Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [22]
Angie was wearing a black skirt and a pink nylon top that parted at her collarbone, and there was something about the tiny string of pearls she wore, and the pink top, and the bright red of her hair that seemed to glow along with the Christmas tree, as if she were some extension of its festivities. She had arrived, as she always did, at precisely six o’clock, smiling her vague, childlike smile, chewing on mints, saying hello to the bartender, Joe, and to Betty, the waitress, then tucking her handbag and coat near the end of the bar. Joe, a thickset man who had tended that bar for many years and had the watchful eye of any good bartender, had come to the private conclusion that Angie O’Meara was really very frightened when she showed up at work each night. This would account for the whiff of booze on her minty breath if you happened to be close enough to smell it, and it accounted for the fact that she never took her twenty-minute break—although she was allowed to by the music union, and encouraged to by the Warehouse owner. “I hate to get started again,” she said to Joe one night, and that’s when he put it together, that Angie must have suffered from stage fright.
If she suffered from anything more, it was considered nobody’s business. It was the case with Angie that people knew very little about her, assuming at the same time that other people knew her moderately well. She lived in a rented room on Wood Street and did not own a car. She was within walking distance of a grocery store and also the Warehouse Bar and Grill—a walk that took precisely fifteen minutes in her black very-high-heeled shoes. In the winter she wore very-high-heeled black boots, and a white fake fur coat, and carried a little blue pocketbook. She could be seen picking her way carefully along the snow-covered sidewalks, then crossing through the big parking lot by the post office, and finally going down the little walkway toward the bay, where the squatty white clapboard Warehouse sat.
Joe was right when he imagined that Angie suffered from stage fright, and she had years ago learned to begin swallowing vodka at five fifteen, so that by the time she left her room half an hour later, she had to hold the wall as she went down the hall stairs. But the walk cleared her head, while leaving her with enough confidence to make her way to the piano, open the keyboard, sit down, and play. What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room. It was the responsibility of this that frightened her. And it was why she played straight through for three hours, without taking a break, in order to avoid the quiet that would fall over the room, to avoid again the way people smiled at her when she sat down to play; no, she didn’t like the attention at all. What she liked was playing the piano. Two bars into the first song, Angie was always happy. For her, it was as though she had slipped inside the music. We are one, Malcolm Moody used to say. Let’s become one, Angie—what do you say?
Angie had never taken piano lessons, although people tended not to believe this. So she had stopped telling people this long ago. When she was four years old, she sat down at the piano in the church and began to play, and it didn’t surprise her then, or now. “My hands are hungry,” she would say to her mother when she was young, and it was like that—a hunger. The church had given her mother a key, and these days Angie could still go there anytime and play the piano.
Behind her she heard the door open, felt the momentary chill, saw the tinsel on the tree sway, and heard the loud voice of Olive Kitteridge say, “Too damn bad. I like the cold.”
The Kitteridges, when they came alone to the Warehouse, tended to come early and did not sit in the lounge first but went straight through to the dining