Saturday Night Widows

by Becky Aikman

  I relished her defiance of convention. “Do you ever worry about social pressure?” I asked for myself as much as her. “That if you date someone else, that if you don’t seem miserable all the time, people will think that you didn’t love your husband?”

  “Life is so short,” Dawn said. “I say, when you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, come talk to me.”

  Her fling with the spa guy had been a lark, but that didn’t satisfy her larger mission. Those kids felt the absence of a father acutely, and her goal was to fill that absence. Good-for-now wouldn’t cut it for long.

  Days before our lunch, Dawn’s daughter had drawn up a wish list for Christmas. “Mommy, all I want is another Daddy,” she said, with pleading eyes. “It’s at the top of my list.” She handed it to Dawn and pointed. “Look, I have an arrow here, next to the word.” Daddy.

  “Honey, Mommy can’t just go on the Internet and find one,” Dawn explained. Actually, Mommy can, she acknowledged to me with a laugh, but she couldn’t be assured of the quality. “Mommy is very open to this, but we have to make sure it’s the right person. It has to just happen. It has to come from God.”

  chapter

  TWELVE

  whether through God, the Internet, or some other higher power, most of the women when we first met seemed bolder than I had been about finding love again, or at least an occasional good-for-now. But the question was how. Attractive, available, age-appropriate men seemed as rare as plutonium and possibly just as dangerous. After we said good-bye to Katie and convened for dinner at a museum café, Tara told us that in the last month she had survived the mortification of one of the great trials of the midlife single person—the public fix-up.

  We found a table near big windows looking out over Central Park. The sun had yet to set, and outside we saw little buds beginning to bloom in the dogwood trees. Appetizers arrived—small plates of roasted eggplant, shrimp arancini, cocktail meatballs, red beet ravioli, and red pepper hummus—while Tara slowly recounted the excruciating details.

  Two longtime couples had invited her to join them for dinner at the home of a single man, a keen woodworker who had recently built a new recycling bin. Ordinarily, Tara might have declined, but Lesley and Dawn had convinced her there was no harm in accepting the attentions of a gentleman more than a year after her husband died. Nevertheless, this being a public fix-up, we groaned at the possibilities for embarrassment—the intimate setting, the implication that Tara and the recycling-bin guy constituted a third couple, the witnesses standing by like laboratory scientists eagerly awaiting evidence of romantic combustion.

  Tara did her best. She brought a bottle of wine—recyclable! She praised the museum-quality bin to the skies. But over dinner, Recycling-Bin Man asked her, “How old are your children?” His were six and eight.

  Tara told him that both her girls were out of college. Silence descended over the table like the dirigible in Black Sunday.

  “How young is he?” Marcia said.

  “Forty-seven.” Tara was fifty-four. A meaningless difference if the man had been the older one, but even in this enlightened era, dating a younger man was still, apparently, a stretch.

  “That’s what I want,” said Marcia, who had just turned fifty-eight. “A younger man.”

  “Well, this guy … freaked out.” Tara dragged out the suspense with her protracted way of speaking.

  Dawn tried to salvage the story. “He was probably thinking, ‘I can’t believe she looks that great and she has kids that age.’ You are feeding into your fears.”

  Tara’s expression shut her down. “It got worse. Afterward, my friends critiqued me. They said I didn’t show enough … interest. I didn’t … flirt enough.” Her alto voice had dropped a full register. “I was … dying.”

  I told her about my failed public fix-up with the mulch man, and Lesley weighed in with one she’d endured. Through the alchemy of retelling, these episodes seemed funnier than they had at the time.

  Nevertheless, Tara had decided that the best approach to this strange new phase in her life was not to think about romance, but to concentrate on upgrading everything else about herself. Perhaps, as a side benefit, she might draw a man to her from some uncharted, outlying sphere on the sheer force of her newfound magnetism. If not, so be it. She was making undeniable progress. Since leaving her job at an educational foundation, she had been casting about for something new, and that dusky voice of hers had opened an unexpected opportunity. A friend who performed voice-over work, reading scripts for commercials and industrial films, recognized her potential and invited Tara along on an audition. Competing against trained actors, she gave it a shot, more for laughs than anything else, and she was thrilled when she began to field some offers—a callback for a drug commercial, a script for a business conference.

  “I’ve had so much fun,” she said. “Not … a whole new career, but it’s a nice little bit of … icing on the cake.”

  Lesley asked Denise how she was faring since the gathering at the cooking class. To help with the mortgage, she told us, she’d been considering a couple of candidates to rent the second bedroom in her apartment. A midlife roommate, unappealing as that sounded, was probably necessary. But the helpful widower was still buying her groceries. “He’s getting me laundry detergent right now,” she said, discreetly pleased. “It’s not romantic, though.”

  “Has he done anything more, like touch you or kiss you?” Lesley asked, watching with sharp eyes.

  “No, he hasn’t. I don’t want more right now.”

  “Let me say this as gently as possible,” I said. “When I was first widowed, I needed all kinds of help—you know, reaching a high shelf, painting the bathroom ceiling. In my experience, the guy who wants to help you is the guy who wants to get into bed with you.”

  “I can’t say I disagree,” Lesley said.

  She filled us in on how everything was humming along in her live-in relationship with Craig. It wasn’t as simple as her marriage had been, when she and Kevin, young and unencumbered, made their home and started a family. Craig was divorced and had custody of a thirteen-year-old son, so the boy was now living with Lesley, too. They were cautiously negotiating protocols on vegetable consumption at dinner and the proper volume of an electric guitar. It sounded as if Lesley was winning over Craig’s son, cautiously extending affection, stepping into her homemaker role, with or without green beans. In her rush to share her home with Craig, she admitted, she hadn’t thought through all the implications of caring for his boy, too, but she was reveling in having company in the house again.

  The sky grew dark outside the windows, and a waiter lit candles on our table. It was easy to talk over the soft undertone of other diners scattered nearby. While we waited for the main course, I passed around my frayed clipping of the Ed Ruscha painting I Was Gasping for Contact.

  “Contact,” Lesley said, nodding. “That was the thing I missed the most from being married to Kevin. I missed touching somebody. Think about babies, how they thrive on touch. You stroke your baby, you touch her head. This is what we need to thrive.”

  “It’s tough,” I said. “In our culture, touching is considered sexual, so if you’re not in a sexual relationship, nobody ever touches you. All you get is a quick social hug, or a peck on the cheek.”

  “All day I’m around tons of people,” Marcia said. “They work and go home. It’s not the same. It’s not intimate.” Listening to Marcia, I began to realize that she wasn’t so much inscrutable as brief. She cut right to the point—blink and you missed it. As this one sank in, I understood that Marcia, with her all-consuming career, might have fewer opportunities for meeting love interests than the rest of the gang.

  “Marcia, we need to get you on Match.com,” Lesley said.

  “No,” Marcia scowled. Point made.

  Lesley rattled on, undeterred. “Craig touches a lot,” she said with a grin. “If I’m in a room full of people, he’ll walk past me and touch me, just to let me know he’s there. I go woooo-h
oooo, like I’m having an orgasm. Those are things you forget.”

  “Also, it’s different now,” said Dawn. “You know what you’ve lost.”

  Something in her expression caught my attention, something fragile. She, too, was wrestling with the matter of needing or wanting touch, but this new relationship with the widower was stirring up more, reviving a longing for the union of love and soul that we’d witnessed in Cupid and Psyche. Dawn told us that she and Adam had carried on a three-hour discussion that day, starting at breakfast and stretching through the morning, trying to sort out what limits to place on their relationship, what to combine and what to keep separate. Dawn was drawn to Adam and his children, but he was resisting.

  “I don’t think he wants to feel anything,” she said. “He said he thought the reason it worked between his wife and him was that they didn’t need each other. They were independent.” But Dawn told him, “It’s not the need. It’s the want.” She turned her eyes on all of us, trying to explain. “It’s the wanting.”

  Her voice built to a whine. “Everything feels so freaking calculated. Is it ever going to be like it was before? Is it ever going to happen where you just meet someone, you love each other, and then you sort everything out later?” She looked at each of us imploringly. Her next words sounded discouraged. “With him it’s all about what works and what doesn’t.”

  “Because you know things now that you didn’t know when you got married,” Marcia said.

  “Just this morning, I said to him, ‘It’s just freakin’ easier to be by yourself.’ ” Dawn banged her hand against the table and made the silverware bounce.

  “I took a different approach with Craig,” Lesley said. “I jumped into this living together without thinking too much. But here’s what I did think: things with Craig are good right now. They might not be good next week, but what the hell, I’m having fun. I’m willing to take that risk. If it doesn’t work next week, my heart will be broken, but you know what? I’ve overcome much.”

  “But it’s different for Dawn,” Marcia said, bringing her analytical mind to bear. “She has to worry about young children, hers and his.”

  Marcia, as usual, had hit on something. None of us thought there was anything wrong with casual affairs, but easygoing romance was harder to pull off when children were involved, especially children who had recently lost a parent and longed for stability.

  The children had met already, Dawn said, her boy and girl and his boy and girl, hitting it off immediately. They played together at Adam’s house as if they had known each other forever, getting all muddy in the yard. She was more touched than she was prepared to admit. This is a family, Dawn looked at them and thought, the family we don’t have anymore. The kids scurried upstairs to clean up, and Dawn followed after a while to call them down for dinner. She came upon Adam’s little girl sitting alone at a child-sized vanity table, rows of nail polish neatly lined up on top, all the girly things belonging to a girl in a family with only a brother and a dad. She turned a hopeful face toward Dawn.

  The sight hit Dawn with heart-stopping force. “I almost lost it,” she said. “I thought, oh my God, this little girl doesn’t have a mom.”

  All the emotions that she wouldn’t let herself feel for herself, that she wouldn’t let herself feel for her own fatherless children, all the emotions that she suppressed to be the happy mom for her family, came to the fore. “The whole situation,” she said, her voice leaping and swooping, “I don’t know if I was feeling it for myself, or feeling it for them, or maybe feeling it for myself vicariously through them. All I know is, this triggered a lot of my own stuff that I probably didn’t experience in my own way. Because you know what?” Her voice squeaked. “I was twelve years old, just her age, when my dad left.”

  We waited, full of thoughts, while Dawn explored sedimentary layers of feeling in her mind.

  “Is it normal to be so nervous about all this?” she asked.

  “Yes,” everyone promptly agreed.

  She took a measured breath. Later that night at home, she said, as she put her children to bed, her son posed a question. “Mom,” he said, “what if we meet a family where there is no mom, and we’re a family that has no dad, you knoooow …?” Dawn drew out the word to leave the question hanging in the air. “Can you imagine?” he said. “What if the kids don’t even know each other’s names?”

  “You see?” Dawn said. “He’s thinking about it. He has all these fears.”

  One day soon after, her daughter told Dawn she had had a dream. “It was a dream about Daddy,” the girl said, “but then all of a sudden I turned around, and it wasn’t my daddy. It was some other man.”

  It sounded as if the possibility of a new husband, a new father, a whole new family, was just too strange for all of them to wrap their heads around. Our minds have to approach such jarring transitions indirectly, I thought, through dreams, or art, or through the lives of others, such representations sometimes being the clearest mirrors for puzzling through changes so big we can’t face them without the distance. This trip to the museum was driving home the point that it might be easier to contemplate something outside ourselves in order to understand something inside ourselves.

  Dawn was thinking the same thing. “I look at my own kids and myself and I think we’re in great shape,” she said. “Then I look at this man’s family and it triggers so much emotion that I can’t even tell you. But we’re in the exact same position!”

  It pained me to see Dawn contending with so much, and it forced me to re-examine my assumptions about her. Naively, I had thought that her beauty, her faith, and her optimism would smooth her way toward a happy destiny. I had thought that men would flock to her, that she and her children would flourish under her buoyant guidance, and that it all would happen quickly for her, snap-snap. I had fallen into the old presumption that attractive women have the world on a string. Uniting her family with another one just like it would have been just the quick, gratifying ending I would have predicted for Dawn. But here she was, involved with a man who wanted to keep her at arm’s length even as his children wanted to embrace her. Even those who are blessed with much, as I understood it now, have their work cut out for them when forced to reorder it all in the middle of their lives.

  Even for Dawn, it wasn’t possible to carry on the way we all had in our youth, before marriages and families and mess intervened. Remaking a family, as opposed to making a family, was a much taller order than finding some great guy when both of you are young and unattached, marrying him, and letting the dice roll. I took a hard look at Dawn. Like the lotus blossom paintings, she might have been showy, but she wasn’t just for show. She had deep roots. She had a striving spirit. And her way forward right now was a murky one. I could only hope that the goddess Diana was out there somewhere, poised to guide her.

  LESLEY CHANGED THE SUBJECT back to art. Her favorite piece, in fact, had been Diana, who offered direction to those in need of it.

  Dawn, of course, was drawn to the lotus paintings. “But tonight I noticed The Three Graces more,” she said, brighter, “for what they stand for.” She looked at each of us in turn around the table. “I always tend to look at life in the way of grace. I’ve had so much of it.”

  The waiter brought Dawn a bowl of ice cream and a spoon. She was the only one who’d ordered dessert.

  We set off through the largely empty museum, wandering unseeing past more great works, having had our fill. Lesley changed the subject again. “We have to do something about a name,” she said. “People ask me what I’m doing, and I have to say I’m going out with my widows’ group. I can’t do it.”

  “I was thinking of one—the Diana group,” said Tara. “But it sounds like a reference to the Princess of Wales.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Marcia.

  “So what about the Lotus Blossoms?” Tara said.

  “Oh no, please,” I said. “People who don’t know our story will think we’re a bunch of little flowers—which we are an
ything but. They’ll think that we sit around talking about crystals and drinking herbal tea and channeling the positive energy in potted plants.”

  “Who cares what they think?” Tara elbowed me aside. “We’re blossoms. We’re blossoming.” Dawn beamed her approval.

  “And we’ve all been in murky waters, haven’t we?” Lesley added.

  I opened my mouth to object, but too late. The others had settled it between them. They were calling themselves the Blossoms now, ambling arm-in-arm, exchanging hugs, sharing conspiratorial whispers, making plans to keep in touch until the next gathering. We passed The Three Graces again, and I lingered, alone, delighting in the similarity between that friendly tableau, the way hands fell softly on shoulders of ancient marble, and the women embracing ahead of me. What about The Graces, I thought, The Six Graces? That’s a name I could live with. Beauty, mirth, and abundance times two.

  But the others had moved on without me. And that was it, the moment when I realized that this group was no longer my group, that it didn’t matter anymore what I wanted to call it, even what I wanted to do with it. I held my tongue. What do you call six widows with nothing more to lose? Anything they want, I thought, anything they want.

  chapter

  THIRTEEN

  a month later, I found myself slathered in some kind of celestial ooze, bound in a full-body straitjacket, unable to free my hands to lob a votive candle at loudspeakers that were playing a pan pipe loop of the Titanic theme that would lodge in my head for the next six days. Yes, I had succumbed to a weekend at a spa, a place in the mountains of Pennsylvania where Dawn had met the spa guy. No, a spa was not my sort of thing. Why did I do it? Because the ladies in my group—don’t make me call them Blossoms—wanted us to go.

  I could hardly object, because I had been belaboring one of the primary purposes of our group, which was to engage in new experiences together, emphasis on new. This one would qualify for me, and I hoped my willingness to compromise would set an example and help avert a crisis. Ever since our first meeting, I’d been lobbying for us to plan a far-flung trip at the end of the year. I was holding out for a wild adventure, something that would challenge us and take us where we’d never thought of going. Others were resisting or pushing destinations that were predictable and sedate. Marcia, ever the lawyer, insisted we wouldn’t leave the spa until we hammered out an agreement. This had the potential to turn boisterous, even contentious, disrupting the high-minded, vaguely Zen calm of our weekend retreat. I’d let the spa attendants baste me in butter sauce and sauté me if it would help avert a showdown.