Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

The moored sailboats now were heaving their bows high, then swooping back down as though pulled by an angry underwater creature.

No, what Suzanne was mistaking for knowing someone was knowing sex with that person for a couple of weeks.

some reason, this made Harmon laugh, the long familiarity of his wife’s voice—and when she laughed with him, he felt a splintering of love and comfort and pain spread through him.

She took a deep, quiet breath and thought how she did not envy those young girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too.

“Oh,” said Louise, laughing softly. “You came here for a nice dose of schadenfreude, and it didn’t work.” She sang, “Saaaaw-ry.”

Who, who, does not have their basket of trips?

And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child—that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else’s home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one’s own.