But then Susanna said, “No rush. We’ll wait. But when you’re ready, we’ll all come there together. Oh, sweetheart, we’ll have such a good time. Maybe it’s a function of age, maybe it’s the scary political climate, but more and more we’re talking about how necessary it is to tell people you love them, how important it is to keep in touch. And you meant a lot to us. We all used to fit so well together! And the three of us have had such a good time over all these years. Did Lorraine tell you about the concerts?”
“No.”
“Well, we go to them at least once a year, we go to all the Stones concerts—Mick is just cadaverous, worse than in photos. We saw Leonard Cohen, who depressed the hell out of us, and we saw Joni—what a great jazz vocalist she is now, isn’t she? She’s aged so much—although what she said about happiness being the best face-lift? Is that not our girl? Is that not just the most beautiful, soulful, wise thing? Of course, it’s not true. Oh, well, we’re all ancient now, except Lorraine, of course, who is eternally beautiful, mostly due to her biweekly visits to the plastic surgeon. Our next trip will probably be to the arthritis spa—do you have it yet, arthritis? I do, and my fingers in the morning! That over-the-counter thing helps, chondroitin. And it’s natural. Oh God. Listen to me. Did you ever imagine talking about such things? I’m telling you, though, Maddy and I are suddenly beset with these health worries. Chest pains, memory loss. Maddy called the other day and said, ‘Okay. Today it’s not only Alzheimer’s, it’s that I’m riddled with cancer. Six months, tops.’ ” She started to laugh, then stopped abruptly. “Oh, Betta. I’m so sorry. I just meant—”
“I know what you mean. Before John got sick, we did the same thing. I remember him once . . . well. We did the same thing.” I sighed, quietly, thinking of John once turning away from the bathroom mirror and a mole he’d just found on his chest to say, “I’ll be right back. I’m just going to run over to the lawyer’s and put my affairs in order.” And I’d said, “Closed casket or open?”
“I guess I’m a little nervous,” Susanna said. “I’m just going on.”
“It’s okay.”
An awkward silence, and then I said, “We will find a time to get together, Suse. I’ll call you. I’ll call everybody—we’ll set a date.”
“Good. Did Lorraine give you Maddy’s number?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s Lorraine for you. She’s in first place and everyone else is in last. If I didn’t love her so much, I’d . . . love her anyway. Here’s the number.”
After I hung up the phone, I moved to the kitchen table and sat quietly for a while, thinking about calling Maddy. Not yet. Then I thought about calling back the man who’d left the message, but decided against that, too. Outside, it had begun to snow: tiny flakes that made it look like the earth was being salted. Tomorrow I would need to buy a new shovel—the one John had used was too heavy for me. He’d appreciated hard manual labor, saying he liked to do work that was outside his head, for a change. I liked reading a good novel while he cleared the walks, popping up every now and then to look out the window and see how he was progressing. That was my contribution. Of course, I had reciprocated—bringing him dinner on a tray when the Sox were playing an important game. Sewing on buttons for him. Finding things he insisted weren’t there when they were actually right before him. I wasn’t sure Lorraine and others like her—ones who were so despairing of marriage, ones who were so sure their expectations could never be met—understood that it was these small moments of caretaking that meant the most, that forged the real relationship. The way one pulled the blankets over the sleeping other, the way one prepared a snack for oneself but made enough to share. Such moments made for the team of two, which made for one’s sword and shield.
I took a long, hot bath, turned down the bed linens, sprayed them with lavender water, plumped my pillows just so, and put Erik Satie’s After the Rain on the CD player. Then I sat at the edge of the bed, wondering about the advisability of what I was about to do. Finally, from the top drawer of my nightstand, I pulled out the package of photographs and slid out the picture on top.
Disappointingly, it was not of John; but it was John who’d taken it—as soon as I saw the image, I remembered vividly that mild spring day we’d spent in a small town in France. Soon after we left the hotel, my back had begun hurting from carrying my overstuffed purse, and John had taken it from me and slung it over his shoulder, never mind its floral motif, he was man enough to not worry about that. This he did without a word, of course, in spite of the fact that he had warned me against carrying so many things. We’d had a lunch of fish and salad and little red potatoes drenched in butter and glorified with parsley, and it had been delicious. Before bed that night, we’d tuned the radio to a classical station, flung open the tall shuttered doors that led to the balcony of our hotel, and lain together looking out at the stars, talking about how, when you were in a foreign country, the stars seemed foreign, too. Yes, there was the Big Dipper, but it was the French Big Dipper. Le Dipper Français, John called it. And something else, this quick flash of memory: I remembered standing naked before the minibar, looking for chocolate for a late-night dessert, and triumphantly pulling out a candy bar. “Sneekairs!” John had said.
But that afternoon John had taken a picture of two men standing together at the railing of a stone bridge. They were dressed alike and casually: tan pants, knit shirts, light jackets, and porkpie hats. One had his hands clasped before him; the other held on to the rail of the bridge with one hand and with the other held a red heart-shaped balloon on a short string. The men were perhaps in their mid-sixties and not what you would call attractive. But they’d stood with a heart-shaped balloon, and I believed they were looking for love.
What, I wondered, would I do, when I felt ready to look for love again? Stand outside with my own red balloon? Would I begin to date—ludicrous word, at my age—and go through the excruciating process of sharing personal histories? It was exhausting to even think about: I was born in, I was an only child, I worked as, I voted for, blah blah blah. A newly divorced friend of mine named Peggy had told me about calling an upscale dating service. She had asked about how the service worked, and the woman who’d answered the phone told her with immoderate good cheer that it was a fail-safe operation: The agency, after taking your thousand (!) dollars, put your picture and bio in a book and made a little video of you. The men chose what women they wanted to meet, and the women chose what men. Unless you chose each other, you didn’t meet. Then the woman had said to Peggy, “So! Now that I’ve told you about us, let’s talk about you. How old are you?” “I’m fifty,” Peggy had said, and there was silence on the line. Then the agency woman had rushed to fill it, saying, “Okay, well, I just have to tell you that most of our clients are in their thirties. But new people call every day, just as you did!” Peggy had hung up, stared out the window for a while, and gone to the library, where she checked out an armful of fat novels and a book called How to Fix Everything—no irony intended. “I’m better off anyway,” she’d said. “Can you imagine the indignity of breaking up at this age?”
I knew it wasn’t completely hopeless; I knew people met and fell in love in later years. But as to what a decent relationship might progress to, how could I ever sleep with someone else? Yet I didn’t want that part of my life to be over. Bad enough to never have had children. What if I never again had a sex partner? Soon after we’d first met, John had told me, “You’re a hot-blooded woman, Betta.” I’d answered, “Yes. That’s for you, you hot-blooded man.” What if I never again enjoyed that particular pleasure?
Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible. Maybe I would simply grow used to it. There were other things I could still do to add spice to my life. Travel, for one—John and I had never gotten to Greece. Or to China. Or Africa. Or Alaska. I took a pen and paper from the drawer—perhaps it would be good to make a list of ideas for things to do, and cross them off as I did them. It would keep me focused and looking forward to the future; i
t would lessen my anxiety. In times of despair, it would be good to have a whole list of possibilities I might refer to.
I leaned against the pillows and rested the pad of paper on my knees. I tapped the pen against my teeth, thinking. And thinking. Finally, I put the pen and paper away. The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen. But trips? No. Without John, no. For now, only raspberries, only cream. Only books waiting at the bedside. Only the worn flannel of my favorite pajamas. Everything else was just too big. I recalled a message I’d seen on an online widow support group, emphasizing that there was no true timetable—people had to honor their own needs and their own methods. One woman had written in saying she felt fine after three weeks, was something wrong with her? Another said it had been three years and still she felt immobilized by pain.
I turned out the light, slid down flat under the covers, and closed my eyes. It was Sunday night, the part of the week that used to make John melancholy. Well, as melancholy as he got, which was not really melancholy at all. People who didn’t know him well wouldn’t have been able to see the difference in him, but I could. It manifested as a kind of distractedness—his mind was being pulled toward the patients he would see the next day. He had to leave behind Sunday before it was through, and this always made him a little sad. His hands stayed too much in his pockets; his head hung lower than usual. His smile was close-mouthed, and anytime he embraced me, on those days, he’d make a tiny, side-to-side rocking motion he did not otherwise make, a movement of consolation meant for both of us. Goodbye to the lovely leisure of the newspaper in bed on Sunday morning, of homemade scones and coffee served on TV trays as we watched the political shows with their blustering and defensive guests, they with their sweating, bald heads, their unironic thick-rimmed black eyeglasses.
When evening came, we went out for dinner, always sushi on Sunday nights, and always he made a toast to what he called our continuing honeymoon. He was such a sweet romantic. His notes on scraps of paper left on the kitchen table. His washing my back in the tub, kissing my forehead on completion, and then saying, “There’s more where that came from. Come and let me dry you.” Surprise necklaces under the pillow, the warm grasp of his hand over mine every time we went to the movies. So long married, and yet the touch of his fingers pushing my hair back from the side of my face could still arouse me. And always he brought me flowers, sometimes huge bouquets from the fancy shop on Boylston Street that had me reapportioning the stems into several vases, other times a single peony snapped from the corner bush in our own front yard but presented with such flair—a bow at the waist, a sweeping motion of his pianist’s hand, a kiss to my own. “My lady,” he would say, and I would say, “Oh, stop,” hoping he never would. And he never did. It occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I kept thinking about opening my store was that I could give to other women what John had given to me.
I thought for a moment about looking at the rest of the pictures but decided against it. There was hope in the waiting. And even though I’d not yet found a picture of John, I’d found memories to enjoy. I wanted them to last.
I turned on the light again, then headed downstairs to the Chinese chest. Perhaps I would find something there. The living room was lit beautifully by a gibbous moon, and I slid the drawer open in that milky glow, thinking its natural magic would help me find something that would make sense to me, that would give me the only nearness to him I could now enjoy. I reached in and pulled out a slip: Amber. I thought hard, to no avail. The stone? The color? Was it the name of a painting, a song, a person, even a small town we’d been to? Nothing came to me. I pulled out another paper: Yolks only. Yolks only? What could this possibly mean? What—the fact that I preferred the yolk to the white? Did yolks have another meaning altogether? Was it the punch line of a joke? Or had he meant folks? But that word would not suggest anything, either. I tried one more: Pepper mill. Oh, John. Oh, Betta. Standing in her living room in her nightgown, digging through a drawer, looking for her husband.
I carried the last slip of paper upstairs and laid it on the pillow next to me. It made no more sense than any of the others I’d looked at tonight. But it was the ink from his black fountain pen on that slip of paper, and he had written it when the blood ran warm in his hand, when images registered and reversed on the back of his retina, when the elegant exchange of oxygen occurred in the alveoli of his lungs, when he was alive.
I turned out the light again. Satie’s wandering and melancholy notes filled the room, and I gave myself over fully to the music, just as I used to years ago. Absent anyone else’s company, I felt no silent commentary interfering with my enjoyment, worried not at all about the volume. There was that. I had always loved Satie as much for his charming eccentricities as for his music. The way he kept two pianos, one on top of the other, in his studio apartment. The way he collected umbrellas and bought twelve gray velvet suits at the same time. The whimsical instructions he included on his scores: “Light as an egg.” “Here comes the lantern.” And one that seems particularly apropos now: “Work it out yourself.”
When I was in eighth grade, I had an art teacher I particularly liked. She was a pretty, reckless blonde who wore huge hoop earrings and laughed loudly all the time, and she made all of us excited about art because of the obvious if erroneous assumption that if we loved art, we’d be like her. Once, when I was trying to sketch something, she came over to help me. She put her hand over mine, and together we began creating a lovely image. Then she said, “Okay, you finish it now.” But I couldn’t finish what we had begun—it didn’t work. Instead, I ended up drawing something altogether different. “Oh, my goodness,” she’d said when she saw the finished drawing. “You did something else! Wonderful!” But I was disappointed. I knew that if her hand had stayed on mine, out of our combined imaginations would have come something neither of us would have done alone. And that it would have been so much better than what I went on to fashion alone. But what was I to do? There was a full forty minutes left to the class. I had to fill the time.
I turned onto my side and sighed deeply, pulled the blankets up higher. This room stayed stubbornly cold, even when the rest of the house was warm. As I punched at my pillow to reshape it, my fingers brushed across my lips, making for a rich tingle. Such a gnawing hunger inside for the simple pleasure of touch, such an edgy despair that came from the lack of it. Tomorrow I would call the man who’d left a message. He might be someone I would like to get to know. I swallowed hard against a sudden montage of imagined humiliations, then decided I’d do no such thing.
In the kitchen the next morning, I looked out the window, blinked my eyes against the brightness, and moaned. It was snowing—large flakes that looked like shredded lace. But I was immune to the beauty: there were three or four inches on the ground already. I didn’t feel able to shovel it. I didn’t feel able to do much of anything. Once again, I’d had terrible, frightening dreams, and this time when I’d awakened, I’d heard a man’s voice, ominous and low, seeming to come directly from a corner of the room. I’d sat up, terrified, but when I’d turned the light on, nothing was there, of course. But I hadn’t been able to go back to sleep.
I pulled out Matthew’s number and dialed it. I would ask if I could hire him to shovel—if not to rent me his room to sleep in at night. The phone rang several times, and then there was Matthew’s voice mail, hopeful-sounding. No doubt he was waiting for his girlfriend to come to her senses. I started to leave a message but decided against it. Who knew when he would call back? I needed to get the sidewalk and porch steps cleared as soon as possible. I’d eat a quick breakfast and get over to the hardware store for the widest, lightest shovel I could find.
I took a long time at the store—it was soothing to be in a place
full of things that could help you repair or rebuild or maintain. There was the smell of coffee in the air, coming from the back room; and two men in paint-splattered clothes talked and laughed at the checkout counter where they waited for keys to be made. I looked at the plastic bins of nails and screws and washers and hinges, the wide variety of lightbulbs, halogen to pink-tinted, then moved over to the housewares section to view the basic pots and pans, the blue-and-white-speckled coffee percolator, the gargantuan bottles of Windex and Formula 409. If a high-end fashion store was a singing siren, a hardware store was your practical Uncle Walter, wearing bib overalls and carrying a hammer, asking you in a hearty, sausage-and-egg voice to point him in the direction of what needed to be done. After I’d finished examining drill bits and wrenches, pliers and ball-peen hammers, and many other things I had no idea how to use, I selected a huge blue plastic shovel, light enough to carry home but heavy enough to get the job done, I hoped.
It took an hour for me to shovel—it was heavy snow and I had to do it twice, because by the time I finished the first time, another inch had fallen. I looked up at the sky—still dark and cloudy, the snow seeming to fall even faster. I supposed I needed to load up on some groceries, too. I rested the shovel against the front porch, then headed resolutely back to town. I needed to check the newspaper or listen to the radio—what were we in for, anyway?
Apparently something bad. Lines at the grocery store were long. People were stocking up on toilet paper, on milk and bread and eggs, on cans of soup and boxes of pasta. Several people had turkeys in their basket. “How bad is it supposed to be?” I asked the cashier, and she rolled her eyes. “Oh, not that bad. They can predict half an inch for the first snowfall and people will do this. It happens every year, I swear. Come January, they can predict three feet and nobody raises an eyebrow.”