PS: Please, don’t be shorter than me.
Chapter Seven
Finders Keepers
Like all the most cliché and annoying love stories and love songs, your smug coupled friends like to say “I found him when I wasn’t looking.” I didn’t even really find him, if you want to know the even more cliché, more annoying truth. He was handed to me on a silver platter: a brand-new love, handpicked for me by my friend Moe, the cofounder of the Hot Young Widows Club and the only friend qualified to vet the next great love of my life.
It was fall. The same season when I’d met Aaron, and when I’d lost him. But fall includes a veritable laundry list of anniversaries tied to Aaron’s love, sickness, and death. They are as follows:
October 21, 2010: When I met Aaron
November 3, 2010: Our first date
November 3, 2011: Aaron’s first brain surgery
November 30, 2011: Aaron’s first day of radiation
December 3, 2011: Our wedding
November 25, 2014: Aaron’s death
December 3, 2014: Aaron’s funeral
I don’t need any of these dates marked in my calendar to remember them—though they are listed in all my Google calendars anyway. Before these anniversaries show up as calendar reminders, my body remembers them. I’ll wake up stiff and aching, my body bracing itself for what happened years ago on that day. Even if my brain were wiped clean, my muscles, my organs, and especially my heart would always remember. Even if I’d been kept in a locked room without access to a calendar, I’d have known that Aaron’s deathaversary was growing near. Your mind can try its best to forget, to avoid, but the body remembers. As our son jumped in piles of leaves and the Minnesota air started to chill, I could feel myself growing harder. My shoulders found a resting place right next to my ears. I woke up with an aching jaw, having bitten holes into my retainer as I slept. My eyeballs pulsed in my head all day long, and my heart raced. My grief had so many layers that it had become an exoskeleton. It was a hard, crusty emotional shell that only I could see. It was ugly, but oddly comfortable, and I had pretty much planned on spending the rest of my life in it.
By early November, the dread had filled me completely, and was spilling out in very productive ways. For example, by spending the better part of a week inside, hunched over my computer, arguing with idiots on the internet. I was able to convincingly act as if this was indeed the best use of my time, and that it wasn’t just a misdirected way of working through my inner emotional turmoil. My little brother, sensing that I may not be providing the most wonderful home environment for my toddler at that moment, invited Ralph to sleep over at his house up the street, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my rage and my laptop, giving me all the space I could need to dig into some online comments and educate Greg H. from Burnsville, Minnesota, on rape culture. I tucked in for a super-chill Saturday night.
Instead, my friend Moe asked me to come over and burn some things in her backyard, and because I never grew out of the pyro phase of my childhood, where my cousins and I would spend family gatherings around the votive tabletop candles, melting plastic forks into small sculptures, I said yes. And even though Moe has seen me at my worst both emotionally and physically, I put on mascara and changed into pants with a zipper. I drove to her house in Saint Paul, where the bonfire “party” she promised turned out to be me, Moe, and our friend Kevin sitting around a fire and drinking boxed wine. I was relieved. Parties are stressful and interacting with more than a few people at a time had become impossible for me since Aaron died. Aaron was always the life of the party, adept at navigating any social situation. I hung on to him like a barnacle. Without a very social whale to cling to, a barnacle is hard to bring to a party.
As far as a night out goes for me, it was great. I was out in public (sort of). I got to burn things, which, as I’ve previously noted, is something I enjoy. I didn’t have to mess with a wine opener. And then, the back gate swung open and another person joined our party. He was dark-haired and beardy and wearing a hoodie underneath a nylon jacket, a combination that made him look like an adult toddler. I thought “Well, the party’s over. Now I have to pretend to know a new person’s name after I’m introduced to him.” I smiled like I imagined a normal person would do in a social situation, and he walked over to take his place at the open chair beside me. I didn’t really get a chance to catch his name, because when he sat down to introduce himself, the cheap plastic Adirondack chair he’d chosen collapsed, and all I heard was his scream as his feet flew through the air and a trail of airborne wine illuminated by the firelight followed the arc of his New Balance. Just as his body made contact with the frozen Minnesota earth, I felt a small crack in my exoskeleton, just big enough for an explosive round of uncontrollable laughter to sneak out. I hadn’t laughed in so long that I couldn’t remember how it worked, but it seemed like the best way to do it was loudly and while pointing at him as he scrambled back to his feet. I couldn’t stop once the action began. Moe went inside with whatshisface, and Kevin, who had helped this guy up, giggled along with me for a few moments before regaining his composure. I had no composure. None. Even writing this now, I am giggling alone to myself while I imagine it happening all over again.
Do I always laugh when people fall? Yes. No. Sometimes! Slapstick humor is truly my favorite kind, and as a preternaturally clumsy person, it’s usually myself that I’m laughing at. I’d been so self-contained for so long, so careful to keep my grief in check, that I’d kept everything in check. There were a few ways to let things out: rage (which the internet was great for), sex (which had already ruined a few lives), and laughter, which was harder to come by than even sex. This moment, spontaneous and strange, sparked something in me. It was an unscripted moment, so out of tune with the usual drudgery of faking it through my grief that I didn’t have time to think, I just reacted. I reacted a lot. It was joy that I was experiencing—yes, at this stranger’s expense—and it was so sweet I was drunk on it. I was also drunk on wine, and even though Kevin had tried several times to move the conversation forward, and asked me politely to stop laughing, I could not. I laughed until my ribs hurt, until I thought I was going to pass out, throw up, or die. I laughed even when this guy returned from Moe’s kitchen, all cleaned up and with a fresh glass of wine. My laughter made him laugh, which made me laugh, which made Moe laugh, which made me laugh more. He righted his chair and tried again. “I’m Matthew,” he said, “and I don’t know how chairs work.”
For weeks, Moe had been insisting that I should meet her friend. Moe and I have different taste in everything. We do not shop in the same sections for clothing or for men. “He’s different from my other friends,” she kept insisting, “he’s a professional.” A professional what? She couldn’t say. But she knew he had a job! In an office! Downtown! And as enticing as that was, I said no, because, as I explained earlier, I was very busy playing the role of Nora the Internet Dummy Slayer and “a guy with a job” wasn’t the best sales pitch I’d ever heard.
In an unexpected turn of events, I spent the rest of the night getting to know the professional friend I had no interest in meeting. He was the guy dressed like a giant toddler, falling out of his chair and spilling wine on himself. He was the guy who didn’t seem to mind when I looked at him and burst into laughter, just remembering that he had fallen out of his chair earlier in the night. When the fire was outmatched by the wind chill we moved our party of four inside, and this man and I sat next to each other on a love seat (foreshadowing!!!).
His name was Matthew. His eyes were so giant and blue they looked like cartoon eyeballs. He listened intently to Moe and me while we talked about our dead husbands and our young sons and he laughed at all the right times. At some point, I realized I was being rude and hogging the conversation and I asked him something like, “So, what’s up with you?” He seemed startled, like he’d never been asked to talk about himself, and he told me that he was a divorced dad. He had a fourteen-year-old son. A nine-year-old daughte
r. He’d been separated for five years. I was . . . fascinated. Moe and I have stories that are tragic—her husband died by suicide, mine by cancer—but divorce seemed like a whole different league of emotional suffering, and I had questions. Lots of questions.
Like, “What happened?”
“Then what happened?”
“Then what happened?”
“Oh my GOD; then what happened?”
“Are you SERIOUS?”
He patiently answered all of them, and when my knee brushed his, he moved it immediately like he was a dried-out forest and I was made of pure fire. I figured it must have been a mistake, and tried again. He moved. Okay, I thought, he isn’t interested. Yet.
By 10:30 (which is the latest any social gathering should ever go), we walked out of Moe’s house together and to our cars, where we waved good-bye like doofuses until he drove away. I immediately set about trying to find him on Facebook. I knew only his first name—Matthew—which was the fifth most popular boys name in the late seventies, and the fact that he was friends with Moe. I also knew that he was handsome and sweet and honest and not self-conscious and that I would like to have sex with him and possibly even go on a date with him, too, but those were not search criteria I could enter into Facebook.
While my car heated up, I peeled off the bandages on my brand-new tattoos, two small hearts traced from doodles that my late husband Aaron had left on Post-it notes for me during our marriage. Earlier that day, I’d had one permanently etched on each wrist: one facing toward me, and the other away. I’d gotten them on a whim, after snagging a walk-in appointment with the very popular Minneapolis tattoo artist Charlie Forbes, so they symbolize that I am an impulsive person. They also symbolize what I hope to do with the love I learned about from Aaron: give it to others, and to myself. To treat it like a renewable resource and not like Aaron had died and taken the secret recipe with him.
I resisted the urge to scratch my itchy new tattoos and scrolled through all of Moe’s friends until I thought I’d found the right Matthew. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, since he didn’t have many public photos, but his profile photo was a portrait drawn in crayon that bore a striking resemblance to the bearded man I’d just met. I wrote a message:
“I think you’re cute and funny and you should ask me out sometime.”
I waited. I drove home. I brushed my teeth. I waited. I went to sleep. I woke up eight hours later convinced I’d messaged the wrong Matthew. I waited some more, until late that afternoon, my phone vibrated. A reply! I had found the right Matthew. He would love to go out sometime. Numbers were exchanged. A new contact added to my phone.
First name: Matthew
Last name: <3.
Chapter Eight
In Between
We spent a lot of time in the car that first year. Our lives were confined to a pretty small circle in Minneapolis, but I found ways to extend our car trips anyway. We didn’t just go to the grocery store, we went to the grocery store on the other side of town, the specialty one that had only twenty percent of what we actually needed. Bonus—it was close enough to a few other grocery stores, which meant more time in the car. I’d happily meet friends for brunch wherever was convenient for them. I’d roll onto the freeway just in time for rush hour to start. I was comfortable being on the move, between places, on my way to somewhere, but not quite there yet.
In this period, my entire life was in between. I was heading somewhere but wasn’t quite there yet. After Aaron died, I quit my job and decided I would do . . . something else. While this sounds like a very brave choice that I made as an empowered woman, it was more like my job needed me to come back now, and I couldn’t do that, and so we parted ways in a way that felt mutual but was definitely more like getting dumped by a really polite guy who doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. I freelanced and worked on a book. I wasn’t a writer quite yet, but I didn’t exactly work in advertising anymore, either. I was in between careers.
Ralph and I spent the immediate months after Aaron died living out of a suitcase, flying back and forth across the country to visit friends and family. We’d travel on one-way tickets, so as not to get trapped into a particular itinerary. We’d overstay our welcome in guest rooms and guesthouses. We’d go back to Minneapolis for a few days at a time, only to check our mail and pack some new clothes. We were in between homes.
Our actual house was mostly empty, so I decided to rent it out to friends. I started using my mother’s house as our pied-à-terre. We hurriedly packed up the essentials in a few suitcases and boxes, leaving the rest behind for our friends to use. We moved in with my mother on the other side of Minneapolis. Theoretically, this seemed like a great plan: my mom and I would help one another out, and Ralph would have the benefit of a two-grown-up household. In practice, my mom and I were like two strangers who had found each other on Craigslist and agreed to share a home just to cut down on our expenses. I was technically a grown-up and a mom, but I also got into heated arguments with my mother over unloading the dishwasher and putting my shoes away. I was in between teenager and adult.
This wasn’t permanent, I knew, but after four months of this return to adolescence, it was too comfortable to be comfortable. My mom and I fell into the best imitation of our typical mother-daughter pattern. If this wasn’t permanent—and it couldn’t be—then what was the plan? You can’t be in between forever.
I am a Realtor’s dream: I don’t know where I want to live, or what kind of space I want. I’d categorize this as “very open minded” but my Realtor, Dave, indicated that it was a cross between “irritating” and “infuriating.” I don’t know why. I’d told him very clearly that I was interested in a small bungalow; a Victorian with a big porch; a spare, modern condo; or something mid-century. I was also open to empty lots available for building on, foreclosures and fixer-uppers, maybe an old commercial building that could be re-zoned as residential, and that I’d like the place to be in turn-key condition and ready to move into ASAP. My access to HGTV at my mother’s house had made me the most insufferable kind of guest on House Hunters, the kind of person who insists that they need space for entertaining and seven bedrooms, who has to have the granite countertop and the apron sink, who wants character but only the kind of character that looks good on Pinterest. My Realtor is also my brother’s father-in-law, so the more I strained him, the more I strained several other relationships within my family. Because my dad was dead, Dave also had to be my stand-in father figure. He had everything a dad should have: a mustache, a deep bench of Dad Jokes for every occasion, and strong opinions about every home that came across during our MLS searches.
“Why don’t you consider renting?” Dave said after I rejected about fifteen potential houses based on the fact that none of them had a fireplace, which had not previously been on my must-have list of criteria. I refused. Rent? I was already renting! I mean, I didn’t pay my mother any money, but she was essentially my landlord. Renting was just another form of in between, a semicolon where I needed a period. I needed Ralph to feel like we had a spot in this world that was really ours, a place to call our own. A place to come home to. I knew that what I was doing, by constantly moving, was avoiding putting roots down in the fear that they wouldn’t take hold. Or that they would, and I’d get chopped down again.
We started our search in downtown Minneapolis, the land of shiny condos and warehouses converted into loft spaces. A condo would be perfect for us, I had decided. No lawn for me to mow, and no snow for me to shovel. Underground parking during the bitter Minnesota winters, and plenty of security. Ralph could ride his bike on the polished concrete floors, and we’d spend our Saturday mornings walking to the local cafe for doughnuts and hot chocolate. We didn’t need much space. It was just the two of us after all.
When I was in fifth grade, I begged my parents to buy me a hermit crab. It was a gross request, but they honored it, and soon I was the happy owner of a sad crustacean that had no business living in Minnesota. The pet store had reco
mmended we buy some extra shells for it, so it could move into something bigger as it grew. We didn’t get any extra shells, because they cost money, and eventually my hermit crab died of mysterious causes. I couldn’t tell you what did him (her?) in, but I can tell you that when I looked at these sleek, small condos, something inside of me said “no.”
It wasn’t just the association fees—although, what the actual hell, those are like a second mortgage payment—it was the clear vision of what my life with Ralph would look like living in a place like that. A two-bedroom condo was enough room for just Ralph and me. We were a good team with a good life together, but we weren’t built to be a duo. Aaron and I had planned on more children. The exact number was never officially agreed upon, but my goal was four. Four was a nice even number that would give Ralph the same number of siblings that I had. Four is chaos in childhood and comfort as an adult. I needed to give us what I hadn’t given to my hermit crab, may it Rest in Peace: a space big enough to grow into. A space to thrive. A space that was bigger than a condo.
So we moved on down the checklist to the million other combinations I was open to, driving to what seemed like a million open houses. Dave was infinitely patient.
“Before we get too far down the path,” Dave said in his Professional Voice, “let’s get you pre-approved for a mortgage.”
Pre-approval sounds fun. Maybe because it has my favorite word in it? I love approval. I seek it from basically any and everyone. Being pre-approved sounded like there was even more approval on the horizon, and this was just a formality: a way for the bank to look me up and down and say, “Yep, we like what we see, come on back in a few weeks for some more affirmations and validations.” Unfortunately, the bank did not like what they saw. They didn’t see the brave, recently widowed woman who was pursuing her dream of being a writer and who was totally, one hundred percent going to succeed. What they saw was an unemployed widow trying to buy a house without a solid, steady income. Both were accurate ways of looking at me, but I preferred the first view.
No Happy Endings Page 5