And she was happy right now, it was true. Jane Houlton, shifting slightly inside her nice black coat, was thinking that, after all, life was a gift—that one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren’t just moments, they were gifts. And how nice, really, that people should celebrate with such earnestness this time of year. No matter what people’s lives might hold (some of these houses they were passing would have to hold some woeful tribulations, Janie knew), still and all, people were compelled to celebrate because they knew somehow, in their different ways, that life was a thing to celebrate.
He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. “Well, that was nice,” she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.
Downtown the cars moved slowly on Main Street, passing by streetlamps that had large wreaths hung on their poles, and shop windows and restaurants that were lit up. Just past the movie theater, Bob saw a parking spot next to the curb and pulled the car over; it took some time, he had to work hard to ease in between the others. Someone from behind them honked with annoyance.
“Oh, phooey to you.” Jane made a face through the dark.
He straightened the wheels, turned the engine off. “Wait there, Janie, till I come around.”
They weren’t young anymore, this was the thing. They kept telling each other as though they couldn’t believe it. But they had each of them in this last year suffered a mild heart attack; hers first—feeling, she said, as though she had eaten too many of the grilled onions at dinner that night. And then his, months later, not feeling like that at all, more like someone had sat hard on his chest, but with his jaw aching the same way Jane’s had.
They felt okay now. But she was seventy-two and he was seventy-five and unless a roof fell down on them both together, one would, presumably, be living without the other at some point in time.
Shop windows twinkled with Christmas lights, and the air smelled like snow. He took Jane’s arm and they walked down the street, where restaurant windows displayed different arrangements of holly or wreaths, and some windowpanes had their corners spray-painted white. “The Lydias,” Jane said. “Wave, honey.”
“Where?”
“Just wave, honey. Over there.”
“There’s no point in my waving if I don’t see who I’m waving to.”
“The Lydias, right there in the steak house. Ages since we’ve seen them.” Jane was waving cheerfully, excessively. He saw the couple through the window now, on either side of a white tablecloth, and he waved, too. Mrs. Lydia was motioning for them to come in.
Bob Houlton put his arm through Jane’s. “I don’t want to,” he said, waving his other hand at the Lydias.
Jane waved more, shook her head, gestured, mouthing each word with exaggeration: “We’ll see you lay-ter. At the concert?” Nodding. More waving, they were on their way. “She looks good,” Jane said. “I’m kind of surprised how good she looks. She must have colored her hair.”
“Did you want to go in?”
“No,” said Jane. “I want to look in store windows. It’s nice out here, not too cold.”
“Now fill me in,” he said, as they continued walking, thinking of the Lydias, whose name was not actually Lydia, but Granger—Alan and Donna Granger. The daughter, Lydia Granger, had been friends with the middle Houlton girl, and Patty Granger had been friends with the youngest Houlton girl. Bob and Jane referred to the parents of their daughters’ friends, even now, by the children’s names.
“Lydia’s been divorced a few years now. The guy bit her. That part’s supposed to be a secret, I think.”
“Bit her? Or beat her?”
“Bit.” Jane snapped her teeth together twice. “You know, chomp, chomp. He was a veterinarian, I think.”
“Did he bite the kids, too?”
“I don’t believe he bit the children. Two children. One of them is hyperactive, can’t concentrate, whatever it is these days when a kid can’t sit still. The Lydias won’t mention it, so don’t bring it up. The woman with the pink hair in the library told me all this. Let’s go. I want to be able to sit on an aisle.”
Ever since her heart attack, Jane had been worried about dying in public. She had had her attack in the kitchen of her home, but the idea that she might fall over in front of people made her very anxious. Years ago, she had witnessed such a thing, a man dead on the sidewalk. The medics had ripped his shirt open, and it could still make her cry if she thought about it hard enough—the tender unknowingness, the goneness of his flung-wide arms, his belly showing. Poor darling thing, she had thought, to be lying there dead.
“And I want to sit toward the back,” her husband said. She nodded. His bowels weren’t what they used to be; sometimes he had to leave a place in a hurry.
The church was dark and cold, almost empty. They handed over their tickets and were given programs, which they held with a tentativeness while they walked into one of the back pews, settling in, unbuttoning their coats, but leaving them on.
“Keep an eye out for the Lydias,” Jane said, turning her head.
He held her hand, picked nervously at her fingertips.
“Was it Lydia who slept over every weekend for a while there, or was that her sister?” Bob asked, while Jane craned her neck back, looking up at the ceiling of the church, the large, dark rafters.
“That was Patty, her sister. Not as nice a girl as Lydia.” Jane leaned in closer toward her husband and whispered, “Lydia had an abortion in high school, you know.”
“I know, I remember.”
“You do?” Jane looked at her husband, surprised.
“Sure,” Bob said. “You told me she used to come to your office with cramps. She came in once and cried for two days.”
“That’s right,” said Jane, warmer now inside her coat. “Poor thing. I suspected it right then, frankly, and pretty soon after that Becky told me it was true. I’m really surprised you remember that.” She chewed her lip pensively, rocked her foot up and down a few times.
“What?” Bob said. “You thought I never listened? I listened, Janie.”
But she waved a hand and sighed, and settled herself against the back of the pew before she said, musingly, “I liked working there.” And she had. She had liked, especially, the adolescent girls, the young, bumbling, oily-skinned, scared girls that talked too loud, or snapped their gum ferociously, or slunk through the corridor with their heads down—she’d loved them, really. And they knew it. They would come to her office with their terrible cramps, lying on the couch gray-faced and dry-lipped with pain. “My father says it’s all in my head,” more than one girl had said, and oh, it broke her heart. What a lonely thing to be a young girl! She would let them stay sometimes all afternoon.
The church was slowly beginning to fill up. Olive Kitteridge walked in, tall and broad-shouldered in a navy-blue coat, her husband behind her. Henry Kitteridge touched his wife’s arm, indicating they take a seat in a pew nearby, but Olive shook her head and they sat instead two pews closer to the front of the church. “I don’t know how he can stand her,” Bob murmured to Jane.
They watched the Kitteridges settle into their pew, Olive shaking off her coat, then placing it back on her shoulders, Henry helping her. Olive Kitteridge had taught math at the school Jane had worked at; very seldom had the two women spoken at length. Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology, and Jane had kept her distance. In response to Bob’s remark now, Jane merely shrugged.
Turning her head, she saw the Lydias going up the back steps to the balcony. “Oh, there they are,” she said to Bob. “Such a long time since we’ve seen them. She looks pretty good.”
He squeezed her hand and whispered, “So do you.”
The members of the orchestra came out in their black clothes and took their seats up front by the pulpit. Music stands were adjusted, legs set at an angle, chins tilted, bows picked up—
and then the disharmonious sound of an orchestra warming up.
It bothered Jane that she knew something about Lydia Granger that Mrs. Lydia might not, even now, know. It felt indecent, invasive. But people ended up knowing things. When you were a school nurse, or a pink-haired librarian, you ended up knowing who married alcoholics, whose kids had attention deficit disorder (that’s what it was), who threw dishes, who slept on the couch. She didn’t want to think there were people in this church right now who knew things about her children that she didn’t know herself. She ducked her head toward Bob and said, “I hope there aren’t people in this church right now who know things about my kids that I don’t know.”
The music started, and he winked one eye at her slowly, reassuringly.
During Debussy he fell asleep, his arms folded across his chest. Glancing at her husband, Jane felt her heart swell with the music, and with love for him, this man next to her, this old (!) man, who had been followed through life by his own childhood troubles—a mother always, always mad at him. In his face right now she felt she could see the little boy, furtive, forever scared; even as he slept here at this very moment there was a tautness of anxiety on his face. A gift, she thought again, placing her mittened hand lightly on his leg, a gift to be able to know someone for so many years.
Mrs. Lydia had had her eyes done; they stared out of her head like a sixteen-year-old’s.
“You look wonderful,” Jane told her, although close-up the effect was frightening. “Just wonderful,” she repeated, because it must have been scary, having someone take a scalpel so close to your eyes. “How’s Lydia?” Jane asked. “And the others?”
“Lydia’s getting married again,” Mrs. Lydia said, moving aside to let someone get by. “We’re happy about it.”
Her husband, squatty, round-shouldered, rolled his eyes and jiggled change in his pocket. “Gets expensive,” he said, and his wife, a red felt hat tucked over her gold hair, gave him a fleeting look, which he seemed to ignore. “All those damn psychiatrist bills,” he added, saying this to Bob with a kind of man-to-man laugh.
“Sure,” said Bob, affably.
“But tell us, what are your bunny rabbits up to?” Mrs. Lydia’s lipstick was dark, perfectly lined on her lips.
And so Jane recited the ages of their grandchildren, described the jobs held by her sons-in-law, the girl they were hoping Tim would marry soon. And because the Lydias only nodded at all this, without even saying “How nice,” Jane felt compelled to go on, to fill the space between their close, almost hovering, faces. “Tim went skydiving this year,” she said, and told them how this had scared her to death. It seemed he’d gotten over it after a few times; he hadn’t mentioned it again. “But honestly,” Jane said, shivering, hugging her black coat close. “Jumping out of a plane, can you imagine?” She herself could imagine it only too well, and it made her heart race.
“Not really a risk taker, are you, Jane?” Mrs. Lydia was looking at her with those new eyes; unnerving to have a sixteen-year old’s eyes looking at you from an old woman’s head.
“No,” said Jane, but she felt indistinctly that she had been insulted, and when Bob’s arm came up to touch her elbow, she felt he had received this, for her, in that way, too.
“You’ve always been a favorite of mine, Janie Houlton,” said the squat, red-faced Mr. Lydia then, abruptly reaching over and rubbing her shoulder through her nice black coat.
She felt exhausted, suddenly, by this silliness. What were you supposed to say when a squat, homely little man whose path you had crossed briefly for a number of years said you had always been a favorite of his? “Do you have any plans to retire soon, Alan?” is what she pleasantly said.
“Never,” the man answered. “I’ll retire the day I die.” He laughed, and they laughed with him, and in the quick glance he gave to Mrs. Lydia, the way she briefly rolled her brand-new eyes, Jane Houlton realized that he did not want to be home all day with his wife, that his wife did not want him there either. Mrs. Lydia said to Bob, “You’ve retired now, since we last saw you? Wasn’t it funny, meeting you in the Miami airport the way we did?
“It’s a small world,” Mrs. Lydia added, tugging on her ear with a gloved hand, glancing at Jane, and then turning her head, looking up the balcony stairs.
Bob stepped to the side, ready to go back into the church.
“When was this?” Jane said. “Miami?”
“Couple years ago. We visited those friends we told you about”—Mr. Lydia nodded at Bob—“in their little gated community. That’s not my dish of ice cream, I can tell you.” He shook his head, then squinted up at Bob. “Doesn’t it make you crazy to be home all day?”
“Love it,” Bob said firmly. “I love it.”
“We do things,” Jane added, as though she needed to explain something.
“What things?”
And then Jane hated her, this tall woman with her painted face, the hard eyes staring out from under the red felt hat; she didn’t want to tell Mrs. Lydia how every morning she and Bobby, early, first thing, took a walk, how they came back and made coffee and ate their bran cereal and read the paper to each other. How they planned their day, went shopping—for her coat, for a special pair of shoes since he had such trouble now with his feet.
“We bumped into someone else that trip,” Mr. Lydia said. “The Shepherds. They were at a golf resort north of the city.”
“Small world,” Mrs. Lydia said again, tugging at her ear with her gloved hand again, not looking at Jane this time, just looking up the stairs at the balcony.
Olive Kitteridge was moving through the crowd of people. Taller than most, her head was visible as she seemed to say something to her husband, Henry, who nodded, an expression of suppressed mirth on his face.
“Better get back in there,” said Bob, nodding toward the inside of the church, touching Jane’s elbow.
“Come on,” said Mrs. Lydia, tapping her husband’s sleeve with a program. “Let’s go. Lovely to see you.” She wiggled her fingers at Jane, then moved up the stairs.
Jane squeezed past a group of people standing right in the doorway, and she and Bob went back to their pew, her tugging her coat around her, crossing her legs, cold inside their black wool slacks. “He loves her,” said Jane, with a tone of admonishment. “That’s how he can stand her.”
“Mr. Lydia?”
“No. Henry Kitteridge.”
Bob didn’t answer, and they watched as others came in, took their seats again, the Kitteridges among them. “Miami?” Jane said to her husband. “What was he talking about?” She looked at him.
Bob thrust out his lower lip and shrugged, to indicate he didn’t know.
“When were you in Miami?”
“He must have meant Orlando. Remember when I had that account I was closing down there?”
“You bumped into the Lydias at the airport in Florida? You never told me that.”
“I’m sure I did. It was ages ago.”
The music took over the church. It took up all the space that wasn’t filled with people or coats or pews, it took up all the space in Jane Houlton’s head. She actually moved her neck back and forth as though to shake off the cumbersome weight of the sound, and realized that she had never liked music. It seemed to bring back all the shadows and aches of a lifetime. Let others enjoy it, these people listening so seriously in their fur coats, their red felt hats, their tiresome lives—a pressure on her knee, her husband’s hand.
She gazed at his hand, spread over her black coat that they had bought together. It was the large hand of an old man; a beautiful hand with the long fingers and the veins rising across; as familiar, almost, as her own hand was to her.
“Are you all right?” He had put his mouth against her ear, but she thought he had whispered too loudly. She made a circular motion with two fingers, their own sign language from years back, Let’s go, and he nodded.
“You all right, Janie?” he asked on the sidewalk, his hand under her elbow.
?
??Oh, I get tired of that heavy music somehow. Do you mind?”
“No. I’d had enough.”
In the car, in the darkness and the silence of the car, she felt some knowledge pass between them. And it had been sitting there in church with them, too, like a child pressed between them in the pew, this thing, this presence that had made its way into their evening.
She said quietly, “Oh, God.”
“What, Janie?”
She shook her head, and he did not ask again.
A traffic light up ahead turned yellow. He slowed down, drove slowly; he stopped.
Jane blurted out: “I hate her.”
“Who?” His tone was surprised. “Olive Kitteridge?”
“Of course not Olive Kitteridge. Why would I hate her? Donna Granger. I hate her. There’s something creepy about her. Smug. Your bunny rabbits. I hate her.” Jane actually stamped a foot against the floor of the car.
“I can’t think it’s worth all that emotion, Janie. I mean, really, do you?” asked Bob, and from the corner of her eye, she saw that he didn’t turn his head to look at her as he asked this.
In the silence that followed, Jane’s anger grew; it became immense, swelling like water around them, as if they had suddenly driven over a bridge and into a pond below—stagnant, cold stuff filled up around them.
“She was so busy getting her hair done that she didn’t even know her kid was pregnant. Didn’t even know it! Still doesn’t know it, probably. She still doesn’t know that I was the one to comfort the girl years ago, I was the one to worry myself sick!”
“You were nice to those girls.”
“That younger sister, though—Patty. She was a nasty thing. I never trusted her, and Tracy shouldn’t have either.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Tracy was too innocent, you know. Don’t you remember that night she had a slumber party and ended up so crushed?”
“There must have been a hundred slumber parties over the years, Jane. No, I don’t remember that one.”
“Patty Granger told Tracy how some other girl didn’t like her, some girl. She really doesn’t like you, you know.” Jane was almost ready to cry, recalling this. Her chin tingled.