Olive Kitteridge (20 page)

Olive knocks on the door, looking at the boots. She bends over and places one boot on the other side of its mate, so they look like they go together, could walk off together, and she knocks again. No answer, so she turns the knob, pushes the door open slowly, walks in.

“Hello, Olive.”

Across the room, facing her, Marlene sits like an obedient schoolgirl in a straight-backed chair by Kerry's double bed, her hands folded in her lap, her plump ankles crossed neatly. On the bed sprawls Kerry. She lies on her stomach with the abandonment of a sunbather, her face turned toward the wall, elbows out, but her hips are turned slightly, so that the black outline of her suit seems to accentuate the rise of her rear end, and her black-stockinged legs are sleek, in spite of the fact that the stockings are shredded in a series of tiny runs at her feet.

“Is she asleep?” Olive asks, walking farther into the room.

“Passed out,” Marlene answers. “Upchucked first in Eddie's room, then fell asleep here.”

“I see. Well, it's a nice place you've given her here.” Olive walks over toward the little dining alcove and brings back a chair, sits down by Marlene.

For a while neither woman speaks, then Marlene says pleasantly, “I've been thinking about killing Kerry.” She raises a hand from her lap and exposes a small paring knife lying on her green flowered dress.

“Oh,” says Olive.

Marlene bends over the sleeping Kerry and touches the woman's bare neck. “Isn't this some major vein?” she asks, and puts the knife flat against Kerry's neck, even poking slightly at the vague throbbing of the pulse there.

“Yuh. Okay. Might want to be a little careful there.” Olive sits forward.

In a moment Marlene sighs, sits back. “Okay, here.” And she hands the paring knife to Olive.

“Do better with a pillow,” Olive tells her. “Cut her throat, there's going to be a lot of blood.”

A sudden, soft, deep eruption of a giggle comes from Marlene. “Never thought of a pillow.”

“I've had some time to think about pillows,” Olive says, but Marlene nods vacantly, like she's really not listening.

“Mrs. Kitteridge, did you know?”

“Know what?” says Olive, but she feels her stomach turn choppy, whitecaps in her stomach.

“What Kerry told me today? She said it happened with her and Ed only once. Just one time. But I don't believe that—it had to be more. The summer after Ed Junior graduated from high school.” Marlene has started to cry, is shaking her head. Olive looks away; a woman needs her privacy. She holds the paring knife in her lap and gazes out through the window above the bed, only gray sky and gray ocean; too high up to see any shoreline, only gray water and sky out there, far as the eye can see.

“I never heard anything,” says Olive. “Why would she choose today to tell you?”

“Thought I knew.” Marlene has pulled a Kleenex from somewhere, from inside her sleeve maybe, and she dabs at her face, blows her nose. “She thought I knew all along, and I was just punishing her by keeping on being nice to her. She got drunk today and started saying how good I got her, killing her and Ed with kindness that way.”

“Jesum Crow,” is all Olive can think to say.

“Isn't that funny, Olive?” Again, out of nowhere comes Marlene's deep giggle.

“Well,” says Olive. “I guess it's not the funniest thing I ever heard.”

Olive looks at the black-suited body of Kerry sprawled there on the bed and wishes there were a door to close or a curtain to draw so they didn't have to see the rise of this girl's rear end, her black stockings outlining the slim calves of her legs. “Does Eddie Junior know?”

“Yuh. Seems she told him yesterday. Thought he knew, too, but he says he didn't. He says he doesn't believe it's true.”

“It may not be.”

“Shit,” says Marlene, shaking her head, crying again. “Mrs. Kitteridge, if you don't mind, I'd like to just say
shit.
”

“Say
shit,
” says Olive, who never uses the word herself.

“Shit,” says Marlene. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“I guess so.” Olive breathes in deeply. “I guess so,” she says again, slowly. She looks around her with little interest—a picture of a cat is on one wall—and her glance comes back to Marlene, who is squeezing her nose. “Quite a day, kiddo. Vomit upstairs, and cigarette butts downstairs.” The woman with the long gray hair has really shaken Olive up:
Seismic
spells itself across her fog-colored mind. She says, “That creature who bought Christopher's house, she's walking around putting her cigarettes out in your plants.”

“Oh, her,” says Marlene. “She's a piece of shit, too.”

“I guess so.” She's going to tell this to Henry tomorrow. She'll tell him the whole thing; only he won't like hearing the word
shit.

“Olive, could I ask you to do me a favor?”

“I wish you would.”

“Could you, please—” And here the poor woman looks so bereft, dazed, in her green flowered dress, her brown hair coming loose from its pins. “Before you leave, could you go upstairs in the bedroom? Turn right at the top of the stairs. In the closet you'll find pamphlets, you know, of different places to go. Could you take them with you? Just take them with you, and throw them all away. The basket they're in, too.”

“Of course.”

Marlene has tears running down past her nose. She wipes her face with a bare hand. “I don't want to open that closet door, knowing it's there.”

“Yes,” says Olive. “I can do that.” She brought Henry's shoes home from the hospital, put them in a bag in the garage, and they are still there. They were new, bought just a few days before the last time they pulled into the parking lot of Shop 'n Save.

“Any other stuff, if you want, Marlene.”

“No. No, Olive. It's that we sat there and made believe we'd go places together.” Marlene shakes her head. “Even after Dr. Stanley told us what the situation was, we'd go through these pamphlets, talking about the trips we'd take when he got well.” She rubs her face with both hands. “Gosh, Olive.” Marlene stops and looks at the knife Olive is holding. “Oh, gosh, Olive. I'm so embarrassed.” And it seems she really is; her cheeks are flushing a deep pink, now a deep red.

“No need to be,” Olive tells her. “We all want to kill someone at some point.” Olive's ready right now to say, if Marlene wants to hear, the different people she might like to kill.

But Marlene says, “No, not that. Not that. That I sat there with him and we planned those trips.” She tears at the Kleenex, which is pretty well shredded. “Gosh, Olive, it was like we believed it. And there he was, losing weight, so weak—‘Marlene, bring over the basket of trips,' he'd say, and I would. It makes me so embarrassed now, Olive.”

An innocent, Olive thinks, gazing at this woman. A real one. You don't find them anymore. Boy, you do not.

Olive stands up and walks to the window over the little sink, looking down onto the driveway. People are leaving now, the last of them; Matt Grearson gets into his truck, backs out, drives away. And here comes Molly Collins with her husband, walking over the gravel in her low pumps; she put in a full day's work, Molly did, just trying to do her best, Olive thinks. Just a woman with false teeth and an old husband—who in two shakes will be dead like the rest of them, or worse, sitting next to Henry in a wheelchair.

She wants to tell Marlene how she and Henry talked about the grandchildren they would have, the happy Christmases with their nice daughter-in-law. How only a little more than a year ago they would go to Christopher's house for dinner and the tension would be so thick, you could put your hand against it, and they'd still come home and say to each other what a nice girl she was, how glad they were that Christopher had this nice wife.

Who, who, does not have their basket of trips? It isn't right. Molly Collins said that today, standing out by the church.
It isn't right.
Well. It isn't.

She would like to rest a hand on Marlene's head, but this is not the kind of thing Olive is especially able to do. So she goes and stands near the chair Marlene sits on, gazing out that side window there, looking down at the shoreline, which is wide now that the tide's almost gone out. She thinks of Eddie Junior down there skipping stones, and she can only just remember that feeling herself, being young enough to pick up a rock, throw it out to sea with force, still young enough to do that, throw that damn stone.

Ship in a Bottle

“Y
ou'll have to organize your days,” Anita Harwood was saying, wiping at the kitchen counter. “Julie, I mean this. People go crazy in prisons and the army because of this exactly.”

Winnie Harwood, who at eleven years old was younger by ten years than her sister, Julie, watched Julie, who was looking at the floor and leaning against the doorway, wearing the red hooded sweatshirt and jeans that she'd slept in. Julie's hands were jammed into her pockets, and Winnie, whose adolescent feelings for her sister amounted these days to almost a crush, tried unobtrusively to put her own hands into her own pockets, and lean against the table with the indifference that Julie appeared to have at what was being said.

“For example,” continued their mother. “What are your plans for today?” She stopped wiping the counter and looked over at Julie. Julie did not look up. Only recently had Winnie's feelings teetered from her mother to her sister. Her mother had won beauty pageants before Julie was born, and she still looked pretty to Winnie. It was like having more candy than other people, or getting stars on homework papers—to have the mother who looked the best. A lot of them were fat, or had stupid hair, or wore their husbands' woolen shirts over jeans with elastic waistbands. Anita never left the house without lipstick and high heels and her fake pearl earrings. Only lately had Winnie started to have the uncomfortable sense that something was wrong, or
might
be wrong, with her mother; that others talked about her in a certain eye-rolling way. She'd have given anything for this not to be the case, and maybe it wasn't—she just didn't know.

“Because of
this exactly
?” Julie asked, looking up. “In prisons and the army? Mom, I'm dying, and you're saying stuff that makes no sense.”

“Don't be casual about the word
dying,
honey. Some people really are dying right now, and terrible deaths, too. They'd be glad to be in your shoes—getting rejected by a fiancé would be like a big mosquito bite to them. Look. Your father's home,” Anita said. “That's sweet. Coming home in the middle of a workday to make sure you're okay.”

“To make sure
you're
okay,” Julie said. Adding, “And it's not accurate to say he rejected me.” Winnie took her hands out of her pockets.

“How's everyone? Everyone doing good?” Jim Harwood was a slightly built man, with a nature of relentless congeniality. He was a recovered alcoholic, going three times a week to AA meetings. He was not Julie's father—who had run off with another woman when Julie was a kid—but he treated her kindly, as he treated everyone. Whether or not their mother had married him while he was still a drunk, Winnie didn't know. All of Winnie's life, he had worked as a janitor at the school. “Maintenance supervisor,” their mother had said once, to Julie. “And don't you ever forget it.”

“We're fine, Jim,” said Anita now, holding the door as he brought in a bag of groceries. “Look at this, girls. Your father's done the shopping. Julie, why don't you make pancakes?”

It was a family custom to have pancakes on Sunday nights; this was Friday noontime.

“I don't want to make pancakes,” said Julie. She had started to cry, soundlessly, and was wiping her face with her hands.

“Well, I'm afraid that's too bad,” said their mother. “Julie, sweet-heart. If you keep on with this crying, I'm going right through the roof.” Anita tossed the sponge into the sink. “Right through the roof, understand?”

“Mom, my God.”

“And stop with the swearing, sweetheart. God has his hands full without you calling upon him in vain. Routine, Julie. Routine is what makes prisons and armies work.”

Winnie said, “I'll make the pancakes.” She wanted her mother to stop talking about prisons and armies. Her mother had been talking about prisons and armies ever since those pictures had come out with the hooded prisoners overseas, and American soldiers leading them around on leashes like dogs.

“We deserve everything we get,” her mother had said a few months ago in the grocery store, talking loudly to Marlene Bonney. And Cliff Mott, who had a big yellow ribbon decal on his truck because of his grandson, had come around from behind the cereal aisle and said, “Be careful with your crazy talk, Anita.”

“All right, Winnie,” said her mother. “You make the pancakes.”

“Want some help?” asked her father. He had taken some eggs from the grocery bag, and leaned to switch on the radio.

“No,” Winnie said. “I'll do it.”

“Yes,” said her mother. “Jim, get the bowl out.”

He got the mixing bowl from the cupboard while Frank Sinatra's voice rose, fell, then rose again, “Myyyy waaayy.”

“Oh, please,” Julie said. “Please, please, please turn that off.”

“Jim,” Anita said. “Turn the radio off.”

Winnie was the one to lean over and turn the radio off. She wanted Julie to see that she was the one who had done it, but Julie wasn't looking.

“Julie, sweetheart,” said their mother, “this can't go on forever. The family has the right to listen to the radio. You know, eventually.”

“It's been four days,” Julie said. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Come on.”

“Six,” said her mother. “Today is day six.”

“Mom, please. Just give me a break.”

Winnie thought someone should give her a tranquilizer. Uncle Kyle had brought some over, but their mother only doled them out at night now, breaking them in half. Winnie woke up sometimes and could tell Julie was awake. Last night the moon had been full and their bedroom had had white all through it. “Julie,” Winnie had whispered. “Are you awake?”

Julie hadn't answered.

Winnie had turned over and looked through the window at the moon. It had been huge, hanging over the water like something swollen. If there'd been a curtain, Winnie would have closed it, but they didn't have curtains in their house. They lived on the end of a long dirt road and their mother had said there was no need for curtains, although a year ago she had hung fishnet up around the edges of the windows in the living room for decoration. She'd sent Winnie and Julie down to the shore to get starfish, all different sizes, so she could dry them out and stick them on the fishnet curtains. Julie and Winnie had walked over the seaweed, flipping back rocks, stacking up a pile of bumpy-skinned starfish.

“This has to do with her father—and mine,” Julie had said. Julie was the only person who told Winnie stuff like that. “She misses both of them. Her father used to bring her starfish at the end of the day when she was a kid. And then she wanted Ted to do that, too, and he did for a while.”

“That was a long time ago,” Winnie had said, peeling a starfish off a rock, a little one; its leg ripped as she pulled. She put the starfish back onto the rock. They grew new legs if they lost them.

“Doesn't matter,” Julie had said. “Missing someone doesn't stop.”

Their grandfather had been a fisherman whose boat had gotten stuck on a ledge out at sea. The newspaper clipping was in the same scrapbook showing the picture of Anita as Miss Potato Queen. “People used to call her Tater Tits,” Julie told Winnie. “Don't tell her I told you she told me.” Anita had married Ted, a carpenter, because she was pregnant with Julie, but Ted had never wanted to stay with anyone for long. Julie said he had made that clear from the beginning. “So she lost both of them in just a couple of years.” Julie peered into the pail of starfish. “We have enough. Let's go.” Walking back over the rocks, Julie added, “Bruce told me most fishermen can't swim. It's funny I didn't know that.”

Winnie was surprised Bruce knew that; he wasn't from around here. He'd come up from Boston and rented a cottage for a month with his brothers, and Winnie didn't know how he would know if fishermen could swim.

“Could
he
swim?” Winnie asked Julie. She meant their grandfather, but she didn't have a name to call him, since he was never mentioned.

“Nope. He had to just sit on that boat with the other guy, watching the tide come in. He'd have known he was going to drown. That's the part that makes Mom nuts, I think.”

After their mother put the starfish in the fishnet curtains, they began to smell because they hadn't been dried out enough first, and Anita threw them out. Winnie watched while her mother stood on the porch leaning over the rail, throwing the starfish back into the ocean one by one. She wore a pale green dress that the wind moved so it showed her figure, her breasts, her tiny waist, her long bare legs, her feet arched as she lifted up onto her toes to throw the starfish out. Winnie heard a sound, like a little scream, come from her mother as she threw the last one.

         

“Honey,” Anita said to Julie now, “take a shower, you'll feel a whole lot better.”

“I don't want to take a shower,” said Julie, still leaning in the doorway, wiping her sleeve across her mouth.

“Now, why not?” asked her mother. “What's the difference between crying in the kitchen and crying in the shower?” She put a hand on her hip, and Winnie saw the pink fingernail polish, perfectly done on her mother's fingertips.

“Because I don't want to take my clothes off. I don't want to see my body.”

Anita's jaw got hard, and she nodded her head in tiny nods. “Winnifred, watch your sleeve near that flame. Another catastrophe right now and I'm liable to kill someone.”

Their house didn't have a shower and a bathroom the way most houses did. There was a shower stall off the hallway, and across from that was a closet with a chemical toilet, a barrel-shaped plastic thing that made a whirring sound when you pushed a button to flush it. There wasn't any door for this closet, just a curtain to pull. Sometimes if Anita walked by, she'd say, “Whew! Who just had a movement?” If you wanted to take a shower, you told people to stay out of the hallway, otherwise you had to get undressed inside the metal shower stall and toss your clothes out into the hall, then wait for the water to warm up, as you pressed against the stall's metal side.

Julie left the kitchen and soon there was the sound of the shower spraying. “I'm taking a shower,” Julie called loudly. “So please stay out.”

“No intention of bothering you,” Anita called back. Winnie set the table and poured some juice. When the shower turned off, they could all hear the sound of Julie's crying.

“I don't know if I can stand this another minute,” said Anita, drumming her nails against the counter.

“Give it time,” said Jim. He poured pancake batter into the frying pan.

“Time?” said Anita, pointing toward the hall. “Jimmy, I have given that girl half my life.”

“Well,” said Jim, winking at Winnie.

“Well? Well, hell. I'm really, really getting tired of this.”

“Your hair looks good, Mom,” Winnie said.

“It should,” said Anita. “It cost two months of groceries.”

Julie came back into the kitchen, her wet hair stuck to her head, the ends dripping onto her red sweatshirt, making it dark on the shoulders. Winnie saw her father flip a pancake made in the wobbly shape of a
J.
“A
J
for my jewel,” he said to Julie, and that made Winnie wonder what had happened to the wedding rings.

The limousine had caused some tension. At first the driver refused to come to the house; he said they should have mentioned the dirt road, that the branches would scratch the paint. “Julie's not walking down a dirt road in her damn wedding dress,” Anita said to her husband. “You make that driver drive the foolish car up here.” The limousine had been Anita's idea.

Jim, looking all scrubbed and pink in his rented tuxedo, stepped outside and talked to the driver. In a few minutes, he went into the cellar and came back up with some hedge clippers. Then he and the driver disappeared down the driveway, and a few minutes later the limousine drove up, Jim waving from the front seat.

Bruce arrived at the house looking sick.

“You can't see the bride before the wedding,” Anita called through the window. “Bruce, dear God!” She started to run to the door, but Bruce had already stepped inside, and when Anita saw his face, she stopped what she was saying. Julie, coming right up behind her, didn't say anything either.

Julie and Bruce went out onto the back lawn, which wasn't so much a lawn as a kind of clearing of roots and pine needles. Winnie watched through the window with her mother. Jim got out of the limousine and came inside and watched with them. Julie looked like an ad from a magazine, standing there next to a bayberry bush in her gown, the white train folded on itself, but still flowing behind her, six feet long.

“Jimmy,” Anita said, “people are at the
church.
”

But he didn't answer. The three of them kept standing there watching through the window. Julie and Bruce hardly moved. They didn't touch each other, or even move their arms, and then Bruce stepped through the bayberry bushes and headed to the road.