* * *
But in Jack’s house—because now it was Jack’s house once more, and not hers, Olive had felt this increasingly since she had first come home from the hospital—she felt unsteady. She did not feel as she had. She kept thinking: I’m different. After the last day that Betty, and the others, worked for her (Betty had tried to hug her, though Olive only stood there), she felt especially bereft; she felt unwell and tired. But when she told Dr. Rabolinski this the next time she saw him, he said, “You’re doing just fine, Olive. There is no reason you can’t live alone and drive your car. You’re fine now.”
“Ay-yuh,” she said.
At times she could name it. It was almost panic that she felt. “Damn man,” she said, and she meant the doctor, who was still young and had no idea—he had no idea—what it was like to be old and alone. But other days she felt okay. Not wonderful. But she could drive and get her groceries, and she visited her friend Edith at that awful old folks’ home she lived in called Maple Tree Apartments. Then when she came home she was glad to be there, although she could not shake the feeling that it was Jack’s house. She sat in Jack’s chair these days so that she wouldn’t have to look at it gapingly empty. And sometimes as she sat there a deep sadness trembled through her, because she wanted to be living in the house she had built with Henry; that house had been torn down, and she couldn’t even stand to go by the spot. But what a nice house it had been! What a nice man Henry had been! And the sadness would deepen as she looked around this house she lived in—had lived in for almost eight years—and she would think: Honest to God. To sit in the middle of this field when I could still be by the water.
She thought about Jack’s expression the night he died in bed next to her. He had said, “Good night, Olive,” and reached to turn the light off, but first giving her a fleeting smile, which now in her memory seemed to be a smile he gave when he was far away from her. She had lived with him just long enough to begin to recognize these things, the changes in expression—so brief—that indicated he was somewhere else. And she thought he was like that when he said his last words, “Good night, Olive.”
To hell with you, she thought, but she was really hurt by this recognition. He was not with her when he died. Oh, he was with her, he was lying next to her, but only because this was his home—his home with his wife Betsy—and Olive felt (now) that it was not her home, and she felt unsteady in it.
* * *
Then one afternoon she fell.
It was the middle of an afternoon in April, and a storm came in. Olive watched while the clouds moved above the field and then she heard the raindrops landing on the porch, hitting the windows. She rose and went out to the porch. She was only going to take in the cushions from the chairs she had put out recently, and she did not put on a coat or take her cane, but she walked out onto the porch, and as she bent to pick up a blue cushion from the wooden chair, she peered closer and saw that right there on the boards of the porch was a cigarette butt. Olive kept looking at this, she could not figure out where in the world it would have come from. She was really puzzled—and alarmed. But there it was, and it did not look like it had been there that long—certainly not for weeks, the white part of the cigarette was still white, but just flattened. Right next to the chair. Had someone been sitting in this chair smoking while she was away? How could that be?
Olive bent down—she couldn’t figure out later how she fell, but she did. She fell right over, almost on her head, but then she rolled onto her side, between the house and the back of the chair, and she was so surprised by this that her head seemed a little different for a moment; it was just surprise. And then she couldn’t get up. She could not get up.
“Olive, get up,” she said quietly, aloud. “Olive, get up.” She tried and tried, but she did not have the strength in her arm to push herself up. “Get up,” she kept saying, over and over. “Olive, get up—you damned fool. Get up.” The wind shifted slightly, and the rain began to come on her straight as though aimed at her. It was a cold rain, and she felt the drops pelting her face, her arm, her legs. My God, she thought, I’m going to die out here. She had spoken to Christopher the night before on the phone, he wouldn’t think to call her for at least a few more days. And if other people called her—who, Edith?—and got no answer, they would think nothing of it. “Olive, get up, you get up right now,” she said again and again.
It was that she would die of—what would she die of? Exposure? No, it wasn’t cold enough, though she was very cold with this rain beating down on her. She would die of starvation. No, she would die of dehydration, and how long would that take? Three days. She would lie here like this for three days. “Olive, you get up right now.” You heard about this kind of thing happening. Marilyn Thompson, who fell in her garage and lay there for two days; Bertha Babcock, who fell down her cellar stairs and lay there for days before being discovered, dead.
“You get up right now, you damned fool.” But she couldn’t. She kept trying, but she could only roll slightly more onto her side, and her arms did not have the strength. She spied the spigot there sticking out from the house. Jack had not wanted the spigot there, he thought it looked stupid coming out of the house straight to the porch, but he had said his wife had wanted it to make watering her plants easier. “Damn right, Betsy,” Olive said. Her teeth were chattering now. Inch by half inch, Olive was able to move her body by thrusting it again and again until she could reach the spigot. She kept trying to reach it and she kept falling short, but then she finally got her hand around it, and by God if it didn’t help. It stayed steady, the spigot, and she was able, by holding it, to get herself to a sitting position, and then she turned and knelt, and then she put her hands on the arms of the chair and she finally stood. She was so shaky that she placed a hand on the shingled wall as she moved slowly back into the house. Once inside, she sat for many minutes, wet, in the wooden chair by the table, and then she finally felt strong enough to shower.
But that had really been something. Sitting on the bed, holding a towel to her hair, Olive looked around. Who in the world had been having a cigarette on her porch? Who could it be? Olive kept picturing a man, sinister, smoking on her porch while he waited for her to return, some horrible man who knew she lived out here in the middle of nowhere all alone.
For the next week Olive could not stop feeling dread. She felt it when she went to bed, she felt it as soon as she woke. She felt dread in the afternoon when she sat and read her book. It did not abate, it got worse. And then she understood that it was true terror she felt, a different sort of terror than when Jack had died, or Henry. In those cases she had been filled with terror, but now terror sat next to her. It sat down across from her in the breakfast nook, it sat on the bathtub while she washed her face, it sat near her by the window as she read, it sat there on the foot of her bed.
And she began to walk around this home she had shared with Jack, and she said, “I hate it, I hate it, I hate this place.”
* * *
Loneliness. Oh, the loneliness!
It blistered Olive.
She had not known such a feeling her entire life; this is what she thought as she moved about the house. It may have been the terror finally wearing off and giving way for this gaping bright universe of loneliness that she faced, but it bewildered her to feel this. She realized it was as though she had—all her life—four big wheels beneath her, without even knowing it, of course, and now they were, all four of them, wobbling and about to come off. She did not know who she was, or what would happen to her.
One day she sat in the big chair that Jack used to sit in and she thought she had become pathetic. If there was one thing Olive hated, it was pathetic people. And now she was one of them.
She heard a car drive into the driveway, and she got up slowly and went to the door, peeking out of the curtain that covered the door’s window. Well, by God, if it wasn’t Halima Butterfly! Olive opened the door, and Halima
sailed through it and said, “Hello, Mrs. Kitteridge.”
“What are you doing here?” Olive asked, closing the door behind her.
“I’m visiting you,” said Halima. She wore the same peach outfit Olive had first seen her in. “I was in the area, and I thought, I’ll go see Mrs. Kitteridge. How are you?”
“Ghastly,” Olive said. Then she said, “Why didn’t you come back?”
Halima said, “I don’t like to drive all the way to Crosby from Shirley Falls, so when I can have a client nearer to me I take them instead.” She shrugged her robed shoulders. Then she smiled her amazing smile of bright white teeth. “But I’m here now.”
“All right then,” Olive said.
Seated in the living room, Olive told Halima about her fall and the cigarette butt. Halima looked concerned. “I don’t like that,” she said. “You should not be living alone.”
Olive made a noise of disgust, waving her hand to indicate that this was a stupid thing to say. But Halima sat forward, pointing a finger at Olive. “In my culture,” she said, “you would never be alone.”
Olive didn’t care for that. “Well, in my culture,” Olive said, pointing her own finger toward the woman, “sons get married, go away, and never come back.”
* * *
The Maple Tree Apartments had a waiting period of twelve months. But on the telephone one night, Christopher said he had figured out how to get her in there in just four months. “Mom,” he said, “I signed you up after your heart attack just in case. So you’re on the waiting list.” Then Christopher said, “But, Mom, listen to me carefully. You’re going to have to sell that house. We need you to live in assisted living, but you can live in the independent living part of it. You can’t live alone in that house anymore.”
Olive was very tired. “Okay,” she said.
* * *
—
And so that was that. As spring broke through, Olive noticed it and felt glad. The forsythia bushes first, and also the snowdrops by the house. But then it snowed lightly one night, and in the morning the forsythia looked like scrambled eggs. Then the daffodils came out, and eventually the lilac trees. She noticed these on the road to the Maple Tree Apartments, where she went these days with more frequency to visit her friend Edith, whose husband, Buzzy, had recently died. Edith kept going on about what a wonderful man he had been; Olive had never particularly liked him, but she sat while Edith told her once more how he had taken a fall and been sent “over the bridge,” as Edith said it was called, the place across an actual little bridge where people went when they had strokes and things, and then how he had died so suddenly….Oh, it was tiresome to listen to. But Edith said she was glad that Olive would soon live there as well, although she said it only once and Olive would have liked to hear it more.
Whenever she entered and left the Maple Tree Apartments, Olive looked—naturally—at the whole thing with different eyes. The people seemed so old. Godfrey, there were men shuffling along, and women all bent over. People with walkers that had little seats in them. Well, this was to be her future. But in truth, it did not feel real to her.
* * *
And then one day when she was sitting in Jack’s chair she heard a car drive into the driveway and she said out loud, “Who the hell is that,” and she got her cane—suddenly hoping that it was Halima Butterfly again—and went to the door, and it was Betty getting out of her truck. As Olive opened the door, Betty said “Hi, Olive!” in a voice that Olive thought was false in its cheerfulness.
“Come in,” said Olive.
Betty sat right down in the chair she had always sat in, and she dropped her pocketbook onto the floor beside her. “How are you?” Betty asked.
And Olive told her. She told her she was moving to the Maple Tree Apartments at the end of the summer, and she told her how she had fallen and almost died (this is how she put it to Betty), and then she told her how it was over a cigarette butt that she had found by the chairs on the porch.
“Oh,” said Betty. “That was probably mine. Sorry.”
Olive had to take a minute to allow this to register. “What do you mean?” she asked.
Betty said, “I came over here one day and you weren’t home so I sat out there and had a cigarette.”
“You smoke?” Olive said. “Are you kidding me?”
Betty looked down at her feet, she had on sneakers with no shoelaces. “Only when I’m really upset. And I was upset that day.” She looked up at Olive then and said, “Jerry Skyler died.”
Olive said nothing, just watched her. She was amazed to see tears come into Betty’s eyes.
“Yup,” said Betty, brushing them away with the back of her hand. “I googled him one day and found out he died. He was only sixty-eight. A heart attack, though maybe I shouldn’t tell you that part. He died raking leaves in the back of his house north of Bangor.”
Olive had been ready to yell at her, this woman who had had a cigarette on her porch, who had scared her to death—to the point of moving!—But Olive did not yell. She watched Betty’s face, she saw the tears slipping down over her mouth, the very same way tears had slipped down Olive’s mouth when she had put lipstick on for the doctor she had been in love with. And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.
After a moment Olive heaved herself out of her chair and brought a Kleenex to Betty, dropping it onto her lap, and then she returned to her seat. Betty blew her nose, wiped at her eyes. “Thanks,” she said.
After a while, Olive asked, “What is your life like, Betty?”
Betty looked at her. “My life?” she said. More tears came over her face. “Oh, you know.” She waved the tissue through the air slightly. “It sucks,” she said, trying to smile.
Olive said, “Well, tell me about it. I’d like to hear.”
Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, “Oh, it’s just a life, Olive.”
Olive thought about this. She said, “Well, it’s your life. It matters.”
And so Betty told her then about her two marriages that had both gone wrong, three children who desperately needed money, about her son who had developed strep throat when he was twelve and it had affected his brain and he was now always talking about how crazy he felt, her own job for a while delivering newspapers at four o’clock in the morning, how she eventually got herself to school to become a nurse’s aide. Olive listened, sinking into this woman’s life, and she thought that her own life had been remarkably easy compared to things this girl had gone through.
When Betty got done talking, Olive was silent.
For Betty to have carried in her heart this love for Jerry Skyler, what did that mean? It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much.
Olive finally said, leaning forward in her chair, “Here’s what I think, young lady. I think you’re doin’ excellent.” Then she sat back.
What a thing love was.
Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck.
Friend
On a morning in early December, Olive Kitteridge clambered onto the small van that took residents from the Maple Tree Apartments into town to go to the grocery store; it had snowed lightly the night before, a white glistening everywhere. She grabbed hold of the railing that went up the small steps to where the driver waited—a sullen young man with tattoos on his neck—and she sat d
own in the third seat next to the window. She was the first person to board the van, and this was her first time on it. Olive still had her car, but she had decided to take the van into town today because her friend Edith, who had lived at Maple Tree for a few years, had recently told Olive that she needed to be friendlier to the people who lived here. “Ay-yuh,” Olive had said. “Well, I think they need to be friendlier to me.”
She watched now as the other old people—Godfrey, some of them were positively ancient—climbed on, and then a woman who looked a little younger than most of them got on and sat down next to Olive. “Hello!” the woman said to Olive, settling herself in with a variety of recycling bags and also a big red handbag. She was a pretty woman, with very blue eyes and white hair that was a bit longer than Olive thought it needed to be. “Hello there,” Olive said, and the van pulled out, bumping over the speed bumps until they were on the main road away from the place. The woman’s name was Barbara Paznik, she told Olive, and she asked how long Olive had lived at Maple Tree. Olive told her, Three months. Well, Barbara said, shifting her weight a tiny bit to look Olive more in the face, she had moved in one month ago, and she thought it was the most wonderful place, didn’t Olive think so? Olive asked, “Where did you come from?” And the woman said she came from New York City, but she had gone to camp in Maine when she was a girl and she and her husband had vacationed here for years, and now here they were, and they just loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. They were early risers and they took a walk on the path through the trees each morning. After a moment the woman said, “Where do you come from?” But Olive turned to look out the window; the woman’s breath smelled.
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