Элизабет Страут - Olive, Again

“Yes,” said Margaret. “So I heard.”

“It rained every day. When we got to the glacier place, Glacier Bay, we were supposed to take a helicopter up to see the glaciers, but it was too foggy.”

“That’s a shame,” said Margaret.

“No, it’s not. Who cares?”

Margaret looked at Helen. “I should think you would have cared. You’d paid all that money to go see the place.”

“Well, I didn’t care,” said Helen. She took two more large swallows of wine. After a moment she said, and she could feel her cheeks flushing slightly, “I’ll tell you what I cared about: the Indonesians who worked on the cruise ship. Everyone working on that boat was from Indonesia, and we got talking to one fellow one night and he worked ten months a year on that boat and went home to Bali for two months. And I bet you anything, ” she pointed a finger at Margaret, “that those guys are stacked up on top of each other in the bottom of that ship with no windows, and once I realized that—well, I couldn’t really enjoy myself anymore. I mean, we were taking this trip on the backs of these people.”

Margaret said nothing, although she had opened her mouth as though she were about to.

“What are you thinking?” Helen asked her.

“I was thinking, How liberal of you.”

After a moment, Helen, who had some trouble taking this in, said, “Why, Margaret, you hate me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

But now Helen felt sad. She thought ministers were supposed to be nice people. She made a raspberry sound with her lips. “I’m sad,” she said, and Margaret said, “I think you may be a little drunk.”

Helen felt her face flush again. She took the bottle of wine and poured more into the stupid mason jar. “Bottoms up,” she said.

—

And then the men could be heard on the stairs, and after a minute the door squeaked open and closed and there they were, standing in the living room. “Oh, boys ,” said Helen. “Boy, am I glad to see you two.” She squinted up at them. “Are you guys okay?”

She couldn’t see Jim’s eyes, but something in the way the men stood made her feel they were not okay. “Look,” she said, “I bought a piece of crap.” She pointed to the small painting, which was on the floor next to the couch.

Bob picked it up, and Jim stepped behind him to look. “God, Helen,” Jim asked, “why did you buy that?” And Bob said, “It’s not so bad.”

“It’s awful,” Helen said. “I just bought it—to be nice. Who was that woman?” Helen looked with confusion at Margaret. “That pickle person. You know—” She tried to snap her fingers, but her fingers slipped. “That person, what—you know, what’s like a pickle?”

“Olive.” Margaret said this coldly.

“Olive.” Helen nodded.

“Olive Kitteridge,” Margaret said.

“Well, she said this was crap.”

“Olive thinks everything is crap,” said Bob. “That’s just who she is.”

Margaret stood up and said, “I think we’d better go to dinner. Helen needs some food.”

It wasn’t until Helen herself stood up that she realized how drunk she might be. “Whoopsie,” she said, quietly. She looked around. “Where did Jimmy go?”

“He’s in the bathroom,” Bob said. “We’ll go in just a minute.”

And then Helen saw the staircase that went upstairs from the living room. “Bobby, is that where you sleep? Up there?”

Bob said that it was.

And Helen climbed the stairs. “I’m just going to peek,” she called out. She put her hand on the wall to steady herself. These stairs were steep as well, and they turned a corner partway up. She stood on the landing and turned around. There was a plant on the landing, and its leaves spread far up and down the steps. “Boy, that would give me the creeps,” Helen said, and then as she started up the rest of the stairs she fell backward, and what she was aware of was how long the fall was taking, how her body was bumping and bumping down these stairs, it was taking forever, and it was shocking. And then she stopped.

Margaret yelled, “Don’t move her!”

Jim went in the ambulance with Helen, and Margaret and Bob followed in their car. Margaret said, “Oh, Bob. Bob. This was all my fault.” He looked over at her. Her eyes seemed bald-looking to him, and they were red-rimmed. “No, it was,” she said. “It was all my fault. Bob, I couldn’t stand her. And she knew it. And it was terrible of me, I didn’t even really try with her. Oh, Bob. And she knew! She knew, because people always know these things, and so she got drunk.”

“Margaret—”

“No, Bob. I feel terrible. She just drove me crazy, and there was no reason that she should have, but she’s— Oh, Bob, she’s just so rich .”

“Well, she is rich. That’s true. But what does that have to do with it?”

Margaret looked over at him. “It makes her self-centered, Bob. She never even asked about me once.”

“She’s shy, Margaret. She’s nervous.”

Margaret said, “That woman is not shy. She’s rich . And I just couldn’t stand her from the very beginning. You know, her hair done so nicely, and her gold earrings. Oh, Bob. And then when she got out her foolish straw hat I thought I’d die.”

“Her straw hat? Margaret, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I couldn’t stand her and she knew it, Bob. And I feel terrible.”

Bob said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. But a quiet sense of almost-unreality seemed to come to him, and he thought the word “prejudice,” and he understood that he needed to drive carefully, and so he did, and then they reached the hospital.

—

It was midnight by the time Helen was released. She had broken an arm, and two ribs, and her face had been badly bruised; one eye was purplish and swollen. Now she sat silently, with her arm in a white cast that bent by the elbow, while Jim—whom Margaret had driven back to their place to get his car—went around and opened her car door and then helped her into the car. There had been a CAT scan done of her head, and there was no damage, and she had had a number of X-rays to check for internal injuries. Now Bob got into the backseat, and he texted Margaret that Helen was okay, Margaret should go to bed.

Jim said over his shoulder, “You have to sleep sitting up when you break any ribs.”

“Oh, Helen,” said Bob, reaching to touch the back of Helen’s head. “I’m so sorry.”

Jim said, “Hellie, we’ll drive back tomorrow. I’m going to rent an SUV, and we’ll just drive straight back. You’ll be more comfortable that way, I think.” And Bob could see Helen nod slightly.

At the inn, Bob helped his brother get Helen seated in the wingback chair—once she was in her pajamas, her cast sticking out at an angle, and her robe pulled over her—in the sitting-room part of their room, and then he said he would be back.

When he went up the stairs to his own bedroom, he was surprised to see that Margaret was fast asleep. There was a small light on by the bed, and he watched this woman, who seemed almost a stranger to him at this moment. He recognized now the smallness of her response to a world she did not know or understand; it was not unlike the response his sister had had to Helen. And he knew that had he not lived in New York for so many years—if his brother, whom he had loved as God, had not lived there as well, rich and famous for all those years—then he might have felt as Margaret did. But he did not feel as she did. He turned the light off and walked down the stairs and back to the inn.