Olive, Again: A Novel (19 page)

Hurriedly he went up the steps to his house, tossing his coat off, and in the bedroom Marie was awake, reading. Her face brightened when she saw him. She put her book down on the bed and waved her hand at him. “Hi there,” she said.

I
t was November.

No snow had fallen yet in Crosby, Maine, and because the sun was out on this particular Wednesday there was a kind of horrifying beauty to the world: The oak trees held their leaves, golden and shriveled, and the evergreens stood at attention as though cold, but the other trees were bare and dark-limbed, stretching into the sky with dwindling spikiness, and the roads were bare, and the fields were swept clean-looking, everything sort of ghastly and absolutely gorgeous with the sunlight that fell at an angle, never reaching the top of the sky. The sky was a darkish blue.

Jack Kennison suggested to Olive Kitteridge that they take a ride in the car. “Oh, I love rides,” she said, and he said he knew that, he was suggesting a ride to make her happy. “I’m happy,” she said, and he said he was too. So they got into their new Subaru—Olive didn’t care for his sports car—and off they went; they decided to head for Shirley Falls, an hour away, where Olive had gone to high school, and where her first husband, Henry, had come from.

Jack and Olive had been together now for five years; Jack was seventy-nine and Olive seventy-eight. The first months, they had slept holding each other. Neither one of them had held another person in bed all night for years. When Jack had been able to be away with Elaine, they sort of held each other at night in whatever hotel they were in, but it was not the same as what he and Olive did their first months together. Olive would put her leg over both of his, she would put her head on his chest, and during the night they would shift, but always they were holding each other, and Jack thought of their large old bodies, shipwrecked, thrown up upon the shore—and how they held on for dear life!

He would never have imagined it. The Olive-ness of her, the neediness of himself; never in his life would he have imagined that he would spend his final years with such a woman in such a way.

It’s that he could be himself with her. This is what he thought during those first number of months with a sleeping, slightly snoring Olive in his arms; this is what he still thought.

She irritated him.

She would not have breakfast, but would get going right away, as if she had things to do. “Olive, you don’t have anything to do,” he would say. And she thumbed her nose at him. Thumbed her nose. God.

It was not until after they married that he began to understand that her anxiety level was high. She rocked her foot constantly as she sat in her chair, she would suddenly leave the house, saying she had to buy some fabric at the Joann fabric store, and she would be gone within moments. But she still clung to him at night, and he still clung to her. And then after another year they did not cling to each other at night but shared the bed and argued about who had taken the blankets during the night; they were really a married couple. And she had grown increasingly less anxious; quietly, this made Jack feel wonderful.

But a couple of years ago they had gone to Miami and Olive hated it. “What are we supposed to do, just sit in the sun?” she had demanded, and Jack took her point; they came home. Last year they had gone to Norway on a cruise around the fjords and they had liked that a great deal better. These days taking a drive was what they both enjoyed. “Like a couple of old farts,” Jack had said during their last drive, and Olive said, “Jack, you know I
hate
that word.”

They drove along now, leaving the town of Crosby, Maine, behind; they drove past the little field with the stone wall and the rocks that showed through the pale grass. “Well,” Olive said. “Edith fell off the pot and broke her arm, so they had to take her away.”

“Take her away?” Jack asked; he glanced over at her.

“Oh, you know.” Olive wiggled her hand through the air. “Off to rehab, or wherever.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“Dunno. Suspect so.” Olive looked out her window; they were entering the town of Bellfield Corners. “God,” she said, “is this town sad.” Jack agreed that the town was sad. Only one diner was open on Main Street, and there was a credit union, and a gas station. Everything else was closed down. Even the mill, which you used to see when you first came into town, had been torn down in the last ten years; Olive told this to Jack.

“I’ve never been to Shirley Falls,” Jack said as they drove out of the town of Bellfield Corners onto the open road once more.

Olive moved so that her back was almost against the car door, and she looked at Jack. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You have never been to Shirley Falls?”

“Why would I have been to Shirley Falls?” Jack asked. “What’s in Shirley Falls these days? Oh, I know it was important, way back in the day, but what’s there now?”

“Somalis,” said Olive, turning forward once more.

“Oh, right,” Jack said. “I forgot about them.” Then he said, “Okay, I didn’t
forget
about them, I just haven’t thought about them for a while.”

“Ay-yuh,” Olive said.

“How did Edith fall off the pot?” Jack asked after a few moments.

“How? I suspect she just…fell. How do I know?”

Jack laughed; he loved this woman. “Well, you know she fell. You know lots of things, Olive.”

“Say, do you know what Bunny Newton told me the other day? Apparently her husband used to know this man who lost his wife, and this man liked this other woman for ten years—even while his wife was still alive—and this other woman, on her birthday, went out and sat down in the middle of the turnpike and got hit and killed. Just sat herself down. Did you ever hear of such a thing? Now the man is mourning her far more than he mourned his wife.”

“So she killed herself?”

“Sounds like that to me. Godfrey, what a way to go.”

“And how old was this woman?”

“Sixty-nine. Oh, and she weighed eighty-seven pounds. So Bunny says. I think it sounds a little crazy to me.”

“It sounds like some piece of information is missing,” Jack said.

“I’m just reporting,” Olive answered. “Oh,” she said, “the woman was filing for divorce. Maybe that’s important, who knows. Crazy.”

“It’s not one of your better stories,” Jack conceded.

“No, it’s not.” After a few minutes Olive said, “I really liked my pedicure, Jack.”

“I’m glad, Olive. You can have another one.”

“I plan on it,” she said.

A few days earlier, Jack had come upon Olive in the bedroom, and she had tiny tears coming from her eyes. It was because she couldn’t cut her toenails anymore, not the way she used to be able to, she was too big and too old to get her feet close enough to her, and she hated, she said, she just
hated
having her toenails so awful-looking. And so Jack had said, “Well, let’s get you a pedicure,” and Olive acted like she barely knew such a thing was possible. “Come on, come on,” Jack said, and he got her in the car and drove her out to Cook’s Corner, where there was a nail salon. “Come on,” he said as she hung back, and so she followed him into the place, and Jack said, “This woman would like a pedicure,” and the small Asian woman said, Yes, yes, okay, this way. Jack said, “I’ll be back,” and waved at Olive, who looked bewildered, but when he went back and picked her up, what a smile she had on her face.

“Jack,” she said, almost breathless, once they were in the car. “Jack, they have one jug of water for one foot, and another jug for the other, well, they’re like little tiny bathtubs, and you just stick your feet in, and the woman, oh, she did a wonderful job—!”

“You’re an easy woman to please,” he had said to her.

And she had said, “You may be the first person to think that.”

Now Olive said, “She rubbed my calves, oh, it felt good. Massaged, that’s the word. She massaged my calves. Lovely.” After another moment she added, “You know that writer who writes all those spooky books—what’s her name—Sharon McDonald—well, she’s just a Bellfield Corners girl, is all she is.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“I mean, years ago, when she was starting out, she started out her life in Bellfield Corners. That’s all she is, really. Just a Bellfield Corners girl.”

Jack considered this. “Well, maybe that’s why she can write about horror so well.”

“I didn’t know she wrote anything well,” Olive said.

“Boy, are you a snob,” Jack said.

And Olive said, “And you’re a nitwit, if you read her junk.”

“I’ve never read her junk,” Jack said. He did not say that his dead wife, Betsy, used to read everything the woman wrote, there was no point in telling Olive that. They were driving along the river now, and there was a beauty to it, the starkness, the gray ribbon of it right next to the road. “I’m glad we’re taking this drive,” Jack said.

“Oh, me too,” Olive said. Then she said, “
Say
, I have a story for you. Bunny and her husband were at Applebee’s the other night, and they were sitting toward the back and there was only one other couple, just as fat as can be, and then the man began to cough, and then he began to throw up—”

“God, Olive.”

“No, listen to this. He kept vomiting, and the woman pulled out these plastic bags and kept apologizing to Bunny while she held these plastic bags for the man to keep puking into.”

“They should have called an ambulance,” Jack said, and Olive said, “That’s what Bunny suggested. But it turned out the man had a medical condition called, oh, what was it called, Zanker’s? Zenker’s diverticu—something, according to the wife, so Bunny and Bill paid their bill, and this poor fat couple sat while he finished throwing up.”

“God,” Jack said. “My God, Olive.”

“Just reporting.” She shrugged.

They were only now entering Shirley Falls, through the back way. The buildings became much closer to one another, and the high wooden houses, built years ago for the millworkers, were there as well, almost on top of one another, with their wooden staircases down the backs of them. Jack peered through the car window and saw a few black women wearing hijabs and long robes walking along the sidewalk. “Jesus,” he said, because the sight surprised him.

“My mother, back in the day,” Olive said, “oh, she hated hearing people speaking French on the city buses here. And of course many of them were speaking French, they had come from Quebec to work in the mills, but, oh, how Mother hated that. Well, times change.” Olive said this cheerfully. “
Look
at these people,” she added.

“It’s kind of weird, Olive.” Jack said this, peering to the right and left. “You have to admit. Jesus. It’s like we drove into a nest of them.”

“Did you just say a nest of them?” Olive asked.

“I did.”

“That’s offensive, Jack.”

“I’m sure it is.” But he felt slightly ashamed, and he said, “Okay, I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

They drove through the town, which seemed to Jack to be very bleak, and then they drove across the river and up a long hill where there were houses in neighborhoods. “Turn, turn, right there,” Olive demanded, so Jack turned right and they drove down the street and she showed him the house that Henry had grown up in.

“Nice,” Jack said. He didn’t really care where Holy Henry had grown up. But he made himself look, and consider, and it seemed the right place for Henry to have been raised. The house was a small two-story, dark-green, with a huge maple tree on its front lawn.

“Henry planted that tree when he was four years old,” Olive said. “He did.” She nodded. “He found this tiny sapling and he decided to stick it in the ground, and his mother—old horror—apparently helped him water it when it was tiny, and now there it is.”

“Very nice,” said Jack.

“You don’t care,” Olive said. “Well, never mind, let’s go.”

Jack made himself look around the little neighborhood, and he said, “I care, Olive. Where do you want to go now?”

And she said out to West Annett, where she had grown up, so he drove the car while she directed him, and they went along a narrow road, past many fields that were still oddly green for November, and the sun slanted across them with that horrifying gorgeousness. They drove and drove, and Olive told him about the one-room schoolhouse her mother had taught in, how her mother had had to come early to get the fire started in the winter, she told him about the Finnish woman who used to watch her—watch Olive—when Olive was too small to go to school, she told him about her Uncle George, who was a drunk and who had married a young wife and the young wife fell in love with a neighbor—“Right there, that house right there”—and then the neighbor, well, Olive didn’t know what went on with him, but the young wife had hanged herself at the bottom of her cellar stairs.

“Jesus,” Jack said.

“Yup,” said Olive. “I was scared to go down to that cellar when I was a kid, someone would send me down to get potatoes or something and, oh, I hated going down there.”

“God,” said Jack.

And then Olive said that her Uncle George had remarried, but ten years after his first wife died, he hanged himself in the same spot.

“My
God,”
Jack said.

So it was like that, they drove around many back roads and they talked. Jack talked about his own childhood, which he had already done, but seeing Olive’s childhood home made him think of his childhood home outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and he spoke of it again now, the sense of its smallness to him, even when he was young, though it was not as small as Olive’s house had been, but he had felt
cramped
, he said now. Olive listened, and said, “Ay-yuh.”

Then she said, “Would you look at that,” because Jack had turned a corner and before them was the November sinking sun against the darkening blue sky. Along the horizon was a spread of yellow. And the bare trees stuck their bare dark limbs into the sky. “That’s kind of amazing,” Jack said.

Up and down the car went, up one small hill and down another, around a long curve, around a short bend, the car dipped and rose over the road as the sun set around them.

Jack said, “Let’s try that new restaurant in Shirley Falls. I heard Marianne Rutledge mention something about it the other day. It’s supposed to be the only nice restaurant in the town. What’s it called—some funny name.”