Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

  He was appalled when she mentioned at work one day the amount of money she had sent the Church of the Holy Mother of Contrition, to ensure that candles were lit for Henry every week, a mass said for him each month. He said, “Well, that’s nice, Denise.” She had lost weight, and when, at the end of the day, he stood in the darkened parking lot, watching from beneath one of the lights on the side of the building, he was struck by the image of her anxious head peering over the steering wheel; and as he got into his own car, a sadness shuddered through him that he could not shake all night.

  “What in hell ails you?” Olive said.

  “Denise,” he answered. “She’s helpless.”

  “People are never as helpless as you think they are,” Olive answered. She added, clamping a cover over a pot on the stove, “God, I was afraid of this.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Just take the damn dog out,” Olive said. “And sit yourself down to supper.”

  An apartment was found in a small new complex outside of town. Denise’s father-in-law and Henry helped her move her few things in. The place was on the ground floor and didn’t get much light. “Well, it’s clean,” Henry said to Denise, watching her open the refrigerator door, the way she stared at the complete emptiness of its new insides. She only nodded, closing the door. Quietly, she said, “I’ve never lived alone before.”

  In the pharmacy he saw that she walked around in a state of unreality; he found his own life felt unbearable in a way he would never have expected. The force of this made no sense. But it alarmed him; mistakes could be made. He forgot to tell Cliff Mott to eat a banana for potassium, now that they’d added a diuretic with his digitalis. The Tibbets woman had a bad night with erythromycin; had he not told her to take it with food? He worked slowly, counting pills sometimes two or three times before he slipped them into their bottles, checking carefully the prescriptions he typed. At home, he looked at Olive wide-eyed when she spoke, so she would see she had his attention. But she did not have his attention. Olive was a frightening stranger; his son often seemed to be smirking at him. “Take the garbage out!” Henry shouted one night, after opening the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, seeing a bag full of eggshells and dog hairs and balled-up waxed paper. “It’s the only thing we ask you to do, and you can’t even manage that!”

  “Stop shouting,” Olive told him. “Do you think that makes you a man? How absolutely pathetic.”

  Spring came. Daylight lengthened, melted the remaining snows so the roads were wet. Forsythias bloomed clouds of yellow into the chilly air, then rhododendrons screeched their red heads at the world. He pictured everything through Denise’s eyes, and thought the beauty must be an assault. Passing by the Caldwells’ farm, he saw a handwritten sign, FREE KITTENS, and he arrived at the pharmacy the next day with a kitty-litter box, cat food, and a small black kitten, whose feet were white, as though it had walked through a bowl of whipped cream.

  “Oh, Henry,” Denise cried, taking the kitten from him, tucking it to her chest.

  He felt immensely pleased.

  Because it was such a young thing, Slippers spent the days at the pharmacy, where Jerry McCarthy was forced to hold it in his fat hand, against his sweat-stained shirt, saying to Denise, “Oh, yuh. Awful cute. That’s nice,” before Denise freed him of this little furry encumbrance, taking Slippers back, nuzzling her face against his, while Jerry watched, his thick, shiny lips slightly parted. Jerry had taken two more classes at the university, and had once again received A’s in both. Henry and Denise congratulated him with the air of distracted parents; no cake this time.

  She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence. Sometimes she stepped out the back door of the pharmacy, and returned with swollen eyes. “Go home early, if you need to,” he told her. But she looked at him with panic. “No. Oh, gosh, no. I want to be right here.”

  It was a warm summer that year. He remembers her standing by the fan near the window, her thin hair flying behind her in little undulating waves, while she gazed through her glasses at the windowsill. Standing there for minutes at a time. She went, for a week, to see one of her brothers. Took another week to see her parents. “This is where I want to be,” she said, when she came back.

  “Where’s she going to find another husband in this tiny town?” Olive asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve wondered,” Henry admitted.

  “Someone else would go off and join the Foreign Legion, but she’s not the type.”

  “No. She’s not the type.”

  Autumn arrived, and he dreaded it. On the anniversary of Henry Thibodeau’s death, Denise went to mass with her in-laws. He was relieved when that day was over, when a week went by, and another, although the holidays loomed, and he felt trepidation, as though he were carrying something that could not be set down. When the phone rang during supper one night, he went to get it with a sense of foreboding. He heard Denise make small screaming sounds—Slippers had gotten out of the house without her seeing, and planning to drive to the grocery store just now, she had run over the cat.

  “Go,” Olive said. “For God’s sake. Go over and comfort your girlfriend.”

  “Stop it, Olive,” Henry said. “That’s unnecessary. She’s a young widow who ran over her cat. Where in God’s name is your compassion?” He was trembling.

  “She wouldn’t have run over any goddamn cat if you hadn’t given it to her.”

  He brought with him a Valium. That night he sat on her couch, helpless while she wept. The urge to put his arm around her small shoulders was very strong, but he sat holding his hands together in his lap. A small lamp shone from the kitchen table. She blew her nose on his white handkerchief, and said, “Oh, Henry. Henry.” He was not sure which Henry she meant. She looked up at him, her small eyes almost swollen shut; she had taken her glasses off to press the handkerchief to them. “I talk to you in my head all the time,” she said. She put her glasses back on. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “For what?”

  “For talking to you in my head all the time.”

  “No, no.”

  He put her to bed like a child. Dutifully she went into the bathroom and changed into her pajamas, then lay in the bed with the quilt to her chin. He sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing her hair until the Valium took over. Her eyelids drooped, and she turned her head to the side, murmuring something he couldn’t make out. As he drove home slowly along the narrow roads, the darkness seemed alive and sinister as it pressed against the car windows. He pictured moving far upstate, living in a small house with Denise. He could find work somewhere up north; she could have a child. A little girl who would adore him; girls adored their fathers.

  “Well, widow-comforter, how is she?” Olive spoke in the dark from the bed.

  “Struggling,” he said.

  “Who isn’t.”

  The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had—their inner selves brushing up against the other. At the end of the day, he said, “I will take care of you,” his voice thick with emotion.

  She stood before him, and nodded. He zipped her coat for her.

  To this day he does not know what he was thinking. In fact, much of it he can’t seem to remember. That Tony Kuzio paid her some visits. That she told Tony he must stay married, because if he divorced, he would never be able to marry in the church again. The piercing of jealousy and rage he felt to think of Tony sitting in Denise’s little place late at night, begging her forgiveness. The feeling that he was drowning in cobwebs whose sticky maze was spinning about him. That he wanted Denise to continue to love him. And she did. He saw it in her eyes when she dropped a red mitten and he picked it up and held it open for her. I talk to you in my head all the time. The pain was sharp, exquisite, unbearable.

  “Denise,” he said one evening as they closed up the s
tore. “You need some friends.”

  Her face flushed deeply. She put her coat on with a roughness to her gestures. “I have friends,” she said, breathlessly.

  “Of course you do. But here in town.” He waited by the door until she got her purse from out back. “You might go square dancing at the Grange Hall. Olive and I used to go. It’s a nice group of people.”

  She stepped past him, her face moist, the top of her hair passing by his eyes. “Or maybe you think that’s square,” he said in the parking lot, lamely.

  “I am square,” she said, quietly.

  “Yes,” he said, just as quietly. “I am too.” As he drove home in the dark, he pictured being the one to take Denise to a Grange Hall dance. “Spin your partner, and promenade…,” her face breaking into a smile, her foot tapping, her small hands on her hips. No—it was not bearable, and he was really frightened now by the sudden emergence of anger he had inspired in her. He could do nothing for her. He could not take her in his arms, kiss her damp forehead, sleep beside her while she wore those little-girl flannel pajamas she’d worn the night Slippers died. To leave Olive was as unthinkable as sawing off his leg. In any event, Denise would not want a divorced Protestant; nor would he be able to abide her Catholicism.

  They spoke to each other little as the days went by. He felt coming from her now an unrelenting coldness that was accusatory. What had he led her to expect? And yet when she mentioned a visit from Tony Kuzio, or made an elliptical reference to seeing a movie in Portland, an answering coldness arose in him. He had to grit his teeth not to say, “Too square to go square dancing, then?” How he hated that the words lovers’ quarrel went through his head.

  And then just as suddenly she’d say—ostensibly to Jerry McCarthy, who listened those days with a new comportment to his bulky self, but really she was speaking to Henry (he could see this in the way she glanced at him, holding her small hands together nervously)—“My mother, when I was very little, and before she got sick, would make special cookies for Christmas. We’d paint them with frosting and sprinkles. Oh, I think it was the most fun I ever had sometimes”—her voice wavering while her eyes blinked behind her glasses. And he would understand then that the death of her husband had caused her to feel the death of her girlhood as well; she was mourning the loss of the only herself she had ever known—gone now, to this new, bewildered young widow. His eyes, catching hers, softened.

  Back and forth this cycle went. For the first time in his life as a pharmacist, he allowed himself a sleeping tablet, slipping one each day into the pocket of his trousers. “All set, Denise?” he’d say when it was time to close. Either she’d silently go get her coat, or she’d say, looking at him with gentleness, “All set, Henry. One more day.”

  Daisy Foster, standing now to sing a hymn, turns her head and smiles at him. He nods back and opens the hymnal. “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” The words, the sound of the few people singing, make him both hopeful and deeply sad. “You can learn to love someone,” he had told Denise, when she’d come to him in the back of the store that spring day. Now, as he places the hymnal back in the holder in front of him, sits once more on the small pew, he thinks of the last time he saw her. They had come north to visit Jerry’s parents, and they stopped by the house with the baby, Paul. What Henry remembers is this: Jerry saying something sarcastic about Denise falling asleep each night on the couch, sometimes staying there the whole night through. Denise turning away, looking out over the bay, her shoulders slumped, her small breasts just slightly pushing out against her thin turtleneck sweater, but she had a belly, as though a basketball had been cut in half and she’d swallowed it. No longer the girl she had been—no girl stayed a girl—but a mother, tired, and her round cheeks had deflated as her belly had expanded, so that already there was a look of the gravity of life weighing her down. It was at that point Jerry said sharply, “Denise, stand up straight. Put your shoulders back.” He looked at Henry, shaking his head. “How many times do I keep telling her that?”

  “Have some chowder,” Henry said. “Olive made it last night.” But they had to get going, and when they left, he said nothing about their visit, and neither did Olive, surprisingly. He would not have thought Jerry would grow into that sort of man, large, clean-looking—thanks to the ministrations of Denise—not even so much fat anymore, just a big man earning a big salary, speaking to his wife in a way Olive had sometimes spoken to Henry. He did not see her again, although she must have been in the region. In her birthday notes, she reported the death of her mother, then, a few years later, her father. Of course she would have driven north to go to the funerals. Did she think of him? Did she and Jerry stop and visit the grave of Henry Thibodeau?

  “You’re looking fresh as a daisy,” he tells Daisy Foster in the parking lot outside the church. It is their joke; he has said it to her for years.

  “How’s Olive?” Daisy’s blue eyes are still large and lovely, her smile ever present.

  “Olive’s fine. Home keeping the fires burning. And what’s new with you?”

  “I have a beau.” She says this quietly, putting a hand to her mouth.

  “Do you? Daisy, that’s wonderful.”

  “Sells insurance in Heathwick during the day, and takes me dancing on Friday nights.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Henry says again. “You’ll have to bring him around for supper.”

  “Why do you need everyone married?” Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son’s life. “Why can’t you just leave people alone?”

  He doesn’t want people alone.

  At home, Olive nods to the table, where a card from Denise lies next to an African violet. “Came yesterday,” Olive says. “I forgot.”

  Henry sits down heavily and opens it with his pen, finds his glasses, peers at it. Her note is longer than usual. She had a scare late in the summer. Pericardial effusion, which turned out to be nothing. “It changed me,” she wrote, “as experiences do. It put all my priorities straight, and I have lived every day since then with the deepest gratitude for my family. Nothing matters except family and friends,” she wrote, in her neat, small hand. “And I have been blessed with both.”

  The card, for the first time ever, was signed, “Love.”

  “How is she?” asks Olive, running water into the sink. Henry stares out at the bay, at the skinny spruce trees along the edge of the cove, and it seems beautiful to him, God’s magnificence there in the quiet stateliness of the coastline and the slightly rocking water.

  “She’s fine,” he answers. Not at the moment, but soon, he will walk over to Olive and put his hand on her arm. Olive, who has lived through her own sorrows. For he understood long ago—after Jim O’Casey’s car went off the road, and Olive spent weeks going straight to bed after supper, sobbing harshly into a pillow—Henry understood then that Olive had loved Jim O’Casey, had possibly been loved by him, though Henry never asked her and she never told, just as he did not tell her of the gripping, sickening need he felt for Denise until the day she came to him to report Jerry’s proposal, and he said: “Go.”

  He puts the card on the windowsill. He has wondered what it has felt like for her to write the words Dear Henry. Has she known other Henrys since then? He has no way of knowing. Nor does he know what happened to Tony Kuzio, or whether candles are still being lit for Henry Thibodeau in church.

  Henry stands up, Daisy Foster fleeting through his mind, her smile as she spoke of going dancing. The relief that he just felt over Denise’s note, that she is glad for the life that unfolded before her, gives way suddenly, queerly, into an odd sense of loss, as if something significant has been taken from him. “Olive,” he says.

  She must not hear him because of the water running into the sink. She is not as tall as she used to be, and is broader across her back. The water stops. “Olive,” he says, and she turns. “You’re not going to leave me, are you?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Henry. You could ma
ke a woman sick.” She wipes her hands quickly on a towel.

  He nods. How could he ever tell her—he could not—that all these years of feeling guilty about Denise have carried with them the kernel of still having her? He cannot even bear this thought, and in a moment it will be gone, dismissed as not true. For who could bear to think of himself this way, as a man deflated by the good fortune of others? No, such a thing is ludicrous.

  “Daisy has a fellow,” he says. “We need to have them over soon.”

  Incoming Tide

  The bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted them. Also there was the twanging sound of the cables hitting the masts of the sailboats moored. A few seagulls gave squawking cries as they dove down to pick up the fish heads and tails and shining insides that the boy was tossing from the dock as he cleaned the mackerel. All this Kevin saw as he sat in his car with the windows partly open. The car was parked on the grassy area, not far from the marina. Two trucks were parked farther over, on the gravel by the dock.

  How much time went by, Kevin didn’t know.

  At one point, the marina’s screen door opened wheezily and slammed shut, and Kevin watched as a man moved in slow steps in his dark rubber boots, tossing a coil of heavy rope into the back of the truck. If the man noticed Kevin, he gave no sign, even when he backed up his truck and turned his head in Kevin’s direction. There was no reason they would recognize each other. Kevin had not been to this town since he was a child; thirteen, when he moved away with his father and brother. He was as much a stranger up here now as any tourist might be, and yet gazing back at the sun-sliced bay, he noted how familiar it felt; he had not expected that. The salt air filled his nose, the wild rugosa bushes with their white blossoms brought him a vague confusion; a sense of sad ignorance seemed cloaked in their benign white petals.

  Patty Howe poured coffee into two white mugs, placed them on the counter, said quietly, “You’re welcome,” and moved back to arrange the corn muffins that had just been passed through the opening from the kitchen. She had seen the man sitting in the car—he’d been there well over an hour—but people did that sometimes, drove out from town just to gaze at the water. Still, there was something about him that was troubling her. “They’re perfect,” she said to the cook, because the tops of the muffins were crispy at the edges, yellow as rising suns. The fact that their newly baked scent did not touch off a queasiness in her, as they had two times in the past year, made her sad; a soft dismalness settled over her. The doctor had said to them, For three months you are not to even think of it.