Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.

And then Olive suddenly thought how she had not been happy even before Henry had his stroke. Why this clarity came to her at that point she did not know. Her knowledge of this unhappiness came to her at times, but usually when she was alone.

Olive did not understand why age had brought with it a

kind of hard-heartedness toward her husband. But it was something she had seemed unable to help, as though the stone wall that had rambled along between them during the course of their long marriage—a stone wall that separated them but also provided unexpected dips of moss-covered warm spots where sunshine would flicker between them in a sudden laugh of understanding—had become tall and unyielding, and not providing flowers in its crannies but some ice storm frozen along it instead.

In other words, something had come between them that seemed insurmountable. She could, on certain days, point out to herself the addition of a boulder here, a pile of rocks there (Christopher’s adolescence, her feelings for that Jim O’Casey fellow so long ago who had taught school with her, Henry’s ludicrous behavior with that Thibodeau girl, the horror of a crime she and Henry had endured together when, under the threat of death, unspeakable things were spoken...

into old age with this high and horrible wall between them. And it was her fault. Because as her heart became more constricted, Henry’s heart became needier, and when he walked up behind her in the house sometimes to slip his arms around her, it was all she could do to not visibly shudder. Stop!, she wanted t...

I spoke to him the night he died. I mean, before he died, of course,” and Suzanne’s saying that made her think: Oh, I’m really not right in the head. She said, “I think I’m not right in my head. Not like my mother being crazy, just everything—”

Bernie raised his large hand. “I know what you’re saying. You’re fine. You’re under stress. You’re not crazy, Suzanne. Of course you feel you’re not right in your head.” Oh, she loved him, this man.

These words rolled over Suzanne with a swiftness, as though something true had been said but she couldn’t catch it.

A tentative earnestness spread through Bernie now. He felt as though he had been called upon to give something of himself that was far outside his purview as a lawyer, and it was something he had never given to anyone, except his wife, vaguely, years ago. “Okay,” he said. “The ‘but’ is this: But do I have faith? I do. The problem is, I can’t describe it. But it’s a faith of sorts. It is a faith.”

“But it’s never starting over, Cindy, it’s just continuing on.”

Here is the thing that Cindy, for the rest of her life, would never forget: Olive Kitteridge said, “My God, but I have always loved the light in February.” Olive shook her head slowly. “My God,” she repeated, with awe in her voice. “Just look at that February light.”

What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his

life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself.

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.

“Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.” Olive drummed her fingers on the tabletop, then put the muffin piece into her mouth. After she swallowed, she repeated, “Just a needle in your goddamn heart.”

“When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.” Andrea looked at her searchingly. “Tell me how it’s freeing.” “Well.” Olive was slightly taken aback; she didn’t know how to explain it. “It’s just that you don’t count anymore, and there is something freeing about that.”

Olive said, “I don’t think I can explain this well. But you go through life and you think you’re something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something. And then you see”—and Olive shrugged in the direction of the girl who had served the coffee—“that you no longer are anything. To a waitress with a huge hind end, you’ve become invisible. And it’s freeing.”

All the way home she told Jack about what had happened; it was Jack, her second husband, whom she seemed to want to tell this to.

“I just plain goddamn love you.” “Why?” she asked. “Because you’re Olive.” “You just said I was too much Olive.” “Olive. Shut up. Shut up, and marry me.”

Eight years they’d had together, as quickly over as an avalanche, and yet—horrible—she thought of him at times as her real

husband. Henry had been her first, and then Jack had been her real one. Horrible thought, and it could not be true.

Jack’s voice: “You’re a snob, Olive. You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Well, you’re a snob, my dear.”

Olive had approached Andrea L’Riuex that day at the marina because the girl was famous. That’s why she had sat herself down and talked to her like she knew her. If Andrea L’Rieux had never become the Poet Laureate of the United States, if she had just been what Olive would have expected of her—another woman with children and sort of happy and mostly unhappy (her sad-faced

faced walks)—then Olive would never have approached her. She hadn’t even liked the girl’s poetry, except for the line about the darkness and the red leaves. But she had sat down across from her because she was famous....

‘You all know who you are. If you just look at yourself and listen to yourself, you know exactly who you are. And don’t forget it.’

Maybe you fall in love with people who save your life, even when you think it’s not worth saving.

For the next week Olive could not stop feeling dread. She felt it when she went to bed, she felt it as soon as she woke. She felt dread in the afternoon when she sat and read her book. It did not abate, it got worse. And then she understood that it was true terror she felt, a different sort of terror than when Jack had died, or Henry. In those cases she had been filled with terror, but now terror sat next to her.

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.

For Betty to have carried in her heart this love for Jerry Skyler, what did that mean? It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much.