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.

He wondered what in her young life had made her not trust happiness; perhaps her mother’s illness. He said, “You enjoy it, Denise. You have many years of happiness ahead.” Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic—you were made to feel guilty about everything.

“From their very first fever, you never stop worrying.”

he was struck with the unhygienic nature of all these people sipping from the same cup, and struck—with cynicism—at how the priest, after everyone else was done, tilted his beaky head back and drank whatever drops were left.

“States and traits,” Dr. Goldstein had said. “Traits don’t change, states of mind do.”

It was the case with Angie that people knew very little about her, assuming at the same time that other people knew her moderately well.

There were nights, now, when her vodka did not do what it had done for many years, which was to make her happy and make everything feel pleasantly at a distance.

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.

But Henry was pretty irritating himself, with his steadfast way of remaining naïve, as though life were just what a Sears catalogue told you it was: everyone standing around smiling.

“God, I love young people,” Harmon said. “They get griped about enough. People like to think the younger generation’s job is to steer the world to hell. But it’s never true, is it? They’re hopeful and good—and that’s how it should be.”

But he wanted a whole bushel of them—grandchildren spilling everywhere. After all the years of broken collarbones, pimples, hockey sticks, and baseball bats, and ice skates getting lost, the bickering, schoolbooks everywhere, worrying about beer on their breath, waiting to hear the car pulling up in the middle of the night, the girlfriends, the two who’d had no girlfriends. All that had kept Bonnie and him in a state of continual confusion, as though there was always, always, some leak in the house that needed fixing, and there were plenty of times when he’d thought, God, let them just be grown. And then they were.

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.

Only the young, he thought, could withstand the rigors of love.

“All these lives,” she said. “All the stories we never know.”

She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people.

schadenfreude,

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.

Who in the world, this strange and incomprehensible world, did she think she was?

It was good manners to wave to someone in a boat.

And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats—then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water—seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. 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.

You just don’t seem to notice that your actions bring reactions.”

Her one concern was that such daily exercise might make her live longer.

But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.

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