Read an Excerpt from Oprah's Latest Book Club Pick Olive, Again
Oprah has just announced her latest Oprah's Book Club Pick is Elizabeth Strout's "Olive, Again." Here, Strout shares an exclusive excerpt called "The Poet"—the first story the author wrote in the book. In this short tale, Olive Kitteridge bumps into an old student of hers, Andrea, who has recently wrapped up her tenure as America's poet laureate—much to the surprise of her former math teacher.
"The Poet" embodies what makes Strout's writing so sublimely wonderful: humor coexisting alongside heartbreak, the essential moments of grace shared between very different people. Check out the exclusive excerpt below.
On a Tuesday morning in the middle of September, Olive Kit-teridge drove carefully into the parking lot of the marina. It was early—she drove only in the early hours now—and there were not many cars there, as she had expected there would not be. She nosed her car into a space and got out slowly; she was eighty-two years old, and thought of herself as absolutely ancient. For three weeks now she had been using a cane, and she made her way across the rocky pathway, not glancing up so as to be able to watch her foot-ing, but she could feel the early-morning sun and sensed the beauty of the leaves that were turned already to a bright red at the tops of the trees.
Once inside, she sat at a booth that had a view of the ocean and ordered a muffin and scrambled eggs from the girl with the huge hind end. The girl was not a friendly girl; she hadn’t been friendly in the year she’d worked here. Olive stared out at the water. It was low tide, and the seaweed lay like combed rough hair, all in one direction. The boats that remained in the bay sat graciously, their thin masts pointing to the heavens like tiny steeples. Far past them was Eagle Island and also Puckerbrush Island with the evergreens spread across them both, nothing more than a faint line seen from here. When the girl—who practically slung the plate of eggs with the muffin onto the table—said, hands on her hips, “Anything else?,” Olive just gave a tiny shake of her head and the girl walked away, one haunch of white pants moving up then coming down as the other haunch moved up; up and down, huge slabs of hind end.
In a patch of sunlight on the table Olive’s rings twinkled on her hand, which sight—lit in such a way—gave her the faintest rever-beration of surprise. Wrinkled, puffy: This was her hand. And then, minutes later, just as she had put another bite of scrambled egg onto her fork, Olive spotted her: Andrea L’Rieux. For a mo-ment Olive couldn’t believe it was the girl—not a girl, she was a middle-aged woman, but at Olive’s age they were all girls—and then she thought, Why not? Why wouldn’t it be Andrea?
The girl, Andrea, sat at a booth by herself; it was a few booths away from Olive, and she faced Olive, but she sat staring out at the water with tinted glasses halfway down her nose. Olive placed her fork on her plate, and after a few moments she rose slowly and walked up to Andrea’s booth and she said, “Hello, Andrea. I know who you are.”
The girl-woman turned and stared at her, and for a moment Olive felt she had been mistaken. But then the girl-woman took off her tinted glasses and there she was, Andrea, middle-aged. There was a long moment of silence—it seemed long to Olive—before Olive said, “So. You’re famous now.”
Andrea kept staring at Olive with eyes that were large, her dark hair was pulled back loosely in a ponytail. Finally she said, “Mrs. Kitteridge?” Her voice was deep, throaty.
“It’s me,” Olive said. “It is I. And I’ve become an old lady.” She sat down across from Andrea, in spite of thinking that she saw in the girl’s face a wish not to be disturbed. But Olive was old, she had buried two husbands, what did she care; she did not care.
“You’ve gotten smaller,” Andrea said.
“Probably.” Olive folded her hands on the table, then put them onto her lap. “My husband died four months ago, and I don’t eat as much. I still have an appetite, but I’m not eating as much, and when you get old, you shrink anyway.”
Andrea said, after a moment, “You do?”
“Shrink? Of course you do. Your spine gets crunched up, your belly pops out—and down you go. I can’t be the first person you’ve seen get old.”
“You’re not,” Andrea agreed.
“Well, then. So you know.”
“Bring your plate over,” said Andrea, looking past Olive to where Olive had been sitting. “Wait, I’ll get it for you.” And she scooted from her seat and in a moment returned with Olive’s plate of eggs, and the muffin, and also Olive’s cane. She was shorter than Olive had thought: childlike, almost.
“Thank you,” Olive said. “I only started with the cane three weeks ago. I had a little car accident, is what happened. I was in the parking lot near Chewie’s. And I stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake.”
Andrea opened her hand slightly and said with a friendly half-grimace, “That’s fair.”
“Not if you’re eighty-two years old. Then everyone seems ready to take away your license. Although I must say, the policeman was very nice. I wept. Can you imagine? I still can’t believe I did. But I stood there and I wept. Awfully nice man, the policeman. And the ambulance people, they were nice too.”
“Were you hurt?”
“Cracked my sternum.”
“God,” Andrea said.
“It’s fine.” Olive pulled her jacket closed. “I move more slowly, and now I just drive in the early morning. Try to, anyway. I totaled two cars in the parking lot that day.”
“Two?”
“Two. That’s right. Well, three, if you count mine. I had to get my friend Edith’s husband, Buzzy Stevens, to help me get another car when the insurance check came in. I don’t think Buzzy cared much for that, but there we are. No one was hurt. Just me. Shook me up, I will say.”
“Well, of course,” Andrea said in her deep voice.
“I saw on Facebook you were just in Oslo,” said Olive. She ate some of her egg.
“You follow me on Facebook? Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious. You just had a whole Scandinavian tour doing poetry readings. I went to Oslo with my second husband, I’ve had two husbands,” Olive said. “And with my second husband we went to Oslo and took a boat—a cruise, I guess it was—around the fjords. They were beautiful, they were. My word. But then Jack got sad, and then I got sad, and we both said, It’s beautiful here, but not as pretty as home. We felt better once we’d figured that out.” Olive wiped her nose with a paper napkin that was on the table. She felt as though she was panting.
The girl was watching her carefully.
“I don’t know what you thought about the fjords, but that’s what we thought.” Olive said this, and sat back.
“I never saw the fjords.”
“You never saw the fjords?”
“No.” Andrea sat up straight. “I gave a reading and hung around with my publisher, and then I had to move on. I wanted to move on. I guess I really don’t care about the fjords.”
“Huh,” Olive said.
“I get lonely when I travel,” Andrea said.
Olive wasn’t sure she’d heard this right, but she decided she had, and she thought about it. “Well,” she said, “you were probably al-ways lonely.”
Andrea looked at her then, gave her a look that confused Olive somewhat; the girl’s eyes were brown but almost a little bit hazel too, and they seemed to break into a tenderness around their cor-ners as she looked at Olive. The girl said nothing.
If there was one student Olive had had over her vast years as a seventh-grade math teacher, if there was one student who was not going to be famous, it was Andrea L’Rieux. The only reason Olive even remembered her was because she used to see the girl out walk-ing alone, and so sad-looking. Such a sad-looking face that girl had. But she had been no student; nope, she had certainly not been that. Not even in English class, because when the girl began to rise to prominence, when she became Poet Laureate of the United States (!) a number of years ago, even her high school English teacher had told a reporter that Andrea had not been much of a student. Horrible old Irene White, stupid as a stick and wouldn’t have known talent if she’d seen it, but still—
“Irene White is dead,” Olive told Andrea, and Andrea nodded and shrugged a slight shrug.
“She seemed old when I had her,” Andrea said. “I remember rouge would get stuck in the wrinkles of her cheeks.”
“Well, she sure wasn’t very generous about you,” Olive said, and when the girl looked at her with surprise, Olive realized that An-drea had not seen the article.
And then Andrea said, “I don’t read anything about myself.”
“Good idea,” Olive said. “Anyway, when they came snooping to me, I said nothing.”
She’d have had nothing to say. She wasn’t going to say the girl had been sad-faced, that she came from a family with God knows how many siblings, let others say that. And they did! But not the sad-faced part; apparently no one but Olive had seen the girl walk-ing the roads of Crosby, Maine, thirty years ago. The sun went down on the apple trees / and held the dark red seemingly forever. This was the only line of Andrea’s poetry that Olive could remem-ber.
Maybe because it was the only line she liked. She had read a great deal of Andrea’s poetry. Everyone in town seemed to have read Andrea’s poetry. Her books were always center on display at the bookstore. People said they loved her work. Andrea L’Rieux had been hailed as all sorts of things: feminist, postmodernist, po-litical mixing with the natural. She was a “confessional poet,” and Olive thought there were some things a person need not confess. (There were “angry vaginas” in one poem, Olive remembered now.)
“Thank you,” Andrea said. “For not talking to any reporter,” she added. And then she shook her head and said, almost to her-self, “I just hate it all.”
“Oh, come on now,” Olive said. “It has to be fun. You got to meet the president.”
Andrea nodded. “I did.”
“It’s not everyone from Crosby, Maine, who gets to rub shoul-ders with the president.” Olive added, “What was he like?”
“I think he just shook my hand.” Now her eyes held mirth as she looked at Olive.
Olive said, “And his wife? Did you shake hands with her as well?”
“I did.”
“So what are they like?” Olive loved this president. She thought he was smart, and his wife was smart, and what a hell of a job he had, with Congress being so horrible to him. She would be sorry to see him go.
“He was kind of arrogant. His wife was very nice. She said she read my poetry and loved it, blah-fucking-blah-blah.” Andrea tugged a stray piece of hair back behind her ear.
Olive finished her egg. She thought surely a poet could find words other than the phrase Andrea had just used. “Use your words,” Olive had told her son, Christopher, when he was small. “Stop whining and use your words.” Now Olive said to Andrea, “My husband—Jack, my second husband—he would have agreed with you about the arrogance.” When the girl made no response to this, Olive asked, “What are you doing up here?”
Andrea exhaled a long sigh. “My father got sick. So—”
“My father killed himself,” Olive said. She started in on her muffin, which she always kept until last.
“Your father did? He committed suicide?”
“That’s right.”
After a moment, Andrea asked, “How?”
“How? Gun.”
“Really,” Andrea said. “I had no idea.” She put both hands on her ponytail and smoothed it over her shoulder. “How old were you?”
“Thirty. Why would you have any idea? I assume your father is not going to kill himself.”
“I think it’s unusual for a woman to use a gun,” Andrea said, picking up the saltshaker and looking at it. “Men, yes, that’s what they do. But women—usually I think it’s pills with women.” She sent the saltshaker spinning just slightly across the table.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No.” Andrea pulled her fingers through her hair that was just above the ponytail. After a few moments, she said, “My father wouldn’t know how to kill himself. He’s, you know, not right in the head anymore. He never was right in the head. But you know what I mean.”
“You mean he’s demented. But what do you mean he was never right in the head?”
“I dunno.” Andrea seemed deflated now. She shrugged. “He was just always—he was just always so mean.”
Olive knew from Andrea’s poetry that the girl had never liked her father, but Olive could not now seem to remember any particu-lar reason for this, he was not a drunk, she’d have remembered that—Olive said, “So now he’s going to die?”
“Supposedly.”
“And your mother is dead.” Olive knew this; the girl’s poetry had been about that.
“Oh, she passed twenty years ago. She’d had eight kids. I mean, come on.”
“You don’t have any kids, am I right?” Olive glanced up as she pulled apart her muffin.
“No. I had enough of babies growing up.”
“Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.” Olive drummed her fingers on the tabletop, then put the muffin piece into her mouth. After she swallowed, she repeated, “Just a needle in your goddamn heart.”
“How many do you have?”
“Oh, I have just the one. A son. That’s enough. I have a step-daughter too. She’s lovely. Lovely girl.” Olive nodded. “A lesbian.”
“Does she like you?”
This question surprised Olive. “I think she does,” she said. “Yes, she does.”
“So you have that.”
“It’s not the same. I met her when she was a grown-up, and she lives in California. It’s not like your own kid.”
“Why is your son a needle in your heart?” The girl asked this with hesitancy, as she tore at the orange peel that had garnished her plate.
“Who knows? Born that way, I guess.” Olive wiped her fingers on a napkin. “You can put that in a poem. All yours.”
The girl said nothing, only looked up through the window at the bay.
It was then that Olive noticed the girl’s sweater, a navy-blue thing with a zipper up the front. But the cuffs were grimy, old-looking. Surely the girl could afford some nice clothes. Olive moved her eyes away quickly, as though she’d seen something she ought not to have seen. She said, “Well, it was good of you to let me join you. I’ll be on my way.”
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