Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [50]
“Thank you,” said Olive. “Now, was that so hard to do?”
The nurse had looked up from her desk in a lobby cleanly bright, and empty. “I need a bathroom,” Olive said, and the nurse raised her whitesweatered arm and pointed. Olive waved her hand over her head and stepped through the door.
“Whew,” she said to herself out loud. “Whewie.” Pleasure is the absence of pain, according to Aristotle. Or Plato. One of them. Olive had graduated magna cum laude from college. And Henry’s mother had actually not liked that. Imagine. Pauline had actually said something about magna cum laude girls being plain and not having much fun…. Well, Olive was not going to spoil this moment thinking of Pauline. She finished up, washed her hands, and looked around as she stuck them under the dryer, thinking how the bathroom was huge, big enough to do surgery in. It was because of people in wheelchairs. Nowadays you got sued if you didn’t build something big enough for a wheelchair, but she’d rather somebody just shoot her if it came to that.
“You all right?” The nurse was standing in the hallway, her sweater and pants droopy. “What’d you have? Diarrhea?”
“Explosive,” said Olive. “My goodness. I’m fine now, thank you very much.”
“Vomiting?”
“Oh, no.”
“Do you have any allergies?”
“Nope.” Olive looked around. “You seem pretty short on business tonight.”
“Well. Weekends it picks up.”
Olive nodded. “People party, I suppose. Drive into a tree.”
“More often than not,” the nurse said, “it’s families. Last Friday we had a brother push his sister out the window. They were afraid she broke her neck.”
“My word,” said Olive. “All this in little Maisy Mills.”
“She was okay. I think the doctor’s ready to see you now.”
“Oh, I don’t need a doctor. I needed a bathroom. We had dinner with friends and I ate everything came my way. My husband’s waiting for me in the parking lot.”
The nurse reached for Olive’s hand and looked at it. “Let’s just be careful for a minute here. Have your palms been itching? Soles of your feet?” She peered up at Olive. “Are your ears always this red?”
Olive touched her ears. “Why?” she said. “Am I getting ready to die?”
“Lost a woman in here just last night,” the nurse said. “About your age. Like you, she’d been out to eat with her husband and came in here later with diarrhea.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Olive said, but her heart banged fast, and her face heated up. “What in hell ailed her?”
“She was allergic to crabmeat and went into anaphylactic shock.”
“Well, there you are. I’m not allergic to crabmeat.”
The nurse nodded calmly. “This woman’d been eating it for years with no problem. Let’s just have the doctor give you a look. You did come in here flushed, showing signs of agitation.”
Olive felt a great deal more agitated now, but she wasn’t going to let the nurse know that, nor was she going to mention to her the mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat. If the doctor was nice, she’d tell him.
Henry was parked straight in front of the emergency room with the engine still running. She gestured for him to put the window down. “They want to check me,” she said, bending her head down.
“Check you in?”
“Check me. Make sure I haven’t gone into shock. Turn that damn thing down.” Although he had already reached over to turn off the Red Sox game.
“Ollie, good Lord. Are you all right?”
“Some woman choked on crabmeat last night and now they’re afraid they’ll be sued. They’re going to check my pulse and I’ll be right out. But you ought to move the car.”
The nurse was holding back a huge green curtain farther down the hall.
“He’s listening to the ball game,” Olive said, walking toward her. “When he thinks I’ve died, I expect he’ll come in.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for him.”
“He’s got on a red jacket.” Olive put her pocketbook on a nearby chair and then sat on the examining table while the nurse took her blood pressure.
“Better safe than sorry,” the nurse said. “But I expect you’re all right.”
“I expect I am,” said Olive.
The nurse left her with a form on a clipboard, and Olive sat on the examining table filling it out.