Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [86]
“Honey,” Anita said to Julie now, “take a shower, you’ll feel a whole lot better.”
“I don’t want to take a shower,” said Julie, still leaning in the doorway, wiping her sleeve across her mouth.
“Now, why not?” asked her mother. “What’s the difference between crying in the kitchen and crying in the shower?” She put a hand on her hip, and Winnie saw the pink fingernail polish, perfectly done on her mother’s fingertips.
“Because I don’t want to take my clothes off. I don’t want to see my body.”
Anita’s jaw got hard, and she nodded her head in tiny nods. “Winnifred, watch your sleeve near that flame. Another catastrophe right now and I’m liable to kill someone.”
Their house didn’t have a shower and a bathroom the way most houses did. There was a shower stall off the hallway, and across from that was a closet with a chemical toilet, a barrel-shaped plastic thing that made a whirring sound when you pushed a button to flush it. There wasn’t any door for this closet, just a curtain to pull. Sometimes if Anita walked by, she’d say, “Whew! Who just had a movement?” If you wanted to take a shower, you told people to stay out of the hallway, otherwise you had to get undressed inside the metal shower stall and toss your clothes out into the hall, then wait for the water to warm up, as you pressed against the stall’s metal side.
Julie left the kitchen and soon there was the sound of the shower spraying. “I’m taking a shower,” Julie called loudly. “So please stay out.”
“No intention of bothering you,” Anita called back. Winnie set the table and poured some juice. When the shower turned off, they could all hear the sound of Julie’s crying.
“I don’t know if I can stand this another minute,” said Anita, drumming her nails against the counter.
“Give it time,” said Jim. He poured pancake batter into the frying pan.
“Time?” said Anita, pointing toward the hall. “Jimmy, I have given that girl half my life.”
“Well,” said Jim, winking at Winnie.
“Well? Well, hell. I’m really, really getting tired of this.”
“Your hair looks good, Mom,” Winnie said.
“It should,” said Anita. “It cost two months of groceries.”
Julie came back into the kitchen, her wet hair stuck to her head, the ends dripping onto her red sweatshirt, making it dark on the shoulders. Winnie saw her father flip a pancake made in the wobbly shape of a J. “A J for my jewel,” he said to Julie, and that made Winnie wonder what had happened to the wedding rings.
The limousine had caused some tension. At first the driver refused to come to the house; he said they should have mentioned the dirt road, that the branches would scratch the paint. “Julie’s not walking down a dirt road in her damn wedding dress,” Anita said to her husband. “You make that driver drive the foolish car up here.” The limousine had been Anita’s idea.
Jim, looking all scrubbed and pink in his rented tuxedo, stepped outside and talked to the driver. In a few minutes, he went into the cellar and came back up with some hedge clippers. Then he and the driver disappeared down the driveway, and a few minutes later the limousine drove up, Jim waving from the front seat.
Bruce arrived at the house looking sick.
“You can’t see the bride before the wedding,” Anita called through the window. “Bruce, dear God!” She started to run to the door, but Bruce had already stepped inside, and when Anita saw his face, she stopped what she was saying. Julie, coming right up behind her, didn’t say anything either.
Julie and Bruce went out onto the back lawn, which wasn’t so much a lawn as a kind of clearing of roots and pine needles. Winnie watched through the window with her mother. Jim got out of the limousine and came inside and watched with them. Julie looked like an ad from a magazine, standing there next to a bayberry bush in her gown, the white train folded on itself, but still flowing behind her, six feet long.
“Jimmy,” Anita said, “people are at the