Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout Page B

showed up. But every town had been promising. Every place at first had said, Here you go—You can live here. You can
rest
here. You can fit. The enormous skies of the Southwest, the shadows that fell over the desert mountains, the innumerable cacti—red-tipped, or yellow-blossomed, or flat-headed—all this had lightened him when he’d first moved to Tucson, taking hikes by himself, then with others from the university. Perhaps Tucson had been his favorite, had he been forced to choose—the stark difference between the open dustiness there and the ragged coastline here.
    But as with them all, the same hopeful differences—the tall, hot white glassed buildings of Dallas; the tree-lined streets of Hyde Park in Chicago, with the wooden stairs behind each apartment (he had loved those, especially); the neighborhoods of West Hartford, where it looked like a storybook, the houses, the perfect lawns—they all became places that sooner or later, one way or another, assured him that he didn’t, in fact, fit.
    When he got his medical degree from Chicago, attending the ceremony only because of one of his teachers—a kind woman, who had said it would sadden her to have him not there—he sat beneath the full sun, listening to the president of the university say, in his final words to them, “To love and be loved is the most important thing in life,” causing Kevin to feel an inward fear that grew and spread through him, as though his very soul were tightening. But what a thing to say—the man in his venerable robe, white hair, grandfatherly face—he must’ve had no idea those words could cause such an exacerbation of the silent dread in Kevin. Even Freud had said, “We must love or we grow ill.” They were spelling it out for him. Every billboard, movie, magazine cover, television ad—it all spelled it out for him: We belong to the world of family and love. And you don’t.
    New York, the most recent, had held the largest hopes. The subways filled with such a variety of dull colors and edgy-looking people; it relaxed him, the different clothes, the shopping bags, people sleeping or reading or nodding their heads to some earphoned tune; he had loved the subways, and for a while the activities of the hospitals. But his affair with Clara, and the end of it, had caused him to recoil from the place, so that the streets now seemed crowded and tiresome—all the same. Dr. Goldstein he loved, but that was it—everyone else had become tiresome, and he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn’t know it.
    What he began to want was to see his childhood house—a house he believed, even as he sat in his car now, that he had never once been happy in. And yet, oddly, the fact of its unhappiness seemed to have a hold on him with the sweetness of a remembered love affair. For Kevin had some memories of sweet, brief love affairs—so different from the long-drawn-out mess with Clara—and none measured up to the inner desire, the
longing
he felt for that place. That house where the sweatshirts and woolen jackets stank like moist salt and musty wood—the smell made him sick, as did the smell of a wood fire, which his father had sometimes made in the fireplace, poking at it in a distracted way. Kevin thought he must be the only person in the country who hated the smell of a wood fire. But the house, the trees tangled with woodbine, the surprise of a lady’s slipper in the midst of pine needles, the open leaves of the wild lilies of the valley—he missed it.
    He missed his mother.
    I’ve made this awful pilgrimage…I’ve come back for more…
Kevin wished, as he often did, that he had known the poet John Berryman.
    â€œWhen I was young,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, holding her sunglasses in her hand, “—little, you know—I’d hide in the wood box when my father came home. And he’d