sit with her. “Godfrey,” Olive murmured, because it was taking Mousy Pants some time to make her way around the tables, and she still looked tentative, as though Olive had not meant to have her sit with her.
“Sit!” Olive said when the woman finally got to the table, and Mousy Pants sat and said, “My name is Isabelle Daignault, and thank you for inviting me to sit with you.”
“Olive,” said Olive. (She thought to herself “Frenchie” because this woman had that last name.)
But then the Chipmans came in, and Olive introduced the couple to her. “Isabelle.” And they all began to eat and talk, and Mousy Pants said very little, and Olive thought, Oh, honest to God. When they had finished eating, Mousy Pants stood up and waited with some uncertainty, and Olive said to her, “You going back?” And Mousy Pants said that she was, so they walked out of the dining room together and back down the hallway.
Mousy Pants said, “I’ve only just moved in here, just two days ago.”
“Is that right?” Olive said. Then Olive added, “It takes some getting used to, I’ll tell you that. The Chipmans are okay. The rest of the people are snot-wots mostly.” Mousy Pants looked at her with confusion on her face. “Bye now,” Olive said. And she left the woman at her door.
* * *
Spring had really arrived now, and Olive decided she wanted a typewriter. She had started to type things up—memories—on her computer, but the printer stopped working and she became so frustrated she shook; her hands were shaking. She called up Christopher and said, “I need a typewriter.” Then she added, “And a rosebush.” And by God if that boy didn’t drive up from New York City the next week with a typewriter and two rosebushes; he brought Little Henry with him.
As Christopher carried in the electric typewriter, he said, “These are hard to come by now, you know,” but she thought he did not say it meanly.
“Well, I appreciate it,” Olive told him. He had brought five cartridges of ink and he showed her how to insert them. And then he planted the rosebushes as she directed, right outside her little back doorway in the patch of ground before the sidewalk; the man who ran the place had said she could garden out there. Christopher dug the holes deep, like she asked him to, and he watered the rosebushes right away as she told him to do as well. “Hi, Grandma,” Little Henry kept saying; she was busy with the rosebushes. But afterward, when Christopher came inside and had washed his hands, Little Henry looked at his father, who nodded at him. “Want to see a picture I made for you?” the child asked, and Olive said, “Yes, I would.” And the boy carefully unfolded a piece of paper with a watercolor done of a skeletal-looking person and a big house. Olive thought it was very unimpressive. “Who is that?” she asked, and he said, “Me, and that’s my house,” and Olive said, “Well, well.”
“Want to put it on your refrigerator?” Little Henry asked with great seriousness, and then he said, “That’s what Mommy does with our drawings,” and Olive said, “I’ll stick it up there later.”
* * *
About the typewriter, Olive felt almost happy. She liked the sound it made, she liked the fact that she could slip in a piece of paper and have it come out—without that damned blinking printer!—and she liked stacking the papers up. Some days she read over the things she had written, and some days she didn’t. But the pile grew slowly. It was the only time she felt that sense of the screen she lived inside of lifting, when she was typing up her memories.
One day a memory came to her. But it could not be true. She was a little girl, asking her mother why she had no brothers or sisters like other people did, and her mother looked down at her and said, “After you? We didn’t dare have another child after you.” But this memory could not be true, and Olive did not type it up.
She did type her memory of how in the months before they discovered her mother’s brain tumor her mother had behaved oddly—and one of the odd things had been that her mother would go and stroke her car as though it had been a horse from her childhood farm. When Olive thought of this now, she understood. She