The Widow's Season (19 page)

Margaret smiled. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

“Wouldn’t you protest, if you had slept with your brother-in-law?”

“
My
brother-in-law”—Margaret laughed—“is bald, fat, and gay . . . Anyway, it’s not surprising, the way Nate was doting on you all night. And with Judith there, playing the panderer. It’s sort of natural, isn’t it? You’ve lost your husband, he’s lost his girlfriend and his brother. Maybe you two could do each other some good.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Well . . .” Margaret hesitated. “He’s not the sort I would have chosen for you. Nate’s a little too sleek for my tastes. I prefer men with more obvious imperfections.”

“Nate has imperfections.”

“Ah.” Margaret nodded. “There you go.” She took a sip of wine. “My only question is whether you really like Nate, or whether he’s just a way of holding on to David.”

Once again Sarah’s eyes turned to her wineglass. “I think I’m holding on to David in all kinds of ways . . . But to tell you the truth, I’ve always had a little crush on Nate. Purely physical, never an emotional attraction. It’s hard to have a brother-in-law who’s so damn handsome.”

Against the nearest window a dying leaf had pressed its yellow face, black-veined and dotted with age spots. Sarah watched the wind peel it away from the glass. “Our neighbors would be so appalled if they knew that I had slept with my brother-in-law. And David only gone three months.”

“Christ.” Margaret planted her glass on the table, causing a tiny red tidal wave to splash over the rim. “We are both too old to give a damn about what the neighbors think. The question is, what do
you
think?”

Sarah shrugged. “I think I’m going to hide from Nate.”

“Right. Good plan.” Margaret rolled her eyes as she dabbed a sponge at the puddle of wine. “Can I ask you something very personal?”

“Since when have you ever asked permission?”

“All right, then. When was the last time you and David had sex?”

Sarah almost laughed. She thought to say “yesterday” just to watch Margaret’s expression, but instead her mind traveled back over the last year of her marriage, in all of its dull grays and muted browns—the bitter politeness, the numbing routine, the occasional kiss on the cheek. After her third miscarriage she and David had stopped having sex. The act had become tainted, love and death intertwined just as the poets always said. Still, on David’s forty-third birthday she had imagined her body as a gift, a bit worn and faded, but nevertheless a three-dimensional object that might be dressed up with a bow.

“Four months before he disappeared.” Sarah flashed Margaret a biting smile. “You think I’m in need of some sexual healing?”

Margaret did not flinch. “I think you’ve been in mourning for a long time. Long before David died. And I think you are entitled to a little joy in your life, wherever it comes from.”

When Sarah did not respond, Margaret lifted a silver platter from the counter to her right. “Enough of this . . . Have a tart.”

The next morning, as she drove a blue campus van down fraternity row, Sarah mulled over Margaret’s words. It was true that she had been in mourning for a long time, and for her, mourning took the form of hibernation, a retreat into dreams in her Victorian cave. She supposed it was high time to rejoin the living, to set aside her brooding and find some pleasure in the world. After all, if David could be resurrected, transformed according to some lost vision from his youth, then why not her? She certainly had the time and the money, and enough years ahead to make a new life possible. But it would take a mighty effort to wake from these past few months. She imagined Rip Van Winkle rising from his mountain knoll—the calcified limbs unfolding, the eyes still cloudy with dreams. What force of nature broke that character’s long siesta?

Nate had roused her body with the pressure of his lips. That was the role of the handsome prince, to wake the cursed woman from her hundred years’ sleep. But even his expert fingers had not managed to touch her heart. That was her own task, she told herself. The goal to which she must consecrate her life. From this day forward—Sarah pledged to the traffic—she must resurrect her own dormant spirit.

And perhaps this was a start, she thought as she parked at the PKE house. This was how widows had repaired their broken lives for centuries, by stepping out of their houses, out of their own thin skins, and into the lives of strangers. There were always other people whose situations were more desperate, people open to the charity of lonely women. The only danger Sarah foresaw in her middling philanthropy was that she might measure her life by the scale of local suffering and end up taking solace in the misery of others.

But there was no misery on fraternity row, where the white pickets gleamed like well-tended teeth. The PKE house had symmetrical staircases that curled in vast parentheses up to a wide verandah. Sarah’s fingers trailed along the railing as she approached the double doors—twelve panels of solid oak, and a half-moon glowing above the transom. She lifted the brass knocker and dropped it once, enough to beckon a sixties-ish housemother whose pleated tennis skirt matched her wrinkled cheeks. Sarah explained that she had come to meet an unnamed senior who was supposed to help with the campus food drive. The woman pointed toward the living room.

“Have a seat in the parlor while I check upstairs.”

The “parlor” was a thirty-foot room with high ceilings, wood floors, and a vast Oriental rug. Its intricate weave of reds and blues seemed perfect for hiding decades of mud, beer, and vomit, but the furniture was less forgiving, with stains on the chintz upholstery and nicks in the legs of the walnut chairs. So much careless wealth—plastic lawn furniture would have been more appropriate.

She remembered standing in a room like this seventeen years ago, when she and David were still dating. They had come to visit Nate in his senior year of college, to attend a Halloween party his fraternity was hosting. David was dressed as Frankenstein and she was his terrible bride—a parody of the undead even in their early days—she with a beehive perched on her skull like a giant Brillo pad. Together they had walked from room to room in search of the too-beautiful brother, finding him in a space like this, with Persian rugs and French doors and leather couches with white creases.

Nate was a young Count Dracula; black circles framed his blue eyes. He was lounging on a sofa, bowing his mouth to the neck of any girl who ventured within reach, and all of them ventured, his ever-willing victims, as if Nate were a bishop offering Communion. He marked each throat with a slimy gel that squirted from the tip of his fangs.

Sarah’s neck alone remained untouched, for when he spotted his brother Nate popped the fangs from his mouth and rose with a benign grin.

“You don’t want to suck my blood?” she had asked when Nate shook her hand.

She still remembered his reply: “Some other time.”

 

 

 

Sarah piveted at a noise in the hallway. The housemother was back, followed by a lanky boy in wrinkled khakis whose hair poked east and west.

“What’s your name?” Sarah asked.

“This is Zack,” the woman answered. “He should be very helpful.” She addressed these last words to the yawning student, heaving a cardboard box full of tin cans into his arms.

Outside, as they descended the curving staircase, Sarah admired the spring in Zack’s legs, and the effortless way he slid the box into the back of the van. When he turned and looked at her, she blushed. “I appreciate your help.”

Zack shrugged with one shoulder and flung his hair back from his eyes. “Our house is on probation. We’ve each got to do five hours of community service before we can have another party.”

“I see.” She smiled. “You are a paragon of altruism.”

Together they walked fraternity row from door to door, along sidewalks barely shaded by skeletal trees. Most of the houses were immense brick structures with round white columns and covered porches. Respectable facades, she thought, for havens of debauchery. Often when they entered, they discovered an empty box waiting in the foyer where Sarah had deposited it three weeks ago. Zack was especially useful then, buttonholing anyone found lounging in front of a television.

“Hey!” He waved the empty box like a cardboard manifesto. “You assholes didn’t leave any food for the poor! Get off your lazy butts and find something in the kitchen!” And when a sheepish boy returned with a few cans: “Don’t give them that crap! Nobody wants to eat that.”

“You have a flair,” Sarah said, which made Zack grin.

At the Sigma Nu house, while Zack was off corralling sophomores, Sarah stood in an alcove and stared out the window. Nate had danced in a space like this on Halloween night—a wood floor, a bay window, stereo speakers three feet tall. She had expected him to gravitate to the most beautiful girls, to reserve himself for partners who approached his own perfection. But no, Nate danced with a pink-haired clown whose waist was twice his size. He danced with fairies, danced with ghosts, danced with a red-lipped Elvira in fishnet stockings. Dark skin, pale skin, freckled and rouged—he was utterly catholic in his taste in partners, bowing to a trio of witches who circled their wands above his head.

But he never danced with Sarah. And now, as she looked out at the leaves crushed beneath the wheels of passing cars, she remembered how she had felt on that distant Halloween, how she had wanted Nate to cross the room and extend his hand—to lead her to the dance floor with the tips of his long, plastic nails. Somehow David’s presence had always rendered her untouchable. She had been waiting seventeen years for her dance with Nate.

“Are you ready?” Zack stood in the doorway with a tower of pasta boxes.

Together they visited sorority houses, administrative buildings, and academic offices. They packed the van so full, it sank down like a low-rider, then they drove to the basement entrance of the local Catholic church, where red double doors opened upon a library of food, thousands of tin cans stacked row after row. There were shelves of tomato paste, shelves of green beans, shelves of peas and corn and beets. A complete Dewey Decimal System of vegetables, and a reference section of cereal.

Here was the practical counterpoint to the world of libraries that Sarah had occupied since high school. She smiled at Zack’s open mouth, and pointed to a gray-haired woman at the top of a stepladder.

“Molly was a middle school librarian before she retired.”

Zack nodded. “Cool.”

The woman examined them through half-moon glasses. “Hello, Sarah. Let’s see what you’ve got for me.”

Outside, when they opened the van’s back doors, a white Lincoln town car pulled up beside them and a bald man in his fifties stepped out of the driver’s side. He opened the passenger door and extracted an elderly woman in a long purple coat and red sequined hat. Sarah recognized Adele, from Margaret’s widows group.

“You’re looking wonderful,” Molly said as Adele smoothed her coat.

“I’m meeting my red-hatted ladies,” Adele explained.

Her driver opened the trunk, revealing rows of cardboard boxes filled with mason jars, each one topped with green-checkered cloth and a red ribbon.

“This one is for you.” Adele handed a jar to Molly.

“Adele makes the best strawberry jam,” Molly explained.

“Raspberry this year.” Adele winked at Sarah. “I’m full of surprises.” She gave Sarah a jar, then nodded at her driver. “This is my nephew Fred. This is Molly, and this is Sarah.”

Fred tipped his hat, lifted two boxes from the trunk, and carried them inside.

“Come with me, dear.” Adele took Sarah’s elbow. “We should leave the lifting to the men.”

In a back room with fluorescent lights and wood paneling, one hundred and twenty Thanksgiving dinners waited in cardboard boxes on rows of folding tables. Sarah surveyed the water-packed turkey breasts and stiff cylinders of cranberry sauce, generic cans of sweet potatoes and twenty-cent cartons of macaroni and cheese. Fred settled the boxes of preserves on a table against the wall, and Adele began unloading the jars one by one, packing them carefully inside each dinner.

Sarah paused to admire the handwritten label on one jar. “You made all of these yourself?”

“Oh no.” Adele chuckled. “There are six of us. We go berry picking together, with plenty of grandchildren to help, and we play bridge while the preserves simmer.”

“You do this every Thanksgiving?”

Adele nodded. “We like to add a personal touch to the dinners. Canned green beans can get so depressing.”

Sarah wedged a jar between boxes of stuffing. “I was thinking that I should do more volunteer work. Get out of the house more, out of my own thoughts.”

Adele held a jar to the light and straightened its checkered cloth. “It took me four months after Edward died—to get out of my house, back into town. And it’s important. Otherwise you just get stuck in the past.” She smiled at Sarah. “You should come here at Christmas. We have three times as many meals then, and we need lots of drivers. I can’t drive.” She nodded at Fred as he carried in another box. “My vision is too cloudy.”

When Fred was gone Adele placed her arthritic fingers, glittering with rings, on Sarah’s hand.

“Have you seen your husband lately?”

Sarah had been expecting the question. “I saw him on Halloween . . . He showed up at the house and talked for a long time . . . And I imagine that I might see him tomorrow, on Thanksgiving.”

“Oh yes.” Adele smiled. “They always come on the holidays. My Edward makes an annual appearance around Christmastime. Last year I only caught a glimpse of him, walking through the hallway. But usually he stops for conversation, and I can see the stitching in his uniform, and the expression in his eyes.”

Sarah contemplated Adele’s foggy pupils. “Do you ever think it’s just a dream?”