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.

He roared with laughter. And what a sound it was; Olive felt a physical sensation, a thrill. At the very same time she felt terror, as though a match had been lit on her and she had been soaked in oil. The terror, the thrill of his laughter—it was nightmarish, but also as though a huge can she had been stuffed into had just opened.

There was no one she could tell about what had happened, and this knowledge stayed in her and made her feel almost constantly unwell.

Kayley watched as her mother screamed and screamed at her. And then a funny thing happened to Kayley. She stopped caring. Like a switch had gone off inside her. All the fear that had been escalating in her disappeared. She was done; she did not care. Her mother even slapped her across the face, which caused tears to spring to Kayley’s eyes, but she did not care. It was the strangest feeling she had ever had, and the feeling—not her mother—frightened her.

“Olive, where did you put your Christmas tree? By the front window?” “I didn’t have a Christmas tree,” Olive said. She said, “Why in the world would I have a Christmas tree?” Ann raised her eyebrows. “Because it was Christmas?” Olive didn’t care for that. “Not in this house it wasn’t,” she said.

She could not understand what it was about her, but it was about her that had caused this to happen. And it had to have been there for years, maybe all of her life, how would she know? As she sat across from Jack—stunned—she felt as though she had lived her life as though blind.

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.

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

For many years Suzanne had had what she thought of—privately—as a faith of sorts, but this sensation had eluded her for a few years now, and she felt very bad about that.

“You know, it’s not my business, but I wonder if you could see someone, a therapist. There has to be a good therapist in Boston. Just for now while you sort all these things out.” “Oh, Bernie,” said Suzanne. She touched his arm briefly. “I’ve been to a therapist. That’s who I had my stupid affair with.”

She looked through the car window at the charred remains of the house where she had grown up. Try, she thought to herself with a kind of fury, and what she meant was: Try and have a good memory come to you. She could not do it.

Bernie had said to him that day, “But I don’t like this, Roger,” and Roger had just smiled at him and said, “You’re my legal adviser, Bernie, not my priest.” This had always stayed with Bernie, because he thought that a priest also had to hear the sorts of secrets that Bernie had to hear from his clients, but a priest was—ostensibly—pure; Bernie did not feel pure.

But whenever someone says they’re an atheist, I always privately have this bad reaction, and they give all the obvious reasons, you know, kids get cancer, earthquakes kill people, all that kind of stuff. But when I hear them, I think: But you are barking up the wrong tree.” She added, “But I couldn’t say what the right tree is—or how to bark up it.”

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.”

Cindy lay down on the bed and looked through the window at the tops of the trees, the limbs bare, and yet there was that funny little soft sun that sneaks around on a cloud-filled afternoon in February—what was it? The bare branches seemed to reach out, reach out, the opposite of shrinking.

What she would have written about was the light in February. How it changed the way the world looked. People complained about February; it was cold and snowy and oftentimes wet and damp, and people were ready for spring. 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.

there’s not one goddamn person in this world who doesn’t have a bad memory or two to take with them through life.”

there were days I’d have liked to have been dead. But I’m still scared of dying.”

“But we’re both old enough to know things now, and that’s good.” “What things?” “When to shut up, mainly.” “What things do you shut up about?” Cindy asked, and Olive seemed to think about it, and then she said, “Well, for example, when he has his breakfast, I don’t say to him, Jack, why the hell do you have to scrape your bowl so hard.”

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.”

As Denny approached the river, and could see in the moonlight how the river was moving quickly, he felt as though his life had been a piece of bark on that river, just going along, not thinking at all. Headed toward the waterfall.

Denny walked home quickly, and he thought: It was not his children at all. This seemed to come to him clearly. His children had been safe in their childhood home, not like poor Dorie. His children were not on drugs. It was himself about which something was wrong. He had been saddened by the waning of his life, and yet it was not over.

But as he drove along the river without seeing anything except the white line in the road, it returned to him, the fact that Olive was his wife, and that they had had a day together of happiness before seeing Elaine tonight. But it did not feel like happiness that he had experienced with Olive, it felt far away from him now. — And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.

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.

Elaine’s face tonight, he realized, had a coldness to it that had surprised him. Her makeup was too perfect, there was something cold about that. And then he realized: I was cold. So he probably had been attracted to, without recognizing it, this coldness in her. Betsy had not been cold—except to him. But her nature had not been a cold one. She was friendly and people liked her.

“But I’m scared. Or I was. Before the medication.” And now Bob felt frightened. Jimmy, he wanted to say, you can’t get scared, you’re my leader! But he knew—a part of him knew, and oh God it made him sad—that Jim was not his leader anymore.

He recognized now the smallness of her response to a world she did not know or understand;

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. Jim would live the rest of his life as an exile, in New York City. And Bob would live the rest of his life as an exile in Maine. He would always miss Pam, he would always miss New York, even though he would continue to make his yearly visits there. He was exiled here. And the weirdness of this—how life had turned out, for himself, and Jim, and even Pam—made him feel an ocean of sadness sway through him.

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.

“I get lonely when I travel,” Andrea said. Olive wasn’t sure she’d heard this right, but she decided she had, and she thought about it. “Well,” she said, “you were probably always lonely.”

Olive thought her hair might catch on fire from the cigarette in the girl’s hand.

“Olive, you’re the kind of person people want to talk to.” “I don’t know about that,” Olive said, but then she thought that what Edith said was true. “She seemed a lonely child,” Olive said.

she, Olive, was—Andrea was right—lonely. She, Olive Kitteridge, who would not have thought this about herself at all.

For a long time, Olive sat on the bed; she was just looking through the glass at the dark field. 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. How funny. How interesting. She, who always thought that she knew everything that others did not. It just wasn’t true. Henry. This word went through Olive’s mind as she gazed through the window at the darkness. And then: Jack. Who were they, who had they been? And who—who in the world—was she? Olive put one hand to her mouth as she contemplated this.

Mrs. Kitteridge told us, years ago in that math class—I will never forget it—one day she just stopped a math problem she was doing on the board and she turned around and she said to the class, ‘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.’ And I never did forget it. It kind of gave me courage over the years because she was right; I did know who I was.”

In the early mornings, she watched it get light through the window and the sky was astonishing as it changed from pale gray to rose to blue; it backlit the treetops and then penetrated them; Olive really felt astonished by this.

When Olive, walking to the kitchen a few minutes later, looked out the window at the truck that Betty had driven over in and saw on the back of it a bumper sticker for that horrible orange-haired man who was president, she almost died.

Olive wondered if her initial feelings for the man had been because she thought he had saved her 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.

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.

Only then—in a certain way—did Olive fully understand why Christopher lived in New York City. “I guess you’re right,” she said slowly, the pain of this a reticulation spreading through her. And then she thought about Amy. That’s what her slight coolness had been: Amy loved her mother, but she was not close to her. The things that happen in childhood do not go away.