Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

  The screen door opened, banged shut. Through the large window, Patty saw that the man in the car still sat looking at the water, and as Patty poured coffee for an elderly couple that had seated themselves slowly into a booth, as she asked how they were this nice morning, she suddenly knew who the man was, and something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. “There you go,” she said to the couple, and didn’t glance out the window again.

  “Say, why doesn’t Kevin come over here instead,” Patty’s mother had suggested, when Patty had been so small her head had only reached the kitchen counter, shaking it No, no, no, she didn’t want to go there. She’d been scared of him; in kindergarten he had sucked on his wrist so hard it was always a brilliant disk of a bruise, and his mother—tall, dark-haired, deep-voiced—had scared her, too. Now, as Patty put the corn muffins onto a plate, she thought that her mother’s response had been graceful, brilliant almost. Kevin had come to her house instead, and he’d patiently swung a jump rope whose other end was tied around a tree, while Patty had jumped and jumped. On her way home from work today, Patty would stop by her mother’s house. You’ll never guess who I saw, she’d say.

  The boy on the dock stood up, holding a yellow pail in one hand, a knife in the other. A seagull swooped in and the boy waved his arm with the knife. Kevin watched as the boy turned to come up the ramp, but a man was sauntering down onto the wharf. “Son, put the knife in the pail,” the man called out, and the boy did that, carefully, and then grabbed the rail and climbed up the ramp to meet his father. He was still young enough that he took the man’s hand. Together they peered into the pail, and then they got into the truck and drove off.

  Kevin, watching all this from his car, thought, Good, and what he meant was that he had felt no emotion watching this, the man and the son.

  “A lot of people don’t have families,” Dr. Goldstein had said, scratching his white beard, then unabashedly brushing away anything that had fallen onto his chest. “But they still have homes.” Folding his hands, calmly, across his big stomach.

  On his way here to the marina, Kevin had driven past his childhood home. The road was still dirt, with deep ruts, but there were a few new homes tucked back into the woods. Tree trunks should have doubled in girth, and perhaps they had, but the woods remained as he remembered them, thick and tangled and rough, an uneven patch of sky showing through as he turned up the hill to where his house was. It was the shed that made him certain he’d not taken a wrong turn—the deep red shed beside the house, and, right next to that, the granite rock that had been large enough that Kevin used to think of it as a mountain, as he climbed it in his little-boy sneakers. The rock was still there—and the house, but it had been renovated; a wraparound front porch added, and the old kitchen gone. Of course: they’d have wanted the kitchen gone. A sense of umbrage pricked him, then left. He slowed the car, peering carefully for any signs of children. He saw no bicycles, no swing set, no tree house, no basketball hoop—just a hanging pink impatiens plant by the front door.

  Relief came, arriving as a sensation beneath his ribs, like a gentle lapping of the water’s edge at low tide, a comforting quiescence. In the back of the car was a blanket, and he would still use it, even if there were no children in the house. Right now the blanket was wrapped around the rifle, but when he returned (soon, while this relief still touched, quietly, the inner blankness he had felt on the long ride up), he would lie down on the pine needles and put the blanket over him. If it was the man of the house who found him—so what? The woman who had hung the pink impatiens? She wouldn’t look for long. But to have a child—no, Kevin could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother’s need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards. Never mind, his mind said to him quietly, as he drove on past. Never mind. The woods were there, and that’s all he wanted, to lie on the pine needles, touch the thin, ripping bark of a cedar tree, have the hackmatack needles above his head, the wild lilies of the valley with their green, open leaves near him. The hidden white starflowers, the wild violets; his mother had shown him all these.

  The extra noise of the clanking sailboat masts made him realize the wind had picked up. The seagulls had stopped their squawking now that the fish entrails were gone. A fat gull that had been standing on the rail of the ramp not far from him took off—its wings flapping only twice before the breeze carried it along. Hollow-boned; Kevin had seen gull bones as a child, out on Puckerbrush Island. He had shouted with panic when his brother had collected some to take back to the house. Leave them where they are, Kevin had shouted.

  “States and traits,” Dr. Goldstein had said. “Traits don’t change, states of mind do.”

  Two cars drove in and parked near the marina. He hadn’t thought there would be so much activity here on a weekday, but it was almost July, and people had their boats to sail; he watched a couple, not much older than he was, take a big basket down the ramp, which already, with the tide coming in, was not so steep. And then the screen door of the diner opened and a woman came out, wearing a skirt that went well over her knees, as well as an apron—she could have stepped out of a different century. She had a metal pail in her hand, and as she moved toward the dock, he watched her shoulders, the long back, her thin hips as she moved—she was lovely, the way a sapling might be as the afternoon sun moved over it. A yearning stirred in him that was not sexual but a kind of reaching toward her simplicity of form. He looked away, and his body jumped a little to see a woman staring through the passenger window, her face close, staring straight at him.

  Mrs. Kitteridge. Holy shit. She looked exactly the same as she had in the classroom in seventh grade, that forthright, high-cheekboned expression; her hair was still dark. He had liked her; not everyone had. He would have waved her away now, or started the car, but the memory of respect held him back. She rapped her hand on the glass, and after hesitating, he leaned and unrolled the window the rest of the way.

  “Kevin Coulson. Hello.”

  He nodded.

  “You going to invite me to sit in your car?”

  His hands made fists in his lap. He started to shake his head. “No, I’m only—”

  But she had already let herself in—a big woman, taking up the whole bucket seat, her knees close to the dashboard. She hauled a big black handbag across her lap. “What brings you here?” she asked.

  He looked out toward the water. The young woman was moving back up from the dock; the seagulls were screeching furiously behind her, beating their large wings and darting down; she’d have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

  “Visiting?” Mrs. Kitteridge prompted. “From New York City? Isn’t that where you live now?”

  “Jesus,” Kevin said quietly. “Does everybody know everything?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said comfortably. “What else is there to do?”

  She had her face turned to him, but he didn’t want to meet her eyes. The wind on the bay seemed to be picking up more. He put his hands into his pockets, so as not to suck on his knuckles.

  “Get a lot of tourists now,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Crawling all over the place this time of year.”

  He made a sound in his throat, acknowledging not the fact—what did he care?—but that she had spoken to him. He watched the slim woman with the pail, her head tilted down as she went back inside, closing the screen door carefully. “That’s Patty Howe,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Remember her? Patty Crane. She married the older Howe boy. Nice girl. She keeps having miscarriages and it makes her sad.”

  Olive Kitteridge sighed, rearranged her feet, pushed the lever—much to Kevin’s surprise—to make herself more comfortable, moving the seat back. “I suspect they’ll get her fixed up one of these days, and then she’ll be pregnant with triplets.”

  Kevin took his hands from his pockets, cracked his knuckles. “Patty was nice,” he said. “I had forgotten about Patty.”


  “She’s still nice. That’s what I said. What are you doing in New York?”

  “Oh.” He raised a hand, saw the reddened marks that spotted them, crossed his arms. “I’m in training. I got my medical degree four years ago.”

  “Say, that’s impressive. What kind of doctor are you training to be?”

  He looked at the dashboard, couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed the filth of it. There in the sunlight it seemed to be telling her he was a slob, pathetic, not a shred of dignity. He took in a breath and said, “Psychiatry.”

  He expected her to say “Ahhh…” and when she said nothing, he glanced at her, and found that she was giving a simple matter-of-fact nod.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said, squinting back toward the bay. The remark held gratitude for what he felt was her discretion, and it was true, as well, for the bay—which he seemed to view from behind a large pane of glass, larger than the windshield—and which did have, he understood, a kind of splendor, the twanging, rocking sailboats, the whipped water, the wild rugosa. How much better to be a fisherman, to spend one’s day in the midst of this. He thought of the PET scans he had studied, always looking for his mother, hands in his pockets, nodding as the radiologists spoke, and sometimes tears twinkling behind his lids—the enlargement of the amygdala, the increase in the white-matter lesions, the severe depletion in the number of glial cells. The brains of the bipolar.

  “But I’m not going to be a psychiatrist,” he said.

  The wind was really picking up now, making the ramp to the float bob up and down. “I imagine you get a lot of wicky-wackies in that business,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, adjusting her feet, making a scraping sound as she moved them across the grit of the car floor.

  “Some.”

  He had gone to medical school thinking he’d become a pediatrician, as his mother had been, but he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course—what bullshit he had witnessed among his colleagues, his professors! His own interest had become narrowed to victims of torture, but that had also led him to despair, and when he had finally come under the care of Murray Goldstein, Ph.D., M.D., and had told the man his plans to work at the Hague with those whose feet had been beaten raw, whose bodies and minds lay in ruinous disorder, Dr. Goldstein had said, “What are you, crazy?”

  He’d been attracted to crazy. Clara—what a name—Clara Pilkington appeared to be the sanest person he’d ever met. And wasn’t that something? She ought to have been wearing a billboard around her neck: COMPLETELY CRAZY CLARA.

  “You know the old saying, I’m sure,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Psychiatrists are nutty, cardiologists are hard-hearted—”

  He turned to look at her. “And pediatricians?”

  “Tyrants,” Mrs. Kitteridge acknowledged. She gave one shrug to her shoulder.

  Kevin nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly.

  After a moment, Mrs. Kitteridge said, “Well, your mother may not have been able to help it.”

  He was surprised. His urge to suck on his knuckles was like an agonizing itch, and he ran his hands back and forth over his knees, found the hole in his jeans. “I think my mother was bipolar,” he said. “Never diagnosed, though.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Kitteridge nodded. “She could’ve been helped today. My father wasn’t bipolar. He was depressed. And he never talked. Maybe they could’ve helped him today.”

  Kevin was silent. And maybe they couldn’t, he thought.

  “My son. He’s got the depression.”

  Kevin looked at her. Small drops of perspiration had appeared in the pockets beneath her eyes. He saw that she did, in fact, look much older. Of course she wouldn’t look the same as she had back then—the seventh-grade math teacher that kids were scared of. He’d been scared of her, even while liking her.

  “What’s he do?” Kevin asked.

  “A podiatrist.”

  He felt the stain of some sadness make its way from her to him. Gusts of wind were now swooping in all directions, so that the bay looked like a blue and white crazily frosted cake, peaks rising one way, then another. Poplar leaves beside the marina were fluttering upward, their branches all bent to one side.

  “I’ve thought of you, Kevin Coulson,” she said. “I have.”

  He closed his eyes. He could hear as she shifted her weight beside him, heard the gravel again on the rubber mat as her foot scraped over it. He was going to say I don’t want you thinking about me, when she said, “I liked your mother.”

  He opened his eyes. Patty Howe had stepped back out of the restaurant; she was walking toward the path in front of the place, and a nervousness touched his chest; it was sheer rock in front there, if he remembered right, a straight drop down. But she would know that.

  “I know you did,” Kevin said, turning to the big, intelligent face of Mrs. Kitteridge. “She liked you.”

  Olive Kitteridge nodded. “Smart. She was a smart woman.”

  He wondered how long this would have to go on. And yet it meant something to him, that she had known his mother. In New York no one knew.

  “Don’t know if you know this or not, but that was the case with my father.”

  “What was?” He frowned, passed his index knuckle briefly through his mouth.

  “Suicide.”

  He wanted her to leave; it was time for her to leave.

  “Are you married?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, my son isn’t either. Drives my poor husband nuts. Henry wants everyone married, everyone happy. I say, for God’s sake, let him take his time. Up here the pickings can be slim. Down there in New York, I suppose you—”

  “I’m not in New York.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not—I’m not in New York anymore.”

  He could hear that she was about to ask something; he thought he could almost feel her desire to turn around and look at the backseat, see what was in his car. If she did, he would have to say he needed to go, ask her to leave. He watched from the corner of his eye, but she was still looking straight ahead.

  Patty Howe, he saw, had shears in her hand. With her skirt blowing about her, she was standing by the rugosa, cutting some of the white blossoms. He kept his eye on Patty, the choppy bay spread out behind her. “How’d he do it?” He rubbed his hand over his thigh.

  “My father? Shot himself.”

  The moored sailboats now were heaving their bows high, then swooping back down as though pulled by an angry underwater creature. The white blossoms of the wild rugosa bent, straightened, bent again, the scraggly leaves around them bobbing as though they too were an ocean. He saw Patty Howe step back from them, and give her hand a shake, as though she had been pricked by the thorns.

  “No note,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Oh, Mother had such a hard time with that no-note business. She thought the least he could’ve done was leave a note, the way he did if he’d walked to the grocery store. Mother would say, ‘He was always considerate enough to leave me a note when he went anywhere.’ But he hadn’t really gone anywhere. He was there in the kitchen, poor thing.”

  “Do these boats ever get loose?” Kevin pictured his own childhood kitchen. He knew that a .22 caliber bullet could travel for one mile, go through nine inches of ordinary board. But after the roof of a mouth, the roof of a house—after that, how far did it go?

  “Oh, sometimes. Not so much as you’d think, given how fierce these squalls can be. But every so often one does, you know—causes a ruckus. They have to go after it, hope it doesn’t smash up on the rocks.”

  “Then the marina gets sued for malpractice?” He said this to divert her.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, “how they handle that kind of thing. Different insurance
arrangements, I guess. Acts of negligence or acts of God.”

  At the very moment Kevin became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar, awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure. He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety.

  “Unusual for a woman to use a gun,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, musingly.

  He looked at her; she did not return the look, just gazed out at the swirling incoming tide. “Well, my mother was an unusual woman,” he said grimly.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “She was.”

  When Patty Howe had gotten done with her shift, taken her apron off, and gone to hang it in the back room, she had seen through the dusty window the yellow daylilies that grew in the small patch of lawn on the far side of the marina. She pictured them in a jar next to her bed. “I’m disappointed too,” her husband had said, the second time, adding, “but I know it must feel like it happens just to you.” Her eyes moistened now, remembering this; a great swelling of love filled her. The lilies would not be missed. No one went to the far side of the marina, partly because the path that ran right in front was so narrow, the drop-off so steep. For insurance purposes the place had recently posted a KEEP OUT sign, and there was even talk of fencing it off before some small child, unwatched, scrambled off into the brush there. But Patty would just snip a few lilies and get going. She found the shears in a drawer and went out to get her bouquet, noticing when she stepped out that Mrs. Kitteridge had joined Kevin Coulson in the car, and it gave her a feeling of safety, having Mrs. Kitteridge with him. She couldn’t have said why, and didn’t dwell on it. The wind had picked up amazingly. She’d hurry and get her flowers, wrap them in a wet paper towel, and stop off by her mother’s on the way home. She bent over the rugosa bushes first, thinking what a sweet combination the yellow and white would be, but they were alive in the wind and her fingers were pricked. She turned to start along the path to where the lilies were.