Christopher this on the phone, and he said, “Well, Mom, he’s probably sad about his wife,” and Olive had said, “But, Chris, he walks around weeping!” And Christopher had said it was cultural. “Cultural?” Olive demanded. “What in hell does that mean?” Christopher said it meant the guy was Jewish, and Jewish men weren’t ashamed to cry.
Olive hung up disgusted with them both.
Ethel MacPherson had lived here for six months—she had moved in after her husband, Fergus, died—and she seemed to know everything about everyone; she was the one who told Olive about Bernie’s wife going over the bridge. Ethel said, “Oh, I couldn’t stand being in that big old house after Fergie died! Oh, how I miss him!”
“Wasn’t he the fellow that used to walk around Crosby in his kilt?” Olive asked.
Ethel said, Yes—that was her husband.
“What was that all about?” Olive asked. “I never quite understood that myself.”
Ethel seemed insulted by that. “Well, if you had Scottish ancestry you might think differently” is what Ethel said.
And Olive said, “I do have Scottish ancestry!”
“Well, maybe it doesn’t mean to you what it did to Fergie,” Ethel said, and she moved away, waving at someone across the dining room.
Phooey to you, Olive thought. But she felt awful; nobody was talking to her, and after a few minutes she went back to her little apartment.
As soon as it got dark she tucked herself into her little single bed and watched television. The news was amazing to her. And this helped her. The country was in terrible disarray, and Olive found this interesting. At times she thought fascism might be knocking on the door of the country, but then she would think, Oh, I’ll die soon, who cares. Sometimes she thought of Christopher and all his kids and she felt worried about their future, but then she would think: There’s nothing I can do about it, everything is going to hell.
Eventually Olive found the Chipmans; they had lived an hour away in Saco, and he was a retired engineer and his wife was a retired nurse. Both were Democrats, thank God, so they could talk about the mess of the world, and they ate their supper together, the three of them at a table for four. This helped Olive; it gave her a place. The fact that she thought they were both a bit dull was not something she dwelled on, but often enough after eating with them she would roll her eyes on the way back to her room.
This is how she lived.
* * *
A few days after Christmas, her son, Christopher, and his wife and all four of their children came to visit. And here was a surprise! Christopher’s oldest son, Theodore, who had been fathered by a different man and who had never, in Olive’s memory, spoken to her, stepped into her apartment, a young adolescent now, and said, “I’m sorry you got sick. With your heart and stuff.”
“Well,” Olive said, “it happens.”
And then the boy said tentatively, “Maybe things will get better here.”
“Maybe,” said Olive.
Olive’s granddaughter Natalie was eight by now, and she would talk to Olive, but then would turn and cling to her mother, who rolled her eyes at Olive and said, “She’s going through a stage.”
“Aren’t we all,” Olive said.
But Little Henry, Olive’s grandson who was ten, had memorized all the presidents of the United States. “Good for you!” Olive told him, but she was extremely bored as he recited them, and when he got to the current president, Olive made a noise of disgust, and the boy said, seriously, “I know.”
After Christopher’s family left, she was bereft, and she ate in her apartment for two days before she went back out and joined the Chipmans.
* * *
It was April when Olive first spotted the woman—she lived two doors down and across the hall from her—and Olive thought she looked mousy, and Olive had never cared for that mousy look. Olive kept on walking to the dining room, and after Olive seated herself at the table, waiting for the Chipmans to come in, she noticed that the mousy woman, who wore a big pair of glasses on her small face and had a cane with four prongs on the end of it, had also come into the dining room, and that she was looking around with uncertainty. Olive reached for her own cane and waved it in the air, and the woman looked at her then, and Olive indicated that she should