Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.

How could he ever tell her—he could not—that all these years of feeling guilty about Denise have carried with them the kernel of still having her? He cannot even bear this thought, and in a moment it will be gone, dismissed as not true. For who could bear to think of himself this way, as a man deflated by the good fortune of others? No, such a thing is ludicrous.

Relief came, arriving as a sensation beneath his ribs, like a gentle lapping of the water’s edge at low tide, a comforting quiescence.

oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.

You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn’t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

felt she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late.

All afternoon Olive has been fighting the sensation of moving underwater—a panicky, dismal feeling, since she has somehow never managed to learn to swim.

When you build a house yourself, you’re going to have a different feeling about it than other people do.

Of course, right now their sex life is probably very exciting, and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they’re finished with loneliness, too.

Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as “big bursts” and “little bursts.” Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee’s, let’s say, or the waitress at Dunkin’ Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

so badly at times that a few months ago it almost gave out, gave up altogether?

Christopher doesn’t need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything. Nobody knows everything—they shouldn’t think they do.

that had made Olive feel sick the way she felt now. But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other.

It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.

“And they said it was normal to feel angry. God, people are stupid. Why in hell should I feel angry? We all know this stuff is coming. Not many are lucky enough to just drop dead in their sleep.”

Now his handsome hand was the hand of a man half-dead. He had dreaded this, as all people did. Why it should have been his fate,

You will marry a beast and love her, Olive thought. You will have a son and love him. You will be endlessly kind to townspeople as they come to you for medicine, tall in your white lab coat. You will end your days blind and mute in a wheelchair. That will be your life.

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

It was ludicrous, as well, to think that Henry would die because she had told him he could. Who in the world, this strange and incomprehensible world, did she think she was?

She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son’s life.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did.

Her one concern was that such daily exercise might make her live longer. Let it be quick, she thought now, meaning her death—a thought she had several times a day.

They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.

And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either.

It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.