Saturday Night Widows (33 page)

She gulped. What now? Two boxes stranded on the floor of the family room, boxes she didn’t recognize, somehow left without color codes.
Fuck
. She tentatively peeked inside. Gingerly opening folders with dirty fingers, she saw files she had forgotten to categorize, letters the girls had sent to their father from summer camp.
Any nuclear family would have chucked them right out. But to Tara they were evidence of normalcy, before everything split apart. Her daughters would need this stuff, she thought, something to cherish.

Tara crumpled onto the dirty floor, done in. Her attention drifted outside, to her once-beautiful lawn, crisped brown by the dull July heat. She flashed on the Easter egg hunts she and David had staged for the girls when the lawn was lush, green, and edged with flowers. It slowly registered that she was sobbing, huge, full-throated sobs. Tears streamed down her dusty face from her eyes and her nose. “It was a big ugly cry,” she told me. She let it rip, sobbing for forty-five minutes without stopping. After weeks, months, of parceling out colored stickers and putting one broken-toed foot in front of the other, she let herself go. “It felt great,” she confided through a lopsided smile, “cleansing, cathartic.”

That night, bunking at a friend’s, she slept the deepest, longest sleep she’d had in years. For a few hours, for now, everything had found a place.

I
MET
M
ARCIA
the evening after she closed on her new apartment. She turned the key and let us in to the empty, echoing living room, and there it was, the city twinkling at our feet through banks of windows, all the way down to Lower Manhattan and the harbor. If you squinted, you could see the Statue of Liberty. Not a bad reward for a lifetime of hard work. I startled Marcia with an impulsive squeeze. She edged away and cracked one of her twisting half smiles, hashing out where she would place the large-screen TV. Not an idle consideration—she was increasingly concerned about
losing touch with her godsons, her husband’s nephews, and she hoped they’d join her for marathon sports blowouts. She had also snagged season tickets to the Giants, on the forty-five-yard line, with them in mind.

At work, Marcia was lapping up even more responsibility, thanks to the new female boss, who hoped to promote Marcia even higher. In her spare time she was reading a book called
Taming Your Gremlin
.

Informative? Yes, Marcia said in her flat, blunt voice. “I’m learning that people like people who are pleasant.”

F
OR
D
ENISE
, the month of August solved the mystery of her husband’s sudden death. She’d waited an entire year for the results of the autopsy, her imagination conjuring ghastly possibilities the longer the determination was delayed. On the anniversary of the sorrowful day, she tromped down to the city department of health. She wanted an answer,
damn it
. Everyone seeking birth or death certificates crowded around her, clasping numbers like customers in a deli. After an hour, she was summoned to plead her case to a functionary behind a glass cage.

The woman heard her out, then turned on a microphone and blasted over a public address system:
“Can the death unit come forward?”

More waiting, more paperwork, and an assurance: the certificate had been lost in the bureaucracy; it would arrive shortly in the mail. It did, with the simplest explanation. Steve had died of a heart attack. That was it. The final resolution of his fate, and the
passage of the anniversary, lifted a cloud for Denise. Encouraged by the Blossoms, she went on her first date, a museum fix-up,
another
museum fix-up. It was a Volvo date, Denise said: steady, safe, reliable, but with no acceleration.

I
T WAS JUST
the right speed for a widow still on her learner’s permit. Dawn, on the other hand, was ready to turn in her license. For months now, she had been wrestling with the question of whether to settle. Settling—I’d often pondered it myself. Was it better to shack up with an acceptable guy, an OK Joe, rather than slog along alone? Ever since the night when our group went to the museum, Dawn had been telling us that Adam was what she called
good on paper
, a widower with two kids she had grown to love, who meshed with her two kids, a ready-made nuclear family. But Adam’s former wife still practically haunted the house, so filled was it with her belongings and his wistfulness for her.

“It could have been such a happy ending for two pretty crummy situations,” Dawn told me when I reached her on speakerphone as she was driving home from work. “But everyone’s got to want the happy ending. I don’t think he does happy well. And I don’t do sad. So there we are.” She laughed, and I knew this was serious. Dawn always looked for the humor when things were at their worst. She and Adam had decided to split.

“I debated, is it worth it because it’s fun once in a while?” Her voice quivered. “But at a certain point it stopped being fun. His kids were getting closer to me. And I can’t, I can’t,
I can’t
. It just rips me apart.” She pulled to the side of the road to compose herself.

She expelled a blast of frustration a few seconds later. “I was stuck with a man who was stuck.” She couldn’t help contrasting him with the women in our group, all upbeat people, she felt, going through shattering times but determined to come out whole. “I’m not saying we don’t have our bad moments,” she said. “I have my moments, and they’re bad. But it’s not who we are at the core.”

“What about his children?” I asked. “Will you ever get to see them?”

“I don’t know.” The day after the breakup, Dawn kept a commitment to take his son with hers to a dinosaur exhibit in the city. “Stay close to me,” she told them on the street. “I don’t want to lose you guys.”

Adam’s boy looked up at her and said, “Dawn, how could we ever lose you? You’re a beacon of light.”

“I could have cried right there in the street,” Dawn told me. “How sweet is that, how painful is that?” She laughed again. It was her heartiest laugh, for when she hurt the most.

T
HE MORNING OF
her daughter Lyndsey’s wedding, Lesley and her three girls wore Kevin’s old blue dress shirts to have their hair and makeup done, so he’d be with them in some way. Later, at the ceremony, there would be a big mashup. Craig and his three boys would attend, their first encounter with a lifetime’s worth of friends and relatives. The pressure was on the mother of the bride to hold herself together while she steered a course between past and future.

Denise and I passed around wedding pictures in the car when
Lesley gave us a ride to our volunteer day at the camp. The bride looked tremulous in an ivory strapless dress and long lace veil, Lesley a bit sober in iridescent taupe silk with a portrait neckline. “You can see I didn’t smile a lot,” she told us while we sat in traffic. “I was trying too hard not to cry.”

Her nerves, she said, were tighter than harp strings as she waited to escort Lyndsey down the aisle in the garden of a country inn. The procession took forever—eight bridesmaids, including Lesley’s other daughters, Robyn and Nikki, along with ring bearers and flower girls, enough to populate the Rose Bowl Parade. Lesley held her face in a rigid mask; the bride began to hyperventilate.

“Calm down, Lynds,” Lesley urged. “Take deep breaths.” It was their turn to walk, and the bride had clenched like a vise. She couldn’t move.

Throughout the flotilla of bridesmaids, an uninvited blue jay had refused to cooperate, its persistent chirping cutting right through Pachelbel’s
Canon
. Someone sitting in a row behind Craig let out a stage whisper: “Oh God, that’s Kev.” In any case, the bird stopped right on cue.

Lesley saw gooseflesh rise on her daughter’s bare shoulders. Her breathing evened. “Okay, I’m ready,” she sighed. “Dad is here.”

At the reception, Lesley displayed two photographs of Kevin next to a lighted candle. He had given her, she said in the toast, her most precious gifts, her girls, and then, to lighten the mood, she added that he would be proud of Lyndsey for coming in under budget. Otherwise, Lesley kept the focus on the bride and groom. After that, she could relax. She and Craig outdanced the kids as the party extended late into the night. The only glitch occurred when an old friend was miffed about her table assignment. “You’ve lost
yourself,” the friend accused Lesley. “You’re not the same person you were.”

Deeply hurt, Lesley struggled to shake it off. “Afterward, I decided, of course I’ve changed,” she told me and Denise. “And you know what? I
like
the person I’ve become.”

In fact, Lesley was exultant about her new life with Craig. He was different from the serious, dark-eyed, driven Kevin. “Craig feels like an old pair of slippers,” she said. He made her laugh as never before, and he was every bit as affectionate as Lesley. She had found herself relishing the same physical abandon that I did in a new relationship.

Even so, the complications with his family and her family and his friends and her friends reminded me of what had scared me about getting involved with other people: the other people. I had to contend with only Bob and Lily, whereas Lesley had a whole unruly contingent of interested parties. Her daughters thought Craig wasn’t sophisticated enough for their mother, and they weren’t fans of his sons’ table manners. The girls still declined to stay at Lesley’s new place with the boys there and urged her to visit one of the girls’ homes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, leaving Craig and his sons to celebrate at Lesley’s alone.

“I feel like I don’t have a home anymore,” one of her daughters said to Lesley.

“They’re old enough,” said Denise. “They’re on their own anyway.”

“I know,” Lesley said distractedly. “But the mother in me, the nurturing side of me … their home is their security.”

Meanwhile, Lesley’s new house was hardly a sanctuary for her. Craig’s youngest son had seemed fond enough of her when he first
moved in, but once his brother arrived, they formed a sullen solidarity that boxed her out. All Lesley could do over screeching licks of an electric guitar was bite her tongue while Craig, caught in the middle, tried to impose civility.