Olive Kitteridge

  And while it had been a really ghastly blow for the Kitteridges to have Christopher so suddenly uprooted by his pushy new wife, after they had planned on him living nearby and raising a family (Olive had pictured teaching his future children how to plant bulbs)—while it had certainly been a blow to have this dream disintegrate, the fact that Bill and Bunny had their grandchildren right next door and the grandchildren were spiteful was a source of unspoken comfort to the Kitteridges. In fact, the Newtons told a story that night about how their grandson had said to Bunny just last week, “You may be my grandmother, but that doesn’t mean I have to love you, you know.” It was a frightful thing—who would expect such a thing? Bunny’s eyes had glistened in the telling of this. Olive and Henry did what they could, shaking their heads, saying what a shame it was that Eddie essentially trained the children to say these things under the guise of “expressing themselves.”

  “Well, Karen’s responsible, too,” Bill said gravely, and Olive and Henry murmured, Well, sure, that was true.

  “Oh, boy,” said Bunny, blowing her nose. “Sometimes it seems like you can’t win.”

  “You can’t win,” Henry said. “You do your best.”

  How was the California contingent, Bill wanted to know.

  “Grumpy,” Olive said. “Grumpy as hell when we called last week. I told Henry we’re going to stop calling. When they feel like speaking to us, we’ll speak to them.”

  “You can’t win,” said Bunny. “Even when you do your best.” But they had been able to laugh, as if something about it were ruefully funny.

  “Always nice to hear other people’s problems,” Olive and Bunny had agreed in the parking lot, pulling on their sweaters.

  It was chilly in the car. Henry said they could turn the heat on if she wanted, but she said no. They drove along through the dark, an occasional car coming toward them with headlights shining, then the road dark again. “Awful what that boy said to Bunny,” Olive remarked, and Henry said it was awful. After a while Henry said, “That Karen’s not much.” “No,” Olive said, “she’s not.” But her stomach, grumbling and shifting in familiar ways, began some acceleration of its own and Olive became alert, then alarmed. “God,” she said, as they stopped for a red light by the bridge that crossed into the town of Maisy Mills. “I really am ready to explode.”

  “I’m not sure what to do,” Henry said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “The gas stations are across town, and who knows if they’re open at this hour. Can’t you sit tight? We’ll be home in fifteen minutes.”

  “No,” said Olive. “Believe me, I’m sitting as tight as I can.”

  “Well—”

  “Green, go. Pull into the hospital, Henry. They ought to have a bathroom.”

  “The hospital? Ollie, I don’t know.”

  “Turn into the hospital, for crying out loud.” She added, “I was born there. I guess they’ll let me use a bathroom.”

  There was the hospital at the top of the hill, bigger now with the new wing that had been built. Henry turned the car in, and then drove right past the blue sign that spelled out EMERGENCY.

  “What are you doing?” asked Olive. “For God’s sake.”

  “I’m taking you around to the front door.”

  “Stop the goddamn car.”

  “Oh, Olive.” His voice was filled with disappointment, she supposed because of how he hated to have her swear. He backed the car up and stopped in front of the big, well-lighted blue door that said EMERGENCY.

  “Thank you,” said Olive. “Now, was that so hard to do?”

  The nurse had looked up from her desk in a lobby cleanly bright, and empty. “I need a bathroom,” Olive said, and the nurse raised her whitesweatered arm and pointed. Olive waved her hand over her head and stepped through the door.

  “Whew,” she said to herself out loud. “Whewie.” Pleasure is the absence of pain, according to Aristotle. Or Plato. One of them. Olive had graduated magna cum laude from college. And Henry’s mother had actually not liked that. Imagine. Pauline had actually said something about magna cum laude girls being plain and not having much fun…. Well, Olive was not going to spoil this moment thinking of Pauline. She finished up, washed her hands, and looked around as she stuck them under the dryer, thinking how the bathroom was huge, big enough to do surgery in. It was because of people in wheelchairs. Nowadays you got sued if you didn’t build something big enough for a wheelchair, but she’d rather somebody just shoot her if it came to that.

  “You all right?” The nurse was standing in the hallway, her sweater and pants droopy. “What’d you have? Diarrhea?”

  “Explosive,” said Olive. “My goodness. I’m fine now, thank you very much.”

  “Vomiting?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Do you have any allergies?”

  “Nope.” Olive looked around. “You seem pretty short on business tonight.”

  “Well. Weekends it picks up.”

  Olive nodded. “People party, I suppose. Drive into a tree.”

  “More often than not,” the nurse said, “it’s families. Last Friday we had a brother push his sister out the window. They were afraid she broke her neck.”

  “My word,” said Olive. “All this in little Maisy Mills.”

  “She was okay. I think the doctor’s ready to see you now.”

  “Oh, I don’t need a doctor. I needed a bathroom. We had dinner with friends and I ate everything came my way. My husband’s waiting for me in the parking lot.”

  The nurse reached for Olive’s hand and looked at it. “Let’s just be careful for a minute here. Have your palms been itching? Soles of your feet?” She peered up at Olive. “Are your ears always this red?”

  Olive touched her ears. “Why?” she said. “Am I getting ready to die?”

  “Lost a woman in here just last night,” the nurse said. “About your age. Like you, she’d been out to eat with her husband and came in here later with diarrhea.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Olive said, but her heart banged fast, and her face heated up. “What in hell ailed her?”

  “She was allergic to crabmeat and went into anaphylactic shock.”

  “Well, there you are. I’m not allergic to crabmeat.”

  The nurse nodded calmly. “This woman’d been eating it for years with no problem. Let’s just have the doctor give you a look. You did come in here flushed, showing signs of agitation.”

  Olive felt a great deal more agitated now, but she wasn’t going to let the nurse know that, nor was she going to mention to her the mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat. If the doctor was nice, she’d tell him.

  Henry was parked straight in front of the emergency room with the engine still running. She gestured for him to put the window down. “They want to check me,” she said, bending her head down.

  “Check you in?”

  “Check me. Make sure I haven’t gone into shock. Turn that damn thing down.” Although he had already reached over to turn off the Red Sox game.

  “Ollie, good Lord. Are you all right?”

  “Some woman choked on crabmeat last night and now they’re afraid they’ll be sued. They’re going to check my pulse and I’ll be right out. But you ought to move the car.”

  The nurse was holding back a huge green curtain farther down the hall.

  “He’s listening to the ball game,” Olive said, walking toward her. “When he thinks I’ve died, I expect he’ll come in.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

  “He’s got on a red jacket.” Olive put her pocketbook on a nearby chair and then sat on the examining table while the nurse took her blood pressure.

  “Better safe than sorry,” the nurse said. “But I expect you’re all right.”

  “I expect I am,” said Olive.

  The nurse left her with a form on a clipboard, and Olive sat on the examining table filling it out. She looked closely at her palms, and set the clipboard aside. Well, if you came stumbling into an emergency
room it was their job to examine you. She’d stick her tongue out, have her temperature taken, go home.

  “Mrs. Kitteridge?” The doctor was a plain-faced man who did not appear old enough to have gone through medical school. He held her large wrist gently, taking her pulse, while she told him about going to the new restaurant and that she’d only come in here to use the bathroom on the drive home, and yes, she’d had some terrific diarrhea, which had surprised her, but no itchy hands or feet.

  “What did you have to eat?” the doctor asked as though he were interested.

  “I started off with mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat, and I know some old lady died from that last night.”

  The doctor touched Olive’s ear lobe, squinting. “I don’t see any signs of a rash,” he said. “Tell me what else you had to eat.”

  She appreciated how this young man did not seem bored. So many doctors made you feel like hell, like you were just a fat lump moving down the conveyor belt.

  “Steak. And a potato. Baked. Big as your hat. And creamed spinach. Let’s see.” Olive closed her eyes. “Puny little salad, but a nice dressing on it.”

  “Soup? A lot of additives in soup that can cause allergic reactions.”

  “No soup,” Olive said, opening her eyes. “But a lovely slab of cheesecake for dessert. With strawberries.”

  The doctor said, as he wrote things down, “This is probably just a case of active gastro-reflux.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Olive. She considered for a moment before adding quickly, “Statistically speaking, it doesn’t seem you’d have two women die of the same thing two nights in a row.”

  “I think you’re okay,” the doctor said. “But I’d like to examine you just the same, palpate your abdomen, listen to your heart.” He handed her a blue papery-plastic square. “Put this on, open in front. Everything off, please.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Olive, but he had already stepped past the curtain. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said again, rolling her eyes, but she did as she was told because he had been pleasant, and because the crabmeat woman had died. Olive folded her slacks and put them on the chair, careful to tuck her underpants beneath them where they couldn’t be seen when the doctor walked back in.

  Silly little plastic belt, made for a skinny pinny; it could barely tie around her. She managed, though—a tiny white bow. Waiting, she folded her hands and realized how every single time she went by this hospital, the same two thoughts occurred to her: that she’d been born here and that her father’s body had been brought here after his suicide. She’d been through some things, but never mind. She straightened her back. Other people had been through things, too.

  She gave a small shake of her head as she thought of the nurse saying someone had tossed his sister out the window like that. If Christopher had had a sister, he never would have thrown her out a window. If Christopher had married his receptionist, he’d still be here in town. Although the girl had been stupid. Olive could see why he’d passed on her. His wife was not stupid. She was pushy and determined, and mean as a bat from hell.

  Olive straightened her back and looked at the little glass bottles of different things lined up on the counter, and the box of latex gloves. In the drawers of that metal cabinet, she bet there were all sorts of syringes ready for all sorts of problems. She flexed her ankle one way, then the other. In a minute she was going to poke her nose out to see if Henry was all set; she knew he wouldn’t stay out there in the car, even with the ball game on. She’d call Bunny tomorrow, tell her about this little fiasco.

  After that, it was like painting with a sponge, like someone had pressed a paint-wet sponge to the inside of her mind, and only what it painted, those splotches there, held what she remembered of the rest of that night. There was a quick, rushing sound—the curtain flung back with the tinny whoosh of its rings against the rod. There was a person in a blue ski mask waving an arm at Olive, shouting, “Get down!” There was the weird confusion, for a second the schoolteacher in her saying, “Hey, hey, hey,” while he said, “Get down, lady. Jesus.” “Get down where?” she might have said, because they were both confused—she was sure of that; she, clutching her papery robe, and this slender person in a blue ski mask waving his arm. “Look,” she did say, her tongue as sticky as flypaper. “My handbag is right on that chair.”

  But there was a shout from down the hall. A man shouting, coming closer, and it was the quick thrust of a booted foot kicking over the chair that swept her into the black of terror. A tall man holding a rifle, wearing a big khaki vest with pocket flaps. But it was the mask he wore, a Halloween mask of a pink-cheeked smiling pig, which seemed to pitch her forward into the depths of ice-cold water—that ghoulish plastic face of a pink smiling pig. Underwater she saw the seaweed of his camouflage pants and knew he was shouting at her but couldn’t hear his words.

  They made her walk down the hall in her bare feet and papery blue robe while they walked behind her; her legs ached and felt enormous, like big sacks of water. A shove behind smacked into her, and she stumbled, clutching her papery robe as she was pushed through the door of the bathroom she had been in. On the floor with their backs against the separate walls sat the nurse and the doctor and Henry. Henry’s red jacket was unzipped and askew, one of his pant legs caught halfway up.

  “Olive, have they hurt you?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” said the man with the smiling pink pig face, and he kicked Henry’s foot. “Say another word and I’ll blow your motherfucking head off right now.”

  A paint splotch of memory that quivered every time: the sound of the duct tape behind her that night, the quick stripping of duct tape from its roll, and the grabbing of her hands behind her back, the wrapping of the tape around them, because then she knew she was going to die—that they would, all of them, be shot execution style; they would have to kneel. She was told to sit, but it was hard to sit down when your hands were taped behind you and your head inside was tilting. She had thought: Just hurry. Her legs were shaking so hard, they actually made a little slapping sound against the floor.

  “Move, you get shot in the head,” Pig-Face said. He was holding the rifle, and he kept turning quickly, while the flaps of his vest bulged, swinging when he turned. “You even look at each other, and this guy shoots you in the head.”

  But when did the things get said? Different things got said.

  Along the exit ramp now were lilac trees and a red berry bush. Olive pulled up at the stop sign, and then almost pulled out in front of a car passing by; even as she looked at the car, she almost pulled out in front of it. The driver shook his head at her as though she were crazy. “Hells bells to you,” she said, but she waited so she wouldn’t end up right behind someone who had just looked at her as though she were crazy. And then she decided to go in the other direction, heading the back way to Maisy Mills.

  Pig-Face had left them in the bathroom. (“It just doesn’t make sense,” different people said to the Kitteridges soon after this happened, after they read about it in the paper, saw it on TV. “It doesn’t make sense, two fellows barging into a hospital hoping to get drugs.” Before people realized the Kitteridges were not going to say three words about the ordeal. What does “making sense” have to do with the price of eggs, Olive could have said.) Pig-Face had left them, and Blue-Mask reached for the doorknob, locking it with the same click sound it had made for Olive not so long before. He sat down on the toilet seat cover, leaning forward, his legs apart, a small, squarish gun in his hand. Made of pewter, it looked like. Olive had thought she would vomit and choke on the vomit. It seemed a certainty; being unable to move her bulky, handless self, she would aspirate the vomit that was on its way up, and she would do it sitting right next to a doctor who wouldn’t be able to help her because his hands were taped, too. Sitting next to a doctor, and across from a nurse, she would die on her vomit the way drunks did. And Henry would watch it and never be the same. People have noticed the change in Henry. She didn’t vomit. The nurse ha
d been crying when Olive was first pushed into the bathroom, and she was still crying. A lot of things were the nurse’s fault.

  At some point the doctor, whose white lab coat had been partly bunched beneath his leg that was closest to Olive, had said, “What’s your name?” using the same pleasant voice he’d used earlier with Olive.

  “Listen,” said Blue-Mask. “Fuck you. Okay?”

  At different times Olive thought: I remember this clearly, but then later couldn’t remember when she’d thought that. Paint streaks, though, of this: They were quiet. They were waiting. Her legs had stopped shaking. Outside the door a telephone rang. It rang and rang, then stopped. Almost immediately it rang again. Olive’s kneecaps bumped up, like big, uneven saucers beyond the edge of the papery blue robe. She didn’t think she would have picked them out as her own, if someone had passed before her a series of photographs of old ladies’ fat knees. Her ankles and bunioned toes seemed more familiar, stuck out in the middle of the room. The doctor’s legs were not as long as hers, and his shoes didn’t seem very big. Plain as a child’s, his shoes. Brown leather and rubber-soled.

  Where Henry’s pant leg was caught up, the liver spots showed on his white hairless shin. He said, “Oh, gosh,” quietly. And then: “Do you think you could find a blanket for my wife? Her teeth are chattering.”

  “You think this is a fucking hotel?” said Blue-Mask. “Just shut the fuck up.”

  “But she’s—”

  “Henry,” Olive said sharply. “Be quiet.”

  The nurse kept crying silently.

  No, Olive could not get the splotches arranged in order, but Blue-Mask was very nervous; she understood early on he was frightened to death. He kept bouncing his knees up and down. Young—she had understood that right away, too. When he pushed up the sleeves of his nylon jacket, his wrists were moist with perspiration. And then she saw how he had almost no fingernails. She had never, in all her years of school teaching, come across nails that had been bitten so extremely to the quick. He kept bringing his fingertips to his mouth, pressing them into the slots of the mask with a ferociousness; even the hand that held the gun would move to his mouth and he would chew the thumb tip quickly; a big bump of bright red.