Olive Kitteridge (14 page)

She felt exhausted, suddenly, by this silliness. What were you supposed to say when a squat, homely little man whose path you had crossed briefly for a number of years said you had always been a favorite of his? “Do you have any plans to retire soon, Alan?” is what she pleasantly said.

“Never,” the man answered. “I'll retire the day I die.” He laughed, and they laughed with him, and in the quick glance he gave to Mrs. Lydia, the way she briefly rolled her brand-new eyes, Jane Houlton realized that he did not want to be home all day with his wife, that his wife did not want him there either. Mrs. Lydia said to Bob, “You've retired now, since we last saw you? Wasn't it funny, meeting you in the Miami airport the way we did?

“It's a small world,” Mrs. Lydia added, tugging on her ear with a gloved hand, glancing at Jane, and then turning her head, looking up the balcony stairs.

Bob stepped to the side, ready to go back into the church.

“When was this?” Jane said. “Miami?”

“Couple years ago. We visited those friends we told you about”—Mr. Lydia nodded at Bob—“in their little gated community. That's not my dish of ice cream, I can tell you.” He shook his head, then squinted up at Bob. “Doesn't it make you crazy to be home all day?”

“Love it,” Bob said firmly. “I love it.”

“We do things,” Jane added, as though she needed to explain something.

“What things?”

And then Jane hated her, this tall woman with her painted face, the hard eyes staring out from under the red felt hat; she didn't want to tell Mrs. Lydia how every morning she and Bobby, early, first thing, took a walk, how they came back and made coffee and ate their bran cereal and read the paper to each other. How they planned their day, went shopping—for her coat, for a special pair of shoes since he had such trouble now with his feet.

“We bumped into someone else that trip,” Mr. Lydia said. “The Shepherds. They were at a golf resort north of the city.”

“Small world,” Mrs. Lydia said again, tugging at her ear with her gloved hand again, not looking at Jane this time, just looking up the stairs at the balcony.

Olive Kitteridge was moving through the crowd of people. Taller than most, her head was visible as she seemed to say something to her husband, Henry, who nodded, an expression of suppressed mirth on his face.

“Better get back in there,” said Bob, nodding toward the inside of the church, touching Jane's elbow.

“Come on,” said Mrs. Lydia, tapping her husband's sleeve with a program. “Let's go. Lovely to see you.” She wiggled her fingers at Jane, then moved up the stairs.

Jane squeezed past a group of people standing right in the doorway, and she and Bob went back to their pew, her tugging her coat around her, crossing her legs, cold inside their black wool slacks. “He loves her,” said Jane, with a tone of admonishment. “That's how he can stand her.”

“Mr. Lydia?”

“No. Henry Kitteridge.”

Bob didn't answer, and they watched as others came in, took their seats again, the Kitteridges among them. “Miami?” Jane said to her husband. “What was he talking about?” She looked at him.

Bob thrust out his lower lip and shrugged, to indicate he didn't know.

“When were you in
Miami
?”

“He must have meant Orlando. Remember when I had that account I was closing down there?”

“You bumped into the Lydias at the airport in Florida? You never told me that.”

“I'm sure I did. It was ages ago.”

The music took over the church. It took up all the space that wasn't filled with people or coats or pews, it took up all the space in Jane Houlton's head. She actually moved her neck back and forth as though to shake off the cumbersome weight of the sound, and realized that she had never liked music. It seemed to bring back all the shadows and aches of a lifetime. Let others enjoy it, these people listening so seriously in their fur coats, their red felt hats, their tiresome lives—a pressure on her knee, her husband's hand.

She gazed at his hand, spread over her black coat that they had bought together. It was the large hand of an old man; a beautiful hand with the long fingers and the veins rising across; as familiar, almost, as her own hand was to her.

“Are you all right?” He had put his mouth against her ear, but she thought he had whispered too loudly. She made a circular motion with two fingers, their own sign language from years back,
Let's go,
and he nodded.

“You all right, Janie?” he asked on the sidewalk, his hand under her elbow.

“Oh, I get tired of that heavy music somehow. Do you mind?”

“No. I'd had enough.”

In the car, in the darkness and the silence of the car, she felt some knowledge pass between them. And it had been sitting there in church with them, too, like a child pressed between them in the pew, this thing, this presence that had made its way into their evening.

She said quietly, “Oh, God.”

“What, Janie?”

She shook her head, and he did not ask again.

A traffic light up ahead turned yellow. He slowed down, drove slowly; he stopped.

Jane blurted out: “I hate her.”

“Who?” His tone was surprised. “Olive Kitteridge?”

“Of course not Olive Kitteridge. Why would I hate her? Donna Granger. I hate her. There's something creepy about her. Smug. Your
bunny rabbits.
I hate her.” Jane actually stamped a foot against the floor of the car.

“I can't think it's worth all that emotion, Janie. I mean, really, do you?” asked Bob, and from the corner of her eye, she saw that he didn't turn his head to look at her as he asked this.

In the silence that followed, Jane's anger grew; it became immense, swelling like water around them, as if they had suddenly driven over a bridge and into a pond below—stagnant, cold stuff filled up around them.

“She was so busy getting her hair done that she didn't even know her kid was pregnant. Didn't even know it! Still doesn't know it, probably. She still doesn't
know
that I was the one to comfort the girl years ago,
I
was the one to worry myself sick!”

“You were nice to those girls.”

“That younger sister, though—Patty. She was a nasty thing. I never trusted her, and Tracy shouldn't have either.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Tracy was too innocent, you know. Don't you remember that night she had a slumber party and ended up so crushed?”

“There must have been a hundred slumber parties over the years, Jane. No, I don't remember that one.”

“Patty Granger told Tracy how some other girl didn't like her, some girl.
She really doesn't like you, you know.
” Jane was almost ready to cry, recalling this. Her chin tingled.

“What are you talking about? You loved Patty.”

“I fed Patty,” Jane answered fiercely. “I fed the goddamn girl for years. Those parents were never home, going this place and that, some party here, some evening there, leaving
other people
to take care of their kids.”

“Janie, calm down.”

“Please don't tell me to calm down,” she said. “Please don't do that, Bob.”

She heard him sigh quietly, could picture in the dark how he rolled his eyes.

They drove the rest of the way in silence, passing Christmas lights, twinkling reindeer; Jane looked out the window, her hands jammed into the pockets of her coat. It wasn't until they were through town, out on the final long stretch of Basing Hill Road, that Jane spoke again, quietly, with genuine confusion in her voice. “Bobby, I didn't know you'd ever run into the Lydias at the Orlando airport. I don't think you ever told me that.”

“You probably forgot. It was a long time ago.”

Ahead of them through the trees the moon gleamed like a shiny little curved particle in the black sky of the night, and something moved in Jane's water-filled mind. It was the way the Lydia woman had looked at her, and then looked away, right before going up the balcony stairs. Purposefully now, Jane made her voice calm, almost conversational. “Bobby,” she said, “please tell me the truth. You did see them at the Miami airport, didn't you?”

And when he didn't answer, she felt her bowels ache, and an age-old sliver of anguish shuddered deep within her—how tired it made her, that particular, familiar pain; a weight that seemed to her to be like a thick, tarnished silver spreading through her, and then it rolled over everything, extinguishing Christmas lights, streetlamps, fresh snow; the loveliness of all things—all gone.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I can't believe it.” She added, “I really can't believe it.”

Bob pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. They sat. “Janie,” he said.

“Tell me.” So calm. She even sighed. “Tell me, please,” she said.

She could hear in the darkness of the car how his breathing was quicker now; and her own was, too. She wanted to say their hearts were too old for this now; you can't keep doing this to a heart, can't keep on expecting your heart to pull through.

In the dim light that shone from their front porch, his face looked ghastly and ghostly. He must not die right now. “Just tell me,” she said again, kindly.

“She got breast cancer, Janie. She called me at the office that spring before I retired, and I hadn't heard from her in years. Really years, Janie.”

“Okay,” Jane said.

“She was very unhappy. I felt bad.” He still did not look at her; he stared over the steering wheel. “I felt…I don't know. I can tell you I wish she hadn't called.” Now he sat back, taking a deep breath. “I had to go to Orlando to close down that account, so I told her I'd come see her, and I did. I went down to Miami and I saw her, and it was awful, it was pathetic, and the next day I flew back from Miami, where I saw the Grangers.”

“You spent the night with her in Miami?” Jane was shivering now, her teeth would chatter if she let them.

Bob was slumped in his seat. He put his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes. “I wanted to drive back to Orlando that night. That's what I'd planned. But it was too late. I didn't feel like I could leave, and then, frankly, it was too late for me to feel I could safely drive back. It was awful, Janie. If you could know how stupid and awful and miserable it was.”

“So how much have you spoken with her since then?”

“I called her once, a few days after I got back, and that was it. I'm telling you the truth.”

“Is she dead?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea. I probably would have heard from Scott or Mary maybe, if she'd died, so I assume she hasn't. But I have no idea.”

“Do you think about her?”

He looked at her pleadingly in the semidarkness. “Jane, I think of you. I care about you. Only you. Janie, it was four years ago. That's a long time.”

“No, it isn't. At our age, it's like turning a couple of quick pages. Blip-blip.” She made a hand gesture in the dark, a quick back and forth.

He didn't answer this but only looked at her with his head still back against the headrest, as though he had fallen out of some tree and lay now, unable to sit up, his eyes rolling sideways to look at her with exhaustion and terrible sadness. “All that matters is you, Janie. She doesn't matter to me. Seeing her—it didn't matter to me. I just did it because she wanted me to.”

Jane said, “But I just don't understand. I mean, at this point in our lives, I just don't understand. Because she
wanted
you to?”

“I don't blame you, Janie. It's ridiculous. It was so—nothing.” He put a large gloved hand over his face.

“I have to go in. I'm freezing.” She got out of the car and went up the front steps of their home as though she were stumbling, but she didn't stumble. She waited for him to unlock the door and then moved past him into the kitchen, then through the dining room into the living room, where she sat down on the couch.

He followed her, and turned on the lamp, then sat on the coffee table, facing her. For a long time they just sat. And she felt that her heart was broken again. Only now she was old, so it was different. He slipped off his coat.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “You want some hot chocolate? Tea?”

She shook her head.

“Take your coat off, though, Janie.”

“No,” she said. “I'm cold.”

“Oh, please, Janie.” He went upstairs and came back down with her favorite sweater, a yellow angora cardigan.

She put the sweater on her lap.

He sat down next to her on the couch. “Oh, Janie,” he said. “I've made you so sad.”

She let him help her, in a moment, put the sweater on. “We're getting old,” she said then. “One day we're going to die.”

“Janie.”

“I'm scared of it, Bobby.”

“Come to bed now,” he said. But she shook her head. She asked, pulling back from his arm, which had gone around her, “Didn't she ever marry?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “No, she never married. She's mental, Janie.”

After a moment, Jane said, “I don't want to talk about her.”

“I don't either.”

“Never again.”

“Never again.”

She said, “It's that we're running out of time.”

“No, we're not, Janie. We still have time together. We could still have twenty years together.”

When he said that, she felt a deep and sudden pity for him. “I need to sit here for just a few more minutes,” she said. “You go on up to bed.”

“I'll stay with you.” And so they sat. The lamp from the side table threw a dim and serious light throughout the silent room.

She took a deep, quiet breath and thought how she did not envy those young girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too.