Olive, Again: A Novel (26 page)

“Well.” Olive was slightly taken aback; she didn’t know how to explain it. “It’s just that you don’t
count
anymore, and there is something freeing about that.”

“I don’t understand,” the girl said. And what shot through Olive’s mind was the thought: You’re honest.

Olive said, “I don’t think I can explain this well. But you go through life and you think you’re something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something. And then you see”—and Olive shrugged in the direction of the girl who had served the coffee—“that you no longer are anything. To a waitress with a
huge
hind end, you’ve become invisible. And it’s freeing.” She watched Andrea’s face and saw that it was struggling with something.

Finally the girl said, “Well, I envy you.” And she laughed, and Olive saw that her teeth were bad; she wondered briefly why she had not seen this in photos of the girl. “I envy you for ever thinking you were something,” Andrea said, her voice throaty.

“Oh, now stop it, Andrea. Last I heard you were Poet Laureate of this country a few years back.”

“Yeah,” said Andrea. “I was.”

As they walked toward Olive’s car, Olive going faster than she would have on her own, the girl rummaged in her coat pocket and the next thing Olive knew a plume of cigarette smoke was going over her. Olive felt a deep tremor of disappointment, and she thought: Well, she’s just a L’Rieux. That’s all she is. Famous or not.

Andrea said, as they stood by Olive’s car, lifting her hand with the cigarette held between two fingers, “It’s all about class now, smoking. It’s like shooting heroin, but that’s not really a class thing anymore.” And then—and this surprised Olive like hell—the girl wrapped her arms around Olive and said, “It was so nice to see you, Mrs. Kitteridge.” Olive thought her hair might catch on fire from the cigarette in the girl’s hand.

“You too,” said Olive, and she got into her car and started it, and backed away slowly, not looking out the window in the direction of the girl—it was a job to back a car up these days. All the way home she told Jack about what had happened; it was Jack, her second husband, whom she seemed to want to tell this to.

When she spoke on the telephone that night to her son, Christopher, who lived in New York City, she mentioned seeing the girl, and he said, “Who’s Andrea L’Rieux? You mean one of the million L’Rieuxs in that family out on East Point Road?”

“Yes,” Olive said, “the one who became Poet Laureate.”

“Became what?” Christopher asked, not especially nicely, and Olive understood that Christopher did not follow Poets Laureate or anyone with whom he had grown up, though Andrea was younger than he was. “She became the Poet Laureate of the United States of America,” Olive said, and Christopher said, “Well, whoop-dee-do.”

When she told her stepdaughter, Cassie, on the telephone, the child was far more appreciative. “Oh, Olive, how nice! Wow.”

And when she told the owner of the bookstore—Olive walked in the next day with the sole purpose of telling him this—he said, “Hey, that’s very, very cool. Andrea L’Rieux, man, she’s just
amazing.”

“Yup,” Olive said. “We had a nice chat. We had breakfast together. She was quite nice. Seemed very ordinary.”

She called her friend Edith, whose husband, Buzzy, had helped her buy the car; they lived in the assisted-living place out by Littlehale’s Farm; and Edith was pretty excited for her as well. “Olive, you’re the kind of person people want to talk to.”

“I don’t know about that,” Olive said, but then she thought that what Edith said was true. “She seemed a lonely child,” Olive said. “As though all her fame and whatnot has meant nothing to her. Sad child. Ratty clothes, smoking her head off. Really, Edith, she was a lonely thing.”

For a couple of weeks Olive waited to hear from Andrea. Each morning when she checked the mail, she realized she was waiting for a card, an old-fashioned, handwritten card that said, How lovely it was to see you, Mrs. Kitteridge. Let’s stay in touch! The girl could get her address from the Internet. But no card came, and after a while Olive stopped waiting for it. When she saw in the newspaper that Severin L’Rieux had died, she wondered if Andrea was still in town, most likely she had come back for the funeral, which according to the paper would be held at St. John’s, and that made sense to Olive; made her shudder a tiny bit too. All those French-Canadian Catholics, well—goodbye to Severin L’Rieux.

For their trip to Oslo, Jack had bought them first-class tickets for the plane. Olive was furious. “I don’t fly first-class,” she had said.

Jack had laughed. “You don’t fly anywhere,” he said, and that made her angrier.

“I’m not flying first-class. It’s obscene.”

“Obscene?” Jack sat down at the kitchen table and watched her, still with amusement in his face. “I like obscene.” When she didn’t answer him he said, “You know what, Olive? You’re a snob.”

“I am the opposite of a snob.”

Jack laughed a long time. “You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you’re a snob.” Then he leaned forward and said, “Oh, come on, Olive. For Christ’s sake. I’m seventy-eight years old, I have money, you have money—though, yes, I have a lot more money than you do—and if not now, when?”

“Never,” she said.

So she had flown coach while he sat up front in first class. She could not believe he would do that, but he did. “Bye now,” he said, waving his hand once, and she was left on her own to find her seat; it was the bulkhead. She sat in the aisle next to a large man—Olive was large herself—and by the window was the man’s girlfriend, an Asian girl probably twenty years younger, but how could you tell with Asians. Before they had even taken off, she hated them both. She was ready to cry when the flight attendant took her bag from her and put it in the overhead bin. “I want my bag,” Olive said, and the woman told her she could get it as soon as they were airborne.

The big man next to her kept turning toward his girlfriend, so his fat back was in Olive’s space. She heard their conversation in bits and pieces, and she recognized early on that the man was a bully, he was bullying his young girlfriend. She thought they were disgusting. “This is what you should be listening to,” the man said, and he repeated that many times. As though the girl had poor taste in music. And then the man whispered in his girlfriend’s ear, and the girl leaned forward slightly to look at Olive. They were talking about her! She, with her knees bent up, unable to straighten her legs, an old woman— What in the world did they have to say about her? The Asian girl gave a little shrug and Olive heard her say, “Well, that’s her life.” Whose life? What did that girl know about Olive’s life? Oh, she was fit to be tied, and she did not sleep a wink the whole flight over. At one point Jack stepped through the curtain dividing the cabin and said to her, “Well, hello, Olive! How’s it going?”

“I want my bag,” she told him. “If you could please get me my bag.”

He got her bag from the overhead bin, placed it in her lap, whispered in her ear, “There, there, little miss.”

“Go away, Jack,” she said. And she saw the big man beside her watching her. She closed her eyes, and kept them closed; the flight was absolutely endless.

But as they went through customs Jack was kind to her. He said, “Let’s get you to the hotel and get you some sleep.” He kept his eye on her as they moved through the line. At the hotel she fell asleep immediately, and they boarded the boat the next day.

When he became sad a few days later, she felt terrible—and frightened. She thought he missed his wife (even though Olive was his wife). She thought she was all wrong for him. Finally, she said, “Jack, I think I’m not a good wife for you—” He looked at her with surprise; she could see his surprise at what she said. “Olive, you’re actually the perfect wife for me. You really are.” He smiled and reached for her hand. “I’m just homesick,” he said. “All this goddamn beauty—” Tossing his head toward the window of their cabin. “It makes me miss the coast of Maine.”

“I miss the coast of Maine too,” she said. And after that they were fine. They had a wonderful time.

The last night on the boat, he said, “Oh, Olive, I got you a first-class ticket for the way home. Hope you don’t mind.” He winked at her.

And she could not believe the flight home. She had her own seat that stretched backward and forward. It was like she was an astronaut, in her own little cubbyhole. There was a kit, with socks and a mask and a toothbrush, all for her! She ate a roast beef sandwich and had ice cream for dessert, and she could not stop looking across the aisle at Jack. He made a kissing sound and said, “Now, don’t disturb me.” And drank his glass of wine.

The second week of October, Olive went to get her hair cut by Janice Tucker, a woman who worked from her home. Olive always had the first appointment of the day, at eight o’clock, and as she settled into her chair, Janice wrapped the plastic apron around her and said, “I heard you had breakfast with Andrea L’Rieux.”

“I did,” said Olive. “I certainly did.”

“Then you must feel terrible about her accident.”

“What did you say?” Olive turned her head.

“In the paper just yesterday. I thought you’d have seen it. Wait, I’ll get it for you.” Janice turned around and went through a pile of newspapers on the table in the waiting area. She brought back the paper and said, “Here. Look at this. Oh, Olive, I thought you knew.”

The small headline read: Former Poet Laureate Struck by Bus, Survives. And a small paragraph said that Andrea L’Rieux had been hit by a bus on a street in Boston, that she was in stable condition with a broken pelvis and internal injuries. A complete recovery was expected.

Olive felt a secretion from the back corners of her mouth. She put the paper on the counter and sat back and said nothing, while Janice got her little scissors and began to snip at Olive’s hair. “So sad, right?” Janice asked, and Olive nodded. She felt awful. As the woman snipped tenderly at her hair, Olive felt worse and worse. And then realizing she had no Jack—or Henry, her first husband—to go home and tell this to, she said suddenly, “Janice, I think the girl was trying to kill herself.”

Janice stood back, the scissors near her chest. “Olive, stop.”

“No, I think she was. I’ve been sitting here thinking about it, and she talked about suicide to me. She said how men use guns and women tend not to use guns, they mostly use pills, and I should have known, I should have realized—”

“Now, Olive. Don’t you think that. Do not even think that. I’m sure it’s not true. She was hit by a bus, it happens, Olive.”

“Janice, you didn’t see her. She looked like hell. She wore a ratty little sweater, and she was smoking. She hated her father, and then he died. And that can make a person messed up too.”

Janice seemed to think about this. And then she said, “Olive, I just don’t believe that she tried to kill herself. I don’t want to believe it, and so I’m not going to.”

“Fine,” said Olive. “Fine, fine, fine.”

She did not tip Janice, as she usually did, and then she left, waving one hand above her shoulder as she went down the steps with her cane.