Olive, Again (ARC)

by Elizabeth Strout

  “Were you hurt?”

  “Cracked my sternum.”

  “God,” Andrea said.

  “It’s fine.” Olive pulled her jacket closed. “I move more slowly, and now I just drive in the early morning. Try to, anyway. I totaled two cars in the parking lot that day.”

  “Two?”

  “Two. That’s right. Well, three, if you count mine. I had to get my friend Edith’s husband, Buzzy Stevens, to help me get another car when the insurance check came in. I don’t think Buzzy cared much for that, but there we are. No one was hurt. Just me. Shook me up, I will say.”

  “Well, of course,” Andrea said in her deep voice.

  “I saw on Facebook you were just in Oslo,” said Olive. She ate some of her egg.

  “You follow me on Facebook? Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious. You just had a whole Scandinavian tour doing poetry readings. I went to Oslo with my second husband, I’ve had two husbands,” Olive said. “And with my second husband we went to Oslo and took a boat—a cruise, I guess it was—around the fjords. They were beautiful, they were. My word. But then Jack got sad, and then I got sad, and we both said, It’s beautiful here, but not as pretty as home. We felt better once we’d figured that out.” Olive wiped her nose with a paper napkin that was on the table. She felt as though she was panting.

  The girl was watching her carefully.

  “I don’t know what you thought about the fjords, but that’s what we thought.” Olive said this, and sat back.

  “I never saw the fjords.”

  “You never saw the fjords?”

  “No.” Andrea sat up straight. “I gave a reading and hung around with my publisher, and then I had to move on. I wanted to move on. I guess I really don’t care about the fjords.”

  “Huh,” Olive said.

  “I get lonely when I travel,” Andrea said.

  Olive wasn’t sure she’d heard this right, but she decided she had, and she thought about it. “Well,” she said, “you were probably always lonely.”

  Andrea looked at her then, gave her a look that confused Olive somewhat; the girl’s eyes were brown but almost a little bit hazel too, and they seemed to break into a tenderness around their corners as she looked at Olive. The girl said nothing.

  If there was one student Olive had had over her vast years as a seventh-grade math teacher, if there was one student who was not going to be famous, it was Andrea L’Rieux. The only reason Olive even remembered her was because she used to see the girl out walking alone, and so sad-looking. Such a sad-looking face that girl had. But she had been no student; nope, she had certainly not been that. Not even in English class, because when the girl began to rise to prominence, when she became Poet Laureate of the United States (!) a number of years ago, even her high school English teacher had told a reporter that Andrea had not been much of a student. Horrible old Irene White, stupid as a stick and wouldn’t have known talent if she’d seen it, but still—

  “Irene White is dead,” Olive told Andrea, and Andrea nodded and shrugged a slight shrug.

  “She seemed old when I had her,” Andrea said. “I remember rouge would get stuck in the wrinkles of her cheeks.”

  “Well, she sure wasn’t very generous about you,” Olive said, and when the girl looked at her with surprise, Olive realized that Andrea had not seen the article.

  And then Andrea said, “I don’t read anything about myself.”

  “Good idea,” Olive said. “Anyway, when they came snooping to me, I said nothing.”

  She’d have had nothing to say. She wasn’t going to say the girl had been sad-faced, that she came from a family with God knows how many siblings, let others say that. And they did! But not the sad-faced part; apparently no one but Olive had seen the girl walking the roads of Crosby, Maine, thirty years ago. The sun went down on the apple trees / and held the dark red seemingly forever. This was the only line of Andrea’s poetry that Olive could remember. Maybe because it was the only line she liked. She had read a great deal of Andrea’s poetry. Everyone in town seemed to have read Andrea’s poetry. Her books were always center on display at the bookstore. People said they loved her work. Andrea L’Rieux had been hailed as all sorts of things: feminist, postmodernist, political mixing with the natural. She was a “confessional poet,” and Olive thought there were some things a person need not confess. (There were “angry vaginas” in one poem, Olive remembered now.)

  “Thank you,” Andrea said. “For not talking to any reporter,” she added. And then she shook her head and said, almost to herself, “I just hate it all.”

  “Oh, come on now,” Olive said. “It has to be fun. You got to meet the president.”

  Andrea nodded. “I did.”

  “It’s not everyone from Crosby, Maine, who gets to rub shoulders with the president.” Olive added, “What was he like?”

  “I think he just shook my hand.” Now her eyes held mirth as she looked at Olive.

  Olive said, “And his wife? Did you shake hands with her as well?”

  “I did.”

  “So what are they like?” Olive loved this president. She thought he was smart, and his wife was smart, and what a hell of a job he had, with Congress being so horrible to him. She would be sorry to see him go.

  “He was kind of arrogant. His wife was very nice. She said she read my poetry and loved it, blah-fucking-blah-blah.” Andrea tugged a stray piece of hair back behind her ear.

  Olive finished her egg. She thought surely a poet could find words other than the phrase Andrea had just used. “Use your words,” Olive had told her son, Christopher, when he was small. “Stop whining and use your words.” Now Olive said to Andrea, “My husband—Jack, my second husband—he would have agreed with you about the arrogance.” When the girl made no response to this, Olive asked, “What are you doing up here?”

  Andrea exhaled a long sigh. “My father got sick. So—”

  “My father killed himself,” Olive said. She started in on her muffin, which she always kept until last.

  “Your father did? He committed suicide?”

  “That’s right.”

  After a moment, Andrea asked, “How?”

  “How? Gun.”

  “Really,” Andrea said. “I had no idea.” She put both hands on her ponytail and smoothed it over her shoulder. “How old were you?”

  “Thirty. Why would you have any idea? I assume your father is not going to kill himself.”

  “I think it’s unusual for a woman to use a gun,” Andrea said, picking up the saltshaker and looking at it. “Men, yes, that’s what they do. But women—usually I think it’s pills with women.” She sent the saltshaker spinning just slightly across the table.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “No.” Andrea pulled her fingers through her hair that was just above the ponytail. After a few moments, she said, “My father wouldn’t know how to kill himself. He’s, you know, not right in the head anymore. He never was right in the head. But you know what I mean.”

  “You mean he’s demented. But what do you mean he was never right in the head?”

  “I dunno.” Andrea seemed deflated now. She shrugged. “He was just always—he was just always so mean.”

  Olive knew from Andrea’s poetry that the girl had never liked her father, but Olive could not now seem to remember any particular reason for this, he was not a drunk, she’d have remembered that— Olive said, “So now he’s going to die?”

  “Supposedly.”

  “And your mother is dead.” Olive knew this; the girl’s poetry had been about that.

  “Oh, she passed twenty years ago. She’d had eight kids. I mean, come on.”

  “You don’t have any kids, am I right?” Olive glanced up as she pulled apart her muffin.

  “No. I had enough of babies growing up.”

&n
bsp; “Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.” Olive drummed her fingers on the tabletop, then put the muffin piece into her mouth. After she swallowed, she repeated, “Just a needle in your goddamn heart.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Oh, I have just the one. A son. That’s enough. I have a stepdaughter too. She’s lovely. Lovely girl.” Olive nodded. “A lesbian.”

  “Does she like you?”

  This question surprised Olive. “I think she does,” she said. “Yes, she does.”

  “So you have that.”

  “It’s not the same. I met her when she was a grown-up, and she lives in California. It’s not like your own kid.”

  “Why is your son a needle in your heart?” The girl asked this with hesitancy, as she tore at the orange peel that had garnished her plate.

  “Who knows? Born that way, I guess.” Olive wiped her fingers on a napkin. “You can put that in a poem. All yours.”

  The girl said nothing, only looked up through the window at the bay.

  It was then that Olive noticed the girl’s sweater, a navy-blue thing with a zipper up the front. But the cuffs were grimy, old-looking. Surely the girl could afford some nice clothes. Olive moved her eyes away quickly, as though she’d seen something she ought not to have seen. She said, “Well, it was good of you to let me join you. I’ll be on my way.”

  The girl looked at her, startled. “Oh—” she said. “Oh, Mrs. Kitteridge, please don’t go. Have some more coffee. Oh, you’re not drinking coffee. Do you want a cup of coffee?”

  “I don’t drink coffee anymore,” Olive said. “It doesn’t seem to agree with my bowels. But have some more if you’d like. I’ll wait with you while you have some.” She turned to find the girl who worked here, and the girl came right over and was very pleasant to Andrea. “There you go,” the girl said, smiling—smiling!—at Andrea, and poured her a cup of coffee. “When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

  Andrea looked at her searchingly. “Tell me how it’s freeing.”

  “Well.” Olive was slightly taken aback; she didn’t know how to explain it. “It’s just that you don’t count anymore, and there is something freeing about that.”

  “I don’t understand,” the girl said. And what shot through Olive’s mind was the thought: You’re honest.

  Olive said, “I don’t think I can explain this well. But you go through life and you think you’re something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something. And then you see”—and Olive shrugged in the direction of the girl who had served the coffee—“that you no longer are anything. To a waitress with a huge hind end, you’ve become invisible. And it’s freeing.” She watched Andrea’s face and saw that it was struggling with something.

  Finally the girl said, “Well, I envy you.” And she laughed, and Olive saw that her teeth were bad; she wondered briefly why she had not seen this in photos of the girl. “I envy you for ever thinking you were something,” Andrea said, her voice throaty.

  “Oh, now stop it, Andrea. Last I heard you were Poet Laureate of this country a few years back.”

  “Yeah,” said Andrea. “I was.”

  As they walked toward Olive’s car, Olive going faster than she would have on her own, the girl rummaged in her coat pocket and the next thing Olive knew a plume of cigarette smoke was going over her. Olive felt a deep tremor of disappointment, and she thought: Well, she’s just a L’Rieux. That’s all she is. Famous or not.

  Andrea said, as they stood by Olive’s car, lifting her hand with the cigarette held between two fingers, “It’s all about class now, smoking. It’s like shooting heroin, but that’s not really a class thing anymore.” And then—and this surprised Olive like hell—the girl wrapped her arms around Olive and said, “It was so nice to see you, Mrs. Kitteridge.” Olive thought her hair might catch on fire from the cigarette in the girl’s hand.

  “You too,” said Olive, and she got into her car and started it, and backed away slowly, not looking out the window in the direction of the girl—it was a job to back a car up these days. All the way home she told Jack about what had happened; it was Jack, her second husband, whom she seemed to want to tell this to.

  When she spoke on the telephone that night to her son, Christopher, who lived in New York City, she mentioned seeing the girl, and he said, “Who’s Andrea L’Rieux? You mean one of the million L’Rieuxs in that family out on East Point Road?”

  “Yes,” Olive said, “the one who became Poet Laureate.”

  “Became what?” Christopher asked, not especially nicely, and Olive understood that Christopher did not follow Poets Laureate or anyone with whom he had grown up, though Andrea was younger than he was. “She became the Poet Laureate of the United States of America,” Olive said, and Christopher said, “Well, whoop-dee-do.”

  When she told her stepdaughter, Cassie, on the telephone, the child was far more appreciative. “Oh, Olive, how nice! Wow.”

  And when she told the owner of the bookstore—Olive walked in the next day with the sole purpose of telling him this—he said, “Hey, that’s very, very cool. Andrea L’Rieux, man, she’s just amazing.”

  “Yup,” Olive said. “We had a nice chat. We had breakfast together. She was quite nice. Seemed very ordinary.”

  She called her friend Edith, whose husband, Buzzy, had helped her buy the car; they lived in the assisted-living place out by Littlehale’s Farm; and Edith was pretty excited for her as well. “Olive, you’re the kind of person people want to talk to.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Olive said, but then she thought that what Edith said was true. “She seemed a lonely child,” Olive said. “As though all her fame and whatnot has meant nothing to her. Sad child. Ratty clothes, smoking her head off. Really, Edith, she was a lonely thing.”

  For a couple of weeks Olive waited to hear from Andrea. Each morning when she checked the mail, she realized she was waiting for a card, an old-fashioned, handwritten card that said, How lovely it was to see you, Mrs. Kitteridge. Let’s stay in touch! The girl could get her address from the Internet. But no card came, and after a while Olive stopped waiting for it. When she saw in the newspaper that Severin L’Rieux had died, she wondered if Andrea was still in town, most likely she had come back for the funeral, which according to the paper would be held at St. John’s, and that made sense to Olive; made her shudder a tiny bit too. All those French-Canadian Catholics, well—goodbye to Severin L’Rieux.

  For their trip to Oslo, Jack had bought them first-class tickets for the plane. Olive was furious. “I don’t fly first-class,” she had said.

  Jack had laughed. “You don’t fly anywhere,” he said, and that made her angrier.

  “I’m not flying first-class. It’s obscene.”

  “Obscene?” Jack sat down at the kitchen table and watched her, still with amusement in his face. “I like obscene.” When she didn’t answer him he said, “You know what, Olive? You’re a snob.”

  “I am the opposite of a snob.”

  Jack laughed a long time. “You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you’re a snob.” Then he leaned forward and said, “Oh, come on, Olive. For Christ’s sake. I’m seventy-eight years old, I have money, you have money—though, yes, I have a lot more money than you do—and if not now, when?”

  “Never,” she said.

  So she had flown coach while he sat up front in first class. She could not believe he would do that, but he did. “Bye now,” he said, waving his hand once, and she was left on her own to find her seat; it was the bulkhead. She sat in the aisle next to a large man—Olive was large herself—and by the window was the man’s girlfriend, an Asian girl probably twenty years younger, but how could you tell with Asians. Before they had even taken off, she hated them
both. She was ready to cry when the flight attendant took her bag from her and put it in the overhead bin. “I want my bag,” Olive said, and the woman told her she could get it as soon as they were airborne.

  The big man next to her kept turning toward his girlfriend, so his fat back was in Olive’s space. She heard their conversation in bits and pieces, and she recognized early on that the man was a bully, he was bullying his young girlfriend. She thought they were disgusting. “This is what you should be listening to,” the man said, and he repeated that many times. As though the girl had poor taste in music. And then the man whispered in his girlfriend’s ear, and the girl leaned forward slightly to look at Olive. They were talking about her! She, with her knees bent up, unable to straighten her legs, an old woman— What in the world did they have to say about her? The Asian girl gave a little shrug and Olive heard her say, “Well, that’s her life.” Whose life? What did that girl know about Olive’s life? Oh, she was fit to be tied, and she did not sleep a wink the whole flight over. At one point Jack stepped through the curtain dividing the cabin and said to her, “Well, hello, Olive! How’s it going?”

  “I want my bag,” she told him. “If you could please get me my bag.”

  He got her bag from the overhead bin, placed it in her lap, whispered in her ear, “There, there, little miss.”

  “Go away, Jack,” she said. And she saw the big man beside her watching her. She closed her eyes, and kept them closed; the flight was absolutely endless.

  But as they went through customs Jack was kind to her. He said, “Let’s get you to the hotel and get you some sleep.” He kept his eye on her as they moved through the line. At the hotel she fell asleep immediately, and they boarded the boat the next day.

  When he became sad a few days later, she felt terrible—and frightened. She thought he missed his wife (even though Olive was his wife). She thought she was all wrong for him. Finally, she said, “Jack, I think I’m not a good wife for you—” He looked at her with surprise; she could see his surprise at what she said. “Olive, you’re actually the perfect wife for me. You really are.” He smiled and reached for her hand. “I’m just homesick,” he said. “All this goddamn beauty—” Tossing his head toward the window of their cabin. “It makes me miss the coast of Maine.”