Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [85]
“No,” Winnie said. “I’ll do it.”
“Yes,” said her mother. “Jim, get the bowl out.”
He got the mixing bowl from the cupboard while Frank Sinatra’s voice rose, fell, then rose again, “Myyyy waaayy.”
“Oh, please,” Julie said. “Please, please, please turn that off.”
“Jim,” Anita said. “Turn the radio off.”
Winnie was the one to lean over and turn the radio off. She wanted Julie to see that she was the one who had done it, but Julie wasn’t looking.
“Julie, sweetheart,” said their mother, “this can’t go on forever. The family has the right to listen to the radio. You know, eventually.”
“It’s been four days,” Julie said. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Come on.”
“Six,” said her mother. “Today is day six.”
“Mom, please. Just give me a break.”
Winnie thought someone should give her a tranquilizer. Uncle Kyle had brought some over, but their mother only doled them out at night now, breaking them in half. Winnie woke up sometimes and could tell Julie was awake. Last night the moon had been full and their bedroom had had white all through it. “Julie,” Winnie had whispered. “Are you awake?”
Julie hadn’t answered.
Winnie had turned over and looked through the window at the moon. It had been huge, hanging over the water like something swollen. If there’d been a curtain, Winnie would have closed it, but they didn’t have curtains in their house. They lived on the end of a long dirt road and their mother had said there was no need for curtains, although a year ago she had hung fishnet up around the edges of the windows in the living room for decoration. She’d sent Winnie and Julie down to the shore to get starfish, all different sizes, so she could dry them out and stick them on the fishnet curtains. Julie and Winnie had walked over the seaweed, flipping back rocks, stacking up a pile of bumpy-skinned starfish.
“This has to do with her father—and mine,” Julie had said. Julie was the only person who told Winnie stuff like that. “She misses both of them. Her father used to bring her starfish at the end of the day when she was a kid. And then she wanted Ted to do that, too, and he did for a while.”
“That was a long time ago,” Winnie had said, peeling a starfish off a rock, a little one; its leg ripped as she pulled. She put the starfish back onto the rock. They grew new legs if they lost them.
“Doesn’t matter,” Julie had said. “Missing someone doesn’t stop.”
Their grandfather had been a fisherman whose boat had gotten stuck on a ledge out at sea. The newspaper clipping was in the same scrapbook showing the picture of Anita as Miss Potato Queen. “People used to call her Tater Tits,” Julie told Winnie. “Don’t tell her I told you she told me.” Anita had married Ted, a carpenter, because she was pregnant with Julie, but Ted had never wanted to stay with anyone for long. Julie said he had made that clear from the beginning. “So she lost both of them in just a couple of years.” Julie peered into the pail of starfish. “We have enough. Let’s go.” Walking back over the rocks, Julie added, “Bruce told me most fishermen can’t swim. It’s funny I didn’t know that.”
Winnie was surprised Bruce knew that; he wasn’t from around here. He’d come up from Boston and rented a cottage for a month with his brothers, and Winnie didn’t know how he would know if fishermen could swim.
“Could he swim?” Winnie asked Julie. She meant their grandfather, but she didn’t have a name to call him, since he was never mentioned.
“Nope. He had to just sit on that boat with the other guy, watching the tide come in. He’d have known he was going to drown. That’s the part that makes Mom nuts, I think.”
After their mother put the starfish in the fishnet curtains, they began to smell because they hadn’t been dried out enough first, and Anita threw them out. Winnie watched while her mother stood on the porch leaning over the rail, throwing the starfish back into the ocean one by one. She wore a pale green dress that the wind moved so it showed her figure, her breasts, her tiny waist, her long bare legs, her