Olive Kitteridge (15 page)

Next to her she heard her husband's breathing change; he had drifted into a sudden sleep, his head thrown back against the cushions of the couch. And then she saw him give a start.

“What is it?” She touched his shoulder. “Bobby, what were you just dreaming?”

“Whew,” he said, raising his head. In the dim light of the living room he looked like a half-plucked bird, his thin, dry hair sticking out in different angled patches from his head.

“The concert hall roof fell in,” he said.

She leaned toward him. “I'm right here,” she said, putting her palm to the side of his face. Because what did they have now, except for each other, and what could you do if it was not even quite that?

Tulips

P
eople thought the Larkin couple would move after what happened. But they didn't move—perhaps they had nowhere to go. Their blinds remained drawn, however, day and night. Although sometimes in the dusk of winter, Roger Larkin would be found shoveling his driveway. Or in the summer, after the grass got high and sad-looking, you might find him out mowing the lawn. In both cases he wore a hat far down over his face and never looked up when someone drove by. Louise, there was never any sight of at all. Apparently she'd been in a hospital down in Boston for a while—the daughter lived near Boston, so that would make sense—but Mary Blackwell, who was an X-ray technician in Portland, said Louise had spent time in the hospital there. What was interesting was that Mary was criticized for reporting this, even though at the time there wasn't a soul in town who wouldn't have chopped off a baby finger for news of any kind. But there was that small outpouring against Mary. With the HIPAA privacy laws these days, she could have lost her job, people said. Remind
me
never to have shock treatments in Portland, people said. And Cecil Green, who brought hot coffee and doughnuts to the reporters who hung around the house those days, took a scolding from Olive Kitteridge.

“What in hell ails you?” Olive demanded over the phone. “Feeding the vultures like that—good God.” But Cecil was known to be a little “slow,” and Henry Kitteridge asked his wife to leave the fellow alone.

How the Larkins got groceries, nobody knew. It was assumed the daughter from Boston must have some hand in getting her parents food, because once a month or so there would be a car parked in the driveway with a Massachusetts license plate, and while she was never seen in the local grocery store, perhaps she brought with her her husband, whom nobody in the town of Crosby would recognize anymore, and maybe he did some shopping in Mardenville.

Had the Larkins stopped going to visit their son? Nobody knew, and after a while people did not talk too much about it; sometimes people driving past the house—large and square, painted pale yellow—even turned their heads away, not wanting to be reminded of what could happen to a family that had seemed as pretty and fresh as blueberry pie.

It was Henry Kitteridge, responding in the middle of the night to a police call that the alarm in his pharmacy had gone off (a raccoon had made his way inside), who saw the Larkins pulling out of their driveway, Roger driving, Louise—presumably Louise, for the woman had a scarf around her head and was wearing dark glasses—sitting motionless beside him. It was two o'clock in the morning, and that's when Henry understood that this couple came and went under cover of night; that most likely, most certainly, they would drive to Connecticut to visit the son—but they did it with a furtiveness, and he thought perhaps they would always live this way. He told Olive this, and she said “Yikes” softly.

In any event, the Larkins and their home and whatever their story was inside it eventually receded so that their house with its drawn shades took on, over time, the nature of one more hillock in the dramatic rise and fall of the coastal landscape. The natural rubber band around people's lives that curiosity stretched for a while had long ago returned to encompass their own particularities. Two, five, then seven years passed by—and in the case of Olive Kitteridge, she found herself positively squeezed to death by an unendurable sense of loneliness.

Her son, Christopher, had married. Olive and Henry had been appalled by the bossiness of their new daughter-in-law, who had grown up in Philadelphia, and who expected things like a diamond tennis bracelet for Christmas (what was a
tennis
bracelet? but Christopher bought her one), and who would send back meals in a restaurant, one time demanding the chef be brought to speak to her. Olive, suffering a seemingly endless menopause, would be washed over with extraordinary waves of heat in the girl's presence, and one time Suzanne said, “There's a soy supplement you could take, Olive. If you don't believe in estrogen replacement.”

Olive thought:
I believe in minding my own business, that's what I believe in.
She said, “I've got to get the tulips in before the ground freezes.”

“Oh?” asked Suzanne, who had proven to be consistently stupid about flowers. “Do you plant those tulips every year?”

“Certainly,” said Olive.

“I'm sure my mother didn't plant them every year. And we always had some in the back of the house.”

“I think if you ask your mother,” Olive said, “you'll find you're mistaken. The bloom of a tulip is already in its bulb. Right there. One shot. That's it.”

The girl smiled in a way that made Olive want to slap her.

At home Henry said, “Don't go telling Suzanne she's mistaken.”

“Oh, hell,” said Olive. “I'll tell her anything I want.” But she made some applesauce and took it over to their house.

The couple hadn't been married four months when Christopher called from work one day. “Now, listen,” he said. “Suzanne and I are moving to California.”

For Olive, everything turned upside down. It was as though she'd been thinking, This is a tree, and here is a kitchen stove—and it wasn't a tree at all, or a kitchen stove either. When she saw the
FOR SALE
sign in front of the house she and Henry had built for Christopher, it was as though splinters of wood were shoved into her heart. She wept at times with such noise the dog whimpered and trembled and pushed his cold nose into her arm. She screamed at the dog. She screamed at Henry. “I wish she'd drop dead,” Olive said. “Just drop dead today.” And Henry didn't admonish her.

California? Why all the way across this vast country?

“I like sunshine,” Suzanne said. “New England autumns are fine for about two weeks, and then the darkness settles in, and—” She smiled, lifting a shoulder. “I just don't like it, that's all. You'll come visit us soon.”

It was hard stuff to swallow. Henry, by then, had retired from the pharmacy—earlier than planned; the rent had skyrocketed, and the building was sold for a big chain drugstore to move in—and he often seemed at a loss for how to fill his days. Olive, who had retired from teaching five years earlier, kept telling him, “Get yourself a schedule, and
stick
to it.”

So Henry took a woodworking class at the extension school in Portland and set up a lathe in the basement, eventually producing four uneven, but quite lovely, maple salad bowls. Olive pored over catalogues and ordered one hundred tulip bulbs. They joined the American Civil War Society—Henry's great-grandfather had been at Gettysburg, and they had the old pistol in the hutch to prove it—driving up to Belfast once a month to sit in a circle and hear lectures about battles and heroes and so forth. They found it interesting. It helped. They chatted with other Civil War people, then drove home in the dark, passing the Larkin house, where no lights were on. Olive shook her head. “I always thought Louise was a little off,” she said. Louise had been a guidance counselor at the school Olive taught in, and there was something about Louise—she would talk too much and too gaily, and wore all that makeup and put such a fuss into her clothes. “She got absolutely tipsy at the Christmas parties,” Olive said. “One year downright drunk. I found her singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers' sitting on the bleachers in the gym. Honestly, it was disgusting.”

“Well,” said Henry.

“Yes,” agreed Olive. “Well, indeed.”

And so they were getting on their feet, Olive and Henry, finding their way in this retirement-land, when Christopher telephoned one night to say calmly that he was getting divorced. Henry was on the phone in the bedroom, Olive on the phone in the kitchen. “But
why
?” they asked in unison.

“She wants to,” Christopher said.

“But what happened, Christopher? For God's sake, you've only been married a year.”

“Mom, it's happened. That's all.”

“Well, then come on home, son,” Henry said.

“No,” Christopher answered. “I like it out here. And the practice is going well. I have no intention of coming back home.”

Henry spent the evening sitting in the living room with his head in his hands.

“Come on. Snap out of it,” Olive said. “At least you're not Roger Larkin, for God's sake.” But her hands were trembling, and she went and took everything out of the refrigerator and cleaned the inside and the racks with a sponge that she dipped into a bowl of cool water and baking soda. Then she put everything back into the refrigerator. Henry was still sitting with his head in his hands.

More and more often, Henry sat in the living room with his head in his hands. One day he said, with sudden cheerfulness, “He'll come back. You'll see.”

“And what makes you so sure?”

“It's his home, Olive. This coastline is his home.”

As though to prove the strength of this geographical pull on their only offspring, they traced their genealogy, driving to Augusta to work in the library there, going to old graveyards miles away. Henry's ancestors went back eight generations; Olive's went back ten. Her first ancestor had come from Scotland, was indentured for seven years of labor, and then started out on his own. The Scottish were scrappy and tough, surviving things you'd never dream of—scalpings, freezing winters with no food, barns burning from a lightning flash, children dying left and right. But they persevered, and Olive would be temporarily lightened in spirit as she read about this.

Still, Christopher remained gone. “Fine,” he would say when they called him. “Fine.”

But who was he? This stranger living in California. “No, not right now,” he said when they wanted to fly out to visit. “Now isn't a good time.”

Olive had trouble sitting still. Instead of a lump in her throat, she felt a lump in her whole body, a persistent ache that seemed to be holding back enough tears to fill the bay seen through the front window. She was flooded with images of Christopher: As a toddler, he had reached to touch a geranium on the windowsill, and she had slapped his hand. But she had loved him! By God, she had loved him. In second grade, he had almost set himself on fire, trying to burn his spelling test out back in the woods. But he knew she loved him. People know exactly who loves them, and how much—Olive believed this. Why would he not allow his parents to even visit him? What had they done?

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.