by Becky Aikman
Marcia became positively talkative. During her marriage, she said, she had become set in her ways. “You develop a lifestyle, perspectives, likes and dislikes. I got into a pattern. When everything got pulled out from under me, I thought, here’s an opportunity to change some things.”
In her wildest dreams, I doubt Marcia would have chosen to spend a couple of hours in this saucy shop. All her life, she said, people were drawn to her for her personality and intelligence, certainly not her bona fides as a girly-girl. It was hard to envision young Marcia at a slumber party, mooning over David Cassidy and the latest colors of lip gloss. “The girly-girls weren’t the ones I was friends with. But this group is giving me another dimension.”
Marcia had another motivation as well. A new boss had entered her workplace, a woman, a very capable one, for the first time ever. She was assigning Marcia more responsibility, giving a reason unheard of when Marcia got her start: to offer the female perspective. It was a tidal change in an office where Marcia’s ability to talk sports with the guys had always been an asset. “I can start to show more femininity.”
She gave a crisp nod around the store. “It’s easy to re-evaluate with this group. They’re not like anybody I’ve ever been friends with before, but they’re very accepting and open. Otherwise, you get stuck, and your life continues just as before, only without your spouse instead of with him.”
She was right. So much had changed for me since Bernie’s death, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still shake myself up. I asked our guide, Maria, to strip the mannequin of the one item in the store that was least likely to be worn by somebody like me. It was a corsetlike novelty straight out of a Feydeau farce, with a tiny skirt attached, barely enough to cover le derrière. The Aphrodite Skirted Bustier, according to the tag. It took some advanced work in spatial relations, but I tucked myself into it, hoisted everything into place, and stepped out to applause and wolf whistles. Then I took a good long look in the mirror. I will be honest: I thought I looked ridiculous. I also thought I looked great.
And not just because my friends said so. Although that helped. I had gained back the weight I lost when Bernie died, but I still had a pert little waist, a nice curvy tush. Not much going on up top, but not sagging up there, either. No way was I going to buy the Aphrodite Bustier, but it had done its work.
Then I took a good long look at my crazy, carefree companions, passing around their selections while making final choices. None of them were kids anymore, but they still looked smokin’. Lesley chose a black mesh negligee with peekaboo bubbles all over it; Dawn an abundance of flamboyant feminine froth; Tara a sultry, sophisticated masterpiece of simplicity. Marcia kept her choices pretty much to herself. Denise, well, Denise didn’t need enhancement. These women were supple, fit, healthy, and in the prime of their lives.
Lesley might say, “Try having sex with someone new, thirty years or twenty years or even one year after someone else.” But, take it from me, this crowd had the figures for it.
Walking into the store that day, I had assumed I knew the underlying reason why a bunch of widows would band together to try on underwear. They were uncomfortable with their bodies, I presumed. They needed reassurance that they still had the requisite allure. Women are always hearing about how insecure they are supposed to feel about their physiques, and I had bought into the line. In fact, everyone looked fabulous, better than most men our ages. I didn’t know what the others were thinking, but if anyone was concerned about body issues, she shouldn’t be. No, I thought, it wasn’t our bodies we were most concerned about. The insecurity was over what to do with them.
We had spent a morning of intimacy with trusted friends. But if anyone wanted sex, and it seemed most everyone did, she would have to plunge into the unknown, the emotional unknown. It would take more than some sassy posturing in a negligee to make the leap.
chapter
NINETEEN
here we were, twenty-first-century women with healthy libidos and post-sexual-revolution attitudes. Yet when some of us started seeing men, we conducted chaste, old-fashioned courtships. If you caught sight of me or Tara out to dinner on a first date, you’d think you were witnessing the comeback of Doris Day, any suggestion of sex more forbidden than deep-fried carbs. I invariably deployed the frumpiest of outfits, right down to underpinnings that would be perfectly appropriate in the presence of Dr. Vogel, my dermatologist. My attire was armor against the intimacy I feared. What exactly were we afraid of?
“You worry about what you’re going to look like naked,” Lesley announced. We were seated at brunch, bags of new va-va-voom lingerie tucked safely beneath the seats. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but there were hearty nods all around. Lesley looked perfectly shapely to me, yet all she could think about was how much thinner she had been when she met Kevin, her husband, at seventeen.
“You know, it’s not true that only size-two women get laid,” I argued. “Men past a certain age don’t look perfect either. And most of them have lost a fair amount of their near vision anyway. Give them naked, and they’re happy. That can’t be all that bothered you.”
Lesley considered the question again. Now that she had five months of living with Craig under her belt, she felt more responsible than ever for guiding the others through tricky terrain. Sex with a relative stranger was a conundrum that called for her expertise, and she took it seriously. “You’re right,” she said. “You also think, ‘Am I going to be able to separate myself from my husband?’ How can you close off that part of your mind?” The rest of us leaned in. “Sex has many different meanings to people. I was so young when I met Kevin, I never had a lot of casual sex. I need to be committed in a certain way emotionally. It doesn’t have to mean I’m in love, but it might have to be heading in that direction.”
Everyone listened intently, each with her own perspective. Denise and Marcia, who had yet to meet the right man. Tara, who might have just met him and had to decide how far to take him. Dawn, who had met someone but couldn’t seem to make it work. And, of course, me. I remembered all too well my struggles over how deeply to engage myself in the messiness of recoupling.
Tara agreed with Lesley. “For me,” she said, “it’s not enough to have a physical attraction. I’d have to have a mental and emotional attraction.”
“That’s the way I felt,” I said. “I had no moral objection to casual sex. But when I was married to Bernie, I was making love with the man who was my closest friend, my most intimate confidant. Sex and comfort went together. Believe me, I had the urge for sex after he died, but the idea of a one-night stand was just too depressing. I’d had the whole package, and I wanted it again.”
“And there’s also the fear—am I picking the wrong guy?” Dawn added. “There’s this danger that you might latch onto somebody because you think you may never find anybody else.”
I could feel the anxiety ratcheting up. Everybody started reaching for Lesley’s side dish of fries. She pushed it to the center of the table.
“I tore an article out of the newspaper about a scientific study,” I said. “They put a woman in an MRI machine and gave her little electric shocks. They could see parts of her brain light up with anxiety. Then they asked the woman’s husband to hold her hand, and they could see the anxiety go down. When a stranger held the hand, it didn’t have the same effect. There’s something about affection from someone you trust—it’s soothing.”
“After Martin died,” said Marcia, “someone asked me if I relied on my husband. Did I depend on him? At first I thought no, because I’m very independent. But when I stopped and thought about it, I realized how much I leaned on him. It was emotional. I trusted him completely. I could say anything to him. He had my best interests at heart.”
“He had your back,” said Lesley.
That was it. No one wanted to get on her back with somebody who didn’t have her back.
Lesley, we knew, had met Craig on Match.com. On a number of dates, they laughed themselves silly, conducte
d some serious talks about their families, and gingerly held hands, but it took a while for them to get seriously physical. “You feel guilt,” she said, “not about sex itself, but about allowing yourself pleasure with someone else. Because you still essentially feel married. You’re thinking, I’m about to make love to a man who is not my husband. What am I doing?”
Not to mention the practical issue: does my body still work? Everyone in our group had gone through a long hiatus, and everyone had heard the admonition: use it or lose it. We shifted uncomfortably. Lesley said she had been worried, too. She had felt no sexual desire for almost two years. “I was dead inside. My daughter offered to buy me a vibrator. I didn’t even have the desire for that.”
It wasn’t only sex. Lesley had stopped doing everything she’d loved when Kevin was alive—gardening, listening to music, taking walks, cooking. She couldn’t bear to enjoy any of it without him. It was only after she began to find pleasure again in everything else that the desire to make love reasserted itself.
Lesley painstakingly planned her first sleepover with Craig. “I tell you, the first time I thought I was going to get naked in front of somebody else, I thought it would be devastating,” she said. A friend took her to buy new lingerie, and she was so addled that she didn’t realize until she saw the bill that she had paid fifty dollars for one pair of little black panties. She had a daughter living at home during a break from college, and Craig had his son, so they booked a hotel room. It was the night of her oldest daughter’s engagement party, and the panties showed through her dress, so Lesley switched to something else and threw the panties in her purse. She also made sure to have a drink to calm her nerves. “I was still carrying too much weight,” she said.
“Now we know how you lost it,” interjected Dawn.
“When it was time to get busy,” Lesley said, she changed in the bathroom and came out holding the fifty-dollar underpants in front of her chest, breaking the tension with a laugh. “I told him I spent fifty dollars for these, so he’d better appreciate them. So that’s how I spent fifty dollars for panties I never wore. Worth every penny.”
As it turned out, Lesley needn’t have worried. Emotions counted for more than physical perfection. “You know, you think, next time around I’m going to get the hottest guy. He’s going to have a twenty-four-pack, never mind a six-pack. But Craig’s got this little tummy. He needs to lose some weight, but when you meet a person and you fall for him, none of that matters.”
“All those details, all those lists you make go out the window,” Dawn said.
“The companionship,” Lesley said, “just sharing your life with someone—you thought you’d never feel it again. It’s something to be grateful for.”
Even so, it took courage. Perhaps that was hard for anyone to understand outside our circle, but we recognized that Lesley had taken a risk, a risk with her heart. Our hearts were like eggshells. Lesley had removed hers from lockdown, and we respected her for that. We wondered how she’d found the nerve.
She answered us without having to think, echoing something she’d said the first time we met. “Because the thing that I was most afraid of had already happened.”
KNOWING LESLEY SOONER after Bernie died would have given me a much-needed shot of courage. And to think I had nearly excluded her from our group. I’d been talking to a woman who ran an adventure travel company, and she suggested I meet Lesley, everyone’s favorite traveling companion on a trip to India the year before. I agreed to see her mostly to be polite. Lesley had already been widowed nearly two and a half years, longer than anyone else who was joining me. She was already dating Craig, whereas none of the others were seeing anyone then. And she was so randy and resolutely cheerful that I couldn’t imagine what she had to gain by dredging up issues of grieving that she would probably rather forget. Yet once I heard her story over lunch at a restaurant near her home, I realized how much the rest of us could learn from Lesley about tenacity and resilience, even as she kept us in stitches.
Kevin’s death hadn’t been her only misfortune. Back in South Africa, she grew up in a tumultuous household. “My father beat the crap out of my mother,” she said with the resignation of long forbearance. He left the family when Lesley was eighteen, and it was a relief, but her mother contracted ovarian cancer five years later, and Lesley watched her die over the course of a year. She still had her brother, who was fourteen months older. Everyone loved and admired him, but no one took the diminutive Lesley seriously or thought she would become successful, and she pretty much believed them. After high school, she found work as a secretary.
“People would ask me how I did it,” she said, speaking of the loss of both her parents. “What was the choice?”
When she was seventeen, a friend fixed her up with a twenty-two-year-old guy who needed a date for a wedding while his steady girlfriend was out of town. When he turned a corner to meet Lesley, all she could say was, “Okay, this is cool.” Kevin was breathtaking, absurdly handsome, tall, dark, with a forthright jaw and level eyes. They had such a good time that she was sure after one evening that she wanted to marry him. First she had to persuade him to drop the girlfriend, a quiet fellow student at his law school, a polar opposite from the boisterous, less-educated Lesley.
The tall lawyer and the pixie-sized dynamo married three years later, when Lesley was twenty, and they had three daughters while he launched a career in securities trading. Then tragedy found her again. Lesley’s brother was killed in a car crash when she was twenty-eight. Kevin spared her by identifying the body—she could depend on him that way. All of her original family gone, she devoted herself to her children and her traditional marriage. Her job was to run the household and orchestrate a busy social life, while Kevin was the breadwinner and a weekend athlete who cycled, climbed mountains, and rowed for a national team. Lesley had to cut more roots when they left South Africa and moved to the United States for Kevin to set up an office. Lonely and friendless, only thirty years old, she gradually adjusted.
“We became even closer here in the States,” she said. “We had just each other and our kids. We were great friends, and we had great passion. I swear I became crazier about my husband as we got older.”
The last person anyone would expect to take his own life, Kevin was successful, active, a rock for his family. Lesley thought something must have gone amiss in his brain chemistry around the time he turned fifty and she forty-five. He couldn’t sleep. He quit his job without discussing it with her first. He lost twenty pounds. “Suddenly, he dwindled away, and I had to keep it together, which was so different. I’d always been the precious one, you see. I didn’t even know how to pay a bill online.” Lesley discovered him organizing matters of family business, laying it all out clearly.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.
“You never know,” he said. “I’m under a lot of stress. I could have a heart attack.”
On the September morning when he killed himself, the house was quiet. Their youngest had only recently started her freshman year away at college. Kevin knew Lesley was leaving for her facial appointment, and he put in his request for her to pick up a sandwich. Right before she left, she was standing at the top of the stairs, and he said, “Do you want to come down for a little bit and talk to me?”
“I’m running late,” she said. “We’ll talk when I get back.”
Lesley always kissed Kevin good-bye, and he would make fun of her for it, but she explained by saying, “You never know. I could get knocked over by a bus.” That morning, in her hurry, she forgot the kiss. When she arrived home, she passed his study, a dark-paneled room lined with photos of Kevin scaling mountains and winning races. He wasn’t there, but she spotted his wristwatch, which he never removed, propped on the desk. There was something about the way it rested there that made Lesley think something horrible had occurred. She ran to the basement and found him, his pulse still faint.
Lesley didn’t reveal how Kevin killed himself, and I didn’t ask.
My research experts had told me it was best not to force painful disclosures. Why prod Lesley to summon the most horrific memory of her life? I found it interesting that later, when our group first convened, instinctively, no one else asked her, either. A sign—Do Not Go There—was plain for all to see. All Lesley told me the first time I met her was that he chose a method that wasn’t violent, knowing she would be the one to find him.
She tried mouth to mouth and called an ambulance, but he couldn’t be saved. In a three-page note, he said he loved Lesley unconditionally, and he said he would like her to marry again one day. That was a kindness.
Eventually, the note helped her to understand. For the longest time, she wondered, “Was I not enough for him?” It wasn’t possible, at first, to grasp his emotional torment. “Mental illness can be as serious as cancer,” Lesley said. Over time, she and her daughters involved themselves in a suicide awareness organization, but that was a long way off. In the early days, they alternated between shock, numbness, and unimaginable despair.
“I felt a pain in my heart, like someone had stuck a knife in there and twisted it,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t get through another day.’ ”
Lesley had never thought of herself as smart or accomplished outside her realm at home. Now she would have to manage everything Kevin had overseen as a matter of course. She had to attend meetings at his firm to negotiate the sale of his shares in the company. “People offered to handle things for me, but I didn’t want to be a little old lady who doesn’t know what’s cooking. I went to every meeting and pretended I knew what they were talking about. I read Suze Orman books so I’d have buzzwords to throw around.”
But otherwise, she sank into an utter funk. “I felt that if a day went by without me crying, I was disappointing him.” She took pills to sleep. She was haunted by the vision of how she’d found him, afraid to close her eyes for fear of seeing it again. For months, she wore the same pair of brown Bermuda shorts with a brown-and-white top until her daughters threw them away. She heard them talking about her. “She didn’t comb her hair today.”