Olive, Again: A Novel (32 page)

“I’m an eighty-three-year-old woman,” she said, looking at him. His eyes behind his thick glasses looked back at her.

And he shrugged and said, “In my world, that’s a baby.”

But when they brought in the breakfast trays and the hospital day started she would become querulous and want to go home. Christopher—who had returned briefly to his home in New York City but was now back—showed up, sometimes while she was poking at her scrambled eggs, or sometimes later, but he looked tired, and she worried about him. “I’ve arranged for home healthcare,” he said to her. “Someone will be with you around the clock for the first two weeks.”

“I don’t need that,” Olive told him. “Phooey.”

But truthfully, the idea of being alone in her house made her afraid.

In the afternoon, the nurse Jeff came to see her before he started his duty in the ICU. “Hello, hello,” she told him. “I’ve been walking around the halls, I’m ready to go home.”

“You’re amazing,” he said. And one time he took her arm as she walked the halls with him, her cane in her other hand.

“So are you,” she said.

Dr. Rabolinski asked her again if she had moved her bowels, and she considered lying about it, but she did not. “Nope,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You will.”

And then that afternoon—oh ye gods! Olive broke wind, and broke it some more, and then she began to leak from her back end. She didn’t understand at first what was happening, but as she raised herself from the bed, she stared at the mess that was there. She rang for the nurse. The nurse did not come. She rang again. The nurse finally arrived and said, “Oh dear.” And that made Olive feel worse.

“I should say so,” Olive said. “This is horrible.”

“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “It happens.”

“It does?” Olive demanded, and the nurse said, Yes, sometimes it did, it was the antibiotics she’d been on for her pneumonia, let’s get you into the shower and she’d change the bed, and when Olive came out of the shower the bed was changed and on the bed was a huge papery diaper.

When Dr. Rabolinski showed up the next morning, Olive waited to see if he had heard of her horror, and when he did not mention it, she finally said, “My bowels moved with a frightful ferocity.” She made herself look at him when she said that. He said, “It’s the antibiotics,” and gave a small shrug. So she relaxed a tiny bit and asked when she could go home, and he said, Any day now. He sat on the bed after that, without saying anything, and Olive gazed out the window. For a few moments she felt something close to bliss, but it was more as though time had stopped—just for these few moments time had stopped—and there was only the doctor and life, and it sat with her in the morning sunshine that fell over the bed. She put her hand on his briefly, and still looking out the window she said, quietly, “Thank you,” and he said, quietly, “You’re welcome.”

Back home, Olive felt awful. She couldn’t understand how she had lived in this house—Jack’s house—for so many years, it seemed very different to her, and she worried that it would always feel that way. It was chilly, and she turned the heat up high, which she had never done before. The living room seemed huge, she felt she could barely walk across it, and she slept in the guest room downstairs. But Betty showed up—the first home healthcare aide—and she was a big person. Not fat, just big. Her maroon cotton pants were tight on her, her shirt barely closed; she was probably fifty years old. She sat down immediately in a chair. “What’s up?” she asked Olive, and Olive didn’t care for that.

“I’ve had a heart attack and apparently you’re supposed to babysit me.”

“Don’t know that I’d call it that,” Betty said. “I’m a nurse’s aide.”

“Fine,” said Olive. “Call yourself whatever you want. You’re still here to babysit me.”

When Olive, walking to the kitchen a few minutes later, looked out the window at the truck that Betty had driven over in and saw on the back of it a bumper sticker for that horrible orange-haired man who was president, she almost died. She took a deep breath and walked back to where Betty sat, and she said to Betty, loudly, “Listen to me. We will not talk about politics. Do you hear me?” And Betty shrugged and said, “Okay, whatever.” Olive shuddered every time she thought about that bumper sticker.

But after a few days of Betty, Olive sort of got used to her. It turned out that Olive had had the woman years ago in Olive’s seventh-grade math class; she had forgotten until Betty reminded her. “You sent me to the principal’s office a lot,” Betty said.

“Why?” Olive asked. “What could you have done?”

“I wouldn’t stop talking in class. I was mouthy.”

“And I sent you to the principal’s office?”

Betty nodded. “I’d do it on purpose. I had such a crush on him.”

Olive watched her from across the room.

“Oh, did I have a crush on that man,” Betty said. “Mr. Skyler. Whoa.”

“Jerry Skyler,” said Olive. “He was a nice man, I liked him myself. He’d always say to people, ‘You’re doin’ excellent.’ He’d been a coach.”

Betty laughed. “You’re right! He’d always say that. Well, I
really
liked him. You know, I was skinny back then,” and she ran her hand down in front of herself. “And kind of cute. And I think he thought I was kind of cute. Who knows. But, boy, I was crazy about that guy.” Betty shook her head slowly, then pointed a finger at Olive and said, “You’re doin’ excellent.”

At four o’clock a different woman would show up; her name was Jane, and she was pleasant but Olive found her bland. Jane made dinner for her, and Olive told her she would like to be alone, so Jane went upstairs. And then when Olive woke up in the morning yet another woman was there, but she left soon and Betty came back.

A few days later, around four o’clock—when it was time for Jane to show up—Betty answered the door, and Olive heard her say “Hello,” but she heard something different in Betty’s voice, it was not as pleasant as it usually was. Olive got up and walked out into the hallway, and standing there was a young dark-skinned woman wearing a brilliant peach-colored headscarf, and a long robelike dress that was a deeper peach color. “Well, hello, hello,” said Olive. “Look at you! You look like a butterfly, come on in.”

The young woman smiled, a row of brilliant white teeth showing across her face. “Hello, Mrs. Kitteridge,” she said. “My name is Halima.”

“Well, just come right on in. Very nice to meet you,” Olive said, and the woman came into the living room and looked around and she said, “A big house.”

“Too big,” Olive said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Betty left, without saying a word, and Olive was disgusted by that. But Halima took right over; she got to work in the kitchen, asking Olive what she ate, and then she made the bed in the guest room, even though it was five o’clock, while Olive sat in the living room.

“Come sit,” Olive finally called to the woman, and so the woman came in and sat down and Olive thought again that she looked beautiful. “I’m going to call you Butterfly,” Olive said, and the woman smiled with those bright white teeth and shrugged and said, “Okay, but my name is Halima.”

“Now tell me, Ms. Halima Butterfly, you must come from Shirley Falls.”

And Halima said that was right; she had gone to Central Maine Community College and earned her nurse’s aide degree and—she shrugged, raising her arms slightly, her robe flapping like gentle wings—here she was, she said.

“You were born here?” Olive asked.

“I was born in Nashville. Then my mother moved here fifteen years ago.”

“Was she in one of those camps in Kenya?” Olive asked her.

And the woman’s face brightened. “You know about the camps?” she asked.

“Of course I do. Do you think I’m an ignorant fool?”

“No, I don’t think that.” Halima leaned back in the chair. “My mother was in the camp for eight years, and then she was able to come over here.”

“Do you like it here?” Olive asked.

Halima only smiled at her, and then said, “Let’s get you something to eat. You’re too skinny,” and this made Olive laugh. “I have never been skinny in my life, Ms. Halima Butterfly,” she said, and Halima went into the kitchen.

“Don’t just sit here and watch me eat,” Olive said to her after Halima had put out a slab of meatloaf and a baked potato done in the microwave. “If you’re not going to eat anything, get out of here.” So Halima swept herself away, then returned to the kitchen just as Olive was finishing with her meal.

“Why do you wear that stuff?” Olive asked.

Halima was washing the dishes, and she turned to smile at Olive over her shoulder. “It is who I am.” After a minute, Halima turned the water off and said, “Why do you wear
that
stuff?”

“Okay,” said Olive. “I was just asking.”

The next day Olive said, “Now you listen to me, Betty Boop.”

Betty sat down in the chair across from Olive.

“I saw how you treated that woman yesterday, and we’ll have none of that in this house.” Betty’s face—Olive could suddenly see this distinctly—looked as though she was twelve years old again and sulking. “And stop sulking,” Olive said. “Honest to God, it’s time you grew up.”

Betty shifted her rump on the chair and said, “You told me we weren’t going to discuss politics.”

“Damn right,” said Olive. “And that woman is not politics. She’s a person, and she has every right to be here.”

“Well, I don’t like the way she looks, that stuff she wears, it gives me the creeps. And it
is
politics,” Betty added.

Olive thought about this, and finally she sighed and said, “Well, in my house you are to be nice to her, do you understand?” And Betty got up and started to do some laundry.

At the end of that first week, Betty drove Olive to her appointment with Dr. Rabolinski. Olive had put lipstick on, and she sat next to Big Betty in her car; it was Olive’s car that Betty drove, Olive would honestly rather have died than be seen in a truck with that bumper sticker. Olive was silent, frightened to think of seeing this man again. In the waiting room of his office they sat for almost an hour, Betty flipping through magazines, sighing, and Olive just sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. Finally, the nurse called Olive in. Olive put the paper gown on and sat down on the examining table, and the nurse came back in and stuck things on her chest and did an EKG, then took the metal things off her and left Olive alone. Olive sat up. A mirror across from her caused her to look at herself and she was aghast. She thought she looked like a man in drag. The lipstick was so bright on her pale face! How had she not noticed this at home? She looked around for a tissue, urgent to get the foolish lipstick off, when Dr. Rabolinski walked in and closed the door behind him. “Hello, Olive,” he said. “How are you?”

“Hellish,” she said.

“Oh dear.” The man sat on a stool and wheeled it toward her. He sat gazing at her through his thick glasses. “Your EKG was just fine. Tell me why you feel hellish,” he said.

And Olive felt then that she was in the first grade, only she had become Squirrelly Sawyer, the boy who sat in front of her in that grade. Squirrelly Sawyer, that she would remember him now. He came from a very poor family and he never understood what the teacher wanted from him, and his state of confusion—and his constant silence—now came back to Olive with a rush of force. She herself could not speak as the doctor waited for her reply.

After a moment the doctor took his stethoscope and deftly slipped it through the opening of her gown to listen to Olive’s heart. Then he put the stethoscope on her back and told her to take deep breaths. “Again,” he said, and she breathed in deeply. “Again.” He sat back on the stool and said, “I like everything I hear.” He held her wrist and she realized he was taking her pulse, and she did not look at him. “Good,” he said, and wrote something down. He put the band of Velcro around her arm and pumped it up for her blood pressure and said “Good” again, and wrote that down as well. Then he sat on the stool once more, and she could tell he was looking at her and he said, “Now try and tell me why you feel hellish.”

And tears—
tears
, dear God!—slipped down her face and over her lips with that foolish lipstick; she felt them tremble. She could not speak, and she would not look at him. He handed her a tissue and she took it and wiped her eyes and her mouth, watching the streak of color come off on the tissue. He said, “Don’t worry, Olive. It’s natural. Don’t forget what I told you—after a heart attack it is common to feel depressed. You are going to feel better, I promise you that.”