“Oh, I don’t think so. That’s not what Mary says.”
“Mary who?”
Louise put her fingers to her mouth in an exaggerated manner. “Whoops.”
“Mary Blackwell? You’re in touch with Mary Blackwell?”
“Mary and I go way back,” Louise explained.
“Yuh. Well, she told everyone things about you, too.” Olive’s heart had started to beat fast.
“And I imagine every one of them was true.” Louise laughed that soft laugh, and made a gesture, as though she were drying nail polish.
“She shouldn’t be telling things from the nursing home.”
“Oh, come now, Olive. People are people. It always seemed to me that you—especially—understood that.”
A silence came into the room, like dark gases coming from the corners. There were no newspapers, or magazines, or any books.
“What do you do all day?” Olive asked. “How do you manage?”
“Ah,” said Louise. “Have you come here for lessons?”
“No,” said Olive. “I came because you were nice enough to write me a note.”
“I was always sorry my kids didn’t have you for a teacher. So many people don’t have that spark, do they, Olive? Are you sure you wouldn’t like that tea? I’m going to have some.”
“No, I’m fine.” Olive watched as Louise stood and moved through the room. Louise bent to straighten a lamp shade, and the sweater fell across her back, showing the thin form of it. Olive didn’t know you could be that thin and still be alive. “Are you ill?” she asked, when Louise returned with a teacup on a saucer.
“Ill?” Louise smiled in that way that reminded Olive once again of flirtation. “In what way ill, Olive?”
“Physically. You’re very thin. But you certainly do look beautiful.”
Louise spoke carefully, but again with that playful tone. “Physically ill, I am not. Though I have little appetite for food, if that’s what you’re referring to.”
Olive nodded. If she had asked for tea, she’d have been able to leave when she’d finished it. But it was too late now. She sat.
“And mentally, I don’t believe, really, that I am one bit more out of my head than any other creature here on earth.” Louise sipped her tea. The veins on her hand were pronounced; one went right down her skinny finger. The teacup clattered just slightly against the saucer. “Has Christopher been out here frequently to help you, Olive?”
“Oh, sure. Sure he has.”
Louise pursed her lips, tilted her head again, studied Olive, and Olive could now see that the woman was wearing makeup. Around her eyes was a shadowing of color that matched her sweater. “Why did you come here, Olive?”
“I told you. Because you were nice enough to send that note.”
“But I’ve disappointed you, haven’t I?”
“Certainly not.”
“You’re the last person I expected to lie, Olive.”
Olive reached down for her handbag. “I’m going to get going. But I do appreciate that you sent the note.”
“Oh,” said Louise, laughing softly. “You came here for a nice dose of schadenfreude, and it didn’t work.” She sang, “Saaaaw-ry.”
Overhead, Olive heard the floorboards creak. She stood, holding her bag, looking for her coat.
“Roger is up.” Louise continued her smile. “Your coat is in the closet, right as you come in. And I happen to know that Christopher has been back only once. Liar, liar, Olive. Pants on fire, Olive.”
Olive went as fast as she could. She had the coat over her shoulder, and turned back briefly. Louise was sitting in her chair, her thin back straight, her face so oddly beautiful; she was no longer smiling. She said to Olive, loudly, “She was a bitch, you know. A slut.”
“Who?”
Louise just stared at her with stony beauty. A shiver ran right through Olive.
Louise said, “She was—Oh, she was something, let me tell you, Olive Kitteridge. A cock tease! I don’t care what the papers said about how she loved animals and small children. She was evil, a living monster brought into this world to make a sweet boy crazy.”
“Okay, okay.” Olive was putting her coat on hurriedly.
“She deserved it, you know. She did.”
Olive turned and saw Roger Larkin on the stairs behind her. He looked old, and wore a loose sweater; he had slippers on. Olive said, “I’m sorry. I’ve disturbed her.”
He only raised a hand tiredly, the gesture indicating that she was not to worry, life had brought them to this point and he was resigned to living in hell. This is what Olive thought she saw, as she hurried to get her coat on. Roger Larkin opened the door, nodding slightly, and as the door was closing behind her, Olive was certain she heard the tiny, quick smashing sound of glass, and the spat-out word, “Cunt.”
A bright haze hung over the river, so you could barely make out the water. You couldn’t even see too far ahead on the path, and Olive was consistently startled by the people who passed by her. She was here later than usual, and more people were out and about. Next to the asphalt pathway, the patches of pine needles were visible, and the fringe of tall grasses, and the bark of the shrub oaks, the granite bench to sit on. A young man ran toward her, emerging through the light fog. He was pushing before him a triangular-shaped stroller on wheels, the handles like those of a bicycle. Olive caught sight of a sleeping baby tucked inside. What contraptions they had these days, these self-important baby boomer parents. When Christopher was the age of that baby, she’d leave him napping in his crib, and go down the road to visit Betty Simms, who had five kids of her own—they’d be crawling all over the house and all over Betty, like slugs stuck to her. Sometimes when Olive got back, Chris would be awake and whimpering, but the dog, Sparky, knew to watch over him.
Olive walked quickly. It was unseasonably hot, and the haze was warm and sticky. She felt the sweat run from below her eyes, like tears. The visit to the Larkin home sat inside her like a dark, messy injection of sludge spreading throughout her body. Only telling someone about it would get it hosed out. But it was too early to call Bunny, and not having Henry—the walking, talking Henry—to tell this to grieved her so much that it was as though she had just that morning lost him to his stroke again. She could picture clearly what Henry would say. Always that gentle amazement. “My word,” he’d say, softly. “My word.”
“On your left!” yelled someone, and a bicycle whizzed past her, coming so close she felt the whir of air on her hand. “Jesus, lady,” said the helmeted alien, as he sped by, and confusion rolled through Olive.
“You’re supposed to stay on the right side of the line,” came a voice from behind her, a young woman on Rollerblades. Her voice was not angry, but it was not kind.
Olive turned and walked back to her car.
At the nursing home, Henry was asleep. With one cheek against the pillow, he looked almost the way he used to look, because his eyes were closed, and the blindness was taken away, so the blank, smiling face was gone. Asleep, with the faintest furrowing of his brows, a hint of anxiety seemed caught within him, making him familiar.
Mary Blackwell was nowhere in sight, but an aide told Olive that Henry had had a “bad night.”
“What do you mean?” Olive demanded.
“Agitated. We gave him a pill around four this morning. He’ll probably sleep awhile longer.”
Olive pulled the chair next to the bed, and sat holding his hand beneath the guardrail. It was still a beautiful hand—large, perfectly proportioned. Surely as a pharmacist all those years, while he counted out pills, people watching had trusted those hands.
Now his handsome hand was the hand of a man half-dead. He had dreaded this, as all people did. Why it should have been his fate, and not (for example) Louise Larkin’s, was anyone’s guess. The doctor’s guess was that Henry should have been on Lipitor or some other statin, since his cholesterol had been a little high. Henry had been one of those pharmacists, though, who seldom took a pill. And Oliv
e’s feeling about the doctor was simple: He could go to hell. She waited now, until Henry woke up, so he wouldn’t wonder where she was. When she tried to wash him, get him dressed with the help of the aide, he was groggy and heavy and kept falling back asleep. The aide said, “Maybe we should let him rest for a bit.”
Olive whispered to Henry, “I’ll be back this afternoon.”
No one answered the telephone when she called Bunny. She called Christopher—with the time difference, he’d be getting ready for work.
“Is he okay?” Christopher asked immediately.
“He had a bad night. I’ll go back up in a while. But Chris, I saw Louise Larkin this morning.”
He made no response the whole time she talked. She could hear an urgency in her voice, something desperate, or defensive. “The crazy creature suggested I cut my wrists,” Olive said. “Can you imagine that? And then said, well, maybe that would take too long.”
Christopher remained silent, even when she finished with the smashed teacup, and the name-calling “Bitch.” (She could not bring herself to say the word cunt.) “Are you there?” she asked, sharply.
“I can’t imagine why you went to see her,” Chris finally said, as though accusing her of something. “After all these years. You never even liked her.”
“She sent that note,” Olive said. “She was reaching out.”
“So what,” said Christopher. “You couldn’t drag me in there to save my life.”
“It would hardly save your life. She’s all ready to stab someone herself. And she said she knows you’ve only come back here once.”
“How would she know that? I think she’s cracked.”
“She is cracked. Haven’t you been listening? But I think she knows that from Mary Blackwell; apparently they’re in touch.”
Christopher yawned. “I have to get into the shower, Mom. Just let me know if Daddy’s all right.”
As she drove to the nursing home, a light rain dropped onto the car, and onto the road before her. The sky was gray and low. She felt an upset different from the times before. It stemmed from Christopher, yes. But she seemed caught between the pincers of some intractable remorse. A personal, deep embarrassment flushed through her, as though she had been caught in the act of shoplifting, which she had never done. It was shame that swiped across her soul, like these windshield wipers before her: two large black long fingers, relentless and rhythmic in their chastisement.
Pulling into the parking lot of the nursing home, she turned the car too sharply and came close to hitting a car pulling in beside her. She backed up, pulled in again, leaving more space, but she was unsettled by how close she had come to hitting the car. She took her big handbag, made sure to put her keys where she could find them, and stepped out. The woman—she was ahead of Olive—started to turn toward her, and in less than a few seconds a strange thing happened. Olive said, “I’m awfully sorry about that, my gosh,” just as the woman said, “Oh, that’s all right,” with a kindness that Olive felt was providential in its spontaneous generosity. The woman was Mary Blackwell. And the moment occurred so suddenly, that neither woman seemed to know at first who the other was. But there they were, Olive Kitteridge apologizing to Mary Blackwell, and Mary’s face kind, gentle, absolutely forgiving.
“I just didn’t see you there, with this rain, I guess,” Olive said.
“Oh, I know. It can be bad, this kind of day—twilight before it even gets going.”
Mary held the door open for her, and Olive passed in front of her. “Thank you,” Olive said. Just to make sure, she glanced at Mary, and the woman’s face was tired and noncombative, the remains of sympathy still there. It was like a sheet of paper on which marks of something simple and honest had been drawn.
Who did I think she was? thought Olive. (And then: Who do I think I was?)
Henry was still in bed. He had not made it into his chair all day. She sat by him, touching his hand, and fed him some mashed potato, which he ate. It was dark as she prepared to leave. Waiting until she knew she would not be interrupted, she leaned over to Henry and whispered right into his ear, “You can die now, Henry. Go ahead. I’m fine. You can go ahead. It’s all right.” She did not look back as she left the room.
Dozing in the bump-out room, she expected the phone to ring.
In the morning, Henry was in his wheelchair, a polite smile on his face, his eyes unseeing. At four o’clock, she returned and spooned into his mouth his supper. The next week was the same. And the week after that. Autumn was upon them; soon it would be dark as she fed him his supper from the tray that sometimes Mary Blackwell brought.
One evening when she returned home, she looked through a drawer of old photographs. Her mother, plump and smiling, but still foreboding. Her father, tall, stoic; his silence in life seemed right there in the photo—he was, she thought, the biggest mystery of all. A picture of Henry as a small child. Huge-eyed and curly-haired, he was looking at the photographer (his mother?) with a child’s fear and wonder. Another photo of him in the navy, tall and thin, just a kid, really, waiting for life to begin. You will marry a beast and love her, Olive thought. You will have a son and love him. You will be endlessly kind to townspeople as they come to you for medicine, tall in your white lab coat. You will end your days blind and mute in a wheelchair. That will be your life.
Olive slipped the picture back into the drawer, her eye catching a photo of Christopher, taken when he was not yet two. She had forgotten how angelic he’d looked, like some creature newly hatched, as though he had not yet grown a skin and was all light and luminescence. You will marry a beast and she will leave you, Olive thought. You will move across the country and break your mother’s heart. She closed the drawer. But you will not stab a woman twenty-nine times.
She went into the bump-out room, lay down on her back. No, Christopher wouldn’t stab someone. (She hoped not.) It was not in his cards. Not in his bulb—planted in this particular soil, hers and Henry’s, and their parents before them. Closing her eyes, she thought of soil, and green things growing, and the soccer field by the school came into her mind. She remembered the days when she was a schoolteacher, how Henry would leave the pharmacy sometimes in the autumn to come and watch the soccer games on the field beside the school. Christopher, never physically aggressive, had spent most of the games sitting on the bench in his uniform, but Olive had suspected he didn’t mind.
There was beauty to that autumn air, and the sweaty young bodies that had mud on their legs, strong young men who would throw themselves forward to have the ball smack against their foreheads; the cheering when a goal was scored, the goalie sinking to his knees. There were days—she could remember this—when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. Maybe it was the purest she had, those moments on the soccer field, because she had other memories that were not pure.
Doyle Larkin had not been at the soccer games—he had not gone to that school. Whether Doyle even played soccer, Olive didn’t know. She could not recall Louise ever saying, “I must go to Portland this afternoon to see Doyle in a soccer game.” But Louise had loved her children, had bragged about them endlessly; when she’d spoken of Doyle being homesick at summer camp, her eyes had moistened, Olive now remembered this.
There was no understanding any of it.
But she had been wrong to visit Louise Larkin, hoping to feel better by knowing the woman suffered. It was ludicrous, as well, to think that Henry would die because she had told him he could. Who in the world, this strange and incomprehensible world, did she think she was? Olive turned onto her side, drew her knees up to her chest, turned on her transistor radio. She would have to decide soon whether or not to plant the tulips, before the ground was frozen.
Basket of Trips
Town is the church, and
the grange hall, and the grocery store, and these days the grocery store could use a coat of paint. But no one’s about to mention that to the grocer’s wife—a plump, short woman who has brown eyes and two little dimples high up on her cheeks. When she was younger, Marlene Bonney was quite shy, and she would push the numbers on the cash register with a tentativeness, patches of pink spreading over her cheeks; you could see it made her nervous, counting out the change. But she was kind and warm-natured, and would listen carefully, her head bent forward, whenever a customer mentioned a problem they had. The fishermen liked her because she was quick to laugh, a sweet eruption of a deep, soft giggle. And when she made a mistake with the change, as she sometimes did, she would laugh even while blushing clear to her roots. “I guess I’m not going to win any prizes,” she’d say. “No prizes for me.”
Now, on this April day, people stand in the gravelly parking lot next to the church, waiting for Marlene to come out with her kids. Those who speak do so quietly, and there is a great deal of abstracted gazing, not uncommon in these circumstances, and many long glances at the ground. This same gravel parking lot stretches along the road and goes, eventually, up to the big side door of the grocery store, which in the past was often open during the summer months, and where people could see Marlene out back there, playing cards with the kids, or fixing them hot dogs to eat; good kids, always running around the store when they were small, always underfoot.
Molly Collins, standing next to Olive Kitteridge, both of them waiting along with the rest, has just looked around behind her at that side of the grocery store, and with a deep sigh says, “Such a nice woman. It isn’t right.”
Olive Kitteridge, who is big-boned and taller by a head than Molly, reaches into her handbag for her sunglasses, and once she has them on, she squints hard at Molly Collins, because it seems such a stupid thing to say. Stupid—this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right. But she finally answers, “She’s a nice woman, it’s true,” turning and looking across the road at the budded forsythia near the grange hall.