“She a good person, this new one?” Cindy counted pills into Dixie cups.
“Haven’t a clue,” Olive said.
“Fertile, though, I guess,” Cindy said, picking up the tray of meds.
Olive had never been in a plane by herself. Not that she was by herself now, of course; there were four other passengers with her in this plane, which was half the size of a Greyhound bus. All of them had gone through security with the complacency of cows; Olive seeming the only one with trepidation. She’d had to remove her suede sandals and the big Timex watch of Henry’s that she wore on her large wrist. Perhaps it was the queer intimacy of standing there in her panty-hosed feet, worried that the watch might not work after it went through the machine, that made her, for one half a second, fall in love with the big security fellow, who said kindly, “There you go, ma’am,” handing her the plastic bowl that had rolled toward her with the watch in it. The pilots, as well—both looking twelve years old with their unworried brows—had been kind, in the easy way they’d asked Olive if she’d mind sitting toward the back for weight distribution, before they climbed into the cockpit, closing the steel door. A thought unfolded before her—their mothers should be proud.
And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats—then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water—seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son’s life.
But at the airport Christopher seemed furious. She had forgotten that, because of security, he would not be able to meet her at the gate, and apparently it hadn’t occurred to him to remind her. Why this should make him so angry, Olive couldn’t figure out. She was the one who had wandered around the luggage area with panic bubbling through her, her face hot as fire by the time Christopher found her lumbering back up the stairs. “Godfrey,” he said, not even reaching to take her bag. “Why can’t you just get a cell phone like everyone else?”
It was not until later, hurtling down an expressway with four lanes and more cars than Olive had ever seen moving together, that Christopher said, “So, how is he?”
“The same,” she answered, and said nothing more until they had taken an exit and were moving through streets lined with uneven buildings, Christopher lurching the car around double-parked trucks. “How’s Ann?” Olive asked then, shifting her feet for the first time since she’d gotten into the car, and Christopher said, “Uncomfortable.” Adding, in a didactic, doctor-ish tone, “It gets very uncomfortable,” as though entirely ignorant of the fact that Olive herself had once been pregnant, uncomfortable. “And Annabelle’s waking up in the night again.”
“Ducky,” said Olive. “Duck soup.” The buildings were lower now, all with steep stoops in the front. She said, “You indicated little Teddy’s become quite a handful.”
“Theodore,” said Christopher. “God, whatever you do, don’t call him Teddy.” He pulled the car up sharply, and backed into a space near the sidewalk. “Honestly, Mom?” Christopher ducked his head, his blue eyes looking straight into hers, the way he would do years ago. He said softly, “Theodore has always been a little piece of crap.”
Confusion, which had started the moment she had stepped off the plane and not found anyone waiting for her, and which had then grown into an active panic on the airport’s escalator, changing into a stunned block of perfect oddness the whole drive in, now, as Olive stepped from the car onto the sidewalk, seemed to cause everything to sway around her, so that reaching to get her bag from the backseat, she actually stumbled and fell against the car. “Easy, Mom,” said Christopher. “I’ll get the bag. Just watch where you step.”
“Oh, goodness,” she said, for already her foot had landed on a crusty roll of dog mess there on the sidewalk. “Oh, hell.”
“I hate that,” Christopher said. He took her arm. “It’s the guy who works on the subway and comes home early in the mornings. I’ve seen him out here while his dog takes a shit, looking around to see no one’ll catch him, just leaving it there.”
“My goodness,” said Olive, because adding to her confusion was the additional factor of her son’s loquaciousness. She had seldom heard him speak so passionately or so long, and she was quite certain she had never heard him use the word shit. She laughed, a false, hard sound. The earlier clarity of the young pilots’ faces came to her as something she had dreamed.
Christopher unlocked a grated gate beneath a large brown stoop of stairs, and stepped back to let her enter. “So, this is your house,” she said, and gave that laugh again, because she could have wept at the darkness, the smell of old dog hair and soiled laundry, a sourness that seemed to come from the walls. The house she and Henry had built for Chris back home in Maine had been beautiful—filled with light, the windows large to show the lawns, and lilies, and fir trees.
She stepped on a plastic toy and almost broke her neck. “Where is everyone?” she asked. “Christopher, I’ve got to take off that shoe before I track dog mess all through the house.”
“Just leave it here,” he said, stepping past her, and so she slipped off the one suede sandal, and walking through a dark hallway, she thought how she had forgotten to bring another pair of panty hose.
“They’re out back in the garden,” said her son, and she followed him through a capacious, dark living room, into a small kitchen that was cluttered with toys, a high chair, pots spread over the counter, open boxes of cereal and Minute Rice. A grimy white sock lay on the table. And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child—that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else’s home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one’s own.
She emerged, blinking, into a small outdoor area—this could not possibly be what he meant as a garden. She stood on a square of concrete. Around her was a chicken wire fence that had been knocked into by something large enough to leave a whole section gaping and broken. A child’s plastic swimming pool was before her. In it, a naked baby sat, staring at her, while a small, dark-haired boy stood nearby, his wet swim trunks sticking to his skinny thighs. He stared at her as well. Behind him, a black dog lay on an old dog bed.
Not far from Olive, a wooden staircase rose, leading to a wooden deck above her head. From the shadow beneath the stairs came the word, “Olive.” A woman appeared, holding a barbecue spatula. “Gosh, there you are. What a sight for sore eyes. I am so glad to meet you, Olive.” Briefly Olive had the image of a huge walking girl-doll; the hair was black and cut straight above the shoulders, the face as open and guileless as a simpleton’s.
“You must be Ann,” said Olive, but the words were lost in a hug the large girl wrapped her in, the spatula falling to the ground, causing the dog to groan and stand up; Olive could see this from just a sliver of vision left to her. Taller than Olive, and with a stomach huge and hard, this Ann held her long arms around her and kissed the side of Olive’s head. Olive did not kiss people. And to be held in the arms of a woman taller than she was—well, Olive was positive this had never happened before.
“Do you mind if I call you Mom?” asked the girl, stepping back but holding Olive by her elbows. “I’m so dying to call you Mom.”
“Call me anything you want,” Olive replied. “I guess I’ll call you Ann.”
/> The boy moved like a slithery animal to grab hold of his mother’s ample thigh.
“You’re Thaddeus, I suppose,” said Olive.
The boy began to cry.
“Theodore,” said Ann. “Honey, that’s all right. People make mistakes. We’ve talked about that, right?”
A rash stood out high on Ann’s cheek, and ran down the side of her neck, where it disappeared under a huge black T-shirt worn over black leggings. Her feet were bare; bits of a pink polish were on her toenails.
“Perhaps I’d better sit down,” Olive said.
“Oh, absolutely,” Ann said. “Honey, pull that chair over here for your mother.”
In the midst of the aluminum beach chair scraping across the cement and the boy crying and Ann saying, “God, Theodore, what is it?”—in the midst of all this, one shoe off and one shoe on, sinking back into the beach chair, Olive distinctly heard the words Praise Jesus.
“Theodore, honey, please, please, please stop crying.”
In the plastic pool the baby slapped the water and shrieked. “Jesus, Annabelle,” said Christopher. “Keep it down.”
Praise the Lord, came distinctly from somewhere above.
“What in God’s name—” said Olive, putting her head back, squinting upward.
“We rent the top floor to a Christian,” Ann said in a whisper, rolling her eyes. “I mean, who would think here in this neighborhood we’d get stuck with a tenant who’s a Christian?”
“Christian?” said Olive, looking back at her daughter-in-law, thoroughly confused. “Are you a Muslim, Ann? Is there a problem?”
“Muslim?” The girl’s plain, big face looked pleasantly at Olive while she bent to pick up the baby from the pool. “I’m not a Muslim.” Quizzically: “Wait, you’re not a Muslim, are you? Christopher never—”
“Oh, godfrey,” said Olive.
“What she means,” Christopher explained to his mother, fiddling with a large barbecue grill near the staircase, “is that most people in this neighborhood don’t go to church. We live in the cool part of Brooklyn, hippity hop as hell, Mother dear, where people are either too artsyfartsy to believe in God, or too busy making money. So it’s somewhat unusual to have a tenant who’s a real so-called Christian.”
“You mean like a fundamentalist,” said Olive, amazed once again at how talkative her son had become.
“Right,” said Ann. “That’s what he is. You know, fundamentally Christian.”
The boy had stopped his crying and, still holding his mother’s leg, said to Olive in a high, earnest voice, “Whenever we swear, the parrot says ‘Praise Jesus’ or ‘God is king.’ ”
And to Olive’s horror and amazement, the child looked skyward and yelled, “Shit!”
“Honey,” said Ann, and smoothed his hair.
Praise God, came the response from above.
“That’s a parrot?” asked Olive. “Good Lord, it sounds like my Aunt Ora.”
“Yeah, a parrot,” said Ann. “Weird, huh.”
“You couldn’t have said no pets allowed?”
“Oh, we’d never do that. We love pets. Dog-Face is part of our family.” Ann nodded in the direction of the black dog, who, having returned to his ratty bed, now had his long face resting on his paws, his eyes closed.
Olive could barely eat her dinner. She had thought Christopher was going to grill hamburgers. But he had grilled tofu hot dogs, and for the grown-ups had, of all things, diced up a can of oysters and poked them into these so-called hot dogs.
“Are you okay, Mom?” It was Ann who asked.
“Fine,” said Olive. “When I travel, I sometimes find I’m not hungry. I think I’ll just eat this hot dog roll.”
“Sure. Help yourself. Theodore, isn’t it nice to have Grandma come and stay?”
Olive put the roll back onto her plate. Not once had it occurred to her that she was “Grandma” to Ann’s children, who had been, she only recently discovered as the hot dogs had been set before her, fathered by two different men. Theodore did not respond to his mother’s question but gazed at Olive while he ate with his mouth open, making appalling chewing sounds.
Less than ten minutes, and the meal was over. Olive told Chris that she’d like to help clean up but that she didn’t know where anything went. “Nowhere,” Chris said. “Can’t you tell? In this house nothing goes anywhere.”
“Mom, you go make yourself comfortable,” Ann said.
So Olive went down into the basement, where they had brought her earlier with her little suitcase, and she lay down on the double bed. The fact was, the basement was the nicest place Olive had seen in the house. It was “finished” and painted all white, and even had, next to the washing machine, a white telephone.
She wanted to cry. She wanted to wail like a child. She sat up and dialed the phone.
“Put him on,” she said, and waited until she could hear only silence. “Smack, Henry,” she said, and she waited a while longer until she thought she heard a tiny grunt.
“Well. She’s a big girl,” said Olive. “Your new daughter-in-law. Graceful as a truck driver. A little dumb, I think. Something I can’t put my finger on. But nice. You’d like her. You two would get along fine.”
Olive looked around the basement room she was in, and thought she heard Henry grunt again. “No, she’s not going to hightail it up the coast anytime soon. Got her hands full here. Belly full, too. They’ve got me down in the basement. It’s kind of nice, Henry. Painted white.” She tried to think what else to say, what Henry would want to hear. “Chris seems good,” she said. She paused for a long time after that. “Talkative,” she added. “Okay, Henry,” she finally said, and hung up.
Back upstairs, no one was around. Thinking they must be putting the children to bed, Olive stepped through the kitchen and out onto the concrete yard, where twilight was gathering.
“Caught me,” said Ann, and Olive’s heart banged.
“Godfrey. You caught me. I didn’t see you sitting there.”
Ann was holding a cigarette in one hand, balancing a beer on her high belly with the other, her legs apart as she sat on a stool by the barbecue. “Have a seat,” Ann said, gesturing toward the beach chair Olive had been sitting in earlier. “Unless it makes you crazy to see a pregnant woman drink and smoke. Which I totally understand if it does. But it’s just one cigarette and one beer a day. You know, when the kids finally get put down. I call it my meditation time.”
“I see,” Olive said. “Well, meditate away. I can go back inside.”
“Oh, no. I’d love your company.”
In the dusk she saw the girl smile at her. Say what you might about judging a book by its cover, Olive always found faces revealing. Still—the bovine nature of this girl was baffling. Was Ann a bit stupid? Olive had taught school enough years to know that large amounts of insecurity could take the form of stupidity. She lowered herself into her chair, and looked away. She didn’t want to guess what might be seen in her own face.
Cigarette smoke wafted in front of her. It amazed her that anyone would smoke these days, and she couldn’t help but feel it as a kind of assault. “Say,” Olive said, “that doesn’t make you feel sick?”
“What, smoking this?”
“Yes. I shouldn’t think that would help the nausea.”
“What nausea?”
“I thought you had the pukes.”
“The pukes?” Ann dropped the cigarette into the bottle of beer. She looked over at Olive, her dark eyebrows raised.
“You haven’t been sick with the pregnancy?”
“Oh, no. I’m a horse.” Ann patted her belly. “I just keep spittin’ these things out with no problem.”
“Apparently.” Olive wondered if the girl was tipsy from the beer. “Where’s your newest husband?”
“He’s reading Theodore a story. It’s nice to have them bonding.”
Olive opened her mouth to ask what kind of bond Theodore had with his real father, but she stopped. Maybe you weren’t supposed to s
ay “real father” these days.
“How old are you, Mom?” Ann was scratching at her cheek.
“I’m seventy-two,” Olive said, “and I wear a size ten shoe.”
“Hey, cool. I wear a size ten. I’ve always had big feet. You look good for seventy-two,” Ann added. “My mother’s sixty-three and she—”
“She what?”
“Oh.” Ann shrugged. “You know, she just doesn’t look so good.” Ann hoisted herself up, leaned toward the grill, where she picked up a box of kitchen matches. “If you don’t mind, Mom, I’m just going to have one more cigarette.”
Olive did mind. This was Christopher’s baby in there, trying to develop its own respiratory system right about now, and what kind of woman would jeopardize such a thing? But she said loudly, “Do whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.”
Praise God, came from above them.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Olive. “How can you stand that?”
“Sometimes I can’t,” Ann said, sitting down again, hugely.
“Well,” Olive said, looking at her lap, smoothing her skirt. “It’s temporary, I guess.” She felt a need to look away as the girl lit a fresh cigarette.
Ann didn’t respond. Olive heard her inhale, then exhale, as the smoke drifted back toward Olive. A realization flowered within her. The girl was panicking. How did Olive know this, never in seventy-two years having put a cigarette to her own lips? But the truth of it filled her. A light went on in the kitchen, and Olive watched through the grated windows as Christopher walked to the kitchen sink.
Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did. But even if, thinking of the smoking Ann, it took three different kids with three different fathers, it was never enough, was it? And Christopher—why had he been so foolhardy as to take all this on and not even, until after the fact, bother to tell his mother? In the near darkness, she saw Ann lean forward and put out her cigarette by sticking the tip into the baby pool. A tiny phisst of a sound, then the girl tossed the rest over toward the chicken wire fence.