Tender Grace (3 page)

Getting my overnight bag, two suitcases, and this laptop into my room (upstairs and down two hallways) took so much energy that I may stay here a week instead of two days. If that’s the case, I could have saved a good deal of money by staying at Mom’s, but I simply wasn’t up for going there without Tom. My room here has a microwave and a refrigerator, and I picked up a Weight Watchers meal for dinner. I also purchased a twelve-pack carton of Diet Coke and hope it will last until morning.

One of these days, I may stay at a hotel and use room service. I did that once when Tom took me with him to a principals’ conference in Orlando. I rather liked it. I really don’t mind eating alone, but I don’t want to eat alone in public. Who cares, I’m sure. But “know thyself,” and I’m just not up to that.

My plan is to run down to the complimentary breakfast room tomorrow, should I wake up before breakfast is cleared away, and get a pastry and three pieces of fruit, two of them for my lunch. I’ve never done that before, but Rita does it all the time. I hope an alarm doesn’t go off when I walk through the doors with contraband fruit stashed in my purse.

I saw Tom’s Bible sitting in the passenger seat when I was unloading the car. I put it there this morning after I made one last walk through the house and noticed it resting on the table by Tom’s chair, neglected for such a long time now. In the last fifteen months I’ve picked it up only on the rare occasions I’ve been compelled to dust the table it was sitting on. The morning I found Tom, that black leather Bible, worn from years of study, was in his lap, open to John 4 in preparation for a lesson he expected to teach the next Sunday. I had opened the door to the garage before I decided to go back and retrieve it. That Bible is the only thing of Tom’s I brought with me.

That—and what’s left of my heart.

It’s eight thirty and still pretty light outside. I went over and pulled the curtains, and now it’s as black as a moonless midnight in here. And it’s quiet, very quiet. I like that.

It’s been a long day. This is the first motel room I’ve checked into by myself. I stood at the counter while the clerk processed my credit card and prepared my key envelope and felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. Yet while this all seems very strange, I think I can sleep. Sleeping is one of my gifts. I’m consistently among the twenty-six percent of Americans who get enough sleep at night. But if I’m wide awake when
Law and Order
is over, I’ll take the Excedrin PM I brought along for emergencies.

I ran into a problem on the drive to Tulsa today. I’m surprised the potential for it eluded me while I planned.

The problem? Hours to think. I about panicked. My diversion was gone: You cannot watch television while driving. But then I remembered I have satellite radio with two or three thousand talk radio channels. I’ve paid for it all these months without using it.

Before I turned on the radio, I had been thinking about the time Tom and I visited Mom and Dad in Broken Arrow and went into Tulsa to spend an afternoon walking through the galleries of the Gilcrease Museum. There was a sculpture there that very nearly mesmerized me. Each time Tom and I became separated, he found me standing in front of it.

“It’s captivating, don’t you think, Tom?” I said the first time he found me there. It became our designated meeting place.

I’ve laid out clothes for tomorrow, even ironed the skirt. I changed it up a bit—white skirt, brown sweater set, and brown slides. I don’t want to flip-flop or freeze my way through the museum. I’ve stayed an extra day in Tulsa to find my bronze sculpture and see if it’s as lovely as I remember.

August 10

I made it to the museum by eleven. For me, that was pretty good.

I picked out a painting for Tom:
Morning in Aspen Grove.
He would have loved it, and I would have spent as much time as he would allow searching through prints trying to find it for him.

I found a painting for me too: Homer’s
Watching the
Breakers.
Two women stand at the edge of the sea watching the waves break on the boulders near their feet. It instantly reminded me of another Tennyson poem, “Break, Break, Break.”

Like “Tears, Idle Tears,” with its haunting last line, “O death in life, the days that are no more,” this poem also speaks of the helpless misery of loss. In college I couldn’t fathom the kind of anguish his words suggest. But in the first month or two after Tom’s death, before I declared a complete moratorium on reading, I pulled my English literature anthology off a shelf and let Tennyson’s lines speak for me:

But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

How easy Tennyson is to memorize:

Break, break, break,
At the foot of the crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

I spent quite some time with the Homer painting. I left it finally to take a lunch break, rummaging in my purse for an apple while I searched for a private bench where I could hide out and stare into space.

I looked for the sculpture everywhere I went this afternoon and thought I’d surely find it in the Native American room. When I didn’t, I was so disappointed that I did something very unlike me, at least at this point in my life: I asked about it. I was so pleased when the lady said they still had it and directed me to the library reading room.

And there he stood, just as I remembered him.

He is a young Indian, exuding dignity. His hair in simple braids, he wears what appears to be buckskin pants with some kind of loincloth over them. He is looking up, and his arms are outstretched beside him, palms up. The work of artist Charles H. Humphriss, the sculpture is called
Appeal
to the Great Spirit.

Like before, I did not want to leave.

Unlike before, I felt suffocated by the desire for Tom to meet me there.

four

August 11

I took my sweet time getting around this morning before I left for Oklahoma City. I knew I didn’t have far to drive, hardly two hours, so I didn’t remove the
Privacy Please
sign on the door of my room until checkout time forced me to leave at noon.

Just before ten I had gone down to the breakfast room and grabbed breakfast and lunch. When I had eaten my pastry and tidied the room, I plopped myself on the plump comforter, settled myself into the bevy of pillows propped against the headboard, and reached for the remote. In my peripheral vision, however, I saw Tom’s Bible sitting next to my suitcase.

When had I brought it in?

I don’t know why I’ve refused to read even the Bible for so long. Or why this morning I still hesitated, why I had to say to myself, “
Do
this.”

After such a hiatus, what to read?

I thought about opening it and reading whatever my finger landed on. People do that, you know. But instead I opened to the place Tom had marked with the card I gave him on our twenty-fifth anniversary, the first chapter of John. He had been taking our small group through John on Sunday nights. I settled back, thinking I’d read a chapter. A few verses into it I realized that a chapter was way too much for this shrunken spirit of mine. I ended up reading only a few of the verses Tom had highlighted in chapter one.

In them Jesus is called
life
and
light
.

Maybe I should begin calling him those things, my antithesis: dear Life, dear Light.

I usually call God my
Father
, because as these verses say, I am a “child of God.” I have not forgotten that. My lostness is emotional, not spiritual. It is my earthbound existence that is in jeopardy. There are spiritual implications, of course. My choosing “death in life,” however unwittingly, seems worse than ingratitude; it seems a betrayal of Life and Light.

And I wonder,
Will he come to the likes of me?

The answer comes to me, an echo of the words I offered the kids mere days ago:
“I am with you always.”

I needed a Coke break, which required an ice run. While ice tumbled into my little plastic bucket, I thought about another verse I read this morning: “From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.”

My bronze Indian gets that.

I wish I did. When you’re emotionally dead, you don’t see. You don’t want. You don’t need. You don’t care. I wish I could see and embrace and rejoice in the blessings instead of hating this post-Tom existence.

Post-Tom!

Delete that compound modifier! It appalls me. It irritates me. It grieves me.

“Class,
post-Tom
is just the sort of modifier we want to cut from our papers,” I’d say, ambling down two rows of desks. “
Ruthlessly
cut,” I’d add with a two-handed machete move.

(Teaching high school language arts has contributed to my madness.)

But how dishonest it would be to malign those two words. They’re perfectly good descriptive words. If I’m going to grieve a word, perhaps it should be the word
hating
.

I found a
Law and Order
episode to watch before I got on the Internet and started planning tomorrow. The one thing I’m sure I won’t be doing is the zoo. I’ve been to one too many zoos in the last five years. Three summers ago, Tom and I were horrified at a bear’s behavior when we visited him in his very nice habitat. With gasps (actually I gasped, Tom laughed) we turned the boys’ strollers toward the big cat section and called the little girls away from the iron fence enclosing the uninhibited grizzly. “Hurry, girls,” we said, “the tigers want to see you!”

As zoos go, few could beat the St. Louis Zoo anyway, the bear notwithstanding. There is a botanical garden here I might visit. I’ve always considered botanical gardens quite enjoyable. They used to have the power to both enchant and calm me. There’s a modern art museum as well. I could try to stretch myself and embrace modern art, instead of sitting insatiably before Renoirs and Monets. Maybe another time.

If Tom were here, we might take in the National Softball Hall of Fame. He had loved going to Cooperstown to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. New York was our destination for our thirtieth anniversary, our last anniversary. We had a week in the city and a week in the countryside, together with our friends John and Rita, the trip culminating with Niagara Falls. We didn’t mean, we had told each other, to plan anything so obviously romantic. We weren’t the type. But the falls were phenomenal, like all such places, beyond what any picture or painting can express. Rita apparently does not believe this. It was she, leaning too far over a rail to get a better picture of this natural wonder than any postcard has rendered, who took the edge off romantic. And John too. Shocked by her uncharacteristic daring, and probably frightened as well, he called her stupid. Of course, we all knew he didn’t mean it.

Actually, I might have sent my husband off to see the Softball Hall of Fame by himself. “Let’s meet at such and such restaurant on the river walk for lunch,” I’d say, confident there would always be a later when we could be together.

I’m going to the memorial tomorrow. I’ll see what seems good after that.

August 12

Tom always drove on any trips we took, short or long. The only exception was when he decided to drive home nonstop from Southern California, a destination that had been both conference and vacation. He admitted he needed a few hours’ sleep when we hit Albuquerque and agreed to let me take over for six hours. I told him that navigating from Southern California to Springfield is not rocket science: There’s I-40 and there’s I-44. You’d have to work at getting lost. Somehow he relaxed enough to sleep, and he awoke refreshed, eager to take back the wheel and get us to Springfield. When I unfolded myself out of the passenger seat at the end of the twenty-five-hour marathon, I told him I hoped he enjoyed that little challenge, because I planned never again to ride in a car more than ten hours on any one day, preferably eight.

Surely there are roses to smell, Tom!

In fairness, he was destination oriented. He’d smell the roses when we got where we were going. And the truth is, I liked the passenger seat, reading and dozing to my heart’s content. I would love to have that luxury again, at least the dozing part. But I have discovered that I can stay awake and both drive and navigate.