Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

“Not keen on it,” Olive said, when he suggested they have the young couple to dinner. Henry let it drop. This was a time when his son—not yet showing the physical signs of adolescence—had become suddenly and strenuously sullen, his mood like a poison shot through the air, and Olive seemed as changed and changeable as Christopher, the two having fast and furious fights that became just as suddenly some blanket of silent intimacy where Henry, clueless, stupefied, would find himself to be the odd man out.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic—you were made to feel guilty about everything.

The year that followed—was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing that such a thing was foolish to claim about any year of one’s life; but in his memory, that particular year held the sweetness of a time that contained no thoughts of a beginning and no thoughts of an end, and when he drove to the pharmacy in the early morning darkness of winter, then later in the breaking light of spring, the full-throated summer opening before him, it was the small pleasures of his work that seemed in their simplicities to fill him to the brim.

He loved her guilelessness, he loved the purity of her dreams, but this did not mean of course that he was in love with her. The natural reticence of her in fact caused him to desire Olive with a new wave of power. Olive’s sharp opinions, her full breasts, her stormy moods and sudden, deep laughter unfolded within him a new level of aching eroticism, and sometimes when he was heaving in the dark of night, it was not Denise who came to mind but, oddly, her strong, young husband—the fierceness of the young man as he gave way to the animalism of possession—and there would be for Henry Kitteridge a flash of incredible frenzy as though in the act of loving his wife he was joined with all men in loving the world of women, who contained the dark, mossy secret of the earth deep within them.

The rock was still there—and the house, but it had been renovated; a wraparound front porch added, and the old kitchen gone. Of course: they’d have wanted the kitchen gone. A sense of umbrage pricked him, then left. He slowed the car, peering carefully for any signs of children. He saw no bicycles, no swing set, no tree house, no basketball hoop—just a hanging pink impatiens plant by the front door.

Even Freud had said, “We must love or we grow ill.”

Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn’t want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. That awful story of the man who jumped—and survived—walking back and forth for an hour on the Golden Gate Bridge, weeping, saying that had anyone stopped to ask why he was weeping, he wouldn’t have jumped.

She always played his song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.

Not once, in twenty-two years, had she called him at home, although she had memorized his number long ago. Twenty-two years, she thought, as she listened to the buzz of the ring, would be considered a very long time by most people, but for Angie time was as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it was like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to do.

This thought causes Olive to nod her head slowly as she lies on the bed. She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. 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.

“Oh, God, yes,” says Suzanne, her quiet words suddenly distinct. “I couldn’t believe it. I mean that she would really wear it.” The dress, Olive thinks. She pulls herself back against the wall. “Well, people dress differently up here.” By God, we do, Olive thinks. But she is stunned in her underwater way. Seaweed Friend murmurs again. Her voice is difficult to make out, but Olive hears her say, “Chris.” “Very special,” Suzanne answers seriously, and for Olive it is as if these women are sitting in a rowboat above her while she sinks into the murky water. “He’s had a hard time, you know. And being an only child—that really sucked for him.” Seaweed murmurs, and Suzanne’s oar slices through the water again. “The expectations, you know.” Olive turns and gazes slowly around the room. Her son’s bedroom. She built it, and there are familiar things in here, too, like the bureau, and the rug she braided a long time ago. But something stunned and fat and black moves through her.

Derrick had been a pack rat with a sentimental streak. Harmon walked along, leaving his car at the marina, the air like a cold washcloth on his face. Each of his sons had been his favorite child.

“That’s great, Daisy.” He had seen that she’d not been smoking on Sunday mornings, but wasn’t going to mention it. The appetites of the body were private battles.

asseverating

A gift, she thought again, placing her mittened hand lightly on his leg, a gift to be able to know someone for so many years.

Pain, like a pinecone unfolding, seemed to blossom beneath her breastbone.

“He seemed nice to everyone,” Louise said. “That’s his modus operandi.” She laughed lightly. “But in ree-al-it-y”—she spoke with exaggerated enunciation—“his heart beats twice an hour.”

“Oh, hello, Olive,” she says. It has taken Marlene years to stop calling her Mrs. Kitteridge, which is what happens when you have people in school. And of course the opposite is true, which is that Olive continues to see half the town as kids, as she can still see Ed Bonney and Marlene Monroe as young schoolkids, falling in love, walking home day after day from school. When they reached the Crossbow Corners, they would stand and talk, and sometimes Olive would see them there as late as five o’clock, because Marlene had to go one way and Ed the other. Tears have appeared in Marlene’s eyes, and she blinks fast. She leans toward Olive and whispers, “Kerry says nobody likes a crybaby.” “Hells bells,” answers Olive.

these pamphlets, talking about the trips we’d take when he got well.” She rubs her face with both hands. “Gosh, Olive.” Marlene stops and looks at the knife Olive is holding. “Oh, gosh, Olive. I’m so embarrassed.” And it seems she really is; her cheeks are flushing a deep pink, now a deep red. “No need to be,” Olive tells her. “We all want to kill someone at some point.” Olive’s ready right now to say, if Marlene wants to hear, the different people she might like to kill. But Marlene says, “No, not that. Not that. That I sat there with him and we planned those trips.” She tears at the Kleenex, which is pretty well shredded. “Gosh, Olive, it was like we believed it. And there he was, losing weight, so weak—‘Marlene, bring over the basket of trips,’ he’d say, and I would. It makes me so embarrassed now, Olive.” An innocent, Olive thinks, gazing at this woman. A real one. You don’t find them anymore. Boy, you do not.

“John! I never knew such goodness in the world.”

She wants to tell Marlene how she and Henry talked about the grandchildren they would have, the happy Christmases with their nice daughter-in-law. How only a little more than a year ago they would go to Christopher’s house for dinner and the tension would be so thick, you could put your hand against it, and they’d still come home and say to each other what a nice girl she was, how glad they were that Christopher had this nice wife. Who, who, does not have their basket of trips? It isn’t right. Molly Collins said that today, standing out by the church. It isn’t right. Well. It isn’t.

then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life.

Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn’t stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were.