Saturday Night Widows

by Becky Aikman

  My job wasn’t progressing as well. The latest owner of Newsday wanted even shorter and less ambitious stories, and I was bored. More and more, as I immersed myself in research on widows, I wanted to write about that—write what you care about, write what you know—but I needed space and time to do the subject justice. I kicked around with Bob the possibility of leaving my job and pursuing the topic on my own. From a lazy beach in Mexico, the project seemed less daunting than I knew it would be.

  And suddenly, so did marriage. We scribbled notes in the back pages of a paperback. Becky, Bob, Lily, Wink, New York, Connecticut—there had to be a way to make the pieces fit. Lily’s custody arrangement—every other week—must have been as discombobulating for her as it was for us. We considered changing it so she would spend school nights at her mom’s, and weekends, holidays, and summers with us. Bob and I thought we could keep both our places, living and working in New York during the week and shifting the whole show to Connecticut on weekends. Maybe Lily would consent to summers in the city.

  I’d already noticed that remaking a life at midstride was more complicated than brokering the subprime mortgage bailout. Make that the subprime bailout combined with a renegotiated divorce settlement. This treaty would demand compromises from all of us. Were they compromises I was willing to make?

  From the perspective of a restful Mexican beach, the logistics didn’t seem as cockamamie as they no doubt would prove. And the expense of keeping both households afloat didn’t seem as formidable. From a clarifying distance, the dream of being together seemed more important than mere matters of where to live and when and how, not to mention what it would cost. Time had worked its magic. I felt solid enough to do this, solid enough to want this.

  When we arrived back home, fate dealt us an opportunity. Newsday planned more cutbacks and offered the staff a voluntary buyout. If I took it, I would sever my ties to my once-beloved job and devote myself, as Bernie had, to writing about what mattered to me. A few weeks later, the landlord of Bob’s ramshackle house in Connecticut said he was putting it up for sale. If we took the buyout money to make a down payment, we could cut the costs of our convoluted two-home marriage plan. Everything was conspiring to force my hand.

  Back in my apartment, alone, I deciphered all the hieroglyphics we’d made in the paperback on the beach. They took up the back pages, the inside covers, and the margins of several chapters. For all of this to work, I had to quit the job I once loved, buy a house I didn’t love, and marry a man I did. I had to change everything, and I had to do it all at once. I felt the way I had on my voyage to the Galápagos, where unknown creatures and undiscovered sights beckoned from shore and sea. If I wanted an adventure, I had to abandon the safety of the boat.

  OUR FRIENDS WERE expecting a simple, casual backyard cocktail party on a sultry June afternoon. And so it appeared, until Bob gathered them under a canopy of trees by the stream behind the house—our house, for all of four days. Then he cranked up a creaky recording of the Dixie Cups singing “Going to the chapel,” the only clue that we were launching this party with the ultimate happy ending—a wedding.

  After surviving our share of heartache, finding someone new had been a fortunate surprise, so it seemed only fitting to hold a surprise wedding to celebrate. We ditched the usual accoutrements: no ballroom at the Acme Wedding Mill, no Sheetrock cake, no unwanted gifts, no wedding gown that looked like a holdover from the Miss America pageant. Even my first marriage when I was in my twenties had been pretty simple—I wasn’t going to go all ostentatious at this point in my life. This wedding would be Bob’s and mine alone, informed by experience only we could know.

  Throwing out the rulebook, we recognized, could have invited trouble. The ring bearer would be Wink, one of the great failures in the history of obedience training. We took a calculated risk making all the food for sixty people ourselves, with help from Lily and two of our best friends. Thunderstorms in the forecast threatened to turn the yard into the La Brea Tar Pits. Whatever happened, we would have to roll with it. We reminded ourselves before everyone arrived: falling in love is a happy accident, too.

  I made my entrance floating out the back door in a weightless white cocktail dress inset with shimmering patches of silver, like clouds. All my nearest and dearest were there, everyone who had worked to pull me through. Bob waited, in jeans and a jacket, by the stream, following me with an expression I can only describe as adoring. I’m pretty sure I was looking at him the same way. Lily took her place beside us, wavering between smiles and tears, glad for our happiness, I was convinced, but all too aware that the dream of a child of divorce, her original family reunited, was dashed for good. Wink stood protective watch next to her, in black bow tie, his single eye overseeing the ceremony with appropriate dignity.

  The serendipity of the moment didn’t escape me. Bob and I had known each other for only a year and a half, but we had decided to do this, to marry in the face of uncertainties we knew too well. I couldn’t help but recall the path of my first marriage, but the awareness that nothing is certain to last, rather than overwhelming my happiness, served to heighten it, stoking the urgency to reach for this now, to hold nothing back. I took Bob’s hand without reservation, looked into those hazel eyes, and thought, I’m really marrying this guy! How lucky can I be?

  When the final “I dos” were out of our mouths, the celebration began, and the thunking bass of “Some Kind of Wonderful” by the Soul Brothers Six carried us into the crowd for congratulations. I might have chosen something from Verdi, but marriage is about compromise, after all. Everyone professed joy at our element of surprise, and not only because it took them off the hook from buying us toaster ovens and place settings.

  The last guests hit the road by midnight. Bob and I took shelter in the house, said good night to Lily, and talked over the party, as couples do, the first shared memory of our married life. Everything, we concluded, had veered in the direction we least expected. The dog performed like a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company. My girlfriends cried on cue. Lily declared the food “insanely delicious.” Torrents of rain fell on every nearby town, but not a drop landed on us. Everything unfurled perfectly, exactly as we’d hoped. I knew too well that all endings aren’t happy ones. But after half a lifetime of facing up to the unforeseen, the most surprising element of our surprise wedding was this: sometimes things turn out exactly right.

  chapter

  TWENTY-SIX

  f ès beckoned like a thousand-piece puzzle. I’d never seen a place so ancient, so foreign, so strange. The city was a jumble of labyrinthine walkways and dwellings the color of sun-dried mud, seemingly unchanged since the ninth century. A corona of dust levitated above. In the distance, the Middle Atlas Mountains loomed. This much I could see as I leaned against the railing on the balcony of my hotel room, situated on a hill overlooking the medina. I’d been warned not to venture into the maze without a guide. I would surely be lost. I must wait for the Blossoms to traverse it with me.

  The twilight call to prayer swelled over the city. Fès is that rare place where the call is performed live by the muezzins, not piped in by a recording. A mournful undulating voice wafted from a distant minaret, and then another joined from elsewhere, and another, weaving together in a pleasing dissonance of devotion. The sound was hypnotic, somewhere between music and chanting and a babel of nagging uncles. The call surrounded me, mystical, like the city, profoundly strange, profoundly foreign to my ears.

  I had achieved my goal: I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The other women were supposed to join me as they arrived, on various routes, through Paris or London or Casablanca, depending on their stash of frequent flyer miles or tolerance for discomfort—higher for me and Denise, who schlepped overland by car through Rabat and Meknès; lower for Marcia, who flew first-class through Paris, with an overnight at the Ritz. We were scheduled to rendezvous on my terrace after sunset, when the prayer call faded. A slice of moon rose over the medina, and I felt a shiver of delicious anticipati
on, followed by another when I thought, How cool is it to say, “The moon rose over the medina”? I listened impatiently for that knock on the door. Once again, with the clarity of distance, I felt what I could not feel back home, when I was in the middle of it, and I realized with a start: I missed them.

  When I inaugurated our group, I had expected that I would remain at a bit of a remove from the others. I was further along in widowhood, after all, remarried for more than a year, in fact, by the time we met. But a funny thing happened on the way to Morocco. Here it was November, eleven months in, and we had come to count on each other, to learn from each other’s choices. Even though I was a wife again, I recognized that of everyone I knew, only these women, having lost what I had lost, understood what that meant to me, the joy and dislocation of starting again. Only they understood that I could be happy with one man while still pining for another who was gone. These women were the role models I’d been seeking. Widowhood—it was better to explore it with a guide. Now I had five.

  I gave thanks for the fellowship they provided as the last notes of the muezzins dissolved into vapor. Each woman had singular expertise to offer. The mothers and I spoke often about strategies for stepparenting. Don’t push it, we agreed; don’t play the pseudo-parent. It was working for me and Lily; we were reaching a rapport. Before I left home, I’d helped with her search for a college, and they advised me on that, too. Dawn bucked me up with positive Dawnisms when I was whipsawed by weekly travel between Brooklyn and Connecticut. Denise, with her editing chops, soothed my concerns about my work, and Marcia chortled at my stories about sharing an office with Bob.

  My marriage was a constant source of happiness, but the circumstances strayed far from the unencumbered life I once envisioned for myself. Despite being in possession of two places to live, Bob and I couldn’t manage one where we each had our own room to work. There were moments, when he conducted business on the phone while I tried to write and Wink whimpered for a walk and Lily asked to use the car … and … and … when our workplace resembled the floor of the stock exchange at a quarter to four. Sometimes it seemed as if we had set out to see how many obstacles we could pile in the way of our new union, how many pressures we could withstand. Had I ditched a model that was too simple for one that was too cluttered? This trip with the group would offer new perspective and a welcome break. My posse offered me release; it had my back.

  Which made me all the more apprehensive about the next ten days. Traveling together can strain the best friendships, and I was only just coming to understand how much I wanted ours to last. To say that this was a gang of forceful personalities was an understatement. If we could survive Marcia’s vociferous objections to camels and camping and Dawn’s preference for mojitos on a beach, Denise’s cool tranquillity and Lesley’s irrepressible humor, Tara’s urge to shop and mine to undertake a crazy-ass desert adventure, this journey would be an achievement to rival the first walk on the moon.

  Like a pot on a boil, everyone arrived at once. Tired from travel but jazzed with excitement, they squealed at the darkening view of mountains and city as stars began to pop overhead. Marcia had scooped up a complimentary bottle of champagne from the Ritz, so Dawn led a toast: “To a fabulous trip.”

  We each raised a glass. “To our dead husbands,” Lesley added. “We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t died.”

  Scandalous! But we knew each other well enough to laugh. I filled everyone in about plans worked out by our guide. Many stalls in the medina would be closed the next afternoon for Jumu’ah, the Friday prayers, so we would slot in a mountain hike, freeing up time for a longer shopping spree in the souks on Saturday.

  “Becky,” said Tara, “that’s the best thing you possibly could have said.”

  Somehow, Tara had overlooked instructions to pack hiking boots, so she would have to trek through craggy terrain in suede loafers. This was a sure tipoff, I thought, to her reluctance to undertake the more vigorous portions of our itinerary. And Marcia was already fussing about the desert camp. “Bathrooms in tents—how can they keep them clean?” At least everyone seemed mollified by this first hotel. A converted old palace just outside the walled city, it would be the most luxurious of the trip. I couldn’t worry about the rest of it now. I had to give everyone points for making this journey at all.

  Whatever unknowns we were about to encounter, news from back home came first. I couldn’t help noticing that Dawn was fidgeting with excitement, and not at the prospect of a mountain hike. She was an eyeful on her worst days, and tonight her radiance rivaled the moon. Tara, who had traveled with her, explained. “I arrived at the airport, and I saw this woman with her phone out, texting like mad, and I said, ‘That looks familiar.’ ” Yes, love had struck again, with technology playing Cupid.

  Feverish texting had been going on for more than a week, and the person at the other end was a guy she’d met at a racetrack. He had actually been driving one of the racecars, which made him sound to me like the very definition of a dangerous fling. But he was not a professional driver, I was relieved to learn—it was a hobby that diverted him from running his own company. “He’s an entrepreneur, like me,” Dawn told us. “We have so much in common.”

  Unfortunately, this didn’t include a place of residence. Collins lived more than three hours away, so they had rendezvoused a week ago in Manhattan, taking rooms in separate hotels. Dawn took it as an omen when they wound up across the street from each other on the same floor, able to wave from window to window. Within hours, she knew this was serious.

  “When he looked at me, I felt the same way I felt when I first met Andries.”

  “On the first date?” Marcia asked.

  “Collins said it wasn’t really one date. Lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch—he counted it as four. But whatever it was, it worked, let me tell you.” She fanned her face against an inner heat and told us that, unlike Adam, Collins wasn’t stingy with his feelings. “You know how a guy looks at you, and it goes beyond what you look like?” She made an approximation of a smitten face. “That’s how he looked at me. But I haven’t been able to see him since. I had to get ready for this trip. This didn’t come at the best time, girls.”

  “Sorry, girl,” I said.

  “I’m telling you, I cried tears of joy.” Dawn wasn’t stingy with feelings, either. “It had been so long since I’d cried any other kind of tears.”

  We linked arms and looked out over the city, now hushed and ghostly in the moonlight. Lesley tentatively broke the silence.

  “I have to ask you all something, and … I’m going to cry.” Her face flushed, and the tears came fast, the first time I had seen Lesley come apart. We waited, braced for the worst, until she could speak. “What do you do,” she said, still struggling, “when you’re so in love, so happy … but it’s breaking apart, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because of external forces?” She looked at us plaintively, expecting an answer. “How do you fix it?”

  “Oh, babe,” I said, pulling her closer.

  “How do you fix it?”

  Craig had seen her off from home, she said, but he wouldn’t be there when she returned. She conveyed her quandary in spurts, through tears. They weren’t breaking up, not entirely, but tensions over children had reached a point where they decided they couldn’t live together anymore. “I told my girls, ‘Suck it up. This is the man I love.’ But I don’t know if Craig is willing to do that with his boys.”

  More and more often, she and Craig had been shutting each other out of decisions when it came to their respective kids. It reached a head when one of Lesley’s daughters injured her leg in a car accident a couple of weeks before. Lesley rushed to the hospital, calling her other daughters, not thinking to phone Craig until she had some news. It was a pattern that ran deep since Kevin’s death, she and her girls circling the wagons in the face of trouble, a pattern that didn’t leave room for Craig. He felt shut out, hurt.

  He sent her a text: I can’t do this anymore. He needed to
attend to his own kids, he said. “So we’re going to try just dating again,” she said miserably.

  “This may save the relationship,” said Marcia, but we all knew Lesley wanted more. Family was the center of her life, and she lived to make a home for someone and partake in the ready affection that arose from living together. She continued to weep, while the rest of us traded grim expressions.

  “How do you fix it?” she asked again.

  “Look,” said Dawn, “not to say anything about the relationship with Craig, but this pain has to do with the other loss, too.”

  Lesley nodded fervently, swallowing and crying harder.

  “It’s another loss,” Dawn said. “Losing again is very hard.”

  “That’s why it was so brave of you to enter a new relationship,” I said. This was what I had dreaded for myself—losing someone again when I’d already lost more than I thought I could bear.

  “You can throw yourself into something to erase the pain,” Dawn continued, “but when it doesn’t work, it’s very hard.”

  Lesley apologized for crying. “You are the only ones I can talk to about this,” she said.

  “Someone was asking me the other day about what we do,” said Tara, “and I answered, ‘We lift each other up.’ ” Looking at Lesley, I wondered if that was enough.

  WHEN I ARRIVED for breakfast on the sun-washed hotel terrace, Dawn was entertaining the troops, reaching into the past. She pulled out photographs of her children and Andries, who was as handsome as advertised.

  “Look at him. So young, so gorgeous. He’ll always be young, the bastard.”

  Lesley’s merry laugh returned. Grief, we knew, comes in waves. She was eating fried flatbread studded with olives, figs, and the fleshiest dates I’d ever seen. It was impossible to feel low under the spell of the sapphire blue sky, the cubist canvas of Fès stretched out below, and the clay-colored mountains beyond.