by Becky Aikman
I gave an approving once-over to Bob, who was taking in the Parisian spectacle with similar contentment. He returned my admiring gaze, and his expression shifted. It was the skittish look again, the one I hadn’t seen since our first days together, but there was tenderness as well.
“Get a look at this view,” he said. “I’m inspired.” He draped an arm across my shoulders as we turned upriver toward Notre Dame and the Île Saint-Louis, and he spoke into my ear. “What do you think about getting married?”
That’s what he said—What do you think about getting married?—but it sounded more like static until the words reconfigured in my mind as I turned to see that he’d meant them. Still, I didn’t respond, and I could tell it unnerved him.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
It was everything I’d hoped for, everything I feared. I struggled to compose an answer.
“I don’t see how we can,” I finally said. “Where would we live?”
“We’ll figure it out.” He was incorrigible—that temperament again. It fell to me to be the cautious one. Where to start?
“You can’t move out of Connecticut,” I began gently. “I know you wouldn’t leave Lily—I wouldn’t love you if you could. But I don’t want to leave New York, for all kinds of reasons. I couldn’t get to my job from Connecticut, for one. And I don’t want to live in Connecticut. My life is elsewhere.” A rush of feeling pulled me toward the dream of permanence that marriage would provide, but an opposing current spun me another way. If I’d gained any wisdom from the last few years, it was that friends and work and autonomy mattered, too. I’d be sacrificing all that if I uprooted myself for him, but it made me heartsick to not say yes, a blind, unthinking yes, the way they do in the movies.
“We’ll figure it out,” Bob urged, maddeningly, again. For the rest of our stay, Paris served as the backdrop of an ongoing game of Rubik’s cube, as we puzzled for a configuration that allowed all the pieces to fit, but they never did. We weighed the possibility of Bob moving to the city, where Lily could visit on weekends and holidays.
“That won’t work. We have to be realistic,” I said in despair. “She’s a teenager, and she’ll want to spend weekends with her friends. I hate to say it, but we can’t get married, we can’t even live together. You really have to stay put until Lily is finished with school. She has to come first.”
Where did that come from? This was a curious twist—Lily had become my responsibility, too. And what was best for her, I knew, was for me and her father to live apart, to remain single, to continue our herky-jerky back-and-forth. It wasn’t the full enchilada, but it would have to be enough for me, and I hoped it would be enough for Bob.
DAWN’S CHILDREN had a blast at a camp for kids who’d experienced the death of someone close, a bit like our adult group without the lingerie and champagne. On a bright, clear August Saturday, we volunteered to work there behind the scenes. While the Blossoms, as even I was beginning to call us, set out glue, glitter, and crepe paper for arts and crafts in the dining hall, we didn’t have much chance to catch up with each other, but that no longer mattered. By now, we stayed in touch between meetings, as friends do, and that month there was much to tell.
Tara had updated me on her last moments in the old house when we met for lunch a week after she left it. Once the movers hoisted everything out, Tara, all alone, had picked her way through the detritus left behind—broken reading glasses, shoes without mates, coffee-stained napkins scrunched up by customers of the furniture sale. “Nothing was left in that house but dirt and crap,” she said. She herself was filthy as a chimneysweep, crud encrusted under her nails, her white linen pants imprinted with grime. She wished she could collapse in the shower, but there wasn’t a single towel in the house.
She gulped. What now? Two boxes stranded on the floor of the family room, boxes she didn’t recognize, somehow left without color codes. Fuck. She tentatively peeked inside. Gingerly opening folders with dirty fingers, she saw files she had forgotten to categorize, letters the girls had sent to their father from summer camp. Any nuclear family would have chucked them right out. But to Tara they were evidence of normalcy, before everything split apart. Her daughters would need this stuff, she thought, something to cherish.
Tara crumpled onto the dirty floor, done in. Her attention drifted outside, to her once-beautiful lawn, crisped brown by the dull July heat. She flashed on the Easter egg hunts she and David had staged for the girls when the lawn was lush, green, and edged with flowers. It slowly registered that she was sobbing, huge, full-throated sobs. Tears streamed down her dusty face from her eyes and her nose. “It was a big ugly cry,” she told me. She let it rip, sobbing for forty-five minutes without stopping. After weeks, months, of parceling out colored stickers and putting one broken-toed foot in front of the other, she let herself go. “It felt great,” she confided through a lopsided smile, “cleansing, cathartic.”
That night, bunking at a friend’s, she slept the deepest, longest sleep she’d had in years. For a few hours, for now, everything had found a place.
I MET MARCIA the evening after she closed on her new apartment. She turned the key and let us in to the empty, echoing living room, and there it was, the city twinkling at our feet through banks of windows, all the way down to Lower Manhattan and the harbor. If you squinted, you could see the Statue of Liberty. Not a bad reward for a lifetime of hard work. I startled Marcia with an impulsive squeeze. She edged away and cracked one of her twisting half smiles, hashing out where she would place the large-screen TV. Not an idle consideration—she was increasingly concerned about losing touch with her godsons, her husband’s nephews, and she hoped they’d join her for marathon sports blowouts. She had also snagged season tickets to the Giants, on the forty-five-yard line, with them in mind.
At work, Marcia was lapping up even more responsibility, thanks to the new female boss, who hoped to promote Marcia even higher. In her spare time she was reading a book called Taming Your Gremlin.
Informative? Yes, Marcia said in her flat, blunt voice. “I’m learning that people like people who are pleasant.”
FOR DENISE, the month of August solved the mystery of her husband’s sudden death. She’d waited an entire year for the results of the autopsy, her imagination conjuring ghastly possibilities the longer the determination was delayed. On the anniversary of the sorrowful day, she tromped down to the city department of health. She wanted an answer, damn it. Everyone seeking birth or death certificates crowded around her, clasping numbers like customers in a deli. After an hour, she was summoned to plead her case to a functionary behind a glass cage.
The woman heard her out, then turned on a microphone and blasted over a public address system: “Can the death unit come forward?”
More waiting, more paperwork, and an assurance: the certificate had been lost in the bureaucracy; it would arrive shortly in the mail. It did, with the simplest explanation. Steve had died of a heart attack. That was it. The final resolution of his fate, and the passage of the anniversary, lifted a cloud for Denise. Encouraged by the Blossoms, she went on her first date, a museum fix-up, another museum fix-up. It was a Volvo date, Denise said: steady, safe, reliable, but with no acceleration.
IT WAS JUST the right speed for a widow still on her learner’s permit. Dawn, on the other hand, was ready to turn in her license. For months now, she had been wrestling with the question of whether to settle. Settling—I’d often pondered it myself. Was it better to shack up with an acceptable guy, an OK Joe, rather than slog along alone? Ever since the night when our group went to the museum, Dawn had been telling us that Adam was what she called good on paper, a widower with two kids she had grown to love, who meshed with her two kids, a ready-made nuclear family. But Adam’s former wife still practically haunted the house, so filled was it with her belongings and his wistfulness for her.
“It could have been such a happy ending for two pretty crummy situations,” Dawn told me when I reached her on speakerphone as
she was driving home from work. “But everyone’s got to want the happy ending. I don’t think he does happy well. And I don’t do sad. So there we are.” She laughed, and I knew this was serious. Dawn always looked for the humor when things were at their worst. She and Adam had decided to split.
“I debated, is it worth it because it’s fun once in a while?” Her voice quivered. “But at a certain point it stopped being fun. His kids were getting closer to me. And I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. It just rips me apart.” She pulled to the side of the road to compose herself.
She expelled a blast of frustration a few seconds later. “I was stuck with a man who was stuck.” She couldn’t help contrasting him with the women in our group, all upbeat people, she felt, going through shattering times but determined to come out whole. “I’m not saying we don’t have our bad moments,” she said. “I have my moments, and they’re bad. But it’s not who we are at the core.”
“What about his children?” I asked. “Will you ever get to see them?”
“I don’t know.” The day after the breakup, Dawn kept a commitment to take his son with hers to a dinosaur exhibit in the city. “Stay close to me,” she told them on the street. “I don’t want to lose you guys.”
Adam’s boy looked up at her and said, “Dawn, how could we ever lose you? You’re a beacon of light.”
“I could have cried right there in the street,” Dawn told me. “How sweet is that, how painful is that?” She laughed again. It was her heartiest laugh, for when she hurt the most.
THE MORNING OF her daughter Lyndsey’s wedding, Lesley and her three girls wore Kevin’s old blue dress shirts to have their hair and makeup done, so he’d be with them in some way. Later, at the ceremony, there would be a big mashup. Craig and his three boys would attend, their first encounter with a lifetime’s worth of friends and relatives. The pressure was on the mother of the bride to hold herself together while she steered a course between past and future.
Denise and I passed around wedding pictures in the car when Lesley gave us a ride to our volunteer day at the camp. The bride looked tremulous in an ivory strapless dress and long lace veil, Lesley a bit sober in iridescent taupe silk with a portrait neckline. “You can see I didn’t smile a lot,” she told us while we sat in traffic. “I was trying too hard not to cry.”
Her nerves, she said, were tighter than harp strings as she waited to escort Lyndsey down the aisle in the garden of a country inn. The procession took forever—eight bridesmaids, including Lesley’s other daughters, Robyn and Nikki, along with ring bearers and flower girls, enough to populate the Rose Bowl Parade. Lesley held her face in a rigid mask; the bride began to hyperventilate.
“Calm down, Lynds,” Lesley urged. “Take deep breaths.” It was their turn to walk, and the bride had clenched like a vise. She couldn’t move.
Throughout the flotilla of bridesmaids, an uninvited blue jay had refused to cooperate, its persistent chirping cutting right through Pachelbel’s Canon. Someone sitting in a row behind Craig let out a stage whisper: “Oh God, that’s Kev.” In any case, the bird stopped right on cue.
Lesley saw gooseflesh rise on her daughter’s bare shoulders. Her breathing evened. “Okay, I’m ready,” she sighed. “Dad is here.”
At the reception, Lesley displayed two photographs of Kevin next to a lighted candle. He had given her, she said in the toast, her most precious gifts, her girls, and then, to lighten the mood, she added that he would be proud of Lyndsey for coming in under budget. Otherwise, Lesley kept the focus on the bride and groom. After that, she could relax. She and Craig outdanced the kids as the party extended late into the night. The only glitch occurred when an old friend was miffed about her table assignment. “You’ve lost yourself,” the friend accused Lesley. “You’re not the same person you were.”
Deeply hurt, Lesley struggled to shake it off. “Afterward, I decided, of course I’ve changed,” she told me and Denise. “And you know what? I like the person I’ve become.”
In fact, Lesley was exultant about her new life with Craig. He was different from the serious, dark-eyed, driven Kevin. “Craig feels like an old pair of slippers,” she said. He made her laugh as never before, and he was every bit as affectionate as Lesley. She had found herself relishing the same physical abandon that I did in a new relationship.
Even so, the complications with his family and her family and his friends and her friends reminded me of what had scared me about getting involved with other people: the other people. I had to contend with only Bob and Lily, whereas Lesley had a whole unruly contingent of interested parties. Her daughters thought Craig wasn’t sophisticated enough for their mother, and they weren’t fans of his sons’ table manners. The girls still declined to stay at Lesley’s new place with the boys there and urged her to visit one of the girls’ homes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, leaving Craig and his sons to celebrate at Lesley’s alone.
“I feel like I don’t have a home anymore,” one of her daughters said to Lesley.
“They’re old enough,” said Denise. “They’re on their own anyway.”
“I know,” Lesley said distractedly. “But the mother in me, the nurturing side of me … their home is their security.”
Meanwhile, Lesley’s new house was hardly a sanctuary for her. Craig’s youngest son had seemed fond enough of her when he first moved in, but once his brother arrived, they formed a sullen solidarity that boxed her out. All Lesley could do over screeching licks of an electric guitar was bite her tongue while Craig, caught in the middle, tried to impose civility.
Lesley and I commiserated for the rest of the ride about the difficulty of forming new households out of the shards of splintered ones. Lesley and Craig had chosen each other, and Bob and I had, too, but the children hadn’t asked for new adults to butt into their lives, and vice versa. We all had to make room for each other, and none of us quite knew how.
There were plenty of complications to go around. All of us—Denise, Dawn, Marcia, Lesley, Tara, me—had set out on a path to reinvent our lives with no idea of the scope and variety of the complications that awaited us. Aside from maybe the blessedly remote and empty dunes of Morocco, it was anybody’s guess where each of us was headed next.
chapter
TWENTY-FOUR
i didn’t know which was more distracting, the view or the guests. It was the last gathering before we took off for Morocco, and the vista from the roof of Marcia’s new apartment building was a knockout. Someone swam lazy laps in the atrium pool as the Manhattan skyline shimmered in the final rays of the October sun. In the distance, the Empire State Building rose like a silver spear.
Marcia made our visitors feel instantly at home with chitchat about cars and football. “I’m glad you guys are here,” she said to them. “I’m usually the odd one out with this gang.”
The rest of us didn’t take offense. We were proud of Marcia for her successful real estate coup, pleased with ourselves for whatever role we’d played in her decision to pull it off. By now it was clear that we all gained from our connection to one another, providing companionship, listening, trading points of view. But one point of view had been consistently absent so far, and it came from a source of particular fascination: men.
And here men were, four of ’em, a lot like us, widowers around our ages, a couple of them graying around the temples, but mostly not much worse for the wear. They had already made themselves useful by carrying platters of food to the roof and hefting patio chairs around a big picnic table as we shrugged off the first nip of fall. One had brought chocolates, another wine, yet another a box of bakery butter cookies tied with a ribbon. Glasses clinked, and hands reached politely for empanadas and crudités. We outnumbered the men by one. Tara had begged off that night for a birthday celebration for Will, but the rest of us saw this as a rare opportunity for insight into the masculine mind-set.
My attempts at research on the subject had gotten me nowhere so far. There are a lot of clichés about how widows and wido
wers differ, perhaps the most common being “women mourn, men replace.” Men are less burdened by guilt, so the conventional wisdom goes. They jump onto the Internet a few weeks after their wives die to hook up with fondly remembered high school sweethearts. While we make do with Lean Cuisine at home, widowers supposedly live the high life, beneficiaries of limitless fix-ups, recipients of unsolicited covered dishes, winners of sought-after roles as extra men at dinner parties. If the stereotypes are to be believed, then perhaps men are better equipped than we are to overcome grief and achieve happiness à la minute. Perhaps, we thought, they possessed coping mechanisms we could co-opt for ourselves. With a little luck, we could ply these specimens with enough wine and finger foods to extract their secrets.
I had already determined that there’d been little actual study on gender and grieving, with the few citations I uncovered finding little difference between the sexes. It was up to us to reach some highly invalid and unscientific conclusions based on four random guys we corralled by asking around.
Was I hoping for more? I’m only human. These were men, eligible men, and I just happened to know some eligible women. Dawn was free again, and Denise and Marcia hadn’t become involved with anyone yet. I noticed Denise decked out in a smart dress and Lesley a showy blouse. Marcia dressed for comfort in pants and a polo shirt, and most of the guys wore pressed cotton shirts and khakis. A take-out place provided the empanadas, their fillings identified with offbeat labels.