Элизабет Страут - Olive, Again

“Oh, stop it, Christopher! Stop it, for Christ’s sake!” This was Ann’s voice; she had walked into the room after Olive, and Olive, turning toward her, was amazed to see that Ann’s face was red, her lips seemed bigger, her eyes seemed bigger, and she said, again, “Stop it, Chris. Just stop it! Let the woman get married. What’s the matter with you? Jesus! You can’t even be polite to him? For crying out loud, Christopher, you are such a baby! You think I have four little kids? I have five little kids!”

Then Ann turned toward Jack and Olive and said, “On behalf of my husband, I would like to apologize for his unbelievably childish behavior. He can be so childish, and this is childish, Christopher. Jesus Christ , is this childish of you.”

Almost immediately Christopher held up his hands and said, “She’s right, she’s right, I am being childish, and I’m sorry. Jack, let’s start again. How are you?” And Christopher put his hand out once again toward Jack, and Jack shook it. But Christopher’s face was as pale as paper, and Olive felt—in her utter bewilderment—a terrible pity for him, her son, who had just been so openly yelled at by his wife.

Jack waved a hand casually and said something about it being no problem, he was sure it was a shock, and he sat down and Christopher sat down and Ann left the room, and Olive stood there. She only barely heard as her son asked Jack—who was still wearing his suede coat—what he had done for work, and she only barely heard Jack say he had taught at Harvard his whole life, his subject had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Christopher nodded and said, Cool, that’s cool. Ann walked back and forth with the children’s things, gathering up all their belongings, the children stood in the doorway watching, sometimes going to their mother, and she shook them off. “Move!” she yelled at one of them. Little Henry stood in the doorway of the living room and began to cry.

Olive went to him. “Now, now,” she said. He ran his hand over his wet eyes and looked up at her. Then—and Olive was never sure this really happened, for the rest of her life she didn’t know if she imagined it—he stuck his tongue out at her. “Okay,” said Olive, “okay, then,” and she moved back into the living room, where Jack and Christopher were now standing, finishing their talk.

“All set?” Christopher asked Ann as she passed through the room once more with a wheelie suitcase. Then he turned to Jack. “Very nice to have met you, if you’ll excuse me, I have to help my wife get our brood together.”

“Oh, of course.” And Jack bowed again in his ironical way. He stepped back and put his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants, and then he took them out again.

Olive was dazed as they got all their things together, their coats on, the shoes, the blue rubber boots; Ann’s expression remained stony, and Christopher was obsequious in his attempts to be helpful to her. Finally they were ready to leave, and Olive put her own coat on so she could walk them to the car. Jack walked them out as well, and Olive saw her son speak to Jack once more by the passenger side—Ann was to drive—and her son seemed open-faced, and even had a smile as he spoke to Jack. The kids were all buckled in, and then Chris walked to Olive and gave her a half hug, almost not touching her, and said, “Bye, Mom,” and Olive said, “Goodbye, Chris,” and then Ann gave her a hug too, not much of one, and Ann said, “Thanks, Olive.”

And then they drove away.

It wasn’t until Olive saw the red scarf that she had knit for Little Henry lying half under the couch in the living room that she felt something close to terror. She bent down and picked it up, and she took the scarf and returned to the kitchen, where Jack was leaning forward with his arms on the tabletop. Olive opened the door and put the scarf into the garbage bin by the front door. Then she came back inside and sat down across from Jack. “Well,” she said.

“Well,” Jack said. He said it kindly. He placed his large, age-spotted hand over Olive’s own. In a moment he added, “I guess we know who wears the pants in that family.”

“Her mother died recently,” Olive said. “She’s grieving.”

But she pulled her hand away. It came to her then with a horrible whoosh of the crescendo of truth: She had failed on a colossal level. She must have been failing for years and not realized it. She did not have a family as other people did. Other people had their children come and stay and they talked and laughed and the grandchildren sat on the laps of their grandmothers, and they went places and did things, ate meals together, kissed when they parted. Olive had images of this happening in many homes; her friend Edith, for example, before she had moved to that place for old people, her kids would come and stay. Surely they had a better time than what had just happened here. And it had not happened out of the blue. She could not understand what it was about her, but it was about her that had caused this to happen. And it had to have been there for years, maybe all of her life, how would she know? As she sat across from Jack—stunned—she felt as though she had lived her life as though blind.

“Jack?”

“Yes, Olive?”

She shook her head. What she would not tell Jack was the alarm she had felt when she saw Ann yell at her son, and what came to her as she sat here now was the fact that it had not been the first time Ann had yelled at him like that; these were openings into the darkness of a relationship one saw by mistake, as if inside a dark barn, the door had been momentarily blown off and one saw things not meant to be seen—

But it was more than that.

She had done what Ann had done. She had yelled at Henry in front of people. She could not remember who, exactly, but she had always been fierce when she felt like it. So there was this: Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.

Jack spoke quietly. “Hey, Olive. Let’s get you out of here for a while. Let’s take a drive, then come to my place. You need a break from being here.”

“Good idea.” Olive stood and went and got her coat and her big black handbag and she let Jack walk her out to the Subaru. He helped her in, and then got in himself, and they drove away. Olive almost looked back behind her, but she closed her eyes instead: She could see it perfectly anyway. Her house, the house she and Henry had built so many years ago, the house that looked small now and would be razed to the ground by whoever bought it, the property was what mattered. But she saw behind her closed eyes the house, and inside her was a shiver that went through her bones. The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.

It was not until the Larkin house burned to the ground that people found out Louise Larkin was not living there anymore. The newspaper said she was in the Golden Bridge Rest Home. “That means she’s gone completely dopey-dope,” Olive Kitteridge said to Jack Kennison as she looked up from the paper. “But my word, what a sad thing about her husband.” Louise Larkin’s husband had died in the fire; apparently he had lived only in the upstairs of the house, and the fire had started in the kitchen. It was drug-related, according to the newspaper that Olive was reading. The headline said: 83-Year-Old Man Dies in House Fire: Drug Users Suspected.

The next day’s newspaper confirmed the part about the drug users. An arrest had been made. Two people who were drug addicts, and who had assumed the place was vacant, had broken into the house to steal things—to steal copper—and then the fire had started as a result of their cooking meth. They had both made it out of the burning house, but by the time the fire was reported, at four in the morning, there was not much the firemen could do. The place was big, but it was wooden and old, and it went like kindling. Now it sat, the charred remains, right there as you drove into the town of Crosby, Maine, and it was really a sad thing to look at.