Saturday Night Widows

by Becky Aikman

  All of us confessed that we had saved some odd piece of well-worn leisure wear, still infused with memories of touch and smell. Tara had given away David’s good suits, and now everything left of value was here behind the furnace, an ignominious location, I suppose. But that’s what happens with the stuff of the missing. What else would we do with it—put it on some kind of permanent museum display, a diorama of the useless?

  Getting rid of the husband’s things—all of us had pushed ourselves through the onerous task, Denise with the help of friends in the first month, Marcia over several months with her nephews. Dawn pointed out that Adam still hadn’t faced up to the disposal of his wife’s possessions, after years. “I think it’s a classic case of not dealing with your past, not dealing with your loss—not dealing!”

  “It’s a matter of forcing yourself,” I said. People tend to think of transformation as organic, I thought: baby birds flex their wings and leave the nest; caterpillars transfigure into butterflies; plant shoots unfurl from tiny seeds; maple leaves wither and fall. In the natural world, reinvention may be driven by the tides or the seasons. But for women in our position, rethinking our way of living, the process was more deliberate, a series of hard choices—what to leave behind, what to keep. That included possessions, of course, but also all that they represented: patterns, habits, actions, traits of personality.

  Sometimes those decisions felt brutal. Upstairs, we had seen Tara’s ornate Scottish sideboard, the first antique she ever bought, a beautiful piece and loaded with memories. Now it wore an ignoble sell sticker: it wouldn’t suit the new house. I thought about photographs of homes in magazines, where rooms are edited of any objects that don’t fit the scheme. The owners must possess a savage lack of sentiment in order to create a space that looks forward rather than back. Here in the flux of Tara’s place, we saw the process in action. She was trying to balance sentiment and brutality to bring about the transformation she sought. It took the cool resolve of a sniper.

  Pulling her aside, I asked if she had any final words of advice.

  She performed one of her trademark theatrical pauses and said, “Let’s go to the beach.”

  We followed her back upstairs, but there it was again, the unmarked cardboard box, the one decision yet unmade. Tara regarded it as if it were the coyote.

  “Yesterday, I was up in the attic,” she said, “and I found this.”

  We stood still for a moment, staring down the box. It held its ground, like a live thing. For the first time that day, Tara became a bit overcome.

  “What is it?” asked Denise, voice lowered to a reverent hush.

  Tara looked at her hard, and then spoke in her slowest, clearest voice. “My … wedding dress. I didn’t open it.”

  We circled the box, according it a respectful distance.

  “What will you do with it?” I wondered.

  Tara didn’t answer. She looked at me through pooling eyes that signaled this decision was beyond her. In a houseful of memories, here was a package too sensitive to open.

  chapter

  TWENTY-TWO

  tara and David had been the golden couple. Everyone said so. She was a prize catch, a college student, a classic beauty with a Garbo voice, when they met on a blind date. He was a find himself, handsome, whip-smart, halfway through an MBA at Harvard. I heard the whole saga the first time Tara and I met, over lunch in her family room, more somber back then, before the makeover. A real estate agent had told me about a young widow who was house-hunting, and Tara agreed to speak with some reluctance.

  She seemed tense and listless eight months after David’s death, engaged in a standoff with gloom and unsure what to do with herself. “I’m putting one foot in front of the other,” she said, rebuffing me at first. “I don’t need anything else in my life right now.” Nevertheless, she had pulled herself together in jeans and a twinset, black cashmere of course, and served a ladies’ lunch—zucchini bisque, chicken panini with pesto and red peppers, and a chocolate brownie.

  Tara and David had it all before it went wrong. She was a bit of a bohemian who loved to dance and write, a senior at a women’s college that emphasized the arts, the daughter of a civil engineer. David was more conventional, old-school, with courtly manners and a penchant for business. “It wasn’t love on the first date,” she admitted. “He was buttoned up and well dressed, and I was into self-expression and … a bit dramatic.”

  After she graduated, Tara took an advertising job in New York, and David had a summer internship at an investment firm. They continued to date long-distance during his last year at school.

  It was a heady time for Tara. She felt lucky to land a spot on Madison Avenue in its heyday, when the ads were well written and the art direction flawless. It was glamorous, fizzy fun, and Tara looked the part, thanks to a sister in the fashion business who outfitted her in free-spirited samples at wholesale prices from Giorgio Sant’Angelo and Calvin Klein. Tara had taste even then. Money was always short, so the sisters shared a closet-size Upper East Side apartment that they carved up with room dividers.

  When David graduated and started full-time at his firm, marriage followed, when he was twenty-seven and she twenty-four. They squeezed into a charmless one-bedroom walk-up awkwardly split between two floors. He jokingly called it “a top-floor duplex penthouse.” They had no furniture to speak of, just a table from her mother and a chest of drawers from his. “It was our first place, and the happiest,” Tara recalled. “Really happy times.”

  She gladly followed him to London when his employer asked him to relocate. “I looked forward to the adventure of living somewhere else,” she said. When the firm offered a shipping container for their things, they had to laugh. The entire household fit into a few suitcases.

  Tara discovered soon enough that women execs were scarce in British advertising. Finding a spot comparable to the one she’d held in New York was next to impossible. In the meantime, she proceeded to walk everywhere in the city and snag cheap flights all over Europe, often meeting David on his business trips. Eventually, she landed a job. She wrote the agency’s maternity leave policy when she had her first child, and the golden couple continued to shine. “My God, David was so handsome,” she said. “So stunning and elegant in his suits. We had … so much fun. I threw wonderful dinners with his mover-and-shaker friends and my creative friends.” Tara rose through the ranks to become the agency’s first female head of new business and board director.

  When they moved back to New York after nine years, they bought the house. He launched his own firm while she headed a foundation that awarded grants to college students. Throughout it all, working and raising two daughters, Tara clung to her bohemian identity. When she met me at the train, I grinned at the big green peace symbol on the side of her car.

  About five years before he died, David began to withdraw from family and friends. Tara knew that he was under unspoken strain from work and the death of his mother, but she also recognized a snowballing depression, and soon she noticed that he began to drink more frequently and furtively. “Substances became a way to dull the sadness,” she said. “It was a slow, insidious change.”

  Over the next four years, the drinking surged out of control, and Tara struggled to protect her family from the toxic fallout. One daughter had left for college when the troubles began, but the other was still finishing high school. Life at home became unmanageable. “We sought help from treatment programs, therapists, doctors … with little success,” Tara said. Prescription drugs only magnified the effects of alcohol.

  David was fifty-six when his heart failed; Tara was fifty-three. She grieved for what could have been, a golden existence squandered, and for her daughters, suddenly fatherless as they entered young adulthood. Tara, alone among our group, had watched her marriage dissolve during the course of her husband’s illness. Any grief is layered with regrets, remorse, and contradictions, I thought, Tara’s possibly more than most.

  She was in a tight, dark spot when we first me
t, out of place in her home, out of place in her town, out of place in her social circle, where nuclear families prevailed. More than once, at the hair salon on a Saturday afternoon, someone would ask, “Are you going to so-and-so’s tonight?” Tara would have to explain that she hadn’t been invited. Even at the first meeting of our group, Tara told me afterward, she worried that the others wouldn’t think her worthy to join because of the divorce proceedings. “I loved David as much as the others loved their husbands,” she said. “I just lost him sooner than death took him.”

  In some ways, Tara seemed to be the saddest one at the outset of our group. Over time, however, I saw that she possessed a flexibility, a willingness to make the hard choices it takes to start over, and the backbone to call in a sharpshooter if necessary. By the time our group met at her house, she had succeeded in finding new work doing voice-overs, a new man, and a breezy new house near the sea where she could breathe. I recalled, from our first meeting, how she said, “You can’t go backward. You’re never going to have what you had. You need to create your own life.” Now, somehow, she was pulling it off.

  Tara didn’t look that day like someone who had spent the last several years in chaos, with the chaos of the move still to come. She looked impossibly assured. She had a color-coded system for it all; she had control. For the first time since—when? her youth?—she alone was in charge. She alone—the casual one, the one who had fulfilled her formal obligations and could live now as she pleased.

  At the beach a mile away, we changed into swimsuits—bright bikinis for Dawn, Denise, and me; a sturdy black one-piece for Marcia, and a more modish one for Tara, with black net edging that resembled chiffon, the nylon-Lycra equivalent of black cashmere. We ate lunch on a shaded deck overlooking Long Island Sound. Will joined us after a quick swim and submitted to questions about his family. He had introduced his seven-year-old daughter to Tara the week before.

  “She’s a little sweetheart,” Tara said, smitten.

  Later, after Will wandered back to the beach, Tara got a chance to dish about him. “In some ways, he’s more like me than David was,” she said. “He’s scrappy, a free spirit.” We the jury murmured our approval. “I was dubious that something like this could even exist. If I had written the script myself, I’d have thought, well … maybe after I get settled in my new house … maybe I could go back to the kind of work I used to do, put my heart and soul into it. After all that, I thought, maybe it would be nice, if it exists at all, to find … this kind of relationship. And maybe I never would. The funny thing is, this started the weekend we were all at the spa, when I least expected it.”

  After lunch, Dawn napped on the beach while the rest of us talked and read. Distracted, I swam a few laps in a pool that overlooked the sound. When I came up for air, I saw an affectionate tableau: Tara and Will leaning against the railing, looking out to sea, their arms around each other, wrapped in matching red-and-white striped towels. They looked just like a couple to me. How quickly that had happened. Problem solved.

  Then I checked myself. I remembered how irritated I got when people assured me that finding Mr. Right would put a happy cap on my own story of widowhood, as if that alone would erase all that had happened before. The ol’ man trap: thinking a man was a cure-all. Will alone wasn’t making Tara happy, I was certain. He was a reward she’d earned for making herself happy.

  Anyway, I knew from experience that there were any number of trip wires not visible in that tableau—children, geography, stubborn patterns of behavior developed over decades of adulthood. Not to cast doubts on their prospects, but blending two lives at our age was a project to rival the subprime mortgage bailout. I knew that it took more to seal a midlife romance than a kiss and a set of matching towels. Or a kiss and a plate of risotto, for that matter.

  chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  a truly exceptional cook, Bob fed me the scallop risotto the night he invited me to his house, the first of many delights over the next few months. He fed me his signature pasta bolognese. He fed me butterflied leg of lamb stuffed with olives and rosemary that he rolled and hogtied like a rodeo star. He fed me chocolate chip cookies with a double dose of chips. He pulled off showstopping feats in the kitchen, his and mine, and I ate like a starving person. I had dreaded the thought of anyone needing me again. It had never occurred to me that someone might feed me rather than need me, and that he’d take such pleasure in it himself.

  Bob stirred other appetites in me, of course, deep, nearly forgotten cravings, long suppressed and ready to ripen. Later, he liked to kid me about my hopeless effort to sleep in the wee hours of that first night. He’d glance over and see my eyes fixed on the ceiling with a zombie stare. I’m no prude, but the realization that I was lying there next to a man who wasn’t my husband was too freaky to allow me rest. Besides, I think sleep implied a level of surrender I wasn’t yet ready to embrace. But the other embraces that night were remarkably easy, and I’m not an easy girl, as you know.

  After I formed my group of widows, we often found ourselves talking about how, once we took the plunge, we felt scandalously free about our sexuality. There was something about being wounded … it had made us vulnerable, but it was profoundly freeing, too. Having lived through the worst, we found it was hard to take mere inhibitions and insecurities seriously. Having been without pleasure, we reveled in it now. The sex, it turned out, was even better than the food.

  Bob and I zipped past all the other milestones of a new relationship. I learned that, left unchecked, he’d slather piri-piri sauce on just about anything. He learned that I read the Sunday Styles section first. I discovered that six in the morning was doggy wake-up time, when persistent white paws tugged at any blankets trailing off the bed. Bob learned that I got my best ideas in the shower. I met his parents; he met my mom. “I guess this makes you the official boyfriend now,” I said. We were the talk of gatherings where we got to know each other’s friends. Everyone who’d seen me through the last few years of pitiful circumstances was thrilled for me now, as if I were one of those Hollywood stars up for an Oscar after a spell in rehab.

  We established a staccato existence. Since Bob’s daughter, Lily, stayed with him half the time, I’d see him alternate weeks. During off weeks, I had my autonomy and my social life with my friends. The perfect setup—my previous full plate, with a satisfying dollop of love, in handy portion-controlled servings. Aside from the sensation of defenses falling (maybe crashing?), something felt extraordinarily right.

  After a couple months of this, it was time to meet Lily. Call me naive, call me inexperienced with children, but I expected this passage to be as easy as all the others with Bob. I’d never had children, to my regret, and as a result, they seemed a bit alien to me, but manageable, kind of like Wink. When the dog first graced my apartment with his presence, I repeatedly started at sudden encounters with a wild animal as he brazenly made himself at home around the place, but I soon learned to regard myself as his humble servant, fixing his dinner or scratching his ears on request. Besides, he was Bob’s responsibility, not mine. So was Lily. By the only account that mattered—Bob’s—she was a father’s dream: sweet, loving, never a spot of worry to her dad.

  Bob invited me to dinner in Connecticut one night when Lily was there. An inveterate researcher, I had studied up on this—in contrast to younger children, teenagers were the most averse to new love interests of their parents. Lily had just turned fourteen. Atoms were about to collide.

  Petite, with luxurious dark hair, Lily was a perfect lady that evening, polite and agreeable, displaying a zany sense of humor. I was utterly charmed. The three of us were in stitches through much of the meal. She tactfully didn’t say a word when Bob nervously overcooked the steak, and after I left, chastely, on a late-night train, she gave him a thumbs-up on his choice of me. This was too easy! But over the next weeks and months, when I showed up for a weekend, I never knew which version of Lily would meet me there. Sometimes we’d review geometry homework or p
lay a lightning round of Monopoly; other times that quaint little house felt like a particle accelerator for all the moody collisions going on. There were entire weekends when Lily wouldn’t look at me and referred to me only when necessary as “She” and “Her,” as in, “When is She going to leave?” or “Are we eating dinner with Her?” Bob and I were careful not to show affection in front of her, but still she wedged herself between us when the three of us walked anywhere and plunked down in the middle if we nestled on the couch. When we went to a restaurant or a movie, she sat as far from me as if I were the source of West Nile virus.

  I couldn’t blame her. She had witnessed the disintegration of her family in a divorce, and any change in the dynamics with her dad now would likely set off new distress. She felt threatened, of course. What if her dad ran off to New York with this vixen; what would become of her? I knew Bob’s devotion was too fierce to allow for that, but divorced parents do such things, everyone knows. I found her mood swings poignant. I was the adult here; I understood what was going on; and she was, after all, Bob’s responsibility, not mine.

  At the same time, where did that leave me? Genuinely intimidated by a ninety-pound schoolgirl. It was possible that I had come this far in a quest for love only to fall short because I couldn’t finesse somebody who still watched cartoons in happy-face pajamas. I was the adult here, but the adult wasn’t in control.

  Once Bob tried to discuss the situation with Lily when I wasn’t around. “Someday you will grow up and have your own life, and I’ll be here by myself,” he said. “Do you want me to be alone for the rest of my life?”

  “Yes.”

  Bob wasn’t easily deterred. He asked me to join him for a five-day getaway to Paris eight months after we met. Paris had been one of those zingers, a place where Bernie and I had enjoyed such dreamy escapes that I hadn’t been able to consider returning without him. On the first afternoon there with Bob, we shook off jet lag to stroll arm-in-arm across the Pont des Arts, our tummies filled with buttery croques monsieurs. It was a warm June day, and sun sparkled off the fast-rushing waters of the Seine below and the limestone edifice of the Louvre across the way. I leaned close to him and breathed in my incredible good luck. I could have lived out my remaining decades alone, a proper widow nursing memories of love until my fading years, but this marvelous man had somehow appeared and opened my heart again. I had defied expectations, my own and everyone else’s. I had pulled myself up from the depths of grief, surrounded myself with caring friends, continued my work—not ideal work, mind you, but a paying job at a newspaper when such a thing was hard to come by—and I had held out for a man who made me truly happy. Now I was in Paris again.