Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

  Joe was right when he imagined that Angie suffered from stage fright, and she had years ago learned to begin swallowing vodka at five fifteen, so that by the time she left her room half an hour later, she had to hold the wall as she went down the hall stairs. But the walk cleared her head, while leaving her with enough confidence to make her way to the piano, open the keyboard, sit down, and play. What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room. It was the responsibility of this that frightened her. And it was why she played straight through for three hours, without taking a break, in order to avoid the quiet that would fall over the room, to avoid again the way people smiled at her when she sat down to play; no, she didn’t like the attention at all. What she liked was playing the piano. Two bars into the first song, Angie was always happy. For her, it was as though she had slipped inside the music. We are one, Malcolm Moody used to say. Let’s become one, Angie—what do you say?

  Angie had never taken piano lessons, although people tended not to believe this. So she had stopped telling people this long ago. When she was four years old, she sat down at the piano in the church and began to play, and it didn’t surprise her then, or now. “My hands are hungry,” she would say to her mother when she was young, and it was like that—a hunger. The church had given her mother a key, and these days Angie could still go there anytime and play the piano.

  Behind her she heard the door open, felt the momentary chill, saw the tinsel on the tree sway, and heard the loud voice of Olive Kitteridge say, “Too damn bad. I like the cold.”

  The Kitteridges, when they came alone to the Warehouse, tended to come early and did not sit in the lounge first but went straight through to the dining room. Still, Henry would always call out, “Evening there, Angie,” smiling broadly on his way through, and Olive would wave her hand over her head in a kind of hello. Henry’s favorite song was “Good Night, Irene,” and Angie would try to remember to play this later as the Kitteridges walked back through on their way out. Lots of people had favorite songs, and Angie would sometimes play them, but not always. Henry Kitteridge was different. She always played his song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.

  Tonight Angie was shaky. There were nights, now, when her vodka did not do what it had done for many years, which was to make her happy and make everything feel pleasantly at a distance. Tonight, as sometimes happened now, she felt a little queer in the head—off-kilter. She made sure to keep a smile on her face and didn’t look at anyone except Walter Dalton, who sat at the end of the bar. He blew her a kiss. She winked, a tiny gesture; you would have thought it was a blink except she did it with only one eye.

  There was a time when Malcolm Moody loved to see her blink like that. “God, but you get me going,” he’d say on those afternoons he came to her room on Wood Street. Malcolm did not like Walter Dalton and referred to him as a fairy, which he was. Walter was also an alcoholic, and the college had let him go, and now he lived in a house on Coombs Island. Walter came into the bar every night that Angie played. Sometimes he brought her a gift—a silk scarf once, a pair of leather gloves with tiny buttons on the side. He always handed his car keys to Joe, and then after closing, Joe often drove him home, with one of the busboys driving Joe’s car to give Joe a drive back.

  “What a pathetic life,” Malcolm had said to Angie, about Walter. “Sitting there every night getting stewed.”

  Angie didn’t like to have people called pathetic, but she didn’t say anything. Sometimes, not often, Angie would think that people might call her life with Malcolm pathetic. This would occur to her as she walked down a sunny sidewalk, or it might happen when she woke in the night. It made her heart race, and she would go over in her mind the kinds of things he had said to her over the years. At first he had said, “I think about you all the time.” He still said, “I love you.” Sometimes, “What would I do without you, Angie?” He never bought her gifts and she wouldn’t have wanted him to.

  She heard the street door open and close, felt the brief chill from the outdoors once again. From the corner of her eye she caught the motion of a man in a dark coat sinking into a chair in the far corner, and there was something in the way he ducked, or moved, that ever so slightly jogged her mind. But she was shaky tonight.

  “Dear,” she whispered to Betty, who was moving past with a tray of glasses. “Could you tell Joe I need a little Irish coffee?”

  “Sure,” said Betty, a nice girl, small as a child. “No problem.”

  She drank it with one hand, still playing the notes of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” and gave a wink to Joe, who nodded gravely. At the end of the night, she would have a drink with Joe and Walter, and she would tell them about visiting her mother in the nursing home today; she might or might not mention the bruises on her mother’s arm.

  “A request, Angie.” Betty dropped a cocktail napkin on her way past, while she held the tray of drinks in the flat of her uplifted hand; you could see how heavy it was for her by the way she swayed her back as she moved around the chairs. “From that man,” she added, moving her head toward the corner.

  “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was written on the napkin and Angie kept playing Christmas carols, smiling her smile. She did not look at the man in the corner. She played every Christmas carol she could think of, but she was not inside the music now. Perhaps another drink would help, but the man in the corner was watching and he would know it was not coffee alone in the cup Betty brought her. His name was Simon. He had once been a piano player, too.

  Fall on your knees, O hear the angels’ voices…. But it was like she had fallen overboard and had to swim through seaweed. The darkness of the man’s coat seemed to press against her head, and there was a watery terror that had to do with her mother; get inside, she thought. But she was very shaky. She slowed down, played “The First Noel” quite lightly. She saw a large snowy field now, with a crack of gentle light along the horizon.

  When she finished, she did something that really surprised her. Later she had to wonder how long she had been planning this without quite knowing. The way she didn’t quite allow herself to know when Malcolm had stopped saying “I think about you all the time.”

  Angie took a break.

  Delicately, she pressed the cocktail napkin to her lips, slipped out from behind the piano, and walked toward the restroom, where there was a pay phone. She did not want to bother Joe for her pocketbook.

  “Darling,” she said quietly to Walter, “do you have some change?”

  He stretched out a leg, reached into his pocket, handed her the coins. “You’re the candy shop, Angie,” Walter said slurringly.

  His hand was moist; even the coins felt moist. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.

  She went to the phone and dialed Malcolm’s number. Not once, in twenty-two years, had she called him at home, although she had memorized his number long ago. Twenty-two years, she thought, as she listened to the buzz of the ring, would be considered a very long time by most people, but for Angie time was as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it was like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to do.

  Malcolm answered the phone. And here was a curious thing—she didn’t like the sound of his voice. “Malcolm,” she said softly. “I can’t see you anymore. I’m so terribly sorry, but I can’t do this anymore.”

  Silence. His wife was probably right there. “Bye, now,” she said.

  On her way past Walter, she said, “Thank you, darling,” and he said, “Anything for you, Angie.” Walter’s voice was thick with drunkenness, his face glistening.

  She played the song Simon wanted then, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” but it wasn’t until she was almost through that she allowed herself to look at him. He did not return her smile, and a flush went through her. />
  She smiled at the Christmas tree. The colored lights seemed terribly bright, and for a moment she felt baffled that people did this to trees—decorated them with all that glitter; some people looked forward to this all year. And then another flush of heat rose through her, to think how in a few weeks the tree would be stripped, taken down, hauled out onto the sidewalk with tinsel still sticking to it; she could picture how awkward this tree would look, perched sideways on the snow, its chopped little trunk sticking at an angle in the air.

  She began to play “We Shall Overcome,” but somebody from the bar called out, “Hey, a little serious there, Angie,” and so she smiled even more brightly and played ragtime instead. Stupid to play that—to play “We Shall Overcome.” Simon would think it was stupid, she realized that now. “You’re so schmaltzy,” he used to say.

  But he had said other things. When he took her to lunch with her mother that first time: “You’re like a person in a beautiful fairy tale,” he had said, sunlight falling across the table on the deck.

  “You’re the perfect daughter,” he had said, out in the rowboat in the bay, her mother waving from the rocks. “You have the face of an angel,” he said the day they stepped from the boat onto Puckerbrush Island. Later he sent her one white rose.

  Oh, she had been just a girl. She had come into this very bar with her friends one night that summer, and there he was playing “Fly Me to the Moon.” It was like he’d had little lights flickering off him.

  A nervous fellow, though, Simon had been, his whole body jerking around like a puppet pulled by strings. A lot of force in his playing. But it lacked—well, deep in her heart she had known even then that his playing lacked—well, feeling. “Play ‘Feelings,’ ” people sometimes requested then, but he never did. Too corny, he said. Too schmaltzy.

  He had come up from Boston just for the summer but stayed two years. When he broke it off with Angie, he said, “It’s like I have to date both you and your mother. It gives me the creeps.” Later, he wrote to her. “You’re neurotic,” he wrote. “You’re wounded.”

  She couldn’t use the pedal; her leg was shaking beneath her black skirt. He was the only person she’d ever told that her mother had taken money from men.

  A burst of laughter came from the bar and Angie looked over, but it was just some of the fishermen telling stories with Joe. Walter Dalton smiled sweetly at her, rolled his eyes toward the fishermen.

  Her mother had knit the three of them matching blue sweaters for Christmas. When her mother left the room, Simon said, “We will never wear these at the same time.” Her mother bought him a whole stack of Beethoven records. When Simon left, her mother wrote and asked him for the records back, but he didn’t send them. Her mother said they could still wear the blue sweaters, and when her mother wore the blue sweater, she had Angie wear hers as well. Her mother said to her one day, “Simon got rejected from music school, you know. He’s a real estate lawyer in Boston. Bob Beane bumped into him down there.”

  “Okay,” Angie had said.

  She thought, then, she wouldn’t see him again. Because she had seen a shadow of envy flicker darkly over his face the day she’d told him (oh, she had told him everything, child that she was in that shack with her mother!) how once, when she was fifteen, a man from Chicago had heard her play at a local wedding. He ran a music school and had talked with her mother for two days. Angie should be at the school. There would be a scholarship, room and board. No, Angie’s mother had said. She’s Mommy’s girl. But for years Angie had pictured the place: a white, sprawling place where young people played the piano all day. She would be taught by kind men and women; she would learn to read music. All the rooms would be heated. There would be none of the sounds that came from her mother’s room, sounds that made her push her hands to her ears at night, sounds that made her leave the house and go to the church to play the piano. But no, Angie’s mother had decided. She was Mommy’s girl.

  She glanced again at Simon. He was leaning back in his chair watching her. There was no pocket of warmth, the way there was whenever Henry Kitteridge walked through the door, or the way there was right now at the bar where Walter sat.

  What was it he had come to see? She pictured him leaving a law office early, driving up the coast in the dark. Perhaps he was divorced; having the kind of crisis men often had in their late fifties, looking back over their lives, wondering why things had worked out the way they had. And so he—after how many years—had thought, or not thought, of her, but for some reason had driven to Crosby, Maine. Had he known she would be working here?

  From the corner of her eye she saw him rise, and there he was leaning against the open baby grand, looking straight at her. He had lost most of his hair.

  “Hello, Simon,” she said. She was playing stuff she’d made up now, her fingers going over the keys.

  “Hello, Angie.” He wasn’t a man you’d look twice at now. Probably back then he wasn’t a man you’d have looked twice at, but that didn’t matter the way people thought it did. It didn’t matter how once he’d had an ugly brown leather jacket and thought it was cool. You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn’t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind. She was slipping into the music now.

  “How are you, Simon,” she said, smiling.

  “Very well, thanks.” He gave a small nod. “Quite well.” And then she felt the ping of danger. His eyes were not warm. They had been warm eyes. “I see you still have your red hair,” he said.

  “I put a rinse through it these days, I’m afraid.”

  He just looked at her; his coat hung loosely. His clothes had always hung loosely.

  “Are you still a lawyer, Simon? I heard you were a lawyer.”

  He nodded. “The truth is, Angie, I’m good at it. It’s nice to be good at something.”

  “Yes. Of course it is. What kind of law?”

  “Real estate.” He looked down. But he raised his chin in a moment. “It’s fun. Like a puzzle.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s nice.” She crossed her left hand over, did a light run.

  “Ever marry, Angie?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. And you?” She had already seen the wedding ring. A broad band. She would not have thought him the type to wear such a broad band.

  “Yes. I have three children. Two boys and a girl, all grown.” He shifted his feet, still leaning against the piano.

  “Oh, lovely, Simon. That’s lovely.” She had forgotten “O Come All Ye Faithful.” She began playing that, her fingers reaching deeply into it; sometimes when she played, it was like being a sculptress, she thought, pulling at the lovely thick clay.

  He looked at his watch. “You’re off at nine, then?”

  “I am. Yes. But I have to skedaddle right out of here, I’m afraid. Sorry to say.” She had stopped blushing; her skin felt chilly now. She had quite a headache.

  “Okay, Angie.” He stood up straight. “I’ll be taking off. Nice to see you after all these years.”

  “Yes, Simon. Nice to see you.”

  Betty’s arm placed a cup of coffee down on the other side. “From Walter,” Betty said, moving past.

  Angie turned her head, gave Walter that small blink of a wink; Walter, watching her, bleary in his eyes.

  Simon was walking away. And there were the Kitteridges, leaving, Henry waving his hand. “Good Night, Irene,” she played.

  Simon turned back; in two jerky motions he was at her side, leaning his face next to hers. “You know, your mother came to Boston to see me.”

  Angie’s face got very warm.

  “She took the Greyhound bus,” said Simon’s voice in her ear. “And then took a taxi to my apartment. When I let her in, she asked for a drink and started taking off her clothes. Unbuttoned that button slowly at the top of her neck.”

  Angie’s mou
th had gone dry.

  “And I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for you, Angie, all these years.”

  She smiled straight ahead of her. “Good night, Simon,” she said.

  She drank, with one hand, all the Irish coffee. And then she played all sorts of songs. She didn’t know what she played, couldn’t have said, but she was inside the music, and the lights on the Christmas tree were bright and seemed far away. Inside the music like this, she understood many things. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy, but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted to be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed.

  The lounge was mostly empty now. And warmer, since the door wasn’t being opened all the time. She played “We Shall Overcome” she played it twice, slowly, grandly, and looked over at the bar to where Walter was smiling at her. He raised a fist into the air.

  “Want a ride, there, Angie?” Joe asked as she closed the top of the piano, went and gathered her coat and pocketbook.

  “No, thank you, dear,” she said as Walter helped her into her white fake fur coat. “The walk will do me good.”

  Clutching her little blue pocketbook, she picked her way over the snowbank by the sidewalk, across the parking lot of the post office. The green numbers by the bank said minus three degrees, but she didn’t feel cold. Her mascara was frozen, though. Her mother had taught her not to touch her eyelashes when it was this cold, or they could break off.