Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [65]
In any event, the Larkins and their home and whatever their story was inside it eventually receded so that their house with its drawn shades took on, over time, the nature of one more hillock in the dramatic rise and fall of the coastal landscape. The natural rubber band around people’s lives that curiosity stretched for a while had long ago returned to encompass their own particularities. Two, five, then seven years passed by—and in the case of Olive Kitteridge, she found herself positively squeezed to death by an unendurable sense of loneliness.
Her son, Christopher, had married. Olive and Henry had been appalled by the bossiness of their new daughter-in-law, who had grown up in Philadelphia, and who expected things like a diamond tennis bracelet for Christmas (what was a tennis bracelet? but Christopher bought her one), and who would send back meals in a restaurant, one time demanding the chef be brought to speak to her. Olive, suffering a seemingly endless menopause, would be washed over with extraordinary waves of heat in the girl’s presence, and one time Suzanne said, “There’s a soy supplement you could take, Olive. If you don’t believe in estrogen replacement.”
Olive thought: I believe in minding my own business, that’s what I believe in. She said, “I’ve got to get the tulips in before the ground freezes.”
“Oh?” asked Suzanne, who had proven to be consistently stupid about flowers. “Do you plant those tulips every year?”
“Certainly,” said Olive.
“I’m sure my mother didn’t plant them every year. And we always had some in the back of the house.”
“I think if you ask your mother,” Olive said, “you’ll find you’re mistaken. The bloom of a tulip is already in its bulb. Right there. One shot. That’s it.”
The girl smiled in a way that made Olive want to slap her.
At home Henry said, “Don’t go telling Suzanne she’s mistaken.”
“Oh, hell,” said Olive. “I’ll tell her anything I want.” But she made some applesauce and took it over to their house.
The couple hadn’t been married four months when Christopher called from work one day. “Now, listen,” he said. “Suzanne and I are moving to California.”
For Olive, everything turned upside down. It was as though she’d been thinking, This is a tree, and here is a kitchen stove—and it wasn’t a tree at all, or a kitchen stove either. When she saw the FOR SALE sign in front of the house she and Henry had built for Christopher, it was as though splinters of wood were shoved into her heart. She wept at times with such noise the dog whimpered and trembled and pushed his cold nose into her arm. She screamed at the dog. She screamed at Henry. “I wish she’d drop dead,” Olive said. “Just drop dead today.” And Henry didn’t admonish her.
California? Why all the way across this vast country?
“I like sunshine,” Suzanne said. “New England autumns are fine for about two weeks, and then the darkness settles in, and—” She smiled, lifting a shoulder. “I just don’t like it, that’s all. You’ll come visit us soon.”
It was hard stuff to swallow. Henry, by then, had retired from the pharmacy—earlier than planned; the rent had skyrocketed, and the building was sold for a big chain drugstore to move in—and he often seemed at a loss for how to fill his days. Olive, who had retired from teaching five years earlier, kept telling him, “Get yourself a schedule, and stick to it.”
So Henry took a woodworking class at the extension school in Portland and set up a lathe in the basement, eventually producing four uneven, but quite lovely, maple salad bowls. Olive pored over catalogues and ordered one hundred tulip bulbs. They joined the American Civil War Society—Henry’s great-grandfather had been at Gettysburg, and they had the old pistol in the hutch to prove it—driving up to Belfast once a month to sit in a circle and hear lectures about battles and heroes and so forth. They found it interesting. It helped. They chatted with other Civil War people, then drove home in the dark, passing the Larkin house, where no lights