Olive Kitteridge (19 page)

Henry might have remembered why they sent the girl away. Olive has never been one for remembering things.

“A drop of whiskey sounds good,” says Marlene. “You want any, Olive?”

“Nope. Thanks.” If she drank, she'd be a guzzler. She stays away from it, always has. She wonders if Christopher's ex-wife might have been a secret guzzler, out there drinking all that California wine.

The house is filling up. People move down the hallway and out onto the front porch. Some of the fishermen have come over from Sabbatus Cove, all scrubbed-looking. Their big shoulders slumped, they seem sheepish, apologetic, as they move into the living room, taking the tiny brownies with their big hands. Soon the living room is so full that Olive can no longer see out to the water. People's skirts, belt buckles move past her. “I just wanted to say, Marlene”—and here, in a sudden clearing of people, is Susie Bradford, pushing herself between the coffee table and the couch—“that he was so brave during his sickness. I never saw him complain.”

“No,” says Marlene. “He didn't complain.” And then: “He had his basket of trips.” At least that's what Olive thinks she's heard. Whatever Marlene has said seems to embarrass her. Olive sees the woman's cheeks flush, as though she has just divulged some private, very intimate secret that she shared with her husband. But Susie Bradford has spilled jelly from one of the cookies down her front, and now Marlene is saying, “Oh, Susie, go into the bathroom down the hall. Such a pretty blouse, what a shame.”

“No ashtrays in this house,” says a woman on her way past Olive, and because of a little crush of people, the woman has to stand there in front of Olive for a moment; she takes a deep drag from her cigarette, squinting her eyes against the smoke. Some tiny ping of recognition, of knowledge, takes place in Olive, but she could not tell you who this woman is—she knows only that she doesn't like the looks of her, with her long, stringy hair that contains a lot of unflattering gray. Olive thinks when your hair gets gray, it's time to chop it off, or pin it up on top of your head, no point in thinking you're still a schoolgirl. “I can't find an ashtray in this house,” the woman says, tilting her face up quickly as she breathes out a stream of smoke.

“Well,” says Olive, “I guess that's too bad.” And the woman moves away.

The couch comes into view again. Kerry Monroe is drinking a tumbler of brown stuff—the whiskey she was offering earlier, Olive suspects—and while Kerry's lipstick remains bright, her cheekbones and jawline still impressively proportioned, it's as though inside her black clothes her joints have become loosened. Her crossed leg swings, a foot bobs, some inner wobbliness is there. “Nice service, Marlene,” Kerry says, leaning forward to pick up a meatball with a toothpick. “Really nice service; you've done him proud.” And Olive nods, because she would like Marlene to be comforted by this.

But Marlene doesn't see Kerry, she is smiling upward, taking hold of someone's hand, and says, “The kids planned it all.” And the hand belongs to Marlene's youngest girl, who in her blue velour jersey and navy-blue skirt squeezes between Marlene and Kerry, putting her head on Marlene's shoulder, nestling her big-girl's body close.

“Everyone's saying how nice the service was,” Marlene says, smoothing the girl's long bangs away from her eyes. “You did a real nice job.”

The girl nods, her head pressed against her mother's arm.

“Great job,” says Kerry, tossing back the rest of the whiskey in her glass as though it were merely iced tea.

And Olive, watching all this, feels—what? Jealousy? No, you don't feel jealous of a woman whose husband has been lost. But an unreachability, that's how she'd put it. This plump, kind-natured woman sitting on the couch surrounded by children, her cousin, friends—she is unreachable to Olive. Olive is aware of the disappointment this brings. Because why, after all, did she come here today? Not just because Henry would have said to go to Ed Bonney's funeral. No, she came here hoping that in the presence of someone else's sorrow, a tiny crack of light would somehow come through her own dark encasement. But it remains separate from her, this old house filled with people, except one voice is beginning to rise above the others.

Kerry Monroe is drunk. In her black suit she stands by the couch and raises an arm. “Cop Kerry,” she says, loudly. “Yep. That should have been me.” Laughing, she sways. People say, “Watch it, Kerry,” “Careful there,” and Kerry ends up sitting on the arm of the couch, slips a black high heel off and flips up and down her black-stockinged foot. “Up against the wall, buster!”

It's disgusting. Olive rises from her chair. Time to leave; goodbyes aren't necessary. No one will miss her.

         

The tide is going out. Near the shore the water is flat, metal-colored, although out past Longway Rock, it's starting to get choppy; there's even a whitecap or two. Lobster buoys down in the cove bob slightly, and seagulls circle the wharf near the marina. The sky is still blue, but off to the northeast, the horizon is lined with a rising cloud bank, and the tops of the pine trees are bending, over there on Diamond Island.

Olive is not able to leave after all. Her car is blocked in the driveway by other cars, and she would have to ask around and make a fuss, and she doesn't want to do that. So she has found herself a nice private spot, a wooden chair right below the deck, off to one corner, in which to sit and watch the clouds move in slowly over the bay.

Eddie Junior walks by on his way down to the shore with some of his cousins. They don't notice her sitting there, and they disappear down the skinny path between the bayberry bushes and the rugosa, and then reappear again on the shore, Eddie Junior lagging behind the rest. Olive watches as he picks up stones and skips them through the water.

Above her on the deck she hears footsteps, big men's boot-shoes
clump, clump.
Matt Grearson's voice says in a long drawl, “Be a real high tide later tonight.”

“Yep,” says someone else—Donny Madden.

“Marlene's going to get lonesome out here this winter,” says Matt Grearson after a while.

Godfrey, thinks Olive from her chair below—run like hell, Marlene. Big flub-dub Matt Grearson.

“I guess she'll manage,” answers Donny, eventually. “People do.”

In another few minutes their boots clump back inside, Olive hears the door close. People manage, she thinks. It's true. But she takes a deep breath and has to shift her weight on this wooden chair, because it's not true, too. She pictures Henry, not even a year ago, measuring what was needed for the mopboards in their new room, down on his hands and knees with the measuring tape, telling her the numbers while she wrote them down. Then Henry standing up, a tall man. “Okay, Ollie. Let's widdle the dogs and go into town.” The car ride—what did they talk about? Oh, how she wants to remember, but she can't remember. In town, in the parking lot of Shop 'n Save, because they needed milk and juice after they went to the lumber store, she said she would stay in the car. And that was the end of their life. Henry got out of the car and fell down. Never stood up again, never walked down the pebble path to the house again, never said an intelligible word again; only sometimes, those huge blue-green eyes would look at her from the hospital bed.

Then he went blind; now he will never see her again. “Not much to look at these days,” she's told him, when she has gone to sit with him. “Lost a little weight now we don't have our crackers and cheese every night. But I guess I look like hell.” He would say that wasn't true. He would say, “Oh no, Ollie. You look wonderful to me.” He doesn't say anything. Some days in his wheelchair he doesn't even turn his head. She makes the drive every day and sits with him. You're a saint, says Molly Collins. God, how stupid can you be? A scared old woman is what she is; all she knows these days is that when the sun goes down, it's time to go to bed. People manage. She is not so sure. The tide is still out on that one, she thinks.

         

Eddie Junior has stayed down there on the shore, skipping stones. His cousins are gone; just Eddie Junior down there on the rocks alone. Hurling those flat stones. Olive feels pleased by how good he is at this, skip-skip, skip-skip; even though the water is no longer flat. She likes the way he immediately bends down, finding another, hurling that.

But there's Kerry, and where did she come from? She must have gone down to the shore from around the other side of the house, because there she is in her stockinged feet on the rocks, veering over the barnacled rocks, calling out to Eddie. Whatever she's saying, he doesn't like. Olive can tell that from here. He keeps on skipping stones, but finally he turns to her and speaks. Kerry opens her arms in a kind of pleading gesture, and Eddie Junior just shakes his head, and a few minutes later, Kerry comes back up from the shore, crawling up the rocks, clearly drunk. She could break her neck out there, Olive thinks. Not that Eddie Junior seems to care. He throws a stone, real hard this time, too hard—it doesn't skip, just smashes into the water.

For a long time Olive sits there. She looks out over the water, and on the far edge of her mind she can hear people getting into their cars, driving away, but she is thinking of Marlene Monroe, a young girl, so shy, walking home with her sweetheart Ed Bonney, how happy a girl she must have been, standing at Crossbow Corners while the birds chirped and Ed Bonney perhaps said, “Gee, I hate to say goodbye.” They lived right here in this house with Ed's mother for the first years of their marriage, until the old lady died. If Christopher had stayed married, his wife wouldn't have let Olive live with them for five minutes. And now Christopher was so different he might not let her live with him either—should Henry die and she find herself in trouble. Christopher might stick her in the attic, except he'd mentioned his California house didn't have an attic. Tie her to a flagpole, but he didn't have one of those either.
So fascist,
is what Christopher said, the last time he was here, as they drove past the Bullocks' house with the flag out front. Whoever went around saying things like that?

A stumbling sound on the deck above her, and then a slurred voice, “I'm sorry, Marlene. Really, you have to believe me.” And then the murmuring sounds of Marlene herself, telling Kerry it's time to go sleep it off, and after that, clumping sounds down the deck stairs; more silence.

Back inside the house, Olive puts a brownie into her mouth and goes off to find the bathroom. Coming out, she runs into the woman with the long gray hair, who is right now sticking a cigarette butt into a potted plant that sits on a table in the hallway. “Who
are
you?” Olive says, and the woman stares at her. “Who are
you
?” the woman answers, and Olive walks past her. That is the woman who bought Christopher's house, Olive realizes with an inner lurch, that woman who hasn't the decency to respect even a poor potted plant, let alone everything Olive and Henry worked for, their son's beautiful house, where their grandchildren were going to grow up.

“Where's Marlene gone to?” Olive asks Molly Collins, who still has Marlene's apron on, and is walking around the living room officiously collecting plates, balled-up paper napkins. Molly looks over her shoulder and says vaguely, “Gee, I'm not sure.”

“Where's Marlene gone?” Olive asks Susie Bradford, who comes by next, and Susie says, “Around.”

It's Eddie Junior who tells her. “Kerry got drunk and Mom's gone to put her in bed.” He says this with a dark look at the back of Susie Bradford, and Olive likes the boy a good deal. She did not have this young fellow in school. She left teaching years before to tend to her own family. Christopher out in California. Henry over in Hasham, at the home. Gone, gone. Gone to hell.

“Thank you,” she says to Eddie Junior, who, in his young eyes, seems to have some awareness of hell himself.

It is no longer a lovely April day. The northeast wind that blows against the side of the Bonney house has also brought the clouds in, and now a sky as gray as November hangs over the bay, and against the dark rocks the water slaps ceaselessly, swirling seaweed around, leaving it bumpily combed out along the higher rocks. Right down to the point the rocky coastline looks barren, almost wintry, only the skinny spruce and pines show dark green, for it is far too early for any leaves to come out; even close to the house the forsythia is only budded.

Olive Kitteridge, on her way to find Marlene, steps over a smashed-looking crocus by the garage's side door. Last week, after the day that was warm enough to take the dog to Henry in the parking lot, it snowed, one of those April dumpings of pure white that all melted the very next day, but the ground in places is still soggy from the assault, and certainly this crushed yellow crocus has been done in. The side door of the garage opens directly to stairs, and Olive walks up them cautiously, stands on the landing; two sweatshirts are hanging on hooks, a pair of muddied yellow rubber boots stand side by side, toes facing in opposite directions.