“Why would she say that? What was so wrong with you as a little kid?” Lucy asked.
“Well. For one thing, I didn’t like to cuddle and, oh, Mother just loved Isa, who would cuddle with her. Mother loved to cuddle, and apparently I did not.”
“Isa? Your sister. Great name, okay, go on.” Lucy picked something off her jeans.
So, Olive’s mother—“What was her name?” Lucy interrupted, looking over at Olive—and Olive said that her mother’s name was Sara. “With an ‘h’?” Lucy asked, and Olive shook her head. No “h.” Sara had one brother, Sara remained devoted to him throughout her life, even though he was completely nutty. “I think his testicles never dropped,” Olive said. “He never had a beard, and he had a high voice, and he was a very peculiar person, oh, he got married to a woman named Ardele, she was a nut too, and they never had kids, but anyway, Mother remained devoted to her brother, she even died at Ardele’s house.”
So, Sara was raised on this small farm in the town of West Annett. She was very short, and a cheerful person—and pretty. “I have never been pretty,” Olive added. Lucy just sat watching her, and Olive had to look out the window. “Go on,” Lucy said quietly.
Olive glanced down at her belly, which stuck out like a basketball, she tugged the side of her jacket over it and continued. “Mother wanted to become a schoolteacher, so she went to Gorham Normal School. Normal school was what it was called to train teachers back then.” Olive added, “This would have been around the second half of the 1920s.”
At the end of the first year Olive’s mother had taken a job waitressing at a resort farther down the coast; she had lived at the resort while working there. And she had fallen in love with the son of the woman who owned the resort.
“Are you listening?” Olive asked.
Lucy said that she was.
“Money. His mother had money, came from money. Don’t know what had happened to the father—dead, I think.” But the point was that Olive’s mother, Sara, had really fallen in love with this fellow, his name was Stephen Turner. And as far as Olive knew, this fellow loved her back.
Stephen’s mother also owned a resort in Florida, so although Olive’s mother went back to Gorham Normal School, she suddenly quit at the end of that first semester and went down to Florida to work in this woman’s—this Mrs. Turner’s—resort.
“Your mother told you this?” Lucy asked.
“She did.”
“Go on.”
“And by the time she came back to Maine—”
“Was the fellow there in Florida?” Lucy asked, and Olive said, Oh yes, Stephen was there. But by the time Sara came back, she and Stephen were no longer a couple. Mrs. Turner had decided that Sara was not sophisticated enough for her son, so she had broken them up in Florida. Stephen was going to be a doctor, which meant that Sara was simply not good enough for him, having come from just a poor, small farm.
“Wait. You heard all this from your mother?” Lucy asked; she was leaning slightly forward.
“Well, yes. Mother told me all this when I was a young girl, twelve or so, I don’t know, but Mother told me. Only one time, though. I don’t remember her ever mentioning it again.”
“Go on,” Lucy said.
Sara went back to normal school in Maine, and three months later she met Olive’s father at a barn dance.
“He was sitting on the end of a bench because he couldn’t socialize, so he stuck himself on the end of the bench and Mother started talking to him, and two months after that they got married.” Olive’s mother became a teacher—her first job was in a one-room schoolhouse—and Olive’s father, who had never finished high school, went to work in a canning factory. He lost his job during the Depression, and he could not pay for groceries.
Olive remembered going with her father to the little grocery store, and the grocer refused to give them food on credit. She remembered that her father had tears in his eyes as he walked out of the store.
Olive paused and looked out the window again. Finally she turned back and said, “Now this part is not so much the story I wanted to tell, but I do want to tell you: My father was an exceptional man.”
“In what way?” Lucy asked.
“In every way,” Olive said.
“All right,” said Lucy.
Olive turned back to the window. “He was a man of very few words. He came from a dreadful background. His father beat him, and his father would try and beat the smaller children, but Father always intervened and took the beatings for those younger kids.”
Lucy said nothing. She was just sitting and watching Olive, her coat still next to her on the couch, her hands in her lap.
“When my father was fifty-seven, he took a rifle and shot himself.” Olive said this glancing at Lucy.
“Where?” Lucy asked quietly. “Where did he do this?”
“In the kitchen. He was in the kitchen when Mother got home from teaching. Brain stuff splattered all over the ceiling.”
“Whoa,” Lucy said, very quietly.
“But that’s not part of the story.”
“Go on with the story,” Lucy said. “We don’t know if that’s part of the story or not.”
Olive felt surprised by that, but she continued. “So, when my mother died, three years after my father did—”
“What did she die of?” Lucy asked.
“Brain tumor.” Olive squinted across the room and said musingly, “It’s interesting, sort of, I think, because her doctor told me that she may have had that brain tumor for years but the distress of my father’s death—the suicide—may have set it off, growing. I always thought that was interesting.”
“It is interesting,” Lucy said. She settled herself against the back of the couch. “You know, I knew a woman who had two of the most adorable kids you ever saw, they were small, and she had a husband who became a famous writer, and he went to some university for a semester and ran off rather quickly with a different woman, and his wife got a brain tumor and within a year she had died. I always wondered if it was related.”
Olive said, “Godfrey. What happened to the husband?”
“He ended up alone and not famous at all after a while.”
