In another few minutes their boots clump back inside, Olive hears the door close. People manage, she thinks. It’s true. But she takes a deep breath and has to shift her weight on this wooden chair, because it’s not true, too. She pictures Henry, not even a year ago, measuring what was needed for the mopboards in their new room, down on his hands and knees with the measuring tape, telling her the numbers while she wrote them down. Then Henry standing up, a tall man. “Okay, Ollie. Let’s widdle the dogs and go into town.” The car ride—what did they talk about? Oh, how she wants to remember, but she can’t remember. In town, in the parking lot of Shop ’n Save, because they needed milk and juice after they went to the lumber store, she said she would stay in the car. And that was the end of their life. Henry got out of the car and fell down. Never stood up again, never walked down the pebble path to the house again, never said an intelligible word again; only sometimes, those huge blue-green eyes would look at her from the hospital bed.
Then he went blind; now he will never see her again. “Not much to look at these days,” she’s told him, when she has gone to sit with him. “Lost a little weight now we don’t have our crackers and cheese every night. But I guess I look like hell.” He would say that wasn’t true. He would say, “Oh no, Ollie. You look wonderful to me.” He doesn’t say anything. Some days in his wheelchair he doesn’t even turn his head. She makes the drive every day and sits with him. You’re a saint, says Molly Collins. God, how stupid can you be? A scared old woman is what she is; all she knows these days is that when the sun goes down, it’s time to go to bed. People manage. She is not so sure. The tide is still out on that one, she thinks.
Eddie Junior has stayed down there on the shore, skipping stones. His cousins are gone; just Eddie Junior down there on the rocks alone. Hurling those flat stones. Olive feels pleased by how good he is at this, skip-skip, skip-skip; even though the water is no longer flat. She likes the way he immediately bends down, finding another, hurling that.
But there’s Kerry, and where did she come from? She must have gone down to the shore from around the other side of the house, because there she is in her stockinged feet on the rocks, veering over the barnacled rocks, calling out to Eddie. Whatever she’s saying, he doesn’t like. Olive can tell that from here. He keeps on skipping stones, but finally he turns to her and speaks. Kerry opens her arms in a kind of pleading gesture, and Eddie Junior just shakes his head, and a few minutes later, Kerry comes back up from the shore, crawling up the rocks, clearly drunk. She could break her neck out there, Olive thinks. Not that Eddie Junior seems to care. He throws a stone, real hard this time, too hard—it doesn’t skip, just smashes into the water.
For a long time Olive sits there. She looks out over the water, and on the far edge of her mind she can hear people getting into their cars, driving away, but she is thinking of Marlene Monroe, a young girl, so shy, walking home with her sweetheart Ed Bonney, how happy a girl she must have been, standing at Crossbow Corners while the birds chirped and Ed Bonney perhaps said, “Gee, I hate to say goodbye.” They lived right here in this house with Ed’s mother for the first years of their marriage, until the old lady died. If Christopher had stayed married, his wife wouldn’t have let Olive live with them for five minutes. And now Christopher was so different he might not let her live with him either—should Henry die and she find herself in trouble. Christopher might stick her in the attic, except he’d mentioned his California house didn’t have an attic. Tie her to a flagpole, but he didn’t have one of those either. So fascist, is what Christopher said, the last time he was here, as they drove past the Bullocks’ house with the flag out front. Whoever went around saying things like that?
A stumbling sound on the deck above her, and then a slurred voice, “I’m sorry, Marlene. Really, you have to believe me.” And then the murmuring sounds of Marlene herself, telling Kerry it’s time to go sleep it off, and after that, clumping sounds down the deck stairs; more silence.
Back inside the house, Olive puts a brownie into her mouth and goes off to find the bathroom. Coming out, she runs into the woman with the long gray hair, who is right now sticking a cigarette butt into a potted plant that sits on a table in the hallway. “Who are you?” Olive says, and the woman stares at her. “Who are you?” the woman answers, and Olive walks past her. That is the woman who bought Christopher’s house, Olive realizes with an inner lurch, that woman who hasn’t the decency to respect even a poor potted plant, let alone everything Olive and Henry worked for, their son’s beautiful house, where their grandchildren were going to grow up.
“Where’s Marlene gone to?” Olive asks Molly Collins, who still has Marlene’s apron on, and is walking around the living room officiously collecting plates, balled-up paper napkins. Molly looks over her shoulder and says vaguely, “Gee, I’m not sure.”
“Where’s Marlene gone?” Olive asks Susie Bradford, who comes by next, and Susie says, “Around.”
It’s Eddie Junior who tells her. “Kerry got drunk and Mom’s gone to put her in bed.” He says this with a dark look at the back of Susie Bradford, and Olive likes the boy a good deal. She did not have this young fellow in school. She left teaching years before to tend to her own family. Christopher out in California. Henry over in Hasham, at the home. Gone, gone. Gone to hell.
“Thank you,” she says to Eddie Junior, who, in his young eyes, seems to have some awareness of hell himself.
It is no longer a lovely April day. The northeast wind that blows against the side of the Bonney house has also brought the clouds in, and now a sky as gray as November hangs over the bay, and against the dark rocks the water slaps ceaselessly, swirling seaweed around, leaving it bumpily combed out along the higher rocks. Right down to the point the rocky coastline looks barren, almost wintry, only the skinny spruce and pines show dark green, for it is far too early for any leaves to come out; even close to the house the forsythia is only budded.
Olive Kitteridge, on her way to find Marlene, steps over a smashed-looking crocus by the garage’s side door. Last week, after the day that was warm enough to take the dog to Henry in the parking lot, it snowed, one of those April dumpings of pure white that all melted the very next day, but the ground in places is still soggy from the assault, and certainly this crushed yellow crocus has been done in. The side door of the garage opens directly to stairs, and Olive walks up them cautiously, stands on the landing; two sweatshirts are hanging on hooks, a pair of muddied yellow rubber boots stand side by side, toes facing in opposite directions.
Olive knocks on the door, looking at the boots. She bends over and places one boot on the other side of its mate, so they look like they go together, could walk off together, and she knocks again. No answer, so she turns the knob, pushes the door open slowly, walks in.
“Hello, Olive.”
Across the room, facing her, Marlene sits like an obedient schoolgirl in a straight-backed chair by Kerry’s double bed, her hands folded in her lap, her plump ankles crossed neatly. On the bed sprawls Kerry. She lies on her stomach with the abandonment of a sunbather, her face turned toward the wall, elbows out, but her hips are turned slightly, so that the black outline of her suit seems to accentuate the rise of her rear end, and her black-stockinged legs are sleek, in spite of the fact that the stockings are shredded in a series of tiny runs at her feet.
“Is she asleep?” Olive asks, walking farther into the room.
“Passed out,” Marlene answers. “Upchucked first in Eddie’s room, then fell asleep here.”
“I see. Well, it’s a nice place you’ve given her here.” Olive walks over toward the little dining alcove and brings back a chair, sits down by Marlene.
For a while neither woman speaks, then Marlene says pleasantly, “I’ve been thinking about killing Kerry.” She raises a hand from her lap and exposes a small paring knife lying on her green flowered dress.
“Oh,” says Olive.
Marlene bends over the sleeping Kerry and touches the woman’s bare neck. “Isn’t th
is some major vein?” she asks, and puts the knife flat against Kerry’s neck, even poking slightly at the vague throbbing of the pulse there.
“Yuh. Okay. Might want to be a little careful there.” Olive sits forward.
In a moment Marlene sighs, sits back. “Okay, here.” And she hands the paring knife to Olive.
“Do better with a pillow,” Olive tells her. “Cut her throat, there’s going to be a lot of blood.”
A sudden, soft, deep eruption of a giggle comes from Marlene. “Never thought of a pillow.”
“I’ve had some time to think about pillows,” Olive says, but Marlene nods vacantly, like she’s really not listening.
“Mrs. Kitteridge, did you know?”
“Know what?” says Olive, but she feels her stomach turn choppy, whitecaps in her stomach.
“What Kerry told me today? She said it happened with her and Ed only once. Just one time. But I don’t believe that—it had to be more. The summer after Ed Junior graduated from high school.” Marlene has started to cry, is shaking her head. Olive looks away; a woman needs her privacy. She holds the paring knife in her lap and gazes out through the window above the bed, only gray sky and gray ocean; too high up to see any shoreline, only gray water and sky out there, far as the eye can see.
“I never heard anything,” says Olive. “Why would she choose today to tell you?”
“Thought I knew.” Marlene has pulled a Kleenex from somewhere, from inside her sleeve maybe, and she dabs at her face, blows her nose. “She thought I knew all along, and I was just punishing her by keeping on being nice to her. She got drunk today and started saying how good I got her, killing her and Ed with kindness that way.”
“Jesum Crow,” is all Olive can think to say.
“Isn’t that funny, Olive?” Again, out of nowhere comes Marlene’s deep giggle.
“Well,” says Olive. “I guess it’s not the funniest thing I ever heard.”
Olive looks at the black-suited body of Kerry sprawled there on the bed and wishes there were a door to close or a curtain to draw so they didn’t have to see the rise of this girl’s rear end, her black stockings outlining the slim calves of her legs. “Does Eddie Junior know?”
“Yuh. Seems she told him yesterday. Thought he knew, too, but he says he didn’t. He says he doesn’t believe it’s true.”
“It may not be.”
“Shit,” says Marlene, shaking her head, crying again. “Mrs. Kitteridge, if you don’t mind, I’d like to just say shit.”
“Say shit,” says Olive, who never uses the word herself.
“Shit,” says Marlene. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“I guess so.” Olive breathes in deeply. “I guess so,” she says again, slowly. She looks around her with little interest—a picture of a cat is on one wall—and her glance comes back to Marlene, who is squeezing her nose. “Quite a day, kiddo. Vomit upstairs, and cigarette butts downstairs.” The woman with the long gray hair has really shaken Olive up: Seismic spells itself across her fog-colored mind. She says, “That creature who bought Christopher’s house, she’s walking around putting her cigarettes out in your plants.”
“Oh, her,” says Marlene. “She’s a piece of shit, too.”
“I guess so.” She’s going to tell this to Henry tomorrow. She’ll tell him the whole thing; only he won’t like hearing the word shit.
“Olive, could I ask you to do me a favor?”
“I wish you would.”
“Could you, please—” And here the poor woman looks so bereft, dazed, in her green flowered dress, her brown hair coming loose from its pins. “Before you leave, could you go upstairs in the bedroom? Turn right at the top of the stairs. In the closet you’ll find pamphlets, you know, of different places to go. Could you take them with you? Just take them with you, and throw them all away. The basket they’re in, too.”
“Of course.”
Marlene has tears running down past her nose. She wipes her face with a bare hand. “I don’t want to open that closet door, knowing it’s there.”
“Yes,” says Olive. “I can do that.” She brought Henry’s shoes home from the hospital, put them in a bag in the garage, and they are still there. They were new, bought just a few days before the last time they pulled into the parking lot of Shop ’n Save.
“Any other stuff, if you want, Marlene.”
“No. No, Olive. It’s that we sat there and made believe we’d go places together.” Marlene shakes her head. “Even after Dr. Stanley told us what the situation was, we’d go through these pamphlets, talking about the trips we’d take when he got well.” She rubs her face with both hands. “Gosh, Olive.” Marlene stops and looks at the knife Olive is holding. “Oh, gosh, Olive. I’m so embarrassed.” And it seems she really is; her cheeks are flushing a deep pink, now a deep red.
“No need to be,” Olive tells her. “We all want to kill someone at some point.” Olive’s ready right now to say, if Marlene wants to hear, the different people she might like to kill.
But Marlene says, “No, not that. Not that. That I sat there with him and we planned those trips.” She tears at the Kleenex, which is pretty well shredded. “Gosh, Olive, it was like we believed it. And there he was, losing weight, so weak—‘Marlene, bring over the basket of trips,’ he’d say, and I would. It makes me so embarrassed now, Olive.”
An innocent, Olive thinks, gazing at this woman. A real one. You don’t find them anymore. Boy, you do not.
Olive stands up and walks to the window over the little sink, looking down onto the driveway. People are leaving now, the last of them; Matt Grearson gets into his truck, backs out, drives away. And here comes Molly Collins with her husband, walking over the gravel in her low pumps; she put in a full day’s work, Molly did, just trying to do her best, Olive thinks. Just a woman with false teeth and an old husband—who in two shakes will be dead like the rest of them, or worse, sitting next to Henry in a wheelchair.
She wants to tell Marlene how she and Henry talked about the grandchildren they would have, the happy Christmases with their nice daughter-in-law. How only a little more than a year ago they would go to Christopher’s house for dinner and the tension would be so thick, you could put your hand against it, and they’d still come home and say to each other what a nice girl she was, how glad they were that Christopher had this nice wife.
Who, who, does not have their basket of trips? It isn’t right. Molly Collins said that today, standing out by the church. It isn’t right. Well. It isn’t.
She would like to rest a hand on Marlene’s head, but this is not the kind of thing Olive is especially able to do. So she goes and stands near the chair Marlene sits on, gazing out that side window there, looking down at the shoreline, which is wide now that the tide’s almost gone out. She thinks of Eddie Junior down there skipping stones, and she can only just remember that feeling herself, being young enough to pick up a rock, throw it out to sea with force, still young enough to do that, throw that damn stone.
Ship in a Bottle
“You’ll have to organize your days,” Anita Harwood was saying, wiping at the kitchen counter. “Julie, I mean this. People go crazy in prisons and the army because of this exactly.”
Winnie Harwood, who at eleven years old was younger by ten years than her sister, Julie, watched Julie, who was looking at the floor and leaning against the doorway, wearing the red hooded sweatshirt and jeans that she’d slept in. Julie’s hands were jammed into her pockets, and Winnie, whose adolescent feelings for her sister amounted these days to almost a crush, tried unobtrusively to put her own hands into her own pockets, and lean against the table with the indifference that Julie appeared to have at what was being said.
“For example,” continued their mother. “What are your plans for today?” She stopped wiping the counter and looked over at Julie. Julie did not look up. Only recently had Winnie’s feelings teetered from her mother to her sister. Her mother had won beauty pageants before Julie was born, and she still looked pretty to Win
nie. It was like having more candy than other people, or getting stars on homework papers—to have the mother who looked the best. A lot of them were fat, or had stupid hair, or wore their husbands’ woolen shirts over jeans with elastic waistbands. Anita never left the house without lipstick and high heels and her fake pearl earrings. Only lately had Winnie started to have the uncomfortable sense that something was wrong, or might be wrong, with her mother; that others talked about her in a certain eye-rolling way. She’d have given anything for this not to be the case, and maybe it wasn’t—she just didn’t know.
“Because of this exactly?” Julie asked, looking up. “In prisons and the army? Mom, I’m dying, and you’re saying stuff that makes no sense.”
“Don’t be casual about the word dying, honey. Some people really are dying right now, and terrible deaths, too. They’d be glad to be in your shoes—getting rejected by a fiancé would be like a big mosquito bite to them. Look. Your father’s home,” Anita said. “That’s sweet. Coming home in the middle of a workday to make sure you’re okay.”
“To make sure you’re okay,” Julie said. Adding, “And it’s not accurate to say he rejected me.” Winnie took her hands out of her pockets.
“How’s everyone? Everyone doing good?” Jim Harwood was a slightly built man, with a nature of relentless congeniality. He was a recovered alcoholic, going three times a week to AA meetings. He was not Julie’s father—who had run off with another woman when Julie was a kid—but he treated her kindly, as he treated everyone. Whether or not their mother had married him while he was still a drunk, Winnie didn’t know. All of Winnie’s life, he had worked as a janitor at the school. “Maintenance supervisor,” their mother had said once, to Julie. “And don’t you ever forget it.”
“We’re fine, Jim,” said Anita now, holding the door as he brought in a bag of groceries. “Look at this, girls. Your father’s done the shopping. Julie, why don’t you make pancakes?”