Perfection (5 page)

I knew what she was talking about. I had done my share of yelling. Parenting young children is hard, and I was ashamed to admit how many times I’d snapped at her after tripping on toys she’d left on the kitchen floor, even for spilling cups of milk at the kitchen table. But I did recall the times Henry had abruptly made her leave his office, and the fury I’d felt at the time rushed back. Liza loved drawing pictures, snipping colored paper into confetti, or molding Sculpey figures of kitties on the floor of my sunporch office while I worked in the late afternoons or evenings. But Henry frequently shooed her out of his office, shutting the door behind her. He insisted on a kind of privacy I had been able to give up.

“You weren’t doing anything wrong,” I replied. “I don’t know why he was like that, but I remember that sometimes he would yell at you. I know how much he loved you, though, even if he was mean sometimes.”

He didn’t love her enough to stay here.

Another flash of anger, as if his death was something he could have prevented. Then sorrow. He couldn’t possibly have wanted his life to end as it did. In spite of our conflicts and his impatient nature, Henry had been a proud and devoted father.

“I think we have to try to forgive him. Now, it’s just the two of us, so please always tell me how you’re feeling,” I said to Liza.

We sat together quietly on the stairs and hugged each other.
Then it was time for bed, where we huddled under the quilt, holding hands tightly till I felt the muscles of her hand relax in sleep.

My social status had flipped a switch.
I was no longer a married woman; I was not sure yet exactly of my new place. But I welcomed a new comfort in a group of women around whom I had formerly only circled at the town and school playgrounds: the single mothers. We were precious few in this place. One woman I had always liked—the mother of another one of Liza’s school friends. After the girls met in class, Tanya and I began arranging playdates. Tanya was quiet, her voice almost a whisper. She wore wristfuls of jingly bangles, dangly earrings, a bear-claw pendant on a leather lace around her neck, airy shawls. In the warm months, she liked to walk through town barefoot, her toenails painted scarlet. Some people thought the barefoot thing was weird, but I secretly liked that Tanya did just as she pleased.

Her home was just another quaint cream-colored clapboard house on a short, tree-lined street, but the interior was like the magical world of a Gustav Klimt painting. Gold Egyptian eyes shimmered on the living room walls; the bathroom walls featured a decoupage of a thousand and one photos of women, clipped from magazines; while pieces of colored glass arranged as a kitchen backsplash mosaic depicted dancing mermaids. Tables and shelves brimmed with bowls and baskets of colored pebbles and shells; free-form weavings of yarn and more shells hung from the ceiling. Two cats roamed the house and yard, a cuddly gray bunny hopped about, colorful fish slowly circled in a fish tank in the kitchen.

Snuggled on her slouchy couch, I drank the large, steaming cups of tea she offered me. My own home felt staid and traditional by comparison. How had I found myself in that beautiful house with a housekeeper and neatly arranged furniture? I felt like I belonged in this house, Tanya’s house.

I could feel myself
withdrawing from my familiar social world. But the friends who did see me as I moved through my days—taking Liza to school, picking her up in the afternoons, shopping at the grocery store—had sounded the alarm. One morning Emily, Cathy, and two other friends, Louise and Diane, arranged themselves at my kitchen table in a kind of gentle intervention.

Cathy told me I was too thin. I needed to eat. She had brought a can of powdered protein drink and a bottle of calcium tablets. I tried to focus my attention on her well-intended appeal concerning the importance of maintaining weight and bone density during a stressful time, thinking that Henry would have offered a more caustic assessment: “Julie, you look like shit.”

I started crying. I knew she was right. I had to eat. I just couldn’t seem to get anything down. My lack of appetite frightened me.

From her sturdy canvas bag, Diane presented a homemade raspberry pie, the beautiful, flaky brown crust oozing ripe, red fruit. The aromas of buttery pastry and warm berries were suddenly tempting. I cut a small sliver and ate.

Cathy said that she wanted to arrange a private talk for me with her minister.

“Fine, that sounds okay,” I heard myself saying between small, exploratory bites, though I had no idea how I would talk to
a minister. I wasn’t interested in ministers. The only thing that interested me was the pie.

My stomach revolted from the shock. Once the cramping and subsequent nausea passed, I cut another slice. Later in the afternoon, I ate another slice, and I ate a piece of pie for dinner and another for breakfast the next morning. When the pie was gone, I called Diane and asked her if she would make me another pie, and she did.

Cathy called a few days later
to arrange a time for her minister to visit. I’d forgotten about her offer but agreed to see him. A cup of coffee seemed harmless enough.

He arrived, and I led him to the kitchen table. He was burly, with an open, friendly face, clear, light eyes. I had seen him several times in town and once at the church, when Cathy had invited us to the winter holiday concert and Christmas pageant. Amy was in the pageant, so of course Liza had been anxious to attend.

This meeting seemed to be something Cathy wanted to offer me so particularly, though I remained deeply uncomfortable with the idea of ministers generally and told him so. But it seemed rude to refuse what was intended as a gift.

If I let him do the talking, this will be over sooner.

He spoke to me earnestly and thoughtfully about the Christian view of death. The eternal life of the spirit, how we can accept loss. I realized that I wasn’t retaining his words—it was all becoming a kind of white noise. For some reason, his kind message made me feel angry, even outraged that this thing had happened to me. It wasn’t fair. I couldn’t listen, though I wished that my mind would open cheerfully, like fingers in the hand
game children play (“Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people!”), and suddenly find that this all made perfect sense. Then I too could show up at church services and feel welcome somewhere.

What would this man think of Henry’s morning visitations?

Tweed jacket, light blue button-down shirt, khaki trousers, sensible and sturdy brown, laced walking shoes. I decided to keep my sexual encounters with the afterlife to myself.

More successfully than her minister,
Cathy herself offered me comfort in her e-mail letters, telling me not to despair, that things would get easier with time, that she believed me to be a strong person capable of remaking my life. It felt strange to receive comfort from someone who had always remained oddly distant. But I was ready to take the comfort, wherever it came from.

My brother, David, visited on Fridays,
shutting himself up in Henry’s office and reading through endless files. At the end of each day, he handed me a list of tasks: call the bank and the insurance company, sign and mail these documents with death certificates attached, envelopes already addressed and stamped, so that I could have title to the car, so that accounts and investments could be transferred to my name. I couldn’t even look at the documents without glazing over and weeping.

David told me that Henry had left behind quite a bit of debt—credit cards I didn’t know about with large balances that would have to be paid off as soon as the estate was settled. Forty thou
sand dollars’ worth. I didn’t ask what the debt was for. It was too late to be angry, and thinking about the money just made me worry. I was not surprised that he had debt—he liked buying things. I figured it was hotel rooms, meals, wine, and rental cars out West during the research year. And a new travel bag. And a new laptop. But $40,000? Henry had blasted through the entirety of his book advance without writing a word. That was a lot of white truffles, even at $150 an ounce.

In spite of the prospect of Henry’s debt,
I had a fierce urge to shop. I bought a pair of boots on Zappos.com: short, brown suede, high-heeled platform boots with zippers up the slender hourglass insteps. When the box arrived, I tried them on, briefly wrestling with guilt about the price, wondering if I’d ever wear them. What life were these boots part of? Not the reclusive life of the town’s young, grieving widow. These boots were part of the life of a young single woman, who lived in the city, worked at a job in a sleek office, and went to parties and downtown restaurants, listened to music in dark nightclubs, tongue-kissing eager young lovers between sips of colorful cocktails.

My friend Chloe persuaded me to join her for a shopping trip in the city. She was the only young widow I knew, and she seemed to be making her way after a few difficult years. She even had a boyfriend. As we wandered through stores in SoHo, I admired, as always, her age-defiant face, radiant at forty-eight, her lips painted the color of wild beach roses. As we stood in front of a rack of dresses at our first boutique stop, Chloe put her arm around my shoulders and confessed that she had bought a lot of
clothes right after her husband died. I missed her husband, a last-of-the-true-English-gentlemen, who had died of lymphoma at fifty-five, four years earlier.

I bought a dress I would never wear in my town—made of a foliage-printed, terra-cotta, silky material with a flouncing hem-line that hugged my new, thin body. I was now as slender as I had been at sixteen. And for the first time in my adult life I liked my body. My butt looked positively girlish as I twirled around for Chloe.

“You look…delicious!” she murmured, smiling with approval.

Two weeks later I took the train back to the city and bought a pair of mule sandals at another store in SoHo. They were expensive, even on sale. They were Italian, of an elasticized woven material that hugged the foot (and would likely give me blisters), in narrow cabana-awning stripes of green, ocher, and gray perched on curvy, sculpted heels.

Back at home I admired the shoes in their fancy box on the floor of my closet, drew them out, slipped my feet inside, and took a turn before the full-view mirror on the bathroom door.

I imagined the tippety-tap patter of the heels on the ancient paved sidewalk of a beloved seaside village in northern Italy. Twenty years earlier I had been in love with that Ligurian town and with a man there. I remembered the silver color of the late afternoon sea, the houses painted in shades of rose pink, sage green, and ocher, the distant mauve mountains flattened in the haze. I remembered the smell of fresh-caught fish displayed in the open-air market, and seaweed, alive with hopping sandmites, exposed at low tide along the pebbled beach. The sun warmed my bare arms and legs, as did the admiration (
“Che bella!”
) of men who passed by me during the evening
passagiatta
.

Henry’s ashes were stored
in a wooden urn in my office. Liza asked if she could see them. The top of the wooden urn unscrewed easily to reveal inside a thick plastic bag, sealed with a twist tie. I untwisted it. Liza and I sniffed the contents. They smelled like ashes, but not like our fireplace ashes, with their woody, smoky odor. These ashes smelled like bone, the last remains of a charred barbecue. Liza was not repelled or frightened; in fact, she seemed intrigued.

“Mama, we need a spoon!”

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a teaspoon from the flatware drawer and a small bowl from the dish cupboard. We took turns scooping out some of the ashes into the bowl. We discovered bits of tangled metal, perhaps from fillings, or the metal pins from the repair of his right leg, the one he broke in the motorcycle accident when he was sixteen. We poked at bits of bone that had not been incinerated by the heat of the cremation oven.

“Mama, can I put some ashes on the flowers outside? Can I have some of Chester’s ashes too?”

Henry and Chester, the old tabby cat, were carefully mixed in the bowl and carried out to the backyard. The clematis vines, Chinese balloon flowers, and roses, dormant still in the winter cold, all received a nourishing dusting.

Liza asked if she could have some ashes to keep with her. I found a small red silk jewelry bag with a drawstring, and she scooped some of Chester and Henry into the bag. She insisted on wearing the silk bag to school the next day. I wrote a note to her very understanding teacher.

The lonely urn needed companionship on the desk, just as
Henry had needed an audience in life. We placed objects around the urn: a pliant twenty-four-karat gold ring from Korea (a gift from his mother), a plastic snow globe containing a gold plastic Buddha (from Henry’s desk), shells and stones from trips to Maine, a note he wrote me on my birthday, a poem of three couplets he wrote for our last Valentine’s Day.

For a writer, he was never much of a letter writer. We had rarely been apart for most of our sixteen years together. I had a few e-mails from the year he was out on the West Coast, but even then, he preferred to make phone calls. I regretted that now, wishing I had more pieces of him, more pieces of paper with his words.

Emily called me every day.
Since the January afternoon when she had arrived to find Henry on the kitchen floor, she had been attentive in every way. I was grateful for her companionship, though now I had the first worries that I owed her a kind of emotional debt I could never repay, and with those worries the first waves of regret that I hadn’t called Anna that day. There had always been a sense of balance between Anna and me that allowed me to ask for something—be it help or sympathy—without worrying about when I would be able to pay her back. My decision to call Emily had seemed so rational then, the extra minutes had seemed so important, but I hadn’t anticipated the fallout.