Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [69]
“Christopher,” she said, into the kitchen phone the next Saturday. “Louise Larkin sent me a note about your father.”
She heard nothing.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Still here,” Christopher said.
“Did you hear what I said about Louise?”
“Yup.”
“Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“Not really.”
Pain, like a pinecone unfolding, seemed to blossom beneath her breastbone.
“I don’t even know how she found out. Shut up in that house all day.”
“Dunno,” Christopher said.
“All right, then,” Olive said. “Well, I’m off to the library. Goodbye.”
She sat at the kitchen table, leaning forward, her hand on her big stomach. The thought that she could, anytime she needed to, kill herself went through her head. It was not the first time in her life that she’d thought this, but before, she would think about the note to leave. Now she thought she would leave no note. Not even: “Christopher, what did I do that you should treat me this way?”
She looked with some caution around the kitchen. There were women, widows, who hated to give up their home, died soon after someone hauled them off to assisted living. But she didn’t know how long she could go on living here. She had been waiting to see if there was some way Henry could finally come home. She had been waiting for Christopher to come back east. As she stood up, looking for her car keys—because she had to get out of here—she remembered, in a distant way, how as a much younger woman she had felt the dreariness of domestic life, yelling, while Christopher ducked his head, “I hate being a goddamn slave!” Maybe she hadn’t yelled that. She called to the dog and left.
Absolutely stick-thin, and appearing ancient in the way she moved, Louise led Olive into the darkened living room. Louise turned on a lamp, and Olive was surprised by the beauty in the woman’s face. “Don’t mean to stare,” Olive said—she had to say this because she knew she was not going to be able to stop staring—“but you look lovely.”
“Do I?” Louise made a sound of soft laughter.
“Your face.”
“Ah.”
It was as though all of Louise’s earlier attempts to be pretty, her dyed blond hair, her heavy pink lipstick, her eagerness of speech and careful clothing, the beads and bracelets and nice shoes (Olive remembered)—all of this had, in fact, been covering up the essence of Louise, who, stripped by grief and isolation, and probably drugged to the gills, emerged in her frailty with a face of astonishing beauty. You seldom saw really beautiful old women, Olive thought. You saw the remnants of it, if they’d once been that way, but you seldom saw what she saw now: the brown eyes that shone with an otherworldliness, sunken behind a bone structure as fine as any sculpture, the skin drawn tight across the cheekbones, the lips still full, her hair white and tied off to the side in a little brown ribbon.
“I’ve made tea,” Louise said.
“No, but thank you.”
“All right, then.” Louise sat down gracefully, in a chair nearby. She was wearing a long, dark green sweater-type robe. Cashmere, Olive realized. The Larkins were the only people in town with money they spent. The kids had gone to private school in Portland. They’d had tennis lessons, and music lessons, and skating lessons, and each summer had gone away to summer camp. People used to laugh about that, because no other kid in Crosby, Maine, went to summer camp. There were summer camps nearby, filled with kids from New York, and why would the Larkins have their children spend the summer with them? It’s how they were, is all. Roger’s suits (Olive remembered) had been made by a tailor, or so Louise used to say. Later, of course, people assumed they must have gone broke. But maybe there weren’t that many expenses, once all the experts got paid.
Olive looked around discreetly. The wallpaper had water stains in one spot, and the wainscoting was faded. It was clean, the room, but not one speck of effort had been given to maintaining it. Olive had