Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

  She could make the bed, do the laundry, feed the dog. But she could not be bothered with any more meals.

  “What’ll we have for supper?” Henry would ask, coming upstairs from the basement.

  “Strawberries.”

  Henry would chide her. “You wouldn’t last a day without me, Olive. If I died tomorrow, whatever would become of you?”

  “Oh, stop it.” It irritated her, that kind of thing, and it seemed to her that Henry enjoyed irritating her. Sometimes she’d get into the car by herself and go for a drive.

  It was Henry who bought the groceries now. One day he brought back with him a bunch of flowers. “For my wife,” he said, handing them to her. They were the saddest damn things. Daisies dyed blue among the white and ludicrously pink ones, some of them half-dead.

  “Put them in that pot,” Olive said, pointing to an old blue vase. The flowers sat there on the wooden table in the kitchen. Henry came and put his arms around her; it was early autumn and chilly, and his woolen shirt smelled faintly of wood chips and mustiness. She stood, waiting for the hug to end. Then she went outside and planted her tulip bulbs.

  A week later—just a morning with errands to do—they drove into town, into the parking lot of the big Shop ’n Save. Olive was going to stay in the car and read the paper while he went in to get the milk and orange juice and a jar of jam. “Anything else?” He said those words. Olive shook her head. Henry opened the door, swinging his long legs out. The creak of the opening car door, the back of his plaid jacket, then the bizarre, unnatural motion of him falling right from that position to the ground.

  “Henry!” she shouted.

  She shouted at him, waiting for the ambulance to come. His mouth moved, and his eyes were open, and one hand kept jerking through the air, as though reaching for something beyond her.

  The tulips bloomed in ridiculous splendor. The midafternoon sun hit them in a wide wash of light where they grew on the hill, almost down to the water. From the kitchen window, Olive could see them: yellow, white, pink, bright red. She had planted them at different depths and they had a lovely unevenness to them. When a breeze bent them slightly, it seemed like an underwater field of something magical, all those colors floating out there. Even lying in the “bum-pout room”—the room Henry had added a few years before, with a bay window big enough to have a small bed tucked right under it—she could see the tops of the tulips, the sun hitting the blooms, and sometimes she dozed briefly, listening to the transistor radio she held to her ear whenever she lay down. She got tired this time of day because she was up so early, before the sun. The sky would just be lightening as she got into her car with the dog and drove to the river, where she walked the three miles one way and the three miles back as the sun rose over the wide ribbon of water where her ancestors had paddled their canoes from one inlet to another.

  The walkway had been newly paved, and by the time Olive made her way back, Rollerbladers would be passing by, young and ferociously healthy, their spandexed thighs pumping past her. She’d drive to Dunkin’ Donuts and read the paper and give the dog some doughnut holes. And then she would drive to the nursing home. Mary Blackwell was working there now. Olive might have said, “Hope you’ve learned to keep your mouth shut,” because Mary looked at her oddly, but Mary Blackwell could go to hell—they all could go to hell. Propped up in his wheelchair, blind, always smiling, Henry was wheeled by Olive to the recreation room, over by the piano. She said, “Squeeze my hand if you understand me,” but his hand did not squeeze her hand. “Blink,” she said, “if you hear me.” He smiled straight ahead. In the evenings, she went back to spoon the food into his mouth. They let her wheel him into the parking lot one day so the dog could lick his hand. Henry smiled. “Christopher is coming,” she told him.

  When Christopher arrived, Henry still smiled. Christopher had gained weight, and he wore a collared shirt to the nursing home. When he saw his father, he looked at Olive with a face stricken. “Talk to him,” Olive directed. “Tell him you’re here.” She walked away so they could have some privacy, but it wasn’t long before Christopher came to find her.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, peevishly. But his eyes were red, and Olive’s heart unfolded.

  “Are you eating all right out there in California?” she asked.

  “My God, how can you stand this place?” her son asked.

  “I can’t,” she said. “The smell stays all over you.” She was like some helpless schoolgirl, careful not to let it show: how glad she was to have him there, to not have to go there alone, to have him in the car beside her. But he did not stay the whole week. He said something had come up at work and he had to get back.

  “All right, then.” She drove him to the airport with the dog in the backseat. The house was emptier than ever; even the nursing home seemed changed with Christopher not being there.

  The next morning she wheeled Henry over by the piano. “Christopher will be back soon,” she said. “He had some work to finish up, but he’s coming back soon. He’s crazy about you, Henry. Kept saying what a wonderful father you were.” But her voice started to wobble, and she had to move away, looking out the window at the parking lot. She didn’t have a Kleenex, and turned to find one. Mary Blackwell stood there. “What’s the matter?” Olive said to her. “Haven’t you ever seen an old lady cry before?”

  She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people.

  It made her skin crawl to sit in Daisy Foster’s tiny dining room, sipping tea. “I went to that damn dopey grief group,” she told Daisy. “And they said it was normal to feel angry. God, people are stupid. Why in hell should I feel angry? We all know this stuff is coming. Not many are lucky enough to just drop dead in their sleep.”

  “People react in their own way, I guess,” Daisy said, in her nice voice. She didn’t have anything except a nice voice, Olive thought, because that’s what Daisy was—nice. To hell with all of it. She said the dog was waiting, and left her teacup still full.

  It was like that—she couldn’t stand anyone. She went to the post office every few days, and she couldn’t stand that either. “How are you doing?” Emily Buck asked her every time, and it annoyed Olive. “I’m managing,” Olive said, but she hated getting the envelopes, almost all with Henry’s name. And the bills! She didn’t know what to do with them, didn’t even understand some of them—and so much junk mail! She’d stand by the big gray waste bin, throwing it all away, and sometimes a bill would get tossed in and she’d have to lean in and fiddle around to find it, all the while aware of Emily watching her from behind the counter.

  A few cards dribbled in. “I’m sorry…so sad.” “I’m sorry to hear…” She answered each one. “Don’t be sorry,” she wrote. “We all know this stuff is bound to happen. There’s not a damn thing to be sorry about.” Only once or twice, fleetingly, did it occur to Olive that she might be out of her head.

  Christopher called once a week. “What can I do for you, Christopher?” she’d ask, meaning Do something for me! “Shall I fly out and visit you?”

  “No,” he always said. “I’m doing all right.”

  The tulips died, the trees turned red, the leaves fell off, the trees were bare, snow came. All these changes she watched from the bum-pout room, where she lay on her side, clutching her transistor radio, her knees tucked to her chest. The sky was black against the long panes. She could see three tiny stars. On the radio a man’s calm voice interviewed people or reported news. When the words seemed to shift in meaning, she knew she had slept for a bit. “Yikes,” she said softly, at times. She thought about Christopher, why he would not let her come visit, why he did not come back east. Her mind briefly passed over the Larkins, wondering if they still visited their son. Perhaps Christopher stayed in California hoping to reconcile with his wife—what a fierce know-it-all Suzanne had been. And yet she hadn’t known a damn thing about any flower that grew up out of the earth.

  One freezing cold morning, Olive took her walk,
went to Dunkin’ Donuts, read the paper in the car while the dog, in the backseat, kept whining. “Hush,” she said. “Stop it.” The dog’s whimpering became louder. “Stop it!” she shouted. She drove. She drove to the library, and didn’t go in. Then she drove to the post office, tossed some junk mail into the waste bin, and then had to bend over and fish out a pale yellow envelope with no return address, the handwriting not one she recognized. In the car she ripped it open, just a plain yellow square. “He was always a nice man, and I’m sure he still is.” Signed, Louise Larkin.

  The next morning while it was still dark, Olive drove by the Larkin home slowly. There, beneath the blind, was the faintest strip of light.

  “Christopher,” she said, into the kitchen phone the next Saturday. “Louise Larkin sent me a note about your father.”

  She heard nothing.

  “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “Still here,” Christopher said.

  “Did you hear what I said about Louise?”

  “Yup.”

  “Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

  “Not really.”

  Pain, like a pinecone unfolding, seemed to blossom beneath her breastbone.

  “I don’t even know how she found out. Shut up in that house all day.”

  “Dunno,” Christopher said.

  “All right, then,” Olive said. “Well, I’m off to the library. Goodbye.”

  She sat at the kitchen table, leaning forward, her hand on her big stomach. The thought that she could, anytime she needed to, kill herself went through her head. It was not the first time in her life that she’d thought this, but before, she would think about the note to leave. Now she thought she would leave no note. Not even: “Christopher, what did I do that you should treat me this way?”

  She looked with some caution around the kitchen. There were women, widows, who hated to give up their home, died soon after someone hauled them off to assisted living. But she didn’t know how long she could go on living here. She had been waiting to see if there was some way Henry could finally come home. She had been waiting for Christopher to come back east. As she stood up, looking for her car keys—because she had to get out of here—she remembered, in a distant way, how as a much younger woman she had felt the dreariness of domestic life, yelling, while Christopher ducked his head, “I hate being a goddamn slave!” Maybe she hadn’t yelled that. She called to the dog and left.

  Absolutely stick-thin, and appearing ancient in the way she moved, Louise led Olive into the darkened living room. Louise turned on a lamp, and Olive was surprised by the beauty in the woman’s face. “Don’t mean to stare,” Olive said—she had to say this because she knew she was not going to be able to stop staring—“but you look lovely.”

  “Do I?” Louise made a sound of soft laughter.

  “Your face.”

  “Ah.”

  It was as though all of Louise’s earlier attempts to be pretty, her dyed blond hair, her heavy pink lipstick, her eagerness of speech and careful clothing, the beads and bracelets and nice shoes (Olive remembered)—all of this had, in fact, been covering up the essence of Louise, who, stripped by grief and isolation, and probably drugged to the gills, emerged in her frailty with a face of astonishing beauty. You seldom saw really beautiful old women, Olive thought. You saw the remnants of it, if they’d once been that way, but you seldom saw what she saw now: the brown eyes that shone with an otherworldliness, sunken behind a bone structure as fine as any sculpture, the skin drawn tight across the cheekbones, the lips still full, her hair white and tied off to the side in a little brown ribbon.

  “I’ve made tea,” Louise said.

  “No, but thank you.”

  “All right, then.” Louise sat down gracefully, in a chair nearby. She was wearing a long, dark green sweater-type robe. Cashmere, Olive realized. The Larkins were the only people in town with money they spent. The kids had gone to private school in Portland. They’d had tennis lessons, and music lessons, and skating lessons, and each summer had gone away to summer camp. People used to laugh about that, because no other kid in Crosby, Maine, went to summer camp. There were summer camps nearby, filled with kids from New York, and why would the Larkins have their children spend the summer with them? It’s how they were, is all. Roger’s suits (Olive remembered) had been made by a tailor, or so Louise used to say. Later, of course, people assumed they must have gone broke. But maybe there weren’t that many expenses, once all the experts got paid.

  Olive looked around discreetly. The wallpaper had water stains in one spot, and the wainscoting was faded. It was clean, the room, but not one speck of effort had been given to maintaining it. Olive had not been here for ages—perhaps a Christmas tea, it had been. A Christmas tree in that corner, lit candles and food all over the place, Louise greeting people. Louise had always liked to present a good show.

  “It doesn’t bother you, staying in this house?” Olive asked.

  “Staying anywhere bothers me,” Louise answered. “To actually pack up and move—well, that’s always seemed too much.”

  “I guess I can see that.”

  “Roger lives upstairs,” Louise said. “And I live downstairs.”

  “Huh.” Olive was having trouble taking things in.

  “Arrangements get made in life. Accommodations get made.”

  Olive nodded. What she minded was how Henry had bought her those flowers. How she’d just stood there. She’d kept the flowers, dried them out, all the blue daisies brown now, bent over.

  “Has Christopher been a help to you?” Louise asked. “He was always such a sensitive boy, wasn’t he?” Louise smoothed her bony hand over her cashmere-covered knee. “But then, Henry was a nice man, so that was lucky for you.”

  Olive didn’t answer. Through the bottom of the drawn blind a thin strip of white light shone; it was morning now. She’d be on her walk by the river if she hadn’t come here.

  “Roger is not a nice man, you see, and that made all the difference.”

  Olive looked back at Louise. “He always seemed nice enough to me.” In truth, Olive didn’t remember much about Roger; he had looked like a banker, which he was, and his suits had fit well—if you cared about that kind of thing, and Olive did not.

  “He seemed nice to everyone,” Louise said. “That’s his modus operandi.” She laughed lightly. “But in ree-al-it-y”—she spoke with exaggerated enunciation—“his heart beats twice an hour.”

  Olive sat completely still, her big handbag on her lap.

  “Cold, cold man. Brrr…But no one cares, because they blame the mother, you know. Always, always, always, they blame the mother for everything.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “You know that’s true. Please, Olive. Make yourself comfortable.” Louise waved a thin white hand, a strip of poured milk in the dim light. Olive tentatively moved her handbag to the floor, sat back.

  Louise folded her hands, and smiled. “Christopher was a sensitive boy just like Doyle. Nobody believes this now of course, but Doyle is the sweetest man alive.”

  Olive nodded, turned around, and looked behind her. Twenty-nine times, the newspapers had kept reporting. And on the TV, too. Twenty-nine times. That was a lot.

  “Maybe you don’t like my comparing Doyle to Christopher.” Louise laughed lightly again, her tone almost flirtatious.

  “How’s your daughter?” asked Olive, turning back to face Louise. “What’s she up to these days?”

  “She lives in Boston, married to a lawyer. Which has been helpful, naturally. She’s a wonderful woman.”

  Olive nodded.

  Louise leaned forward, both hands on her lap. She tilted her head back and forth and chanted softly, “Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider, girls go to college to get more knowledge.” She laughed her soft laugh, and sat back. “Roger ran right off to his lady friend in Bangor.” Again, the soft laugh. “But she rejected him, poor thing.”

  For Olive there was more than an inner
silent groan of disappointment. There was an almost desperate urge to leave, and yet she could not, of course, having trespassed, having written Louise back, having asked to visit.

  “You’ve probably thought of killing yourself.” Louise said this serenely, as though discussing a recipe for lemon pie.

  Olive felt a sudden disorientation, as though a soccer ball had just been bounced off her head. “I hardly see that would solve anything,” she said.

  “Of course it would,” Louise said, pleasantly. “It would solve everything. But there’s the question of how to do it.”

  Olive shifted her weight, touched her handbag that was next to her.

  “Myself, of course, it would be pills and drink. You—I don’t see you as a pill person. Something more aggressive. The wrists, but that would take so long.”

  “I guess that’s enough of that,” said Olive. But she couldn’t help adding, “There are people who depend on me. For heaven’s sake.”

  “Exactly.” Louise held up a bony finger, tilted her head. “Doyle lives for me. So I live for him. I write him every day. I visit every chance it’s allowed. He knows he’s not alone, and so I stay alive.”

  Olive nodded.

  “But surely Christopher doesn’t depend on you? He has a wife.”

  “She divorced him,” Olive said. It was odd how easy it was to say this. The truth was that she and Henry had never told anyone, except their friends up the river, Bill and Bunny Newton. With Christopher in California, it didn’t seem anyone needed to know.

  “I see,” said Louise. “Well, I’m sure he’ll find a new one. And Henry doesn’t depend on you, dear. He doesn’t know where he is, or who is with him.”

  Olive felt a shoot of fury stab through her. “How do you know that? It’s not true. He knows damn well I’m there.”