandparents as a housekeeper, fell into caring for my dad and his siblings, and eventually became a second grandmother to me.
Lucy had only been living in my house for a few years. I learned that she was a mysterious character who was definitely worth investigating. I heard her loudly cackling on the phone at all hours of the night. What was she laughing about? What’s more, I didn’t understand how anyone could have so much to talk about that they stayed on the phone practically all day! With the help of my spy kit and my dear friend, Celia, we conducted a thorough investigation of Lucy’s life.
My first task was to interview Lucy on the ins and outs of her past, from her childhood in rural West Virginia through present-day. Her answers were vague. When I started asking Lucy about her romantic life, it went like this:
“Lucy, were you ever married?”
“I sure was, but I threw him right out the window.”
Now this was the reveal I was looking for. If Lucy threw her own husband out the window, her past was truly haunted! It would have impacted the entire course of her life! How did she get away without being charged for manslaughter? Did he survive?
Celia and I then took to the landing of Lucy’s staircase to listen in on her phone conversations, hoping specifically for some reference to the time she threw her husband out the window.
We tiptoed down the basement steps and crouched on the first landing so we could peer over at her couch, where she sat as always, faithfully on the phone with some friend or family member. We were sure to record all revealing gossip. After the spying was over, I climbed onto my kitchen counter and reached up to the very top shelf of the cabinet where my mom kept her crystal wine glasses. I took two and filled them with grape juice so that our debrief would be as sophisticated as possible. Celia and I sat in the living room sipping on our grape juice as we discussed our notes. With the little context we had, there was not much to talk about. We gasped at any slightly scandalous bit of dialogue we overheard. We agreed that Lucy had something up her sleeve. We just didn’t know what.
As the years unfolded, I realized that Lucy's comment about throwing her husband out the window was not literal (surprise!). It was fun to believe that it could be. Lucy recently passed at almost 97 years old, and in that time, she successfully kept most of her past a mystery.
Certain people's lives are too complex for even the best spies to make sense of. Still, I will always wish I knew more. Though I don’t know the whereabouts of my old spy kit, I like to think that bits and pieces of Lucy’s story can still be found in my childhood house. In the invisible-pen scribblings of my detective notepad, or in the faded little fingerprints on Lucy’s now dark and vacant stairwell landing. The case is forever unsolved.