Olive, Again

by Elizabeth Strout

  What she would have written about was the light in February. How it changed the way the world looked. People complained about February; it was cold and snowy and oftentimes wet and damp, and people were ready for spring. But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now. Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was. As Cindy lay on her bed she could see this even now, the gold of the last light opening the world.

  * * *

  The next day, Sunday, after lunch, Cindy returned to bed, and Tom came upstairs with her, trying to be helpful, arranging the pillows, straightening the quilt.

  A car could be heard coming up the driveway, and Tom pulled back the curtain and looked out. “Oh Christ,” he said. “It’s that old bag. Olive Kitteridge. What in hell is she doing here?”

  “Let her in,” Cindy said, her voice muffled in the pillows.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  Cindy sat up. “I said, let her in. Please, Tom.”

  “Are you crazy?” Tom asked.

  “Yes. Let her come in.”

  And so Tom went down the stairs and Cindy heard him open the front door, which they never used, and in a moment Mrs. Kitteridge came up the stairway, followed by Tom, and she stood in the doorway of the bedroom. She wore her red coat, which was rather puffy, the way winter coats can be.

  “Hi, Mrs. Kitteridge,” Cindy said. She sat up in the bed, putting the pillows behind her back. “Tom, can you take her coat?” And so Mrs. Kitteridge took off her coat and handed it to Tom, who said, “Cindy? You want me to stay?” Cindy shook her head at him, and he went back downstairs with the coat of Mrs. Kitteridge.

  Mrs. Kitteridge was wearing black slacks and a jacket-type thing that went halfway down her thighs; its print was of bright reds and orange swirls. She placed her black leather bag on the floor. “Call me Olive. If you can. I know sometimes a person can’t when I’ve been Mrs. Kitteridge all their life.”

  Cindy looked up at this woman before her; she saw in her eyes a distinct light. “I can call you Olive. Hello, Olive.” Cindy looked around and said, “Here, pull up that chair.”

  Olive pulled the chair over toward the bed, it was a straight-back chair, and Cindy hoped that she could fit on it comfortably. But with her coat off, Olive didn’t look quite as large, and she sat on the chair and folded her hands in her lap. “I thought if I called you might say I shouldn’t come over.” Olive waited. Then she said, “And I thought, hell’s bells, I want to go over and see that girl. So I just got in the car and came.”

  “It’s fine,” Cindy said. “I’m glad you did. How are you, Olive?”

  “The question is you. You’re not okay.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Any chance you will be?”

  “Fifty percent. Is what they say.” Then Cindy added, “I have my last treatment next week.”

  Mrs. Kitteridge looked straight at Cindy. “I see,” she said. Then she looked around the room—at the white bureau, and the clothes hanging over another chair in the corner, and all the books stacked on the windowsill—before looking back at Cindy. “So you feel crappy? What do you do all day? Do you read?”

  “It’s a problem,” Cindy acknowledged. “Because I do feel crappy. And I don’t read as much as I used to. I can’t really concentrate.”

  Olive nodded, as though considering this. “Yuh,” she said. Then she added, “Hell of a mess to be in.”

  “Well, it is kind of.”

  “I should say so.” The woman sat there, her hands still folded in her lap. It didn’t appear she had anything else to say.

  And so Cindy blurted out, “Oh, Mrs. Kitteridge. Olive. Oh, Olive, I’m so— I’m so angry.”

  Olive nodded. “I should think to God you would be.”

  “I want to feel peaceful, I want to accept this, but I am so angry, I’m just angry every minute, and when I saw you in the store, people had been looking at me. I don’t want to go out, people look at me and they get afraid.”

  “Yuh,” Olive said. Then she added, “Well, I’m not afraid.”

  “I know that. I mean, I appreciate it.”

  “How’s Tom?”

  “Oh, Tom.” Cindy sat up, and the bedclothes seemed to her almost soiled, although they had been changed the day before, but there was that faint odor of something like metal that she had smelled for months now. “Olive, he keeps talking like I’ll get better. I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it, it makes me so lonely, oh dear God, I am so lonely.”

  Olive made a grimace of sympathy. “God, Cindy. That sucks. As the kids used to say. That really sucks.”

  “It does.” Cindy lay back on her pillow, watching this woman who had come over uninvited. “There’s a nurse who comes in twice a week, and she told me Tom was acting like every man she’s ever seen in these situations. That men just can’t deal with it. But it’s terrible, Olive. He’s my husband and we’ve loved each other now for many years, and this is awful.”

  Olive sat looking at Cindy, then looking at the foot of the bed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s a male thing or not. The truth is, Cindy, I wasn’t very good to my husband during his last years.”

  Cindy said, “Yes, you were. Everyone knew—you went to the nursing home every day to see him.”

  Olive shook her head. “Before that.”

  “He was sick before that?”

  “I don’t know,” Olive said thoughtfully. “He may have been and I just didn’t know it. He became very needy. And I wasn’t— I just wasn’t very nice to him. It’s something I think about a lot these days, and it bugs me like hell.”

  Cindy waited a moment. “Well, if you didn’t know he was sick—”

  Olive heaved a deep sigh. “I know, I know. But I’m just saying, I wasn’t especially good to him, and it hurts me now. It really does. At times these days—rarely, very rarely, but at times—I feel like I’ve become, oh, just a tiny—tiny—bit better as a person, and it makes me sick that Henry didn’t get any of that from me.” Olive shook her head. “Here I go, talking about myself again. I’ve been trying not to talk about myself so much these days.”

  Cindy said, “Talk about anything you want. I don’t care.”

  “Take a turn,” Olive said, raising a hand briefly. “I’m sure I’ll get back to myself.”

  Cindy said, “One time, it was on Christmas Day, I just began to cry. I cried and cried, and my sons were both here and so was Tom, and I stood on the stairs, just wailing, and then I noticed that they had all left, they walked away from me until I stopped crying.”

  Olive’s eyes closed briefly. “Oh Godfrey,” she murmured.

  “I scared them.”

  “Yuh.”

  “And now they will always think of that, every Christmas to come, my sons will remember that.”

  “Probably.”

  “I did that to them.”

  Olive sat forward and said, “Cindy Coombs, there’s not one goddamn person in this world who doesn’t have a bad memory or two to take with them through life.” She sat back and crossed her feet at her ankles.

  “But I’m scared!”

  “Oh, I know, I know, of course you are. Everyone is scared to die.”

  “Everyone? Is that true, Mrs. Kitteridge? Are you scared to die?”

  “I am scared to death to die, is the truth.” Olive adjusted herself on the chair.

  Cindy thought about this. “I’ve heard of people who make peace with it,” she said.

  “I guess that can happen. I don’t know how they do it, but I think it can happen.”

  Th
ey were quiet. Cindy felt—she almost felt normal. “Well,” she said finally. “It’s just that I’m so alone. I don’t want to be so alone.”

  “ ’Course you don’t.”

  “You’re scared to die, even at your age?”

  Olive nodded. “Oh Godfrey, there were days I’d have liked to have been dead. But I’m still scared of dying.” Then Olive said, “You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is—we’re all just a few steps behind you. Twenty minutes behind you, and that’s the truth.”

  Cindy had not thought of that. She had thought that Tom, and her sons, and—people—that they would go on living forever and ever, without her. But Olive was right: They were all headed where she was going. If she was going.

  “Thank you,” Cindy said. “And thank you for coming over.”

  Olive Kitteridge stood up. “Bye now,” she said.

  * * *

  When Cindy’s mother was dying—she had been fifty-two and Cindy had been thirty-two—her mother had screamed and wept and cursed Cindy’s father for abandoning them years before. In truth, Cindy’s mother had frequently, during Cindy’s lifetime, screamed and wept; the poor woman had been so tired. But when her mother was dying it scared Cindy terrifically, how her mother carried on, and she had thought to herself: I will not die that way. And this is why she felt so bad that she had done that to her sons by crying hard on the stairs on Christmas Day. Cindy had not, during her sons’ lives, screamed and wept. Cindy had cared for them every single second, it seemed like this to her, and she had hugged them and held them when they were small and needed comfort.

  She thought about this a great deal, and she thought about it a few nights later as she sat next to Tom on the couch, a blanket pulled up to her throat, watching television with him. She said, during a television commercial, “Honey, I feel so bad about that day I cried on the stairs with you and the boys here. I told Mrs. Kitteridge. I forgot to tell her it reminds me of my mother.”

  Tom pulled back and looked at her quickly. “Mrs. Kitteridge? Why would you tell that old bag anything so personal?”

  “Well—” Cindy began.

  “Did you hear she got married to Jack Kennison?”

  “She did?” Cindy started to sit up straight.

  “Yes, she did. Can you imagine anyone marrying that old bag, except for her poor first husband, Henry?”

  After that, Cindy didn’t say much.

  * * *

  A few days later the weather turned bad. It rained and was also sleeting, and as Tom was getting things ready for her—her lunch was in the refrigerator, the phone was near her bed, another cellphone was in bed with her—as he was doing these things before he went to work at the ironworks, she found that he was irritating her. “It’s okay, honey, just go,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, and she said that she was sure, just please go now.

  And so off he went, calling once more from down the stairs, “Goodbye, sweetie heart!” And she called back to him, and then he was finally gone.

  Cindy dozed, and when she woke she was annoyed that Tom hadn’t left any lights on in the house. He was too cheap, is what she thought; it was depressing with no lights on, and so she got herself out of bed and went about the bedroom, turning on the lamp on the bureau and the one beside her bed, although through the bedroom door the hallway remained gray.

  Her phone whistled. There was a text from her sister-in-law Anita, asking, Can I call? Cindy sat on the edge of the bed and texted back Yes.

  “You doing okay?” asked Anita. And Cindy said, yeah, it was the same as usual.

  “Sorry I haven’t been by this week, I’ll come soon.” And Anita started to speak of her problems at home, which Cindy felt bad for—Anita’s kids were all kind of crazy; they were in high school. Cindy got up to walk into the hallway to turn more lights on, and she heard a car in the driveway, and going over to look out the window she saw Mrs. Kitteridge getting out of her car.

  “Anita,” Cindy said, “Mrs. Kitteridge just drove up. I told you how she came to visit me. Well, she’s here again.”

  Anita laughed. “Well, have a good time. Like I said, I always kind of liked that woman, myself.”

  The rain was coming down hard, and Mrs. Kitteridge did not have an umbrella. Cindy rapped on the window, and Mrs. Kitteridge looked up. Cindy waved her arm for Mrs. Kitteridge to come in, then she pointed to the side door, and in a few minutes the side door had opened and closed and there was Mrs. Kitteridge standing in her coat at the bedroom door.

  “Take off your coat,” Cindy said. “I’m sorry you got wet. Just throw it on the floor. Unless you want it hung up. If you want it hung up, then—” But Mrs. Kitteridge tossed her coat, the same red puffy one, onto the rug and she sat down in the straight-backed chair once again. Her hair was plastered to her head from the rain. Drops landed on her collar and she stood up and said to Cindy, “Where’s the bathroom?” And Cindy indicated where it was, and in a moment Olive came back with a pink-and-white-striped hand towel and she sat down again and toweled her hair; Cindy kind of couldn’t believe it.

  Cindy said, “Mrs. Kitteridge, did you get married? Tom said he heard you married Jack Kennison, but I thought, That can’t be right.”

  Olive Kitteridge held the towel above her head and looked at the wall. She said, “Yes, it’s true. I have married Jack Kennison.”

  Cindy stared at her. “Well, congratulations. I guess. Is it weird?”

  “Oh, it’s weird.” Olive looked at her and nodded. “It is weird, yessiree.” Olive hesitated, and then, starting to dry her hair again, she added, “But we’re both old enough to know things now, and that’s good.”

  “What things?”

  “When to shut up, mainly.”

  “What things do you shut up about?” Cindy asked, and Olive seemed to think about it, and then she said, “Well, for example, when he has his breakfast, I don’t say to him, Jack, why the hell do you have to scrape your bowl so hard.”

  Cindy asked, “How long have you been married?”

  “Coming up to almost two years, I guess. Imagine at my age, starting over again.” Olive put the towel in her lap and raised one opened hand slightly. “But it’s never starting over, Cindy, it’s just continuing on.”

  For quite a while they sat in silence, and the rain could be heard on the roof. And then Olive said, “I don’t imagine you want to think of Tom starting over.”

  Cindy let out a great sigh. “Oh, Mrs. Kitteridge, I can’t stand to think of him alone. I can’t stand it, really, I can’t. He’d be just a— Oh, he’d be like a big huge baby all alone, and that breaks my heart. But that he might be with someone, it breaks my heart more.”

  Olive nodded as though she understood this. “You know, Cindy, you and Tom grew up together. Henry and I were like that. Eighteen when we met, twenty-one when we married, and the truth is—that’s who you lived with, that never ever goes away.” Olive gave a shrug. “It just doesn’t.”

  “Do you talk about Henry to Jack Kennison?”

  Olive looked at her. “Oh, yes. When Jack and I first met, we talked about his wife and my husband nonstop. Nonstop.”

  “Was that uncomfortable?”

  “God, no. It was wonderful.”

  Cindy lay silent for a while. “I don’t know that I want to be talked about.”

  Olive shrugged. “Not much you can do about it, if it comes to that. But I’ll tell you this, you will be sainted. You will become an absolute saint.”

  Cindy laughed. She laughed! And Olive, after a moment, laughed as well.

  Then Cindy said, “Your son. Does he like this Jack Kennison?”

  Olive said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “No, he does not. But I don’t think he likes me much either. Even before I married Jack.”

  “Oh, Olive, I’m sorry.”

>   Olive’s foot was bobbing up and down. “Ay-yuh,” she said. “Nothing to do about it at this point.”

  Cindy hesitated, and then she asked, “Were things always bad with your son?”

  Olive tilted her head as though thinking about this, and then she said, “I really don’t know. I don’t think so. Not for a while. Maybe things started with his first wife.”

  After a minute, Cindy—who’d turned her gaze toward the window, and saw the grayness of the sleet that was splattering against it—said, “Well, I’m sure you didn’t scream and yell a lot like my mother did. She was difficult, Olive. But then, she had a difficult life.” She turned her face back to Olive.

  And Olive said, “Oh, I think I did scream and yell a lot.”

  Cindy opened her mouth, but Olive continued. “I can’t honestly remember, but I think I did. I was pretty awful when I felt like it. My son probably thinks I’m a difficult woman, like you think your mother was.”