Olive Kitteridge Page 11

  You started to expect things at a certain age. Harmon knew that. You worried about heart attacks, cancer, the cough that turned into a ferocious pneumonia. You could even expect to have a kind of midlife crisis—but there was nothing to explain what he felt was happening to him, that he’d been put into a transparent plastic capsule that rose off the ground and was tossed and blown and shaken so fiercely that he could not possibly find his way back to the quotidian pleasures of his past life. Desperately, he did not want this. And yet, after that morning at Daisy’s, when Nina had cried, and Daisy had gotten on the phone, making arrangements for the parents to come and get her—after that morning, the sight of Bonnie made him feel cold.

  The house felt like a damp, unlit cave. He noticed how Bonnie never asked him how things were at the store—perhaps after all these years, she didn’t need to ask. Without wanting to, he began to keep score. A whole week might go by when she asked him nothing more personal than if he “had any thoughts about dinner.”

  One night he said, “Bonnie, do you know my favorite song?”

  She was reading and didn’t look up. “What?”

  “I said—Do you know my favorite song?”

  Now she looked at him over the tops of her glasses. “And I said, what? What is it?”

  “So you don’t know?”

  She put her glasses onto her lap. “Am I supposed to know? Is this twenty questions?”

  “I know yours—‘Some Enchanted Evening.’ ”

  “Is that my favorite song? I didn’t know.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Bonnie shrugged, put her glasses back on, looked at her book. “ ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.’ Last time I checked, that was yours.”

  When would be the last time she checked? He barely remembered that song. He was going to say, “No—it’s ‘Fools Rush In.’ ” But she turned the page, and he didn’t say anything.

  On Sundays he visited Daisy, sitting on the couch. They spoke frequently of Nina. She was in a program for eating disorders, and having private psychotherapy, and family therapy, too. Daisy was in touch with the girl by phone, and frequently spoke to her mother. Talking all this over, Harmon sometimes felt that Nina was their child, his and Daisy’s—that every aspect of her well-being was their great concern. When she gained weight, they broke a doughnut in half, and touched it together as a toast. “To doughnut breakers,” Harmon said. “To Muffin Luke.”

  When he was in town, it seemed he saw couples everywhere; arms tucked against the other in sweet intimacy; he felt he saw light flash from their faces, and it was the light of life, people were living. How much longer would he live? In theory, he could live twenty more years, even thirty, but he doubted that he would. And why would he want to, unless he was altogether healthy? Look at Wayne Roote, only a couple years older than Harmon, and his wife had to tape a note to the television saying what day it was. Cliff Mott, just a ticking bomb waiting to go off, all those arteries plugged. Harry Coombs’d had a stiff neck, and was dead from lymphoma by the end of last year.

  “What will you do for Thanksgiving?” Harmon asked Daisy.

  “I’ll go to my sister’s. It’ll be fine. And what about you? Will all the boys be home?”

  He shook his head. “We have to drive three hours to have it with Kevin’s in-laws.” As it turned out, Derrick didn’t come, choosing to go to his girlfriend’s instead. The other boys were there, but it wasn’t their house, and seeing them was almost like visiting relatives, not sons.

  “Christmas will be better,” Daisy promised. She showed him a gift she was sending Nina—a pillow cross-stitched with the words I AM LOVED. “Don’t you think that might help her, to glance at that sometimes?”

  “That’s nice,” Harmon said.

  “I spoke to Olive, and I’m signing the card from the three of us.”

  “That’s very nice, Daisy.”

  He asked Bonnie if she wanted to make popcorn balls for Christmas. “God in heaven, no,” Bonnie said. “Whenever your mother made those, I thought my teeth would come out.” For 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. Derrick came home for two days; he helped his father chop down a Christmas tree, helped him put it up, and then the day after Christmas, he left to go skiing with some friends. Kevin was not as jovial as Harmon remembered him; he seemed grown-up and serious, and maybe a little bit afraid of Martha, who wouldn’t eat the carrot soup when she found it had been made with a chicken stock base. The other boys watched sports on television, and went off to visit their girlfriends in towns far away. It occurred to Harmon it would be years before they had a house full of grandchildren.

  On New Year’s, he and Bonnie were in bed by ten. He said, “I don’t know, Bonnie. The holidays made me kind of blue this year.”

  She said, “Well, the boys have grown up, Harmon. They have their own lives.”

  One afternoon at work, when the store was especially slow, he called Les Washburn and asked if the place he had rented to the Burnham boy was still empty. Les said it was, he wasn’t renting to kids again. Tim Burnham had left town, which Harmon hadn’t known. “Went off with a different girl, not that pretty hellion who was sick.”

  “Before you rent it to anyone,” Harmon said, “just let me know, would you? I might be looking for a work space.”

  Then one day in January, when there had been one of those days of midwinter thaw, the snow melting for just a few moments, making the sidewalks wet and the fenders of cars sparkle, Daisy called him at the store. “Can you stop by?” she asked.

  Olive Kitteridge’s car was in Daisy’s little driveway, and when he saw it, he knew. Inside, Daisy was crying and making tea, and Olive Kitteridge was sitting at the table not crying, tapping a spoon against the table relentlessly. “That goddamn know-it-all daughter-in-law of mine,” she said. “To hear her talk, you’d think she was an expert on every goddamn thing. She said, ‘Olive, you couldn’t really have expected her to get well. People with that disease never actually get over it.’ And I said to her, ‘Well, they don’t all die, Suzanne,’ and she said, ‘Well, Olive, many of them actually do.’ ”

  “The funeral’s private,” Daisy told Harmon. “Just the family.”

  He nodded.

  “She was taking laxatives,” Daisy said, putting a cup of tea in front of him, wiping at her nose with a tissue. “Her mother found them in a drawer in her room, and it made sense, I guess, because she’d stopped gaining the few ounces she’d been gaining. And so she went into the hospital on Thursday—” Here Daisy had to sit down and put her face into her hands.

  “It was an awful scene,” Olive told him. “From what the mother described. Nina didn’t want to go, of course. They had to call people, get officials involved, and off she went kicking and biting.”

  “Poor little thing,” said Daisy.

  “She had the heart attack last night,” Olive said to Harmon. Olive shook her head, slapped lightly at the table with her hand. “For the love of Jesus,” she said.

  It had been dark a long while by the time he left.

  “Where in the world have you been?” Bonnie said. “Your supper’s all cold.”

  He didn’t answer, just sat down. “I’m not that hungry, Bonnie. I’m sorry.”

  “You better tell me where you’ve been.”

  “Driving around,” he said. “I told you I’ve been kind of blue.”

  Bonnie sat down across from him. “Your being so blue makes me feel awful. And I don’t feel like feeling awful.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Kevin called him at the store a few mornings later. “You busy, Dad? Got a minute?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to know if you’re okay, if everything’s okay.”

  Harmon watched Bessie Davis looking through the lightbulbs. “Sure, son. Why?”

  “I wa
s thinking you seemed a little depressed these days. Not yourself.”

  “No, no. Swimmingly, Kevin.” A phrase they’d used since Kevin had learned to swim late, when he was almost a teenager.

  “Martha thinks you might be mad because of Christmas and the carrot soup.”

  “Oh, Jesus, no.” He saw Bessie turn, walk down toward the brooms. “Is that what your mother said?”

  “No one said anything. I was just wondering.”

  “Has your mother been complaining to you?”

  “No, Dad. I just told you. It’s me. Wondering, that’s all.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Harmon said. “I’m just fine. And you?”

  “Swimmingly. Okay. Stay cool.”

  Bessie Davis, the town’s old maid, stood and talked for a long time while she bought a new dustpan. She spoke of her hip problems, her bursitis. She spoke of her sister’s thyroid condition. “Hate this time of year,” she said, shaking her head. Harmon felt a rush of anxiety as she left. Some skin that had stood between himself and the world seemed to have been ripped away, and everything was close, and frightening. Bessie Davis had always talked on, but now he saw her loneliness as a lesion on her face. The words Not me, not me crossed over his mind. And he pictured the sweet Nina White sitting on Tim Burnham’s lap outside the marina, and he thought, Not you, not you, not you.

  On Sunday morning, the sky had a low overcast, and the lights in Daisy’s living room glowed from beneath the little lamp shades. “Daisy, I’m just going to say this. I don’t want you to answer, or in any way feel responsible. This is not because of anything you’ve done. Except be you.” He waited, looked around the room, looked into her blue eyes, and said, “I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  He felt so certain of what was coming, her kindness, her tender refusal, that he was amazed when he felt her soft arms around him, saw the tears in her eyes, felt her mouth on his.

  He paid the rent to Les Washburn from their savings account. How soon before Bonnie would notice, he couldn’t say. But he thought he had a few months. What was he waiting for? The labor pains to squeeze so hard his new life would shoot forth? By February, as the slow opening of the world began once more—the air having a lightness of smell at times, the extra minutes of daylight as the sun lingered across a snow-covered field and made it violet in color—Harmon was afraid. What had begun—not when they were “fuck buddies,” but as a sweet interest in the other—questions probing the old memories, a shaft of love moving toward his heart, sharing the love and grief of Nina’s brief life, all this was now, undeniably, a ferocious and full-blown love, and his heart itself seemed to know this. He thought it beat irregularly. Sitting in his La-Z-Boy, he could hear it, feel it pulsing right behind his ribs. It seemed to be warning him in its heavy pounding, that it would not be able to continue like this. Only the young, he thought, could withstand the rigors of love. Except for little cinnamon-colored Nina; and it seemed all inside out, backward to forward, that he had been handed the baton by her. Never, never, never give up.

  He went to the doctor he’d known for years. The doctor stuck metal disks onto his bare chest, wires attached to each one. Harmon’s heart showed no signs of trouble. As he sat in front of the doctor’s big wooden desk, he told the man he perhaps was going to leave his marriage. The doctor said quietly, “No, no, this is no good,” but it was the doctor’s body, the sudden way he moved the folders on his desk, the way he moved back from Harmon, that Harmon would always remember. As though he had known what Harmon didn’t know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

  But there was no telling Harmon anything. There is no telling anyone anything when they have been infected this way. He was waiting now—living in the hallucinatory world of Daisy Foster’s generous body—waiting for the day, and he knew it would come, when he left Bonnie or when she kicked him out; he didn’t know which of the two would happen, but it would—waiting like Muffin Luke for open-heart surgery, not knowing if he would die on the table, or live.

  A Different Road

  An awful thing happened to the Kitteridges on a chilly night in June. At the time, Henry was sixty-eight, Olive sixty-nine, and while they were not an especially youthful couple, there was nothing about them that gave the appearance of being old, or ill. Still, after a year had gone by, people in this small New England coastal town of Crosby agreed: Both Kitteridges were changed by the event. Henry, if you met him at the post office now, only lifted his mail as a hello. When you looked into his eyes, it was like seeing him through a screened-in porch. Sad, because he had always been an open-faced and cheerful man, even when his only son had—out of the blue—moved to California with his new wife, something people in town understood had been a great disappointment for the Kitteridges. And while Olive Kitteridge had never in anyone’s memory felt inclined to be affable, or even polite, she seemed less so now as this particular June rolled around. Not a chilly June this year, but one that showed up with the suddenness of summer, days of dappled sunlight falling through the birch trees, making the people of Crosby uncharacteristically chatty at times.

  Why else would Cynthia Bibber have approached Olive in the shopping mall out at Cook’s Corner to explain how Cynthia’s daughter, Andrea, who after years of evening classes had earned a social work degree, thought maybe Henry and Olive hadn’t been able to absorb the experience they’d had last year? Panic, when it wasn’t expressed, became internalized—and that, Cynthia Bibber was saying, in an earnest half whisper, as she stood next to a plastic ficus tree, could lead to a depressive situation.

  “I see,” said Olive loudly. “Well, you tell Andrea that’s pretty impressive.” Olive, years ago, had taught math at the Crosby Junior High School, and while her emotions at times had attached themselves fiercely to particular students, Andrea Bibber had never seemed to her to be anything more than a small, dull, asseverating mouse. Like her mother, Olive thought, glancing past her at the silk daffodils that were stuck in rows of fake straw by the benches near the frozen yogurt place.

  “It’s a specialty now,” Cynthia Bibber was saying.

  “What is?” asked Olive, considering the possibility of some frozen chocolate yogurt if this woman would move on.

  “Crisis counseling,” said Cynthia. “Even before nine-eleven”—she shifted a package under her arm—“but when there’s a crash, or a school shooting, or anything nowadays, they bring in psychologists right off the bat. People can’t process this stuff on their own.”

  “Huh.” Olive glanced down at the woman, who was short and small-boned. Olive, big, solidly built, towered over her.

  “People have noticed a change in Henry,” Cynthia said. “And you, too. And it’s just a thought that crisis counseling might have helped. Could still help. Andrea has her own practice, you know—gone in with another woman part-time.”

  “I see,” said Olive again, quite loudly this time. “Aren’t they ugly words, Cynthia, that those people think up—process, internalize, depressive whatever. It’d make me depressive to go around saying those words all day.” She held up the plastic bag she carried. “D’you see the sale they’re having at So-Fro?”

  In the parking lot she couldn’t find her keys and had to dump the contents of her pocketbook out onto the sun-baked hood of the car. At the stop sign she said, “Oh, hells bells to you,” into the rearview mirror when a man in a red truck honked his horn, then she pulled into traffic, and the bag from the fabric store slid onto the floor, a corner of denim material poking out onto the gravelly mat. “Andrea Bibber wants us to make an appointment for crisis counseling,” she’d have said in the old days, and it was easy to picture Henry’s big eyebrows drawing together as he stood up from weeding the peas. “Godfrey, Ollie,” he’d have answered, the bay spread out behind him and seagulls flapping their wings above a lobster boat. “Imagine.” He might even have put his head back to laugh the way he did sometimes, it would have been that funny.

  Olive merged onto the highway
, which was how she’d gotten home from the mall ever since Christopher had moved to California. She didn’t care to drive by the house with its lovely lines, and the big bowed window where the Boston fern had done so well. Out here by Cook’s Corner the highway went along the river, and today the water was shimmery and the leaves of poplars fluttered, showing the paler green of their undersides. Maybe, even in the old days, Henry wouldn’t have laughed about Andrea Bibber. You could be wrong thinking you knew what people would do. “Bet you anything,” Olive said out loud, as she looked over at the shining river, the sweet ribbon of it there beyond the guardrails. What she meant was: Bet you anything Andrea Bibber has a different idea of crisis than I do. “Yup, yup,” she said. Weeping willows were down there on the bank, their swooping, airy boughs a light, bright green.

  She had needed to go to the bathroom. “I need to go to the bathroom,” she had said to Henry that night as they were pulling into the town of Maisy Mills. Henry had told her, pleasantly, she’d have to wait.

  “Ay-yuh,” she had said, pronouncing the word with exaggeration in order to make fun of her mother-in-law, Pauline, dead for some years, who used to say that in response to anything she didn’t want to hear. “Ay-yuh,” Olive had repeated. “Tell my insides,” she added, shifting slightly in the darkened car. “Good Lord, Henry. I’m about ready to explode.”

  But the truth was, they had had a pleasant evening. Earlier, farther up the river, they had met their friends Bill and Bunny Newton, and had gone to a restaurant recently opened, enjoying themselves a good deal. The mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat were marvelous, and all evening the waiters bowed politely, filling water glasses before the water had gone halfway down.

  More gratifying, however, was the fact that for Olive and Henry the story of Bill and Bunny’s offspring was worse than their own. Both couples had only the one child, and Karen Newton—the Kitteridges privately agreed—had created a different level of sadness for her parents. Even if Karen did live next door to Bill and Bunny and they got to see her, and her family, all the time. Last year Karen had carried on a brief affair with a man who worked for Midcoast Power, but decided in the end to stay in her marriage. All this, of course, worried the Newtons profoundly, even though they had never cared a great deal for their son-in-law, Eddie.