Olive Kitteridge (26 page)

“Did something happen, Mom?” Ann asked. “You weren't going to leave for a few more days.”

She'd be damned if she was going to tell them how they'd let her sit there and dribble stuff down herself; they'd have treated their own kids better than that, wiped the mess off. But
her
they let just sit there with butterscotch sauce all down her front. “I told Christopher when he first asked me here that I'd stay for three days. After that I stink like fish.”

Ann and Christopher looked at each other. “You said you'd stay a week,” Chris said, warily.

“Right. Because you needed help, but you weren't even honest enough to say that.” A fury was rumbling up through her, ignited further by their sense of conspiracy; how Chris had stroked Ann's hair, the look they had exchanged. “God, I hate a liar. No one brought you up to lie, Christopher Kitteridge.” From Ann's hip, the baby stared at her.

“I asked you to come visit,” Christopher said slowly, “because I wanted to see you. Ann wanted to meet you. We were hoping we could just have a nice time. I was hoping that things had changed, that
this
wouldn't happen. But, Mom, I'm not going to take responsibility for the extreme capriciousness of your moods. If something happened to upset you, you should tell me. That way we can talk.”

“You've never talked your whole damn life. Why are you starting now?” It was the therapist, she realized suddenly. Of course. That foolish Arthur fellow. She ought to be careful, this would get repeated in a therapy group.
Extreme capriciousness of your moods.
That was not Christopher's voice. Good God, they'd discussed her to pieces already. The thought caused her whole body to shudder. “And what are you talking about, the capriciousness of my moods? What in hell is that all about?”

Ann was mopping at the milk with a sponge, still holding the baby. Christopher stood calmly in front of her. “You kind of behave like a paranoid, Mom,” he said. “You always have. At least a lot, anyway. And I never see you taking any responsibility for it. One minute you're one way, the next—you're furious. It's tiring, very wearing for those around you.”

Beneath the table, Olive's foot bounced like the devil. Quietly, she said, “I don't need to sit here and be called a schizoid. I've never heard of such a thing in all my life. A son turning around and calling his mother schizoid. God knows, I didn't like my mother, but I never—”

“Olive,” said Ann. “Please, please stay calm. No one called you any names. Chris was only trying to tell you that your moods change kind of fast sometimes, and it's been hard. For him growing up, you know. Never knowing.”

“What in God's name would you know about it? Were you there?” Olive's head was all twirly inside. Her eyesight didn't seem right. “I suppose both of you now have degrees in family psychology.”

“Olive,” Ann said.

“No, let her go. Go, Mom. That's fine. I'll call you a car service to get you to the airport.”

“You're going to send me out there alone? For God's sake!”

“In one hour I have to go to work, and Ann has the kids to take care of. We can't drive you to the airport. The car service will be fine. Ann, why don't you call them? You'll have to go to the ticket counter, Mom, to get your ticket changed. But there shouldn't be a problem.”

Amazingly, her son started to collect dirty dishes from the counter and load the dishwasher.

“You're kicking me out, just like that?” Olive said, her heart pumping ferociously.

“See, there's an example,” Chris answered, calmly. Loading the dishwasher, calmly. “You say you want to leave, then accuse me of kicking you out. In the past, it would make me feel terrible, but I'm not going to feel terrible now. Because this is not my doing. You just don't seem to notice that your actions bring reactions.”

She got up, holding the edge of the table, and made her way to the basement, where her bag was already packed. She had packed it in the night. She brought it back up the stairs, panting.

“The car will be here in twenty minutes,” Ann said to Christopher, and he nodded, still loading the dishwasher.

“I can't believe this,” Olive said.

“I shouldn't wonder.” Christopher had started scrubbing a pot now. “I always found it unbelievable myself. But I just don't want to put up with it anymore.”

“You haven't put up with me for years!” Olive shouted. “You have treated me poorly for years!”

“No,” said her son, quietly. “I think if you think about it, you'll see that the story is quite different. You have a bad temper. At least I think it's a temper, I don't really know what it is. But you can make people feel terrible. You made Daddy feel terrible.”

“Chris,” said Ann, in a warning kind of way.

But Christopher shook his head. “I'm not going to be ruled by my fear of you, Mom.”

Fear of her? How could anyone be afraid of her? She was the one who was afraid! He kept scrubbing the pots, the pans, wiping down the counters, all the while answering her calmly. Whatever she said, he answered calmly. Calm as the Muslim who sold him a newspaper each morning, before sending him off on a subway to blow up. (Wasn't
that
paranoid? Her son was the one who was paranoid!)

She heard Theodore call from the top of the stairs, “Mummy, come here. Mummy!” Olive started to cry.

Everything became blurry, not just her eyes. She said things, with more and more fury—and Christopher answered, calmly, still washing kitchen things calmly. She kept crying. Christopher was saying something about Jim O'Casey. Something about him being a drunk, driving into a tree. “You'd scream at Daddy like Jim's death was his fault. How could you do that, Mom? I don't know what I hated more—when you went after him and sided with me, or when you went after me.” Christopher was tilting his head, as though really considering this.

“What are you talking about?” Olive cried. “You, with your new wife. She's so
nice,
Christopher, it makes me puke. Well, I hope you have a damn nice life, since you've got it all figured out.”

Back and forth, Olive crying, Christopher calm. Until he said quietly, “Okay, get your bags. Here's the car.”

         

The line to get to the gate—the security line—was so long it went around a corner. A black woman, wearing a red airport vest, kept saying in the same plangent tone, “People, move around to the corner and against the wall. Move around to the corner and against the wall.”

Twice Olive approached her. “Where do I go?” Olive asked her, thrusting forward her ticket.

“This line right here,” the woman said, raising an arm toward the long line. Her hair had been straightened and seemed like a badly fitting bathing cap with whiskers around its back rim.

“Are you sure?” Olive said.

“The line right here.” Raising her arm again. Her indifference was impenetrable.

(You were the scariest teacher at the school, Mom.)

Standing in line, she looked to those near her for some confirmation that this was ridiculous, standing in a line this long, that something must be wrong. But people who met her eye looked away with no expression. Olive put her sunglasses on, blinking. Everywhere she looked, people seemed removed and unfriendly. As she got closer, she didn't understand—the line spread into one mass of people who all seemed to know what she didn't—where to go, what to do.

“I need to call my son,” she said to a man standing near her. What she meant was that she had to leave the line to get to a pay phone because surely if she called Christopher, he would come get her—she would beg, she would bawl, anything it took to be saved from this hell. It had just gone terribly wrong, that's all. Sometimes things went terribly wrong. But looking around, she could see there were no pay phones anywhere; everyone had a cell phone stuck to their ear, talking, talking; they all had someone to talk to.

(His utter calm as he washed those dishes while she wept! Even Ann had had to leave the room.
Do you have no memory of these things at all? These days, they'd send a social worker right to the home, if a kid showed up that way.

Why are you torturing me? she had cried. What are you talking about? All your life I have loved you. And this is what you feel?

He'd stopped washing the dishes. Said just as calmly:
Okay. Now I don't have anything left to say.
)

The man she had told she had to call her son looked at her, then looked away. She couldn't call her son. He was cruel. And his wife was cruel.

Olive was moved along with the small sea of people: Move along, handbag on the rollers, move along, have your boarding pass out. A man, not nicely, motioning for her to step through the security arc. Glancing down, saying without expression, “Take off your shoes, ma'am. Take off your shoes.”

She pictured standing before him, her shredded panty hose exposed like some crazy lady. “I will not take off my shoes,” she heard herself say. She said, “I don't give a damn if the plane blows up, do you understand? I don't give one good goddamn if any of you are blown sky-high.” She saw the security man give the slightest gesture of his hand, and two people were beside her. They were men, and in half a second a woman was there, too. Security officials in their white shirts and special stripes above the pockets.

In voices of great gentleness, they said, “Come this way, ma'am.”

She nodded, blinking behind her sunglasses, and said, “I'd be glad to.”

Criminal

T
hat morning Rebecca Brown stole a magazine, even though Rebecca was not, ordinarily, the type of person who stole things. Ordinarily, Rebecca wouldn't take the soap from a motel bathroom on Route 1; she'd never even think to take the towels. It was the way she had been raised. In truth, Rebecca had been raised not to do a lot of things, and she'd done a great many of them anyway, except for stealing—she had never done that. But in the bleak white of a doctor's office in the town of Maisy Mills, Rebecca stole a magazine. There was a story in it that she wanted to finish, and she thought: This is only a doctor's office, and only a magazine, so really this is no big deal.

The story was about an ordinary, balding, kind of out-of-shape man who came home for lunch every day and sat at the kitchen table with his wife, eating sandwiches and talking about things like getting the lawn mower fixed. It gave Rebecca the same hopeful feeling that she got sometimes when she walked down a side street at night and saw through the window some kid playing in his pajamas, with a father ruffling the kid's hair.

So when the nurse opened her glass window and called out a name, Rebecca rolled up the magazine and slipped it into her knapsack. She didn't feel bad about it. She felt pleased when she got on the bus and knew she could finish the story.

But the man's wife wanted more from life than Saturday trips to the hardware store and eating sandwiches every day just because lunchtime had rolled around, and by the end of the story, the wife had packed up and left, and the man stopped coming home for lunch. He just stayed in his office at lunchtime, not eating anything. Rebecca felt sick when she finished the story; she was not a person who should read on a bus. The bus went around a corner and the magazine fell, and when Rebecca picked it up, it was open to a picture of an ad for a man's shirt. The shirt looked like a painter's smock, gathered across the chest and kind of billowy. Rebecca turned the magazine, looked at it more. By the time she stepped off the bus, she had decided to order the shirt for David.

“You'll love it,” the woman said over the telephone. “It's all hand sewn and all. A beautiful shirt.” The number had been an 800 number, and this woman taking the order had a Southern accent. Rebecca thought her voice was like stepping into one of those television commercials for laundry soap where sunlight streams through a window across a shiny floor.

“Now, let's see,” the woman said. “These come in small, medium, and large. Oh, honey, I've got to put you on hold.”

“That's all right,” Rebecca said. On the bus ride home, her stomach had started to feel like a wet balloon was in there, with its insides stuck together, so she put the phone between her neck and shoulder and reached across the counter for the Maalox spoon. Maalox sticks to everything. You can't put the spoon in the dishwasher because even the glasses come out flecked with white. They had a serving spoon David called the Maalox spoon, and it stayed right there by the corner of the sink. Rebecca was standing there licking the Maalox spoon when her father's voice came into her head. It was in her head, but it was clear as a bell.
I hate a person who steals,
he said.

The day her father died, Rebecca read in a magazine about a psychic woman who helped police solve murders. The woman said she did it by reading the thoughts of the dead people, that dead people still had thoughts even after they were dead.

“I'm sorry about that,” said the woman with her Southern accent.

“It's okay,” Rebecca said.

“Now,” said the woman. “Is your husband's width more in his shoulders or in his stomach region?”

“He's not my husband,” Rebecca said. “Not exactly. I mean, he's my boyfriend.”

“Well, sure,” the woman said. “And is your boyfriend's width in his shoulders, or his stomach region?”

“Shoulders,” Rebecca said. “He runs a health club and he always works out.”

“Okay,” said the woman slowly, like she was writing this down. “Now, I'm just wondering if a large would be too loose around the waist.”

“We probably
will
get married,” Rebecca said. “You know, someday.”

“Well, of course,” the woman said. “What size suit does he wear? That might help us out.”

“I don't know if I've ever seen him in a suit.”

“Why don't we go with the large,” the woman said.

“I don't usually order things like this,” Rebecca told her. “To get sent to me, I mean. And I've never ordered anything online. I'd never give my credit card number online.”

“No?” the woman asked. “Some people feel that way. Some people don't like to order things anyway. You prefer to do your shopping right there in the store. I'm like that myself.”

“Things get lost,” Rebecca told her. “There's a lot of billing clerks and truck drivers out there. You know, all those people who could have a bad night's sleep or a fight with their boss.” As she spoke, she flipped through the magazine, found the first page of the story—when the man had still been happy—and ripped it out slowly. Using the cigarette lighter she kept in her back pocket, Rebecca set the page on fire in the sink.

“I suppose if you think about it like that,” the woman said, agreeably. “But we guarantee delivery.”

“Oh, I trust you,” Rebecca said, and she did. What a voice that woman had—Rebecca could have told her anything. “It's just that I'm the kind of person,” Rebecca continued, “that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn't be a pin for me.”

The woman didn't say anything.

“Do you ever think that?” Rebecca asked. She watched the small flame, like a little living spirit, flare up for a moment in the sink.

“No,” the woman said. “I never do.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Rebecca said.

“Don't be sorry,” said the woman. “It's a pleasure. We'll do this. We'll go with the large, and if it's too big, you just send it on back.”

Rebecca ran water over the flakes of ashes in the sink. “Can I just ask you something?” she said to the woman.

“Well, sure,” the woman said.

“Are you a Scientologist?”

“Am I—” There was a pause. “No, I'm not,” the woman said, in her easy Southern accent.

“Me either. It's just I happened to be reading an article about Scientology, and, boy, it sounds like pretty weird stuff.”

“I guess to each his own. Now—”

“I always talk too much,” Rebecca explained to the woman. “My boyfriend tells me that. And now I've given myself this headache.”

“It's a pleasure doing business with a friendly person,” the woman said. “A cold facecloth pressed right against the eyeballs should help. And don't be afraid to really press either.”

“Thank you,” Rebecca said. “I guess large will do.”

“Obviously you've got to lie right back,” the woman said. “Put the facecloth in the freezer first.”

Rebecca Brown came from a line of Congregational ministers. Her grandfather had been a much-loved pastor of a large church in Shirley Falls, and her mother had been the daughter of this Reverend Tyler Caskey's second marriage, his first wife dying and leaving him with two small girls. By the time he had married again, and had Rebecca's mother, the other girls were old enough to not pay much attention to her, and it wasn't until Rebecca's mother married a minister herself, and then left very suddenly to go to California to be an actress, that Rebecca's aunt Katherine got involved. “It is unthinkable that a mother would take off like that,” she said, with tears in her eyes. Except it wasn't unthinkable at all—Rebecca's mother had done it, and had not even put up a fight when Rebecca's father, Reverend Brown of a tiny church in Crosby, Maine, had gone to court for custody. “This is sick,” said Aunt Katherine. “He'll spousify you. Let's hope he gets married again soon.”

Aunt Katherine had had a lot of therapy, and Rebecca was nervous around her. In any event, her father did not remarry, and Rebecca had grown up in a solitary house owned by the church, and had known quietly and secretly, the way that children know things, that her father was not the minister her grandfather had been. “It breaks my heart,” Aunt Katherine said once, on a visit, and Rebecca hoped she wouldn't come again. Her mother, in California, sent a postcard once in a while, but when it was discovered that she had joined the church of Scientology, even Aunt Katherine said it was better not to have much to do with her. That wasn't hard—the postcards stopped coming.

Rebecca sent a whole bunch of letters, one after another, to her mother at the last address she had for her—in a town called Tarzana. Rebecca never put on a return address, because she didn't want her father to find the letters if they got returned. And most likely they would have been returned. The address was four years old, and when Rebecca called directory assistance for a telephone number in Tarzana, and all the towns nearby, there was no listing for Charlotte Brown, or Charlotte Caskey either. Where did the letters go?

Rebecca had gone to the library to read about Scientology. She read how they wanted to clear the world of body titans, aliens who they believed inhabited the earth after a nuclear explosion seventy-five million years ago. She read how members were required to “disconnect” from family members who were critical of Scientology. Which is why her mother didn't write to her anymore. Maybe writing to Rebecca had been a “suppressive act”—and her mother had been required to go before the Rehabilitation Project Force. Rebecca read about one member who was told that, with the right training and discipline, he could learn to read people's thoughts.
Come get me,
Rebecca thought—hard—to her mother.
Come get me, please.
Later on, she thought,
Fuck you.

She stopped reading about Scientology and started reading books about being a minister's wife. You were supposed to have a can of fruit cocktail in the pantry in case some parishioner came to call. For a number of years Rebecca made sure to have fruit cocktail in the cupboard, though it was very seldom that anyone came to call.

When she graduated from high school and knew she'd be going two hours away to the university,
living somewhere else,
Rebecca was so dazed to think such good fortune had finally arrived that she worried she'd be hit by a car and become paralyzed and have to live in the rectory forever. But once she was at the university, she sometimes missed her father, and she tried not to think of him alone in that house. When people spoke of their mothers, she would say quietly that her own mother had “passed away,” which made people uncomfortable, because Rebecca had a way of looking down after she said this, as though to indicate she could not bear to say any more about it. She thought, in a very technical way, what she said was true. She didn't say her mother was dead, which, as far as she knew, wasn't true. Her mother had passed (as in an airplane far above) away (to a different land), and Rebecca was quite used to the phases she went through when she thought a great deal about her mother, and then when she did not think about her at all. She did not know anyone else whose mother had run off and never looked back, and she thought her own thoughts about it must be natural, given the circumstances.

         

It was during her father's funeral that Rebecca had the kind of thoughts she knew couldn't be natural. Certainly not during a funeral, anyway. A shaft of sunlight had come through a window of the church, bouncing off the wooden pew and slanting across the carpet, and the sun like that had made Rebecca want someone. She was nineteen years old, and had learned some things in college about men. The minister doing the funeral was a friend of her father's; they had gone to seminary together years ago, and watching him up there with his hand raised in a blessing, Rebecca started thinking about things she could do to him under his robe, things he'd have to pray about later. “Carleton's spirit remains here with us,” the minister said, and goose bumps started all over Rebecca's head. She thought about the psychic woman reading dead people's thoughts, and she got the feeling that her father was right behind her eyeballs, seeing what she was imagining doing to his friend.

Then she thought about her mother—that maybe her mother had been taught to read people's thoughts, and was reading Rebecca's thoughts right now. Rebecca closed her eyes as though she were praying.
Fuck you,
she said to her mother.
Sorry,
she said to her father. Then she opened her eyes, looked at the people in the church, as dull-looking as dry sticks. She pictured lighting little piles of papers in the woods; she had always liked the sudden small burst of a flame.

         

“What've you got there, Bicka-Beck?” David asked. He was sitting on the floor aiming the remote control at the television, switching channels every time a commercial came on. Above him on the windowpane were reflections from the television screen, jerking and dancing across the glass.