Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

  Turning onto Wood Street, the streetlamps pale in the dark cold, she said out loud, “Huh!” because she was baffled by many things. That often happened after being inside the music the way she’d been tonight.

  She stumbled a little with her high-heeled boots, put her hand against the porch rail.

  “Cunt.”

  She had not seen him standing beside the house, in the dark shadow from the overhang.

  “You cunt, Angie.” He stepped toward her.

  “Malcolm,” she said softly. “Now, please.”

  “Calling my house. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “Well,” she said. She pressed her lips together, put a finger to her mouth. “Well,” she said. “Let’s see.” It was not her style to call his house, but even less so to remind him that she, in twenty-two years, had never done so before.

  “You’re a fucking nut,” he said. “And you’re a drunk, too.” He walked away. She saw his truck parked on the next block. “You call me at work when you sober up,” he said over his shoulder. And then, more quietly, “And don’t go pulling this shit again.”

  Even drunk, she knew she would not call him when she sobered up. She let herself into the apartment house and sat down on the stairwell. Angela O’Meara.

  A face like an angel. A drunk. Her mother sold herself to men. Never married, Angela?

  But sitting on the stairwell, she told herself that she was no more, no less, pathetic than any of them, including Malcolm’s wife. And people were kind: Walter, Joe, and Henry Kitteridge. Oh, definitely, there were kind people in the world. Tomorrow she would get to work early and tell Joe about her mother and the bruises. “Imagine,” she would say to Joe. “Imagine someone pinching an old paralyzed woman like that.”

  Angie, leaning her head now against the hallway wall, fingering her black skirt, felt she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late. Tomorrow she would go play the piano in the church, stop thinking about the bruises on her mother’s upper arm, that thin arm with its slack soft skin, so loose from the bone that when you squeezed it in your fingers, it was hard to imagine it could feel anything.

  A Little Burst

  Three hours ago, while the sun was shining full tilt through the trees and across the back lawn, the local podiatrist, a middle-aged man named Christopher Kitteridge, was married to a woman from out of town named Suzanne. This is the first marriage for both of them, and the wedding has been a smallish, pleasant affair, with a flute player and baskets of yellow sweetheart roses placed inside and outside the house. So far, the polite cheerfulness of the guests seems to show no sign of running down, and Olive Kitteridge, standing by the picnic table, is thinking it’s really high time everyone left.

  All afternoon Olive has been fighting the sensation of moving underwater—a panicky, dismal feeling, since she has somehow never managed to learn to swim. Wedging her paper napkin into the slats of the picnic table, she thinks, All right, I’ve had enough, and dropping her gaze so as to avoid getting stuck in one more yakkety conversation, she walks around to the side of the house and steps through a door that opens directly into her son’s bedroom. Here she crosses the pine floor, gleaming in the sunshine, and lies down on Christopher’s (and Suzanne’s) queen-size bed.

  Olive’s dress—which is important to the day, of course, since she is the mother of the groom—is made from a gauzy green muslin with big reddish-pink geraniums printed all over it, and she has to arrange herself carefully on the bed so it won’t wind up all wrinkly, and also, in case someone walks in, so she will look decent. Olive is a big person. She knows this about herself, but she wasn’t always big, and it still seems something to get used to. It’s true she has always been tall and frequently felt clumsy, but the business of being big showed up with age; her ankles puffed out, her shoulders rolled up behind her neck, and her wrists and hands seemed to become the size of a man’s. Olive minds—of course she does; sometimes, privately, she minds very much. But at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food, and that means right now she probably looks like a fat, dozing seal wrapped in some kind of gauze bandage. But the dress worked out well, she reminds herself, leaning back and closing her eyes. Much better than the dark, grim clothes the Bernstein family is wearing, as though they had been asked to a funeral, instead of a wedding, on this bright June day.

  The inside door of her son’s bedroom is partly open, and voices and sounds make their way from the front of the house, where the party is also going on: high heels clicking down the hallway, a bathroom door pushed aggressively shut. (Honestly, Olive thinks—why not just close a door nicely?) A chair in the living room gets scraped over the floor, and in there with the muted laughter and talk is the odor of coffee, and the thick, sweet smell of baked goods, which is the way the streets near the Nissen bread factory used to smell before it closed down. There are different perfumes as well, including one that all day has smelled to Olive like that bug spray Off! All these smells have managed to move down the hall and drift into the bedroom.

  Cigarette smoke, too. Olive opens her eyes: Someone is smoking a cigarette in the back garden. Through the open window she hears a cough, the click of a lighter. Really, the place has been overrun. She pictures heavy shoes stepping through the gladiola bed, and then, hearing a toilet flush down the hall, she has a momentary image of the house collapsing; pipes breaking, floorboards snapping, walls folding over. She sits up slightly, rearranges herself, and puts another pillow against the headboard.

  She built the house herself—well, almost. She and Henry, years ago, did all the design and then worked closely with the builder, so that Chris would have a decent place to live when he came back from podiatry school. When you build a house yourself, you’re going to have a different feeling about it than other people do. Olive is used to this because she has always liked to make things: dresses, gardens, houses. (The yellow roses were arranged in their baskets by her this morning, before the sun was up.) Her own house, a few miles down the road, she and Henry also built, years ago, and just recently she fired the cleaning woman because of the way the foolish girl dragged the vacuum cleaner across the floor, banging it into walls and bumping it down the stairs.

  At least Christopher appreciates this place. Over the last few years, the three of them, Olive and Henry and Christopher, have taken care of it together, clearing more woods, planting lilacs and rhododendrons, digging postholes for the fence. Now Suzanne (Dr. Sue is what Olive calls her in her head) will take over, and coming from money the way she does, she will probably hire a housekeeper, as well as a gardener. (“Love your pretty nasturtiums,” Dr. Sue said to Olive a few weeks ago, pointing to the petunia rows.) But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.

  Through her closed eyelids Olive sees a red light slanting through the windows; she can feel sunlight warming her calves and ankles on the bed, can feel beneath her hand how it warms the soft fabric of her dress, which really did come out nicely. It pleases her to think of the piece of blueberry cake she managed to slip into her big leather handbag—how she can go home soon and eat it in peace, take off this panty girdle, get things back to normal.

  Olive senses someone in the room, and opens her eyes. A small child stands staring from the doorway; one of the bride’s little nieces from Chicago. It’s the one who was supposed to sprinkle rose petals on the ground right before the ceremony but at the last minute decided she didn’t want to, and hung back, sulking. Dr. Sue was nice about it, though, speaking reassuringly to the little girl, cupping her hand gently around the child’s head. Finally Suzanne called out good-naturedly “Oh, go ahead” to a woman standing near a tree, who started playing a flute. Then Suzanne walked over to Christopher—who was not smiling, looking as stiff as driftwood—and the two stood there, getting married, on the lawn.

  But the gesture, the smooth cupping of the little girl’s head, the way Suzanne’s han
d in one quick motion caressed the fine hair and thin neck, has stayed with Olive. It was like watching some woman dive from a boat and swim easily up to the dock. A reminder how some people could do things others could not.

  “Hello,” Olive says to the little girl, but the child does not reply. After a moment, Olive says, “How old are you?” She is no longer familiar with young children, but she guesses this one is around four, maybe five; nobody in the Bernstein family seems tall.

  Still the child says nothing. “Run along now,” Olive tells her, but the girl leans against the doorjamb and sways slightly, her eyes fixed on Olive. “Not polite to stare,” Olive says. “Didn’t anyone teach you that?”

  The little girl, still swaying, says calmly, “You look dead.”

  Olive lifts her head up. “Is that what they teach you to say these days?” But she feels a physical reaction as she leans back down, a soft ache beating on her breastbone for a moment, like a wing inside her. The child ought to have her mouth washed out with soap.

  Anyway, the day is almost over. Olive stares up at the skylight over the bed and reassures herself that she has, apparently, lived through it. She pictured herself having another heart attack on the day of her son’s wedding: She would be sitting on her folding chair on the lawn, exposed to everyone, and after her son said, “I do,” she would silently, awkwardly fall over dead, with her face pressed into the grass, and her big hind end with the gauzy geranium print stuck up in the air. People would talk about it for days to come.

  “What are those things on your face?”

  Olive turns her head toward the door. “Are you still there? I thought you’d gone away.”

  “There’s a hair coming out of one of those things on your face,” the child says, bolder now, taking a step into the room. “The one on your chin.”

  Olive turns her gaze back to the ceiling and receives these words without an accompanying wing beat in her chest. Amazing how nasty kids are these days. And it was very smart to put that skylight over the bed. Chris has told her how in the winter sometimes he can lie in bed and watch it snow. He has always been like that—a different kind of person, very sensitive. It was what made him an excellent oil painter, though such a thing was not usually expected of a podiatrist. He was a complicated, interesting man, her son, so sensitive as a child that once, when he was reading Heidi he painted a picture to illustrate it—some wildflowers on an Alpine hillside.

  “What is that on your chin?”

  Olive sees that the little girl has been chewing on a ribbon from her dress. “Crumbs,” Olive says. “From little girls I’ve eaten up. Now go away before I eat you, too.” She makes her eyes big.

  The girl steps back slightly, holding the doorjamb. “You’re making that up,” she finally says, but she turns and disappears.

  “ ’Bout time,” Olive murmurs.

  Now she hears the sound of high heels clattering unevenly down the hallway. “Looking for the little girls’ room,” a woman’s voice says, and Olive recognizes the voice of Janice Bernstein, Suzanne’s mother. Henry’s voice answers, “Oh, right there, right there.”

  Olive waits for Henry to look into the bedroom, and in a moment he does. His big face is shiny with the affability that comes over him in large groups of people. “You all right, Ollie?”

  “Shhh. Shut up. I don’t need everyone knowing I’m in here.”

  He steps farther into the room. “You all right?” he whispers.

  “I’m ready to go home. Though I expect you’ll want to stay until the last dog dies. Don’t I hate a grown woman who says ‘the little girls’ room.’ Is she drunk?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Ollie.”

  “They’re smoking outside there.” Olive nods toward the window. “I hope they don’t set the place on fire.”

  “They won’t.” Then, after a moment, Henry says, “Everything went well, I think.”

  “Oh, sure. You go say your goodbyes now, so we can get going.”

  “He’s married a nice woman,” Henry says, hesitating by the foot of the bed.

  “Yes, I think he has.” They are silent for a moment; it is a shock, after all. Their son, their only child, married now. He is thirty-eight years old; they’d gotten pretty used to him.

  They expected at one point that he would marry his office assistant, but that didn’t last very long. Then it seemed that he would marry the teacher who lived out on Turtleback Island, but that didn’t last long either. Then it happened, right out of the blue: Suzanne Bernstein, M.D., Ph.D., showed up in town for a conference and trotted around all week in a new pair of shoes. The shoes inflamed an ingrown toenail and caused a blister the size of a big marble to appear on her sole; Suzanne was telling the story all day. “I looked in the yellow pages, and by the time I got to his office, I had ruined my feet. He had to drill through a toenail. What a way to meet!”

  Olive found the story stupid. Why hadn’t the girl, with all her money, simply bought a pair of shoes that fit?

  However, that was how the couple met. And the rest, as Suzanne was saying all day, was history. If you call six weeks history. Because that part was surprising as well—to get married quick as a thunder-clap. “Why wait?” Suzanne said to Olive the day she and Christopher stopped by to show off the ring. Olive said agreeably, “No reason at all.”

  “Still, Henry,” Olive says now. “How come a gastroenterologist? Plenty of other kinds of doctors to be, without all that poking around. You don’t like thinking about it.”

  Henry looks at her in his absent way. “I know it,” he says.

  Sunlight flickers on the wall and the white curtains move slightly. The smell of cigarette smoke returns. Henry and Olive are silent, gazing at the foot of the bed, until Olive says, “She’s a very positive person.”

  “She’s good for Christopher,” Henry says.

  They have been almost whispering, but at the sound of footsteps in the hallway, both of them turn toward the half-open door with perky, pleasant expressions on their faces. Except that Suzanne’s mother doesn’t stop; she goes right on past in her navy-blue suit, holding a pocketbook that looks like a miniature suitcase.

  “You better get back out there,” Olive says. “I’ll come say my goodbyes in a minute. Just give me a second to rest.”

  “Yes, you rest, Ollie.”

  “How about we stop at Dunkin’ Donuts,” she says. They like to sit in the booth by the window, and there’s a waitress who knows them; she’ll say hi nicely, then leave them alone.

  “We can do that,” Henry says, at the door.

  Lying back against the pillows, she thinks how pale her son was standing there getting married. In his guarded Christopher way he looked gratefully at his bride, who stood, thin and small-breasted, gazing up at him. Her mother cried. It was really something—Janice Bernstein’s eyes positively streaming. Afterward she said to Olive, “Don’t you cry at weddings?”

  “I don’t see any reason to cry,” Olive said.

  Weeping would not have come close to what she felt. She felt fear, sitting out there on her folding chair. Fear that her heart would squeeze shut again, would stop, the way it did once before, a fist punched through her back. And she felt it, too, at the way the bride was smiling up at Christopher, as though she actually knew him. Because did she know what he looked like in first grade when he had a nosebleed in Miss Lampley’s class? Did she see him when he was a pale, slightly pudgy child, his skin broken out in hives because he was afraid to take a spelling test? No, what Suzanne was mistaking for knowing someone was knowing sex with that person for a couple of weeks. You never could have told her that, though. If Olive had told her that the nasturtiums were actually petunias (which she did not do), Dr. Sue might have said, “Well, I’ve seen nasturtiums that look just like that.” But, still, it was disconcerting how Suzanne looked at Christopher while they were getting married, as though saying, “I know you—yes, I do. I do.”

  A screen door bangs. A man’s voice asking for a cigarette. An
other click of a lighter, the deep murmur of men’s voices. “Stuffed myself….”

  Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah. And they’d just as soon blah-blah-blah about you when your back is turned. “Never trust folks,” Olive’s mother told her years ago, after someone left a basket of cow flaps by their front door. Henry got irritated by that way of thinking. But Henry was pretty irritating himself, with his steadfast way of remaining naïve, as though life were just what a Sears catalogue told you it was: everyone standing around smiling.

  Still, Olive herself has been worried about Christopher’s being lonely. She was especially haunted this past winter by the thought of her son’s becoming an old man, returning home from work in the darkness, after she and Henry were gone. So she is glad, really, about Suzanne. It was sudden, and will take getting used to, but all things considered, Dr. Sue will do fine. And the girl has been perfectly friendly to her. (“I can’t believe you did the blueprints yourself!” Blond eyebrows raised sky-high.) Besides, Christopher, let’s face it, is gaga over her. Of course, right now their sex life is probably very exciting, and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they’re finished with loneliness, too.

  This thought causes Olive to nod her head slowly as she lies on the bed. She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as “big bursts” and “little bursts.” Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee’s, let’s say, or the waitress at Dunkin’ Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.