Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [27]
Turning onto Wood Street, the streetlamps pale in the dark cold, she said out loud, “Huh!” because she was baffled by many things. That often happened after being inside the music the way she’d been tonight.
She stumbled a little with her high-heeled boots, put her hand against the porch rail.
“Cunt.”
She had not seen him standing beside the house, in the dark shadow from the overhang.
“You cunt, Angie.” He stepped toward her.
“Malcolm,” she said softly. “Now, please.”
“Calling my house. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Well,” she said. She pressed her lips together, put a finger to her mouth. “Well,” she said. “Let’s see.” It was not her style to call his house, but even less so to remind him that she, in twenty-two years, had never done so before.
“You’re a fucking nut,” he said. “And you’re a drunk, too.” He walked away. She saw his truck parked on the next block. “You call me at work when you sober up,” he said over his shoulder. And then, more quietly, “And don’t go pulling this shit again.”
Even drunk, she knew she would not call him when she sobered up. She let herself into the apartment house and sat down on the stairwell. Angela O’Meara.
A face like an angel. A drunk. Her mother sold herself to men. Never married, Angela?
But sitting on the stairwell, she told herself that she was no more, no less, pathetic than any of them, including Malcolm’s wife. And people were kind: Walter, Joe, and Henry Kitteridge. Oh, definitely, there were kind people in the world. Tomorrow she would get to work early and tell Joe about her mother and the bruises. “Imagine,” she would say to Joe. “Imagine someone pinching an old paralyzed woman like that.”
Angie, leaning her head now against the hallway wall, fingering her black skirt, felt she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late. Tomorrow she would go play the piano in the church, stop thinking about the bruises on her mother’s upper arm, that thin arm with its slack soft skin, so loose from the bone that when you squeezed it in your fingers, it was hard to imagine it could feel anything.
A Little Burst
Three hours ago, while the sun was shining full tilt through the trees and across the back lawn, the local podiatrist, a middle-aged man named Christopher Kitteridge, was married to a woman from out of town named Suzanne. This is the first marriage for both of them, and the wedding has been a smallish, pleasant affair, with a flute player and baskets of yellow sweetheart roses placed inside and outside the house. So far, the polite cheerfulness of the guests seems to show no sign of running down, and Olive Kitteridge, standing by the picnic table, is thinking it’s really high time everyone left.
All afternoon Olive has been fighting the sensation of moving underwater—a panicky, dismal feeling, since she has somehow never managed to learn to swim. Wedging her paper napkin into the slats of the picnic table, she thinks, All right, I’ve had enough, and dropping her gaze so as to avoid getting stuck in one more yakkety conversation, she walks around to the side of the house and steps through a door that opens directly into her son’s bedroom. Here she crosses the pine floor, gleaming in the sunshine, and lies down on Christopher’s (and Suzanne’s) queen-size bed.
Olive’s dress—which is important to the day, of course, since she is the mother of the groom—is made from a gauzy green muslin with big reddish-pink geraniums printed all over it, and she has to arrange herself carefully on the bed so it won’t wind up all wrinkly, and also, in case someone walks in, so she will look decent. Olive is a big person. She knows this about herself, but she wasn’t always big, and it still seems something to get used to. It’s true she has always been tall and frequently felt clumsy, but the business of being big showed up with age; her ankles puffed out, her shoulders rolled up behind her neck, and her wrists and hands seemed