Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [37]
“Bonnie, I said—”
“And I said stop it.”
He turned the pages of the magazine, not reading. There was only the sound of her ripping the strips of wool. Then she said, “I want this rug to look like the forest floor.” She nodded toward a piece of mustard-colored wool.
“That’ll be nice,” he said. She had braided rugs for years. She made wreaths from dried roses and bayberry, and made quilted jackets and vests. It used to be she’d stay up late doing these things. Now she fell asleep by eight o’clock most nights, and was awake before it was light; he often woke to hear her sewing machine.
He closed the magazine, and watched as she stood, flicking off tiny bits of green wool. She bent gracefully and put the strips into a large basket. She looked very different from the woman he had married, though he didn’t mind that especially, it only bewildered him to think how a person could change. Her waist had thickened considerably, and so had his. Her hair, gray now, was clipped almost as short as a man’s, and she had stopped wearing jewelry, except for her wedding band. She seemed not to have gained weight anywhere except around the middle. He had gained weight everywhere, and had lost a good deal of hair. Perhaps she minded this about him. He thought again of the young couple, the girl’s clear voice, her cinnamon hair.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he said.
“You just got back from a drive. I want to make some applesauce and get started on this rug.”
“Any of the boys call?”
“Not yet. I expect Kevin will call soon.”
“I wish he’d call to say they were pregnant.”
“Oh, give it time, Harmon. Goodness.”
But he wanted a whole bushel of them—grandchildren spilling everywhere. After all the years of broken collarbones, pimples, hockey sticks, and baseball bats, and ice skates getting lost, the bickering, schoolbooks everywhere, worrying about beer on their breath, waiting to hear the car pulling up in the middle of the night, the girlfriends, the two who’d had no girlfriends. All that had kept Bonnie and him in a state of continual confusion, as though there was always, always, some leak in the house that needed fixing, and there were plenty of times when he’d thought, God, let them just be grown.
And then they were.
He had thought Bonnie might have a bad empty-nest time of it, that he’d have to watch out for her. He knew, everyone knew, of at least one family these days where the kids grew up and the wife just took off, lickety-split. But Bonnie seemed calmer, full of a new energy. She had joined a book club, and she and another woman were writing a cookbook of recipes from the early settlers that some small press in Camden had said they might publish. She’d started braiding more rugs to sell in a shop in Portland. She brought home the first check with her face flushed with pleasure. He just never would have thought, that’s all.
Something else happened the year Derrick went off to college. While their bedroom life had slowed considerably, Harmon had accepted this, had sensed for some time that Bonnie was “accommodating” him. But one night he turned to her in bed, and she pulled away. After a long moment she said quietly, “Harmon, I think I’m just done with that stuff.”
They lay there in the dark; what gripped him from his bowels on up was the horrible, blank knowledge that she meant this. Still, nobody can accept losses right away.
“Done?” he asked. She could have piled twenty bricks onto his stomach, that was the pain he felt.
“I’m sorry. But I’m just done. There’s no point in my pretending. That isn’t pretty for either of us.”
He asked if it was because he’d gotten fat. She said he hadn’t really gotten fat, please not to think that way. She was just done.
But maybe I’ve been selfish, he said. What can I do to please you? (They had never really talked about things in this way—in the dark he blushed.)
She said, couldn’t he understand—it wasn’t him, it was her. She was just done.
He opened the Newsweek again now, thinking how in a few years the house would be full again; if not all the time, at least a