Starting from Square Two

by Caren Lissner

  Erika, on the couch, pulled a blanket around herself and shivered visibly. The rain snapped more loudly at the windows. “What would we do?”

  “We’d hole up right in this room in our sweatpants and play truth-or-dare and confess our deepest secrets to each other,” Hallie said, “and order heaping bowls of pad Thai and drink cheap wine.”

  “I want a guy to do those things with,” Erika whined.

  “Well, you ain’t got one, so shut up.”

  “I’m twenty-nine,” Erika said. “It isn’t even healthy to be boyfriendless this long. My body needs to be physically touched by a member of the opposite sex.”

  “Get a root canal.”

  Gert gazed over the blankets neatly laid out on the floor, and at the popcorn on the table, and really did feel like a kid at a sleepover. She wondered if later Erika would break out the Ouija board, hoping to channel Elvis, and after that the three of them would try to levitate themselves, chanting, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board….”

  The door opened, and it was tiny Cat, lugging a doggie bag from whichever pricey restaurant she’d been to with her aunt. Gert had only met Cat a few times. Cat constantly complained, in her squeaky voice, that she wasn’t meeting anyone, but turned down every invitation Hallie and Erika made to go out, whether it was dancing at Polly Esther’s or rinsing trays at the University Community Soup Kitchen. She was “too tired,” or it was too cold out, or she was spending the weekend with her family. Hallie and Erika privately ragged on her, but at the same time, they loved it when she actually did come out with them, because her shrinking-violet existence made them feel good about their own lives. At least they’d had real relationships.

  One more thing about Cat was that she wasn’t willing to accept any degree of obnoxiousness in boys. If a guy even made a joke about sex, Cat looked intimidated, and she retreated. Gert was glad that Cat stuck by what she believed in, but Hallie and Erika said that Cat would be alone until she was sixty-five. Then she could meet a nice guy who had prostate cancer and just wanted to be her very good friend.

  Hallie got up and turned off the light so the women could watch the male canon movies they had rented: Monty Python’s Holy Grail, This Is Spinal Tap, and number eleven in the canon, Reservoir Dogs. Gert was hoping Hallie and Erika would like the movies, but the odds were against it. She’d never had a female friend who had the same sense of humor as she did, except for her high school friend Nancy, who lived in L.A. now.

  Even before the movie started, Gert’s prediction was proven right. Instead of paying attention to the opening scenes of Holy Grail, Erika was fussing over her throw pillows. Hallie was finishing with her nails. Cat had already gone into her room.

  Hallie got up and paused the DVD. “I forgot,” she said. “Before the movie starts, I have to tell you this. I thought of a great question for the two of you today.” She was wearing an orange long-sleeved T-shirt and gray sweatpants that Gert thought looked cute. Even though Erika was around making her nervous, Gert realized that at least this was just a no-pressure girls’ night. They didn’t have to worry about how they looked or how they dressed. Maybe it could be fun.

  “Not another of your profound probing questions,” Erika said to Hallie, flicking a piece of popcorn across the coffee table.

  “No, this is great,” Hallie said, prying and probing as usual. She crawled over to the table and waved her nails to dry them. “Let’s say a soothsayer told you that you would not meet the man of your dreams for eight more years.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Let’s say that the soothsayer said that without a doubt, when you turned thirty-seven, you would finally meet someone, fall madly, madly in love with him, and live happily ever after. Would you still date people in the interim?”

  “No,” Gert said.

  “No,” Cat said, coming back into the room.

  “Probably not,” Erika said. “I wouldn’t bother.”

  “Interesting,” Hallie said. “So dating is just a means to an end for all of you. It’s not about fun or socializing or sex.”

  “I have enough fun,” Gert said.

  “I do enough socializing,” Erika said.

  “I…do enough socializing,” Cat said.

  “Most people won’t admit that,” Hallie said. “They won’t admit that dating is work. Maybe we should all decide we’re going to meet the man of our dreams when we’re thirty-seven. Then we’ll stop squeezing into tight shirts and walking around half-naked and analyzing every encounter as future husband material. We’ll stop feeling the need to put on makeup to take out the trash just in case he’s walking by. Maybe we should just assume that we’ll meet our dream man at some future point, and stop driving ourselves crazy before then.”

  “I already met the man of my dreams,” Erika said. “He’s married to a bitch.”

  “I already met mine,” Gert said. “And then he was gone.”

  The room was silent for a minute.

  Cat said, “Anyone for Ouija?”

  The movies ended up largely ignored for the night, as a half hour into the first one, something reminded Erika of Ben, and she said she just had to show Hallie and Gert what had happened on Challa’s Web site that day.

  Gert had sighed. Erika had the attention span of a Chihuahua.

  Standing in Hallie’s room by the big bed, they waited for the Web site to load. Hallie’s bedroom was mostly black, with a black comforter over the bed and black furniture. She still had the same purple telephone from college, Gert noticed, and she wondered if it still had the same sticky goo around the push-buttons.

  Across the computer screen flashed a page with a rich blue background and the words “Challa’s Corner.” A gliding pastiche of photos swirled across the screen, most of them of Challa, Ben and their baby. On the left was a list of links to things like the Weather Channel and Elle magazine.

  Gert had to admit to herself that it looked cheesy.

  And at the bottom of the screen was the bane of Erika’s existence: The Web log.

  Standing in front of Hallie’s computer, the three women read that day’s blog entry from Challa.

  Last night was cold out, and we stayed in and put the baby to sleep and made dinner. I cooked linguine and mussels, and Ben tossed a salad. It was soooo romantic!;) We polished off an entire bottle of red wine LOL!!!

  Gert suspected that deep inside, all of the women were thinking that mussels and wine sounded a lot better than soda and popcorn at 11:00 p.m. Gert almost felt her body ache, remembering the effort and passion that went into something as mundane as preparing dinner together.

  Erika returned to the home page and clicked a link that said, “Message board.” That was where Challa’s friends could leave comments like: “Hi, Chall!” “Hey, girl, love the new pix!” “Thanks for helping me waste time at work.”

  But recently Erika had started to leave messages, too.

  She’d used all seven of her America Online screen names to create aliases to post things. Some were meant to annoy Challa, and some were just meant to confuse her. She told Hallie and Gert that Challa deserved it. Why did Challa have to shove everyone else’s face in her and Ben’s bliss all the time? Erika said that if she herself were married to someone as passionate and artistic as Ben, there was no way she would waste her free time writing blog entries about it.

  The three of them read what Erika had posted on the message board that morning.

  “You are banal,” Erika had written under the screen name Mr. HushPuppy. (She chose screen names completely at random, based on whatever she happened to see from the Internet café while she was typing. That day, someone had walked by in Hush Puppies.)

  “Yes, she is, isn’t she?” Erika had responded to herself, this time using the name LadyAndTheTrump. “She started a whole Web site dedicated to herself. Sweetie, you don’t need TOO much attention, do you?”

  “Challa’s a ho and a slut,” Mr. HushPuppy wrote.

  “Ho, ho, ho, Merrrryyyyy Chall-mas,�
�� wrote “JenDurr.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if Challa did name a holiday after herself,” Mr. HushPuppy wrote. “Too much attention isn’t enough for this girl. She should be lucky for what she has, not clog everyone else’s cyberspace with her binary spittle.”

  “You’re a sick girl, Erika Dennison,” Hallie said, laughing.

  What really got a rise out of Erika and Hallie that evening was that Challa, who previously had been ignoring the posts, was now getting into fights with the “writers.”

  “Can’t you at least say something meaningful between your insults?” Challa had written back to Mr. HushPuppy. “If you hate me so much, then please don’t read this board. I didn’t invite you. At least LadyAndTheTrump sometimes has something meaningful to say.”

  “Ah,” Erika said aloud, triumphantly. “She’s using me as an example for me to follow.”

  Gert worried that someday, Erika would take this too far.

  Chapter

  2

  “This girl, Erika, told me she’s just like me, but we’re really very different,” Gert told her support group on Long Island.

  The group was for young widows. Until a few years ago, most of the “young widows” in Gert’s area had been in their forties and fifties. Now there was a handful in their twenties and thirties, too. Gert found it worth the forty-five-minute rail jaunt each Saturday morning to talk to people who could understand what she was going through.

  She hadn’t gone to the group right away. In the weeks after Marc had died, she’d been surrounded by close friends and relatives. They were at the funeral, at Marc’s parents’ house, stopping by Gert’s apartment. Gert needed to be squeezed among a crushing throng of people who knew Marc so well that they understood the profoundness of the loss; people who knew his interests, his kindness, the expressions on his bespectacled face. Only people who knew him as well as she did could understand the depth of the void.

  Right after the accident, Gert’s mother temporarily moved into Gert’s condo in Queens. She had already tried to convince Gert to move back to L.A., but failed. Gert’s best friend from childhood, Nancy, had tried, too. But Gert wasn’t sure she wanted to go back yet. All the experts said that you shouldn’t make major changes in your life within a year after a death. Besides, deep inside her, she feared that going back home would make her feel even lonelier. At least in New York, there were people like her. Alone.

  For a while, relatives stopped by her condo to visit. Co-workers of Marc’s from the brokerage firm sent cards and flowers.

  Then, slowly, the comforters tapered off. That meant that entire days yawned open with emptiness. Gert would pull herself out of bed, slog to work, get the occasional call from a friend who’d emit platitudes about taking things one step at a time, come home and, if she could stand to do something normal for two hours, watch a movie. In the past, no matter what happened to her, she knew he would be at the end—the end of the phone line, the end of a rough day, the end of the long commute home. Now, only she was there. All she had left to cling to were the vestiges of old routines.

  Gert’s parents found her a therapist on Fifth Avenue. For the first six months, she went every week and talked to an overly clinical woman who was nevertheless a good listener. But she realized that she would have rather stayed home. What she really needed, she decided, was to interact with people her own age who’d lost a spouse.

  Gert knew she wouldn’t have found such a support network if not for September 11. Most of the young widows’ support groups in the area had sprung up because of that day. Marc had died only four days before that, on the seventh. The funeral was two days later. If it had been two days after that, it probably would have had to be postponed. She’d lost him, buried him and forty-eight hours later the world had exploded.

  She found several groups advertising on the back page of the Voice. The first day, she had felt intense self-loathing as she walked into the room. All of the women were strangers, and they looked strange, too. Strange and sad. They were women who had absolutely nothing in common with her—except for one horrible event. But she had forced herself to hold back her tears. She sat down in a hard school chair in the circle. She listened. And she talked. She found out they all had similar experiences to hers. The other women in the group were prone to dazing out for five minutes at a time for no reason, too. They, too, were still getting sales calls for their husbands and not knowing how to respond. They, too, were incessantly told by well-meaning people that they would feel better soon. They, too, had assumed they would be married to one person for the rest of their lives—and suddenly had had that person yanked away forever.

  The only time Gert felt unburdened was when she was in the group. Normally she struggled under the weight of knowing that if she bumped into someone and had to explain that her husband had died, it’d be an uphill battle to deal with their awkward responses, to make them understand how she felt and all of the challenges she faced. The women in the group just knew.

  “Where were you when Erika said this?” asked Brenda, a heavyset thirty-five-year-old nurse. Brenda, who had the voice of an evangelist, had become the group’s de facto leader. Their group had been started by a social worker from a local hospital, but the social worker eventually had found they were able to run it on their own.

  “We were staying at Hallie’s apartment Friday night,” Gert said. “Hallie was my roommate in college. Erika is her friend from high school. Anyway, Hallie was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and Erika and I were smoothing out our blankets on the floor, and Erika got serious. She turned to me and said, ‘I know you think no one understands what you’re going through. But every day when I wake up, I still want to say hi to Ben. He was in my life for so long, and then he was gone. I love him and I never get to see him anymore. So believe me, I know how you feel.’” Gert paused to take a deep breath. “And I know she was trying to be helpful, but having your husband die in a car accident is not the same thing as breaking up with him because you weren’t sure you loved him and then he ends up with someone else. I wanted to tell her this—”

  She broke off.

  “But you didn’t,” said Leslie, a short owl-eyed girl who had been married to a man thirty years older than she. Gert felt sorry for her, imagining she’d taken the first guy to be smitten with her—and then Gert felt bad for being judgmental.

  Brenda said to Gert, “You could have told her.”

  “But she was only trying to help,” Gert said.

  Michele shook her head. She was thirty-four, a paralegal. “They all are,” she said. “But don’t you ever want to say, no, this is how it really feels? Losing your husband feels like nothing, dead, like you want to jump back into that week when you had him back, and all you can do is look back because there aren’t things to look ahead to anymore.”

  “I can’t say all that,” Gert said.

  “Honey, you need to let someone in,” Brenda said. “Don’t be afraid of being real with people.”

  If I was real with people, Gert thought, I’d lose all of them.

  The other topics at the meeting were standard: How they’d gotten through special occasions, how they filled their free time, how they were managing their financial affairs. Marc hadn’t had any life insurance, except for the $1,000 policy he’d gotten—along with a free Discman—for signing up for a Sony Mastercard. Who would ever have thought to get life insurance for a twenty-seven-year-old? Marc’s parents, luckily, paid for the burial and for a year of the mortgage on the condo. Some of the women in the group had had to sell their homes.

  “The problem with moving isn’t necessarily about money,” a woman named Arden said. “I can’t pack up his things. Some of them, I haven’t touched since he died.”

  Gert thought of the extra bedroom in the condo, the one Marc had used as a workroom. It held a computer, trophies going back to his high school soccer championships, even Boy Scout patches. She had barely touched these things since he’d died. Sometimes she wandered into
the room and stood there for a while, in a comfortable haze.

  “Don’t push yourself,” Brenda told Arden. “Everything has a time.”

  “It feels like you’re putting him away when you put something aside,” Leslie said. “A pipe exploded last year and it poured all over Jesse’s Yankees cap, and I had to throw it away. Then I started crying.”

  Everyone was quiet for a minute.

  “But see, they got to the Series,” Brenda said. “So he was watching over them.”

  Leslie laughed. “I don’t think he did that.”

  “See?” Michele said. “We can smile when we remember, not just cry.”

  Gert’s mind started drifting. She found herself wishing that Chase were there. Chase was a quiet girl with short hair and a shy smile who had come to several meetings and then stopped. Chase was twenty-nine, too, and she had lost her fiancé around the time that Gert had lost Marc. She seemed like a nice person, and Gert had hoped they would become friends. But Gert hadn’t gotten to the point where she felt comfortable asking for Chase’s home number or inviting her to do anything. And then, suddenly, Chase had stopped coming. Gert wasn’t sure why. As much as she liked the women in the group, most of them were a few years older than she. She hoped Chase would come back.

  People like Chase—fiancées—had it worse than everyone, Gert thought. They hadn’t even married their loved one yet. They had had to lose someone they loved before they’d officially become related. They didn’t even get to call themselves widows. What should they be called? In this day and age, there needed to be a less clunky term than Bereaved Significant Other.

  Gert noticed that the people in the group were getting up, and she realized the session was over. She’d been dazing again.

  She had to stop doing that.