The Widow’s Husband

by Sheila Evans

  Early on, his censuring of my taste seemed right—after all, he knew best, he was smart. I had no experience, no background, no innate knowledge or instincts to fall back on. Had gone straight from my parents’ Depression-era brownstone to Emmett’s apartment. I liked his apartment’s eclectic furnishings, its board-and-brick bookcases, thrift shop knock-arounds; and posters everywhere, even on the refrigerator. I wanted to live with that kind of counter-culture ambiance, but Emmett decided the time for it was over. He was ready for a swing to the right. He became interested in security, in safe deposit boxes, retaining walls, steel belted radials. He was ready to take his place in life, and there was no room for decorating with posters.

  Before Amy was born, we bought this house, the typical suburban American home, suitable for middle management personnel such as Emmett was getting to be. It’s up a hill in what was then a new tract. All the houses are identical except for variations in trim—brick, or slump stone, or river rock. Ours is trimmed with brick, with a podocarpus-framed entry paved with more used brick, accented with long thin windows through which indoor plants get a peek of sun. From the front, these houses present impervious garage faces that stare at each other across suburban asphalt. They are, though, above the smog generated by the Interstate. A real plus, a selling point. Also, many of them are on cul-de-sacs. So good for kids, the circular streets branching from a thoroughfare, like grapes affixed to a stalk.

  Homeowners around here tend toward identical landscaping. Retaining walls covered with English ivy, disguised with pampas grass. Aggregate cement decks trimmed with railroad ties, furnished with redwood tables, barbecues, and tiki lights. Some hot tubs, some swimming pools, but we never got that far. I sometimes railed at the assembly line atmosphere, but, as Emmett pointed out, it was a solid investment, you have to look at resale value. He’d usually been right, I had to admit that. So the tract house, the oak end tables, his roll-top desk, the tweed sofa, and Naugahyde La-Z-Boy recliner are what he, what we, settled on. Like everyone else.

  And maybe the teak table isn’t that nice anymore, I think, looking at it, really seeing it for the first time in years. It’s scuffed and scarred, partly the result of those poker nights, and partly of my neglect—I’ve become an indifferent housekeeper. The table seems spindly, laden with a bountiful spread of food and serving dishes. Emmett had been right about the solidity of oak. He’d always been right.

  At once my eyes fill, the lump behind them threatening to melt. I push hard, willing away an attack of blubbering. Look at the food, I tell myself, look at someone’s good china and silver, the candles. Look at the irises, Dutch irises, clear deep purple, rich amethyst, delicate mauve, and pale blue, the same light clear blue that Emmett’s eyes had been. I will not cry now. I cannot cry now, no, I will not permit it. Wait until later.

  These irises have come from bulbs transplanted from my mother’s yard to mine. This particular floral arrangement seems so special—my mother’s irises—and again I fight tears. I cannot bear it. Think of something else. Anything.

  My mother hadn’t approved of Emmett, and I try to recall what she’d objected to. As with the fight that led me to sleep behind the bank, I can’t remember any details. Is this to be my future? Go through the rest of life trying to piece together incidents that only the dead remember? Well, it doesn’t matter, because by the time Amy was born, my mother had accepted Emmett. Or more likely, had decided to keep her objections to herself. Now both my parents are gone, as are Emmett’s. Both of us were only children, so the family dwindles down to just Amy.

  But Amy can carry on, even thrive. I watch her operate: Amy in a clingy black dress that makes her look lithe and sleek, not tough and meaty as in those sausage-casing workout suits. She effuses over the buffet, talking easily with neighbors she knows only slightly: she moved out two years ago, right after my mother died and left her a bit of money. PawPaw, Amy’s six-toed Siamese, left with me because Amy’s condo allows no pets, sidles forward, throws himself on his back for a belly rub. Amy obliges. She kneels, and the side slits of her skirt open, showing off her legs.

  A thin woman in navy blue, her hair in a spun sugar poof, comes up to me. “Mrs. Malone, Peg, may I call you Peg? Here, let me fix you a plate.” At my look, she adds, “I’m Irene, you know me? I live kitty-corner to Frieda? The whole neighborhood, we’re so broken up, I can’t tell you but time, you know what they say.”

  “Oh, well, thanks … yes, something about time. Uh, I guess I can help myself,” I add stiffly as the woman starts to ladle food onto a plate for me. After all, it is my house, however alien it seems filled with these strangers. I assess my choices—scalloped potatoes and ham, fried chicken nuggets (KFC?), a Mexican casserole, an Irish stew. Rolls, biscuits, three-bean salad, a yellow Jell-O mold that’s beginning to sit down in its own juice. Pickles, pies, cakes. The variety of serving dishes, from Tupperware to cut crystal, attests to the community effort behind this spread, and I am grateful. Such kind people—I’ll have to reach out to them when this is over. But I am nervous, overcome, and the room seems overheated. Ah, Christ, I am going to have menopausal hot flashes on top of everything else.

  Mingling with the smell of food is a cigarette. Someone is smoking … I haven’t allowed smoking since Emmett was forced to quit a year ago. Who’s smoking? I look around, see Larry, Amy’s current swain, a cigarette dangling from his lip while he serves up drinks in the kitchen. Amy goes to talk to him, perhaps to caution him about the cigarette? She lays her hand with its lilac-painted nails on his bare arm—he’s taken off his jacket and has rolled up his sleeves for the hard work of pouring drinks. And it is work: business is brisk. I am taken aback at the large collection of bottles he’s amassed and is pouring from. Who’s footing the bill for all this? The liquor will cost a fortune … maybe I should have Amy tell Larry to go light on the booze. Besides, Emmett wouldn’t like it if his party got sloppy.

  “I love your home, it’s just made for entertaining,” says Irene, still standing there, the hostess soothing the diffident guest.

  I mutter something, yes, entertaining is easy, just the thing, some nonsense. As I turn away, I consider the stupidity of the woman’s remark—the houses in this subdivision are almost clones. We all entertain the same way, no big deal. But then she’s as nervous as I am, both of us clutching at the straws of small talk.

  Through my own rooms, now filled with unfamiliar hazards, I weave like a pirogue through a bayou. I steer around old Mr. Purdy, mossy as an underwater snag. He lives next door, a cranky widower. I look away quickly after catching him stuff his pockets with cashews from a bowl on Amy’s piano. I detour toward the den to avoid Frieda, whom I’ve known until now only as Mrs. Russell. The woman is painfully self-assured, frighteningly efficient. She organizes the Neighborhood Watch program, alerts people about invasions of noxious weeds (tansy ragwort, purple loosestrife, two-toed Pete), passes out homemade popcorn balls and candied apples on Halloween, although her own children are grown and gone.

  I see her approach with another bowl of flowers, so I drift off trying to look casual. I speak to a few people, but sense that they yearn to keep their distance. After a well chosen word or two, they navigate away, as if death were contagious, or I’m about to do something loose and unseemly like blubber or talk philosophy or break into prayer. I see, as if for the first time in a long while, Emmett’s big screen TV; I stare at his La-Z-Boy recliner. It seems to hold the shape of his body, and I visualize him in it, his long legs stretched out while he watches his baseball game, or football, or a National Geographic special. His presence is so immediate, I seem to smell his scent—soap, his after-shave, the fabric softener I used on his shirts.

  I’d just done the laundry, put away his clean clothes. Before washing them, I held to my nose his soiled shirts, inhaling Emmett, his essence. Not just his essence, but the work he’d done while wearing these clothes. A faint aroma of wood, of cedar, like newly sharpened pencils; furniture finishing compounds and shipping c
ontainers; even a whiff of the hand soap in the dispenser at the plant. It was an odd scent, sort of greenish, like sage but spicier.

  I have to get out of the den, away from the ghost of Emmett. Carrying my plate, I thread through the room, and go outside where the high cool cloud cover, now increasing into black storminess, has, thank goodness, discouraged the crowd. Someone has set up folding tables and chairs on the deck, and mowed the lawn. Such nice people, I should know who they are. I will go through the cards piled on the mantel, find their names. Emmett would have been so pleased.

  Just as I breathe a sigh of relief at being alone, but worrying about it, too—I don’t want to seem weird, or do anything untoward, memorable in any way, that they’ll talk about in the office—a man opens the gate to the side yard and steps toward me.

  “Just rolled up the windows on my truck, I think it’s gonna rain. Besides, it’s hot as a pistol in there.”

  “Oh, good, it’s not just me. I think I’ll sit down out here.”

  “Not in that one, it’s wet. Someone just hosed off the deck. You know me? I’m Harold, from the plant.” He’s a pale man, perhaps also looking for solitude. He has washed-out blond hair, not burnished and bright as Emmett’s had been. An old man, not like Emmett. “So sorry, Mrs. Malone,” he says. “We’re all just shook. Anything we can do to help you, let us know. Or let me know. Such as, well, clean out Emmett’s desk, tie up loose ends.”

  “Clean out his desk? Yes, of course.” I hadn’t realized he’d have a desk at work to tidy up. What was I thinking! Of course he’d have a desk. “I will need someone to bring his things home. Yes, could you do that, please, uh, Harold?”

  “Sure thing, Mrs. Malone.”

  “Peg. Call me Peg.”

  “Why, I thought your first name was Liz, Elizabeth.”

  I smile, shake my head, fork around a bite of the stew. The plate is white bone china with a circle of gold, ideal for a funeral supper. “No, I’m Peg, or Margaret. But nobody calls me Margaret.” Hadn’t Emmett ever mentioned my name? Hadn’t he talked about his family? I used to attend the plant’s social functions, the summer picnic, the Christmas party. Maybe the company no longer hosts such gatherings, what with the new concern for political correctness, for sobriety. “Tell me Harold, isn’t that the boss, Mr. Hawley, in there talking to the woman in the green dress?” A discordant green dress with side slits, like Amy’s. Surely it isn’t right for this solemn gathering.

  “Yeah, that’s Chuck.”

  “And that woman? Is she new? She must be from the office. I don’t think she’s a neighbor.”

  “Maggie Quinn, or Margaret—another Margaret. She runs the front desk. Been there a couple of years.” For a minute or two, we both watch the scene in the house. The woman, Maggie, has a spill of hair as red as an Irish setter’s. I mentally sniff: no one has real hair that color. It’s curly, not ripply, a mass of coils, like springs. Like the cascading arrangement on that stiff-armed step dancer in “Riverdance.” Emmett had loved that program, even sent for the video.

  In the den the man talks intently into the redhead’s upturned face. But she’s only half listening, has the pensive unfocused expression you sometimes see on models in underwear ads. Puffy areas around her eyes … has she been crying, mourning Emmett’s death? I recall the muffled sob in the mortuary chapel. Could it have come from her? Such a pretty girl. I wonder uneasily why Emmett never mentioned her. That hair, so striking even if it’s dyed. Emmett, awhile back, suggested I do something with my hair. A lot of gray in my dark brown now, giving me a sort of tweed effect I’ve begun to like. But Emmett hadn’t liked it. Get a rinse, he urged, get a perm. I’ve worn my hair exactly the same way—straight and long, pulled back with barrettes—since the seventh grade.

  I thought it odd at the time, Emmett’s sudden interest in my hair, in my person. He’d also wanted me to add color to my wardrobe, wear high heels more often. Earrings and perfume. I’d scoffed, how ridiculous at my age, what frivolity. A waste of time and money. He knew who I was—his plain wife in flat shoes, with straight hair.

  I stare at the woman in my house. She has pale skin, almost translucent, as if lit with an interior light bulb. And white, as waxy white as Emmett’s had been in death. I have a wild image of the cover shot on a slick magazine touting tourism in Ireland. Maggie Quinn, yes, she’s Irish. Emmett had developed an intense interest in things Irish the last few years—that “Riverdance” fixation, and shamrocks, Celtic crosses, dark beer and smoky pubs and fiddle music. Irish stew and soda biscuits, such as are on my plate now. I put down my knife, thinking that Maggie in there might have brought this very food into my house.

  Those travel brochures in Emmett’s desk. That brochure about Ireland …

  The woman’s dreamy expression, the slim but voluptuous figure, the rich colors—she could be one of the models in the brochure from Victoria’s Secret, another piece of the junk mail in Emmett’s desk.

  Suddenly the parts all come together, and I know. Emmett’s impatience, his indifference, yes, there’s the cause, right in my den a mere ten feet away. I put a face on his restlessness, and it’s that face. I tell myself that I’m being ridiculous. I tell myself that I’m surprised, and shocked, but on some subliminal level I’d known, at least I’d suspected that there had been another presence in Emmett’s life. One of those foolish poems from Emmett’s desk—I’d read it so many times it’s engraved on my memory—chooses this moment to mock me:

  Before you, my days were neutral shades—

  Monday a blue, a pale but gloomy hue—

  Tuesday off-white, the color of the hall, of flight—

  Wednesday a faded gray, color of a rainy day—

  Thursday a taupe, a nothing, a thing without hope—

  Friday a blotch, a stew, cruel, before you—

  Weekend dirt-colored, with calluses, wheelbarrows and shovels—

  And then, without plan, again it began.

  But now there’s you, and my days are rainbow hues—

  My purples, my yellows, my sapphire blues—

  My Brilliance, my dear one, my darling—

  Now there’s you.

  Emmett’s handwiting, Emmett’s mind behind the lines. After all, hadn’t he insisted we paint the hall off-white? But doesn’t everybody? At least everybody around here. And he’d done yard work on the weekends, had callused his hands with wheelbarrow and shovel. But that had been his choice.

  I stare, openmouthed, at a loss. My skin prickles with electricity; I must be careful, or I’ll do something foolish in front of these people that they’ll discuss around the water cooler, e-mail each other about from their desks, laugh about at lunch time. I do so want to seem normal. But in what manner is a new widow “normal”?

  Clearly uncomfortable, Harold shuffles, clears his throat, mumbles, “Say, maybe I should get Chuck out here, you can ask him about … well, you got anything you wanna ask about? Uh, death benefits, insurance … oh, forget it. What’s the matter with me. Not now.”

  All those late hours, how tired Emmett had been, how indifferent he’d grown to anything around the house. The way he’d spruced up, had taken an interest in his clothes, his designer haircuts, his whole appearance. I thought he trimmed down and toned up for his health, but now I see the whole pattern of deception behind his self-improvement. My blood, under the electricity of my skin, runs to ice water; I can’t eat this food, can’t stand the way it smells. I think I’m going to be sick in the bushes.

  “Liz, are you okay?”

  “Peg, I’m Peg!”

  “Peg, yeah, Peg. Short for Margaret. Like Maggie in there. The same name.” When I glare at him, he adds quickly, “So, how about it?”

  “How about what?”

  “You wanna talk to Chuck?”

  “No! Well, maybe later. I can’t seem to think right now.”

  “You sure look white. Can I getcha a drink?”

  I say yes, to get rid of him. I’m scaring him, at the very least makin
g him uneasy. I’m probably making them all uneasy. Everyone in there from Emmett’s office, from the whole plant, knows about that redhead and my husband. I am horribly embarrassed, ashamed; I grieve for Emmett, and I wish for him back so I could give him hell. I’d give him hell because he got away with it, he got away with it clean, he’s beyond me. My anger boils over my grief; if I’m not careful, I’ll make a mess; I’ll make a scene.

  I am angry at myself, too, for being blind and stupid. This is going to be painful, so painful I have no idea of the extent of the hurt I am going to have to live through. But that’s the point, I think, almost gloating. I am going to live through it; Emmett is the one who’s dead. I still have the gift of life.

  I suddenly remember what turned my mother against Emmett. My mother thought Emmett had trouble with commitment. She saw the way Emmett treated me. Several times while we were dating, after Emmett came back from Vietnam and we were on the verge of seriously considering marriage, he’d deserted me, he’d left me to sit by the phone, pining for his call, waiting for some word from him. In those days, women didn’t call men; at least, women like me didn’t. Women like me sat by the silent phone and wondered what they’d done wrong.

  At least I waited and worried and wondered. And walked miles around town looking for signs of Emmett or at least his car; losing weight and interest in life, crying myself to sleep every night. Then he’d turn up again, he’d call and ask me out, never giving an explanation for his absence, no reason offered for his silence. In this regard, my mother thought Emmett cruel. I would not allow that judgement. I told my mother that Emmett was going through a readjustment process. The war experience had changed him in some way, but he’d get over it. My own father had come back from Germany full of the glow of victory, but the guys from Vietnam were different. They tended to be a silent bunch, disillusioned, moody, bitter. I would change that in Emmett. I’d been that young, that naïve, back in those days. I should have known better.