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Bob glanced out the window at the field they were passing with the rocks in it; the grass was a vivid green, and the sun poured over the whole thing. “Everything worked out, Jimmy.” He looked over at his brother. Jim looked at the road in front of him. “Okay,” he said.
“What do you think?” Helen asked, eagerly, almost breathlessly, and Bob said it was amazing. “Really something,” he said. “You don’t like it,” Helen answered, and Bob had said that wasn’t true at all, but it was true.
And Bob felt a swift swoop of desolation; he could not remember ever speaking to his brother like that, or having Jim respond with an apology as he just had.
Bob said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. But a quiet sense of almost-unreality seemed to come to him, and he thought the word “prejudice,” and he understood that he needed to drive carefully, and so he did, and then they reached the hospital.
Inside Bob moved a sadness he had not felt in years. He had missed his brother—his brother!—and his brother had missed Maine. But his brother was married to a woman who hated Maine, and Bob understood that they would not come up here again.
He ached, as though he had walked far longer than his body could walk, his whole entire body ached, and he thought: My soul is aching. And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect: This was true for Jim and Helen, and for Margaret and himself, as well.
The world sparkled, and the yellows and reds, and orange and pale pinks, were just splendid for anyone driving down the road out to the bay. Olive could see this without driving; from her front door she saw the woods, and every morning when she opened the door she was aware of the beauty of the world.
But here was the world, screeching its beauty at her day after day, and she felt grateful for it.
It seemed to her she had never before completely understood how far apart human experience was.
They had been married for forty-two years, and for the last thirty-five they had barely spoken to each other. But they still shared the house. In his youth, Mr. MacPherson—his name was Fergus—had had an affair with a neighbor; back then there was no forgiveness and no divorce. So they were stuck together in their house.
In truth, Fergus’s enthusiasm for this entire thing had been waning, but he knew his wife laughed at him for partaking in it, and so he continued to do so.
Ethel watched her daughter bring in her little suitcase, and then Ethel said, “You’re in love.” It’s because of how Lisa looked that her mother said this; there was an extra layer of beauty to her face. “Oh, Mom,” said Lisa, closing the door behind her.
He had felt like throwing stones at them, but of course he did not, and he noticed as the years went by that this sort of thing happened much less frequently and so he had his own private theory that people were becoming more tolerant—about a man wearing a kilt, anyway, if not more tolerant about the mess in the country—and this pleased him.
“Anita,” Fergus said, turning to her. “This is a hell of a world we live in.” “Oh, I know,” Anita said casually. She nodded. “Yuh, I know.” She added, “Always has been, I suspect.” “Do you think so?” Fergus asked. He looked at her through his sunglasses. “Do you think it has always been this bad, really? It seems to me like things are getting crazier.” Anita shrugged. “I think they’ve always been crazy. That’s my view.”
Betty shifted her rump on the chair and said, “You told me we weren’t going to discuss politics.” “Damn right,” said Olive. “And that woman is not politics. She’s a person, and she has every right to be here.”
Maybe you fall in love with people who save your life, even when you think it’s not worth saving.
And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary.
About the typewriter, Olive felt almost happy. She liked the sound it made, she liked the fact that she could slip in a piece of paper and have it come out—without that damned blinking printer!—and she liked stacking the papers up.
When Olive returned to her apartment she didn’t write up any memories; she just sat in the chair and watched her birds at the feeder outside her window and thought that she was not unhappy.
The truth is, Olive, Amy is good to me, but she does live in Iowa, and I sometimes think when a child moves that far away they’re really trying to get away from something, and in this case I suspect it’s me.”
“I don’t think my mother ever really liked me. I guess she loved me, but I don’t know if she liked me.”
She had been lucky, she supposed. She had been loved by two men, and that had been a lucky thing; without luck, why would they have loved her? But they had. And her son seemed to have come around. It was herself, she realized, that did not please her.
Leaning forward, poking at the keys, she typed one sentence. Then she typed one more. She pulled the sheet of paper out and placed it carefully on top of her pile of memories; the words she had just written reverberated in her head. I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.
