Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

He understood that he was a seventy-four-year-old man who looks back at life and marvels that it unfolded as it did, who feels unbearable regret for all the mistakes made.

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

‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’?” “ ‘A long way from home,’ ” Olive finished. “Yeah, that one,” Ann said. Then Ann said, “But I always felt that way. And now I am.”

The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.

“You’re my legal adviser, Bernie, not my priest.” This

I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to—” Her voice became calm, adultlike. “To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

“One more thing. Now listen to me.” “I’m listening,” Suzanne said. He said, “You hang up and have yourself a good cry. Have a cry like you’ve never had in your life. And when you’re done, get yourself something to eat. I bet you haven’t eaten a thing all day.”

She almost had no preference for any kind of book, and she had sometimes thought that odd; she had read Shakespeare and the thrillers of Sharon McDonald, and biographies of Samuel Johnson and different playwrights, silly romance novels, and also—the poets. She thought, privately, that poets just about sat on the right hand of God.

But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now.

Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was. As Cindy lay on her bed she could see this even now, the gold of the last light opening the world.

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

There were so many things that could not be said,

there was a kind of horrifying beauty to the world: The oak trees held their leaves, golden and shriveled, and the evergreens stood at attention as though cold, but the other trees were bare and dark-limbed, stretching into the sky with dwindling spikiness, and the roads were bare, and the fields were swept clean-looking, everything sort of ghastly and absolutely gorgeous with the sunlight that fell at an angle, never reaching the top of the sky.

And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.

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.

“You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you’re a snob.”

It seemed to her she had never before completely understood how far apart human experience was. She had no idea who Andrea L’Rieux was, and Andrea had no idea who Olive was, either. And yet. And yet. Andrea had gotten it better than she had, the experience of being another.

have had her curlers in, but eventually she cut her hair short and dyed it an orangey-yellow; she still was often knitting—watching separate shows on their televisions, each turning up the volume to drown out the other. But then a few years ago Fergus—right before he retired from the ironworks, where he had been a draftsman—went and got a fancy set of earphones that

“Hello, Lisa! Hello!” And Lisa got out of the car and said, “Hi, Mom,” and they sort of hugged each other, which is what they always did, a sort of half a hug. “Let

but that night she seemed to exude something that Fergus wanted.

‘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.’

life. 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.

“God, Jack,” she thought, “you’re missing a hell of a time.” She felt enormously angry at him for dying. And then she thought: He wasn’t so much, that Jack.

And so, in a way, Olive felt a different layer of bereavement now; Isabelle still had her mother, in some form, and Olive did not. Olive

But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go.

She thought then about Henry, the kindness in his eyes as a young man, and the kindness still there when he was blind from his stroke, the pleasant expression on his face as he sat in that wheelchair, staring. She thought about Jack, his sly smile, and she thought about Christopher. 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.

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.