“You’re very popular,” Helen said to Margaret as they continued down the street, and Margaret said, “I’m a minister. When we moved here a few years ago, I was lucky to get a part-time job with the UU church.”
“The what church?” asked Helen.
“Unitarian,” said Margaret.
And Helen said, after a moment, “Well, you’re still popular.” Margaret looked at Helen through her sunglasses and laughed, and so Helen laughed as well. They were moving past a café that had its doors open. Helen stopped and brought out a straw hat from her bag, the hat could be rolled up, and now she unrolled it and put it on her head.
“You look like a tourist,” Margaret said to her, and Helen said, “Well, I am a tourist.”
Another man walked by, he had a gray beard, and Helen saw that he was wearing a skirt. Helen looked away, then looked back at him. It was a kilt, she realized, though it didn’t seem as long as a kilt usually was. It was brown, and the man wore a gray T-shirt and brown walking shoes. “Hello, Fergie,” said Margaret, and the man said, “Hello, Margaret.”
When they were past him, Helen said, “Why was he wearing that?”
“I guess he likes it,” Margaret said.
“I’ve lived in New York for fifty years, and I have never seen a man walking down the street in a skirt,” said Helen. “A kilt,” she added. Margaret turned her sunglasses toward Helen, and Helen said, raising a finger, “Whoops, that’s not true. There used to be a man who went jogging on Third Avenue in a black negligee. Which is still not a skirt.”
“Well, I guess you win,” said Margaret. “Far as I know we have no men jogging about in black negligees.”
“He was old, too. The man in the black negligee,” Helen said.
Margaret kept walking.
“It was kind of weird,” Helen said. “You know.”
And Margaret didn’t say anything; she just stopped at the next booth of art.
Helen was becoming hot, even with her hat stopping the sun from hitting her straight on her head, and she said to Margaret as she stepped up behind her, “I didn’t know it got so warm in Maine.”
Margaret said, “Well, it does.”
And then Helen decided she would buy a piece of art. That’s what she decided to do so that Margaret wouldn’t think she was a snob, because maybe Margaret was thinking that Helen was a snob. “Hold on,” she said, touching Margaret lightly on the arm. “Let me look at these paintings.” They were seascapes, a lot of purple waves and foaming spray. Helen found one, a smaller piece stuck up high on the white canvas: It was a painting of a rock with water swirling around it. “Oh, I’ll take that,” Helen said, and she brought out her credit card and the fellow seemed very pleased to sell it to her. “I’ll just take it, no need to wrap it in anything,” Helen said, because the fellow was ready to put it in brown wrapping paper.
As Helen took the painting and turned to go, she bumped into a tall big old woman who was saying loudly to the man she was with, “God, have I seen enough of this crap! Come on, Jack.”
Margaret said, “Oh, hello, Olive.”
The woman looked surprised and she said, “Hello, Margaret.” Then she looked Helen up and down through her sunglasses; Helen could see the woman’s head move slightly as she took Helen in. “Who are you?” the woman asked.
“I’m Margaret’s sister-in-law,” Helen said, and the woman kept looking at her and Helen added, “My husband is Bob’s brother, and we came up from New York to drop our grandson off at camp.”
The woman said, “Well.” She pointed a finger at the painting Helen held. “You enjoy that,” and she turned around, waving a hand over her head as she and the man walked past the two of them.
“She’s got me all stuffed up on antidepressants,” Jim was saying. He shrugged, and gave his lopsided grin to his brother and sister. “What can I do?”
“Are you depressed, Jimmy?” Susan sat down at the kitchen table across from her brother. Susan was an optometrist, and she had taken the afternoon off to be with both of them. Sunlight fell through the window, making a square on the table and across Susan’s arm.
“Well, not now.” And Jim laughed.
Susan and Bob did not laugh, and Susan said, “But were you before?”
Jim placed his hands together on the table and looked off to the side. “I don’t know.” He looked around the kitchen some more; it was a small kitchen, but Susan’s house was a small house. There were orange curtains at the kitchen windows, one was just slightly lifting in the breeze from the open window; the room was warm. “But she seems to think I’m easier to live with when I’m on them, so—I am. On them.” Jim looked at Bob and smiled. “Maximum dose, so I don’t drink. Which is okay. But I’ll tell you, Helen’s taken up the sauce. She enjoys her nightly wine, I have noticed that.”
Susan glanced at Bob, and they both said nothing for a few moments. Then Susan said, “But you’re okay, though. Right?”
“Sure,” Jim said, looking from one to the other. To Bob it seemed as though he was looking at Jim through a pane of glass; he understood now what was different about Jim. His edge was gone. It’s not that he had mellowed, it’s that he was medicated. Bob felt a slight tightening of his chest, and he sat up straight.
Jim added, “Got that huge house now, all done up spiffy.” His face glistened just slightly.
“You don’t like it?” Susan asked, plucking at the front of her blue-and-white-striped blouse, and Jim looked serious.
“You know,” Jim said, as though he was just realizing this now, “I really don’t. I miss the old way it was, it was a pretty great house, and now it’s like …” He looked around Susan’s kitchen as though the answer was there.
“A palace,” Bob said. “It looks like a modern palace.”
“Yeah,” Jim said slowly, looking at Bob, nodding.
“Well, maybe it was your penance for having those affairs,” Susan said, and Jim said immediately, “Oh, it was, there’s no doubt about that.”
Jim and Helen lived in a brownstone in Park Slope, and a few years earlier they had renovated the entire place. When Bob first stepped inside after the renovation, he could not believe it was the same house. All the old original woodwork, the horsehair wallpaper, all of that was gone, and the house seemed as sleek as a palace. “What do you think?” Helen asked, eagerly, almost breathlessly, and Bob said it was amazing. “Really something,” he said.
“You don’t like it,” Helen answered, and Bob had said that wasn’t true at all, but it was true.
Susan got up to turn off the teakettle, and as she made tea—three mugs with a tea bag in each—Jim said, “I miss Maine.”
Bob said, “What?” And Jim repeated what he had said.
“Do you? I’ve been thinking about Mommy a lot,” Susan said, turning her head toward Jim.
“That’s funny,” Jim said, “because I have too.”
“What have you been thinking?” Susan asked. She brought two mugs to the table and turned back to get the third.
“I don’t know. What a hard life she had.” Jim said, “You know what else I’ve been thinking about recently? We were really poor growing up.”
Susan said, “You just now figured that out?” She laughed abruptly. “Jimmy, my goodness, of course we were poor.”
Jim looked at Bob. “Did you know that?”
Bob said, “Ah—yes. I did know that, Jim.”
“You know, I’ve been rich so long—I mean, I’ve lived like a rich person for so long—that I kind of forgot that when we grew up we were really pretty poor.”
“Well, we were, Jimmy,” Susan said. “I can’t believe you forgot that. We had newspapers stuffed into all the windows to keep the cold out.”
“I didn’t forget it. I’m just saying I haven’t thought about it.”
Susan sat down. “But we weren’t unhappy,
really.” She looked from one brother to the other. “Were we?”
“Nah,” Bob said, just as Jim said, “Yes.”
“Jimmy, you were unhappy?” Susan, who had picked up her mug, now put it back down.
“Of course I was unhappy. I thought I had killed Dad, and every day I thought about that. And about how I let Bob take the blame. Every day I thought of that.”
Susan shook her head slowly. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Bob said, “Jim, just let that go. We were kids. We’ll never know what really happened.”
Jim looked at him. “Well,” Jim finally said, “it’s okay to tell me to let it go now, but it was with me every day of my life.” He looked around, crossed one leg over the other. “Every single day.”
“Look,” Bob said—and he was sort of quoting Margaret—“if it had happened today we probably would have all gone to therapy and talked about it. But it happened more than fifty years ago, and nobody ever mentioned anything back then, not up here in Shirley Falls—anything. And you got caught in the middle of it.” He added, “I’m really sorry, Jimmy.”
Jim looked at him with seriousness. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry, Bobby.”
Susan reached and put her hand over Jim’s hand that held his mug of tea. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said. “Well, we’re all here, we all made it through.”
A look of sadness came over Jim’s face, and Bob tried to think of something to say to dispel it, but Susan was asking Bob about Pam. “How’s she doing?” Susan asked. “You know, I think one of the funnest summers was when she lived with us in that house. She was pretty great. Not everyone would have wanted to spend their summer from college living with us in that tiny house, but she did. I guess she came from a small place too. Jim, you were gone …” And Jim nodded. “Anyway, I think of her. She’s okay?”
The last time Bob had been to New York, he had called his ex-wife, Pam, and they had met at a café near where she lived on the Upper East Side. “Bobby!” she said, and threw her arms around him. She looked the same, only older, and he told her this, and she laughed and said, “Well, you look great.”
“I’ve missed you,” he said, and this was true.
“Oh, Bobby, I’ve missed you so much,” she said, flicking her hair back; it was shoulder-length hair, dyed a nice reddish color. “I just keep thinking, are you okay up there in that awful state of Maine? Oh, I don’t mean to say it’s awful—it just seems so …”
“Awful,” he said, and they laughed. “I’m fine, Pam. It’s all just fine.”
As Bob remembered this now, he felt a surge of love for Pam; they had married right out of college, just kids. And they had stayed married for almost fifteen years. In Bob’s mind, Pam had left him when she found out—when they found out—that Bob couldn’t father children. And it had broken Bob’s heart. Only later did he realize it had broken Pam’s heart as well, but she found a man, and had her two boys—boys that Bob had met over the years, great kids they were—and her husband seemed fine. She never complained about him; he was a top manager of a pharmaceutical company, and Pam had tons of money now, but whenever she and Bobby got together, they were just like kids again. Only older, and they both said this every time they met.
“She’s great,” Bob said to Susan.
Margaret had not liked New York. This had been evident to Bob on their one visit there together: He saw her fear as they walked down the stairs to the subway, and even though he tried to reassure her, and she tried—he could see this—to take it all in stride, it had not really gone that well, because Bob could not stop himself from sensing her discomfort, and it had made him sad, because he loved New York, where he had lived for thirty years before meeting Margaret in Maine.
“Will you tell Pam I was asking about her?” Susan said, and Bob said of course he would.
Jim said, “You’re better off with Margaret,” and Susan said, “Why do you say that?”
But Bob said, “Susan, tell us how Zach is. Jim said he seemed pretty good when he came to New York.”
“Oh, Zach.” Susan ran her hand through her hair, which was gray and wavy and cut just above her shoulders. “Jim, he’s doing so well. Into computer programming, as I’m sure he told you, and he’s going to marry that girlfriend he met down in Massachusetts.”
“Do you like her?” Jim asked. He raised his tea mug, took a sip, returned it to the table.
“I do.”
“Well, there we are.” Jim looked around now as though a restlessness had come over him. “You know, you guys, I’d like to come back up here more. I miss it. I miss Shirley Falls, and I miss you both.”
Bob and Susan looked at each other, Susan widening her eyes slightly. “Well, do,” she said. “Boy, we would love that.”
“I gained ten pounds this year,” Jim said. “Can you tell?”
“Nah,” said Bob. He was lying.
“Bob, you still boozing it up?” Jim squinted at his brother.
“No. Maybe one glass a night at most. And I haven’t had a cigarette since I married Margaret.”
Jim shook his head slowly. “Amazing.” Then he asked Susan, “How’s the eye business?”
“Booming,” Susan said. “I could retire, but I don’t feel like it. I like my job.”
“Look at you two,” Jim said.
Back in the small apartment, Helen said, “How about a glass of wine?”
Margaret looked surprised—to Helen she looked that way—and she said, “Okay,” and she got out the bottle of white wine that Bob had put in the refrigerator earlier and opened it and poured a small amount into a mason jar. She handed it to Helen.
“Lovely,” Helen said, and decided she would not make a joke about the wineglass. “You’re not having any?” Margaret shook her head, sitting down in the rocking chair that had the split upholstery; Helen sat on the couch. Helen crossed her legs and swung a foot. “So,” she said.
“So,” Margaret said.
“Oh, let me show you just a few more pics of my grandkids,” and Helen brought out her phone. “I just keep thinking about little Ernie. I’m just not sure he’s old enough to be at camp all by himself, but his parents wanted him to, and even Ernie seemed keen on it, but the cabin he was in seemed—well, terribly rustic.” When Margaret didn’t respond, Helen found some pictures on her phone and had Margaret look at many pictures of her three grandchildren. She told Margaret how little Sarah was talking already—almost full sentences and she was barely two, could you believe it? “No,” said Margaret, peering at the phone through the glasses she wore on the string that fell over her chest. Then Margaret sat back and sighed.
Helen rose and went into the kitchen, returning with the bottle of wine. She poured more into her glass and then said, looking at her phone again, presenting it to Margaret, “And look at Karen! She’s three, and she’s so different from her brother, he’s all confident and outgoing, and Karen—don’t you like that name, Karen? it’s so straightforward—and she is just the sweetest little thing—” Helen looked up at Margaret and said, “I’m talking about my grandchildren too much.”
Margaret said, “Yes. You are.”
Helen felt a sense of disbelief, and her face got hot immediately. She put her phone into her handbag, and when she looked back at Margaret, she saw that Margaret’s cheeks were pink as well. “I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I’m very sorry. I know you and Bobby never—”
“No, having no children makes us different. We feel fine about it, but it does get tiresome to hear—” Margaret waved a hand and stopped. “I apologize. I’m sure your grandchildren are all just wonderful.”
Helen took two big swallows of the wine and felt the warmth of it spread through her chest. “I wonder when the boys will be back,” said Helen, looking around the place; she was mad at Margaret now, just plain mad. She stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use yo
ur bathroom.”
“Of course,” Margaret said.
Helen took her wine with her and finished the glass as soon as she closed the bathroom door. But then she realized that if she called Jim, everything could be overheard, so she sat on the toilet and texted him. Jimmy, she texted, where are you? M is making me NUTS. She waited, and there was no response. Then she texted, I think she is GRUESOME. Oh, come on, Jimmy, she thought, and then she worried that Margaret would not hear her peeing—because Helen had not needed to—and so she tried, and then she made a small gaseous sound, which was very upsetting, Margaret was right out there listening! After a moment she stood up and washed her hands carefully—the towel looked a little grimy—and then she returned to where Margaret was still sitting in the rocking chair as though she hadn’t moved at all.
Helen poured herself more wine.
“I really am awfully sorry,” Margaret said to her.
“No, no, that’s fine.” Helen drank the wine.
On the drive back to Crosby, Jim said, “You know, Bobby, here’s the truth: I’ve loved Helen even more since she redid the house.” He glanced over at Bob, who sat without moving. “You know why?”
“No,” said Bob.
“Because she actually thought it would help. She thought if she changed the house it would eradicate everything that had gone on in it, meaning that last year when I fell apart and screwed those dopes, and Helen really thought, If we change things, it will be different.”
Olive, Again (ARC) Page 18