Olive, Again: A Novel (34 page)

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.

O
n 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 down 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.

They were driving past the Congregational church, where Olive’s first husband, Henry, had had his funeral, and then the van drove down Appleton Avenue past the small houses there; a child and his mother had just come out the door of one. The child was a boy, he wore no hat, and his mother, Olive noted, looked tired. She was wearing sneakers in this snow.

“I come from here,” Olive said, turning to the woman. But Barbara Paznik was talking to the woman across the aisle from her now, the back of her tweed coat was almost all Olive could see. After a moment, Olive took her finger and poked the tweed coat hard, and Barbara turned with surprise on her face. “I said I come from here,” Olive said, and Barbara said, “Oh, I see,” and then went back to speaking with the woman across the aisle.

In the parking lot of the big grocery store, the van pulled to a stop, and people got off—slowly. Olive bought toothpaste and laundry soap and some crackers and oatmeal, then she was ready to go. For a few minutes, she sat on a bench inside the store, by the front door, holding her recycling bag with the stuff in it; she had gone to this grocery store most of her life, and she had never sat on this bench by the door; this fact now made her feel strangely—and particularly—sad. She got up and went back out to the van. The driver opened the folding door; he kept looking down at his cellphone. She tapped the snow from the tip of her cane and sat down in the seat by the window that she had been sitting in before; she was the first person back on the van. Silence surrounded her as she waited.

Watching while the others finally got into the van, Olive noticed that a few of the old women were apparently wearing those Depends things, those awful diapers for old people. She could see them bulk up the women’s hind ends if their coat didn’t go below their waist, and one woman, as she bent to get something she had dropped onto the floor of the bus, just about exposed this fact to everyone. It made Olive shudder.

Barbara Paznik did not even look at Olive when she got on; she simply went behind Olive and sat with someone else. No one sat in the seat next to Olive. And everyone seemed to be yakking to somebody. Then, as the van wound its way up the street and around the corner—Olive could not believe this—they all started to sing. “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round….” Women looked at her with laughter on their ancient faces as they sang, even the few old men were laughing. Olive had to look out of the window, her cheeks getting warm. “God, Jack,” she thought, “you’re missing a hell of a time.” She felt enormously angry at him for dying. And then she thought: He wasn’t so much, that Jack.

To Olive, it felt that a screen had been lowered over her, the type of thing that went over a cake on a summer picnic table to keep the flies out. In other words, she was trapped, and her vision of the world had become smaller. Every morning, she drove to the local doughnut shop and bought two doughnuts and a cup of coffee to go, and then she drove out to Juniper Point and watched the water while she ate her doughnuts; the tides, the seaweed, the spruce trees on the little island, these things reminded her of her life with Henry. She would get out and throw her coffee cup in the garbage can there. And then reluctantly she drove back to the Maple Tree Apartments.

Her apartment, which was one room with a kitchenette and a bedroom and a large bathroom, faced north, and therefore got no direct sunlight. This bothered Olive tremendously. She loved the sun. Was she to live without sun? She had told this to Christopher on the telephone when she had first arrived, and he said, “Mom, we were lucky to get you in there at all.”

She had brought with her the single bed from the guest room of the house she had lived in with her second husband, Jack, and a wooden table that she had had with her first husband, Henry. And a small hutch that she had with Henry as well. It had been Jack who had suggested storing those pieces of furniture in the basement of their house, and now she was very glad she had done so. It meant there were pieces of Henry here. “Thank you, Jack,” she had said, after the movers had left. And then she said, “And thank you, Henry.” On the hutch she had placed a photograph of Henry and also a smaller photograph of Jack.

Every evening a group of residents gathered in the lounge area, where there were small wooden tables and a group of chairs, dark green with armrests. Here these people had their wine, and Olive kept trying to join them. The evening after that horrific van ride, she went and stood near the group of people in the lounge, holding a glass of white wine, but these people—she thought—made it clear that she was not one of them. They were wealthy, Olive had come to understand, and they were snobs. This evening a woman, who was tall and wore dark blue slacks with a white blouse, was talking about Harvard. Harvard this, and Harvard that. Olive said to her, “My second husband taught at Harvard. He went to Yale, and then he was the youngest person to get tenure at Harvard.”

The woman looked at her. Just looked at her. “I see,” she said, and walked away.

“Well, hell’s bells to all of you,” Olive said, putting her wineglass down on a small tabletop, and in her mind she meant Jack as well. In fact, when she got back to her apartment, she put away the one photograph of Jack, and just had Henry’s photo there on the hutch by itself.

A few of the people were local; her friend Edith, for example, who had lived in this place for years, but Edith had a full life here. When Olive, on her very first night, went into the dining room for supper—it was a large room with foolish white latticework on the top half of the walls—Edith was sitting at a table for four, with three other people, and she gave Olive a little wave, and that was that, and Olive sat alone at a table for two. She hadn’t known what to do with her face as she ate the stupid salad from the salad bar, and then the skimpy piece of salmon and yellow rice.

But Bernie Green was living here. Olive remembered him, because when Henry had to sell his pharmacy to that huge chain, Bernie had handled the legal aspects for him, and Henry had always spoken highly of him. And here he was, looking old as the hills, and where was his wife? His wife was over the bridge, it turned out; she had developed Alzheimer’s very soon after they had moved here together, and so Bernie went every morning—over the little walking bridge that went to the Alzheimer’s unit—and he sat by her bed even as she became more and more out of it. Whenever Olive saw him he had tears in his eyes, and sometimes they were just coming straight down his face. What was that all about? She asked Christopher this on the phone, and he said, “Well, Mom, he’s probably sad about his wife,” and Olive had said, “But, Chris, he walks around weeping!” And Christopher had said it was cultural. “Cultural?” Olive demanded. “What in hell does that mean?” Christopher said it meant the guy was Jewish, and Jewish men weren’t ashamed to cry.

Olive hung up disgusted with them both.

Ethel MacPherson had lived here for six months—she had moved in after her husband, Fergus, died—and she seemed to know everything about everyone; she was the one who told Olive about Bernie’s wife going over the bridge. Ethel said, “Oh, I couldn’t stand being in that big old house after Fergie died! Oh, how I miss him!”

“Wasn’t he the fellow that used to walk around Crosby in his kilt?” Olive asked.

Ethel said, Yes—that was her husband.

“What was that all about?” Olive asked. “I never quite understood that myself.”

Ethel seemed insulted by that. “Well, if you had Scottish ancestry you might think differently” is what Ethel said.

And Olive said, “I do have Scottish ancestry!”

“Well, maybe it doesn’t mean to you what it did to Fergie,” Ethel said, and she moved away, waving at someone across the dining room.

Phooey to you, Olive thought. But she felt awful; nobody was talking to her, and after a few minutes she went back to her little apartment.

As soon as it got dark she tucked herself into her little single bed and watched television. The news was amazing to her. And this helped her. The country was in terrible disarray, and Olive found this interesting. At times she thought fascism might be knocking on the door of the country, but then she would think, Oh, I’ll die soon, who cares. Sometimes she thought of Christopher and all his kids and she felt worried about their future, but then she would think: There’s nothing I can do about it, everything is going to hell.

Eventually Olive found the Chipmans; they had lived an hour away in Saco, and he was a retired engineer and his wife was a retired nurse. Both were Democrats, thank God, so they could talk about the mess of the world, and they ate their supper together, the three of them at a table for four. This helped Olive; it gave her a place. The fact that she thought they were both a bit dull was not something she dwelled on, but often enough after eating with them she would roll her eyes on the way back to her room.

This is how she lived.

A few days after Christmas, her son, Christopher, and his wife and all four of their children came to visit. And here was a surprise! Christopher’s oldest son, Theodore, who had been fathered by a different man and who had never, in Olive’s memory, spoken to her, stepped into her apartment, a young adolescent now, and said, “I’m sorry you got sick. With your heart and stuff.”

“Well,” Olive said, “it happens.”

And then the boy said tentatively, “Maybe things will get better here.”

“Maybe,” said Olive.

Olive’s granddaughter Natalie was eight by now, and she would talk to Olive, but then would turn and cling to her mother, who rolled her eyes at Olive and said, “She’s going through a stage.”

“Aren’t we all,” Olive said.

But Little Henry, Olive’s grandson who was ten, had memorized all the presidents of the United States. “Good for you!” Olive told him, but she was extremely bored as he recited them, and when he got to the current president, Olive made a noise of disgust, and the boy said, seriously, “I know.”