“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.”
Still, she wouldn’t look at him.
“Okay?” he said, and she nodded. “Come back and see me in a week,” he said.
He got up and left the room. And then she wept and wept, and finally cleaned off the lipstick and wiped her eyes and got dressed, and when she went out Betty looked up at her with some surprise, and Olive flapped a hand at her to indicate she should shut up. They drove home in silence.
When they were inside the house, Betty said, “Now just tell me, are you okay?”
Olive sat down in the chair that used to be Jack’s. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just damn sick of it all.”
“You’re doing really well, though,” Betty said, heaving herself down in the chair across from the one Olive sat in. “Believe me, I’ve had patients who couldn’t take a shower for weeks by themselves, and the first day you got home, you went right in and washed your hair and came right out.” Betty pointed at her and said, “You’re doin’ excellent!”
Olive looked at her. “They couldn’t take a shower? After a heart attack?”
“Sure,” Betty said.
“So what did you do?”
“I helped them,” Betty said. “But I haven’t had to help you a bit. I haven’t even taken your arm, for criminy’s sake.”
Olive considered this. “Well, I’m still sick of it,” she finally said.
When Halima Butterfly showed up, Betty said with exaggeration, “Hello there!” Olive could have killed her.
“She’s an idiot,” Olive said to Halima once Betty had gone. Halima looked at Olive and said, “You mean her bumper sticker?”
“Yes,” Olive said, “that is exactly what I mean.”
Halima said, looking down, running a finger across the table that a lamp sat on, “Do you know when my little brother heard that man became president, he started to cry.” Halima looked up at Olive. “He cried and said, Now we’ll have to go back, and my mother explained to him that he was born here and he didn’t have to leave.”
“Oh Godfrey,” said Olive; briefly she closed her eyes. Then Olive said, “Tell me what it’s like to be you.” Halima looked around the room. Today she wore a dark red robe and a dark headscarf. “By the way,” Olive added, “that peach-colored thing you had on the other day was just lovely.”
Halima smiled slightly and said, “You don’t like this?”
“Not as much,” Olive said. “Too dark.”
; Halima told Olive that she had four sisters and two little brothers, and that two of the sisters and one brother lived in Minneapolis. “Why?” Olive asked. And Halima said they liked it there. Then she stood up and said she was going to get started on Olive’s dinner.
When Halilma Butterfly did not show up the next day—it was Jane again—Olive felt very bad. She asked Jane where the Somali girl was, and Jane said that she didn’t know.
Olive kept thinking about this, she kept going over in her head why the girl had not shown up; she just hadn’t liked Olive was what Olive thought, and this hurt her feelings and also made her angry.
The next morning when Betty was out doing some errands for her, Olive called the home healthcare place and asked why Halima had not shown up. The woman on the phone said she had no idea, scheduling was not what she did. “Fine,” Olive said, and hung up.
The next week’s visit to Dr. Rabolinski, Olive drove the car herself, but she had Betty with her. Earlier, she had taken a practice drive into town and then back home—also with Betty. “See?” Betty said. “You’re all good.”
This time Olive had prepared herself. She looked as good as she could for a baggy old woman with a heart attack under her belt; she wore a blue and white jacket she’d discovered in her closet, and when she saw the doctor, she felt almost no attachment to him. This surprised her; and she noticed too—or thought she did—that he was not as nice to her as he had been before. “You’re doing fine,” he said, then shrugged. “What can I say? You are good to go.”
“Ay-yuh,” she said.
“I’ll see you in a month,” he told her. And then, as he was going out the door, he stopped and said, “You must have been a very good mother, Olive.”
She could not have heard him right. “Why in the world do you think that?” she asked as she stuck her legs down over the table.
“Because your son was so often in attendance at the hospital, and he’s called me twice to make sure you’re all right.” The doctor cocked his head slightly. “So you must have been a very good mother.”
Olive was baffled by this. “I don’t know if that’s true,” she said slowly.
“Get dressed and see me in my office,” Dr. Rabolinski said.
In his office, he simply repeated that she was doing fine. And Olive got up and left.
As she drove home, with Big Betty next to her, Olive wondered if her initial feelings for the man had been because she thought he had saved her life. Maybe you fall in love with people who save your life, even when you think it’s not worth saving.
But in Jack’s house—because now it was Jack’s house once more, and not hers, Olive had felt this increasingly since she had first come home from the hospital—she felt unsteady. She did not feel as she had. She kept thinking: I’m different. After the last day that Betty, and the others, worked for her (Betty had tried to hug her, though Olive only stood there), she felt especially bereft; she felt unwell and tired. But when she told Dr. Rabolinski this the next time she saw him, he said, “You’re doing just fine, Olive. There is no reason you can’t live alone and drive your car. You’re fine now.”
“Ay-yuh,” she said.
At times she could name it. It was almost panic that she felt. “Damn man,” she said, and she meant the doctor, who was still young and had no idea—he had no idea—what it was like to be old and alone. But other days she felt okay. Not wonderful. But she could drive and get her groceries, and she visited her friend Edith at that awful old folks’ home she lived in called Maple Tree Apartments. Then when she came home she was glad to be there, although she could not shake the feeling that it was Jack’s house. She sat in Jack’s chair these days so that she wouldn’t have to look at it gapingly empty. And sometimes as she sat there a deep sadness trembled through her, because she wanted to be living in the house she had built with Henry; that house had been torn down, and she couldn’t even stand to go by the spot. But what a nice house it had been! What a nice man Henry had been! And the sadness would deepen as she looked around this house she lived in—had lived in for almost eight years—and she would think: Honest to God. To sit in the middle of this field when I could still be by the water.
She thought about Jack’s expression the night he died in bed next to her. He had said, “Good night, Olive,” and reached to turn the light off, but first giving her a fleeting smile, which now in her memory seemed to be a smile he gave when he was far away from her. She had lived with him just long enough to begin to recognize these things, the changes in expression—so brief—that indicated he was somewhere else. And she thought he was like that when he said his last words, “Good night, Olive.”
To hell with you, she thought, but she was really hurt by this recognition. He was not with her when he died. Oh, he was with her, he was lying next to her, but only because this was his home—his home with his wife Betsy—and Olive felt (now) that it was not her home, and she felt unsteady in it.
Then one afternoon she fell.
It was the middle of an afternoon in April, and a storm came in. Olive watched while the clouds moved above the field and then she heard the raindrops landing on the porch, hitting the windows. She rose and went out to the porch. She was only going to take in the cushions from the chairs she had put out recently, and she did not put on a coat or take her cane, but she walked out onto the porch, and as she bent to pick up a blue cushion from the wooden chair, she peered closer and saw that right there on the boards of the porch was a cigarette butt. Olive kept looking at this, she could not figure out where in the world it would have come from. She was really puzzled—and alarmed. But there it was, and it did not look like it had been there that long—certainly not for weeks, the white part of the cigarette was still white, but just flattened. Right next to the chair. Had someone been sitting in this chair smoking while she was away? How could that be?
Olive bent down—she couldn’t figure out later how she fell, but she did. She fell right over, almost on her head, but then she rolled onto her side, between the house and the back of the chair, and she was so surprised by this that her head seemed a little different for a moment; it was just surprise. And then she couldn’t get up. She could not get up.
“Olive, get up,” she said quietly, aloud. “Olive, get up.” She tried and tried, but she did not have the strength in her arm to push herself up. “Get up,” she kept saying, over and over. “Olive, get up—you damned fool. Get up.” The wind shifted slightly, and the rain began to come on her straight as though aimed at her. It was a cold rain, and she felt the drops pelting her face, her arm, her legs. My God, she thought, I’m going to die out here. She had spoken to Christopher the night before on the phone, he wouldn’t think to call her for at least a few more days. And if other people called her—who, Edith?—and got no answer, they would think nothing of it. “Olive, get up, you get up right now,” she said again and again.
It was that she would die of—what would she die of? Exposure? No, it wasn’t cold enough, though she was very cold with this rain beating down on her. She would die of starvation. No, she would die of dehydration, and how long would that take? Three days. She would lie here like this for three days. “Olive, you get up right now.” You heard about this kind of thing happening. Marilyn Thompson, who fell in her garage and lay there for two days; Bertha Babcock, who fell down her cellar stairs and lay there for days before being discovered, dead.
“You get up right now, you damned fool.” But she couldn’t. She kept trying, but she could only roll slightly more onto her side, and her arms did not have the strength. She spied the spigot there sticking out from the house. Jack had not wanted the spigot there, he thought it looked stupid coming out of the house straight to the porch, but he had said his wife had wanted it to make watering her plants easier. “Damn right, Betsy,” Olive said. Her teeth were chattering now. Inch by half inch, Olive was able to move her body by thrusting it again and again until she could
reach the spigot. She kept trying to reach it and she kept falling short, but then she finally got her hand around it, and by God if it didn’t help. It stayed steady, the spigot, and she was able, by holding it, to get herself to a sitting position, and then she turned and knelt, and then she put her hands on the arms of the chair and she finally stood. She was so shaky that she placed a hand on the shingled wall as she moved slowly back into the house. Once inside, she sat for many minutes, wet, in the wooden chair by the table, and then she finally felt strong enough to shower.
But that had really been something. Sitting on the bed, holding a towel to her hair, Olive looked around. Who in the world had been having a cigarette on her porch? Who could it be? Olive kept picturing a man, sinister, smoking on her porch while he waited for her to return, some horrible man who knew she lived out here in the middle of nowhere all alone.
For the next week Olive could not stop feeling dread. She felt it when she went to bed, she felt it as soon as she woke. She felt dread in the afternoon when she sat and read her book. It did not abate, it got worse. And then she understood that it was true terror she felt, a different sort of terror than when Jack had died, or Henry. In those cases she had been filled with terror, but now terror sat next to her. It sat down across from her in the breakfast nook, it sat on the bathtub while she washed her face, it sat near her by the window as she read, it sat there on the foot of her bed.
And she began to walk around this home she had shared with Jack, and she said, “I hate it, I hate it, I hate this place.”
Loneliness. Oh, the loneliness!
It blistered Olive.
She had not known such a feeling her entire life; this is what she thought as she moved about the house. It may have been the terror finally wearing off and giving way for this gaping bright universe of loneliness that she faced, but it bewildered her to feel this. She realized it was as though she had—all her life—four big wheels beneath her, without even knowing it, of course, and now they were, all four of them, wobbling and about to come off. She did not know who she was, or what would happen to her.
Olive, Again (ARC) Page 25