Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

  In the living room Daisy sat on the couch, crossing her plump ankles. She lit another cigarette. “How are you, Harmon?” she said. “How are the boys?” For she knew this was his sadness: His four sons had grown and scattered. They visited, appearing in town as great grown men, and she remembered when, in years past, you never saw Harmon alone. Always one or more of these small, then teenage, boys were with him, running around the hardware store on Saturdays, yelling across the parking lot, throwing a ball, calling out to their father to hurry.

  “They’re good. They seem good.” Harmon sat next to her; he never sat in Copper’s old easy chair. “And you, Daisy?”

  “Copper came to me in a dream last night. It didn’t seem like a dream. I could swear he came—well, from wherever he is, to visit me.” She tilted her head at him, peering through the smoke. “Does that sound crazy?”

  Harmon raised a shoulder. “I don’t know as anyone’s got a corner on the market of that stuff, no matter what people say they believe, or don’t.”

  Daisy nodded. “Well, he said everything was fine.”

  “Everything?”

  She laughed softly, her eyes squinting again as she put the cigarette to her mouth. “Everything.” Together they looked about the small, lowceilinged room, the smoke leveling above them. Once, during a summer thunderstorm, they had sat in this room while a small ball of electricity had come through the partly opened window, buzzed ludicrously around the walls, and then gone out the window again.

  Daisy sat back, tugging the blue sweater over her large, soft stomach. “No need to tell anyone I saw him like that.”

  “No.”

  “You’re a good friend to me, Harmon.”

  He said nothing, ran his hand over the couch cushion.

  “Say, Kathleen Burnham’s cousin is in town with his girlfriend. I saw them drive by.”

  “They were just at the marina.” He told how the girl had put her head down on the table. How she had said to the fellow, Stop smelling me.

  “Oh, sweet.” Daisy laughed softly again.

  “God, I love young people,” Harmon said. “They get griped about enough. People like to think the younger generation’s job is to steer the world to hell. But it’s never true, is it? They’re hopeful and good—and that’s how it should be.”

  Daisy kept smiling. “Everything you say is true.” She took a final drag on her cigarette, leaned forward to squish it out. She had told him once how she’d thought with Copper she was pregnant, how happy they’d been—but it wasn’t to be. She wasn’t going to mention this again. Instead she put her hand over his, feeling the thickness of his knuckles.

  In a moment they both stood, and climbed the narrow staircase to the little room where sunlight shone through the window, making a red glass vase on the bureau glow.

  “I take it you had to wait.” Bonnie was ripping long strips of dark green wool. A soft pile of these strips lay at her feet, the late morning sun making a pattern across the pine floor from the small-paned window she sat near.

  “I wish you’d come. The water’s beautiful. Calm, flat. But it’s picking up now.”

  “I guess I can see the bay from here.” She had not looked up. Her fingers were long. Her plain gold band, loose behind the knuckle, caught the sun with each rip. “I suppose it’s mostly out-of-staters making you wait.”

  “No.” Harmon sat down in the La-Z-Boy that looked out over the water. He thought of the young couple. “Maybe. Mostly, it was the usual.”

  “Did you bring me back a doughnut?”

  He sat forward. “Oh, gosh. Gosh, no. I left it there. I’ll go back, Bonnie.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “I will.”

  “Sit down.”

  He had not stood up, but had been ready, with his hands on the chair’s arms, his knees bent. He hesitated, sat back. He picked up a Newsweek magazine on the small table beside the chair.

  “Would’ve been nice if you’d remembered.”

  “Bonnie, I said—”

  “And I said stop it.”

  He turned the pages of the magazine, not reading. There was only the sound of her ripping the strips of wool. Then she said, “I want this rug to look like the forest floor.” She nodded toward a piece of mustard-colored wool.

  “That’ll be nice,” he said. She had braided rugs for years. She made wreaths from dried roses and bayberry, and made quilted jackets and vests. It used to be she’d stay up late doing these things. Now she fell asleep by eight o’clock most nights, and was awake before it was light; he often woke to hear her sewing machine.

  He closed the magazine, and watched as she stood, flicking off tiny bits of green wool. She bent gracefully and put the strips into a large basket. She looked very different from the woman he had married, though he didn’t mind that especially, it only bewildered him to think how a person could change. Her waist had thickened considerably, and so had his. Her hair, gray now, was clipped almost as short as a man’s, and she had stopped wearing jewelry, except for her wedding band. She seemed not to have gained weight anywhere except around the middle. He had gained weight everywhere, and had lost a good deal of hair. Perhaps she minded this about him. He thought again of the young couple, the girl’s clear voice, her cinnamon hair.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” he said.

  “You just got back from a drive. I want to make some applesauce and get started on this rug.”

  “Any of the boys call?”

  “Not yet. I expect Kevin will call soon.”

  “I wish he’d call to say they were pregnant.”

  “Oh, give it time, Harmon. Goodness.”

  But he wanted a whole bushel of them—grandchildren spilling everywhere. After all the years of broken collarbones, pimples, hockey sticks, and baseball bats, and ice skates getting lost, the bickering, schoolbooks everywhere, worrying about beer on their breath, waiting to hear the car pulling up in the middle of the night, the girlfriends, the two who’d had no girlfriends. All that had kept Bonnie and him in a state of continual confusion, as though there was always, always, some leak in the house that needed fixing, and there were plenty of times when he’d thought, God, let them just be grown.

  And then they were.

  He had thought Bonnie might have a bad empty-nest time of it, that he’d have to watch out for her. He knew, everyone knew, of at least one family these days where the kids grew up and the wife just took off, lickety-split. But Bonnie seemed calmer, full of a new energy. She had joined a book club, and she and another woman were writing a cookbook of recipes from the early settlers that some small press in Camden had said they might publish. She’d started braiding more rugs to sell in a shop in Portland. She brought home the first check with her face flushed with pleasure. He just never would have thought, that’s all.

  Something else happened the year Derrick went off to college. While their bedroom life had slowed considerably, Harmon had accepted this, had sensed for some time that Bonnie was “accommodating” him. But one night he turned to her in bed, and she pulled away. After a long moment she said quietly, “Harmon, I think I’m just done with that stuff.”

  They lay there in the dark; what gripped him from his bowels on up was the horrible, blank knowledge that she meant this. Still, nobody can accept losses right away.

  “Done?” he asked. She could have piled twenty bricks onto his stomach, that was the pain he felt.

  “I’m sorry. But I’m just done. There’s no point in my pretending. That isn’t pretty for either of us.”

  He asked if it was because he’d gotten fat. She said he hadn’t really gotten fat, please not to think that way. She was just done.

  But maybe I’ve been selfish, he said. What can I do to please you? (They had never really talked about things in this way—in the dark he blushed.)

  She said, couldn’t he understand—it wasn’t him, it was her. She was just done.

  He opened the Newsweek again now, thinking how in a few years the house would
be full again; if not all the time, at least a lot. They’d be good grandparents. He read the magazine’s paragraph over again. They were making a film about the towers going down. It seemed to him he should have some opinion about this, but he did not know what to think. When had he stopped having opinions on things? He turned and looked out at the water.

  The words cheating on Bonnie were as far away as seagulls circling Longway Rock, not even dots to the eye of anyone standing on shore—they had no real meaning to Harmon. Why would they? They implied a passion that would turn him away from his wife, and this was not the case. Bonnie was the central heating of his life. His brief Sunday moments with Daisy were not untender, but it was more a shared interest, like bird-watching. He turned back to the magazine, an inner shudder to think if one of his sons had gone down in one of those planes.

  On Thursday it was just getting dark when the couple came into the hardware store. Harmon heard the high voice of the girl before he actually saw her. Stepping around from behind the rack of drill bits, he was surprised at her forthright “Hi.” She said it in almost two syllables, and while she didn’t smile, her face had that same matter-of-factness that he had seen outside the marina.

  “Hi there,” Harmon said. “How’re you folks today?”

  “Good. We’re just looking.” The girl put her hand into the boy’s pocket. Harmon gave a little bow, and they wandered down toward the lightbulbs. He heard her say, “He reminds me of Luke in the hospital. I wonder what happened to him. Remember Muffin Luke who ran the fucking place?”

  The boy answered in a murmur.

  “Luke was fucking weird. Remember I told you he said he was going in for heart surgery? I bet he made a terrible patient—he was so used to being in charge. He got scared about his stupid heart, though. Remember I told you he said he didn’t know if he’d wake up dead or alive?”

  Again, a murmur, and Harmon got the broom from the back of the store. Sweeping, he glanced at the back of them, the girl standing close to the boy, who had a coat with baggy pockets. “But you don’t wake up dead, do you?”

  “Let me know if you need my help,” Harmon said, and they both turned, the girl looking startled.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He took the broom up front. Cliff Mott came in to ask if there were snow shovels yet, and Harmon told him the new ones would be in next week. He showed Cliff one from last year and Cliff looked at it a long time, said he’d be back.

  “We should get this for Victoria,” Harmon heard the girl say. With the broom, he moved up to the front of the gardening aisle, and saw she had picked up a watering can. “Victoria says her plants listen when she talks, and I believe her.” The girl put the can back on the shelf, and the boy, slouchy, easygoing, nodded. He was looking at the coiled hoses hanging on the wall. Harmon wondered why they would want a hose this time of year.

  “You know how she’s been such a bitch?” The girl was wearing the same denim jacket with the fake fur at the cuffs. “It’s because the guy she likes has a fuck buddy and he didn’t tell her. She found out from someone else.”

  Harmon stopped sweeping.

  “But a fuck buddy—I mean, who cares. That’s the point of a fuck buddy.” The girl put her head against her boyfriend’s shoulder.

  The boy nudged her toward the door. “Night, now,” Harmon said. The girl pulled the handle with her small hand. On her feet were big suede shapeless boots, her legs as skinny as spider legs rising from them. It was not until they were out of sight down the sidewalk that Harmon recognized the uneasy feeling he had. He didn’t know, but years of experience in the store made him think the boy had shoplifted something.

  The next morning, he called his son Kevin at work.

  “Everything all right, Dad?” the kid asked.

  “Oh, sure, sure.” Harmon was suddenly overcome with a bashfulness. “Everything okay with you?” he asked.

  “The same. Work’s okay. Martha’s talking about wanting a kid, but I say we wait.”

  “You’re both young,” Harmon said. “You can wait. I can’t wait. But don’t rush. You just got married.”

  “It makes you feel old, though, doesn’t it? Once that ring is on the finger.”

  “It does, I guess.” It was hard for Harmon to remember the emotions of his first years of marriage. “Say, listen, Kev. Are you smoking pot?”

  Kevin laughed through the phone. It was, to Harmon’s ear, a healthy sound, straightforward, relaxed. “Jesus, Dad. What’s gotten into you?”

  “I wondered, is all. Couple of kids have moved into the Washburn place. People are afraid they’re potheads.”

  “Weed makes me antisocial,” Kevin said. “Makes me turn my face to the wall. So no, I don’t smoke it anymore.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Harmon said. “And don’t tell your mother, for Christ’s sake. But these kids came in the store yesterday, they were talking, casual, you know, and they mentioned ‘fuck buddies.’ You heard of that?”

  “You’re kind of surprising me here, Dad. What’s going on?”

  “I know, I know.” Harmon waved a hand. “I just hate getting old, one of those old people that don’t know anything about young people. So I thought I’d ask.”

  “Fuck buddies. Yeah. That’s a thing these days. Just what it says. People who get together to get laid. No strings attached.”

  “I see.” Now Harmon didn’t know what more to say.

  “I gotta go, Dad. But listen, stay cool. You’re cool, Dad. You’re not an old fart, don’t worry about that.”

  “All right,” Harmon said, and after he hung up, he stared out the window for a long time.

  “That’s fine, honestly,” Daisy said when he called her the next morning. “I mean it, Harmon.” He could hear her smoking as they spoke. “You’re not to worry,” she said.

  Within fifteen minutes, she called back. He had a customer in the store, but Daisy said, “Say, listen. Why don’t you stop by anyway and we’ll just talk. Talk.”

  “All right,” he said. Cliff Mott brought the snow shovel up to the register. Cliff Mott, who had heart disease, and could go any minute. “All set, then,” Harmon said, handing the man his change.

  Harmon still did not sit in Copper’s chair; he sat on the couch beside Daisy, and once or twice they might briefly touch hands. Otherwise, they did what she had suggested—talked. He told her of trips to his grandmother’s house, the way her pantry smelled of ammonia, the homesickness he had felt. “I was small, see,” he said to the responsive face of Daisy. “And I understood it was meant to be fun. That was the idea, you see. But I couldn’t tell anyone it wasn’t fun.”

  “Oh, Harmon,” said Daisy, her eyes moistening. “Yes. I know what you mean.”

  She told him about the morning she took a pear from the front yard of Mrs. Kettleworth, and her mother made her take it back, how embarrassed she’d been. He told about finding the quarter in the mud puddle. She told of going to her first high school dance, wearing a dress of her mother’s, and the only person who asked her to dance was the principal.

  “I’d have asked you,” Harmon said.

  She told him her favorite song was “Whenever I Feel Afraid,” and she sang it to him softly, her blue eyes sparkling with warmth. He said the first time he heard Elvis on the radio singing “Fools Rush In,” it made him feel like he and Elvis were friends.

  Walking back to his car at the marina on those mornings, he was sometimes surprised to feel that the earth was altered, the crisp air a nice thing to move through, the rustle of the oak leaves like a murmuring friend. For the first time in years he thought about God, who seemed a piggy bank Harmon had stuck up on a shelf and had now brought down to look at with a new considering eye. He wondered if this was what kids felt like when they smoked pot, or took that drug ecstasy.

  One Monday in October, there was an article in the local paper saying arrests had been made at the Washburn residence. Police broke up a party where marijuana was found growing in pots along a window
sill. Harmon perused the paper carefully, finding the name Timothy Burnham, and his “girlfriend, Nina White,” who had the extra charge of assaulting a police officer.

  Harmon couldn’t imagine the girl with the cinnamon hair and skinny legs assaulting a police officer. He pondered this as he moved around the hardware store, finding some ball bearings for Greg Marston, a toilet plunger for Marlene Bonney. He made a sign that said 10% OFF, and put it on the one remaining barbecue up front. He hoped Kathleen Burnham would come in, or someone from the sawmill so he could ask, but they didn’t, and none of his customers mentioned it. He telephoned Daisy, who said she’d seen the article, and hoped the girl was all right. “Poor little thing,” Daisy said, “must’ve been scared.”

  Bonnie came home from her book club that night and reported how Kathleen said her nephew Tim just had the bad luck of inviting a bunch of friends over who turned up the music too loud, and some were smoking pot, including Tim’s girlfriend. When the police came, the girl, Nina, started to kick like a wildcat and they had to cuff her, though probably the charges would be dropped, and they’d just all have to pay a fine, and be on probation a year.

  “Idiots,” Bonnie said, shaking her head.

  Harmon said nothing.

  “She’s sick, you know,” Bonnie added, dropping the book onto the couch. It was a book by Anne Lindbergh; she’d told him about it. Anne Lindbergh liked to get away from it all.

  “Who’s sick?”

  “That girl. The girlfriend of Tim Burnham.”

  “What do you mean sick?”

  “She’s got that disease where you don’t eat anything. Apparently she’s had it long enough there’s some damage to her heart, so she really is an idiot.”

  Harmon felt a sprinkle of perspiration arrive on his forehead. “Are you sure?”