Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [110]
Rebecca had gone to the library to read about Scientology. She read how they wanted to clear the world of body titans, aliens who they believed inhabited the earth after a nuclear explosion seventy-five million years ago. She read how members were required to “disconnect” from family members who were critical of Scientology. Which is why her mother didn’t write to her anymore. Maybe writing to Rebecca had been a “suppressive act”—and her mother had been required to go before the Rehabilitation Project Force. Rebecca read about one member who was told that, with the right training and discipline, he could learn to read people’s thoughts. Come get me, Rebecca thought—hard—to her mother. Come get me, please. Later on, she thought, Fuck you.
She stopped reading about Scientology and started reading books about being a minister’s wife. You were supposed to have a can of fruit cocktail in the pantry in case some parishioner came to call. For a number of years Rebecca made sure to have fruit cocktail in the cupboard, though it was very seldom that anyone came to call.
When she graduated from high school and knew she’d be going two hours away to the university, living somewhere else, Rebecca was so dazed to think such good fortune had finally arrived that she worried she’d be hit by a car and become paralyzed and have to live in the rectory forever. But once she was at the university, she sometimes missed her father, and she tried not to think of him alone in that house. When people spoke of their mothers, she would say quietly that her own mother had “passed away,” which made people uncomfortable, because Rebecca had a way of looking down after she said this, as though to indicate she could not bear to say any more about it. She thought, in a very technical way, what she said was true. She didn’t say her mother was dead, which, as far as she knew, wasn’t true. Her mother had passed (as in an airplane far above) away (to a different land), and Rebecca was quite used to the phases she went through when she thought a great deal about her mother, and then when she did not think about her at all. She did not know anyone else whose mother had run off and never looked back, and she thought her own thoughts about it must be natural, given the circumstances.
It was during her father’s funeral that Rebecca had the kind of thoughts she knew couldn’t be natural. Certainly not during a funeral, anyway. A shaft of sunlight had come through a window of the church, bouncing off the wooden pew and slanting across the carpet, and the sun like that had made Rebecca want someone. She was nineteen years old, and had learned some things in college about men. The minister doing the funeral was a friend of her father’s; they had gone to seminary together years ago, and watching him up there with his hand raised in a blessing, Rebecca started thinking about things she could do to him under his robe, things he’d have to pray about later. “Carleton’s spirit remains here with us,” the minister said, and goose bumps started all over Rebecca’s head. She thought about the psychic woman reading dead people’s thoughts, and she got the feeling that her father was right behind her eyeballs, seeing what she was imagining doing to his friend.
Then she thought about her mother—that maybe her mother had been taught to read people’s thoughts, and was reading Rebecca’s thoughts right now. Rebecca closed her eyes as though she were praying. Fuck you, she said to her mother. Sorry, she said to her father. Then she opened her eyes, looked at the people in the church, as dull-looking as dry sticks. She pictured lighting little piles of papers in the woods; she had always liked