This Angel on My Chest

by Pietrzyk, Leslie

  Throughout the whirlwind of sequins and mesh and beads, Mei moved among them, adjusting a ruched waist, tugging a strap, stepping back to admire—“very fabulous”—or “maybe try another” when she sensed discomfort—insisting Jayne show off more cleavage; dashing out for tiny sparkly bags, impossible stilettos, and blingy costume jewelry; keeping up a running patter on the mythical birthday party; pouring a second, a third glass of champagne.

  The shimmery silver dress, the strappy shoes she would never imagine wearing . . . she breathed differently, as if she hadn’t properly filled her lungs for a long time, until now, and Jayne wriggled into the turquoise taffeta sheath for the third time, and Suellen posed on the pedestal at the three way mirror, admiring her butt in the tight peacock blue. And then Mei asked, “How do you three know each other?”

  Silence for the tiniest moment, half a moment, the amount of time it would take for an apple to drop from a tree and thud onto the ground, for Cinderella’s shoe not to fit, and she couldn’t breathe anymore, not in the shimmery silver dress, not at all.

  To break the silence, Jayne said, “How much is this dress?” and when Mei flipped the tag to show her, Jayne turned to let herself be unzipped. The ratchet seemed to echo, seemed to sound to her like the undoing of someone’s heart—when, say, it stopped working suddenly one morning over breakfast, or when it shattered into a thousand dangerous shards.

  Suellen said, “It feels like we’ve known each other for a long time, doesn’t it?” and Mei nodded, too eagerly, too enthusiastically.

  “I know what’s next,” Mei said, that whorish cheerfulness swinging down like a hammer. “What about a dress for your wedding, Suellen? Or did you decide to go traditional after all? I have a friend in bridal at Saks in the Tysons Galleria who you’d love.”

  Suellen bought the tiny purse and a dress that she whispered she would return to another Nordstrom. No one else bought anything. She had a headache for the rest of the day, meaning the champagne—sparkling wine, actually—was cheap and overly sweet. She had shared countless bottles of champagne with him over the years and never once got a headache. That night she lay in bed, flipping through their wedding album, beginning to end, end back to beginning, over and over. What was the point of saving that wedding dress, professionally preserved in a special box? Why had she been trying on a shimmery silver dress that he would never see her wear?

  The group meets every other week, and Ruth doesn’t allow herself to be late for the second meeting. There are two new women plus a new man, and the woman who wanted to move to Florida doesn’t show, so maybe she has up and done it and is sitting on a beach in Miami right now, forgetting her life back here. The hard thing to learn is not to think about them after they go. There are a few Ruth might wonder about, especially among the teens who have lost a parent, but for most of the grievers, Ruth silently wishes them well on their journey and then turns her attention to their replacements. In these short-term groups, Ruth purposely tries not to remember anyone’s name from meeting to meeting.

  The doctor’s office has stopped calling, but she signs for a certified letter that she throws away. A lawyer’s recommendation, no doubt. She has been notified, blah, blah, not our fault she didn’t come in, not our fault the stupid fool died. Blah, blah.

  The man from last time, Tom, is talking again about how he wants his daughter to come home from study abroad in Italy. He needs her, he says—whines, it seems to Ruth, though she shouldn’t think such things. The daughter wouldn’t let him drive her to Dulles. “‘You’ll just cry at the airport, Dad,’ she told me,” Tom whines. “Of course I’m going to cry. I’m crying talking about it.” He claws for a Kleenex then looks at Ruth, needing an answer.

  She says, “That’s a lot of loss to deal with all at once. First your wife, and now your daughter.”

  The rest of the group nods. Ruth has used her wise voice, so they assume she’s wise, when, in fact, she’s only repeating what the man has said, using better words. That’s what she does: reword things they already know.

  My husband is dead. That’s a tremendous loss.

  I’m sad and scared and confused. Those are powerful feelings.

  This is unfair. It is unfair.

  I’m angry. Hell, yeah.

  I’m dying of cancer. You’re dying of cancer.

  Charlotte is on a business trip, but Ruth goes to the health club at 6:30 anyway, and cranks up the incline. Noah called last night while she was at the young widow group and left a message demanding her to call him, that it was urgent. “It’s about Jiggs,” he said. The cat. She lost custody of the cat in the divorce, though Jiggs sometimes visits when Noah is traveling. She knows the cat is fine. That cat will live forever; it’s fifteen years old and as spry as a ferret, with nine lives to rely on.

  Noah is still programmed in her phone.

  “Jesus Christ,” he sputters. “What the hell time is it?”

  “Six thirty,” Ruth puffs. There’s a no phones rule, but the twentysomethings yammer on phones constantly, so she supposes she can, too. In case the cat really is sick.

  “Ruth, shit. I mean, fucking fuck.”

  Noah is always liberal with the cuss words. In another life, he must have been a sailor. In this life, he’s a procurement officer. And, now, he’s gay. She cheated on him, just a stupid one-time thing, frustration with their lack of communication, and when she confessed, hoping to forge a pathway to the new beginning they needed, he confessed that he was finally being true to himself and admitting he was gay. It was a moment a therapist might dream of; a wife not so much.

  “Up and at ’em, tiger,” she says.

  He groans. “Something about a doctor,” he says. “Why aren’t you taking better care of yourself?”

  Why aren’t you taking care of me? she thinks.

  “They can cure it,” he says. “Doctors will make you better. It’s not some automatic death sentence. . . .” More in that vein—not one word about the cat, of course—but what lingers after Ruth hangs up is a refrain in her head, in rhythm with her feet pounding the machine: you take care of me, you, you take care of me. If the words were in a song, it would be the saddest song in the world.

  The third meeting. Mostly it’s embarrassingly easy for Ruth not to think about what’s going on in her body—denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, haha—but here, the messy circle of young widows always reminds her of that first meeting, the one she was uncharacteristically late for, and that skipped appointment at the doctor’s office. Here, in the church basement, she listens to the sad stories unfold like an old-fashioned line of identical, linked paper dolls, as she feels her cancer plow furrows up and down the inside of her body. She thinks of her cancer as breathlessly efficient and thorough—not like a toddler run amok with a butcher’s knife, but like a Nazi, the worst Nazi there could be: calm, cool, organized, patient. Hitler times two, times infinity. The precision. She imagines her cancer goose-stepping through her body.

  The quiet one is talking. She usually doesn’t say much, and Ruth hasn’t seen her cry, though sometimes her eyes get a glassy, pre-crying sheen. She’s pretty, but in a shy way, as if it’s embarrassing to her to be considered attractive. Today, though, she’s shown up in a sleeveless, leopard print blouse. It looks expensive, bought at a boutique rather than a teen store, definitely not tawdry, but the blouse also looks confused, as if it landed on the wrong body and is puzzled to be here, on this woman, at this meeting, the center of attention, all eyes watching as she talks. Her husband is the one who died at breakfast. Cornflakes—she mentions the cornflakes every time, as if they are important. People latch onto details, Ruth thinks.

  The cornflakes woman says, “I guess I’m confused about all this stuff of his. How much I should throw away or what, though I have to say, I moved some of my clothes to his side of the closet pretty fast, like maybe even the day after the funeral.”

  There are titters and smiles. That’s another thing Ruth has noticed about this cornflakes woman, that sh
e is quick to go for the joke. Deflection. Stay with the feeling, Ruth thinks half-heartedly, but does she really care? There are jokes about breast cancer: Hey, at least this double mastectomy means that men will look me in the eye now, haha.

  The cornflakes woman crosses her arms tightly against her chest, either because she’s about to say something revealing or because the leopard print blouse isn’t warm enough as the air conditioner kicks into full gear. She continues: “All his books are organized in this special way. One bookshelf for his absolute favorite books. Another for his absolute favorite books about Africa. I look at those shelves and cry, but if they were gone, I’d miss them. Am I supposed to box up the books and keep them for the rest of my life? Someone will just throw them away when I’m dead, right? I mean, no one but me cares about these books, and the way they’re arranged and the order they’re in and how it was his hand pushing each book into its exact spot on the shelf. There’s his notes scribbled inside, and sometimes yellow Post-its fall out, with to-do lists in his tiny writing of places to eat and things to read and, and—” Tears glide down her cheeks, and she makes no move to wipe them away, as if she’s afraid to touch them.

  Stay with the feeling, Ruth thinks. Stay, cornflakes woman, stay. You’re doing good work here. She is surprised at how touched she is; she hasn’t expected much from this woman, has pegged her as one to drop out early.

  Her friend rests a hand on the woman’s bare arm.

  The cornflakes woman takes a deep breath: “Those books are him. That collection of books that he assembled, it’s like that’s the story of his whole life, just right there. Not even the story. The life. The life is right there. It’s in front of me, right in front of me, and yet . . .” She makes an angry little exhalation. “I can’t explain what I mean.”

  “Like, how could all this be gone,” Tom says. “How could it just be . . . gone?”

  In the thickening silence, the rumble of the air conditioner feels rude. The faces of the group turn toward Ruth, who sits in the same icy blast that they do. She will say something wise. Instead, she finds herself sobbing harsh, frightening tears wrenched from some deep darkness, and she leans forward, letting her hair curtain her face as she sobs. She senses the paralyzing terror of the members of the group. This is a thing that isn’t supposed to happen. Ruth has never made this mistake before.

  There’s a flash of clarity in Ruth’s head: I’m only human, she thinks.

  In July she invited Jayne and Suellen to her house for drinks and dinner. It seemed like a brave thing to do. She hoped maybe they could sit in the screened-in porch and not have to be too long inside the house, staring at his things and at the empty space where his things had been. It was silly; only she knew what was no longer there. The watercolor his parents gave them was no longer on the far wall. Lined up along that bookcase used to be the rocks they had picked up in Cape Cod while on their honeymoon—she liked the smooth, he preferred jagged. The champagne corks used to be in that basket until she dumped them into a shoebox that she shoved under the guest bed. He had taught her how to open champagne properly: “twist the bottle,” he said, “never the cork,” and though she was angry with him more days than not, looking to rebel against his every remembered word, she had to agree: twisting the cork led to a mess.

  She stirred up a pitcher of gin martinis, and though it was too hot to sit outside, Jayne and Suellen followed her to the porch without complaint. Dinner was Caesar salad, steak on the grill, sautéed wild mushrooms from the farmer’s market, green beans, and homemade peach pie now cooling on a wire rack. A bottle of cabernet. It was an intentionally manly meal, food women living alone might not cook.

  They had unconsciously created a flow to their get-togethers. First they caught up with daily life—what happened to the awful admin she was supposed to fire; how Jayne’s bathroom renovation was coming along; how to keep Suellen’s visiting father busy and was the tourist tour of the White House worthwhile—and then they covered issues of general interest—movies to recommend, books that were good—followed by gossip about the group—did Ruth color her hair; jokes about setting up support group bingo with the constancy of Tom’s crying, the two-year woman shredding Kleenex, and Ruth’s, “How does that make you feel?”—and then, finally, what they had been waiting for, with the steaks now on the plate—perfectly cooked; she had also learned that from him—and the talk could turn to the missing men.

  None of them had children, and that was all at once harder and easier . . . discuss.

  Should Jayne call Doug’s mother on her birthday the way he used to . . . discuss.

  Was Suellen a terrible person for flirting shamelessly with the new guy at her office, since she admitted to loathing his personality but liking that he didn’t know what had happened to her because he was new? “Someone must have told him,” Jayne said. “You know what offices are like.” Discuss.

  She had something they had not spoken of before. She had known about it for a couple of weeks, but she hadn’t mentioned it. Remember when she was going through all those books?

  They nodded.

  Cicadas buzzed. Jayne sliced her steak into squares. There were fireflies suddenly. The red glow of the coals out on the patio, and the scent of burnt fat. Moths crawling up the screens, attracted to the candlelight within the porch. Someone remoting a car door. Maybe even a star or two penetrating the urban wall of lights. The quiet danger of calm.

  She had been going through all those books, and she had found a small leather book with no words written on the spine, so she pulled it out to see what it was: a diary of sorts, a journal of sporadic entries.

  “He kept it on the shelf?” Suellen asked. “He didn’t hide it?”

  “There were so many books,” she said. “And it was pushed way back. You’d never see it, unless you knew it was there. Unless you were going through every single book.”

  “Did you read it?” Jayne asked.

  “Throw it away,” Suellen said. They spoke simultaneously, the words loud in the dark.

  Yes, she had read it. She had taken it to bed immediately, leaving piles of the real books teetering everywhere, and she read each page. His handwriting was quite clear, especially for a man. Actually, their handwriting looked alike. Early on, his mother mistook one of her notes for a final letter from her son and called, angry and sad. She stayed up past midnight, reading and rereading the journal.

  “Well?” Suellen asked. Everyone had put down their knives. All the steak had been eaten.

  She said, “It was something he took with him on business travel, so there’d be entries for those days, and then maybe a month with nothing. So very erratic, you know? But reading what he’d written. It was like hearing his voice.”

  Jayne let out her breath in a swift gust. “So a good thing?” Jayne ventured.

  When she didn’t speak right away, Suellen did: “He didn’t—?” Suellen asked.

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t cheat on me. Or if he did, he was smart enough not to write about it.” Her half-smile, nervous, making the other two nervous, so they laughed lightly.

  “That’s super-dumb,” Suellen said. “Dear Diary, Today I fucked a waitress I picked up.” And then they did laugh for real.

  “He was impatient and felt trapped,” she said. “He said I was needy. And demanding. And it took so much out of him sometimes just to get through the day with me. I complained about stupid things. I was moody.”

  “Stop,” Jayne said. “You’re none of those things.”

  “I’m all of those things,” she said. “He’s right. I was a terrible wife to him.”

  Discuss.

  People just let off steam, Jayne said, pointing to the example of the group, where people said some pretty shitty things about their spouses sometimes. Suellen wanted to snatch up the journal and throw it away immediately. “Where is it?” she demanded. “At least lock it up so you don’t read it and obsess.” Don’t let his mom ever get hold of it, Jayne advised, “she’ll use it a
s evidence that you weren’t good enough for him.”

  “It’s not the whole story,” Suellen said. “It’s the story of one day, out of how many?”

  “Married nine years, together thirteen,” she said. “But more than one day actually. He started it a couple years ago.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s a pinprick in the universe,” Suellen said. “In the whole great sky.”

  The night felt like velvet brushing against her skin.

  “He loved you,” Jayne said. “They loved us.”

  “They loved us,” Suellen said.

  She let them talk it all away from her, until the journal was just another confusing thing in a sea of confusing things. He loved her. He loved her, and it turned out that loving her was also confusing, but he did it anyway. He loved her anyway.

  It’s the heart of summer vacation weather, when everyone heads to their beach rental or their friend’s beach house. Charlotte has invited Ruth for a long weekend at her parents’ place in Rehoboth. “Do you good to relax,” Charlotte tells her. Charlotte has stopped asking about the doctor, stopped volunteering to take her to appointments, stopped telling her about friends who either are or know specialists, stopped forwarding various medical links that Ruth deletes, stopped with the worried and frightened eyes. Now Charlotte’s eyes are furious. Charlotte will not be able to last much longer. This beach weekend is—Ruth assumes—Charlotte’s last-ditch effort to rescue Ruth.

  Ruth knows she should go—to the beach, to the doctor. She should be a courageous example; she should be the kind of person of whom it’s murmured, “She was brave through the end”; she should be a pink ribbon-wearing inspiration. Instead, she thinks of herself as an inspiration to those who give up. Where is their leader?

  The young widows complain that well-meaning friends, relatives, and—yes—strangers constantly bray variations of this refrain: “If that happened to me, I’d fall apart. I don’t know how you’re doing it. I couldn’t get through the day.” The sentiment is neither helpful nor comforting to the young widows, implying that they’re not sad enough, or suggesting there’s an alternative to getting through the day when the most painful thing the young widows have to figure out is that there is no alternative. If there was an alternative, they would take it in a heartbeat, in a New York minute, faster than a speeding bullet. They would not choose this, this ENDLESS ALL CAPITAL LETTERS PAIN, but no one gets a choice. There’s no choice. And you too, Well-Meaning Friend, smug and happy and alive, you’d do the same thing, you really, truly would. Yes.