Olive, Again: A Novel (36 page)

Olive asked to see a photograph of the girl, and Isabelle pointed behind Olive, and Olive turned around and saw a whole array of photos. The girl was much older than Olive would have pictured, but then she remembered how young Isabelle was when she had her. Amy wore her grayish hair short now, but her face was full and had a sweetness to it. “Huh,” Olive said. She looked at the photos carefully.

“Well, I wasn’t a good mother either,” Olive said, turning back to face Isabelle. “But my son loves me. Now. After I had my heart attack he seemed to grow up.” She said, “What does Amy do?”

Isabelle said, “She’s a doctor. She’s an oncologist.”

“My word,” Olive said. “Well, that’s something. Working with cancer patients all day, my goodness.”

“Oh, I think it has to be very hard, but she seems to find it fascinating. You know, her first little boy, he died when he was eighteen months old. Not of cancer. SIDS. And she was in nursing school, and then she just kept right on going. She’s married to a doctor as well. He’s a pediatrician.”

Somehow Olive found this astonishing. She said, “Well, my son is also a doctor, in New York City.”

“New York!” Isabelle said, and asked what kind of doctor he was.

“A podiatrist,” said Olive. Adding, “People walk a lot in New York. He has a blazing practice.” She looked over at the many little figurines that were on a shelf by the window.

“Those were my mother’s,” Isabelle said.

“So when did you marry?” Olive asked, looking back at her.

“Oh, I married a wonderful man, he was a pharmacist—”

“
I
married a pharmacist!” Olive almost yelled this. “My husband’s pharmacy was right here in Crosby, and he was a
lovely,
lovely man. Henry was made of love.”

“So was my husband,” Isabelle said. “I married him right about the time Amy went to college. He died last year, and our house was just too much for me, and so Amy got me into this place.”

“
Well
,” said Olive. “Well, well, well. We
both
married pharmacists.”

Isabelle said, “My husband’s name was Frank.”

“And he was a Franco,” said Olive. “What we used to call a Frenchie.” And Isabelle said yes, and wasn’t that funny, because back when she worked in that shoe factory, thinking she was superior to the women who worked there, she would never have thought she’d marry a Franco. But she did. And he was wonderful. He’d had a wife who’d died very young, before they’d had any children, and what this man did after his wife died, every day in the spring and summer and fall, was to go home after work—he and this young wife had had a house outside of Shirley Falls with fields all around—and he would get on his mower and he just mowed those fields. Mowed and mowed and mowed. And then he met Isabelle.

“Did he stop mowing?” Olive asked.

Isabelle said, “He didn’t mow as much.”

Olive felt a warmth move through her; she stuck her cane onto the ground and pushed herself out of the chair. “Well, I like the sunlight you get here,” she said.

Then something happened that made Olive far more concerned than the lack of sun in her apartment. Olive’s bowels began to leak. She had first had this occur at night, it had woken her each time with a terrific sense of dread, and then one day on her way out of the dining room, she thought: I’d better hurry back to the bathroom, but she didn’t get there quite in time. For Olive, this was absolutely appalling.

She rose at six in the morning the next day and got into her car—she passed Barbara Paznik and her husband, who were out walking, and Barbara waved with enthusiasm—and Olive drove to the Walmart far out of town. Walking as quickly as she could with her cane, she bought a box of those atrocious diapers for old people, and she brought them back and put them in the top of her bathroom closet. She wondered when she should put one on. She never knew when these episodes would occur.

A few nights later after supper, as she and Isabelle walked down the hallway, she felt the urge, and when Isabelle said, “Do you want to come in?,” Olive said, “Yes, and hurry,” and she walked directly into Isabelle’s bathroom. “Whew,” she said, and as she was straightening herself out a few minutes later, she glanced up and saw—a box of Depends!

Olive came out and sat down and said, “Isabelle Goodrow Daignault. You wear those foolish diapers for old people,” and Isabelle’s face became pink. Olive said, “Well, so do I! Or at least I’d better start occasionally wearing them.”

Isabelle pushed her glasses up her nose with the back of her swollen wrist and said, “My bladder can’t seem to control itself, so I had to start wearing them. Not always, but at night I do.”

Olive said, “Well, my back end leaks, I’d say that was far worse.”

Isabelle’s mouth opened in dismay. “Oh, good heavens, Olive. That
is
worse.”

“I guess to God it is. And I think after I eat is when this happens. Honest to good God, Isabelle. I’m going to have to make sure I have my foolish
poopie
panties
on. Even my granddaughter’s outgrown them—years ago!”

Isabelle seemed to enjoy that; she laughed until tears came from her eyes. Then she told Olive how she was always embarrassed to buy them when she took the van to the store with the other old people (she did not have a car); she always tried to sneak off and get them, and Olive said, “Hell, I’ll buy all you want, I go to Walmart when it opens at six in the morning is what I do.”

“Olive.” Isabelle let out a sigh. “I’m awful glad I met you.”

When Olive returned to her apartment she didn’t write up any memories; she just sat in the chair and watched her birds at the feeder outside her window and thought that she was not unhappy.

And so the year went by. At Christmas, Olive met Amy Goodrow and her husband, who was Asian—Olive already knew this from the photographs—and she was surprised by Amy in person; there was something at once kind about her, but also cool. Olive didn’t know what to make of her, but she told Isabelle after they had left—they had flown into town for three days—that she was a nice girl. “Oh, she is
wonderful
,” Isabelle said, and Olive thought about that, how much Isabelle adored this girl.

Olive’s own family stayed in New York for Christmas. “They have all those little kids and the tree and all that foolishness,” Olive told Isabelle. And Isabelle said, “Of course they do.”

Another spring slowly arrived.

One evening Olive noticed that Bernie Green had some guests with him at supper. She watched from the doorway as she entered. They were a couple, maybe in their fifties, but as she watched she suddenly realized: Why, that’s the Larkin girl! So Olive walked over to their table, and she said, “Hello, are you the Larkin girl?”

And the woman looked up at her, closing her dark red cardigan with one hand, and said, tentatively, “Yes?”

Olive said, “I thought so. You look like your mother. I’m Olive Kitteridge. She used to be a guidance counselor at the school where I worked.”

The woman said, “Well, I’m Suzanne, and this is my husband.” The man nodded at Olive pleasantly. Olive thought Suzanne was a pretty thing, though she seemed to Olive to have a pulse of sadness going through her.

“Do you know—oh, this was years ago now—” Olive sat down at the empty chair at the table. “Your mother called me a cunt.”

Suzanne Larkin’s hand went to her throat, and she looked at her husband, and then at Bernie. Bernie started to chuckle.

“Oh, I deserved it,” Olive said. “I went to see her after my first husband died, and I went there because I thought her problems were worse than my own, and she knew that was why I was there, it was extraordinary, really, I never forgot it. But my word, what a word to use.”

Suzanne Larkin looked at Olive, and then a sudden kindness came to her face. “I’m so sorry about that,” she said.

And Olive said there was no reason to be sorry at all.

“She just passed away this week,” the girl said.

“Oh Godfrey,” Olive said. Then she said, “Well, I’m sorry. For you.”

And the girl reached to touch Olive’s hand lightly. “No reason to be sorry.” She leaned in toward Olive. “At all.”

Mostly, Olive and Isabelle spoke of their husbands, and also a little bit of their childhoods; Olive had told Isabelle right away that her father had killed himself in the kitchen of his house when Olive was thirty years old, and Isabelle’s face had shown genuine sorrow. This was important to Olive; had the woman appeared judgmental, Olive thought they might have stopped being friends. Only seldom did they mention their grandchildren, and one day Olive asked Isabelle why she didn’t talk more about her grandson, the fellow in California doing computer stuff. Isabelle put her hand to her chin as though thinking about this. “Well, talking about grandchildren can be boring for others, and also—” Here Isabelle sighed and looked around Olive’s living room—they traded off their places to visit—and said, “And also, I don’t really know him very well. The truth is, Olive, Amy is good to me, but she does live in Iowa, and I sometimes think when a child moves that far away they’re really trying to get
away
from something, and in this case I suspect it’s me.”

Only then—in a certain way—did Olive fully understand why Christopher lived in New York City. “I guess you’re right,” she said slowly, the pain of this a reticulation spreading through her. And then she thought about Amy. That’s what her slight coolness had been: Amy loved her mother, but she was not close to her. The things that happen in childhood do not go away.

“I love my grandson,” Isabelle was saying. “Oh, I do, but he’s not really a part of my life.”

Olive swung her foot up and down. After a minute she told Isabelle how she had written a letter to Little Henry and one to his older brother, who had suddenly been nice to Olive, and they had both written back, and then she got a call from Christopher saying, “Mom, you need to write the girls as well.” And Olive had been stung by that, so she wrote the girls, and never heard a thing back from them.

Isabelle listened, and shook her head slowly. “I don’t know, Olive,” she said.