had never understood it before, but because her car gave her the only freedom she had, Olive saw that her mother had loved her car as well, as though it had been the pony from her youth and would get her out, from one place to another.
“Henry believed in God,” Olive typed one day. Then she added, “So did I because of the frogs we dissected in biology class.” She remembered how in college she had thought one day, looking at the inside of a frog: There must be a God who made all these things. Now she considered this, and then typed, “I was young then.”
* * *
Mousy Pants continued to eat with Olive and the Chipmans, and then one day, as they walked back from the dining room, Mousy Pants asked Olive if she would like to come in and visit. Only recently had Olive found out that Mousy Pants came from Shirley Falls—that’s how mousy she was, not to have mentioned it earlier—and so Olive said, “All right,” and she went into Mousy Pants’s apartment and was surprised by all the little knickknacks the woman had, a figurine in lederhosen and another in a Swiss dress, and many different photographs spread out on the surfaces of tables. Olive sat down. “Well, at least you have some sun,” she said.
She saw how Mousy Pants’s ankles were very swollen, and her wrists—which Olive had noticed before—were also swollen, and Mousy Pants said to her now, “I have rheumatoid arthritis.”
“Horrible,” said Olive, and the woman agreed that it was difficult.
Mousy Pants spoke quietly, and Olive asked her if she could speak up. “I can’t hear you,” Olive said, leaning forward in her chair.
Mousy Pants said, “Yes, I’m sorry.”
And Olive said, “Oh, for God’s sakes, there’s no reason to be sorry, I’m just asking if you can speak up.”
Mousy Pants sat forward herself then, and she began to talk. She talked without stopping, and Olive found herself becoming extremely interested in everything she said. The woman said this: She said her name had originally been Isabelle Goodrow, and as a girl she had become pregnant by her father’s best friend. This was not long after her father had died. She was an only child, and she had been very protected, and she had known—she said this looking at Olive directly—nothing about sex at all. And so this happened. The man was married and lived in California with his family, and he had come back to the small town in New Hampshire where Isabelle and her mother were living to visit. And when he left she was pregnant. Her mother had taken her to the Congregational minister, who had said that God’s love worked in mysterious ways, and so Isabelle, who graduated from high school just about this time, had the baby and stayed home with her mother, and she took some courses at the university but her mother died, and then she was alone with the baby. And she felt very ashamed. “Back then, people did,” Isabelle said. “I mean, people such as myself. Very ashamed.” She sat back.
Olive said, “Go on.”
After a moment Isabelle sat forward again and said that she had packed everything up one day and driven up the coast to Shirley Falls, Maine.
“I told you I went to high school in Shirley Falls,” Olive interrupted. “I came from the little town of West Annett and I went to high school there, and so did my husband.” Isabelle waited, her swollen fingers draped over the top of her cane. Olive said, “Okay, keep going. I won’t stop you again.”
Well, said Isabelle, she knew no one in that town when she first arrived, and she guessed that was the point. But she was very lonely. She found a babysitter for her little girl, and she got a job working in the office room of a shoe factory, she was the secretary to the man who ran that department, and the room was filled with women. “I thought I was better than they were,” Isabelle said. “I really did. For years, I worked with these women, and I thought, Well, my grades in high school were very good, I would have been a teacher if I’d not had Amy, and these women could never be teachers. I would think things like that,” she said, and she looked directly at Olive again.
Olive thought: By God, she’s honest.
The women in the office room, though, turned out to be real