Good Grief (11 page)
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 here 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.
I tug off her ponytail holder and brush her silky hair, amazed at how easily the brush sails through it. Ruth’s shoulders drop and she tips back her head. I turn over the paper bag with Tony’s note and write,
Tony’s Good-Riddance List,
on the other side. Then I hand her the pen.
Terrible with children,
she writes.
Greasy hair.
She pauses to read what she’s written, sets down the pen, looks at her clothes. Then she scoops them into her arms and heads for the bathroom. I’m relieved when I hear the shower running.
Kit and I pull up to a Queen Anne house painted a hopeful powder blue with white gingerbread trim and a picket fence surrounding the yard. A lattice arbor loops over the gate to the front walk, which is lined with box hedges.
“This place is for
rent
?” I ask Kit. Ivy drapes out of an old milk can set beside a wooden porch swing.
“It’s a B and B, but one of the owners got sick. They’re renting the place for a year until their son can move to town and take over the business.” He says the place is called Colonel Cranson’s, after the original owner—a retired Civil War colonel who used to manage the railroad station back when the train ran through Ashland.
“It looks like the Happily-Ever-After Institute.”
“We can commit you on the first of the month.”
“Do I have to like scones?”
The inside of the house smells like an attic—like mothballs and cedar and musty fabrics. Sunshine spills through the warbly glass in the windows onto the long oriental runner in the front hall. I admire the doors’ glossy porcelain knobs. We creak past the living room, which is crowded with antiques that remind me of old ladies. Wingback chairs with tea party posture. Pedestal tables with demure padded feet. A grandfather clock at the end of the long hall lets out a loud gong. I jump and grab Kit’s arm, then quickly let go, embarrassed.
The bright kitchen still smells of yeast and coffee. I run my fingers over the grain of the oak table, which is surrounded by chairs with embroidered seats.
“Sold!” I tell Kit.
Dear Ethan: Don’t worry about me. I live in a Pepperidge Farm ad now.
“There might be mice.” Kit swipes cobwebs from a windowsill. “And rumor has it there’s a ghost.” He pushes open the back door, which leads to a porch alongside the house. We step outside. “This is where the guests eat breakfast.” Directly across the street there’s a gas station equipped with a car wash. Machinery whirrs and water gushes. A car chugs through the giant spinning black and blue brushes, the driver blinking into the sunlight as he emerges. “It’s a little noisy,” Kit admits. He’s sort of the anti-realtor—without bluster or hype.
I shrug. “My car will always be clean.”
We sit in wicker rockers on the porch and review the rental agreement. Kit lowers his voice and leans toward me. “The ghost’s name is Alice.” He laughs. “She’s the Cransons’ daughter, who died of pneumonia. The owners claim she rustles around in the kitchen in the middle of the night and once she left the milk out on the counter.”
I can relate to Alice. Restless and hungry in the middle of the night, milk carton absentmindedness.
“No problem. I’ll take it.” I’m used to living with ghosts.
Soon after I sign the lease for Colonel Cranson’s, Big Brothers/ Big Sisters calls to say that my background check has been cleared and that I’ve been matched with a thirteen-year-old eighth-grader named Crystal Lowman. During the intake meeting, I told the counselor that I didn’t care what age the child was. She said this might make for a faster match. But secretly I hoped for a littler girl, like Simone, with whom I could finger-paint and build Legos. “It’s a henhouse!” Simone shrieked with glee the time we built a simple red Lego building. Will a teenage girl be this easy to please?
Now the counselor explains that Crystal lives alone with her mother and has trouble at school. “She’s bright enough but spends a lot of afternoons in detention,” the woman says. “Her mother doesn’t seem to participate in her life much. But I’m sure you’ll make a great role model.”
Role model! Sure, let me show you how to lose your job and your house and gain fifteen pounds in no time.
Crystal, her mother, and I meet for the first time at the agency with a counselor. Crystal looks young for thirteen, with a thin, boyish figure. Her face is pretty, though, with high rosy cheekbones like Ruth’s and a small pointed nose that’s chapped on the end. Her skin is flawless and translucent, with an almost bluish tinge, like skim milk. Her short hair is so blond that it’s nearly white. Roxanne, Crystal’s mother, is a larger version of her daughter—thin and sinewy, with long legs. She looks younger than me, more like a sister than a mother.
When we discuss what day of the week to get together, Crystal’s indifference makes my stomach drop. “What
ever,
” she says with dramatic exhaustion when I suggest Sundays at two. It’s as though she thinks our get-togethers will be about as fun as detention. She barely looks at me during our meeting. Instead she systematically examines her split ends, her eyes crossing as she tugs pieces of her short hair in front of her nose. As for her mother, she’s either had too much caffeine or there’s someplace else she has to be. Her Reebok-clad foot circles the air frenetically, and she keeps checking her watch. She and Crystal exude an impatience that makes me wonder why they came to the agency in the first place.
A few days later, I attend an orientation meeting for “Bigs.” The counselors recommend that we take our “Littles” on outdoor adventures, such as hiking or ice-skating. They warn against letting our Littles persuade us to always take them shopping, to the video arcade, or out for junk food.
“It’s not about you being their sugar daddy,” a counselor explains. “It’s about forming a friendship and being a mentor.”
Wrong house?
I wonder, standing on Crystal’s front porch the afternoon of our first date. I double-check the address on the paper in my purse. No, this is right. I’ve been stood up. By a thirteen-year-old! This isn’t supposed to be like dating.
Wedged between the aluminum storm door and front door of her house, I ring the bell a second and then a third time. Nothing. I knock, but no sounds come from inside the house, which is painted the weirdest color: a pale powdery pink that makes it look like a giant after-dinner mint.
There are probably a hundred other things a teenager would rather do than hang out with a thirty-six-year-old on a Sunday afternoon. I peer into Crystal’s empty living room. Everything is tidy and sparse—a TV with little flags of tinfoil attached to the antennae, a sofa with square red pillows nestled neatly at each end.
Finally I give up and jot a note on the back of a checkbook deposit slip for Crystal:
I stopped by, but you weren’t in,
I write, wanting to sound casual.
Call you later. Sophie.
I tuck the note in the mailbox so that one corner’s sticking out. As I head back down the porch steps, I don’t feel like a very big Big.
Stepping onto the front walk, I notice a white starfishlike clump in the grass. I jump when I realize it’s a hand, palm open, fingers spread wide. The long sleeve of a navy blue sweatshirt snakes into the rhododendron. I crouch and peer into the bushes, where I see Crystal sprawled on her back, arms and legs spread open as if she’s making a snow angel.
“Crystal?”
“Yeah?” A white wisp of breath curls up from her mouth.
“Hi.”
She rolls her head to look at me. “I was waiting for you,” she says. Her smoky blue eyes are outlined in heavy black liner, and her lips shimmer with pink gloss.
“Usually people wait in the house or on the porch.” I laugh nervously, realizing this isn’t particularly funny.
“No shit! My mom told me to wait outside.”
“In the bushes?” My thighs ache from my morning jog. I sit cross-legged on the cold, hard sidewalk.
“She’s a bitch.”
“I see. Well, what would you like to do today?”
Crystal turns onto her side and hoists herself up onto her elbow, resting her head in her palm. A crescent of short blond hair falls across her forehead. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“Sure, I have a cigarette and some crack. Would you like some?
No,
I don’t have a cigarette. I don’t smoke. And if I did, I wouldn’t give you one, silly.”
Crystal rolls her eyes and collapses back onto the ground, squinting through the bushes. Already I feel as though I’m not fun or cool. I want to be cool. I wish Ethan were here. He wouldn’t be shy or nervous. For a computer nerd, he was cool.
Crystal reminds me of those girls in junior high who were sexy and moody and gravelly-voiced early on, while the rest of us still piled stuffed animals on our beds. I remember cowering in the last stall in the girls’ room as they smoked and talked about the boys they planned on cornering behind the gym after school. Crystal doesn’t look as voluptuous as those girls, though; she’s too skinny and childlike.
She rolls over suddenly, crawls out of the bushes, and stands up, the hood of her big sweatshirt falling onto her shoulders. Her jeans are slung low around her narrow waist, with flared bell-bottoms tattered and caked with mud. She smacks dirt from her hands.
“Dude,”
she says. “Let’s go to the movies.”
“Nice wheels,” Crystal says of my Honda as we head toward Medford to the multiplex.
“Thanks. It’s practically the only thing I
own
right now. Except for cardboard boxes of stuff.”
She rests the waffle soles of her clunky platform sneakers on the dashboard and jams two sticks of gum into her mouth. “How come?”
“Just moved here.”
“You mean you, like, live in this hick hole on
purpose
?”
“Yes. And I wouldn’t exactly call Shakespeare a hick.”
“You work at the festival?”
“No.”
Silence. Gum snapping. “Seen the plays?”
“I hope to see all of them.”
Crystal turns up the heat. “My class went last year?” She poses most of her statements as questions. “Sucked hard core.”
I try not to seem alarmed by Crystal’s language.
“If you like plays, you’ll like this movie.” She juts a chunk of newspaper in my face to show me an R-rated movie circled in pen. I’ve read reviews and I know there’s lots of sex and swearing involved.
“Oh.” I push the paper away so I can see the road. “Well, that’s rated R. How about we compromise and pick a PG-13 movie?”
“How is that a compromise, chiquita? My mom doesn’t care if I see an R-rated movie. You want to call her?” Crystal cracks her knuckles, pulls a cell phone out of her jacket pocket, and flashes it at me. “I’m not allowed to call anyone but my mom on this. It’s like the Mom Police hotline. She’s at work. We can ask her.”
“Okay,” I agree warily. Already I’m faltering! I should be able to put the kibosh on this movie without having to bother Crystal’s mother.
Crystal presses one button on her phone and it automatically dials a number. She shoves it across the seat toward me and the next thing I know there’s a voice on the other end.
“Roxanne Lowman,” a woman says briskly. I explain that Crystal wants to see an R-rated show.
“It’s a coming-of-age story,” Roxanne says, annoyed. “It’s better to be open with teenagers than to try to hide everything. Teenagers
have
sex, you know.”
“I, uh . . .” They do?
Crystal
does? I look at her across the seat, her arms and legs as thin and delicate as willow tree branches.
“Okay,” I tell her mother, trying to sound confident.
“See?” Crystal says, vindicated as she snaps the phone shut. “All my mom cares about is that my grades don’t fall below a C average and that I don’t go to jail. She’s, like, all about attaining a respectable level of mediocrity.”
This seems a sadly grown-up interpretation for a thirteen-year-old.
In the theater, Crystal takes a long sip from her barrel-size Coke, then tugs at the straw with her teeth, making it squeak loudly.
“Hush,”
scolds one of two college-age boys in front of us.
“Okay, douche bag,” Crystal says, lightly kicking the back of the boy’s seat with her chunky sneaker. I doubt she’ll ever want to play checkers or sing along to
The Sound of Music.
He snaps around and glares at me, and I shrug.
“Sorry,” I whisper.
Crystal giggles.
“Watch the language,” I tell her.
She huffs a sigh and crosses and recrosses her arms and legs. She’s in constant fidgeting motion, as though her bones are trying to get out of her body. I wonder if what she really wants is someone to set boundaries for her. Maybe I just need to work up a tough-love shtick. I’d rather call Big Brothers/ Big Sisters and ask for a younger, easier-to-manage kid. A little girl with pigtails who would want to color or bake. But I know I should give Crystal more of a chance. No one said this would be easy.
The movie starts and there’s tons of swearing and sex. Crystal finally stops fidgeting, her mouth hanging open, her pointed chin still. I swear next Sunday will be different: Jiffy Pop and a game of Risk by the fire.
“Married?” Crystal asks, pointing at my wedding ring. She digs into the whipped cream and nuts cascading over the giant banana split I bought her after the movie. So far I’ve established myself as a pushover, letting her mow through all the popcorn, soda, and ice cream she wants. But it looks as though she could use a few extra pounds.
“Widowed.” I take a bite of pralines and cream.
“What happened?”
“Cancer.”
“How come you still wear the ring?” Crystal doesn’t swerve tactfully around the questions everybody really wants to ask.
“It’s not like I’m divorced.”
“But you’re not married and you’re, like,
never
going to get a boyfriend if you wear that thing.” She raises her eyebrows and nods at the ring.
My ice cream is bland and waxy. Suddenly I would rather not be sitting at Baskin-Robbins with Crystal. I’ve run away from Silicon Valley to Ruth’s house, and I’ve run away from Ruth’s house to the movies with Crystal, and now I want to run away from Crystal to the rest room and lock myself in a stall for six months, surviving on Lifesavers and purse lint.
“That’s not the point,” I tell her. “Anyway. Your house is an unusual color.”
“Yeah, my mom likes pink. Hello! What a freak show!” Her eyes brighten. “Hey, you can buy me beer.”
“I’m not buying you beer. And we’re not seeing any more R-rated movies, either.”
“What
ever.
” There’s fudge sauce on her chin, and I resist the impulse to lick my thumb and rub it off. I push my ice cream aside and watch her eat, noticing for the first time that there are pea-size red rings across the tops of her hands. Some have rusty scabs, while others shine like red licorice. Crystal catches my gaze and tugs the sleeves of her too big sweatshirt over her hands, bunching the fabric in her fists.