Olive Kitteridge (23 page)

“You mean like a fundamentalist,” said Olive, amazed once again at how talkative her son had become.

“Right,” said Ann. “That's what he is. You know, fundamentally Christian.”

The boy had stopped his crying and, still holding his mother's leg, said to Olive in a high, earnest voice, “Whenever we swear, the parrot says ‘Praise Jesus' or ‘God is king.' ”

And to Olive's horror and amazement, the child looked skyward and yelled, “Shit!”

“Honey,” said Ann, and smoothed his hair.

Praise God,
came the response from above.

“That's a parrot?” asked Olive. “Good Lord, it sounds like my Aunt Ora.”

“Yeah, a parrot,” said Ann. “Weird, huh.”

“You couldn't have said no pets allowed?”

“Oh, we'd never do that. We love pets. Dog-Face is part of our family.” Ann nodded in the direction of the black dog, who, having returned to his ratty bed, now had his long face resting on his paws, his eyes closed.

         

Olive could barely eat her dinner. She had thought Christopher was going to grill hamburgers. But he had grilled tofu hot dogs, and for the grown-ups had, of all things, diced up a can of oysters and poked them into these so-called hot dogs.

“Are you okay, Mom?” It was Ann who asked.

“Fine,” said Olive. “When I travel, I sometimes find I'm not hungry. I think I'll just eat this hot dog roll.”

“Sure. Help yourself. Theodore, isn't it nice to have Grandma come and stay?”

Olive put the roll back onto her plate. Not once had it occurred to her that she was “Grandma” to Ann's children, who had been, she only recently discovered as the hot dogs had been set before her, fathered by two different men. Theodore did not respond to his mother's question but gazed at Olive while he ate with his mouth open, making appalling chewing sounds.

Less than ten minutes, and the meal was over. Olive told Chris that she'd like to help clean up but that she didn't know where anything went. “Nowhere,” Chris said. “Can't you tell? In this house nothing goes anywhere.”

“Mom, you go make yourself comfortable,” Ann said.

So Olive went down into the basement, where they had brought her earlier with her little suitcase, and she lay down on the double bed. The fact was, the basement was the nicest place Olive had seen in the house. It was “finished” and painted all white, and even had, next to the washing machine, a white telephone.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to wail like a child. She sat up and dialed the phone.

“Put him on,” she said, and waited until she could hear only silence. “Smack, Henry,” she said, and she waited a while longer until she thought she heard a tiny grunt.

“Well. She's a
big
girl,” said Olive. “Your new daughter-in-law. Graceful as a truck driver. A little dumb, I think. Something I can't put my finger on. But nice. You'd like her. You two would get along fine.”

Olive looked around the basement room she was in, and thought she heard Henry grunt again. “No, she's not going to hightail it up the coast anytime soon. Got her hands full here. Belly full, too. They've got me down in the basement. It's kind of nice, Henry. Painted white.” She tried to think what else to say, what Henry would want to hear. “Chris seems good,” she said. She paused for a long time after that. “Talkative,” she added. “Okay, Henry,” she finally said, and hung up.

Back upstairs, no one was around. Thinking they must be putting the children to bed, Olive stepped through the kitchen and out onto the concrete yard, where twilight was gathering.

“Caught me,” said Ann, and Olive's heart banged.

“Godfrey. You caught me. I didn't see you sitting there.”

Ann was holding a cigarette in one hand, balancing a beer on her high belly with the other, her legs apart as she sat on a stool by the barbecue. “Have a seat,” Ann said, gesturing toward the beach chair Olive had been sitting in earlier. “Unless it makes you crazy to see a pregnant woman drink and smoke. Which I totally understand if it does. But it's just one cigarette and one beer a day. You know, when the kids finally get put down. I call it my meditation time.”

“I see,” Olive said. “Well, meditate away. I can go back inside.”

“Oh, no. I'd love your company.”

In the dusk she saw the girl smile at her. Say what you might about judging a book by its cover, Olive always found faces revealing. Still—the bovine nature of this girl was baffling.
Was
Ann a bit stupid? Olive had taught school enough years to know that large amounts of insecurity could take the form of stupidity. She lowered herself into her chair, and looked away. She didn't want to guess what might be seen in her own face.

Cigarette smoke wafted in front of her. It amazed her that anyone would smoke these days, and she couldn't help but feel it as a kind of assault. “Say,” Olive said, “that doesn't make you feel sick?”

“What, smoking this?”

“Yes. I shouldn't think that would help the nausea.”

“What nausea?”

“I thought you had the pukes.”

“The pukes?” Ann dropped the cigarette into the bottle of beer. She looked over at Olive, her dark eyebrows raised.

“You haven't been sick with the pregnancy?”

“Oh, no. I'm a horse.” Ann patted her belly. “I just keep spittin' these things out with no problem.”

“Apparently.” Olive wondered if the girl was tipsy from the beer. “Where's your newest husband?”

“He's reading Theodore a story. It's nice to have them bonding.”

Olive opened her mouth to ask what kind of bond Theodore had with his real father, but she stopped. Maybe you weren't supposed to say “real father” these days.

“How old are you, Mom?” Ann was scratching at her cheek.

“I'm seventy-two,” Olive said, “and I wear a size ten shoe.”

“Hey, cool. I wear a size ten. I've always had big feet. You look good for seventy-two,” Ann added. “My mother's sixty-three and she—”

“She what?”

“Oh.” Ann shrugged. “You know, she just doesn't look so good.” Ann hoisted herself up, leaned toward the grill, where she picked up a box of kitchen matches. “If you don't mind, Mom, I'm just going to have one more cigarette.”

Olive did mind. This was Christopher's baby in there, trying to develop its own respiratory system right about now, and what kind of woman would jeopardize such a thing? But she said loudly, “Do whatever you want. I don't give a damn.”

Praise God,
came from above them.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” said Olive. “How can you stand that?”

“Sometimes I can't,” Ann said, sitting down again, hugely.

“Well,” Olive said, looking at her lap, smoothing her skirt. “It's temporary, I guess.” She felt a need to look away as the girl lit a fresh cigarette.

Ann didn't respond. Olive heard her inhale, then exhale, as the smoke drifted back toward Olive. A realization flowered within her. The girl was panicking. How did Olive know this, never in seventy-two years having put a cigarette to her own lips? But the truth of it filled her. A light went on in the kitchen, and Olive watched through the grated windows as Christopher walked to the kitchen sink.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did. But even if, thinking of the smoking Ann, it took three different kids with three different fathers, it was never enough, was it? And Christopher—why had he been so foolhardy as to take all this on and not even, until
after the fact,
bother to tell his mother? In the near darkness, she saw Ann lean forward and put out her cigarette by sticking the tip into the baby pool. A tiny
phisst
of a sound, then the girl tossed the rest over toward the chicken wire fence.

A horse.

Christopher had not been truthful when he'd e-mailed that Ann had the pukes. Olive put her hand to her cheek, which had grown warm: Her son, being Christopher, would never be able to say, “Mom, I miss you.” He had said his wife had the pukes.

Christopher stepped through the door, and her heart rose toward him. “Come join us,” she said. “Come. Sit down.”

He stood, his hands loosely on his hips, and then he took one hand and rubbed the back of his head slowly. Ann stood. “Sit here, Chris. If they're asleep I'm going to take a bath.”

He didn't sit on the stool, but pulled up a chair next to Olive, and sat in the same sprawled-out way that he used to sit on the couch at home. She wanted to say, “It's awful good to see you, kid.” But she didn't say anything, and he didn't either. For a long while they sat together like that. She would have sat on a patch of cement anywhere to have this—her son; a bright buoy bobbing in the bay of her own quiet terror.

“So, you're a landlord,” she finally said, because the oddity of that struck her now.

“Yup.”

“Are they a nuisance?”

“No. It's just the guy and his religious parrot.”

“What's the fellow's name?”

“Sean O'Casey.”

“Really? How old is he?” she asked, pulling herself up in her chair so her breath could move through.

“Let's see.” Christopher sighed, shifting his weight. He was familiar to her now, slow moving, slow talking. “ 'Bout my age, I think. Little younger.”

“He's not related to Jim O'Casey, is he? The fellow that drove us to school? They had a shoe full of children. His wife had to move, once Jim went off the road that night. Remember that? She took the kids and went back to her mother. Is this guy upstairs one of those?”

“Haven't a clue,” Christopher said. He sounded like Henry, the absentminded way Henry used to respond sometimes: Haven't a clue.

“It's a common enough name,” Olive admitted. “Still, you might ask him if he's any relation to Jim O'Casey.”

Christopher shook his head. “Don't care to.” He yawned, stretching out farther, his head thrown back.

         

She had first seen him at a town meeting, held in the high school gym. She and Henry were sitting on folding chairs near the back, and this man stood near the bleachers, close to the door. He was tall, his eyes set back under that brow, his lips thin—a certain kind of Irish face. The eyes not brooding exactly, but very serious, looking at her with seriousness. She had felt a pulse of recognition, although she knew she'd never seen him before. Throughout the evening they had glanced at each other a number of times.

On their way out, someone introduced them, and she found he had come to town from West Annett, where he taught at the academy. He had moved with his family because they needed more room, living out there now by the Robinsons' farm. Six kids. Catholic. Such a tall man he was, Jim O'Casey, and during the introductions there seemed a whiff of shyness to him, a slight deferential ducking of his head, particularly as he shook Henry's hand, as though already apologizing for absconding with the affections of this man's wife. Henry, who didn't have a clue.

As she stepped out of the school that night, into the wintry air, walking with the talking Henry to their car in the far parking lot, she had the sensation that she had been seen. And she had not even known she'd felt invisible.

The next fall Jim O'Casey gave up his job at the academy and started teaching at the same junior high school Olive taught at, the one Christopher went to, and every morning, because it was on the way, he drove them both there, and then back home again. She was forty-four, he was fifty-three. She had thought of herself as practically old, but of course she hadn't been. She was tall, and the weight that came with menopause had only begun its foreshadowing, so at forty-four she had been a tall, full-figured woman, and without one
sound
of warning, like a huge silent truck that suddenly came from behind as she strolled down a country road, Olive Kitteridge had been swept off her feet.

“If I asked you to leave with me, would you do it?” He spoke quietly, as they ate their lunch in his office.

“Yes,” she said.

He watched her as he ate the apple he always had for lunch, nothing else. “You would go home tonight and tell Henry?”

“Yes,” she said. It was like planning a murder.

“Perhaps it's a good thing I haven't asked you.”

“Yes.”

They had never kissed, nor even touched, only passed by each other closely as they went into his office, a tiny cubicle off the library—they avoided the teachers' room. But after he said that that day, she lived with a kind of terror, and a longing that felt at times unendurable. But people endure things.

There were nights she didn't fall asleep until morning; when the sky lightened and the birds sang, and her body lay on the bed loosened, and she could not—for all the fear and dread that filled her—stop the foolish happiness. After such a night, a Saturday, she had been awake and restless and then had fallen asleep with suddenness; a sleep so heavy that when the phone beside the bed rang, she didn't know where she was. And then hearing the phone picked up, and Henry's soft voice, “Ollie, the saddest thing happened. Jim O'Casey drove off the road last night right into a tree. He's in intensive care down in Hanover. They don't know if he'll make it.”

He died later that afternoon, and she supposed his wife was at his side, maybe some of the kids.

She didn't believe it. “I don't believe it,” she kept saying to Henry. “What happened?”

“They say he lost control of the car.” Henry shook his head. “Terrible,” he said.

Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately. Absolutely nuts. She was so mad at Jim O'Casey. She was so mad, she went into the woods and hit a tree hard enough to make her hand bleed. She cried down by the creek until she gagged. And she fixed supper for Henry. Taught school all day, and came home and fixed supper for Henry. Or some nights he fixed it for her because she said she was tired, and he'd open a can of spaghetti, and God, that stuff made her sick. She lost weight, looked better than ever for a while, which lacerated her heart with the irony. Henry reached for her often those nights. She was certain he'd had no idea. He would have said something, because Henry was that way, he did not keep things to himself. But in Jim O'Casey there had been a wariness, a quiet anger, and she had seen herself in him, had said to him once, We're both cut from the same piece of bad cloth. He had just watched her, eating his apple.