Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [107]
“What are you talking about?” Olive cried. “You, with your new wife. She’s so nice, Christopher, it makes me puke. Well, I hope you have a damn nice life, since you’ve got it all figured out.”
Back and forth, Olive crying, Christopher calm. Until he said quietly, “Okay, get your bags. Here’s the car.”
The line to get to the gate—the security line—was so long it went around a corner. A black woman, wearing a red airport vest, kept saying in the same plangent tone, “People, move around to the corner and against the wall. Move around to the corner and against the wall.”
Twice Olive approached her. “Where do I go?” Olive asked her, thrusting forward her ticket.
“This line right here,” the woman said, raising an arm toward the long line. Her hair had been straightened and seemed like a badly fitting bathing cap with whiskers around its back rim.
“Are you sure?” Olive said.
“The line right here.” Raising her arm again. Her indifference was impenetrable.
(You were the scariest teacher at the school, Mom.)
Standing in line, she looked to those near her for some confirmation that this was ridiculous, standing in a line this long, that something must be wrong. But people who met her eye looked away with no expression. Olive put her sunglasses on, blinking. Everywhere she looked, people seemed removed and unfriendly. As she got closer, she didn’t understand—the line spread into one mass of people who all seemed to know what she didn’t—where to go, what to do.
“I need to call my son,” she said to a man standing near her. What she meant was that she had to leave the line to get to a pay phone because surely if she called Christopher, he would come get her—she would beg, she would bawl, anything it took to be saved from this hell. It had just gone terribly wrong, that’s all. Sometimes things went terribly wrong. But looking around, she could see there were no pay phones anywhere; everyone had a cell phone stuck to their ear, talking, talking; they all had someone to talk to.
(His utter calm as he washed those dishes while she wept! Even Ann had had to leave the room. Do you have no memory of these things at all? These days, they’d send a social worker right to the home, if a kid showed up that way.
Why are you torturing me? she had cried. What are you talking about? All your life I have loved you. And this is what you feel?
He’d stopped washing the dishes. Said just as calmly: Okay. Now I don’t have anything left to say.)
The man she had told she had to call her son looked at her, then looked away. She couldn’t call her son. He was cruel. And his wife was cruel.
Olive was moved along with the small sea of people: Move along, handbag on the rollers, move along, have your boarding pass out. A man, not nicely, motioning for her to step through the security arc. Glancing down, saying without expression, “Take off your shoes, ma’am. Take off your shoes.”
She pictured standing before him, her shredded panty hose exposed like some crazy lady. “I will not take off my shoes,” she heard herself say. She said, “I don’t give a damn if the plane blows up, do you understand? I don’t give one good goddamn if any of you are blown sky-high.” She saw the security man give the slightest gesture of his hand, and two people were beside her. They were men, and in half a second a woman was there, too. Security officials in their white shirts and special stripes above the pockets.
In voices of great gentleness, they said, “Come this way, ma’am.”
She nodded, blinking behind her sunglasses, and said, “I’d be glad to.”
Criminal
That morning Rebecca Brown stole a magazine, even though Rebecca was not, ordinarily, the type of person who stole things. Ordinarily, Rebecca wouldn’t take the soap from a motel bathroom on Route 1; she’d never even think to take the towels. It was the way she had been raised. In truth, Rebecca had been raised not to do a lot of things, and she’d done a great many of them anyway, except for stealing