This Angel on My Chest

by Pietrzyk, Leslie

  It has been Ruth’s experience that the young widows don’t mention suicide. There are children, families making a fuss, the discipline of paperwork: there are reasons to live even in pain. When they’re in this group, they’re still in crisis, still afraid. They haven’t found anger yet, especially not the women. This doesn’t mean suicide doesn’t happen. She worries about Tom.

  Ruth tells Charlotte that she can’t miss the young widows group. She’ll head up early Saturday morning and stay overnight. On Sunday, she’ll hit the outlet mall for tax-free shopping, then drive home. She promises. Charlotte will have to up her game and work quickly with this schedule.

  Tom is missing, but the rest of what Ruth considers the core group has come, along with one new woman who Ruth spoke to on the phone; Ruth invited her to the meeting but is surprised the woman actually shows up. She had seemed iffy. They start by going around the circle. The people who have been coming since the beginning are brief and matter-of-fact, though their facts are still sad. My husband’s name is X, and he died because Y, and that happened Z months ago. The women tell their stories without tears. The women laugh when the cornflakes woman jokes that her husband died on a Sunday because he didn’t want to mow the lawn that afternoon. The two-year woman shreds Kleenexes, but that’s all.

  The new woman sits next to Ruth, staring at her own feet, which are lined up next to each other, touching. She wears battered blue and yellow striped espadrilles, the kind you might buy on vacation in a sunny country. She doesn’t have a purse, just a bulky keychain loaded with keys and club cards that she clutches tightly in one hand.

  When it’s her turn, the room falls silent. The new woman keeps staring at her feet. It’s as if she’s in a trance and finally Ruth has to say, “Did you want to tell us your name?” in her most gentle voice, the voice saved for skittish animals.

  The new woman starts. “I’m sorry,” she says in a quivery whisper, and the others lean forward. No one will dare suggest that she speak up. “My name is Elizabeth and my husband Bill died two weeks ago. He was thirty-six.” She pauses, and glances up from her shoes as if to measure the effect her words are having. The group looks back at her, with wary compassion. This woman is unpredictable, this woman might be trouble. Ruth feels each of them thinking exactly that. “He had colon cancer,” she continues in her whisper-thin voice. “We found out earlier this summer, when we were in France, having this really great time—our first big vacation away from the kids—and it was the day we were going to the Eiffel Tower. But he woke up that morning with awful stomach cramps—we thought it was the fancy food, and he said he’d be fine, and he took Pepto. But we were waiting in this really long line of thousands of people, and he was sweating and clammy and could barely stand, grabbing the rail, and all I could think was being trapped at the top of the Eiffel Tower with him sick, so I dragged him out of line and we found some people who helped us get to the hospital, and my God. There were all these tests and everyone speaking French and trying to help but the words you need to know most aren’t in a French–English dictionary. People were nice, but I thought if I could just get him back home, everything would be okay—his dad’s a doctor and knows all kinds of people—and there I was all by myself in France.”

  She pauses. As she’s been speaking, her voice has grown stronger. Tears are streaming down her face, and her mouth screws up before she hunches over and breaks into sobs. Someone nudges over the Kleenex box, and she grabs a tissue that she wads up and pushes against her mouth, then she reaches for another that she presses to her eyes. The big ring of keys balances in her lap. “I’m sorry,” she says. Her shoulders shake as she cries. “I can’t stop crying,” she chokes out. “I’m so sorry.”

  The group is silent.

  Ruth watches them without appearing to. They are shaken. They remember this raw grief, this pain, this intensity, the freshness of being lost down in the very bottom of that trench. They remember being there themselves. And now—likely for the first time—now, they suddenly realize that they are no longer all the way down there. Maybe they don’t know exactly where they are, but it’s somewhere else. Several of them shift in their chairs, perhaps embarrassed, or perhaps ashamed that they didn’t break into tears when telling their own stories—but Ruth suspects that for these women this realization will bring mostly relief. Wherever they are on this journey, it’s not where the Eiffel Tower woman is. Time has been at work already. Scab is an ugly word, as is scar, so Ruth uses sediment, evoking layers, evoking rock formations, evoking the forward inevitability of time.

  They’re in a fragile place, this group of young widows, and have only barely clawed their way to here. The Eiffel Tower woman’s tiny voice calls to them from some distant, terrible place. They can’t look back, not now.

  So Ruth knows that many of them will not return for the last meeting. Two-year woman and maybe Tom, Eiffel Tower woman and some of the others who joined midstream. But the rest will discover an unfortunate scheduling conflict: an out-of-town visitor that same night or tickets to a concert. It doesn’t matter. Ruth will show up at the church basement in two weeks, as scheduled, but she already considers tonight the final meeting of this young widow support group.

  She was driving down the George Washington Parkway with her sunroof open, admiring shimmers of light dissolve across the Potomac River.

  She was sitting in the screened-in porch at twilight, watching fireflies flicker off the grass, too many to count, reading their secret language.

  She found the first thick caterpillar, striped yellow and black, munching the butterfly weed.

  She saw a shooting star. She had never before seen a shooting star in the Virginia suburbs, and she glanced up at the right time to make her wish. She knew no one else would wish for the same thing. She understood that this wish would never come true but also that she would never stop wishing it.

  She watched crisscrossed airplane contrails melt into a blue sky from where she lay one Saturday, in a hammock, the lawn freshly mown, the scent of cut grass and the crisp hint of autumn mingling in the air. She thought she might rent a cabin in the mountains for a week or two. She’d never done anything like that, taken a vacation by herself, and she had always thought she might like to. She would do it this fall, now.

  Ruth is driving to the beach. Not that time; it rained that weekend, and she canceled, and then put off another time. But Charlotte will not allow her to cancel again or put off. Charlotte is insistent on the phone, her voice twisting Ruth’s arm, and Ruth lets her. “I’ll be there,” she says.

  “Labor Day,” Charlotte says.

  “I never liked that one,” Ruth says. “The end of summer.”

  “Yes, the end of summer.”

  There’s scads of traffic, but Ruth doesn’t mind. It seems interesting to be doing something that everyone else is doing, to be traveling on a popular path. She’s excited to be at the beach—Dolle’s salt water taffy! Grotto Pizza! Thrasher’s Fries!—and though Charlotte doesn’t know it yet, Ruth will let her win. Ruth has known all along that there is no alternative.

  She has this feeling—she is going to die—and she must stay with it. She, who teaches people how to live after their great sadnesses. She will die. If not from this, though this seems likely, but if not—another time. Some time. Yes.

  She will die, and there will be people to mourn her and people to talk about who she was, people to tell stories and miss her, and people to love her—to love the memory of her, the precious memory of her—until the day they die. She has lived, and now, too soon, she will die.

  Too soon.

  That’s what the young widows all say when they share their stories in the circle: Too soon. It is always too soon.

  PRESENT TENSE

  He knew I was a writer when he married me. He knew I write about everything, eventually. That I write about everything eventually.

  That I would finish this book.

  We’re walking side by side; it’s March, frozen, windy; the empty
beach might as well belong to us. Thick gray sky, gray surf. With each wave, sea foam hisses and laces, sliding up and back along the sand, white bits fluttering free. The gray horizon doesn’t frame, only blurs.

  Too cold to hold hands; we hunch in pockets, under hats, deep within now vertical collars. My cheeks feel scraped of skin. After twenty easy minutes away from the boardwalk, with wind ramming our backs, now we’ve turned.

  “I never noticed seagulls have polka dots on their tails,” he says, pointing to a bird lingering on the sand, at the sweep of the last wave.

  “Me neither,” I say. The wind slaps our words.

  The gull dances from us; then, resigned, it heaves itself into the wind, careening, zigzagging. We stop, circle our backs to the wind, and watch. For a moment the gull stops, suspended, before getting caught and carried away.

  “The spots are on the edges of the wings,” I observe. “Not the tail. The tail is white.”

  He says, “I like it the other way. Polka-dotted.”

  “Me too.”

  We walk backward a step or two, then turn, continuing on, heads down. The shells are only shards and fragments, most hued white, and plentiful enough to invite carelessness; they’re common—clams, oysters, scallops.

  From time to time, we cross the tangle of our own footprints, those that haven’t yet been washed away. My step is deep and rough: boots chopping sand, divots under each heel. These tracks look sad to me, or scared. Anxious. His step stays flat and exactly even.

  He’s not a beach person, so this weekend celebration is for me, to make me happy. A reward for all that writing. We ate a dozen oysters each. Browsed the bookstore and bought hardcovers. Shared beach pizza and French fries with vinegar. Cosied on the same side of a booth and listened to a not bad bar band called Freezer Burn. Salt water taffy waits in the car, one box for us, two for folks in the office. Caramel corn.

  Everyone else is driving home already, stopping at the outlet malls, gulping McDonald’s coffee, dreading traffic. He wants to be doing those things—to be driving home—but I want this last walk on the beach.

  In front of us, suddenly, is a heart etched into the sand, a heart the size of a picture window.

  RYAN

  LOVES

  ASHLEY

  scrawls across the inside, each word its own line. We both stop.

  This heart wasn’t here when we passed this point before. Was it? The lettering is thin and precise, and I picture a boy’s bare finger pushing through the cold, damp sand, a girl posing for a photograph on her phone. Laughter. A kiss, another. This wind forgotten.

  On a sunny day we might bend down and draw our own beach heart and write our silly names in the sand. But now we’re older, wiser—we aren’t those people, Ryan and Ashley. It’s okay, I tell myself.

  “That won’t last,” he says, “that’s so . . .,” but his voice ebbs.

  The sand, the waves, the ocean, the crashing waves, the shifting sand, the endless ocean. Love and life and death.

  There are no new metaphors at the beach. All we can do when we write about the beach is report what we saw, so I report that I saw a heart in the sand; I report that Ryan loves Ashley.

  Or omit. We can omit things: the bloated seagull with the twisted wing; the tattered Ziploc weighted with dog shit; the decaying horseshoe crab, washed ashore and pecked apart; Styrofoam crumbs rolling off the waves and the empty soda bottles. We choose what to report.

  “Nothing lasts,” he says. He is facing out, staring at all that water.

  The first husband, the first wife. Their invisible footprints pressed into the sand alongside ours.

  Stop it. Stare at the horizon. Stop thinking, because every beach metaphor is a cliché, even when the heart in the sand is real, even when I see it with my own eyes, even when Ryan and Ashley truly love each other, even when my first husband died when he was thirty-seven, even when he fits neatly into a beach metaphor where nothing lasts, where waves endlessly smooth the sand, where shell fragments get swept back into the sea, where no wave is the final one.

  I will cry if he kneels to draw his heart in the sand. I will sob.

  We both know what we’re talking about here.

  All weekend I’ve held my breath for him to ask me, for him to say it: “Would you ever write a book about me? Do you love me enough to write a whole book about me? Do you love me that much, as much as him? Do you love me as much as you loved him?”

  No.

  No, he does not ask that. He does not ask that. He does not draw a heart with his bare finger. He doesn’t need to ask those questions—or to hear my answer—he doesn’t need to see our names written in the sand. He can stand and stare straight at the endless ocean in this moment and be unafraid.

  And that, that is always the first thing on the list of the things I love about him—about you, Steve, about you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So much gratitude!

  First, I’m extraordinarily grateful to Drue Heinz, the University of Pittsburgh Press, and contest judge Jill McCorkle. It’s an unbelievable honor (and thrill) to see my book and my name listed with the Drue Heinz Literature Prize winners.

  Portions of this book were written and revised at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Hambidge Center. I am so appreciative of that lovely gift of time, space, and place. Also offering time, space, and place was Anna March, who lent me her beach apartment for two fabulous weeks of writing.

  I’m lucky to have a smart community of writers to share with, lean upon, and learn from. As this book progressed, many people read pages and/or offered advice, insight, and clarity during much confusion. I’m especially indebted to: Marlin Barton, Sandra Beasley, Susan Coll, Dan Elish, Rachel Hall, Beth Kephart, Dylan Landis, Carolyn Parkhurst, Charlotte Safavi, Clay Snellgrove, Amy Stolls, Susan Tekulve, Paula Whyman, and Mary Kay Zuravleff. I’m thankful for the support of director Rick Mulkey, my teaching colleagues, and the graduate students at the Converse College Low-Residency MFA Program, where I first shared several of these stories in public readings. I’m grateful to S. M. Shrake and Story League in Washington, DC, for giving me the opportunity to attempt live storytelling, with a piece that eventually led to “One Art.” And how I love my neighborhood prompt group, always ready with an encouraging word . . . these people never fail to remind me that writing is also joyful!

  My thanks to the journals in which many of these stories were first published, and to their hard-working editors: Cimarron Review, The Collagist, Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Potomac Review, Shenandoah, The Sun, and r.kv.r.y. And my ongoing appreciation to Converse College for selecting “Ten Things” for the Julia Peterkin Award in 2003.

  Under the awkward catchall of “special thanks,” I would like to acknowledge my parents, who filled my life with books from the beginning, and the world’s most supportive sister. Thanks to Gerry Romano, Cynthia Weldon, and Veronica Grogan, for their abundant enthusiasm. I am grateful to have met Sandy Spidell when I did. And I will forever treasure the Rauth family.

  Finally, gratitude and love to Steve Ello, for believing in the written word, for believing in me, and, always, for trusting that there are second acts.