Olive Kitteridge (22 page)

         

The sun was setting over the water. Winnie watched it through the bedroom window. It looked like the postcards they sold at Moody's. On her bed, Julie sat painting her fingernails. She had spoken to Bruce, who was on his way back to Boston, and no, he wouldn't press charges. But he had said he thought Anita—and Julie whispered this, leaning forward—
was a fucking nut.

“That's not nice,” Winnie said. She felt herself blush.

“Oh, baby girl.” Julie sat back. “When you get out of here,” she said, “if you ever do get out of here, you'll find out not everyone lives like this.”

“Like what?” Winnie said, sitting down on the foot of her bed. “Lives like what?”

Julie smiled at her. “Let's start with toilets,” she said. She held up a pink fingernail and blew on it gently. “People have toilets, you know, Winnie, flush toilets. And let's move on to shooting people. Most mothers don't shoot their daughter's boyfriends in the driveway.”

“I know that,” Winnie said. “I don't have to go away to know that. We'd have a flush toilet, too, except Daddy says a septic tank—”

“I know what Daddy says,” Julie told her, twisting the cap to the nail polish carefully, her fingers splayed out. “But it's Mom. She wants to stay in this house because her poor now-lost-and-legendary father bought it when she got pregnant with me, and Ted didn't have a nickel to spare. Daddy'd move out of here tomorrow, he'd move into town.”

“There's nothing wrong with living here,” Winnie said.

Julie smiled calmly. “Mommy's little girl.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, Winnie,” Julie said. But she was squinting at her baby finger, and then she unscrewed the nail polish again. “You know what Mrs. Kitteridge said in class one day?” Julie asked.

Winnie waited.

“I always remember she said one day, ‘Don't be scared of your hunger. If you're scared of your hunger, you'll just be one more ninny like everyone else.' ”

Winnie waited, watching Julie do her baby fingernail once more with the perfect pink polish. “Nobody knew what she meant,” Julie said, holding her nail up, looking at it.

“What
did
she mean?” Winnie asked.

“Well, that's just it. At first I think most of us thought she was talking about food. I mean, we were just seventh graders—sorry, Doodle—but as time went by, I think I understand it more.”

“She teaches math,” Winnie said.

“I know that, dopey. But she'd say these weird things, very powerfully. That's partly why kids were scared of her. You don't have to be scared of her—if she's still teaching next year.”

“I am, though. Scared of her.”

Julie looked at her sideways. “Lot scarier stuff right here in this house.”

Winnie frowned, pushed her hand into the pillow near her on her bed.

“Oh, Winnie,” Julie said. “Come here.” She held out her arms. Winnie stayed where she was. “Oh, poor Winnie-doodle,” Julie said, and she moved down the bed to where Winnie was, put her arms around her awkwardly, holding her hands out to keep the nail polish from smudging. Julie kissed the side of Winnie's head, and then she let her go.

         

In the morning, Anita's eyes were puffy, as though all that sleep had exhausted her. But she sipped her coffee, and said brightly, “Whew, that was some sleep I had.”

“I don't want to go to church this morning,” Julie said. “I'm not ready to have everyone look at me yet.”

Winnie thought there might be a fight about that, but there wasn't. “Okay,” said Anita, after she had considered for a minute. “All right, honey. Just don't sit around and mope while we're gone.”

Julie piled the breakfast dishes into the sink, her pink nails shining. “I won't,” she said.

In the hallway, Jim said to Winnie, “Doodle-bug, give your old father a hug,” but Winnie brushed past him, patting his arm that he held out, before going to put on her church clothes. In church she sat with her dress sticking to the pew. It was a hot summer day; the church windows were open but there wasn't any breeze. Through the window Winnie saw in the distance a few dark clouds. Next to her, she heard her father's stomach growl. He looked at her and winked, but Winnie looked out the window again. She thought how she had passed by him when he'd asked for a hug, how she had seen her mother do that to him, too, only sometimes Anita would touch his shoulders and kiss the air beside his cheek. Maybe Julie was right, she was Mommy's girl, and maybe Winnie was going to turn out to be like her, someone who brushed past people even when she was smiling; maybe she'd grow up and shoot people in the driveway with a rifle.

Tiredly, she stood up for the hymn. Her mother reached to straighten a wrinkle in the back of Winnie's dress.

         

On Winnie's pillow was a folded note. “PLEASE make them think I'm out taking a walk. I've gone to Moody's to catch the bus. My life depends on this. I love you, Doodle, I do.” Hot tingles shot through Winnie's arms and fingers; even her nose and chin tingled.

“Winnifred,” her mother called. “Come peel some potatoes, please.”

The bus to Boston stopped at Moody's at eleven thirty. Julie would still be there, probably trying to stay out of sight, maybe sitting in the grass behind the store. They could go get her in the car. She'd cry and there'd be a big fight and someone might have to give her a pill, but they could still do it, she was still here.

“Winnifred?” Anita called again.

Winnie took her church clothes off, took her hair out of its ponytail, so the hair would fall in front of her face.

“You all right?” Anita asked.

“I have a headache.” Winnie scooched down and took some potatoes from the bin in the bottom cupboard.

“You need some food in your stomach,” her mother said. “Where's your sister? You'd think she could have started the potatoes.” Anita put the Sunday steak into the broiling pan.

Winnie washed the potatoes and started to peel them. She filled a pot with water and cut the potatoes; they plopped into the water. She looked at the clock above the stove.

“Where
is
she?” Anita asked again.

“Gone for a walk, I think,” Winnie said.

“Well, we're about to eat,” her mother said, and then Winnie almost cried.

Uncle Kyle had told a story once about being on a train that hit and killed a teenage girl. He said he would never forget how he sat there looking out the window of the train as they waited for the police, thinking about the girl's parents, how they would still be in their house watching TV or doing the dishes, not even knowing that their daughter was dead, while he sat on the train and knew.

“I'll go look for her,” Winnie said. She rinsed her hands and dried them.

Anita glanced at the clock and turned over the steak. “Just give a holler,” she said. “Out by the back woods.”

Winnie opened the back door and stepped outside. The clouds were moving in. The air had gotten chilly and smelled like the ocean. Her father stepped out onto the back porch. “About to eat, Winnie.” Winnie pulled at the leaves of a bayberry bush. “Look kind of lonesome out there,” he said.

The phone rang in the kitchen. Her father went back inside and Winnie followed, watching from the hall.

“Yes, hello, Kyle,” her mother said.

         

In the afternoon it started to rain. The house got dark and the rain beat down on the roof and against the big windowpane in the living room. Winnie sat in a chair and watched the ocean, choppy and gray. Uncle Kyle had gone to Moody's for a paper, and he had seen Julie up near the back of the bus as it pulled away. Anita had rushed into the girls' bedroom, tearing things apart. Julie's duffel bag was gone, and most of her underwear, and her makeup, too. Anita found Julie's note to Winnie. “You
knew,
” she said to Winnie, and Winnie understood that something had changed for good, something more than Julie's running away. Uncle Kyle had come over, but now he was gone.

Winnie sat in the living room with her father. She kept thinking of Julie on the bus riding through the rain, staring out the window at the turnpike going by. She thought her father was probably picturing this too, maybe imagining the sound of the bus's windshield wipers going back and forth.

“What're you going to do when you finish the boat?” Winnie asked.

Her father looked surprised. “Well,” he said. “Dunno. Go for a ride, I guess.”

Winnie smiled to be nice, because she didn't think he'd be going anywhere. “That'll be fun,” she said.

Toward evening the rain stopped. Anita hadn't come out of her room. Winnie tried to figure out if Julie was there yet; she didn't know how long it took to get to Boston, but it took a long time.

“I wonder if she's got some money with her,” her father said, but Winnie didn't answer—she didn't know.

Rain dripped from the side of the roof and off the trees. She thought of all the starfish she had laid out on the rock, all of them drenched from the rain. After a while her father stood up and went to the window. “Didn't plan on things working out like this,” he said, and Winnie had a sudden thought of him on his own wedding day. Unlike Anita, he had not been married before. Anita had not worn a white dress, because of Julie. “You only wear white once,” Anita had said. There were no wedding pictures—that Winnie knew of, anyway—of her parents' wedding day.

Her father turned around. “Pancakes?” he asked her.

Winnie didn't want pancakes. “Sure,” she said.

Security

I
t was May, and Olive Kitteridge was going to New York. She had never, in her seventy-two years, set foot in the city, although she had on two occasions many years ago sat in a car and ridden past it—Henry at the wheel, worried about this exit and that—and seen from a distance the skyline, buildings against buildings, gray against a gray sky. Like a science-fiction city, it had seemed, built on a moon. It held no appeal, not then, not now—although back when those planes ripped through the towers, Olive had sat in her bedroom and wept like a baby, not so much for this country but for the city itself, which had seemed to her to become suddenly no longer a foreign, hardened place, but as fragile as a class of kindergarten children, brave in their terror. Jumping from the windows—it clutched her heart, and she had felt a private, sickening shame to know that two of the dark-haired hijackers, silently thrilled with their self-righteousness, had come down through Canada and walked through the airport in Portland on their way to such hellacious destruction. (She might have driven right by them that morning, who knows?)

Time passed, though, as it does, and the city—at least from Olive's faraway vantage—seemed eventually itself again, no place she cared to go, in spite of the fact that her only son had moved there recently, acquired a second wife and two children not his. The new wife, Ann—if you were to believe the one photograph that took ages to download—was as tall and big as a man; pregnant now with Christopher's child, and according to a characteristically cryptic e-mail from Chris, with no attention paid to punctuation or any use of capital letters, Ann was tired and “had pukes.” In addition, it seemed Theodore turned into a hellion each morning before going off to preschool. Olive had been summoned to help.

The request had not been put this way. After sending the note, Christopher had called from his office and said, “Ann and I've been hoping you'll come visit for a couple of weeks.” To Olive, this meant they needed help. It had been years since she'd been in the company of her son for a couple of weeks.

“Three days,” she said. “After that I stink like fish.”

“A week, then,” Chris had countered, adding, “You could walk Theodore to school. It's around the corner one block.”

Like hell, she thought. Her tulips, seen right there through her dining room window, jubilant cups of yellow and red, would be dead by the time she got back. “Give me a few days to make the arrangements,” she said. The arrangements took twenty minutes. She called Emily Buck at the post office and told her to hold her mail.

“Oh, this'll be good for you, Olive,” said Emily.

“Ay-yuh,” said Olive. “I'm sure.”

Then she called Daisy up the road and asked her to water the garden. Daisy, who'd had fantasies—Olive was certain of this—of living out her widowhood with Henry Kitteridge if only Olive could have died early on, said she would be glad to water the garden. “Henry was always so good about watering mine when I went to see Mother,” Daisy said. Daisy added, “This will be good for you, Olive. You'll have a good time.”

A good time was not something Olive expected to have again.

That afternoon she drove to the nursing home and explained to Henry what she was up to, while he sat motionless in his wheelchair, the expression on his face one he frequently wore—that of confused politeness, as though something had been placed on his lap that he could not comprehend, but which he felt required a polite expression of thanks. Whether or not he was deaf, there was still some question. Olive did not believe he was, nor did Cindy, the one nice nurse. Olive gave Cindy the number in New York.

“She a good person, this new one?” Cindy counted pills into Dixie cups.

“Haven't a clue,” Olive said.

“Fertile, though, I guess,” Cindy said, picking up the tray of meds.

         

Olive had never been in a plane by herself. Not that she was by herself now, of course; there were four other passengers with her in this plane, which was half the size of a Greyhound bus. All of them had gone through security with the complacency of cows; Olive seeming the only one with trepidation. She'd had to remove her suede sandals and the big Timex watch of Henry's that she wore on her large wrist. Perhaps it was the queer intimacy of standing there in her panty-hosed feet, worried that the watch might not work after it went through the machine, that made her, for one half a second, fall in love with the big security fellow, who said kindly, “There you go, ma'am,” handing her the plastic bowl that had rolled toward her with the watch in it. The pilots, as well—both looking twelve years old with their unworried brows—had been kind, in the easy way they'd asked Olive if she'd mind sitting toward the back for weight distribution, before they climbed into the cockpit, closing the steel door. A thought unfolded before her—their mothers should be proud.

And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats—then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water—seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son's life.

         

But at the airport Christopher seemed furious. She had forgotten that, because of security, he would not be able to meet her at the gate, and apparently it hadn't occurred to him to remind her. Why this should make him so angry, Olive couldn't figure out. She was the one who had wandered around the luggage area with panic bubbling through her, her face hot as fire by the time Christopher found her lumbering back up the stairs. “Godfrey,” he said, not even reaching to take her bag. “Why can't you just get a cell phone like everyone else?”

It was not until later, hurtling down an expressway with four lanes and more cars than Olive had ever seen moving together, that Christopher said, “So, how is he?”

“The same,” she answered, and said nothing more until they had taken an exit and were moving through streets lined with uneven buildings, Christopher lurching the car around double-parked trucks. “How's Ann?” Olive asked then, shifting her feet for the first time since she'd gotten into the car, and Christopher said, “Uncomfortable.” Adding, in a didactic, doctor-ish tone, “It gets very uncomfortable,” as though entirely ignorant of the fact that Olive herself had once been pregnant, uncomfortable. “And Annabelle's waking up in the night again.”

“Ducky,” said Olive. “Duck soup.” The buildings were lower now, all with steep stoops in the front. She said, “You indicated little Teddy's become quite a handful.”

“Theodore,” said Christopher. “God, whatever you do, don't call him Teddy.” He pulled the car up sharply, and backed into a space near the sidewalk. “Honestly, Mom?” Christopher ducked his head, his blue eyes looking straight into hers, the way he would do years ago. He said softly, “Theodore has always been a little piece of crap.”

Confusion, which had started the moment she had stepped off the plane and not found anyone waiting for her, and which had then grown into an active panic on the airport's escalator, changing into a stunned block of perfect oddness the whole drive in, now, as Olive stepped from the car onto the sidewalk, seemed to cause everything to sway around her, so that reaching to get her bag from the backseat, she actually stumbled and fell against the car. “Easy, Mom,” said Christopher. “I'll get the bag. Just watch where you step.”

“Oh, goodness,” she said, for already her foot had landed on a crusty roll of dog mess there on the sidewalk. “Oh, hell.”

“I hate that,” Christopher said. He took her arm. “It's the guy who works on the subway and comes home early in the mornings. I've seen him out here while his dog takes a shit, looking around to see no one'll catch him, just leaving it there.”

“My goodness,” said Olive, because adding to her confusion was the additional factor of her son's loquaciousness. She had seldom heard him speak so passionately or so long, and she was quite certain she had never heard him use the word
shit.
She laughed, a false, hard sound. The earlier clarity of the young pilots' faces came to her as something she had dreamed.

Christopher unlocked a grated gate beneath a large brown stoop of stairs, and stepped back to let her enter. “So, this is your house,” she said, and gave that laugh again, because she could have wept at the darkness, the smell of old dog hair and soiled laundry, a sourness that seemed to come from the walls. The house she and Henry had built for Chris back home in Maine had been beautiful—filled with light, the windows large to show the lawns, and lilies, and fir trees.

She stepped on a plastic toy and almost broke her neck. “Where is everyone?” she asked. “Christopher, I've got to take off that shoe before I track dog mess all through the house.”

“Just leave it here,” he said, stepping past her, and so she slipped off the one suede sandal, and walking through a dark hallway, she thought how she had forgotten to bring another pair of panty hose.

“They're out back in the garden,” said her son, and she followed him through a capacious, dark living room, into a small kitchen that was cluttered with toys, a high chair, pots spread over the counter, open boxes of cereal and Minute Rice. A grimy white sock lay on the table. And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child—that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own.

She emerged, blinking, into a small outdoor area—this could not possibly be what he meant as a garden. She stood on a square of concrete. Around her was a chicken wire fence that had been knocked into by something large enough to leave a whole section gaping and broken. A child's plastic swimming pool was before her. In it, a naked baby sat, staring at her, while a small, dark-haired boy stood nearby, his wet swim trunks sticking to his skinny thighs. He stared at her as well. Behind him, a black dog lay on an old dog bed.

Not far from Olive, a wooden staircase rose, leading to a wooden deck above her head. From the shadow beneath the stairs came the word, “Olive.” A woman appeared, holding a barbecue spatula. “Gosh, there you are. What a sight for sore eyes. I am so
glad
to meet you, Olive.” Briefly Olive had the image of a huge walking girl-doll; the hair was black and cut straight above the shoulders, the face as open and guileless as a simpleton's.

“You must be Ann,” said Olive, but the words were lost in a hug the large girl wrapped her in, the spatula falling to the ground, causing the dog to groan and stand up; Olive could see this from just a sliver of vision left to her. Taller than Olive, and with a stomach huge and hard, this Ann held her long arms around her and kissed the side of Olive's head. Olive did not kiss people. And to be held in the arms of a woman taller than she was—well, Olive was positive this had never happened before.

“Do you mind if I call you Mom?” asked the girl, stepping back but holding Olive by her elbows. “I'm so dying to call you Mom.”

“Call me anything you want,” Olive replied. “I guess I'll call you Ann.”

The boy moved like a slithery animal to grab hold of his mother's ample thigh.

“You're Thaddeus, I suppose,” said Olive.

The boy began to cry.

“Theodore,” said Ann. “Honey, that's all right. People make mistakes. We've talked about that, right?”

A rash stood out high on Ann's cheek, and ran down the side of her neck, where it disappeared under a huge black T-shirt worn over black leggings. Her feet were bare; bits of a pink polish were on her toenails.

“Perhaps I'd better sit down,” Olive said.

“Oh, absolutely,” Ann said. “Honey, pull that chair over here for your mother.”

In the midst of the aluminum beach chair scraping across the cement and the boy crying and Ann saying, “God, Theodore, what
is
it?”—in the midst of all this, one shoe off and one shoe on, sinking back into the beach chair, Olive distinctly heard the words
Praise Jesus.

“Theodore, honey, please, please, please stop crying.”

In the plastic pool the baby slapped the water and shrieked. “Jesus, Annabelle,” said Christopher. “Keep it down.”

Praise the Lord,
came distinctly from somewhere above.

“What in God's name—” said Olive, putting her head back, squinting upward.

“We rent the top floor to a Christian,” Ann said in a whisper, rolling her eyes. “I mean, who would think here in this neighborhood we'd get stuck with a tenant who's a Christian?”

“Christian?” said Olive, looking back at her daughter-in-law, thoroughly confused. “Are you a Muslim, Ann? Is there a problem?”

“Muslim?” The girl's plain, big face looked pleasantly at Olive while she bent to pick up the baby from the pool. “I'm not a Muslim.” Quizzically: “Wait,
you're
not a Muslim, are you? Christopher never—”

“Oh, godfrey,” said Olive.

“What she means,” Christopher explained to his mother, fiddling with a large barbecue grill near the staircase, “is that most people in this neighborhood don't go to church. We live in the
cool
part of Brooklyn, hippity hop as hell, Mother dear, where people are either too artsyfartsy to believe in God, or too busy making money. So it's somewhat unusual to have a tenant who's a real so-called Christian.”