The Widow’s Husband

by Sheila Evans

  Between the humidity of Jerry and the ice of Raoul, there’s Sid, the mailman. He’s not my mailman, the neighborhood guy with nice legs, but a commercial deliverer. He’s friendly and harmless as a puppy, and (sometimes) as annoying as one that jumps up on you with muddy paws, insistently sniffing your crotch. But he brings with him an aura of leather, newly cut grass, and gasoline; he brings into the cold office the warm outside that I miss badly, now that autumn’s hard on us.

  Sid tells jokes, cable TV jokes. “These two cable guys were flying to Hawaii on a four-engine plane, and one of the engines conks out. The captain comes back and says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make it, but we’ll be an hour late.’

  “Then the second engine goes, and the captain says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be three hours late, is all.’ Then the third engine conks and the captain says, ‘We’ll be six hours late, but everything’s okay.’ Then the fourth engine quits and one cable guys says to the other, ‘Shit, we’re going to be up here all day.’”

  Dutifully, I laugh, thankful that he doesn’t tell dirty jokes. I am as defenseless against dirty jokes as I am against flirtiness. Almost light-headed with the realization that he’ll soon be gone, I initial his clipboard, then take on my natural coloration, my camouflage—which is to disappear under my headset. As a temp, I learned to do that. Temps are invisible. Once I worked in an insurance office for a couple of weeks. Came back from lunch one day and the guy who sat at the next desk got up and came to the counter to wait on me. “Help you?” Customer-polite. Temps have no presence.

  For Tiffany, I have presence. She watches and waits, and I am worn out with it. I don’t know what she wants, or what she’s got against me. But there is something electric in the air when one of the men talks to me—it hisses and hums with hostility, as if a downed power line were writhing loose on the floor. Tiffany of the green eye shadow and black clothes, who slams and sulks and skulks, who watches for Vi to head back for Oakland so she can switch the FM from E-Z Listenin’ to K-Porn. Tiffany has it in for me. She waits, hard-edged with resentment.

  It’s not because Sid tells me jokes. I have heard the men—Al or Eugene or one of the vendors—tell her a joke or two. These, apparently, also involve cable installers. I overheard one about installers going into a whorehouse, because one of the girls … and the teller’s voice drops so I can’t make it out. Because one of the girls … what? Is getting poor reception? Has her wires crossed? Needs new plug-ins? What’s the punch line, I want to shout. I’ll hide my embarrassment, I promise.

  I see Zack, the warehouse gofer, come up behind Tiff and touch her shoulder, smile into her face, murmur into her ear. But Tiff likes Zack—they are of the same generation, and certainly of the same psychic bent—so this titillation is allowed. Tiff flirts with Zack, although she lives with someone. Despite the punk look, which I associate with rebellious freethinking, I have overheard Tiff on the phone giving orders to Someone. “At Albertson’s, buy milk, bread—not that seedy kind, but plain white bread—bananas—not too green, but not too ripe, either—and coffee. Now,” commands Tiff, “read back to me what I said. What kind of bread? And the milk, tell me again, is it skim, 1%, 2% or whole?” I long to get in it, mix it up, say to Tiffany, “The coffee, is it regular or decaf? Thirty-two ounce can or forty-eight? Colombian or French Roast?”

  I wonder what Bruce, blushing Bruce from my garage sale, thinks of Tiffany. But Bruce is the exact opposite of Raoul: I sense that he’s available, he’s even eager. This makes me avoid him, as I do Jerry and Sid. I can’t win. No one needs to tell me that I have issues around men. I know that.

  So I am alarmed when Bruce from the warehouse appears with his own bagged lunch (I’d started bringing mine, an economy measure), settles with me to eat in the conference room. Amy was right about him: he’s a throw-out. His wife evicted him, and he lives with his grown daughter, Isabel, in an apartment out near the freeway. He’s adrift, and I am uneasily aware of his dependence, his neediness, his tendency to grasp at straws. He’s attractive enough, a tall guy with a lean runner’s body. He wears his iron filings hair in an old-fashioned flattop that reminds me of my father, a style uncool, yet cool at the same time. I like his gray eyes. But they’re full of vulnerability, susceptibility; I’m afraid he’ll latch onto me and sink us both. I’m not that strong. He should know that.

  I’m relieved when Helen, also from the warehouse, begins to pack her lunch, too. At noon we unwrap our sandwiches together. Ham and cheese for me, something extravagant for Helen (she lives to eat), peanut butter and jelly for Bruce—he confides that Izzie is no cook, their kitchen is disorganized, ill-equipped. The three of us: are we kooks? Is that our bond? Are we affording each other cover? I accept that Helen will eat with me—two single women … but what’s with Bruce? I have suspicions about his motives, consider him unmanly, to choose the company of women over the men available—Eugene and Al also bring bag lunches and eat in the warehouse. Is Bruce gay? Is he looking for someone to do his ironing?

  I welcome Helen wholeheartedly—I see clearly now that I need more people, more women, in my life. Helen is a jolly short plump woman a bit younger than I, the kind you’d call a “gal,” a career single who keeps busy on the weekends. She drives one of the new Beetles, a convertible, and she talks of spinning along with the top down on the Silverado Trail to the Wine Country, or out to the Mother Lode, or into San Francisco for a shopping spree. Listening to her stories, I begin to long for a new car, too—as if that will fill up some of the holes in my life. A new VW, like Helen’s, to replace my clunky Bronco—well, I’ll never get that far. But I enjoy the fantasy, and I recall with pleasure that night of sleeping in my little old VW behind the bank, the nascence of myself as a real person, separate and apart from Emmett.

  On the whole, though, I’m glad of my lunch company, because Amy and I have fallen apart. When Emmett had been alive, Amy and I had practiced a stealth alliance, had established a conspiratorial understanding. Without him providing an adversarial backdrop, our relationship breaks down. Amy becomes preoccupied; I grow testy, and I blame myself for alienating her with attacks of insensitivity, of rudeness such as I displayed that night of the tuna salad. In short, we’re operating at crosscurrents. I suggest we meet for lunch; but Amy is busy. I mention shopping, but no, there’s that thing she has to do. Come for dinner—same excuse (I see it as an excuse), too much to do.

  So despite my tendency to be a loner, I welcome my lunch companions and I begin to open up to them. At first it’s superficial nonevents—how Amy borrows the vacuum cleaner just when I’m ready to use it; how hard the Bronco is on gas; how easy to save money on groceries when you’re shopping for one. By now I’ve told them about Emmett’s shocking death, and how it had thrown me for a loop. Helen, who urges me to get out and get on with it, says not to tell people—men—that I’m a widow. Men don’t cotton to widows. Just say I’m alone, no reason given—which is what Bruce does. He admits his ex-wife filed first, then evicted him from their house with a court order. He does not elaborate on the cause.

  While we eat, Tiffany stomps by in the hall, glaring in at us. I wonder why she doesn’t go somewhere and scarf up some bolts, nails, and batwings. Despite that grocery list she gave Someone, I’ve never seen her eat anything. Finally she can’t stand it, she interrupts, “Peg, there’s a guy on the phone who says you told him he’d get a discount if he put his bill on Visa.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “You come out here and tell him.”

  “I’m eating lunch. You tell him, or get a number and I’ll call back.”

  Tiffany is in an especially black mood. This morning she locked her keys in her car and had to call a locksmith. In front of the whole office, in front of the whole world—at least as far as our complex is concerned—she had to admit she’d done a stupid thing.

  “What is her problem!” I grouch to Bruce and Helen.

  “Rumor has it when things smooth out, there’ll be permanent office work for one pe
rson, not two. It’s politics. You know somebody, or something. Tiff’s afraid Vi’ll pick you, on account of you got pull.”

  I put down my sandwich. “I’ve got pull! You gotta be kidding. Who do I know? I thought it had something to do with you. With her designs on you.”

  “Me!” Bruce blushes. “Designs on me? No way.”

  For a reason I’m not willing to analyze, this pleases me immensely. Now, if I can figure out where he stands in relation to Helen.…

  One day after lunch, I notice Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs is replaced with Bert Kaemphfert’s schlock. Vi’s voice interrupts “Bye, Bye, Blues,” pages me into the conference room. I go, filled with dread.

  Vi is friendly, too friendly. She says I must have had to deal with a difficult transition, a readjustment. She asks if everything’s okay now, how’s my life outside the office, do I have hobbies. Am I involved with people, a support group?

  I mutter something about Amy, about my neighborhood friends. I tell her about my standing date with Mr. Purdy (who’s seventy-eight years old, I hastily add) to eat oyster stew every Friday night at the Soup Kettle. I tell her about Irene bringing me chrysanthemums, Frieda a piece of apricot torte. Frieda asked me if I wanted some venison, and I said no. Vi laughs with me about this. She says she’s squeamish about eating game, too.

  Vi compliments me on the red sweatshirt, the one Jerry liked. She says she likes my new black leggings. I tell her they’re Amy’s—I’m losing weight, she’s gaining; we’re meeting in the middle at a size 8. Vi chuckles with me.

  She grows serious, invites me to pull my chair in closer. She says that men gather around when there’s a single woman giving them the come-on (that’s not the word she uses, but that’s what she means). I feel my face flush. Who is it: Jerry, Raoul, or Sid? Or even Bruce? Am I interfering with these helpless men, me, the conniving man-hungry woman?

  Vi says it would pay me to check the signals I’m sending, because women are in control, in these kinds of situations. She goes on, “We’re a team here, you know. Everyone has a job and gets it done. By now that must be clear. Tiffany might seem a bit rough around the edges, but she’s a jewel, sharp and smart. I was hoping you’d get close to her. She can be a friend.”

  I murmur something, yes, of course. I’m thinking, Aha, it’s Tiffany, she’s carrying stories about me back to Vi. I should get close to her? Only when I’m wearing my silver cross, my garlic wreath.

  Vi goes on about crossing the line from business to personal, how undermining, irresponsible. She spreads around some pat phrases about cooperation, teamwork, something about putting the good for the whole over selfish self-satisfaction, blah, blah, blah. I can barely listen, I’m embarrassed, insulted.

  At the end of her lecture, I go into the bathroom and gaze at my flaming cheeks, and into my eyes. I’ve started doing them with mascara and shadow and liner, but gently, not ferociously, like Tiffany. I wonder: Why all this subterfuge, now? Surely not to impress these men. I tell myself it’s because I was bored with the way I looked. I embellish for the same reason I’d redo the bedroom. There’s nothing wrong with the off-white color, we used the same paint as in the hall, but a nice soft yellow (to highlight my new bedspread) would brighten things up. However, now I question my motives. “Who am I turning into?” I ask my reflection.

  CHAPTER 10

  Slumped at my desk in the cable office, I stare into a rain-darkened afternoon. The double glass doors are smeared and dirty. What’s eating Zack, I wonder; it’s his job to keep them clean and he’s been extra sullen and sluggish lately. Did he and Tiff have a falling out? Everyone’s edgy, perhaps due to just losing an hour, going back to standard time.

  I get the Windex to wash the glass myself, then pause in mid-swipe to watch a pair of crows in the parking lot. They’re cavorting in a puddle of rainwater, laughing raucously, splashing each other while sharing a bath. First rain of the season, and on Halloween, too. It’s also Friday, a double holiday.

  Once I’d been glad when it rained on Halloween. It dampened Amy’s urge to dress up and go out sexy. When she was little, and I was still in control, her costume was no problem. I’d put together odds and ends, create a semblance of a ballerina or a fairy princess or a cowgirl, something innocent, and I got away with it. But when she was older, say around twelve, Halloween gave her an excuse to paint on gaudy makeup—glittery swaths around her eyes, heavy rouge, mascara, and lipstick. Then it would rain, and she’d have to cover her bare midriff, her attempt at décolletage, with rain gear.

  However, those crows—they’re not ambivalent about Halloween rain, flapping and shaking water from their black suits. Probably a mated pair. Crows mate for life, and they can live thirty years or more. The partnership I’m watching could last longer than mine had with Emmett. I’m doing the math—they’ll outlast me by six years—when Helen comes in from the warehouse.

  “You nervous about tonight?” she says.

  “Nah,” I lie. “Perfect timing, having a blind date on Halloween. I can use a camouflage to get out of myself.”

  “Atta girl. Blind date. Peg, you kill me.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I dunno … that’s a toughie.”

  I brush this off, vaguely nettled. “How about you?” I ask to divert her. “What’re you doing?”

  “I’ve got a friend in San Francisco; we’re going out for some hijinks. What are you going as?” She’s joined me, is also staring at the crows.

  “A China girl, I’ve got one of those coolie hats, a dress with a mandarin collar, sandals. I hope I can dance in them. If I can dance, period.”

  The truth is I am nervous. Tonight I’m stepping out with Frieda’s cousin to a singles’ party down at the Elks hall. What prompted this: Frieda’s been after me to get out, get out, get out, and that phrase of Vi’s, support group, resounds in my head. Because I don’t really have one, apart from Helen and Bruce, my lunch partners.

  They are a sort of support. One day after work when my Bronco wouldn’t start, I had to ask Bruce to give me a ride home to get Mr. Purdy who seems to speak the Bronc’s language. On our way across town, I was self-conscious with Bruce, sat bolt upright, hadn’t been with a man in his vehicle for so long. It’s a huge diesel pickup, a rig (his term, “rig”) he bought when his kids were little. At Christmas, as a family, they used to go to a tree farm in the Mother Lode to cut their own silver tip, and to get it home they needed the truck.

  “You bought this—what is it?”

  “A one-ton Dodge Ram, biggest they make, with the dual wheels and all.”

  “Just to haul a Christmas tree?”

  “I know it sounds silly now, but me and Jan, we did everything for the kids. I, I miss my family. I hope we—my son and me—can work something out some day, get back together. Not Jan; she’s remarried.” He went on to say he and his son are estranged, but he lives with his grown daughter in an apartment complex across town.

  This bleak recital of his family’s fracturing brought him to the brink of tears. I was embarrassed, and irritated at having to witness such unadorned pain, such abject servility. I wanted to snap, “Get a grip, fella!” Instead, I asked how long he’d been divorced.

  “Four years this coming Thanksgiving. But I’m not alone, I’ve got Izzie, Isabel, my daughter. She’s twenty-four, just finished her CPA course. Todd, he’s twenty-two, he still lives with Jan and … the new guy.”

  “Yes, but four years—”

  “I know, only four years. I’m doing okay.”

  It occurred to me that some people, men, might be so damaged by their personal tragedies that they never recover. I vowed it wouldn’t be that way for me, that I’d rebuild myself into being tougher, more capable, than I was when Emmett died. Which, I conceded, wouldn’t be hard. Lately I’d been very critical of my former caviling, indecisive self.

  “There. That’s my house, the beige one,” which was ridiculous: all these houses are beige. A monotone street of beige.

&nbs
p; “Nice neighborhood, sort of like the one Jan and me lived in. Well, she’s still there.” A gulp. Then he went on, “Listen, are you sure you can deal with the Bronco?”

  “Mr. Purdy,” I said, clambering down about eight feet from the cab, “he knows the Bronc. He’s good with it, and he’s home, too. His lights are on.”

  And I hurried away to my real support group, well, not group, but one person—steady, dependable Mr. Purdy, who has been more valuable than a whole bunch of Bruces and Helens.

  Taking me back to the office in his rattly little pickup, though, Mr. Purdy made some smart comment I didn’t like about Mad Max bringing me home … which made me think, could he be jealous? Preposterous. However, I recalled, with chagrin, my attack of possessiveness when he paid attention to Frieda at the garage sale.

  In the parking lot of the cable office, he tweaked things under the Bronco’s hood. While he worked, I told him I was thinking about a new car, that the Bronco needed Emmett’s hand to keep it going, although he’d pretty much ignored it.

  Mr. Purdy peered at me over his glasses, said I’d put my finger on the problem. Emmett had neglected routine maintenance and the chickens were coming home to roost. For him to point his accusing finger at a dead man annoyed me. But it was true. Why had Emmett let the car go so badly? Well, I knew. I was back at the beginning: Emmett expected to be driving that red Miata.

  Mr. Purdy, my support group. Because I admit that Bruce is too openly wounded to count on for much. Well, I’ve got Helen, too. She “supports” me, as well as she is able to, which means she invites me along on some of her jaunts. We’ve been to Sutter Creek for Mexican food; to San Francisco for Chinese; to the Delta for seafood—Helen likes to eat.