Olive Kitteridge Read online

  “Goodness,” Olive said, when he moved off her.

  In college, Henry Thibodeau had played football, just as Henry Kitteridge had. “Wasn’t it great?” the young Henry asked him one day. He had arrived early to pick Denise up, and had come into the store. “Hearing the people yelling from the stands? Seeing that pass come right at you and knowing you’re going to catch it? Oh boy, I loved that.” He grinned, his clear face seeming to give off a refracted light. “Loved it.”

  “I suspect I wasn’t nearly as good as you,” said Henry Kitteridge. He had been good at the running, the ducking, but he had not been aggressive enough to be a really good player. It shamed him to remember that he had felt fear at every game. He’d been glad enough when his grades slipped and he had to give it up.

  “Ah, I wasn’t that good,” said Henry Thibodeau, rubbing a big hand over his head. “I just liked it.”

  “He was good,” said Denise, getting her coat on. “He was really good. The cheerleaders had a cheer just for him.” Shyly, with pride, she said, “Let’s go, Thibodeau, let’s go.”

  Heading for the door, Henry Thibodeau said, “Say, we’re going to have you and Olive for dinner soon.”

  “Oh, now—you’re not to worry.”

  Denise had written Olive a thank-you note in her neat, small handwriting. Olive had scanned it, flipped it across the table to Henry. “Handwriting’s just as cautious as she is,” Olive had said. “She is the plainest child I have ever seen. With her pale coloring, why does she wear gray and beige?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, agreeably, as though he had wondered himself. He had not wondered.

  “A simpleton,” Olive said.

  But Denise was not a simpleton. She was quick with numbers, and remembered everything she was told by Henry about the pharmaceuticals he sold. She had majored in animal sciences at the university, and was conversant with molecular structures. Sometimes on her break she would sit on a crate in the back room with the Merck Manual on her lap. Her child-face, made serious by her glasses, would be intent on the page, her knees poked up, her shoulders slumped forward.

  Cute, would go through his mind as he glanced through the doorway on his way by. He might say, “Okay, then, Denise?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

  His smile would linger as he arranged his bottles, typed up labels. Denise’s nature attached itself to his as easily as aspirin attached itself to the enzyme COX-2; Henry moved through his day pain free. The sweet hissing of the radiators, the tinkle of the bell when someone came through the door, the creaking of the wooden floors, the ka-ching of the register: He sometimes thought in those days that the pharmacy was like a healthy autonomic nervous system in a workable, quiet state.

  Evenings, adrenaline poured through him. “All I do is cook and clean and pick up after people,” Olive might shout, slamming a bowl of beef stew before him. “People just waiting for me to serve them, with their faces hanging out.” Alarm made his arms tingle.

  “Perhaps you need to help out more around the house,” he told Christopher.

  “How dare you tell him what to do? You don’t even pay enough attention to know what he’s going through in social studies class!” Olive shouted this at him while Christopher remained silent, a smirk on his face. “Why, Jim O’Casey is more sympathetic to the kid than you are,” Olive said. She slapped a napkin down hard against the table.

  “Jim teaches at the school, for crying out loud, and sees you and Chris every day. What is the matter with social studies class?”

  “Only that the goddamn teacher is a moron, which Jim understands instinctively,” Olive said. “You see Christopher every day, too. But you don’t know anything because you’re safe in your little world with Plain Jane.”

  “She’s a good worker,” Henry answered. But in the morning the blackness of Olive’s mood was often gone, and Henry would be able to drive to work with a renewal of the hope that had seemed evanescent the night before. In the pharmacy there was goodwill toward men.

  Denise asked Jerry McCarthy if he planned on going to college. “I dunno. Don’t think so.” The boy’s face colored—perhaps he had a little crush on Denise, or perhaps he felt like a child in her presence, a boy still living at home, with his chubby wrists and belly.

  “Take a night course,” Denise said, brightly. “You can sign up right after Christmas. Just one course. You should do that.” Denise nodded, and looked at Henry, who nodded back.

  “It’s true, Jerry,” Henry said, who had never given a great deal of thought to the boy. “What is it that interests you?”

  The boy shrugged his big shoulders.

  “Something must interest you.”

  “This stuff.” The boy gestured toward the boxes of packed pills he had recently brought through the back door.

  And so, amazingly, he had signed up for a science course, and when he received an A that spring, Denise said, “Stay right there.” She returned from the grocery store with a little boxed cake, and said, “Henry, if the phone doesn’t ring, we’re going to celebrate.”

  Pushing cake into his mouth, Jerry told Denise he had gone to mass the Sunday before to pray he did well on the exam.

  This was the kind of thing that surprised Henry about Catholics. He almost said, God didn’t get an A for you, Jerry; you got it for yourself, but Denise was saying, “Do you go every Sunday?”

  The boy looked embarrassed, sucked frosting from his finger. “I will now,” he said, and Denise laughed, and Jerry did, too, his face pink and glowing.

  Autumn now, November, and so many years later that when Henry runs a comb through his hair on this Sunday morning, he has to pluck some strands of gray from the black plastic teeth before slipping the comb back into his pocket. He gets a fire going in the stove for Olive before he goes off to church. “Bring home the gossip,” Olive says to him, tugging at her sweater while she peers into a large pot where apples are burbling in a stew. She is making applesauce from the season’s last apples, and the smell reaches him briefly—sweet, familiar, it tugs at some ancient longing—before he goes out the door in his tweed jacket and tie.

  “Do my best,” he says. No one seems to wear a suit to church anymore.

  In fact, only a handful of the congregation goes to church regularly anymore. This saddens Henry, and worries him. They have been through two ministers in the last five years, neither one bringing much inspiration to the pulpit. The current fellow, a man with a beard, and who doesn’t wear a robe, Henry suspects won’t last long. He is young with a growing family, and will have to move on. What worries Henry about the paucity of the congregation is that perhaps others have felt what he increasingly tries to deny—that this weekly gathering provides no real sense of comfort. When they bow their heads or sing a hymn, there is no sense anymore—for Henry—that God’s presence is blessing them. Olive herself has become an unapologetic atheist. He does not know when this happened. It was not true when they were first married; they had talked of animal dissections in their college biology class, how the system of respiration alone was miraculous, a creation by a splendid power.

  He drives over the dirt road, turning onto the paved road that will take him into town. Only a few leaves of deep red remain on the otherwise bare limbs of the maples; the oak leaves are russet and wrinkled; briefly through the trees is the glimpse of the bay, flat and steel-gray today with the overcast November sky.

  He passes by where the pharmacy used to be. In its place now is a large chain drugstore with huge glass sliding doors, covering the ground where both the old pharmacy and grocery store stood, large enough so that the back parking lot where Henry would linger with Denise by the dumpster at day’s end before getting into their separate cars—all this is now taken over by a store that sells not only drugs, but huge rolls of paper towels and boxes of all sizes of garbage bags. Even plates and mugs can be bought there, spatulas, cat food. The trees off to the side have been cut down to make a parking lot. You get used to things, he thinks,
without getting used to things.

  It seems a very long time ago that Denise stood shivering in the winter cold before finally getting into her car. How young she was! How painful to remember the bewilderment on her young face; and yet he can still remember how he could make her smile. Now, so far away in Texas—so far away it’s a different country—she is the age he was then. She had dropped a red mitten one night; he had bent to get it, held the cuff open and watched while she’d slipped her small hand in.

  The white church sits near the bare maple trees. He knows why he is thinking of Denise with this keenness. Her birthday card to him did not arrive last week, as it has, always on time, for the last twenty years. She writes him a note with the card. Sometimes a line or two stands out, as in the one last year when she mentioned that Paul, a freshman in high school, had become obese. Her word. “Paul has developed a full-blown problem now—at three hundred pounds, he is obese.” She does not mention what she or her husband will do about this, if in fact they can “do” anything. The twin girls, younger, are both athletic and starting to get phone calls from boys “which horrifies me,” Denise wrote. She never signs the card “love,” just her name in her small neat hand, “Denise.”

  In the gravel lot by the church, Daisy Foster has just stepped from her car, and her mouth opens in a mock look of surprise and pleasure, but the pleasure is real, he knows—Daisy is always glad to see him. Daisy’s husband died two years ago, a retired policeman who smoked himself to death, twenty-five years older than Daisy; she remains ever lovely, ever gracious with her kind blue eyes. What will become of her, Henry doesn’t know. It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men. The possibility of Olive’s dying and leaving him alone gives him glimpses of horror he can’t abide.

  And then his mind moves back to the pharmacy that is no longer there.

  “Henry’s going hunting this weekend,” Denise said one morning in November. “Do you hunt, Henry?” She was getting the cash drawer ready and didn’t look up at him.

  “Used to,” Henry answered. “Too old for it now.” The one time in his youth when he had shot a doe, he’d been sickened by the way the sweet, startled animal’s head had swayed back and forth before its thin legs had folded and it had fallen to the forest floor. “Oh, you’re a softie,” Olive had said.

  “Henry goes with Tony Kuzio.” Denise slipped the cash drawer into the register, and stepped around to arrange the breath mints and gum that were neatly laid out by the front counter. “His best friend since he was five.”

  “And what does Tony do now?”

  “Tony’s married with two little kids. He works for Midcoast Power, and fights with his wife.” Denise looked over at Henry. “Don’t say that I said so.”

  “No.”

  “She’s tense a lot, and yells. Boy, I wouldn’t want to live like that.”

  “No, it’d be no way to live.”

  The telephone rang and Denise, turning on her toe playfully, went to answer it. “The Village Pharmacy. Good morning. How may I help you?” A pause. “Oh, yes, we have multivitamins with no iron…. You’re very welcome.”

  On lunch break, Denise told the hefty, baby-faced Jerry, “My husband talked about Tony the whole time we were going out. The scrapes they’d get into when they were kids. Once, they went off and didn’t get back till way after dark, and Tony’s mother said to him, ‘I was so worried, Tony. I could kill you.’ ” Denise picked lint off the sleeve of her gray sweater. “I always thought that was funny. Worrying that your child might be dead and then saying you’ll kill him.”

  “You wait,” Henry Kitteridge said, stepping around the boxes Jerry had brought into the back room. “From their very first fever, you never stop worrying.”

  “I can’t wait,” Denise said, and for the first time it occurred to Henry that soon she would have children and not work for him anymore.

  Unexpectedly Jerry spoke. “Do you like him? Tony? You two get along?”

  “I do like him,” Denise said. “Thank goodness. I was scared enough to meet him. Do you have a best friend from childhood?”

  “I guess,” Jerry said, color rising in his fat, smooth cheeks. “But we kind of went our separate ways.”

  “My best friend,” said Denise, “when we got to junior high school, she got kind of fast. Do you want another soda?”

  A Saturday at home: Lunch was crabmeat sandwiches, grilled with cheese. Christopher was putting one into his mouth, but the telephone rang, and Olive went to answer it. Christopher, without being asked, waited, the sandwich held in his hand. Henry’s mind seemed to take a picture of that moment, his son’s instinctive deference at the very same time they heard Olive’s voice in the next room. “Oh, you poor child,” she said, in a voice Henry would always remember—filled with such dismay that all her outer Olive-ness seemed stripped away. “You poor, poor child.”

  And then Henry rose and went into the other room, and he didn’t remember much, only the tiny voice of Denise, and then speaking for a few moments to her father-in-law.

  The funeral was held in the Church of the Holy Mother of Contrition, three hours away in Henry Thibodeau’s hometown. The church was large and dark with its huge stained-glass windows, the priest up front in a layered white robe, swinging incense back and forth; Denise already seated in the front near her parents and sisters by the time Olive and Henry arrived. The casket was closed, and had been closed at the wake the evening before. The church was almost full. Henry, seated next to Olive toward the back, recognized no one, until a silent large presence made him look up, and there was Jerry McCarthy. Henry and Olive moved over to make room for him.

  Jerry whispered, “I read about it in the paper,” and Henry briefly rested a hand on the boy’s fat knee.

  The service went on and on; there were readings from the Bible, and other readings, and then an elaborate getting ready for Communion. The priest took cloths and unfolded them and draped them over a table, and then people were leaving their seats aisle by aisle to go up and kneel and open their mouths for a wafer, all sipping from the same large silver goblet, while Henry and Olive stayed where they were. In spite of the sense of unreality that had descended over Henry, 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.

  Six young men carried the casket down the center aisle. Olive nudged Henry with her elbow, and Henry nodded. One of the pallbearers—one of the last ones—had a face that was so white and stunned that Henry was afraid he would drop the casket. This was Tony Kuzio, who, thinking Henry Thibodeau was a deer in the early morning darkness just a few days ago, had pulled the trigger of his rifle and killed his best friend.

  Who was to help her? Her father lived far upstate in Vermont with a wife who was an invalid, her brothers and their wives lived hours away, her in-laws were immobilized by grief. She stayed with her in-laws for two weeks, and when she came back to work, she told Henry she couldn’t stay with them much longer; they were kind, but she could hear her mother-in-law weeping all night, and it gave her the willies; she needed to be alone so she could cry by herself.

  “Of course you do, Denise.”

  “But I can’t go back to the trailer.”

  “No.”

  That night he sat up in bed, his chin resting on both hands. “Olive,” he said, “the girl is utterly helpless. Why, she can’t drive a car, and she’s never written a check.”

  “How can it be,” said Olive, “that you grow up in Vermont and can’t even drive a car?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry acknowledged. “I had no idea she couldn’t drive a car.”

  “Well, I can see why Henry married her. I wasn’t sure at first. But when I got a look at his mother at the funeral—ah, poor thing. But she didn’t seem to have a bit of oomph to her.”

  “Well, she’s about broken wit
h grief.”

  “I understand that,” Olive said patiently. “I’m simply telling you he married his mother. Men do.” After a pause. “Except for you.”

  “She’s going to have to learn to drive,” Henry said. “That’s the first thing. And she needs a place to live.”

  “Sign her up for driving school.”

  Instead, he took her in his car along the back dirt roads. The snow had arrived, but on the roads that led down to the water, the fishermen’s trucks had flattened it. “That’s right. Slowly up on the clutch.” The car bucked like a wild horse, and Henry put his hand against the dashboard.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Denise whispered.

  “No, no. You’re doing fine.”

  “I’m just scared. Gosh.”

  “Because it’s brand-new. But, Denise, nitwits can drive cars.”

  She looked at him, a sudden giggle coming from her, and he laughed himself then, without wanting to, while her giggle grew, spilling out so that tears came to her eyes, and she had to stop the car and take the white handkerchief he offered. She took her glasses off and he looked out the window the other way while she used the handkerchief. Snow had made the woods alongside the road seem like a picture in black and white. Even the evergreens seemed dark, spreading their boughs above the black trunks.

  “Okay,” said Denise. She started the car again; again he was thrown forward. If she burned out the clutch, Olive would be furious.

  “That’s perfectly all right,” he told Denise. “Practice makes perfect, that’s all.”

  In a few weeks, he drove her to Augusta, where she passed the driving test, and then he went with her to buy a car. She had money for this. Henry Thibodeau, it turned out, had had a good life insurance policy, so at least there was that. Now Henry Kitteridge helped her get the car insurance, explained how to make the payments. Earlier, he had taken her to the bank, and for the first time in her life she had a checking account. He had shown her how to write a check.