Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [84]
“For example,” continued their mother. “What are your plans for today?” She stopped wiping the counter and looked over at Julie. Julie did not look up. Only recently had Winnie’s feelings teetered from her mother to her sister. Her mother had won beauty pageants before Julie was born, and she still looked pretty to Winnie. It was like having more candy than other people, or getting stars on homework papers—to have the mother who looked the best. A lot of them were fat, or had stupid hair, or wore their husbands’ woolen shirts over jeans with elastic waistbands. Anita never left the house without lipstick and high heels and her fake pearl earrings. Only lately had Winnie started to have the uncomfortable sense that something was wrong, or might be wrong, with her mother; that others talked about her in a certain eye-rolling way. She’d have given anything for this not to be the case, and maybe it wasn’t—she just didn’t know.
“Because of this exactly?” Julie asked, looking up. “In prisons and the army? Mom, I’m dying, and you’re saying stuff that makes no sense.”
“Don’t be casual about the word dying, honey. Some people really are dying right now, and terrible deaths, too. They’d be glad to be in your shoes—getting rejected by a fiancé would be like a big mosquito bite to them. Look. Your father’s home,” Anita said. “That’s sweet. Coming home in the middle of a workday to make sure you’re okay.”
“To make sure you’re okay,” Julie said. Adding, “And it’s not accurate to say he rejected me.” Winnie took her hands out of her pockets.
“How’s everyone? Everyone doing good?” Jim Harwood was a slightly built man, with a nature of relentless congeniality. He was a recovered alcoholic, going three times a week to AA meetings. He was not Julie’s father—who had run off with another woman when Julie was a kid—but he treated her kindly, as he treated everyone. Whether or not their mother had married him while he was still a drunk, Winnie didn’t know. All of Winnie’s life, he had worked as a janitor at the school. “Maintenance supervisor,” their mother had said once, to Julie. “And don’t you ever forget it.”
“We’re fine, Jim,” said Anita now, holding the door as he brought in a bag of groceries. “Look at this, girls. Your father’s done the shopping. Julie, why don’t you make pancakes?”
It was a family custom to have pancakes on Sunday nights; this was Friday noontime.
“I don’t want to make pancakes,” said Julie. She had started to cry, soundlessly, and was wiping her face with her hands.
“Well, I’m afraid that’s too bad,” said their mother. “Julie, sweet-heart. If you keep on with this crying, I’m going right through the roof.” Anita tossed the sponge into the sink. “Right through the roof, understand?”
“Mom, my God.”
“And stop with the swearing, sweetheart. God has his hands full without you calling upon him in vain. Routine, Julie. Routine is what makes prisons and armies work.”
Winnie said, “I’ll make the pancakes.” She wanted her mother to stop talking about prisons and armies. Her mother had been talking about prisons and armies ever since those pictures had come out with the hooded prisoners overseas, and American soldiers leading them around on leashes like dogs.
“We deserve everything we get,” her mother had said a few months ago in the grocery store, talking loudly to Marlene Bonney. And Cliff Mott, who had a big yellow ribbon decal on his truck because of his grandson, had come around from behind the cereal aisle and said, “Be careful with your crazy talk, Anita.”
“All right, Winnie,” said her mother. “You make the pancakes.”
“Want some help?” asked her father. He had taken some eggs from the grocery