Saturday Night Widows

by Becky Aikman

  The other women I met could not have been more different. They were mourning, but their moods cycled through the quicksilver changes that I recognized from myself. And something else—I liked them, right away, something no laboratory could quantify.

  So I extended the invitation. We would see whether we all found what we were seeking—adventure, companionship, understanding, a more cheerful way to spend a Saturday night. What had Professor Bonanno said? “Grief is a process of finding comfort.” Maybe we’d find that.

  chapter

  SEVEN

  we began by finding our rhythm.

  Lesley and Dawn were so hooked into a groove that they were cutting loose in giddy riffs. It was the Saturday night of our second meeting, a private cooking class that was spinning off into free-form silliness. Those two, tapping away with their knives on some innocent celery stalks, were the only two women I knew who could find the sexual innuendo in rice pilaf.

  “It’s all about the rhythm,” Lesley trilled, bouncing in time to the knife work.

  “Let’s see that rhythm, girl.” Dawn boogalooed along. “Up … down … up … down …” She dissolved into giggles, then elbowed Lesley and turned fake serious. “It scares me that you and I are always on the same page here.”

  We had invaded the kitchen of Lauren, a chef and cookbook author, who must have felt like Miss Molly trying to keep order in Romper Room. Dawn, vamping it up in a low-cut sweater under her apron, her showy glamour a magnet for attention, and Lesley, her naughty sense of humor fully deployed, were clearly the class cutups. It sounded like a flock of woodpeckers had landed as we practiced our chopping techniques around a central workstation, smacking down stalks of celery to flatten them out and dicing them into tiny bits on our cutting boards. Very therapeutic.

  Lauren, no doubt expecting what most people do from a group of recent widows, didn’t seem to know what to make of our guerrilla group. “I want us to talk about cooking,” she pleaded, barely loud enough to be heard over the chatter.

  We’d already heard the reason for Lesley and Dawn’s exuberance. In the month since our first gathering, Lesley had moved into the new house she’d bought, the biggest decision she’d ever made on her own. Almost instinctively, she followed up by impulsively asking Craig, the guy she’d started dating the summer before, to move in with her. She was keeping house again, and she was ecstatic about it. Dawn had high hopes of her own, having met a promising widower with two kids the same ages as hers. The two women couldn’t contain their high spirits long enough to knuckle down in class.

  If Dawn and Lesley were the Don’t-Bes, Marcia was the Do-Be, diligently hacking away as per Lauren’s instructions. Marcia hadn’t wasted any time letting Lauren know her level of skill in the kitchen (nil) and her level of interest (less than nil). Nevertheless, she applied herself with steam-driven concentration, extra credit for trying at all.

  “My husband was the cook,” she said with characteristic bluntness. “I don’t cook. I make breakfast.”

  Marcia had all of her other meals delivered, and she ate them alone when she got home from lawyering at ten or eleven every night. Yet she persevered with slow if determined chopping, stolid in her sturdy jeans and stiff linen work shirt. I entertained the possibility that Marcia, as intimidating as I found her to be, might also be something I hadn’t expected: a good sport.

  I gave myself some points, too, for bringing off this evening at all. No one had bailed on this enterprise after our first get-together. In fact, they had all told me that they felt as jazzed up as I had afterward, invigorated by the company of others who could read some of their thoughts and finish some of their sentences. In the four weeks since, Dawn had come into the city from New Jersey for a gossipy one-on-one dinner with Tara, and then a more sober one with Denise. “Human beings are just incredible,” she told me when we spoke on the phone. “What we endure and how we move forward! These women are so inspiring to me.”

  This February night, everyone had made it to Lauren’s suburban house through the slushy residue of a snowstorm. Everyone except Tara. The weather had waylaid her at a stopover in the Houston airport. I got a text message as we piled through Lauren’s front door and shook the snow off our boots: so sorry. best to all, xo T. I worried out loud that maybe she wouldn’t stick with the group, especially after her hesitation at the first go-round.

  “She wanted this companionship most of all,” Lesley reassured me. “She just wanted us to know that whatever she does now, she does on her own terms. I understand it after everything she’s been through.”

  Once our hostess put us to work, I relaxed into the evening, feeling little of the anxiety of our first encounter. The group had made it through the hardest part, our backstories already revealed. This one would be easy. Easier. We’d pick up some cooking techniques as we prepared dinner, and then enjoy a good gossip as we polished off the results.

  As an engaging theme for one of our first Saturday nights, I thought, we couldn’t do better than food. If grief is a search for comfort, food was comfort itself, nurturing, sustaining, both a carnal pleasure and essential for life. This group needed nurturing, and maybe some carnal pleasure, too—these widows had appetites. It would be useful to learn to make some simple, delicious dishes as a treat for one or an entertainment for others. And food was universal. Despite the various personalities on vivid display in that kitchen, we all had to eat. Simple, right?

  As the lesson progressed, though, I felt a growing disquiet whenever I stole a look at Denise. Her inscrutable composure had helped me hold on to mine at our first meeting. Yet tonight she was keeping to herself, at a cautious remove from the banter and horseplay. She quietly chopped and whisked on command, and smiled as if she had sat and practiced it, but her usually mindful presence seemed unsettled, far away.

  “Do you like to cook?” I asked her, trying to draw her in.

  “I love it,” she answered dutifully. “I loved cooking for Steve. But now that he’s gone, I’ve quit cooking, and I’ve quit eating.” There was that smile again as if to soften the message, and then she turned her full attention to stacking her chopped vegetables in a neat Lego-like pile on her cutting board.

  Denise, I had noticed before, often displayed the same courteous smile, especially when she was saying something sad. She smiled with her mouth, but her pale, wide-set eyes seemed far away. It was a considerate smile, self-effacing. It seemed to be saying, Please don’t feel obligated to be sad on my behalf. Look here. See? I’m smiling. Only she wasn’t, not in a heartfelt way.

  I looked more closely. Her porcelain complexion looked as faded as bone, and even under a loose tunic and trademark yoga pants, she looked thin. Not frail—all those hours of yoga had granted her a supple strength—but there seemed to be less of her this time.

  I worried that our unfettered repartee was too much, too soon, too too for Denise. Her husband had died at the end of August, and this was only February. I had resolved not to invite anyone to join our group if she was still suffering through the early months of grief, but I had made an exception with her. She seemed so centered, so serene, so in command of herself that I thought she might be ready to re-engage with the world faster than most. She was also the youngest, not even forty. Whether that rendered her more resilient or more tender, I couldn’t know.

  I COULDN’T KID MYSELF, either. Denise was the most recently wounded, and I had seen the signs of it the first time we met, when I asked her to consider participating in my group. She had invited me to her apartment one evening only two months after her husband died. Denise displayed the same measured grace even then, but the expressions on her face were what captured my attention most. When she wasn’t turning on that wan smile, when her face was at rest, I could have been looking into a mirror at myself during my earliest days of loss. It was a spot-on impression of a grieving person that I’d seen in some writings by scientists like Professor Bonanno: the face literally sagging, the eyebrows knitted together and raised up, forming a
triangle, the jaw slack, the lower lip drawn out and down. “Whether we are aware of it or not, this expression is a compelling signal to others that we may need help,” Bonanno wrote. I had brought Denise some take-out food, and it was all I could do not to go all Jewish mother on her and spoon it right into her mouth. I couldn’t help myself—I wanted to help. She said she didn’t feel like eating, so instead we settled in her big empty living room.

  “I’ve been on the Widow Tour,” Denise told me. She flicked on that polite smile for my benefit. Practically everyone she knew had stopped by or asked her out for lunch or drinks or dinner, asking, “How are you? Is there anything I can do?”

  “It was the same with me,” I said. “People asked what they could do on a daily basis, but I could never think of anything. It was much better when they suggested something concrete. One of my friends offered to help me write thank-you notes, which was a godsend. I couldn’t string two words together myself.”

  “That was considerate.” Denise said she appreciated the kindness, all the invitations, but they were exhausting. “I have to master this performance of being somewhat pulled together, and I have to talk about the particulars,” she said. “And my short-term memory is shot, so I can’t remember what to ask about what’s going on with anybody else.”

  “Yes, I was just the same!” I said. “I sounded like Mrs. Elton in Emma. It was all about me. Or else I’d be sitting there thinking how I’ve got to say something, anything, but my mind was a blank.”

  “People want to be kind, but if they are people I don’t know particularly well, it’s very wearing.”

  Maybe that included me—we’d just met, after all—but the “widow” entry on my résumé seemed to grant me diplomatic immunity, so we plunged into the dreaded particulars, taking the scenic route through Denise’s early life first. Her father, a headmaster at various private schools, moved the family around a lot—Florida, Germany, Minnesota. It was there where a tragedy redirected her childhood when Denise was twelve. Her brother, one year younger than Denise, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Then, over the next three months, her mother had surgery for thyroid cancer, after which Denise’s grandfather contracted stomach cancer and died. Denise related these facts to me patiently, without adornment, without any reference to their effect on her. It was as if she had been a spectator in a family defined by sudden heartbreak. I suspected that it was during that three-month period and its aftermath when she perfected a skill at containment, a talent for not bothering anyone.

  “My brother and Steve had the same birthday,” Denise said. It took me a moment to register that Steve was her husband. Denise’s gaze turned inward as she slipped out of our conversation into a hazy, preoccupied state, her stare fixed on something far away. I recognized this, too, from Bonanno’s description of typical grieving behavior and from my own memories of swinging in and out of focus after Bernie died. I gave her time to reconnect before I prompted her to continue.

  Denise’s response to the tragedy of a brother’s shocking death seemed to be to strive for achievement and perfection in herself, deflecting attention by never causing a fuss. When she was sixteen, a teacher suggested she go straight to college, and so she did, never finishing high school. “It was a good thing for me to start over,” she said.

  She met Steve on an otherwise unpromising day when she moved into an apartment in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Under her door, she got an invitation to a welcome-to-the-building party, but when she showed up, she was the only guest of an unemployed guy who looked like a member of ZZ Top and kept his shades drawn against the daylight. Single life at its worst.

  As consolation, a friend took her out to the All State Café. It was a classic dive bar in the neighborhood, home to a mellow crowd, a jukebox blasting out “Wild Horses” and bartenders with nicknames like Uncle Gig and The Shark. Decades of residue from greasy cuisine coated the dull brick walls, and illegal smoke drifted under hanging lamps dimmed by shades of dark green glass. It was the kind of place where conversations with strangers took care of themselves. Steve, there with friends, spotted Denise risking an order of nachos with her wine.

  He asked her about her camera, a Canon ELPH that she’d placed on the table.

  “You probably think I’m old-fashioned, because I still shoot with film, not digital,” she said. Of such lines are romances born.

  Steve was a professional photographer and a film fanatic, too. Before he left, he took some pictures of Denise with his ever-present Leica. A couple days later, their first date made a detour into home improvement when he stopped at her new place to pick her up and saw that her electrical outlets were shooting sparks. He rewired all the outlets. “Now you’re safe,” he said.

  They never made it out of the apartment that night. Nor on the next date, when she had a cold and he brought her flowers and juice. Denise, the girl who had grown up too fast, reveled in being cared for.

  That was August. By December, they were engaged. By the next August they had moved into the apartment of their striving dreams, a neglected mess when they bought it, but with great bones. Steve bought them unisex uniforms, matching coveralls made from stiff gray cotton, and they changed into them when they replaced the wiring, rehung the doors, or installed new ceiling fans. Gradually, they turned the apartment into the showplace the group saw at our first meeting. The next summer they married in a simple ceremony with thirty friends. The decorations were blowups of the photographs Steve took of Denise the day they met.

  They hoped their next project would be to have a child. But the following August, a year after the wedding, Steve was gone. “We only got three years, pretty much to the day,” she said. That smile again, briefly, and then another moment lost in introspection.

  At five thirty in the morning on the day he died, Steve woke Denise and said he wasn’t feeling well. She listened from bed as he went into the shower, and when he came out, she heard a crash in the hallway. Denise ran out. He gasped out his last words—“Help me”—and collapsed on the floor.

  “I knew he was dead,” Denise said. She called 911 and began CPR, but he didn’t respond. Ambulance workers arrived, too late. Police treated her apartment like a crime scene, leaving his body there all day, covered, while they waited for the medical examiner to take it away for an autopsy, required in the case of an unexplained death of such a young person. Steve had been fifty. Once again, Denise kept to the facts in telling me this story, periodically smiling her don’t-worry-about-me smile.

  Somehow she had the composure to speak without notes at the funeral. “I couldn’t speak at Bernie’s,” I said. “I didn’t think I had the strength. That took nerve.”

  “Or just adrenaline. I felt like I had to. It was my only chance.”

  Afterward, wallowing in grief was not an option. Denise had started a job as a senior editor at a publishing house only six months before. Bad timing—it takes at least two years to prove oneself as an editor, and none of her books would come out for another year or more. The pressure was on to find successful books and edit them quickly. She couldn’t let up, forcing herself to concentrate on reading entire manuscripts at a stage of widowhood when I could barely follow a paragraph in the newspaper. I had been able to get by on my salary, but for Denise, the near-impossible burden of paying the mortgage by herself loomed. She stopped eating. She stopped sleeping. Yoga classes helped her hold herself together. They were tranquil, familiar, conducted in the presence of others, but somehow private, too. And she was good at yoga. It gave her a crucial sense of mastery when her husband was lost and everything else that mattered—job, home, bank account—was hanging by a thread.

  Meanwhile, her striking outward composure led people to make the strangest comments. Some acquaintance said, “Now you can go out and have sex with whoever you want,” which defied all explanation. Or this: “Don’t you find it disgusting that he died right in your apartment?” And another weird one: “You’ll see, in six months you’ll be pregnant.”

&nb
sp; “It provoked a lot of self-analysis,” Denise said. “Have I ever said anything like that to anyone? Ugh, I hope not.”

  Impressed by her equilibrium, I invited Denise to join the group. And after the first meeting, everyone else told me they admired her self-possession as much as I did. It hadn’t occurred to me that a cooking class might cause her distress. But what happened that Saturday night at the cooking class would make me doubt what I knew about Denise, about widows, about what constitutes comfort in or out of the kitchen.

  LAUREN, OUR TEACHER, was eager to embrace our widowhood dilemmas. She had devised a menu with all that in mind.

  “It’s unfortunate when people don’t feel entitled to cook unless they have another body around,” she said. She handed each of us an apron in her impeccably equipped kitchen, punctuating a relentlessly buoyant tone with the gestures of a majorette. A rambunctious Labrador retriever, Mango, fishtailed wildly around our knees. “Eating and sharing and smelling good food cooking are incredible pleasures in life.”

  Marcia tied on an apron with a brisk tug. “That dog needs a sedative,” she said.

  Lauren scooted Mango out the swinging door and described the menu. All the recipes, from lamb chops slathered with a chunky fresh tomato salsa to fudgy chocolate-chocolate chip cookies—just about the right amount of chocolate, as far as I’m concerned—were designed to teach basic skills: measuring, chopping, braising, and grilling. We could make any of the dishes for one or for a crowd, helping us repay the awkward social debts to people inviting us out on the Widow Tour.

  First we mixed cookie batter, a deep, decadent chocolate hash made more sophisticated with hints of cinnamon and espresso. It was Lesley’s job to roll the dough into logs. Lauren explained that they could be stored frozen that way, ready at short notice to be cut into individual cookies, the better to accommodate a widow treating herself to a fresh-baked indulgence on her own. She could also pop the whole batch into the oven at once for a party of friends, or mainline the entire stash in one orgiastic bender, I thought, a perfectly plausible option that went unmentioned. Lesley pulled up the sleeves of her silk blouse and made a show of stroking and caressing the mixture into a long, smooth cylinder, seizing the opportunity for bawdy repartee.