Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [114]
“Maybe it’s because I talked about the barium enema I had,” Rebecca said, with a shrug. She turned the heat down so the spaghetti wouldn’t boil over. “I talked a lot,” she admitted. “I probably talked too much.”
David sat down at the table and looked at her. “See, that might not be a good idea. See, Bicka, maybe nobody ever told you this, but people don’t really want to hear about other people’s barium enemas.”
Rebecca took the facecloth out of the freezer. She folded it into a strip and sat down across from David, holding the facecloth over her eyes. “If a person’s had one,” she said, “I don’t think they would mind.”
David didn’t answer.
“Evidently the dentist never had one,” Rebecca added.
“Man,” said David. “Where in the world did you come from? Can I just ask how the subject came up? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be talking about teeth?”
“We’d already talked about teeth by then.” Rebecca pressed on the facecloth. “I was telling him why I wanted the job. How important it is for all these helpers dressed in white to be nice to scared people.”
“Okay, okay,” David said. Rebecca peeled back the facecloth and looked at him with one eye. “Tomorrow you’ll get a job,” he said.
And she did. She got a job in Augusta, typing traffic reports for a fat man who scowled and never said please. The man was the head of an agency that studied the flow of traffic in and around different cities in the state, so the cities would know where to build ramps and put up lights. Rebecca hadn’t thought of anyone doing that before, studying traffic, and it was interesting the first morning, but by afternoon it was not so interesting anymore, and after a few weeks, she knew she would probably quit. One afternoon as she was typing, her hand began to shake. When she held up her other hand, it was shaking, too. She felt the way she had on the Greyhound bus that weekend Jace had told her about the blonde, when she kept thinking: This can’t be my life. And then she thought that most of her life she had been thinking: This can’t be my life.
In the lobby near the mailboxes was a brown padded envelope addressed to Rebecca. The shirt had made its way from Kentucky to Maine. Rebecca carried it upstairs to the apartment, and pulled the tab across the top of the envelope, while pieces of gray stuffing sprayed across the table. The woman was right, it was a beautiful shirt. Rebecca spread it out over the couch, arranging the full sleeves over the cushions, and then stepped back to look. This was not a shirt David would wear. Never in the world would David wear this shirt. This was a shirt for Jace.
“It happens,” the woman said cheerfully. “Just send it on back.”
“All right,” Rebecca said.
“You sound discouraged,” the woman said. “But you’ll get your money back, honey. It’ll take a few weeks, but you’ll get it back.”
“All right,” Rebecca said again.
“No problem, honey. It’s no problem at all.”
The next day, Rebecca looked around the doctor’s office for something to steal. Other than magazines, there wasn’t much. It was like they’d planned it that way, even the coat hangers were the kind that couldn’t come off the rack. But there was a small glass vase on the windowsill, plain and ordinary, with the pale remnants of a brown stain around the bottom.
“The doctor will see you now,” said the nurse. Rebecca followed her down the hallway into the examining room. She rolled up her sleeve for the blood pressure check. “How’s the stomach feel?” the nurse asked, and glanced at the chart.
“Good,” Rebecca said. “Well, not good. The Maalox doesn’t really work.”
The nurse unpeeled the Velcro strip from Rebecca’s arm. “Tell the doctor,” she said.
But the doctor, Rebecca could see right away, was irritated with her. He folded his arms across his white-coated chest and pressed his lips together, gazing at her without blinking.
“It still hurts,” Rebecca said. “And—”
“And what?”
She had been planning on telling him how her hands were shaking, how she felt that something was deeply wrong. “And I just wondered why it still hurt.”