Olive, Again (ARC)

by Elizabeth Strout

  Fergus stood up and said, If they would excuse him, he’d forgotten something back at his house.

  “What’d you forget?” asked Charlene, and he just shook his head. As he got into his truck he saw that she was still watching him.

  In the driveway, he was surprised to see Laurie’s car, and even more surprised when he saw his grandson, Teddy—named after the dog—sitting in the backseat of the car. “Teddy Bear,” said Fergus, opening the car door. “What are you doing sitting here all alone?”

  The boy looked at him with serious eyes. “Mom said I couldn’t come in, that the conversation was something I couldn’t hear.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Fergus. He loved this kid like the devil. “Aren’t you kind of hot?”

  The boy nodded. “But I got the windows down. She said she wouldn’t be long.”

  “How long has she been in there?”

  The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. Not very long, I guess. I just wish—” He looked around miserably. “I just wish I didn’t have to sit here.” Then he said, quizzically, “Grandpa, you’ve got your uniform on. It looks different.”

  “Come sit on the porch, at least,” said Fergus. “Come on, I’ll take the blame if you get in trouble for just sitting on the porch. Come on, Bear.” And so Teddy got out of the car with a book, and he sat down on the first step of the porch.

  “Why does your uniform look different?” Teddy asked.

  “Oh, it’s not pressed.”

  “Pressed?” Teddy asked, squinting up at his grandfather.

  “It’s not ironed. Probably why it looks different.” Fergus glanced down at his pants, and was struck by how rumpled they were.

  Through the open window came sudden hollering.

  Teddy looked up at Fergus with alarm in his eyes, and Fergus said, “Okay, back in the car, kid. I’ll come get you soon. I promise.” And so the boy returned to the car, and said, “It’s going to be okay, right?” And Fergus said, “You bet it is,” and he thought the boy’s face relaxed some, and this pleased Fergus unduly.

  “Did she tell you?” Laurie flung these words at her father when he walked into the house. “Did she?”

  “She did,” Fergus said. “Just calm down.”

  “That she sticks pins in men’s penises? Did she tell you that?”

  Fergus had to sit down. “For Christ’s sake, Laurie. Stop it.” His scrotum seemed to shrivel as he said this.

  “You’re telling me to stop it? I can’t believe you’re telling me to stop it. I’m the normal one in the family! Oh my God, your daughter is a prostitute and you’re telling me to calm down.” Laurie’s neck stuck forward a bit as she said this.

  “Yes, I am,” Fergus said. “I am asking you to calm down right now, Laurie MacPherson. This is not helping matters one bit.”

  Laurie turned to her mother. “Mom. Help me out here. Please.”

  But Ethel, who had been standing behind her chair, now sat down in it and she said only, “Oh, Laurie.” She added, “But she’s not a prostitute, Laurie. I think.”

  “Oh my God,” said Laurie. She dropped her pocketbook onto the floor and put both hands on her hips.

  “It’s just that I don’t know what to say,” Ethel said. “Can’t you understand that? I just don’t know what to say. The whole thing has been—it’s just been awful.”

  “You think?” Laurie gave a little dramatic head toss as she said this.

  Fergus said, “Laurie, for Christ’s sake, calm the hell down. Now.”

  Laurie pressed her lips together, then reached down and picked up her pocketbook. She said quietly, “This is the sickest family that ever lived on God’s earth.” She turned and walked through the door, slamming it so hard that a pan on the other side of the kitchen fell from a shelf it was on.

  Fergus rose and went after her. “Teddy Bear,” he said to his grandson, bending down to speak to him through the car window, “let’s you and I see each other soon. Your mother’s mad at the moment, but she’ll get over it, and then you and I can go fishing.”

  “Fishing,” said Laurie, as she strapped her seatbelt on. “You can go effing fishing all right.” And she drove out of the driveway with her tires squealing while her poor son looked down at his lap as Fergus waved to him.

  In the living room, Lisa seemed serene. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, and she looked young. She was speaking to her mother, and she turned her body slightly to include her father as he came in and sat in his chair. A glance at Ethel made Fergus actually feel sorry for his wife; she seemed frightened, and smaller physically. Lisa was saying, “You know, I just want to say, Mrs. Kitteridge told us, years ago in that math class—I will never forget it—one day she just stopped a math problem she was doing on the board and she turned around and she said to the class, ‘You all know who you are. If you just look at yourself and listen to yourself, you know exactly who you are. And don’t forget it.’ And I never did forget it. It kind of gave me courage over the years because she was right; I did know who I was.”

  “You knew you were a—a dominatrix?” Fergus asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Kind of, yes, that is what I’m saying. I knew, I always knew I loved to dress up, and I like to tell people what to do, I like people, Dad, and these people have certain needs and I get to fulfill them, and that’s a pretty great thing.”

  Ethel said, “I’m just not understanding this. I am not understanding this at all.” Her eyes seemed like they were turning in different directions; this is the image Fergus got when he glanced at her again. He also noticed that the roots of her hair were dark and the yellow parts were sticking out; she must have been running her hand through it—yes, there, she did it, ran her hand through her hair. “Honey, I’m trying,” Ethel said. “Lisa, I am trying, but I just don’t get it.”

  Lisa nodded patiently. Her dark eyes shone and her face had that glow that it had when she had first walked into the house. “And this is exactly why we’re doing the documentary. Because people don’t have to feel so—so, so, you know, marginalized anymore if they are into this stuff. It’s all just human behavior, and that’s what we’re trying to say.” She smoothed her hair over her shoulder; she had a confidence that was notable.

  Fergus cleared his throat, and sat forward with his elbows on his knees. “If putting needles into some man’s penis is acceptable human behavior, then something’s very, very wrong.” He tugged on his beard. “God, Lisa.” He stood and turned to leave the room, then turned back and said, “Human behavior? For Christ’s sake, the concentration camps run by the Nazis were human behavior. What’s this defending-human-behavior crap? Honestly, Lisa!”

  And then the tears came. Buckets of them. Lisa wept and wept, her eyes becoming smudged and causing black stuff to roll down her cheeks. How could he say she was a Nazi? How could he say that? And then, after minutes of sobbing noisily, she said it was because of ignorance. She stood up; there was a smudge of black eye makeup on her white T-shirt. “I love you, Dad,” she said. “But you are ignorant.”

  By the side of the road stood Anita Coombs, next to a low blue car with a bent fender. Fergus pulled his truck over and got out. There were no other cars around, it was on the road out toward the Point, and all one could see were fields. The sun beat down and made Anita’s fender glint. “Oh, Fergie,” she said as he approached. “Boy, am I glad to see you. This damn car broke down.”

  Fergus put his hand out, and she handed him the key. Squashed into the driver’s seat, he tried to start the car and nothing happened. He tried a few more times, then got out and said, “It’s dead. Did you call anyone?”

  “Yeah.” Anita gave a great sigh and looked at her watch. “They said they’d be here in fifteen minutes, and that was half an hour ago.”

  “Let me call them,” said Fergus, and he took Anita’s phone and called the tow people and spoke to them brusqu
ely. He gave her back the phone. “Okay,” he said. “They’re on their way.” He leaned against her car and folded his arms. “I’ll wait with you,” he added.

  “Thanks, Fergie.” Anita seemed tired. She put her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and shook her head slowly. Then she said, “Where’re you headed?”

  “Nowhere,” said Fergus, and Anita nodded.

  It was Sunday afternoon. Fergus had gone back to the park in the dark last night and found his pup tent, standing by itself—he had been vaguely surprised to see that it was still there—and he had packed it up and put it into the back of his truck. Also in the back of his truck now, in a garbage bag, was his Civil War uniform, with the boots and the cap. This morning after breakfast—she had seemed calm again, never mentioning her foolish documentary—Lisa said, “I’m going to call Laurie. I don’t like that she’s so mad at me.” Fergus almost said, “I’m mad at you too,” but he didn’t; he just took the dishes and washed them while Ethel remained at the dining room table, drumming her fingers on it. They could both hear, from Lisa’s room, her voice, but could not make out the words. But Lisa talked and talked and talked, and after a while Ethel said, “Come on, Teddy,” and took the dog out for a walk. When she came back she asked, “Still talking?” And after a moment Fergus said, “Yes.” Then he said, “Teddy, tell your mother I’m going for a drive,” and he had gone out in his truck with the intention of taking his Civil War uniform to the garbage can out near the Point and dumping it in there. In the truck he had said out loud a few times, “Creag Dhubh!” which was the war cry of the MacPherson clan, and then he stopped it; he thought of the Highland Games and wondered if that was foolishness too: standing there every summer in his kilt yelling that with the rest of the clan.

  Now he said to Anita, “What do you think of Olive Kitteridge?”

  “Olive?” said Anita. “Oh, I’ve always liked her myself. She’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I like her.” After a moment she said “Why do you ask?” and Fergus just shook his head. Anita gave a small laugh. “She was the one—did Ethel tell you this?—who suggested to us when we were filling out those fishing licenses and they asked for the weight of the person, Olive said, ‘Why don’t you ask them what they think a game warden would say about how much they weighed?’ It was kind of brilliant. You know, you get these fatties in there and you don’t want to just say, Hey, how much do you weigh? So we started doing that.”

  “Anita,” Fergus said, turning to her. “This is a hell of a world we live in.”

  “Oh, I know,” Anita said casually. She nodded. “Yuh, I know.” She added, “Always has been, I suspect.”

  “Do you think so?” Fergus asked. He looked at her through his sunglasses. “Do you think it has always been this bad, really? It seems to me like things are getting crazier.”

  Anita shrugged. “I think they’ve always been crazy. That’s my view.”

  And so Fergus thought about this.

  After another few moments he said, “Things all right with you, Anita?”

  She gave a sigh that made her cheeks expand for a moment. “Nah.” She looked both ways on the road and said, “Gary’s been a mess since he got laid off, and that was a few years ago, and my kids are crazy.” She looked at Fergus and made a circle around her ear with her forefinger. She said, “I mean, they are really crazy.” She shook her head. “You know what my oldest son is into? He watches some Japanese reality show on his computer where the contestants sniff each other’s butts.”

  Fergus looked over at her. “God,” he said. Then he said, “Come on, Anita, the world has certainly gotten crazier.”

  “Oh, maybe a little, who knows.” Anita shrugged slightly.

  Fergus finally said, looking at the ground. “Well, kids. What can you do.”

  “Nothing,” said Anita. “How are your girls?”

  “Oh, they’re crazy too. Batty as can be.” He saw the tow truck across the field and motioned toward it and Anita said, “Oh, good.”

  “You’re going to need cash for the tow,” Fergus said. “You got it?”

  “No, just my credit card.”

  Fergus reached into his pocket and gave Anita his roll of cash. He waited until the tow truck was driving away, Anita sitting in the front seat of it, waving to him, and then he got back into his truck and drove to the Point and threw his uniform into the garbage, pushing the bag all the way down into the bin. He wondered about Anita’s children, how crazy they were, or were not. Watching people sniff each other’s butts? Jesus God. That was pretty goddamn crazy stuff.

  Back home, he was surprised once again to see Laurie’s car in the driveway, but no Teddy sat in it, and when he walked into the house he heard his television on. He knew it was his, and not Ethel’s, because of the kind of sound it made. He went straight into the living room and found Ethel and his daughters all sitting on his lounge chair, Ethel on the front edge of it, and one girl on each arm, and he was about to open his mouth and say What the hell when he saw that on the television screen was—it was Lisa—and she was dressed in leather and holding a whip, and she cracked the whip and a man moaned; his face was on the floor, turned to its side, and the image pixelated his face, but his buttocks were bare, and again this woman—Lisa—whipped him and again he moaned.

  “Turn that off,” Fergus said. “Turn that off right now.” His wife pressed a button on a remote control, and the screen went a blank blue except for the DVD sign. “And who said you could use my TV?” Fergus added.

  Lisa said, “We had to, Dad, because Mom’s is too old to take a DVD and she said she was ready to try and watch this, and so did Laurie—”

  “Dad,” Laurie said. “You won’t believe this. She had one guy that she made roll around in like a hundred squished-up bananas and then—oh God, Dad, she took a dump on him!”

  Fergus looked at Laurie hard. “And what changed your mind about this filth?”

  Laurie said, “Well, Lisa and I had a really long talk and I began to think about it, and I think maybe she’s right, people should be educated, so I came here to watch it with Mom. And Mom said she would give it a try, because, you know, it’s Lisa, it’s her daughter—”

  “Where’s Teddy?” Fergus looked around.

  “He’s at his father’s. It’s Sunday.”

  Fergus had an odd sensation of not fully knowing where he himself was. He said to Lisa, “You took a shit on a man?”

  Lisa looked down. “That’s his thing, Dad.”

  Fergus walked to the television set, and then he was aware of a different strange feeling, his eyes became blurry very quickly, and without any sense of warning that his body would do this he went crashing to the floor, hitting his head on the corner of his television; briefly he saw stars. When he came to, he heard the loud talking of women, this would be his family, and they were trying to sit him up, and they did, and then he was standing and they were pushing him into the car.

  All Fergus wanted to do was curl up, this kept going through his head, just curl up, curl up, curl up, and when they got him to the hospital he did that, he curled up on the floor of the emergency room, and very quickly a nurse came and got him standing again, and then he was on a thin bed and he curled up on the bed. When someone tried to straighten out his legs, he curled them right back up, almost to his chest, and his head was down there too. All he wanted was to stay curled up with his eyes closed.

  Eventually he heard someone say “sedative,” and he thought Yes, give me that, and they must have, because he slept deeply, and when he woke he felt frightened and did not know where he was.

  “Dad?” It was Lisa, lowering her head, speaking to him quietly. “Oh, Daddy, guess what? You’re okay! Oh God, Daddy, you scared us so much, but you’re okay. They’re going to keep you here tonight, but you’re okay, Daddy.”

  She held his hand, and he squeezed it.

  Then Laurie was ther
e, and she said, “Oh, Dad, we were so scared,” and he nodded.

  Then he was alone, and he fell asleep again. When he woke, he knew right away that he was in the hospital and it was nighttime, a small light was on above his hospital bed. He closed his eyes again.

  As he lay there he became aware of someone stroking his arm, very slowly, rhythmically, back and forth went the hand on his arm. He kept his eyes closed so it would continue, and it did. After many minutes went by—who knew how many minutes?—he turned his head and opened his eyes and saw that it was his wife. She stopped when she saw him watching her and put her hand into her lap.

  “Ethel,” he said. “What have we done?”

  “Done about what?” she asked quietly. “You mean our life, or our children?”

  He said, “I don’t know what I mean.” After a moment he said, “You have to tell me about Anita’s kids. Not right now, but someday soon.”

  “Oh,” Ethel said. “They’re looney tunes.”

  “Not like ours,” he said.

  Ethel said, “Not like ours.”

  And then he nodded toward his arm, a small nod, but old marrieds that they were she understood. She began to stroke his arm again.

  Heart

  Olive Kitteridge opened her eyes.

  She had just been somewhere—it had been absolutely lovely—and now where was she? Someone seemed to be saying her name. Then she heard beeping sounds. “Mrs. Kitteridge? Do you know where you are?” Wherever she had been was very sunny and there was no sun here, just lights on above her. “Mrs. Kitteridge?”

  “Huh,” she said. She tried to turn her head, but it wouldn’t turn. A face appeared right near hers. “Hello,” she said. “Who are you? Are you Christopher?”

  A man’s voice said, “I’m Dr. Rabolinski. I’m a cardiologist.”

  “Is that right,” said Olive, and she moved her eyes to looking back up at the lights.

  “Do you know where you are?” the man’s voice said.