Olive Kitteridge (30 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Strout
“I still don't know what you mean by saying you're a peasant. In this country I don't think it's peasantry. Perhaps you mean you're a cowboy.” She glanced at him, was surprised to see he was smiling at her good-naturedly. “I can see you as a cowboy,” he said.
“Fine, I'm a cowboy.”
“A Republican, then?” Jack asked, after a moment.
“Oh, for God's sake.” Olive stopped walking, looked at him through her sunglasses. “I didn't say
moron.
You mean because we have a cowboy for a president? Or before that an actor who
played
a cowboy? Let me tell you, that idiot ex-cocaine-addict was never a cowboy. He can wear all the cowboy hats he wants. He's a spoiled brat to the manor born. And he makes me puke.”
She was really riled, and it took her a moment to see that he was looking away, his expression closed off, as though inside his head he had backed away, was just waiting for her to finish.
“God,” she said finally. “You didn't.”
“Didn't what?”
“You voted for him.”
Jack Kennison looked tired.
“You voted for him. You, Mr. Harvard, Mr. Brains. You voted for that stinker.”
He gave a small bark of a laugh. “My God, you do have the passions and the prejudices of a peasant.”
“That's it,” said Olive. She began walking, at her pace now. She said over her shoulder, “At least I'm not prejudiced against homosexuals.”
“No,” he called. “Just white men with money.”
Damn right, she thought.
        Â
She called Bunny, and BunnyâOlive couldn't believe thisâactually
laughed.
“Oh, Olive,” she said. “Does it really matter?”
“Matter that someone voted for a man who is lying to the country? Bunny, for God's sake, this world is a mess.”
“That's true enough,” Bunny said. “But the world has always been a mess. I think if you enjoy his company, you should just let it go.”
“I don't enjoy his company,” Olive said, and hung up. She'd never realized Bunny was an idiot, but there you were.
It was terrible, though, when you couldn't tell people things. Olive felt this keenly as the days went by. She called Christopher. “He's a Republican,” she said.
“Well, that's gross,” Christopher answered. Then: “I thought you were calling to see how your grandson is.”
“Of course I wonder how he is. I wish you'd call
me
to tell me how he is.” Where and how, exactly, this rupture with her son had taken place, Olive couldn't have said.
“I do call you, Mom.” A long pause. “Butâ”
“But what?”
“Well, it's a little hard to converse with you.”
“I see. Everything is my fault.”
“No. Everything is someone else's fault; that's my point.”
It had to be her son's therapist who was responsible for all this. Who would ever have expected this? She said into the phone, “Not I, said the Little Red Hen.”
“What?”
She hung up.
Two weeks passed by. She walked along the river earlier than six, so she wouldn't bump into Jack, and because she woke after just a few hours' sleep. The spring was gorgeous, and seemed an assault. Starflowers popped through the pine needles, clusters of purple violets were there by the granite seat. She passed the elderly couple, who were holding hands again. After that, she stopped her walking. For a few days she stayed in bed, whichâto her memoryâshe had never done before. She was not a lie-er downer.
Christopher didn't call, Bunny didn't call. Jack Kennison didn't call.
One night she woke at midnight. She turned on her computer, and typed in Jack's e-mail address, which she had gotten back when they were having lunch and going into Portland for concerts.
“Does your daughter hate you?” she wrote.
In the morning was the simple “Yes.”
She waited two days. The she wrote: “My son hates me, too.”
An hour later came the response. “Does it kill you? It kills me that my daughter hates me. But I know it's my fault.”
She wrote immediately. “It kills me. Like the devil. And it must be my fault, too, though I don't understand it. I don't remember things the way he seems to remember them. He sees a psychiatrist named Arthur, and I think Arthur has done this.” She paused a long time, clicked on Send, then immediately wrote, “P.S. But it has to be my fault, too. Henry said I never apologized for anything, ever, and maybe he was right.” She clicked on Send. Then she wrote: “P.S. AGAIN. He was right.”
There was no reply to this, and she felt like a schoolgirl whose crush had walked off with a different girl. In fact, Jack probably did have a different girl, or woman. Old woman. Plenty of them aroundâRepublicans, too. She lay on the bed in the little bump-out room and listened to the transistor radio she held to her ear. Then she got up and went outside, taking the dog for a walk on a leash, because if he was loose, he'd eat one of the Moodys' cats; this had happened before.
When she came back, the sun was just past its peak, and it was a bad time of day for her; it'd be better when it got dark. How she had loved the long evenings of spring when she was young, and all of life stretched before her. She was looking through the cupboard for a Milk-Bone for the dog when she heard her phone message machine beep. It was ludicrous, how hopeful she was that Bunny or Chris had called. Jack Kennison's voice said, “Olive. Could you come over?”
She brushed her teeth, left the dog in his pen.
        Â
His shiny red car was in his small driveway. When she knocked on the door, there was no answer. She pushed the door open. “Hello?”
“Hello, Olive. I'm back here. I'm lying down, I'll be right there.”
“No,” she sang out, “stay put. I'll come find you.” She found him on the bed in the downstairs guest room. He was lying on his back, one hand beneath his head.
“I'm glad you came over,” he said.
“Are you feeling poorly again?”
He smiled that tiny smile. “Only soul poor. The body bangs on.”
She nodded.
He moved his legs aside. “Come,” he said, patting the bed. “Sit down. I may be a rich Republican, though I'm not that rich, in case you were secretly hoping. Anywayâ” He sighed and shook his head, the sunlight from the windows catching his eyes, making them very blue. “Anyway, Olive, you can tell me anything, that you beat your son black and blue, and I won't hold it against you. I don't think I will. I've beaten my daughter emotionally. I didn't speak to her for two years, can you imagine such a thing?”
“I did hit my son,” Olive said. “Sometimes when he was little. Not just spanked. Hit.”
Jack Kennison nodded one nod.
She stepped into the room, put her handbag on the floor. He didn't sit up, just stayed there, lying on the bed, an old man, his stomach bulging like a sack of sunflower seeds. His blue eyes watched her as she walked to him, and the room was filled with the quietness of afternoon sunlight. It fell through the window, across the rocking chair, hit broadside the wallpaper with its brightness. The mahogany bed knobs shone. Through the curved-out window was the blue of the sky, the bayberry bush, the stone wall. The silence of this sunshine, of the world, seemed to fold over Olive with a shiver of ghastliness, as she stood feeling the sun on her bare wrist. She watched him, looked away, looked at him again. To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world.
“God, I'm scared,” he said, quietly.
She almost said, “Oh, stop. I hate scared people.” She would have said that to Henry, to just about anyone. Maybe because she hated the scared part of herselfâthis was just a fleeting thought; there was a contest within her, revulsion and tentative desire. It was the sudden memory of Jane Houlton in the waiting room that caused Olive to walk to the bedâthe freedom of that ordinary banter, because Jack, in the doctor's office, had needed her, had given her a place in the world.
His blue eyes were watching her now; she saw in them the vulnerability, the invitation, the fear, as she sat down quietly, placed her open hand on his chest, felt the thump, thump of his heart, which would someday stop, as all hearts do. But there was no someday now, there was only the silence of this sunny room. They were here, and her bodyâold, big, saggingâfelt straight-out desire for his. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes.
What young people didn't know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.
And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn't have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this unionâwhat pieces life took out of you.
Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitudeâand regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.
For my mother
who can make life magical
and is the best storyteller I know
Also by Elizabeth Strout
Abide with Me
Amy and Isabelle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E
LIZABETH
S
TROUT
is the author of
Abide with Me,
a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, and
Amy and Isabelle,
which won the
Los Angeles Times
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the
Chicago Tribune
Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including
The New Yorker
and
O: The Oprah Magazine.
She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and lives in New York City.
Read on for an excerpt from
The Burgess Boys
A Novel
by ELIZABETH STROUT
Published by Random House
Â
My mother and I talked a lot about the Burgess family. “The Burgess kids,” she called them. We talked about them mostly on the telephone, because I lived in New York and she lived in Maine. But we talked about them also when I visited her and stayed in the hotel nearby. My mother had not been in many hotels, and it became one of our favorite things: to sit in a roomâthe green walls stenciled with a strip of pink rosesâand speak of the past, those who had left Shirley Falls, those who had stayed. “Been thinking about those Burgess kids,” she'd say, pulling back the curtain and looking toward the birch trees.
The Burgess kids had a hold on her, I think, as a result of the fact that all three had suffered publicly, and also my mother had taught them years before in her fourth-grade Sunday-school class. She favored the Burgess boys. Jim, because he was angry even back then and trying to control it, she felt, and Bob because his heart was big. She didn't care much for Susan. “Nobody did, far as I know,” she said.
“Susan was pretty when she was little,” I remembered. “She had those curls and big eyes.”
“And then she had that nutty son.”
“Sad,” I said.
“Lots of things are sad,” my mother said. My mother and I were both widowed by then, and there would be a silence after she said this. Then one of us would add how glad we were that Bob Burgess had found a good wife in the end. The wife, Bob's second and we hoped his last, was a Unitarian minister. My mother did not like Unitarians; she thought they were atheists who didn't want to be left out of the fun of Christmas, but Margaret Estaver was from Maine, and that was good enough. “Bob could have married someone from New York after living there all those years. Look what happened to Jim, marrying that snob from Connecticut,” my mother said.
We had talked about Jim a good deal, of course: how he'd left Maine after working homicides in the attorney general's office, how we'd hoped he would run for governor, the puzzle of why he suddenly hadn't, and then weânaturallyâtalked about him the year of the Wally Packer trial when Jim was on the news each night. The trial was back when they were first allowing trials to be televised, and in another year O. J. Simpson would eclipse many people's memory of the Packer trial, but until then there were Jim Burgess devotees across the country who watched with amazement as he got an acquittal for the gentle-faced soul singer Wally Packer, whose crooning voice (
Take this burden from me, the burden of my love
) had swept most of our generation into adulthood. Wally Packer, who had allegedly paid to have his white girlfriend killed. Jim kept the trial in Hartford, where race was a serious factor, and his jury selection was said to be brilliant. Then, with eloquent and relentless patience, he described just how deceptive the fabric could be that wove togetherâor in this case, he claimed, did not weave togetherâthe essential components of criminal behavior: intent and action. Cartoons ran in national magazines, one showing a woman staring at her messy living room with a caption that said, “If I intend this room to be clean, when will it become clean?” Polls indicated that most people believed as my mother and I did, that Wally Packer was guilty. But Jim did a stunning job and became famous as a result. (A few magazines listed him as one of the Sexiest Men of 1993, and even my mother, who loathed any mention of sex, did not hold this against him.) O. J. Simpson reportedly wanted Jim on his “Dream Team”; there was a flurry of talk about this on the networks, but with no comment from the Burgess camp it was decided that Jim was “resting on his laurels.” The Packer trial had given my mother and me something to talk about during a time when we were not pleased with each other. But that was in the past. Now when I left Maine I kissed my mother and told her I loved her, and she told me the same.