Элизабет Страут - Olive, Again

“You get up right now, you damned fool.” But she couldn’t. She kept trying, but she could only roll slightly more onto her side, and her arms did not have the strength. She spied the spigot there sticking out from the house. Jack had not wanted the spigot there, he thought it looked stupid coming out of the house straight to the porch, but he had said his wife had wanted it to make watering her plants easier. “Damn right, Betsy,” Olive said. Her teeth were chattering now. Inch by half inch, Olive was able to move her body by thrusting it again and again until she could reach the spigot. She kept trying to reach it and she kept falling short, but then she finally got her hand around it, and by God if it didn’t help. It stayed steady, the spigot, and she was able, by holding it, to get herself to a sitting position, and then she turned and knelt, and then she put her hands on the arms of the chair and she finally stood. She was so shaky that she placed a hand on the shingled wall as she moved slowly back into the house. Once inside, she sat for many minutes, wet, in the wooden chair by the table, and then she finally felt strong enough to shower.

But that had really been something. Sitting on the bed, holding a towel to her hair, Olive looked around. Who in the world had been having a cigarette on her porch? Who could it be ? Olive kept picturing a man, sinister, smoking on her porch while he waited for her to return, some horrible man who knew she lived out here in the middle of nowhere all alone.

For the next week Olive could not stop feeling dread. She felt it when she went to bed, she felt it as soon as she woke. She felt dread in the afternoon when she sat and read her book. It did not abate, it got worse. And then she understood that it was true terror she felt, a different sort of terror than when Jack had died, or Henry. In those cases she had been filled with terror, but now terror sat next to her. It sat down across from her in the breakfast nook, it sat on the bathtub while she washed her face, it sat near her by the window as she read, it sat there on the foot of her bed.

And she began to walk around this home she had shared with Jack, and she said, “I hate it, I hate it, I hate this place.”

Loneliness. Oh, the loneliness!

It blistered Olive.

She had not known such a feeling her entire life; this is what she thought as she moved about the house. It may have been the terror finally wearing off and giving way for this gaping bright universe of loneliness that she faced, but it bewildered her to feel this. She realized it was as though she had—all her life—four big wheels beneath her, without even knowing it, of course, and now they were, all four of them, wobbling and about to come off. She did not know who she was, or what would happen to her.

One day she sat in the big chair that Jack used to sit in and she thought she had become pathetic. If there was one thing Olive hated, it was pathetic people. And now she was one of them.

She heard a car drive into the driveway, and she got up slowly and went to the door, peeking out of the curtain that covered the door’s window. Well, by God, if it wasn’t Halima Butterfly! Olive opened the door, and Halima sailed through it and said, “Hello, Mrs. Kitteridge.”

“What are you doing here?” Olive asked, closing the door behind her.

“I’m visiting you,” said Halima. She wore the same peach outfit Olive had first seen her in. “I was in the area, and I thought, I’ll go see Mrs. Kitteridge. How are you?”

“Ghastly,” Olive said. Then she said, “Why didn’t you come back?”

Halima said, “I don’t like to drive all the way to Crosby from Shirley Falls, so when I can have a client nearer to me I take them instead.” She shrugged her robed shoulders. Then she smiled her amazing smile of bright white teeth. “But I’m here now.”

“All right then,” Olive said.

Seated in the living room, Olive told Halima about her fall and the cigarette butt. Halima looked concerned. “I don’t like that,” she said. “You should not be living alone.”

Olive made a noise of disgust, waving her hand to indicate that this was a stupid thing to say. But Halima sat forward, pointing a finger at Olive. “In my culture,” she said, “you would never be alone.”

Olive didn’t care for that. “Well, in my culture,” Olive said, pointing her own finger toward the woman, “sons get married, go away, and never come back.”

The Maple Tree Apartments had a waiting period of twelve months. But on the telephone one night, Christopher said he had figured out how to get her in there in just four months. “Mom,” he said, “I signed you up after your heart attack just in case. So you’re on the waiting list.” Then Christopher said, “But, Mom, listen to me carefully. You’re going to have to sell that house. We need you to live in assisted living, but you can live in the independent living part of it. You can’t live alone in that house anymore.”

Olive was very tired. “Okay,” she said.

—

And so that was that. As spring broke through, Olive noticed it and felt glad. The forsythia bushes first, and also the snowdrops by the house. But then it snowed lightly one night, and in the morning the forsythia looked like scrambled eggs. Then the daffodils came out, and eventually the lilac trees. She noticed these on the road to the Maple Tree Apartments, where she went these days with more frequency to visit her friend Edith, whose husband, Buzzy, had recently died. Edith kept going on about what a wonderful man he had been; Olive had never particularly liked him, but she sat while Edith told her once more how he had taken a fall and been sent “over the bridge,” as Edith said it was called, the place across an actual little bridge where people went when they had strokes and things, and then how he had died so suddenly….Oh, it was tiresome to listen to. But Edith said she was glad that Olive would soon live there as well, although she said it only once and Olive would have liked to hear it more.

Whenever she entered and left the Maple Tree Apartments, Olive looked—naturally—at the whole thing with different eyes. The people seemed so old . Godfrey, there were men shuffling along, and women all bent over. People with walkers that had little seats in them. Well, this was to be her future. But in truth, it did not feel real to her.

And then one day when she was sitting in Jack’s chair she heard a car drive into the driveway and she said out loud, “Who the hell is that,” and she got her cane—suddenly hoping that it was Halima Butterfly again—and went to the door, and it was Betty getting out of her truck. As Olive opened the door, Betty said “Hi, Olive!” in a voice that Olive thought was false in its cheerfulness.

“Come in,” said Olive.

Betty sat right down in the chair she had always sat in, and she dropped her pocketbook onto the floor beside her. “How are you?” Betty asked.

And Olive told her. She told her she was moving to the Maple Tree Apartments at the end of the summer, and she told her how she had fallen and almost died (this is how she put it to Betty), and then she told her how it was over a cigarette butt that she had found by the chairs on the porch.