Olive Kitteridge (13 page)

“I bought my son a ski mask like that,” Olive told him. “He lives in California and skis in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”

The boy looked at her. His eyes were pale blue, and his eyelashes were almost colorless. The whites of his eyes had spidery red veins. He kept staring at Olive without changing his hangdog expression. “Just please shut up,” he finally said.

         

Olive sat in her car in the far back of the hospital's parking lot, where she could see the blue door of the emergency room, but there was no shade and the sun baked through the windshield; even with the windows open, she was too warm. The lack of shade had not been a problem all year, of course. In the winter, she would come and sit with the car running. Never did she stay long. Only enough to gaze at the door and to remember the clean, bright lobby, the huge bathroom with its shiny chrome rail that ran along part of one wall; a rail that right now, perhaps, some old doddering lady was holding on to, in order to hoist herself off the toilet—the rail Olive had stared at as they all sat, legs splayed out, hands behind their backs. In hospitals, lives were changed all the time. A newspaper said the nurse had not returned to work, but maybe by now she had. About the doctor, Olive didn't know.

The kid kept getting up and sitting back down on the toilet seat. When he sat, he'd be hunched forward, the gun in one hand, the other hand folded in front of his mouth, him chewing the hell out of those fingertips. The sirens did not sound for very long. She had thought that, but maybe they had sounded for a long time. It was the pharmacist who'd been able to signal a janitor to call the police, a special unit brought to negotiate with Pig-Face, but none of them had known that then. A telephone kept ringing and stopping. They waited, the nurse rolling her head back, closing her eyes.

Olive's little plastic strip of a belt had come untied. The memory of this was a splotch of thick, dense paint. The belt, somewhere along the line, had come untied, and the papery gown was open. She tried crossing one leg over the other, but that made the gown open more, and she could see her big stomach with its folds, and her thighs, white as two massive fish bellies.

“Honestly,” Henry said. “Can't you find something to cover my wife? She's all exposed.”

“Shut up, Henry,” Olive said. The nurse opened her eyes and gazed over at Olive, and the doctor of course turned his head to look at her. They were all looking at her now. “God, Henry.”

The boy leaned forward, and said softly to Henry, “See—you gotta be quiet, or someone's gonna blow your head off. Your motherfucking head,” he added.

He sat back. His glance, as he looked around, fell on Olive, and he said, “Oh, Jesus, lady,” a look of real discomfort passing over his face.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” she said, furious—oh, she was furious; and if her teeth had been chattering before, she now felt sweat rolling down her face; she seemed to be one moist, furious sack of horror. She tasted salt and did not know if these were tears or rivulets of sweat.

“Okay, listen.” The kid took a deep, quick breath. He got up and came over to her, squatting down, putting the gun on the tile floor. “Any of you move, I'll kill you.” He looked around. “Just give me a fucking second here.” And then he tugged quickly on both sides of her papery blue robe, tied the white plastic strip in a knot right there on her stomach. His shaved head with the tiny glints of orange stubble was close to her. The top of his forehead was still red from where the ski mask had excited the skin. “Okay,” he said. He took his gun and went back and sat on the toilet.

That moment, right there, when he sat back down and she wanted him to look at her—that was a vivid paint spot on her mind. How much she wanted him to look at her right then, and he didn't.

         

In the car, Olive started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove past a drugstore, the doughnut shop, a dress shop that had been there forever, then she drove over the bridge. Farther ahead, if she continued that way, was the cemetery where her father was buried. Last week she had taken lilacs to put on his grave, though she wasn't one who went in, especially, for decorating graves. Pauline was down there in Portland, and this was the first year that Olive had not accompanied Henry on Memorial Day to plant geraniums at the head of Pauline's grave.

There had been a pounding on the bathroom door (locked from the inside by the kid, the way Olive herself had locked it) and the hurried, “Come on, come on, open up, it's
me
!” And then she had seen—Henry couldn't because of where he was sitting, but she had seen, when the kid opened the bathroom door that was being pounded upon—the horrible Pig-Face guy with the rifle hit the boy hard, crack him right across the face, shouting, “You took off your
mask
! You dumb-shit motherfucker!” Screaming, “You dumb
shit
!” There was an immediate resurgence of the thickening of her limbs, her eye muscles seemed to thicken, the air got thick; the whole thick, slow feeling of things not being real. Because now they would die. They had been thinking they wouldn't, but they saw again that they would: This was clear in Pig-Face's panicky voice.

The nurse started saying Hail Mary's quickly and loudly, and as far as Olive could remember, it was after the nurse had repeated for the umpteenth time “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb” that Olive said to her, “God, will you shut up with that crap?” And Henry said, “Olive, stop.” Siding with the nurse like that.

Olive, stopping at a red light, reaching down to put the bag from the fabric store back up onto the seat next to her, still didn't get it. She didn't get it. No matter how many times she went over it in her mind, she didn't understand why Henry had sided with the nurse like that. Unless it was because the nurse didn't swear (Olive bet that nurse could swear) and Henry, trussed up like a chicken and about to be shot, had been mad at Olive for swearing. Or for putting down Pauline earlier, when Olive had been trying to save his life.

Well, she had said some things about his mother then. After Pig-Face had screamed at the kid, and then disappeared again, and they all knew he'd be back to shoot them—in that blurry, thick, awful part when Henry said, “Olive, stop,” she, Olive, said some things about his mother then.

She said: “
You're
the one who can't stand these Hail-Mary Catholics! Your mother taught you that! Pauline was the only real Christian in the world, as far as Pauline was concerned. And her good boy, Henry. You two were the only good Christians in the whole goddamn world!”

She said things like that. She said: “Do you know what your mother told people when my father died? That it was a
sin
! How's that for Christian charity, I ask you?” The doctor said, “Stop now. Let's stop this,” but it was like an engine inside Olive had the switch flipped on, and the motor was accelerating; how did you stop such a thing?

She said the word
Jew.
She was crying, everything was all mixed up, and she said, “Did it ever occur to you that's why Christopher left? Because he married a Jew and knew his father would be judgmental—did you ever think of that, Henry?”

In the sudden silence in the room, the kid sitting on the toilet seat hiding his hit face in his arm, Henry said quietly, “That's a despicable thing to accuse me of, Olive, and you know it isn't true. He left because from the day your father died, you took over that boy's life. You didn't leave him any room. He couldn't stay married and stay in town, too.”

“Shut up!” Olive said. “Shut up, shut up.”

The boy stood up, holding that gun, saying, “Jesus fucking Christ. Oh
fuck,
man.”

Henry said, “Oh, no,” and Olive saw that Henry had wet himself; a dark stain grew in his lap, and down his trouser leg. The doctor said, “Let's try and be calm. Let's try and be quiet.”

And they could hear the crackling of walkie-talkies out in the hall, the sound of the strong, unexcited speech of people in charge, and the boy started to cry. He cried without trying to hide it, and he held the small gun, still standing up. There was a gesture with his arm, a tentative move, and Olive whispered, “Oh,
don't.
” For the rest of Olive's life she would be certain the boy had thought of turning the gun on himself, but the policemen then were everywhere, covered with dark vests and helmets. When they cut the duct tape from her wrists, her arms and shoulders ached so that she couldn't put her arms down by her sides.

         

Henry was standing on the front deck, looking over the bay. She had thought he would be working in the garden, but there he was, just standing, looking out over the water.

“Henry.” Her heart was thumping ferociously.

He turned. “Hello, Olive. You're back. You were gone longer than I thought you'd be.”

“I bumped into Cynthia Bibber and she wouldn't shut up.”

“What's new with Cynthia?”

“Nothing. Not one thing.”

She sat down in the canvas deck chair. “Listen,” she said. “I don't remember. But you defended that woman, and I was just trying to help you. I didn't think you'd want to hear that Catholic mumbo jumbo crap.”

He shook his head once, as though he had water in his ear that he was trying to shake out. After a moment he opened his mouth, then closed it. He turned back to look at the water, and for a long time neither said anything. Earlier in their marriage, they'd had fights that had made Olive feel sick the way she felt now. But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different. She felt the sun's warmth on her arms, although down here under the hill by the water, the air held the hint of nippiness.

The bay was sparkling brilliantly in the afternoon sun. A small outboard cut across toward Diamond Cove, its bow riding high, and farther out was a sailboat with a red sail, and a white one. There was the sound of the water touching against the rocks; it was almost high tide. A cardinal called from the Norwegian pine, and there was the fragrance of bayberry leaves from the bushes that were soaking up the sun.

Slowly, Henry turned and lowered himself onto the wooden bench there, leaning forward, resting his head in his hands. “Do you know, Ollie,” he said, looking up, his eyes tired, the skin around them red. “In all the years we've been married, all the years, I don't believe you've ever once apologized. For anything.”

She flushed immediately and deeply. She could feel her face burn beneath the sunshine that fell upon it. “Well, sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, taking her sunglasses from where they'd been resting on top of her head, and putting them back on. “What exactly are you saying?” she asked. “What in hell ails you? What in hell is this all about? Apologies? Well, I'm sorry then. I
am
sorry I'm such a hell of a rotten wife.”

He shook his head and leaned forward, placing his hand on her knee. You rode along in life a certain way, Olive thought. Just like she'd ridden home from Cook's Corner for years, past Taylor's field, before Christopher's house had even been there; then his house was there, Christopher was there; and then after a while he wasn't. Different road, and you had to get used to that. But the mind, or the heart, she didn't know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn't get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it.

“Olive, we were scared that night.” He gave her knee a faint squeeze. “We were both scared. In a situation most people in a whole lifetime are never in. We said things, and we'll get over them in time.” But he stood up, and turned and looked out over the water, and Olive thought he had to turn away because he knew what he said wasn't true.

They would never get over that night. And it wasn't because they'd been held hostage in a bathroom—which Andrea Bibber would think was the crisis. No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl, picturing him at his sedulous afternoon work in the prison garden; ready to make him a gardening smock as the prison liaison had told her she could do, with the fabric she bought at So-Fro today, unable to help herself, as Karen Newton must have been with her man from Midcoast Power—poor, pining Karen, who had produced a child who'd said, Just because you're my grandmother doesn't mean I have to love you, you know.

Winter Concert

I
n the dark of the car, his wife, Jane, sat with her nice black coat buttoned up all the way—the coat they'd bought together last year, going through all those stores. Hard work; they'd get thirsty and end up having a sundae at the place on Water Street, the sullen young waitress always giving their senior discount even though they never asked; they had joked about that—how the girl had no idea, as she plunked down their mugs of coffee, that her own arm would someday be sprinkled with age spots, or that cups of coffee had to be planned since blood pressure medicine made you widdle so much, that life picked up speed, and then most of it was gone—made you breathless, really.

“Oh, this is fun,” his wife said now, gazing through the night at all the houses they passed, lit up with different Christmas lights, and it made Bob Houlton smile as he drove; his wife contented, her hands folded on her lap. “All these lives,” she said. “All the stories we never know.” And he smiled further, reaching to touch her mittened hand because he had known she might be thinking that.

Her small gold earring caught the light from a streetlamp as she turned her head. “Remember on our honeymoon,” she asked, “when you wanted me to care about those old Mayan ruins the way you did, and all I wanted to know was which people on the bus had pom-poms on their shower curtains back home? And we had that fight, because deep down you were scared you'd married a dull thing? Pleasant, but dull.”

He said no, he didn't remember that at all, and she sighed deeply to let him know she thought he did, pointing, then, to a house on the corner done all in blue lights, strings of blue lights up and down the whole front of it, turning her head to keep looking as the car moved past.

He said, “I'm mental, Janie.”

“Very mental,” she agreed. “You have the tickets?”

He nodded.

“Funny to have tickets in order to get into a church.”

In fact, it made sense to move the concert into St. Catherine's after this latest storm had caused the roof of Macklin Music Hall to cave in. No one had been hurt, but it made Bob Houlton shudder; he had an image of sitting in the plush red seats, he and Jane, and the roof falling in, the two of them suffocating, their life together ending in that horrible way. He was prone to that sort of thinking these days. He had even had a sense of foreboding coming out tonight, but it wasn't something he'd say; and she loved seeing all these lights.

And she was happy right now, it was true. Jane Houlton, shifting slightly inside her nice black coat, was thinking that, after all, life was a gift—that one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren't just moments, they were gifts. And how nice, really, that people should celebrate with such earnestness this time of year. No matter what people's lives might hold (some of these houses they were passing would have to hold some woeful tribulations, Janie knew), still and all, people were compelled to celebrate because they knew somehow, in their different ways, that life was a thing to celebrate.

He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. “Well, that was nice,” she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.

Downtown the cars moved slowly on Main Street, passing by streetlamps that had large wreaths hung on their poles, and shop windows and restaurants that were lit up. Just past the movie theater, Bob saw a parking spot next to the curb and pulled the car over; it took some time, he had to work hard to ease in between the others. Someone from behind them honked with annoyance.

“Oh, phooey to you.” Jane made a face through the dark.

He straightened the wheels, turned the engine off. “Wait there, Janie, till I come around.”

They weren't young anymore, this was the thing. They kept telling each other as though they couldn't believe it. But they had each of them in this last year suffered a mild heart attack; hers first—feeling, she said, as though she had eaten too many of the grilled onions at dinner that night. And then his, months later, not feeling like that at all, more like someone had sat hard on his chest, but with his jaw aching the same way Jane's had.

They felt okay now. But she was seventy-two and he was seventy-five and unless a roof fell down on them both together, one would, presumably, be living without the other at some point in time.

Shop windows twinkled with Christmas lights, and the air smelled like snow. He took Jane's arm and they walked down the street, where restaurant windows displayed different arrangements of holly or wreaths, and some windowpanes had their corners spray-painted white. “The Lydias,” Jane said. “Wave, honey.”

“Where?”

“Just wave, honey. Over there.”

“There's no point in my waving if I don't see who I'm waving to.”

“The Lydias, right there in the steak house. Ages since we've seen them.” Jane was waving cheerfully, excessively. He saw the couple through the window now, on either side of a white tablecloth, and he waved, too. Mrs. Lydia was motioning for them to come in.

Bob Houlton put his arm through Jane's. “I don't want to,” he said, waving his other hand at the Lydias.

Jane waved more, shook her head, gestured, mouthing each word with exaggeration: “We'll see you lay-ter. At the concert?” Nodding. More waving, they were on their way. “She looks good,” Jane said. “I'm kind of surprised how good she looks. She must have colored her hair.”

“Did you want to go in?”

“No,” said Jane. “I want to look in store windows. It's nice out here, not too cold.”

“Now fill me in,” he said, as they continued walking, thinking of the Lydias, whose name was not actually Lydia, but Granger—Alan and Donna Granger. The daughter, Lydia Granger, had been friends with the middle Houlton girl, and Patty Granger had been friends with the youngest Houlton girl. Bob and Jane referred to the parents of their daughters' friends, even now, by the children's names.

“Lydia's been divorced a few years now. The guy bit her. That part's supposed to be a secret, I think.”

“Bit her? Or beat her?”

“Bit.” Jane snapped her teeth together twice. “You know, chomp, chomp. He was a veterinarian, I think.”

“Did he bite the kids, too?”

“I don't believe he bit the children. Two children. One of them is hyperactive, can't concentrate, whatever it is these days when a kid can't sit still. The Lydias won't mention it, so don't bring it up. The woman with the pink hair in the library told me all this. Let's go. I want to be able to sit on an aisle.”

Ever since her heart attack, Jane had been worried about dying in public. She had had her attack in the kitchen of her home, but the idea that she might fall over in front of people made her very anxious. Years ago, she had witnessed such a thing, a man dead on the sidewalk. The medics had ripped his shirt open, and it could still make her cry if she thought about it hard enough—the tender unknowingness, the
goneness
of his flung-wide arms, his belly showing. Poor darling thing, she had thought, to be lying there dead.

“And I want to sit toward the back,” her husband said. She nodded. His bowels weren't what they used to be; sometimes he had to leave a place in a hurry.

The church was dark and cold, almost empty. They handed over their tickets and were given programs, which they held with a tentativeness while they walked into one of the back pews, settling in, unbuttoning their coats, but leaving them on.

“Keep an eye out for the Lydias,” Jane said, turning her head.

He held her hand, picked nervously at her fingertips.

“Was it Lydia who slept over every weekend for a while there, or was that her sister?” Bob asked, while Jane craned her neck back, looking up at the ceiling of the church, the large, dark rafters.

“That was Patty, her sister. Not as nice a girl as Lydia.” Jane leaned in closer toward her husband and whispered, “Lydia had an abortion in high school, you know.”

“I know, I remember.”

“You do?” Jane looked at her husband, surprised.

“Sure,” Bob said. “You told me she used to come to your office with cramps. She came in once and cried for two days.”

“That's right,” said Jane, warmer now inside her coat. “Poor thing. I suspected it right then, frankly, and pretty soon after that Becky told me it was true. I'm really surprised you remember that.” She chewed her lip pensively, rocked her foot up and down a few times.

“What?” Bob said. “You thought I never listened? I listened, Janie.”

But she waved a hand and sighed, and settled herself against the back of the pew before she said, musingly, “I liked working there.” And she had. She had liked, especially, the adolescent girls, the young, bumbling, oily-skinned, scared girls that talked too loud, or snapped their gum ferociously, or slunk through the corridor with their heads down—she'd loved them, really. And they knew it. They would come to her office with their terrible cramps, lying on the couch gray-faced and dry-lipped with pain. “My father says it's all in my head,” more than one girl had said, and oh, it broke her heart. What a lonely thing to be a young girl! She would let them stay sometimes all afternoon.

The church was slowly beginning to fill up. Olive Kitteridge walked in, tall and broad-shouldered in a navy-blue coat, her husband behind her. Henry Kitteridge touched his wife's arm, indicating they take a seat in a pew nearby, but Olive shook her head and they sat instead two pews closer to the front of the church. “I don't know how he can stand her,” Bob murmured to Jane.

They watched the Kitteridges settle into their pew, Olive shaking off her coat, then placing it back on her shoulders, Henry helping her. Olive Kitteridge had taught math at the school Jane had worked at; very seldom had the two women spoken at length. Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology, and Jane had kept her distance. In response to Bob's remark now, Jane merely shrugged.

Turning her head, she saw the Lydias going up the back steps to the balcony. “Oh, there they are,” she said to Bob. “Such a long time since we've seen them. She looks pretty good.”

He squeezed her hand and whispered, “So do you.”

The members of the orchestra came out in their black clothes and took their seats up front by the pulpit. Music stands were adjusted, legs set at an angle, chins tilted, bows picked up—and then the disharmonious sound of an orchestra warming up.

It bothered Jane that she knew something about Lydia Granger that Mrs. Lydia might not, even now, know. It felt indecent, invasive. But people ended up knowing things. When you were a school nurse, or a pink-haired librarian, you ended up knowing who married alcoholics, whose kids had attention deficit disorder (that's what it was), who threw dishes, who slept on the couch. She didn't want to think there were people in this church right now who knew things about her children that she didn't know herself. She ducked her head toward Bob and said, “I hope there aren't people in this church right now who know things about my kids that I don't know.”

The music started, and he winked one eye at her slowly, reassuringly.

During Debussy he fell asleep, his arms folded across his chest. Glancing at her husband, Jane felt her heart swell with the music, and with love for him, this man next to her, this old (!) man, who had been followed through life by his own childhood troubles—a mother always, always mad at him. In his face right now she felt she could see the little boy, furtive, forever scared; even as he slept here at this very moment there was a tautness of anxiety on his face. A gift, she thought again, placing her mittened hand lightly on his leg, a gift to be able to know someone for so many years.

         

Mrs. Lydia had had her eyes done; they stared out of her head like a sixteen-year-old's.

“You look wonderful,” Jane told her, although close-up the effect was frightening. “Just wonderful,” she repeated, because it must have been scary, having someone take a scalpel so close to your eyes. “How's Lydia?” Jane asked. “And the others?”

“Lydia's getting married again,” Mrs. Lydia said, moving aside to let someone get by. “We're happy about it.”

Her husband, squatty, round-shouldered, rolled his eyes and jiggled change in his pocket. “Gets expensive,” he said, and his wife, a red felt hat tucked over her gold hair, gave him a fleeting look, which he seemed to ignore. “All those damn psychiatrist bills,” he added, saying this to Bob with a kind of man-to-man laugh.

“Sure,” said Bob, affably.

“But tell us, what are your bunny rabbits up to?” Mrs. Lydia's lipstick was dark, perfectly lined on her lips.

And so Jane recited the ages of their grandchildren, described the jobs held by her sons-in-law, the girl they were hoping Tim would marry soon. And because the Lydias only nodded at all this, without even saying “How nice,” Jane felt compelled to go on, to fill the space between their close, almost hovering, faces. “Tim went skydiving this year,” she said, and told them how this had scared her to death. It seemed he'd gotten over it after a few times; he hadn't mentioned it again. “But honestly,” Jane said, shivering, hugging her black coat close. “Jumping out of a plane, can you imagine?” She herself could imagine it only too well, and it made her heart race.

“Not really a risk taker, are you, Jane?” Mrs. Lydia was looking at her with those new eyes; unnerving to have a sixteen-year old's eyes looking at you from an old woman's head.

“No,” said Jane, but she felt indistinctly that she had been insulted, and when Bob's arm came up to touch her elbow, she felt he had received this, for her, in that way, too.

“You've always been a favorite of mine, Janie Houlton,” said the squat, red-faced Mr. Lydia then, abruptly reaching over and rubbing her shoulder through her nice black coat.