settling herself in with a variety of recycling bags and also a big red handbag. She was a pretty woman, with very blue eyes and white hair that was a bit longer than Olive thought it needed to be. “Hello there,” Olive said, and the van pulled out, bumping over the speed bumps until they were on the main road away from the place. The woman’s name was Barbara Paznik, she told Olive, and she asked how long Olive had lived at Maple Tree. Olive told her, Three months. Well, Barbara said, shifting her weight a tiny bit to look Olive more in the face, she had moved in one month ago, and she thought it was the most wonderful place, didn’t Olive think so? Olive asked, “Where did you come from?” And the woman said she came from New York City, but she had gone to camp in Maine when she was a girl and she and her husband had vacationed here for years, and now here they were, and they just loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. They were early risers and they took a walk on the path through the trees each morning. After a moment the woman said, “Where do you come from?” But Olive turned to look out the window; the woman’s breath smelled.
They were driving past the Congregational church, where Olive’s first husband, Henry, had had his funeral, and then the van drove down Appleton Avenue past the small houses there; a child and his mother had just come out the door of one. The child was a boy, he wore no hat, and his mother, Olive noted, looked tired. She was wearing sneakers in this snow.
“I come from here,” Olive said, turning to the woman. But Barbara Paznik was talking to the woman across the aisle from her now, the back of her tweed coat was almost all Olive could see. After a moment, Olive took her finger and poked the tweed coat hard, and Barbara turned with surprise on her face. “I said I come from here,” Olive said, and Barbara said, “Oh, I see,” and then went back to speaking with the woman across the aisle.
In the parking lot of the big grocery store, the van pulled to a stop, and people got off—slowly. Olive bought toothpaste and laundry soap and some crackers and oatmeal, then she was ready to go. For a few minutes, she sat on a bench inside the store, by the front door, holding her recycling bag with the stuff in it; she had gone to this grocery store most of her life, and she had never sat on this bench by the door; this fact now made her feel strangely—and particularly—sad. She got up and went back out to the van. The driver opened the folding door; he kept looking down at his cellphone. She tapped the snow from the tip of her cane and sat down in the seat by the window that she had been sitting in before; she was the first person back on the van. Silence surrounded her as she waited.
Watching while the others finally got into the van, Olive noticed that a few of the old women were apparently wearing those Depends things, those awful diapers for old people. She could see them bulk up the women’s hind ends if their coat didn’t go below their waist, and one woman, as she bent to get something she had dropped onto the floor of the bus, just about exposed this fact to everyone. It made Olive shudder.
Barbara Paznik did not even look at Olive when she got on; she simply went behind Olive and sat with someone else. No one sat in the seat next to Olive. And everyone seemed to be yakking to somebody. Then, as the van wound its way up the street and around the corner—Olive could not believe this—they all started to sing. “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round….” Women looked at her with laughter on their ancient faces as they sang, even the few old men were laughing. Olive had to look out of the window, her cheeks getting warm. “God, Jack,” she thought, “you’re missing a hell of a time.” She felt enormously angry at him for dying. And then she thought: He wasn’t so much, that Jack.
* * *
To Olive, it felt that a screen had been lowered over her, the type of thing that went over