Saturday Night Widows (13 page)

Lauren worked overtime to make us comfortable in her family dining room, her husband banished to the multiplex for the night. She presided at the head of a long, formal table set as if for a state dinner, with pink roses and crystal candlesticks. Denise chose a chair at the opposite end, as far away as possible, and the rest of us settled along the sides.

Lesley was even more animated than usual, flush with the pleasure of having a new man under her roof again, and while the ostensible topic for the night was food, she couldn’t resist the far more enticing subject that filled her thoughts. “I’m a homemaker,” she chatted up Lauren as we began the meal. “That’s what my job is, and I love my job. But after my husband died, I stopped cooking.
Now that I’ve met somebody else, I’ve been able to experience being in love again in a different way, and I’m cooking again. I’ve found that part of me again.” She radiated such happiness—sitting across from her, I lapped it up.

Caring for a family, Lesley had told me, was her life—her vocation and her joy. I wasn’t surprised that she wanted to fill her new house and feed that part of her again. “This is what I do,” she said to us. “This is what I do well. It would be a shame to waste it.”

Lauren warmed to parallels between cooking and romance. “Cooking is a connective sport,” she said. “There are not many things in this world that you make with your own hands and ask somebody to put into their mouth, roll it around, and swallow. How many things are there? That are that intimate?”

Lesley nodded. “This guy thinks I’m so much sexier when I cook for him,” she said.

“That’s because of what you’re thinking about when you’re doing all that cooking,” said Dawn. They grinned at each other like co-conspirators.

“It’s such a gratifying thing. I did it for twenty-seven years, because I loved it and my family enjoyed it. But now, the second time around, the pleasure, the intimacy …”

“You lost it and now you’re getting it back,” said Dawn.

I knew when I started the group that some of our members might fall in love, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. I peered around the table to assess how the others were taking the news. Clearly, Dawn was as glad for Lesley as I was. Marcia, inscrutable as ever, was harder to read, and Denise, nearly lost at the distant end—I wondered where this development would leave her.

Lesley’s fast-moving love life underscored for me how everyone
here was at a different juncture, how there were disparities that could make us root for each other or allow jealousies or resentments to intrude. My plans for this particular Saturday night had been motivated by the connection between food and comfort, but I’d overlooked that there was a flip side to this connection, too. Food shared and food unshared were two entirely different meals. There were those of us who had someone to share their tables—Dawn with her children, for example, and now Lesley with her new love—and those who did not.

“I really am enjoying cooking the second time around,” Lesley chattered on. Her husband, like her, had been South African, she said, and South African men, at least back when she got married, tended to expect home-cooked meals from their women. “Now I’m with an American man—he’s never seen anything like this. Seriously, I can cook
nothing
and he thinks it’s fabulous.”

Dawn and I laughed heartily. Dawn’s husband had been South African, too, as it happened, so she understood the different mentality. Marcia chuckled, and Denise executed one of her careful smiles.

Thinking of Denise, I asked Lesley how she had felt about food in the early days of her loss, in the more uncertain state where Denise still resided.

“I didn’t even want food in my house, and I sure didn’t want to cook,” Lesley said. At first she lost a ton of weight. But then she and her girls sank into the big, soft living room couch for what seemed like weeks, while their Jewish friends carted in copious provisions every day. Lesley called it the Sitting Shiva Weight-Gain Program. She never changed out of a pair of sloppy sweatpants.

“Then one day I woke up and said, ‘The dryer is shrinking my
underwear!’ I couldn’t understand it. Because of those sweatpants, I had no clue that my waist was widening and my panties just didn’t fit anymore.”

That got the rest of us talking about our own experiences with eating or not eating, the changes wrought on our bodies by the physical impact of grief.

“I had lived a traditional Manhattan life where you go out to dinner all the time,” Marcia said. “Or my husband made food and I’d eat when I got home. So nothing has changed.”

“Except that now you’re eating alone,” I said. “The social element is gone. When I started eating alone, I read a magazine to keep from going bonkers with boredom.” For two decades, dinner had been the time to talk over the day with someone who cared about my take on the Iowa caucuses or the new Terrence McNally play. Bernie’s empty chair mocked me with an indifference that all the come-ons in
Condé Nast Traveler
couldn’t dispel.

“Read a magazine, that’s what
I
do,” said Denise, taking an interest.

“I eat in front of the television,” said Marcia. “The news, whatever. I don’t even use my dining table.” I envisioned her alone in the apartment that she found so small and isolating, grimly absorbing updates from the Weather Channel. “I don’t even
like
to watch TV.”

“It’s company,” said Lesley. “It’s the jibber-jabber in the background.”

“I fall asleep with the radio on now,” said Denise. “If I fall asleep, that is, which I don’t. I can’t sleep, and I can’t eat. I’ve lost twenty-seven pounds in the last six months.”

We gasped. I’d been attributing Denise’s all-yoga-wear fashion choices to her all-yoga fitness regimen. Now I realized that the
stretchy gear was low-maintenance camouflage, like those sweatpants of Lesley’s. I should have known. In the first months after Bernie’s death, I switched to nothing but dresses after a pair of pants dropped right off my bony hips. Food tasted like ashes to me then. I needed big glasses of water to flush it down my throat.

Dawn told us that she had lost weight, too, but food was re-emerging now as a source of pleasure. “The widower I just met is a good cook,” she said. “We met at a sports program where I take my children. He says I should come over to his house and bring the kids, and he’ll make dinner for us.” She turned the color of the tomato salsa she was spooning onto her lamb chops. Lesley clapped and made little fox terrier sounds.

“A widower!” I said, as if she’d drawn four aces. “I always thought it would be nice to meet a widower, somebody who understands what we’re going through.”

“I dated a divorced guy before this,” Dawn said. “He said that in some ways I was better off than he was. I don’t want to say it’s better, but it
is
different. We don’t have to deal with the ex—who’s got the kids, who got the house, all the stuff that people get so worked up about.”

“We have all kinds of roiled-up emotions, but they aren’t angry emotions,” I said.

“I hope never to know what a divorce is like,” said Dawn. “I’m sure it’s horrible. But when you’ve gone through what we have, it’s hard to tolerate people who are caught up in pettiness. You want to say, ‘You know, you could die tomorrow.’ ”

“Nobody else looks at things like us,” said Lesley.

“It’s funny …” Dawn said. She often started sentences with “It’s funny.” Like Denise’s smile, I noticed, the phrase often preceded a
sentiment that was anything but. “It’s funny, this widower’s wife died nine years ago in an accident, when their kids were toddlers, a boy and a girl. When he said that to me, it took my breath away.” She made a horrified face and quickly shook her head to fend off the memory. “Now I can relate to how people react when I tell them about me. I’ve never been on the other side like that.”

We all nodded. We’d all seen the look. We knew our power to strike the fear of early death into everyone we met.

“I met a widower, also.” Denise resurfaced at the far end of the table, where she had been picking here and there at her dinner.

“Woo-hoo.” Lesley nearly jumped out of her chair like a kid who’s opened a present, her eyes and lips forming perfect circles.

“Completely, completely randomly,” Denise added quickly. The peculiar smile had washed off her face, and she looked pleased, in a careful and tentative way. She was supposed to meet a friend who never showed up at a restaurant, Denise said, so to kill time, she started speaking to a man at the next table. “His wife died four years ago. He has a twelve-year-old daughter. He loves to bring me groceries every day.” She glanced around the table, almost sheepish. “Nothing has happened between us, but he brings me groceries every day.”

“I’m liking this twist,” Dawn said, grinning.

“He’s worried that I don’t eat.”

We had met only a month ago, and already more was going on with this crew than with all my other friends combined. Lesley had moved Craig into her new house; Dawn had found a promising widower; and now Denise, fragile Denise, had met someone who brought her groceries every day.

“He’s not being pushy. Or being sexual.”

“As a widower, I suppose he knows what it’s like,” I said, feeling protective. “Sex may be too much to handle right now.”

“I didn’t ask for this,” Denise said, half apologetically. But still she looked half pleased, maybe a little more than half.

The widower and his groceries reminded me of Denise’s first encounters with her husband, Steve, how he had cared for her when she was sick and fixed her faulty wiring. Denise was projecting a quality of wanting to be cared for again, and why not? She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t escape the pressures of money and work. Plenty of faulty wiring to fix, more than ever before. This widower of hers sounded nurturing and caring. He brought her stinky, runny cheeses and Kalamata olives and crusty baguettes, tempting snacks, because he knew she didn’t want normal meals.

“That’s really good,” said Dawn. “Take it slow.”

Could it be that Denise had achieved what many a widow dreams of, finding a simpatico man, a no-pressure man who could fill some of the emptiness so that she didn’t have to endure a protracted span alone? Could she even cope with it now if she did? Hard to say.

I couldn’t help worrying about her. “Why are you still losing so much weight?” I asked.

She performed one of those seismic mental shifts I’d seen her make before, lost in her thoughts while we waited for a reply. The widower and his groceries were forgotten.

“I always used to cook for Steve,” she said finally, driftily. Then she took a detour into another story about food and the weight it can bring to bear on a psyche. It was a couple of months after Steve died. A friend, going through a divorce, was staying with her, and the atmosphere in the apartment was heavy with doom. How to
dispel it? The friend had a magnanimous idea. She’d roast Denise a chicken. It would be ready by the time she got home.

Denise took one look at that succulent bird and broke into tears. The aroma of rich melting fat mingled with lemon and garlic, so reminiscent of candlelit Sunday dinners, hit her with a force that shattered all of her carefully cultivated poise.

“That was the last thing I made for Steve before he died,” she gulped.

Denise smiled again, that mirthless smile that I had come to know, the smile with the pleading eyes, only this time tears poured down her cheeks. Instead of wiping them away, she sat at the end of the table with her perfect posture, hands folded in her lap, smiling, the tears flowing, unashamed.

“I can never eat roast chicken again,” she insisted.

I couldn’t think of a thing to do to stanch the tears. The others held their tongues, too, until Lesley, bless her, blew past the awkwardness with a story of her own. It wasn’t going to be another one of her funny stories—that was apparent in the forthright set of her face.

She borrowed Dawn’s “it’s funny” phrase. “It’s funny,” Lesley said, her voice at a low and even pitch, “we all have these things. The day Kevin died he knew I had an appointment for a facial. Now, I was always at home, never on any particular schedule, so he could never know when I wouldn’t be there. But he knew I had this appointment, and that I’d be out for an hour.”

Before she left, she asked him what he would like for lunch. She was the homemaker. That was her job. A Subway sandwich, he said. That meant Lesley would take some extra time after her appointment to stop by the Subway shop.

“So I got the Subway, and when I came back, he had taken his life.”

Unlike Denise, Lesley didn’t smile. She was setting an example again: Tell your story. Don’t let it rattle you. “I can never eat Subway now. It’s like your roast chicken.”

Dawn followed Lesley’s lead, seeking a way to show Denise that she had more company in her distress. “I’m trying to think if I can associate anything like that,” she said, casting about in her mind. “Not food, because we were apart when Andries died. But I’m thinking about a song. I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike a few months ago, or I thought I was, and suddenly I realized I was on the wrong road.” Her voice rose unintentionally, more forceful and slightly shrill. “I didn’t know how that happened. I saw a sign that said Route 301. Where was I? What was I doing there?” Dawn threw her whole body into the story, lots of hand gestures—operatic. “And this song came on the radio, a John Denver song, ‘Country Roads,’ which Andries always liked. ‘Country roads, take me home to the place I belong, West Virginia …’ And that’s where Andries died.”

Dawn hit the dial. She pulled off the road, stopped the car with a jerk. “All I could do was say, ‘
Oh my God. He’s really not coming back.
’ ”

Everyone at the table stiffened. Recognition. And triggers, those simple, familiar sights and sounds and tastes and smells that spark feelings sharper than any in the sensory world. For Marcia, they included an Italian restaurant that she passed almost every day. For me, there was the briny tang of freshly shucked oysters.

“It’s a shame when you associate something you enjoy, like a food or a song, with a person who is gone and you feel you have to
give it up,” I said. “I loved eating oysters with Bernie, but if I didn’t force myself to eat them now, I’d never get to have one again. What would that accomplish? But it took me a while. I felt too guilty doing things without him that he used to enjoy.”