How to Talk to a Widower (10 page)

“That's not what I meant,” Debbie says, her voice shaking.

“You mean it's not what you meant to say out loud.”

“Maybe you two should step outside,” Mike says.

“Maybe you should shut the fuck up.”

“Language, Douglas!” my mother says, snapping her fingers across the table at me.

“You are being such an asshole,” Debbie sobs.

“And you're a self-absorbed little twat.”

“Okay! So here's some news,” Claire announces gaily. “I'm pregnant. And I've left Stephen.” Everyone turns to stare at her. She sits in her seat, twiddling her thumbs on the table. “Don't everyone congratulate me all at once.”

My mother grabs my father's forearm and looks at Claire. “Could you say that again, please?” she says, holding her other hand against her chest.

“Which part?”

“All of it.”

“I'm pregnant and I'm getting divorced.”

“Kaboom,” Russ says loudly, and I guess it's the marijuana kicking in, but he suddenly starts to laugh, and then the laughing gets louder, and pretty soon he's hysterical, shaking back and forth, his mouth open wide, tears streaming down his face. “Russ,” I say, nudging him under the table, “cut it out!” But that just makes him laugh harder, banging his hands deliriously on the table. “Kaboom!” he shouts again at the top of his lungs, waving his arms wildly over his head as he collapses into another loud paroxysm of laughter. For a minute, we all sit there in stunned silence, helplessly watching Russ, waiting for him to stop, and then my father starts laughing along with him, loud and hearty, and then, after another few seconds, so does Claire, and then me, and it spreads across the table like a wave, until we're all laughing uncontrollably, while Mike and his parents sit there staring at us, wondering what the hell could be so goddamn funny. And if I could speak I would tell them nothing, there's nothing even remotely funny, it's sadder than anything you could imagine, and then I would say welcome to the family.

         

By the time dessert comes, things have returned to some semblance of normalcy, which is to say that my mother is popping her Vil Pills like candy, Mr. Sandleman is talking my father's ear off about the federal interest rates, Russ is silently and methodically buttering and eating every leftover roll and breadstick in the breadbasket, and Mike is quietly and conspicuously groping Debbie under the table.

“It always has to be about you, doesn't it, Claire?” Debbie says bitterly. “I should have known you'd come up with something tonight.”

“That's right, Pooh. I'm screwing up my life just to steal your thunder.”

“No. You're screwing up your life because that's what you do. You're just announcing it here because God forbid anyone should go ten minutes without paying attention to you.”

“Everything happens for a reason, right?”

“Go to hell, Claire.”

“Language, Deborah,” my mother says absently. She tries to snap but can't seem to get her fingers to cooperate. She washed down her pills with some white wine, and she's ensconced in a narcotic haze, feeling no pain.

“Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?” Mrs. Sandleman says to Claire in a bold conversational gambit.

“Excuse me?” Claire says.

“The baby.”

Claire shakes her head. “No idea.”

“That's right,” Debbie says glumly. “Everyone pay attention to Claire. God only knows what she'll do next if we don't. A sex-change operation, maybe.”

“Take it easy, baby.”

“Shut up, Mike.”

“Sinatra!” my father exclaims, jumping to his feet. And indeed, the band has started to play an old Sinatra tune. “Dance with me,” he says, extending his hand to my mother.

“Oh, no,” she says, pushing his hand away. “I don't think I can even walk straight right now.”

“Debbie?” he says, looking down at her.

“Not now, Dad.”

“Please?”

“No one's dancing, Dad.”

“Wrong,” he says. He steps past the two tables behind us and starts dancing by himself along the large bank of windows overlooking the Long Island Sound, spinning and stepping in time to the music. The sun is setting and the last pink crayon slashes of light color the sky behind him.

“Oh Jesus,” Debbie says, pushing back her chair and getting to her feet. She runs over to my father and tries to pull him back to the table, but he pulls her into his embrace and begins dancing with her, humming along to the music as he goes. She struggles at first, but then she stops fighting it and her body goes limp as she settles into him, wrapping her arms around his neck and resting her head on his shoulder. And then she starts to cry, not quietly, but deep, anguished sobs that rack her body, and he just holds her, absorbing her small convulsions, rubbing her neck, and pressing his lips against her scalp. They stay that way for a long time, long after the song has changed, rocking gently back and forth as outside the sky goes dark and the Long Island Sound slowly disappears.

         

Mom vanishes after dinner, and I find her down on the beach, shoes off, standing on the rocky breakwater and looking out into the dark ocean, her black dress flapping and clinging to her, her hair released from its bobby pins to blow freely in the wind. I'm not saying my mother necessarily picks these poses purely for dramatic effect, but outside of the movies, no one really stands like that, just looking off to the horizon, thinking deep thoughts until someone joins them for a meaningful discussion. In real life we do our deep thinking in stolen moments, while we're eating, or driving, or shitting, or waiting on line. But because that's not as easily conveyed on film, some unheralded director invented the stare-out-at-the-horizon technique to signify deep thinking. My mother, who long ago lost sight of the line between real behavior and the depiction of it, is also high on Vil Pills and alcohol, which means her relationship to reality is probably even more compromised than usual.

“We used to come to this beach all the time when you were little,” she says without taking her eyes off the blackness of the Sound. “Do you remember?”

“Sure.”

She sighs. “I used to love coming here. The three of you loved to be in the water. It was practically the only thing you could agree on. And I would just sit on my blanket watching your little bobbing heads, and know that, at least for the time being, I was doing my job, and you were all happy. But then you started bringing your Walkman, and you would just lie on the blanket plugged into your headphones, lost in your own troubles, and Claire grew boobs and discovered bikinis and would run off with all those horrible boys, and that would leave Deborah with no one, so she'd bug you until you made her cry or you walked away, and then I'd end up yelling at her, and it was at that point that I stopped loving the beach.”

I just stand quietly, an actor in the wings, waiting for my cue.

“You're being kind of hard on your sister, don't you think?” she says.

“Not really, no,” I say, stepping up onto the breakwater to join her.

She nods, the floodlights from the restaurant casting her features in a blue glow. “Mike is a good man. Oh, sure, he's a little dim-witted for a lawyer, and we're going to have to have his hand surgically removed from your sister's ass, but he loves her and, more important, she loves him. I can see it in her eyes.”

“She owns him.”

“Oh, get off your high horse, would you? It's no less real. She loves with dominance, you grieve with hostility. Different strokes for different folks.”

“Point taken.”

“But that's not my point. This is.” She turns to fix me with a stern look. “Cut her some slack. This is her time. With any luck, she's only going to get married once. So don't rain on her parade. It's not her you're really mad at anyway.”

“No? Who is it I'm mad at?”

“At Hailey, of course,” she says, looking back out to the ocean. “So am I, by the way, pissed as all get-out at her, for leaving you like this. But that's old news, and I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

“Neither do I.” The water slaps angrily at the rocks below us, splashing the air, and I can feel the tiny droplets of cold mist settling on my face like wet pinpricks.

“Whatever Debbie's heinous crime against you was, it was committed in the name of love, and you, of all people, should appreciate that.”

“Self-love,” I say.

“Oh, come on, Douglas. Is there any other kind?”

“Listen, Mom.”

“No, you listen. Listen to your mother. I may be a flake, and I may be three sheets to the wind, but I've been around a bit longer than you, and I know a thing or two that you don't. I know Deborah can be a tight-assed bitch, but that's genetic and there's nothing she can do about it. But what you should understand is that it was no picnic for her, growing up with you and Claire. On your good days, the two of you were simply exclusive, and on your bad days you were downright cruel.”

“Oh, come on. We weren't that bad.”

She raises a thin, plucked-within-an-inch-of-its-life eyebrow at me. “You were terrible. You still are. She is one of three, but she's always been on the outside, looking in at the two of you, with your private jokes and your secret looks. She'd have given her right arm to be a part of it. She still would. Maybe it's my fault, for not making you include her more. All she's ever wanted was for you and Claire to love her.”

It's rare for someone to say something to you, just a few words, really, and actually make you see yourself from a completely different vantage point. But my mother is still capable of occasionally turning in a revelatory performance. “I never really thought about it like that,” I say, feeling like an asshole.

“Of course you didn't. You and Claire are always too wrapped up in your own dramas to notice anyone else. And that's genetic too,” she says, flashing me a sad little grin. “Unbridled narcissism is practically your birthright.”

In the distance, I can hear Russ's voice calling me from the parking lot. “They're looking for us,” I say.

She nods and takes my hand as I help her off the breakwater, then carries her shoes as we walk across the sand toward the parking lot. I can see my father and Claire spinning around like Fred and Ginger in the glow of the sodium lights. “Dad was something else tonight, huh?”

My mother nods, and loops her arm through mine. “Here's what will happen. When we get home he'll want to make love repeatedly, and then he'll lie in bed holding me, telling me stories about you all when you were kids, or about when we were first dating, and I'll stay up as long as I can, holding on to him, not wanting to miss a minute of it, wishing we could stay like that forever, but eventually I'll fall asleep while he's still talking. And when I wake up tomorrow morning, he'll be urinating in the flowerbeds, or playing ball in his underwear, or building a tower of glass on the living room floor with my grandmother's crystal, or God knows what. And I'll hide under my covers crying and wondering when and if I'll see him again.” She turns to face me, her eyes wide and knowing, and puts a cold hand on my cheek. “You lost your wife, Douglas. My heart breaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don't even get to mourn.”

“Jesus, Mom,” I say, my voice cracking, but she's already walking again. It's a favorite technique of hers. She likes to stick and move. Stick and move.

“Come on, Douglas,” she says brightly, pulling me forward. “Life's a bitch, there's no doubt about it. But on the bright side, at least one of us is going to get laid tonight.”

In the parking lot my father comes over to my mother and throws his suit jacket and then his arm over her trembling shoulders. They say good night to the Sandlemans, who are still looking a little shell-shocked from the whole horror show and probably can't wait to get into their car and start talking about us. Once they're gone, the rest of us hug and shake hands as we say our good-byes, and to an outside observer, someone who doesn't know us any better, we probably look exactly like a regular family.

14

How to Talk to a Widower
By Doug Parker

T
here are three things that people will say without fail when confronted with you, three things that you wish like hell they wouldn't say, inane platitudes guaranteed to make your bowels clench and the blood in your ears pound with rage. And even though by now you're braced for them, when you hear them you still find yourself struggling to quell the overpowering urge to bark obscenities and hurl large, breakable objects, to haul off and punch the well-wishers in their sympathetically creased faces, to feel the crack of bone under your fist, see the hot crimson spray of blood erupt like a geyser from their nostrils.

“I'm sorry.”

I know it's the universal default, but the problem is, one's first knee-jerk response when someone says “I'm sorry” is to say “It's okay.” We are programmed from kindergarten, from the first time the inevitable snot-nosed kid knocks over our blocks, to forgive. And it's not okay, it's as far from okay as it can really get, but there you are, tricked by a sociolinguistic tic into affirming that it is. Not only that, but now you've switched roles, and you're comforting instead of being comforted, which is fine, you're sick of people fruitlessly trying to comfort you, you're a man and you like to take your comfort in private; drinking too much and screaming at the television, punching brick walls, or crying in the shower, where your tears can be obliterated as soon as they emerge. But under no circumstances should you have to stand there and comfort someone else. You've just lost your wife, I think it's safe to say you've got your own problems. So after that happens a few times, you train yourself to simply say thank you, and then you just feel ridiculous. Thank you for being sorry. What the hell does that even mean? It's yet one more evidentiary exhibit of meaninglessness in what has become an almost completely meaningless existence.

“
How are you doing?”

Once again, your first impulse is a betrayal. Because your mouth wants to say “fine,” and they're expecting you to say “fine,” hoping to God you'll say “fine,” maybe with a sad, weary shrug, but “fine” nonetheless. They have expressed their rote concern, and “fine” is their receipt for tax purposes. But you're not fine, you're a fucking mess, often drunk before lunch and talking to yourself, weeping over photos, losing hours at a time staring into space, torturing yourself with an infinite array of if-only scenarios, feeling lost or devastated or angry or guilty or some potent cocktail blend of all of those at any given moment. You want to move on, but to do that you have to let her go, and you don't want to let her go, so you don't move on. Or maybe you do, just a little bit, and then you feel the grief of losing her all over again, and the guilt of trying to stop feeling that grief, and then you get pissed because you feel guilty when you shouldn't, and then you feel guilty for being pissed about your dead wife. Does that sound like “fine” to you? And to say it is to somehow discredit everything you're going through, and, in some way, it feels like a slight to your dead wife, the mark of an inferior love, for you to be fine. But no one wants to hear the ugly truth, and even if they did, you don't really feel comfortable sharing your grief like that, so once again you just say “fine,” and breathe deeply until the impulse to commit a gory, ritualistic homicide has passed.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Yes, now that you mention it. Go back in time and stop my wife from getting on that goddamn plane. That would be a big help, actually. I'd be eternally grateful. Short of that, what could you have possibly thought you were going to offer that would solve my problems here? Cook me dinner? I lost my wife, not my microwave.

And whatever you do, do
not
attempt to empathize. Don't whip out your own tragedy like a secret fraternity handshake. This misery wants no company. I don't want to hear about your father's car crash, your mother's heart attack, your sister's slow death from leukemia. My sorrow trumps all others, and I don't want to be mucking about in your grief any more than I want you mucking about in mine.

I know you mean well, but that doesn't make it any easier to listen to you. If you want to demonstrate your friendship and support, here's what you do: Leave it alone. Don't address it directly. I know you think praising my wife or sharing a warm remembrance will somehow ease my pain, but you'll just have to take my word for it that it won't. If you can't look the other way, then a simple greeting is really all that I can stand right now. If you feel you absolutely must acknowledge my tragedy, then you can do one of those somber nods, with the pursed lips and the raised eyebrows, and I'll let it slide. But beyond that, keep it light. Ask me the time, and I'll check my watch. Invite me along to a movie. I'll say no, but you'll have offered and we'll have shared a simple exchange that didn't make me want to flay the skin off your face. And maybe, if I have enough of those simple exchanges, just basic human contact that asks nothing of me, maybe I'll start being able to start maintaining eye contact once again, start engaging the world at my own pace.

And then, who knows? Maybe one day you'll catch me at just the right moment and I'll actually agree to go to the movies with you, because it will get me out of the house and I'll know that for two hours I won't have to make conversation. Then, when it's over, we can talk about the movie. You won't have made anything better, you won't have helped me come to terms with my loss, but the sooner you give up on that dream, the better off we'll both be. Healing is a deeply private process and, honestly, you're not welcome to be a part of it. But you will have given me a short furlough from the dark, sorry prison of my mind, and that gift, precious in its own right, is really the best you can hope to offer.

And it should go without saying that if you bring me to a romantic comedy, I will shoot you dead before turning the gun on myself.