Olive Kitteridge (4 page)

“Go,” Olive said. “For God's sake. Go over and comfort your girlfriend.”

“Stop it, Olive,” Henry said. “That's unnecessary. She's a young widow who ran over her cat. Where in God's name is your compassion?” He was trembling.

“She wouldn't have run over any goddamn cat if you hadn't given it to her.”

He brought with him a Valium. That night he sat on her couch, helpless while she wept. The urge to put his arm around her small shoulders was very strong, but he sat holding his hands together in his lap. A small lamp shone from the kitchen table. She blew her nose on his white handkerchief, and said, “Oh, Henry. Henry.” He was not sure which Henry she meant. She looked up at him, her small eyes almost swollen shut; she had taken her glasses off to press the handkerchief to them. “I talk to you in my head all the time,” she said. She put her glasses back on. “Sorry,” she whispered.

“For what?”

“For talking to you in my head all the time.”

“No, no.”

He put her to bed like a child. Dutifully she went into the bathroom and changed into her pajamas, then lay in the bed with the quilt to her chin. He sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing her hair until the Valium took over. Her eyelids drooped, and she turned her head to the side, murmuring something he couldn't make out. As he drove home slowly along the narrow roads, the darkness seemed alive and sinister as it pressed against the car windows. He pictured moving far upstate, living in a small house with Denise. He could find work somewhere up north; she could have a child. A little girl who would adore him; girls adored their fathers.

“Well, widow-comforter, how is she?” Olive spoke in the dark from the bed.

“Struggling,” he said.

“Who isn't.”

The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had—their inner selves brushing up against the other. At the end of the day, he said, “I will take care of you,” his voice thick with emotion.

She stood before him, and nodded. He zipped her coat for her.

         

To this day he does not know what he was thinking. In fact, much of it he can't seem to remember. That Tony Kuzio paid her some visits. That she told Tony he must stay married, because if he divorced, he would never be able to marry in the church again. The piercing of jealousy and rage he felt to think of Tony sitting in Denise's little place late at night, begging her forgiveness. The feeling that he was drowning in cobwebs whose sticky maze was spinning about him. That he wanted Denise to continue to love him. And she did. He saw it in her eyes when she dropped a red mitten and he picked it up and held it open for her.
I talk to you in my head all the time.
The pain was sharp, exquisite, unbearable.

“Denise,” he said one evening as they closed up the store. “You need some friends.”

Her face flushed deeply. She put her coat on with a roughness to her gestures. “I have friends,” she said, breathlessly.

“Of course you do. But here in town.” He waited by the door until she got her purse from out back. “You might go square dancing at the Grange Hall. Olive and I used to go. It's a nice group of people.”

She stepped past him, her face moist, the top of her hair passing by his eyes. “Or maybe you think that's square,” he said in the parking lot, lamely.

“I am square,” she said, quietly.

“Yes,” he said, just as quietly. “I am too.” As he drove home in the dark, he pictured being the one to take Denise to a Grange Hall dance. “Spin your partner, and promenade…,” her face breaking into a smile, her foot tapping, her small hands on her hips. No—it was not bearable, and he was really frightened now by the sudden emergence of anger he had inspired in her. He could do nothing for her. He could not take her in his arms, kiss her damp forehead, sleep beside her while she wore those little-girl flannel pajamas she'd worn the night Slippers died. To leave Olive was as unthinkable as sawing off his leg. In any event, Denise would not want a divorced Protestant; nor would he be able to abide her Catholicism.

They spoke to each other little as the days went by. He felt coming from her now an unrelenting coldness that was accusatory. What had he led her to expect? And yet when she mentioned a visit from Tony Kuzio, or made an elliptical reference to seeing a movie in Portland, an answering coldness arose in him. He had to grit his teeth not to say, “Too square to go square dancing, then?” How he hated that the words
lovers' quarrel
went through his head.

And then just as suddenly she'd say—ostensibly to Jerry McCarthy, who listened those days with a new comportment to his bulky self, but really she was speaking to Henry (he could see this in the way she glanced at him, holding her small hands together nervously)—“My mother, when I was very little, and before she got sick, would make special cookies for Christmas. We'd paint them with frosting and sprinkles. Oh, I think it was the most fun I ever had sometimes”—her voice wavering while her eyes blinked behind her glasses. And he would understand then that the death of her husband had caused her to feel the death of her girlhood as well; she was mourning the loss of the only
herself
she had ever known—gone now, to this new, bewildered young widow. His eyes, catching hers, softened.

Back and forth this cycle went. For the first time in his life as a pharmacist, he allowed himself a sleeping tablet, slipping one each day into the pocket of his trousers. “All set, Denise?” he'd say when it was time to close. Either she'd silently go get her coat, or she'd say, looking at him with gentleness, “All set, Henry. One more day.”

         

Daisy Foster, standing now to sing a hymn, turns her head and smiles at him. He nods back and opens the hymnal. “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” The words, the sound of the few people singing, make him both hopeful and deeply sad. “You can learn to love someone,” he had told Denise, when she'd come to him in the back of the store that spring day. Now, as he places the hymnal back in the holder in front of him, sits once more on the small pew, he thinks of the last time he saw her. They had come north to visit Jerry's parents, and they stopped by the house with the baby, Paul. What Henry remembers is this: Jerry saying something sarcastic about Denise falling asleep each night on the couch, sometimes staying there the whole night through. Denise turning away, looking out over the bay, her shoulders slumped, her small breasts just slightly pushing out against her thin turtleneck sweater, but she had a belly, as though a basketball had been cut in half and she'd swallowed it. No longer the girl she had been—no girl stayed a girl—but a mother, tired, and her round cheeks had deflated as her belly had expanded, so that already there was a look of the gravity of life weighing her down. It was at that point Jerry said sharply, “Denise, stand up straight. Put your shoulders back.” He looked at Henry, shaking his head. “How many times do I keep telling her that?”

“Have some chowder,” Henry said. “Olive made it last night.” But they had to get going, and when they left, he said nothing about their visit, and neither did Olive, surprisingly. He would not have thought Jerry would grow into that sort of man, large, clean-looking—thanks to the ministrations of Denise—not even so much fat anymore, just a big man earning a big salary, speaking to his wife in a way Olive had sometimes spoken to Henry. He did not see her again, although she must have been in the region. In her birthday notes, she reported the death of her mother, then, a few years later, her father. Of course she would have driven north to go to the funerals. Did she think of him? Did she and Jerry stop and visit the grave of Henry Thibodeau?

“You're looking fresh as a daisy,” he tells Daisy Foster in the parking lot outside the church. It is their joke; he has said it to her for years.

“How's Olive?” Daisy's blue eyes are still large and lovely, her smile ever present.

“Olive's fine. Home keeping the fires burning. And what's new with you?”

“I have a beau.” She says this quietly, putting a hand to her mouth.

“Do you? Daisy, that's wonderful.”

“Sells insurance in Heathwick during the day, and takes me dancing on Friday nights.”

“Oh, that's wonderful,” Henry says again. “You'll have to bring him around for supper.”

“Why do you need everyone married?” Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son's life. “Why can't you just leave people alone?”

He doesn't want people alone.

         

At home, Olive nods to the table, where a card from Denise lies next to an African violet. “Came yesterday,” Olive says. “I forgot.”

Henry sits down heavily and opens it with his pen, finds his glasses, peers at it. Her note is longer than usual. She had a scare late in the summer. Pericardial effusion, which turned out to be nothing. “It changed me,” she wrote, “as experiences do. It put all my priorities straight, and I have lived every day since then with the deepest gratitude for my family. Nothing matters except family and friends,” she wrote, in her neat, small hand. “And I have been blessed with both.”

The card, for the first time ever, was signed, “Love.”

“How is she?” asks Olive, running water into the sink. Henry stares out at the bay, at the skinny spruce trees along the edge of the cove, and it seems beautiful to him, God's magnificence there in the quiet stateliness of the coastline and the slightly rocking water.

“She's fine,” he answers. Not at the moment, but soon, he will walk over to Olive and put his hand on her arm. Olive, who has lived through her own sorrows. For he understood long ago—after Jim O'Casey's car went off the road, and Olive spent weeks going straight to bed after supper, sobbing harshly into a pillow—Henry understood then that Olive had loved Jim O'Casey, had possibly been loved by him, though Henry never asked her and she never told, just as he did not tell her of the gripping, sickening need he felt for Denise until the day she came to him to report Jerry's proposal, and he said: “Go.”

He puts the card on the windowsill. He has wondered what it has felt like for her to write the words
Dear Henry.
Has she known other Henrys since then? He has no way of knowing. Nor does he know what happened to Tony Kuzio, or whether candles are still being lit for Henry Thibodeau in church.

Henry stands up, Daisy Foster fleeting through his mind, her smile as she spoke of going dancing. The relief that he just felt over Denise's note, that she is glad for the life that unfolded before her, gives way suddenly, queerly, into an odd sense of loss, as if something significant has been taken from him. “Olive,” he says.

She must not hear him because of the water running into the sink. She is not as tall as she used to be, and is broader across her back. The water stops. “Olive,” he says, and she turns. “You're not going to leave me, are you?”

“Oh, for God's sake, Henry. You could make a woman sick.” She wipes her hands quickly on a towel.

He nods. How could he ever tell her—he could not—that all these years of feeling guilty about Denise have carried with them the kernel of still having her? He cannot even bear this thought, and in a moment it will be gone, dismissed as not true. For who could bear to think of himself this way, as a man deflated by the good fortune of others? No, such a thing is ludicrous.

“Daisy has a fellow,” he says. “We need to have them over soon.”

Incoming Tide

T
he bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted them. Also there was the twanging sound of the cables hitting the masts of the sailboats moored. A few seagulls gave squawking cries as they dove down to pick up the fish heads and tails and shining insides that the boy was tossing from the dock as he cleaned the mackerel. All this Kevin saw as he sat in his car with the windows partly open. The car was parked on the grassy area, not far from the marina. Two trucks were parked farther over, on the gravel by the dock.

How much time went by, Kevin didn't know.

At one point, the marina's screen door opened wheezily and slammed shut, and Kevin watched as a man moved in slow steps in his dark rubber boots, tossing a coil of heavy rope into the back of the truck. If the man noticed Kevin, he gave no sign, even when he backed up his truck and turned his head in Kevin's direction. There was no reason they would recognize each other. Kevin had not been to this town since he was a child; thirteen, when he moved away with his father and brother. He was as much a stranger up here now as any tourist might be, and yet gazing back at the sun-sliced bay, he noted how familiar it felt; he had not expected that. The salt air filled his nose, the wild rugosa bushes with their white blossoms brought him a vague confusion; a sense of sad ignorance seemed cloaked in their benign white petals.

         

Patty Howe poured coffee into two white mugs, placed them on the counter, said quietly, “You're
wel
come,” and moved back to arrange the corn muffins that had just been passed through the opening from the kitchen. She had seen the man sitting in the car—he'd been there well over an hour—but people did that sometimes, drove out from town just to gaze at the water. Still, there was something about him that was troubling her. “They're perfect,” she said to the cook, because the tops of the muffins were crispy at the edges, yellow as rising suns. The fact that their newly baked scent did not touch off a queasiness in her, as they had two times in the past year, made her sad; a soft dismalness settled over her. The doctor had said to them, For three months you are not to even think of it.

The screen door opened, banged shut. Through the large window, Patty saw that the man in the car still sat looking at the water, and as Patty poured coffee for an elderly couple that had seated themselves slowly into a booth, as she asked how they were this nice morning, she suddenly knew who the man was, and something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. “There you go,” she said to the couple, and didn't glance out the window again.

“Say, why doesn't Kevin come over here instead,” Patty's mother had suggested, when Patty had been so small her head had only reached the kitchen counter, shaking it
No, no, no,
she didn't want to go there. She'd been scared of him; in kindergarten he had sucked on his wrist so hard it was always a brilliant disk of a bruise, and his mother—tall, dark-haired, deep-voiced—had scared her, too. Now, as Patty put the corn muffins onto a plate, she thought that her mother's response had been graceful, brilliant almost. Kevin had come to her house instead, and he'd patiently swung a jump rope whose other end was tied around a tree, while Patty had jumped and jumped. On her way home from work today, Patty would stop by her mother's house. You'll never guess who I saw, she'd say.

         

The boy on the dock stood up, holding a yellow pail in one hand, a knife in the other. A seagull swooped in and the boy waved his arm with the knife. Kevin watched as the boy turned to come up the ramp, but a man was sauntering down onto the wharf. “Son, put the knife in the pail,” the man called out, and the boy did that, carefully, and then grabbed the rail and climbed up the ramp to meet his father. He was still young enough that he took the man's hand. Together they peered into the pail, and then they got into the truck and drove off.

Kevin, watching all this from his car, thought,
Good,
and what he meant was that he had felt no emotion watching this, the man and the son.

“A lot of people don't have families,” Dr. Goldstein had said, scratching his white beard, then unabashedly brushing away anything that had fallen onto his chest. “But they still have homes.” Folding his hands, calmly, across his big stomach.

On his way here to the marina, Kevin had driven past his childhood home. The road was still dirt, with deep ruts, but there were a few new homes tucked back into the woods. Tree trunks should have doubled in girth, and perhaps they had, but the woods remained as he remembered them, thick and tangled and rough, an uneven patch of sky showing through as he turned up the hill to where his house was. It was the shed that made him certain he'd not taken a wrong turn—the deep red shed beside the house, and, right next to that, the granite rock that had been large enough that Kevin used to think of it as a mountain, as he climbed it in his little-boy sneakers. The rock was still there—and the house, but it had been renovated; a wraparound front porch added, and the old kitchen gone. Of course: they'd have wanted the kitchen gone. A sense of umbrage pricked him, then left. He slowed the car, peering carefully for any signs of children. He saw no bicycles, no swing set, no tree house, no basketball hoop—just a hanging pink impatiens plant by the front door.

Relief came, arriving as a sensation beneath his ribs, like a gentle lapping of the water's edge at low tide, a comforting quiescence. In the back of the car was a blanket, and he would still use it, even if there were no children in the house. Right now the blanket was wrapped around the rifle, but when he returned (soon, while this relief still touched, quietly, the inner blankness he had felt on the long ride up), he would lie down on the pine needles and put the blanket over him. If it was the man of the house who found him—so what? The woman who had hung the pink impatiens? She wouldn't look for long. But to have a child—no, Kevin could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother's need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards. Never mind, his mind said to him quietly, as he drove on past. Never mind. The woods were there, and that's all he wanted, to lie on the pine needles, touch the thin, ripping bark of a cedar tree, have the hackmatack needles above his head, the wild lilies of the valley with their green, open leaves near him. The hidden white starflowers, the wild violets; his mother had shown him all these.

The extra noise of the clanking sailboat masts made him realize the wind had picked up. The seagulls had stopped their squawking now that the fish entrails were gone. A fat gull that had been standing on the rail of the ramp not far from him took off—its wings flapping only twice before the breeze carried it along. Hollow-boned; Kevin had seen gull bones as a child, out on Puckerbrush Island. He had shouted with panic when his brother had collected some to take back to the house. Leave them where they are, Kevin had shouted.

“States and traits,” Dr. Goldstein had said. “Traits don't change, states of mind do.”

Two cars drove in and parked near the marina. He hadn't thought there would be so much activity here on a weekday, but it was almost July, and people had their boats to sail; he watched a couple, not much older than he was, take a big basket down the ramp, which already, with the tide coming in, was not so steep. And then the screen door of the diner opened and a woman came out, wearing a skirt that went well over her knees, as well as an apron—she could have stepped out of a different century. She had a metal pail in her hand, and as she moved toward the dock, he watched her shoulders, the long back, her thin hips as she moved—she was lovely, the way a sapling might be as the afternoon sun moved over it. A yearning stirred in him that was not sexual but a kind of reaching toward her simplicity of form. He looked away, and his body jumped a little to see a woman staring through the passenger window, her face close, staring straight at him.

Mrs. Kitteridge. Holy shit. She looked exactly the same as she had in the classroom in seventh grade, that forthright, high-cheekboned expression; her hair was still dark. He had liked her; not everyone had. He would have waved her away now, or started the car, but the memory of respect held him back. She rapped her hand on the glass, and after hesitating, he leaned and unrolled the window the rest of the way.

“Kevin Coulson. Hello.”

He nodded.

“You going to invite me to sit in your car?”

His hands made fists in his lap. He started to shake his head. “No, I'm only—”

But she had already let herself in—a big woman, taking up the whole bucket seat, her knees close to the dashboard. She hauled a big black handbag across her lap. “What brings you here?” she asked.

He looked out toward the water. The young woman was moving back up from the dock; the seagulls were screeching furiously behind her, beating their large wings and darting down; she'd have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

“Visiting?” Mrs. Kitteridge prompted. “From New York City? Isn't that where you live now?”

“Jesus,” Kevin said quietly. “Does everybody know everything?”

“Oh, sure,” she said comfortably. “What else is there to do?”

She had her face turned to him, but he didn't want to meet her eyes. The wind on the bay seemed to be picking up more. He put his hands into his pockets, so as not to suck on his knuckles.

“Get a lot of tourists now,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Crawling all over the place this time of year.”

He made a sound in his throat, acknowledging not the fact—what did he care?—but that she had spoken to him. He watched the slim woman with the pail, her head tilted down as she went back inside, closing the screen door carefully. “That's Patty Howe,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Remember her? Patty Crane. She married the older Howe boy. Nice girl. She keeps having miscarriages and it makes her sad.”

Olive Kitteridge sighed, rearranged her feet, pushed the lever—much to Kevin's surprise—to make herself more comfortable, moving the seat back. “I suspect they'll get her fixed up one of these days, and then she'll be pregnant with triplets.”

Kevin took his hands from his pockets, cracked his knuckles. “Patty was nice,” he said. “I had forgotten about Patty.”

“She's still nice. That's what I said. What are you doing in New York?”

“Oh.” He raised a hand, saw the reddened marks that spotted them, crossed his arms. “I'm in training. I got my medical degree four years ago.”

“Say, that's impressive. What kind of doctor are you training to be?”

He looked at the dashboard, couldn't believe he hadn't noticed the filth of it. There in the sunlight it seemed to be telling her he was a slob, pathetic, not a shred of dignity. He took in a breath and said, “Psychiatry.”

He expected her to say “Ahhh…” and when she said nothing, he glanced at her, and found that she was giving a simple matter-of-fact nod.

“It's beautiful here,” he said, squinting back toward the bay. The remark held gratitude for what he felt was her discretion, and it was true, as well, for the bay—which he seemed to view from behind a large pane of glass, larger than the windshield—and which did have, he understood, a kind of splendor, the twanging, rocking sailboats, the whipped water, the wild rugosa. How much better to be a fisherman, to spend one's day in the midst of this. He thought of the PET scans he had studied, always looking for his mother, hands in his pockets, nodding as the radiologists spoke, and sometimes tears twinkling behind his lids—the enlargement of the amygdala, the increase in the white-matter lesions, the severe depletion in the number of glial cells. The brains of the bipolar.

“But I'm not going to be a psychiatrist,” he said.

The wind was really picking up now, making the ramp to the float bob up and down. “I imagine you get a lot of wicky-wackies in that business,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, adjusting her feet, making a scraping sound as she moved them across the grit of the car floor.

“Some.”

He had gone to medical school thinking he'd become a pediatrician, as his mother had been, but he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course—what bullshit he had witnessed among his colleagues, his professors! His own interest had become narrowed to victims of torture, but that had also led him to despair, and when he had finally come under the care of Murray Goldstein, Ph.D., M.D., and had told the man his plans to work at the Hague with those whose feet had been beaten raw, whose bodies and minds lay in ruinous disorder, Dr. Goldstein had said, “What are you, crazy?”

He'd been attracted to crazy. Clara—what a name—Clara Pilkington appeared to be the sanest person he'd ever met. And wasn't that something? She ought to have been wearing a billboard around her neck:
COMPLETELY CRAZY CLARA.

“You know the old saying, I'm sure,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Psychiatrists are nutty, cardiologists are hard-hearted—”

He turned to look at her. “And pediatricians?”

“Tyrants,” Mrs. Kitteridge acknowledged. She gave one shrug to her shoulder.

Kevin nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly.

After a moment, Mrs. Kitteridge said, “Well, your mother may not have been able to help it.”

He was surprised. His urge to suck on his knuckles was like an agonizing itch, and he ran his hands back and forth over his knees, found the hole in his jeans. “I think my mother was bipolar,” he said. “Never diagnosed, though.”