Olive Kitteridge (6 page)

He missed his mother.

I've made this awful pilgrimage…I've come back for more…
Kevin wished, as he often did, that he had known the poet John Berryman.

“When I was young,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, holding her sunglasses in her hand, “—little, you know—I'd hide in the wood box when my father came home. And he'd sit down on the wood box and say, ‘Where's Olive? Where can Olive be?' This would go on, till I'd knock on the side, and he'd act surprised. ‘Olive,' he'd say, ‘I had no idea where you were!' And I'd laugh, and he'd laugh.”

Kevin looked over at her; she put her sunglasses on. She said, “I don't know how long that continued, probably until I was too big to get into the wood box.”

He didn't know what to say to this. He squeezed his hands in as tiny a gesture as possible, looking down at the steering wheel. He felt her big presence, and imagined—fleetingly—that an elephant sat next to him, one that wanted to be a member of the human kingdom, and sweet in an innocent way, as though her stubs of forelegs were folded on her lap, her trunk moving just a little as she finished speaking.

“That's a nice story,” he said.

He thought of the boy cleaning the fish, how his father had held his hand out to him. He thought again of John Berryman.
Save us from shotguns & fathers' suicides…Mercy!…do not pull the trigger or all my life I'll suffer from your anger….
He wondered if Mrs. Kitteridge, being a math teacher, knew much poetry.

“Look how the wind's picked up,” she said. “Always kind of exciting, long as you don't have a wharf that floats away, like ours used to do. Henry'd be down on those rocks with the waves—Oh, God what a fracas it was.”

Again, Kevin found himself liking the sound of her voice. Through the windshield he saw the waves coming in higher now, hitting the ledge in front of the marina hard enough to send a spray far into the air, the spray then falling back languidly, the drops sifting through shards of sunlight that still cracked its way between the dark clouds. The inside of his head began to feel as choppy as the surf before him. Don't go, his mind said to Mrs. Kitteridge. Don't go.

But this turbulence in him was torture. He thought how yesterday morning, in New York, as he'd walked to his car, he had for one moment not seen it. And there was that prick of fear, because he'd had it all planned and wrapped up, and where was the car? But there it was, right there, the old Subaru wagon, and then he knew what he'd felt had been hope. Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn't want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. That awful story of the man who jumped—and survived—walking back and forth for an hour on the Golden Gate Bridge, weeping, saying that had anyone stopped to ask why he was weeping, he wouldn't have jumped.

“Mrs. Kitteridge, you have to—”

But she was leaning forward, squinting through the windshield. “Wait, what in
hell—
” And moving faster than he would have thought possible, she was out of the car, the door left open, and had gone to the front of the marina, her black bag left on the grass. For a moment she disappeared, then reappeared, waving her arms, shouting, though he couldn't hear what she was saying.

He stepped from the car, and was surprised by the force of the wind that whipped through his shirt. Mrs. Kitteridge was shouting, “Hurry up! Hurry!” Waving her arms like a huge seagull. He ran to where she was and looked down into the water, the tide higher than he'd have thought. Mrs. Kitteridge pointed with a repeated thrust of her arm, and he saw the head of Patty Howe rise briefly above the choppy water, like a seal's head, her hair wet and darkened, and then she disappeared again, her skirt swirling with the swirling dark ropes of seaweed.

Kevin turned, so that as he slid down the high sheet of rock, his arms were spread as though to hug it, but there was nothing to hug, just the flat scraping against his chest, ripping his clothes, his skin, his cheek, and then the cold water rose over him. It stunned him, how cold the water was, as though he'd been dropped into a huge test tube containing a pernicious chemical eating at his skin. His foot hit something steady in the massive swooshing of the water; he turned and saw her reaching for him, her eyes open, her skirt swirled around her waist; her fingers reached for him, missed, reached for him again, and he got hold of her. The water receded for a moment, and as a wave came back to cover them, he pulled her hard, and her grip on him was so tight he would not have thought it possible with her thin arms that she could hold anything as tightly as she held him.

Again the water rose, they both took a breath; again they were submerged and his leg hooked over something, an old pipe, unmoving. The next time, they both reached their heads high as the water rushed back, another breath taken. He heard Mrs. Kitteridge yelling from above. He couldn't hear the words, but he understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Patty from falling away, and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.

The Piano Player

F
our nights a week Angela O'Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at the Warehouse Bar and Grill. The cocktail lounge, commodious and comfortable with its sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs, and low tables, was right there as soon as you walked through the heavy doors of the old establishment; the dining room was farther back, with windows overlooking the water. Early in the week the lounge tended to be rather empty, but by Wednesday night and continuing straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound of piano notes, tinkling and constant; and the talk of the people who were slung back on their couches, or sitting forward in their chairs, or leaning over the bar seemed to accommodate itself to this, so the piano was not so much “background” music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the townspeople of Crosby, Maine, had for many years now taken into their lives the cocktail music and presence of Angie O'Meara.

Angie, in her youth, had been a lovely woman to look at, with her wavy red hair and perfect skin, and in many ways this was still the case. But now she was into her fifties, and her hair, pinned back loosely with combs, was dyed a color you might consider just a little too red, and her figure, while still graceful, had a thickening of its middle, the more noticeable, perhaps, because she was otherwise quite thin. But she was long-waisted, and when she sat at the piano bench, she did so with the ease of a ballet dancer, albeit past her prime. Her jawline had gone soft and uneven, and the wrinkles near her eyes were quite pronounced. But they were kind wrinkles; nothing harsh—it seemed—had happened to this face. If anything, her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age. There was, in the tilt of her head, the slight messiness of the very bright hair, the open gaze of her blue eyes, a quality that could, in other circumstances, make people uncomfortable. Strangers, for example, who passed her in the Cook's Corner shopping mall were tempted to sneak an extra peek or two. As it was, Angie was a familiar figure to those who lived in town. She was just Angie O'Meara, the piano player, and she had been playing at the Warehouse for many years. She had been in love with the town's first selectman, Malcolm Moody, for a number of years as well. Some people knew this, others did not.

On this particular Friday night, Christmas was a week away, and not far from the baby grand piano stood a large fir tree heavily decorated by the restaurant's staff. Its silver tinsel swung slightly every time the door to the outside was opened, and different-colored lights the size of eggs shone amidst the various balls and strings of popcorn and cranberries that adorned the slightly bent-downward branches of the tree.

Angie was wearing a black skirt and a pink nylon top that parted at her collarbone, and there was something about the tiny string of pearls she wore, and the pink top, and the bright red of her hair that seemed to glow along with the Christmas tree, as if she were some extension of its festivities. She had arrived, as she always did, at precisely six o'clock, smiling her vague, childlike smile, chewing on mints, saying hello to the bartender, Joe, and to Betty, the waitress, then tucking her handbag and coat near the end of the bar. Joe, a thickset man who had tended that bar for many years and had the watchful eye of any good bartender, had come to the private conclusion that Angie O'Meara was really very frightened when she showed up at work each night. This would account for the whiff of booze on her minty breath if you happened to be close enough to smell it, and it accounted for the fact that she never took her twenty-minute break—although she was allowed to by the music union, and encouraged to by the Warehouse owner. “I hate to get started again,” she said to Joe one night, and that's when he put it together, that Angie must have suffered from stage fright.

If she suffered from anything more, it was considered nobody's business. It was the case with Angie that people knew very little about her, assuming at the same time that other people knew her moderately well. She lived in a rented room on Wood Street and did not own a car. She was within walking distance of a grocery store and also the Warehouse Bar and Grill—a walk that took precisely fifteen minutes in her black very-high-heeled shoes. In the winter she wore very-high-heeled black boots, and a white fake fur coat, and carried a little blue pocketbook. She could be seen picking her way carefully along the snow-covered sidewalks, then crossing through the big parking lot by the post office, and finally going down the little walkway toward the bay, where the squatty white clapboard Warehouse sat.

Joe was right when he imagined that Angie suffered from stage fright, and she had years ago learned to begin swallowing vodka at five fifteen, so that by the time she left her room half an hour later, she had to hold the wall as she went down the hall stairs. But the walk cleared her head, while leaving her with enough confidence to make her way to the piano, open the keyboard, sit down, and play. What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room. It was the responsibility of this that frightened her. And it was why she played straight through for three hours, without taking a break, in order to avoid the quiet that would fall over the room, to avoid again the way people smiled at her when she sat down to play; no, she didn't like the attention at all. What she liked was playing the piano. Two bars into the first song, Angie was always happy. For her, it was as though she had slipped inside the music.
We are one,
Malcolm Moody used to say.
Let's become one, Angie—what do you say?

Angie had never taken piano lessons, although people tended not to believe this. So she had stopped telling people this long ago. When she was four years old, she sat down at the piano in the church and began to play, and it didn't surprise her then, or now. “My hands are hungry,” she would say to her mother when she was young, and it was like that—a hunger. The church had given her mother a key, and these days Angie could still go there anytime and play the piano.

Behind her she heard the door open, felt the momentary chill, saw the tinsel on the tree sway, and heard the loud voice of Olive Kitteridge say, “Too damn bad. I like the cold.”

The Kitteridges, when they came alone to the Warehouse, tended to come early and did not sit in the lounge first but went straight through to the dining room. Still, Henry would always call out, “Evening there, Angie,” smiling broadly on his way through, and Olive would wave her hand over her head in a kind of hello. Henry's favorite song was “Good Night, Irene,” and Angie would try to remember to play this later as the Kitteridges walked back through on their way out. Lots of people had favorite songs, and Angie would sometimes play them, but not always. Henry Kitteridge was different. She always played his song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.

Tonight Angie was shaky. There were nights, now, when her vodka did not do what it had done for many years, which was to make her happy and make everything feel pleasantly at a distance. Tonight, as sometimes happened now, she felt a little queer in the head—off-kilter. She made sure to keep a smile on her face and didn't look at anyone except Walter Dalton, who sat at the end of the bar. He blew her a kiss. She winked, a tiny gesture; you would have thought it was a blink except she did it with only one eye.

There was a time when Malcolm Moody loved to see her blink like that. “God, but you get me going,” he'd say on those afternoons he came to her room on Wood Street. Malcolm did not like Walter Dalton and referred to him as a fairy, which he was. Walter was also an alcoholic, and the college had let him go, and now he lived in a house on Coombs Island. Walter came into the bar every night that Angie played. Sometimes he brought her a gift—a silk scarf once, a pair of leather gloves with tiny buttons on the side. He always handed his car keys to Joe, and then after closing, Joe often drove him home, with one of the busboys driving Joe's car to give Joe a drive back.

“What a pathetic life,” Malcolm had said to Angie, about Walter. “Sitting there every night getting stewed.”

Angie didn't like to have people called pathetic, but she didn't say anything. Sometimes, not often, Angie would think that people might call her life with Malcolm pathetic. This would occur to her as she walked down a sunny sidewalk, or it might happen when she woke in the night. It made her heart race, and she would go over in her mind the kinds of things he had said to her over the years. At first he had said, “I think about you all the time.” He still said, “I love you.” Sometimes, “What would I do without you, Angie?” He never bought her gifts and she wouldn't have wanted him to.

She heard the street door open and close, felt the brief chill from the outdoors once again. From the corner of her eye she caught the motion of a man in a dark coat sinking into a chair in the far corner, and there was something in the way he ducked, or moved, that ever so slightly jogged her mind. But she was shaky tonight.

“Dear,” she whispered to Betty, who was moving past with a tray of glasses. “Could you tell Joe I need a little Irish coffee?”

“Sure,” said Betty, a nice girl, small as a child. “No problem.”

She drank it with one hand, still playing the notes of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” and gave a wink to Joe, who nodded gravely. At the end of the night, she would have a drink with Joe and Walter, and she would tell them about visiting her mother in the nursing home today; she might or might not mention the bruises on her mother's arm.

“A request, Angie.” Betty dropped a cocktail napkin on her way past, while she held the tray of drinks in the flat of her uplifted hand; you could see how heavy it was for her by the way she swayed her back as she moved around the chairs. “From that man,” she added, moving her head toward the corner.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” was written on the napkin and Angie kept playing Christmas carols, smiling her smile. She did not look at the man in the corner. She played every Christmas carol she could think of, but she was not inside the music now. Perhaps another drink would help, but the man in the corner was watching and he would know it was not coffee alone in the cup Betty brought her. His name was Simon. He had once been a piano player, too.

Fall on your knees, O hear the angels' voices…. But it was like she had fallen overboard and had to swim through seaweed. The darkness of the man's coat seemed to press against her head, and there was a watery terror that had to do with her mother; get inside, she thought. But she was very shaky. She slowed down, played “The First Noel” quite lightly. She saw a large snowy field now, with a crack of gentle light along the horizon.

When she finished, she did something that really surprised her. Later she had to wonder how long she had been planning this without quite knowing. The way she didn't quite allow herself to know when Malcolm had stopped saying “I think about you all the time.”

Angie took a break.

Delicately, she pressed the cocktail napkin to her lips, slipped out from behind the piano, and walked toward the restroom, where there was a pay phone. She did not want to bother Joe for her pocketbook.

“Darling,” she said quietly to Walter, “do you have some change?”

He stretched out a leg, reached into his pocket, handed her the coins. “You're the candy shop, Angie,” Walter said slurringly.

His hand was moist; even the coins felt moist. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.

She went to the phone and dialed Malcolm's number. Not once, in twenty-two years, had she called him at home, although she had memorized his number long ago. Twenty-two years, she thought, as she listened to the buzz of the ring, would be considered a very long time by most people, but for Angie time was as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it was like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to do.

Malcolm answered the phone. And here was a curious thing—she didn't like the sound of his voice. “Malcolm,” she said softly. “I can't see you anymore. I'm so terribly sorry, but I can't do this anymore.”

Silence. His wife was probably right there. “Bye, now,” she said.

On her way past Walter, she said, “Thank you, darling,” and he said, “Anything for you, Angie.” Walter's voice was thick with drunkenness, his face glistening.

She played the song Simon wanted then, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” but it wasn't until she was almost through that she allowed herself to look at him. He did not return her smile, and a flush went through her.

She smiled at the Christmas tree. The colored lights seemed terribly bright, and for a moment she felt baffled that people did this to trees—decorated them with all that glitter; some people looked forward to this all year. And then another flush of heat rose through her, to think how in a few weeks the tree would be stripped, taken down, hauled out onto the sidewalk with tinsel still sticking to it; she could picture how awkward this tree would look, perched sideways on the snow, its chopped little trunk sticking at an angle in the air.

She began to play “We Shall Overcome,” but somebody from the bar called out, “Hey, a little serious there, Angie,” and so she smiled even more brightly and played ragtime instead. Stupid to play that—to play “We Shall Overcome.” Simon would think it was stupid, she realized that now. “You're so schmaltzy,” he used to say.

But he had said other things. When he took her to lunch with her mother that first time: “You're like a person in a beautiful fairy tale,” he had said, sunlight falling across the table on the deck.