A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  When she left Manhattan for a year-round residence in the Hamptons—and for her second marriage—she pronounced that city life was fit only for sexual predators and thrill-seekers who were without her capacity for self-knowledge. (After many years in Bridgehampton, Eleanor continued to think of the south fork of Long Island as rural, for she had no experience with genuine country living. She had attended an all-women’s college in Massachusetts, and while she looked back on her experience there as decidedly unnatural, she did not categorize it as either rural or urban.)

  Eleanor had once burned her bra in public, before a small gathering in a Grand Union parking lot, but throughout the eighties she was a politically active Republican—the alleged influence of her second husband. Having tried unsuccessfully, for years, to get pregnant, she finally conceived her only child with the aid of an anonymous sperm donor; thereupon she became adamantly opposed to abortion. Possibly this was the alleged influence of what Mrs. Dash’s late husband called “the mystery sperm.”

  During two decades, Eleanor Holt went from eating everything to strict vegetarianism to eating everything again. The changes in her diet were confusingly imposed upon her sperm-donated child, a haunted girl, whose birthday party—she was only six at the time—was spoiled for her, and for the other children in attendance, by Eleanor’s decision to show the home movie of her daughter’s birth.

  Jane Dash’s only son had been one of the traumatized children at the birthday party. The episode had troubled Mrs. Dash, for she had always been physically modest in the presence of her son. Her late husband had frequently been naked around the house—he slept in the nude, and so forth—but this hadn’t troubled Jane, at least not for her son’s sake. After all, they were both boys. Jane, however, had made every effort to cover herself. Then her son had come home from the Holt girl’s birthday party, having seen an apparently vivid film of a live birth—having seen Eleanor Holt, displayed like an open book!

  And over the years, Eleanor would again from time to time impose the obstetrical film on her poor daughter—and not necessarily for educational reasons. Rather it was for Eleanor Holt’s unstoppable self-importance: the woman needed to demonstrate to her own daughter how, at least at the moment of giving birth, she had suffered.

  As for the daughter, she either developed or had been born with a contrary personality; whether this was the result of her overexposure to the gore of her own delivery or something in the secret genes of “the mystery sperm,” the daughter seemed intent on embarrassing her mother. And the poor girl’s contrariness encouraged Eleanor to attack other possible sources that might be disturbing her daughter—for Eleanor Holt never faulted herself, not for anything.

  What Mrs. Dash would always remember was Eleanor Holt’s emergence as an anti-pornography picketer. The porn shop, which was on the outskirts of Riverhead, Long Island, a far cry from the Hamptons, was not a place that lured young or unsuspecting or otherwise innocent readers to its door. It was a low, shingled building with small windows and a shed roof. The sign outside was not ambiguous.

  X-RATED BOOKS & MAGAZINES ADULTS ONLY!

  Eleanor and a small band of outraged matronly women only once entered the building. They abruptly withdrew, agitated and flushed. (“The strong victimizing the weak!” Eleanor told a local reporter.) The couple who ran the pornography shop were elderly; they had been longing to escape the dreary Long Island winters. In the ensuing fuss, they conned a concerned-citizens’ group (of Eleanor’s initiation) into buying the building. But the concerned citizens not only paid too much for the old shed, they were left with . . . ah, the inventory, as Mrs. Dash thought of it.

  As a novelist, and as an interested party, Jane Dash volunteered to estimate the value of the stock. She had previously but politely declined an invitation to join Eleanor’s crusade against pornography, on the grounds that she was a writer; she was basically opposed to censorship. When Eleanor pressed her case—that she was appealing to Jane “as a woman first and a writer second”—Jane had surprised both Eleanor and herself by her response.

  “I’m a writer first,” Mrs. Dash had said.

  Jane was allowed to investigate the pornography at her leisure. Its “value” aside, Mrs. Dash found it disappointing. The coarseness of it was to be expected—apparently not by Eleanor Holt! But grossness was the norm for many people. Crudeness and prurient interests were the motivating humors for all sorts of individuals; Mrs. Dash happily did not associate with them. Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of people she had met.

  In the unseemly collection from the porn shop, now closed for good, there were no depictions of sexual acts with animals or with underage children. Mrs. Dash considered it mildly reassuring that these depravities had not made their way as far east of Manhattan as Suffolk County—at least not in magazine or book form. What she found in ample evidence was the commonplace exaggeration of female orgasms, and men (always with penises of unlikely size) who displayed an unconvincing interest in the labors they were performing. Bad acting on the part of both sexes, Jane Dash concluded. She thought the closeup views of the countless and various female genitalia were . . . well, clinically interesting. She’d never before looked at other women in such uninviting detail.

  Pressed for her evaluation, Jane declared the contents of the shop to be worthless trash—unless the concerned citizens wanted to reduce their expenses by selling off the remaining stock to certain curious locals. But such a sidewalk sale in Riverhead would have amounted to the concerned citizens playing the role of pornographers. Therefore, the books and magazines were burned—a total loss.

  Again defining herself as “a writer first,” Mrs. Dash said she wanted no part of the burning ceremony; she wouldn’t even watch it. The local newspapers captured a small but triumphant band of women tending to a fire. Real firemen stood anxiously nearby, in case the burning photographs of strenuous sexual endeavors and stray genitals should suddenly develop into a spreading flame.

  In Suffolk County, six years passed without further public demonstrations in the field of sexual morality. The sperm-donated daughter was twelve when she took Eleanor Holt’s dildo—a battery-powered vibrator—to the Bridgehampton alternative middle school for that ill-considered part of American education known as Show and Tell. Once again, Jane Dash’s son, who’d been witness to the film of the live birth at the six-year-old’s birthday party, was privileged to see this brief glimpse of Eleanor’s formerly private experience.

  The twelve-year-old daughter was fortunately inexpert at demonstrating the tool, which the astonished teacher quickly took away from her. There was little more to observe than the shocking size of the thing. Mrs. Dash, who never saw it, gathered from her son’s description that the dildo was modeled on nothing resembling an actual male member. The boy compared the vibrator to “some kind of missile.” Also fixed in the lad’s memory was the sound that the missile made when it was turned on. The vibrator, of course, vibrated. While this was not highly detectable, before the teacher grabbed the dildo from the twelve-year-old and turned it off, the particular sound was a surprise to all who heard it.

  “Exactly what did it sound like?” Jane asked her son.

  “Zzzt! Zzzt! Zzzt!” the boy reported. There was a hint of warning in this sound, Mrs. Dash thought—a buzzing sound, with a t on the end. The novelist couldn’t get this sound out of her head.

  And here the playfulness of Mrs. Dash’s late husband would return to haunt her. Whenever they had spotted Eleanor Holt—at a dinner party, in the supermarket, or dropping off her daughter at the alternative middle school—Jane’s husband would whisper in the novelist’s ear, “Zzzt!” It seemed to Jane that, in his clever way, he was telling her to be careful.

  Repeatedly, it was the sheer good fun of him that Mrs. Dash missed most of all. Even the sight of Eleanor Holt would forcefully remind Jane of her widowhood and what she’d lost.

  Five
more years passed, yet Jane remembered the dildo episode as if it had happened only yesterday. What possessed Mrs. Dash to confront Eleanor Holt with an almost perfect imitation of the sound made by her vibrator was twofold: Jane keenly desired to bring back to her life her late husband’s sense of humor, and Jane knew that if she didn’t do something to Eleanor directly, she would be driven to write about her, which would be worse. As a novelist, Mrs. Dash despised writing about real people; she found it a failure of the imagination—for any novelist worthy of the name ought to be able to invent a more interesting character than any real person. To turn Eleanor Holt into fiction, even for the purpose of derision, would be a kind of flattery.

  Besides, the moment of Mrs. Dash’s decision to imitate the sound of Eleanor’s vibrator was no “decision” at all. It was completely accidental. It was not, quite unlike a Jane Dash novel, a planned act. The situation was the annual picnic for the alternative middle school, which was an alternative kind of school picnic, coming as it did well after the close of the school year; it was intended to coincide with the first good swimming weather of the early summer. The Atlantic Ocean was exceedingly cold until the end of June. But if the school waited for its picnic as late as July, the public beach would be overcrowded with “the summer renters.”

  Mrs. Dash had no intentions of swimming before August; she never swam at the school picnics, not even when her husband had been alive. And since her son had graduated from the alternative middle school, his attendance (and Jane’s) at this year’s picnic was more in the spirit of an alumni gathering, a reunion of sorts, which also marked Mrs. Dash’s most public outing in Bridgehampton since she’d become a widow. Some were surprised to see her. Not Eleanor Holt.

  “Good for you,” Eleanor said to Jane. “It’s about time you went out in the world again.” That was probably what set Mrs. Dash to thinking. She hardly considered the alternative middle school’s picnic as “the world,” nor did she care to be congratulated by Eleanor Holt.

  Jane distracted herself with pleasant observations of her son: how he had grown! And his former schoolmates . . . well, they had grown up, too. Even Eleanor’s troubled daughter was quite a pretty girl, relaxed and outgoing—now that she was in a boarding school and wasn’t living in the same house with the lurid movie of her own birth and her mother’s nuclear missile of pleasure.

  Jane also distracted herself by observing the smaller children. She didn’t know many of them, and some of the younger parents were strangers to her as well. The teacher who’d taken away the vibrating dildo came to sit beside Mrs. Dash. Jane didn’t hear what she was saying; the novelist was trying to imagine how to frame her question, and if she dared to ask it. (“When you grabbed hold of the thing, how hard was it shaking? I mean, like a blender, maybe, or a food processor, or was it . . . ah, gentler than that?”) But of course Mrs. Dash would never ask such a question; she just smiled. Eventually the teacher wandered away.

  As the afternoon darkened, the younger children shivered with cold. The beach turned an eggshell-brown color, the ocean gray. There were shivering children in the parking lot, too, as Mrs. Dash and her son put their picnic basket and their towels and beach blankets into the trunk of their car. They were parked beside Eleanor Holt and her daughter. Jane was surprised to see Eleanor’s second husband. He was an excessively litigious divorce lawyer who rarely appeared at social events.

  A wind came up. The younger children moaned. Something colorful—it looked like a raft—was lifted by the wind. It flew out of the hands of a small boy and landed on the roof of Eleanor Holt’s car. The divorce lawyer reached for the colorful thing, but it flew on. Jane Dash caught it in the air.

  It was a partially deflated air mattress, red and blue, and the little boy who’d lost control of it came running up to Mrs. Dash. “I was trying to let the air out of it,” the little boy said. “It won’t fit in the car. Then it got away, in the wind.”

  “Well now, let me show you—there’s a trick to this,” Mrs. Dash told the boy. Jane was watching Eleanor Holt bend over. Eleanor knelt down on one knee; she was tying her shoe. Her litigious husband had aggressively positioned himself at the steering wheel. Her mystery-sperm daughter was sitting sullenly alone in the backseat—doubtless returned to her childhood horrors by this reunion.

  Jane found a pebble of the right size in the parking lot. She unscrewed the cap that covered the air valve for the red and blue air mattress, and she stuck the pebble into the valve. The pebble pressed the valve needle down. The air hissed out.

  “Just push down on the pebble,” Mrs. Dash said. She demonstrated for the small boy. “Like this.” The air escaped the mattress in sudden blasts. “And . . . if you hug the mattress hard, like this, it will deflate faster.”

  But when Jane did this, the air rattled the pebble against the valve. Eleanor heard the sound just as she was standing up.

  “Zzzt! Zzzt! Zzzt!” said the red and blue air mattress. The delight in the little boy’s face was apparent. It was quite a wonderful sound, to him. But in Eleanor Holt’s expression was the sudden recognition that she had been exposed. At the steering wheel, her husband turned his face (like a lawsuit) to the sound. Then Eleanor’s daughter turned to face the sound, too. Even Jane Dash’s son, twice introduced to the intimate life of Eleanor Holt, turned in recognition of the thrilling sound.

  Eleanor stared at Mrs. Dash, and at the rapidly deflating air mattress, like a woman who’d been undressed before a mob.

  “It is about time I went out in the world again,” Jane admitted to Eleanor.

  Yet, on the subject of “the world”—and what it was, and when it was time for a widow to re-enter it safely—the red and blue air mattress offered only a cautionary word: “Zzzt!”

  Allan at Fifty-Four

  Ruth had read aloud in a deadpan voice. Some of the audience seemed disconcerted by her final “Zzzt!” Eddie, who’d read the whole book twice, loved the ending of the first chapter, but a portion of the audience briefly withheld their applause; they weren’t sure the chapter had ended. The stupid stagehand stared open-mouthed at the TV monitor, as if he were preparing himself to deliver an epilogue. Not a single word was forthcoming—not even another charmless comment regarding his tireless appreciation of the famous novelist’s “hooters.”

  It was Allan Albright who clapped first, even before Eddie. As Ruth Cole’s editor, Allan well knew the 2“Zzzt!” with which the first chapter concluded. The applause that eventually followed was generous, and it was sufficiently sustained for Ruth to appraise the solitary ice cube in the bottom of her water glass. The ice had melted enough to provide her with a single swallow.

  The questions and answers that followed the reading were a disappointment; Eddie felt bad for Ruth that, after an entertaining performance, she had to suffer through the anticlimax that questions from the audience always engendered. And throughout the entire Q and A, Allan Albright had frowned at Ruth—as if she could have done something to elevate the intelligence of the questions! During her reading, Allan’s animated expressions in the audience had irritated her—as if it were his role to entertain Ruth at her own reading!

  The first question was openly hostile; it set a tone that the subsequent questions and answers could not break free of.

  “Why do you repeat yourself ?” a young man asked the author. “Or is it unintentional?”

  Ruth judged him to be in his late twenties. Admittedly, the houselights were not bright enough for her to see his exact expression—he was seated near the back of the concert hall—but from his tone of voice Ruth had no doubt that he was sneering at her.

  After three novels, Ruth was familiar with the charge that her characters were “recycled” from one book to the next, and that there were also “signature eccentricities” that she repeated in novel after novel. I suppose I do develop a fairly limited cast of characters, Ruth considered. But, in her experience, people who accused an author of repetition were usually referring to a detail that they hadn’t liked
the first time. After all, even in literature, if one likes something, what is the objection to repeating it?

  “I assume you mean the dildo,” Ruth said to the accusing young man. There had been a dildo in her second novel, too. But no dildo had reared its head (so to speak) in her first novel—doubtless an oversight, Ruth thought to herself. What she said was: “I know that many of you young men feel threatened by dildos, but you really needn’t worry that you’ll ever be entirely replaced.” She paused for the laughter. Then she added: “And this dildo is really not at all the same type of dildo as the dildo in my previous novel. Not every dildo is the same, you know.”

  “You repeat more than dildos,” the young man commented.

  “Yes, I know—‘female friendships gone awry,’ or lost and found again,” Ruth remarked, realizing (only after she spoke) that she was quoting from Eddie O’Hare’s tedious introduction. Backstage, Eddie at first felt awfully pleased; then he wondered if she’d been mocking him.

  “Bad boyfriends,” the persistent young man added. (Now there was a theme!)

  “The boyfriend in The Same Orphanage was a decent guy,” Ruth reminded her antagonistic reader.

  “No mothers!” shouted an older woman in the audience.

  “No fathers, either,” Ruth snapped.

  Allan Albright was holding his head in his hands. He had advised her against Q and A. He’d told her that if she couldn’t let a hostile or a baiting remark go—if she couldn’t just “let it lie”—she should not do Q and A. And she shouldn’t be “so ready to bite back.”

  “But I like to bite back,” Ruth had told him.

  “But you shouldn’t bite back the first time, or even the second,” Allan had warned her. His motto was: “Be nice twice.” On principle, Ruth approved of the idea, but she found it hard advice to follow.