Good Grief: A Novel

  “Um . . .” I am searching for an answer. Looks aren’t everything, after all, and it is Valentine’s Day, and maybe it’s a good thing to have a friendly dinner with a man I can’t possibly lust after. Besides, Al’s a musician and he’s probably talented and sweet and interesting. Lonely, like me.

  “Sure,” I say, trying to smile. Al reminds me of my geometry teacher, Mr. Rowinson, who wore similar brown polyester pants but was kind and patient and let you retake quizzes to bring up your grade.

  After the meeting, Al and I walk to the warehouse-type brewery in town that serves gourmet pizzas and beer. I order a wheat beer and vegetable pizza for dinner; Al orders pasta and wine. As we’re sipping our drinks, he leans over the table and tries to take my hand. My arm jerks back instinctively and Al gets only two fingers. He squeezes them and gives me a mournful look.

  “I know it’s hard,” he says.

  “For you, too,” I tell him, unlooping my fingers and folding my hands in my lap.

  Here’s what happens in the movies: A single woman moves to a small town in the country to start over, and a rugged Sam Shepard kind of guy—lean and muscular, a cleft chin, and a thirty-three-inch waist in faded Levi’s—finds her. He’s got an old Ford pickup with a friendly black Lab in the back and a big, soft bed with a brass headboard and miles of flannel quilt you could hide under all day.

  Here’s what happens in real life: A single woman moves to a small town in the country to start over, and Professor Tweedly—his breath smelling faintly like the cat box, his hands as oily and plump as sausages—finds her. Despite his feeble comb-over, she figures maybe he’ll offer a bit of benign companionship, a bit of dreamy Mozart that will take her mind off things.

  But no! After dinner I agree to walk the four blocks over to Al’s house for coffee and he seats himself at the piano in his living room and begins playing a Barry Manilow song.

  “‘I write the songs that make the young girls cry . . . ,’” Al swoons, closing his eyes and swaying. Suddenly I can imagine why Ruth lowered her standards for Tony. If this is the alternative! The wheat beer makes my head throb. I curse myself for agreeing to this evening. My weak spot: desperate for a dinner mate.

  “Al?” I say, raising my voice over the second chorus. “Al, I have a migraine.” I clutch my temples.

  He stops playing, quickly pulls the cover down over the keys, and rushes to my side on the sofa.

  “Let me give you a massage.” He reaches for my shoulders.

  “No.” I squirm away. “I need to get going.”

  “Of course, let me drive you.”

  It’s pouring now, and I’m exhausted and don’t have an umbrella.

  “All right.” I grab my coat. As Al tries to help me into it, I duck my head, fighting back tears. Ethan, I need a ride! Wherever my husband is, however dark that place might be, I want to go there, right now.

  Al’s car is parked in the street in front of his house. We get in and he starts the engine, then he puts his hands in his lap instead of on the steering wheel.

  “I was hoping . . . ,” he says, looking down. But then he stops speaking and lunges across the seat, trying to kiss me. His beard is coarse and scratchy, like Easter basket grass. I turn my head, and his lips, warm and sticky, brush my cheek. Then his arms are around me and his grasp is firm. I spot a tennis racket in the backseat and reach over and grab it, smacking the window as I try to hit him with a cramped backhand swat.

  “Quit it!” The racket bounces against the back of his head with a twong!

  “Yeow!”

  I hold the tennis racket in the air between us, watching him through the squares in the netting. He slides back against the door.

  “Okay. Sorry! It’s just that you’re so beautiful. And I’m so lonely.”

  “Well, get a hold of yourself.”

  Just then a woman in a yellow slicker rounds the corner by Al’s house. When she sees us in the car, she speeds up, swinging her arms and huffing, her scarf flying in the wind behind her.

  “Al!” she screeches.

  Al sinks to the floor of the car, the upper half of his body folded over the seat.

  “Shit! My wife!”

  “Your wife? Your dead wife?”

  “She’s not exactly dead,” Al moans. Then he grabs a piece of newspaper—the “Local and State” section—and pulls it over his head.

  “Dead or alive, she already saw you.”

  “Al!” The woman charges toward the car and raps on the window with her umbrella. “Where’s the check, Al? We’re on instant oatmeal, Al. And I don’t mean for breakfast. I mean your daughter, who you can’t be bothered to call on her birthday, is eating instant oatmeal for dinner!” She gives the window another smack with the umbrella.

  “And who’s this? Suzie Coed? One of your piano students? Did you take her out for a nice roast beef dinner while your daughter ate instant oatmeal?” She looks at me. “Honey,” she says, poking the umbrella toward my face, “this man couldn’t even get a job playing the piano at Bob’s Bar.”

  “You’re a deadbeat dad?” I ask Al.

  “It’s a long story,” Al says.

  “You posed as a widower to get a dinner date?”

  “I am filled with pain and loss,” he says, pulling the paper farther down over his head, trying to get smaller on the floor of the car.

  I open the passenger door and get out.

  “I’m not his student,” I tell the woman. “I met him at a grief group. He said he was a widower—that his wife was dead.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s killing me all right.” She leans into the car and beats at the newspaper with the umbrella. “You worthless man. You worthless bad comb-over bastard!”

  I realize I’m still clenching the tennis racket. I use it to give the newspaper over Al’s head a good swat, then hand it to his ex-wife.

  “Liar!” the woman shrieks, whacking the paper with the racket and then tossing it into the backseat.

  “Liar!” I agree.

  “Ow. Yeowch!” Al hollers.

  “See you in court, Al,” the woman says. She slams the car door and the engine stalls, then quits. The woman and I look at each other for a moment. She seems to decide that I am no threat. Then we head off down the street in opposite directions.

  Al. As in no alimony.

  Droplets of rain dot the rhododendron bushes like glass beads. As the wind blows, water from the trees stings my scalp. It is a different kind of rain in Oregon, sharp, cold drops that seem to find a way of getting inside your body, of seeping through your clothes into your blood and bones and making everything ache.

  BARGAINING

  11

  Isn’t there some way out of this? I wake up thinking in the middle of the night, desperate to negotiate a deal. Isn’t there some way around having to start this new life without my husband?

  Maybe there’s been a mistake. A clerical error. Maybe the angel of death is a bumbling bureaucrat who took the wrong Ethan. “Oh, your Ethan,” the sweet volunteer in the daffodil-colored uniform behind the front desk at the hospital lobby would say if I called the hospital to check. “He didn’t die. He went home.” Then I’d climb into the Honda, drive back down to San Jose, and find Ethan in our kitchen waiting for me.

  “I’ve been at the hardware store,” he’d say, shrugging and holding out a tiny brown bag of drill bits.

  That’s it: My husband went to the hardware store for seven months. You know how men are!

  I wish life were like one of those cheesy movies where ghosts come back to visit their loved ones. Hover around and knock stuff over. Breathe a tickle of warm air on your neck while you’re flossing your teeth or opening the mail.

  Maybe if we had gone to the doctor a month earlier, when Ethan’s glands first started to mysteriously swell and ache, he’d be here in Ashland with me now. We’d be starting over together. He could work for the festival managing their Web site and make it home every night in time for dinner.

  But Ethan’s not h
ere and Ruth has to go to work early and Simone needs her Cheerios. So I get up every morning and try to make a contribution. If not to the world, or my life, at least to Ruth’s household.

  Ruth’s stalwart work ethic inspires me to at least do my grief group homework: exercise twenty minutes a day. Even if I’d rather eat a roll of cookie dough than walk around the block, Sandy promises that exercise will make us feel a little better. Back in San Jose I would have chucked this advice, but now I’m wistful for my waistline, for my former energy level. I treat myself to a new pair of sneakers, cushiony white socks, and a snug sports bra that feels as if it’s giving me a supportive you-can-do-it hug.

  Every morning after breakfast I set out with Simone in her Baby Jogger, hoping to shed the fifteen gummy pounds I’ve packed on since Ethan died. I run across the bridge from Ruth’s house into town, pushing her past the bookstore, and into the park. Simone seems as heavy as a sack of cement. At first my chest tightens and my thighs cramp. Then the moist Oregon air pushes the fear of rejoining the world out of my lungs and my body tingles with possibility. Pretty soon I’ll find a house. Then a job. My feet pound the earth with determination. “Pretty soon,” I tell Simone.

  “Pretty soon,” she chants.

  I collapse on a bench by the duck pond, exhausted. Mothers pour down the paths toward the water, pushing babies in strollers, plastic wheels clacking along the pavement. As I pull Simone out of her jogger, the smell of her baby-shampooed ringlets shoots straight to my heart. If I don’t have a job, then I should have a baby. If you can rent a house and a car and a storage locker—rent a new life—why can’t you rent a baby? It’s odd not having anyplace to report to or anyone to care for at eight-thirty in the morning. These mothers in the park obviously have routines: walk, nap, lunch. Warm onesies from the dryer to fold in the afternoons.

  I hand Simone a bag of cracked corn and the ducks swarm around her, orange beaks lurching toward her little fingers. On the other side of the park, beyond the community center where my grief group meets, a pretty row of houses lines the street. I wonder if any of them are for rent. But they’re too big for a single person living alone. Rental houses should come with families, the way wallets come with photos of families. I think of Kit’s rental applications with the many boxes to check for available features: Furnished? Washer and dryer? Garage? Wall-to-wall carpet? Husband? Child? Twins?

  I’ve always hated an empty house. When I was eight, I would beg my mother, who was already forty by then, to have another baby, to fill the kitchen table with siblings.

  “Honey, I can’t have any more children,” she said, smoothing over my hair, trying to tuck it behind my ears.

  “Why not?”

  “Some women have a harder time than others. That’s why I’m lucky to have you.”

  I was suspicious about the difference between can’t and won’t and would wait only a few days before asking her again.

  When Ethan and I struggled to get pregnant, I wished I hadn’t nagged Mother about having a baby, that I’d been more sympathetic.

  At least if I had a baby now, I’d have a part of Ethan with me: his peanut toes or inability to carry a tune. At parties I could trade play date anecdotes by the Havarti with the other moms.

  In college, Ruth sort of rented a kid. She joined Big Brothers/ Big Sisters and brought a tiny freckled girl to our dorm every weekend. We taught her how to play checkers, do needlepoint, and dribble a basketball. Maybe I could get a little sister, a girl like Simone, who needs help fastening butterfly barrettes in her hair. I remember Ruth and her little sister sitting cross-legged on the dorm room floor, singing along to The Sound of Music’s sound track.

  Simone pokes the toe of her sneaker into a puddle rimmed with duck glop. I scoop her up and wrestle her back into the jogger. As I run out of the park, I imagine my own rented bungalow, a sunny kitchen with an old refrigerator decorated with construction paper collages and finger paintings by my own “little sister,” the smudgy shapes of tiny hands.

  When I return to Ruth’s house, I call Big Brothers/ Big Sisters. The woman who answers schedules me for an intake meeting. She says they’ll ask me lots of questions about myself and why I want to join the program, then do a background check. I try to mask my disappointment. Of course they can’t drop off a kid at my house tomorrow morning.

  “Mama?” I hear Simone say as I hang up the phone.

  “She’s at work,” I say, trying to pump enthusiasm into this fact. But when I round the corner into the kitchen, I’m surprised to find Ruth sitting at the table in her robe. Her forehead rests in her hands, a curtain of blond hair covering her face. Having recently returned from Planet Bathrobe, I don’t like the sight of her trapped in pink terry cloth as lunchtime approaches.

  “Taking the day off?” I try not to sound judgmental. The coffee has turned as dark as molasses in the pot. Simone sits on the living room floor, speaking soothingly to a stuffed tiger, assuring it of something.

  “Taking a mental health day,” Ruth says, looking past me and out the window. Her eyes are red around the rims. She stares straight ahead without blinking. I kick off my sneakers and sit next to her at the table.

  “Hey.” I wrap an arm around her shoulder. “You’re not thinking about a career as a bathrobe model, are you?”

  “I asked Tony not to come over anymore.”

  “Broke up?”

  She nods.

  “I’m sorry.” I try to conceal my relief.

  “You were right about him.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to be right. I wanted to be proven wrong. He just—”

  Ruth holds up her hand to stop me, then passes me a note written in Tony’s fourth-grader handwriting on a flattened paper bag.

  Baby, the note says. Your the greatest. Call me when you change your mind. Love, Tony.

  “The pathetic thing is,” Ruth says, “I want to call him. No. I don’t want to call him. I want to sleep with him. I think. Fork!” She pounds her fist on the table. She has a medley of faux F-words so she never swears in front of Simone. “Frittata,” she adds. Then she lowers her voice. “I feel sick. I’m going back to bed.” She spreads her hands across the table but doesn’t get up. “I think I’ll take the rest of the week off.”

  “Oh, no.” I fetch her a glass of water. “We can go out for a three-martini lunch or you can sleep all day. But tomorrow you have to go back to work.”

  She looks at the glass of water on the table.

  “I’ll dress you if I have to, but you only get one bathrobe day.” I say this as firmly as I can, finding it odd that I’m the one trying to convince her not to crumble.

  “You’re right,” Ruth mutters. But she doesn’t move. Her gaze wanders to a smudge of butter on the kitchen table. She frowns, as though she’d like to wipe it up but can’t muster the energy. I know this feeling. Smudges moving in on you while you’re trapped in an inertia as sticky as flypaper.

  “I know you’ll miss Tony,” I tell her. “But being alone is better than being with him, trust me.” How do I know? I’m so lonely that I’ll go to dinner with No Alimony Al.

  Ruth rubs the butter smudge, then licks her finger.

  “This used to be the other way around,” I remind her. “You’d encourage me to ditch the loser guys. You’re the originator of the good-riddance list.”

  Ruth shakes her head and the corners of her mouth turn up a little. She dabs under her eyes with a napkin, blots at her cheeks.

  The good-riddance list was a list of annoying qualities about a guy that you were supposed to make after a breakup. Whenever you missed the guy, Ruth said you had to consult the list.

  I dated this golden-haired law student in college named Tad Pennington, who looked like Robert Redford in The Way We Were but turned out to be a liar and a cheat who had another girlfriend he didn’t tell me about. I was devastated when we broke up, but Ruth made me write a good-riddance list and carry it in my wallet.

  “Tad threw his gum out the car window,?
?? I tell her now. “And he was rude to waitresses. See? I still remember.”

  Ruth blows her nose and laughs. “Tad the Cad. He was cute.” She frowns again and tightens her robe across her chest, two fists of terry cloth in her hands.

  “I was always a little envious of your perfect marriage,” she says softly. “I wish I weren’t so pissed off and could cherish boxes of my lost husband’s stuff and wear his dirty ski sweater.”

  I’m taken aback by this confession. How could you be envious of a dead husband?

  “The sweater’s not dirty,” I stammer.

  Ruth looks at me, raising her eyebrows.

  When she found out about Mark and Missy, she didn’t make a good-riddance list. Instead, she cut all the buttons off Mark’s shirts and coats, threw his clothes onto the lawn, and changed the locks. This was a side of her I’d never seen, a side that seemed healthy compared to her unflinching composure over the years. Later, she mailed the buttons to him with the divorce papers.

  “My marriage wasn’t perfect,” I insist, our knees bumping under the table as I lean toward her. “We couldn’t have a baby, for one thing, and Ethan was a workaholic. Even cancer couldn’t get him to make our time together a priority over work.” While this is true, I think part of the reason Ethan went back to work right after he went into remission was to get back in cancer’s face. A steely resolve not to submit to the disease.

  “But he didn’t leave you with a baby for a bimbo in Mickey Mouse scrubs.”

  “Oh Ruth.” I stand up and rub her shoulders. “Mark must have lost his mind.”

  Maybe the only upside of your husband dying is that he didn’t leave you for someone else. At least you can’t take cancer personally.

  I look over at Simone, who is concentrating on keeping her small hand inside the lines of a picture in a coloring book. She makes the sky brown and a house blue and a tree yellow. I refill her sippy cup with watered-down juice, then head to Ruth’s room and fetch her clothes and a hairbrush. When I place the jeans, sweater, and underwear on the table, Ruth closes her eyes, as though they’re too much to contemplate right now.