As soon as it got dark she tucked herself into her little single bed and watched television. The news was amazing to her. And this helped her. The country was in terrible disarray, and Olive found this interesting. At times she thought fascism might be knocking on the door of the country, but then she would think, Oh, I’ll die soon, who cares. Sometimes she thought of Christopher and all his kids and she felt worried about their future, but then she would think: There’s nothing I can do about it, everything is going to hell.
Eventually Olive found the Chipmans; they had lived an hour away in Saco, and he was a retired engineer and his wife was a retired nurse. Both were Democrats, thank God, so they could talk about the mess of the world, and they ate their supper together, the three of them at a table for four. This helped Olive; it gave her a place. The fact that she thought they were both a bit dull was not something she dwelled on, but often enough after eating with them she would roll her eyes on the way back to her room.
This is how she lived.
A few days after Christmas, her son, Christopher, and his wife and all four of their children came to visit. And here was a surprise! Christopher’s oldest son, Theodore, who had been fathered by a different man and who had never, in Olive’s memory, spoken to her, stepped into her apartment, a young adolescent now, and said, “I’m sorry you got sick. With your heart and stuff.”
“Well,” Olive said, “it happens.”
And then the boy said tentatively, “Maybe things will get better here.”
“Maybe,” said Olive.
Olive’s granddaughter Natalie was eight by now, and she would talk to Olive, but then would turn and cling to her mother, who rolled her eyes at Olive and said, “She’s going through a stage.”
“Aren’t we all,” Olive said.
But Little Henry, Olive’s grandson who was ten, had memorized all the presidents of the United States. “Good for you!” Olive told him, but she was extremely bored as he recited them, and when he got to the current president, Olive made a noise of disgust, and the boy said, seriously, “I know.”
After Christopher’s family left, she was bereft, and she ate in her apartment for two days before she went back out and joined the Chipmans.
It was April when Olive first spotted the woman—she lived two doors down and across the hall from her—and Olive thought she looked mousy, and Olive had never cared for that mousy look. Olive kept on walking to the dining room, and after Olive seated herself at the table, waiting for the Chipmans to come in, she noticed that the mousy woman, who wore a big pair of glasses on her small face and had a cane with four prongs on the end of it, had also come into the dining room, and that she was looking around with uncertainty. Olive reached for her own cane and waved it in the air, and the woman looked at her then, and Olive indicated that she should sit with her. “Godfrey,” Olive murmured, because it was taking Mousy Pants some time to make her way around the tables, and she still looked tentative, as though Olive had not meant to have her sit with her.
“Sit!” Olive said when the woman finally got to the table, and Mousy Pants sat and said, “My name is Isabelle Daignault, and thank you for inviting me to sit with you.”
“Olive,” said Olive. (She thought to herself “Frenchie” because this woman had that last name.)
But then the Chipmans came in, and Olive introduced the couple to her. “Isabelle.” And they all began to eat and talk, and Mousy Pants said very little, and Olive thought, Oh, honest to God. When they had finished eating, Mousy Pants stood up and waited with some uncertainty, and Olive said to her, “You going back?” And Mousy Pants said that she was, so they walked out of the dining room together and back down the hallway.
Mousy Pants said, “I’ve only just moved in here, just two days ago.”
“Is that right?” Olive said. Then Olive added, “It takes some getting used to, I’ll tell you that. The Chipmans are okay. The rest of the people are snot-wots mostly.” Mousy Pants looked at her with confusion on her face. “Bye now,” Olive said. And she left the woman at her door.
Spring had really arrived now, and Olive decided she wanted a typewriter. She had started to type things up—memories—on her computer, but the printer stopped working and she became so frustrated she shook; her hands were shaking. She called up Christopher and said, “I need a typewriter.” Then she added, “And a rosebush.” And by God if that boy didn’t drive up from New York City the next week with a typewriter and two rosebushes; he brought Little Henry with him.
As Christopher carried in the electric typewriter, he said, “These are hard to come by now, you know,” but she thought he did not say it meanly.
“Well, I appreciate it,” Olive told him. He had brought five cartridges of ink and he showed her how to insert them. And then he planted the rosebushes as she directed, right outside her little back doorway in the patch of ground before the sidewalk; the man who ran the place had said she could garden out there. Christopher dug the holes deep, like she asked him to, and he watered the rosebushes right away as she told him to do as well. “Hi, Grandma,” Little Henry kept saying; she was busy with the rosebushes. But afterward, when Christopher came inside and had washed his hands, Little Henry looked at his father, who nodded at him. “Want to see a picture I made for you?” the child asked, and Olive said, “Yes, I would.” And the boy carefully unfolded a piece of paper with a watercolor done of a skeletal-looking person and a big house. Olive thought it was very unimpressive. “Who is that?” she asked, and he said, “Me, and that’s my house,” and Olive said, “Well, well.”
“Want to put it on your refrigerator?” Little Henry asked with great seriousness, and then he said, “That’s what Mommy does with our drawings,” and Olive said, “I’ll stick it up there later.”
About the typewriter, Olive felt almost happy. She liked the sound it made, she liked the fact that she could slip in a piece of paper and have it come out—without that damned blinking printer!—and she liked stacking the papers up. Some days she read over the things she had written, and some days she didn’t. But the pile grew slowly. It was the only time she felt that sense of the screen she lived inside of lifting, when she was typing up her memories.
One day a memory came to her. But it could not be true. She was a little girl, asking her mother why she had no brothers or sisters like other people did, and her mother looked down at her and said, “After you? We didn’t dare have another child after you.” But this memory could not be true, and Olive did not type it up.
She did type her memory of how in the months before they discovered her mother’s brain tumor her mother had behaved oddly—and one of the odd things had been that her mother would go and stroke her car as though it had been a horse from her childhood farm. When Olive thought of this now, she understood. She had never understood it before, but because her car gave her the only freedom she had, Olive saw that her mother had loved her car as well, as though it had been the pony from her youth and would get her out, from one place to another.
“Henry believed in God,” Olive typed one day. Then she added, “So did I because of the frogs we dissected in biology class.” She remembered how in college she had thought one day, looking at the inside of a frog: There must be a God who made all these things. Now she considered this, and then typed, “I was young then.”
Mousy Pants continued to eat with Olive and the Chipmans, and then one day, as they walked back from the dining room, Mousy Pants asked Olive if she would like to come in and visit. Only recently had Olive found out that Mousy Pants came from Shirley Falls—that’s how mousy she was, not to have mentioned it earlier—and so Olive said, “All right,” and she went into Mousy Pants’s apartment and was surprised by all the little knickknacks the woman had, a figurine in lederhosen and another in a Swiss dress, and many different photographs spread out on the surfaces of tables. Olive sat down. “Well, at least you have some sun,” she said.
/> She saw how Mousy Pants’s ankles were very swollen, and her wrists—which Olive had noticed before—were also swollen, and Mousy Pants said to her now, “I have rheumatoid arthritis.”
“Horrible,” said Olive, and the woman agreed that it was difficult.
Mousy Pants spoke quietly, and Olive asked her if she could speak up. “I can’t hear you,” Olive said, leaning forward in her chair.
Mousy Pants said, “Yes, I’m sorry.”
And Olive said, “Oh, for God’s sakes, there’s no reason to be sorry, I’m just asking if you can speak up.”
Mousy Pants sat forward herself then, and she began to talk. She talked without stopping, and Olive found herself becoming extremely interested in everything she said. The woman said this: She said her name had originally been Isabelle Goodrow, and as a girl she had become pregnant by her father’s best friend. This was not long after her father had died. She was an only child, and she had been very protected, and she had known—she said this looking at Olive directly—nothing about sex at all. And so this happened. The man was married and lived in California with his family, and he had come back to the small town in New Hampshire where Isabelle and her mother were living to visit. And when he left she was pregnant. Her mother had taken her to the Congregational minister, who had said that God’s love worked in mysterious ways, and so Isabelle, who graduated from high school just about this time, had the baby and stayed home with her mother, and she took some courses at the university but her mother died, and then she was alone with the baby. And she felt very ashamed. “Back then, people did,” Isabelle said. “I mean, people such as myself. Very ashamed.” She sat back.
Olive said, “Go on.”
After a moment Isabelle sat forward again and said that she had packed everything up one day and driven up the coast to Shirley Falls, Maine.
“I told you I went to high school in Shirley Falls,” Olive interrupted. “I came from the little town of West Annett and I went to high school there, and so did my husband.” Isabelle waited, her swollen fingers draped over the top of her cane. Olive said, “Okay, keep going. I won’t stop you again.”
Well, said Isabelle, she knew no one in that town when she first arrived, and she guessed that was the point. But she was very lonely. She found a babysitter for her little girl, and she got a job working in the office room of a shoe factory, she was the secretary to the man who ran that department, and the room was filled with women. “I thought I was better than they were,” Isabelle said. “I really did. For years, I worked with these women, and I thought, Well, my grades in high school were very good, I would have been a teacher if I’d not had Amy, and these women could never be teachers. I would think things like that,” she said, and she looked directly at Olive again.
Olive thought: By God, she’s honest.
The women in the office room, though, turned out to be real friends. When Amy was sixteen years old, there was a crisis. Isabelle found out that Amy had been having a relationship with her math teacher. “A sexual one,” Isabelle said. Isabelle had become furious. “Do you know what I did?” She looked at Olive, and Olive saw that the woman’s eyes were smaller and becoming red.
“Tell me,” Olive said.
“Amy had always had beautiful hair. Long, wavy yellow hair, her father’s hair, not mine, and when I found out about that math teacher—Olive, I walked into that girl’s bedroom with a pair of shears—and—and I cut her hair off.” Isabelle looked away and took her glasses off and drew a hand across her eyes.
“Huh.” Olive considered this. “Well, I guess I can understand,” she said.
“Can you?” Isabelle looked at her, putting her glasses back on. “I can’t. Oh, I mean I did it, so I should understand it, but, oh, the memory haunts me, what a thing to do to that child!”
“Does she like you now?” Olive asked.
And Isabelle’s face broke into gladness. “Oh, she loves me. I don’t understand how she can, I really was not a good mother, I was so quiet and she had no friends, but yes, she lives in Des Moines now, and she has one son who is thirty-five and living in California doing computer stuff. But yes, Amy does love me, and she’s the reason I can afford this place.”
Olive asked to see a photograph of the girl, and Isabelle pointed behind Olive, and Olive turned around and saw a whole array of photos. The girl was much older than Olive would have pictured, but then she remembered how young Isabelle was when she had her. Amy wore her grayish hair short now, but her face was full and had a sweetness to it. “Huh,” Olive said. She looked at the photos carefully.
“Well, I wasn’t a good mother either,” Olive said, turning back to face Isabelle. “But my son loves me. Now. After I had my heart attack he seemed to grow up.” She said, “What does Amy do?”
Isabelle said, “She’s a doctor. She’s an oncologist.”
“My word,” Olive said. “Well, that’s something. Working with cancer patients all day, my goodness.”
“Oh, I think it has to be very hard, but she seems to find it fascinating. You know, her first little boy, he died when he was eighteen months old. Not of cancer. SIDS. And she was in nursing school, and then she just kept right on going. She’s married to a doctor as well. He’s a pediatrician.”
Somehow Olive found this astonishing. She said, “Well, my son is also a doctor, in New York City.”
“New York!” Isabelle said, and asked what kind of doctor he was.
“A podiatrist,” said Olive. Adding, “People walk a lot in New York. He has a blazing practice.” She looked over at the many little figurines that were on a shelf by the window.
“Those were my mother’s,” Isabelle said.
“So when did you marry?” Olive asked, looking back at her.
“Oh, I married a wonderful man, he was a pharmacist—”
“I married a pharmacist!” Olive almost yelled this. “My husband’s pharmacy was right here in Crosby, and he was a lovely, lovely man. Henry was made of love.”
“So was my husband,” Isabelle said. “I married him right about the time Amy went to college. He died last year, and our house was just too much for me, and so Amy got me into this place.”
“Well,” said Olive. “Well, well, well. We both married pharmacists.”
Isabelle said, “My husband’s name was Frank.”
“And he was a Franco,” said Olive. “What we used to call a Frenchie.” And Isabelle said yes, and wasn’t that funny, because back when she worked in that shoe factory, thinking she was superior to the women who worked there, she would never have thought she’d marry a Franco. But she did. And he was wonderful. He’d had a wife who’d died very young, before they’d had any children, and what this man did after his wife died, every day in the spring and summer and fall, was to go home after work—he and this young wife had had a house outside of Shirley Falls with fields all around—and he would get on his mower and he just mowed those fields. Mowed and mowed and mowed. And then he met Isabelle.
“Did he stop mowing?” Olive asked.
Isabelle said, “He didn’t mow as much.”
Olive felt a warmth move through her; she stuck her cane onto the ground and pushed herself out of the chair. “Well, I like the sunlight you get here,” she said.
Then something happened that made Olive far more concerned than the lack of sun in her apartment. Olive’s bowels began to leak. She had first had this occur at night, it had woken her each time with a terrific sense of dread, and then one day on her way out of the dining room, she thought: I’d better hurry back to the bathroom, but she didn’t get there quite in time. For Olive, this was absolutely appalling.
She rose at six in the morning the next day and got into her car—she passed Barbara Paznik and her husband, who were out walking, and Barbara waved with enthusiasm—and Olive drove to the Walmart far out of town. Walking as quickly as she could with her cane, sh
e bought a box of those atrocious diapers for old people, and she brought them back and put them in the top of her bathroom closet. She wondered when she should put one on. She never knew when these episodes would occur.
A few nights later after supper, as she and Isabelle walked down the hallway, she felt the urge, and when Isabelle said, “Do you want to come in?,” Olive said, “Yes, and hurry,” and she walked directly into Isabelle’s bathroom. “Whew,” she said, and as she was straightening herself out a few minutes later, she glanced up and saw—a box of Depends!
Olive came out and sat down and said, “Isabelle Goodrow Daignault. You wear those foolish diapers for old people,” and Isabelle’s face became pink. Olive said, “Well, so do I! Or at least I’d better start occasionally wearing them.”
Isabelle pushed her glasses up her nose with the back of her swollen wrist and said, “My bladder can’t seem to control itself, so I had to start wearing them. Not always, but at night I do.”
Olive said, “Well, my back end leaks, I’d say that was far worse.”
Isabelle’s mouth opened in dismay. “Oh, good heavens, Olive. That is worse.”
“I guess to God it is. And I think after I eat is when this happens. Honest to good God, Isabelle. I’m going to have to make sure I have my foolish poopie panties on. Even my granddaughter’s outgrown them—years ago!”
Isabelle seemed to enjoy that; she laughed until tears came from her eyes. Then she told Olive how she was always embarrassed to buy them when she took the van to the store with the other old people (she did not have a car); she always tried to sneak off and get them, and Olive said, “Hell, I’ll buy all you want, I go to Walmart when it opens at six in the morning is what I do.”
“Olive.” Isabelle let out a sigh. “I’m awful glad I met you.”
When Olive returned to her apartment she didn’t write up any memories; she just sat in the chair and watched her birds at the feeder outside her window and thought that she was not unhappy.
Olive, Again (ARC) Page 27