Saturday Night Widows (19 page)

The children had met already, Dawn said, her boy and girl and his boy and girl, hitting it off immediately. They played together at
Adam’s house as if they had known each other forever, getting all muddy in the yard. She was more touched than she was prepared to admit.
This is a family
, Dawn looked at them and thought,
the family we don’t have anymore
. The kids scurried upstairs to clean up, and Dawn followed after a while to call them down for dinner. She came upon Adam’s little girl sitting alone at a child-sized vanity table, rows of nail polish neatly lined up on top, all the girly things belonging to a girl in a family with only a brother and a dad. She turned a hopeful face toward Dawn.

The sight hit Dawn with heart-stopping force. “I almost lost it,” she said. “I thought,
oh my God
, this little girl doesn’t have a mom.”

All the emotions that she wouldn’t let herself feel for herself, that she wouldn’t let herself feel for her own fatherless children, all the emotions that she suppressed to be the happy mom for her family, came to the fore. “The whole situation,” she said, her voice leaping and swooping, “I don’t know if I was feeling it for myself, or feeling it for them, or maybe feeling it for myself vicariously through them. All I know is, this triggered a lot of my own stuff that I probably didn’t experience in my own way. Because you know what?” Her voice squeaked. “I was twelve years old, just her age, when my dad left.”

We waited, full of thoughts, while Dawn explored sedimentary layers of feeling in her mind.

“Is it normal to be so nervous about all this?” she asked.

“Yes,” everyone promptly agreed.

She took a measured breath. Later that night at home, she said, as she put her children to bed, her son posed a question. “Mom,” he said, “what if we meet a family where there is no mom, and we’re a family that has no dad, you
knoooow
…?” Dawn drew out the word
to leave the question hanging in the air. “Can you imagine?” he said. “What if the kids don’t even know each other’s names?”

“You see?” Dawn said. “He’s thinking about it. He has all these fears.”

One day soon after, her daughter told Dawn she had had a dream. “It was a dream about Daddy,” the girl said, “but then all of a sudden I turned around, and it wasn’t my daddy. It was some other man.”

It sounded as if the possibility of a new husband, a new father, a whole new family, was just too strange for all of them to wrap their heads around. Our minds have to approach such jarring transitions indirectly, I thought, through dreams, or art, or through the lives of others, such representations sometimes being the clearest mirrors for puzzling through changes so big we can’t face them without the distance. This trip to the museum was driving home the point that it might be easier to contemplate something outside ourselves in order to understand something inside ourselves.

Dawn was thinking the same thing. “I look at my own kids and myself and I think we’re in great shape,” she said. “Then I look at this man’s family and it triggers so much emotion that I can’t even tell you. But we’re in the exact same position!”

It pained me to see Dawn contending with so much, and it forced me to re-examine my assumptions about her. Naively, I had thought that her beauty, her faith, and her optimism would smooth her way toward a happy destiny. I had thought that men would flock to her, that she and her children would flourish under her buoyant guidance, and that it all would happen quickly for her, snap-snap. I had fallen into the old presumption that attractive women have the world on a string. Uniting her family with another one just like it would have been just the quick, gratifying ending I
would have predicted for Dawn. But here she was, involved with a man who wanted to keep her at arm’s length even as his children wanted to embrace her. Even those who are blessed with much, as I understood it now, have their work cut out for them when forced to reorder it all in the middle of their lives.

Even for Dawn, it wasn’t possible to carry on the way we all had in our youth, before marriages and families and mess intervened. Remaking a family, as opposed to making a family, was a much taller order than finding some great guy when both of you are young and unattached, marrying him, and letting the dice roll. I took a hard look at Dawn. Like the lotus blossom paintings, she might have been showy, but she wasn’t just for show. She had deep roots. She had a striving spirit. And her way forward right now was a murky one. I could only hope that the goddess Diana was out there somewhere, poised to guide her.

L
ESLEY CHANGED THE SUBJECT
back to art. Her favorite piece, in fact, had been Diana, who offered direction to those in need of it.

Dawn, of course, was drawn to the lotus paintings. “But tonight I noticed
The Three Graces
more,” she said, brighter, “for what they stand for.” She looked at each of us in turn around the table. “I always tend to look at life in the way of grace. I’ve had so much of it.”

The waiter brought Dawn a bowl of ice cream and a spoon. She was the only one who’d ordered dessert.

We set off through the largely empty museum, wandering unseeing past more great works, having had our fill. Lesley changed the subject again. “We have to do something about a name,” she
said. “People ask me what I’m doing, and I have to say I’m going out with my widows’ group. I can’t do it.”

“I was thinking of one—the Diana group,” said Tara. “But it sounds like a reference to the Princess of Wales.”

“I don’t like it,” said Marcia.

“So what about the Lotus Blossoms?” Tara said.

“Oh no, please,” I said. “People who don’t know our story will think we’re a bunch of little flowers—which we are anything
but
. They’ll think that we sit around talking about crystals and drinking herbal tea and channeling the positive energy in potted plants.”

“Who cares what they think?” Tara elbowed me aside. “We’re blossoms. We’re blossoming.” Dawn beamed her approval.

“And we’ve all been in murky waters, haven’t we?” Lesley added.

I opened my mouth to object, but too late. The others had settled it between them. They were calling themselves the Blossoms now, ambling arm-in-arm, exchanging hugs, sharing conspiratorial whispers, making plans to keep in touch until the next gathering. We passed
The Three Graces
again, and I lingered, alone, delighting in the similarity between that friendly tableau, the way hands fell softly on shoulders of ancient marble, and the women embracing ahead of me. What about The Graces, I thought, The Six Graces? That’s a name I could live with. Beauty, mirth, and abundance times two.

But the others had moved on without me. And that was it, the moment when I realized that this group was no longer
my
group, that it didn’t matter anymore what I wanted to call it, even what I wanted to do with it. I held my tongue. What do you call six widows with nothing more to lose?
Anything they want
, I thought,
anything they want
.

chapter
THIRTEEN

a
month later, I found myself slathered in some kind of celestial ooze, bound in a full-body straitjacket, unable to free my hands to lob a votive candle at loudspeakers that were playing a pan pipe loop of the
Titanic
theme that would lodge in my head for the next six days. Yes, I had succumbed to a weekend at a spa, a place in the mountains of Pennsylvania where Dawn had met the spa guy. No, a spa was not my sort of thing. Why did I do it? Because the ladies in my group—don’t make me call them Blossoms—wanted us to go.

I could hardly object, because I had been belaboring one of the primary purposes of our group, which was to engage in new experiences together, emphasis on
new
. This one would qualify for me, and I hoped my willingness to compromise would set an example and help avert a crisis. Ever since our first meeting, I’d been lobbying for us to plan a far-flung trip at the end of the year. I was holding out for a wild adventure, something that would challenge us and take us where we’d never thought of going. Others were
resisting or pushing destinations that were predictable and sedate. Marcia, ever the lawyer, insisted we wouldn’t leave the spa until we hammered out an agreement. This had the potential to turn boisterous, even contentious, disrupting the high-minded, vaguely Zen calm of our weekend retreat. I’d let the spa attendants baste me in butter sauce and sauté me if it would help avert a showdown.

“Ladies,” Tara said with full solemnity on our arrival, “this is … serious. Our leader … has never been to a spa before.”

She and Dawn, veterans of such indulgences, promised to guide me. First we changed into fluffy white robes and matching slippers like escapees from a virgin-sacrifice slumber party. Then they directed me toward the spa services, which included this Soothing Herbal Body Wrap that was turning my skin—and possibly my brain—into custard. Algae-scented custard.

They explained to me the purpose of a spa—equal parts chakra-aligning relaxation and drill-sergeant-sanctioned self-improvement. We would achieve a higher state of being through pampering, exercise, and food so healthy that I’d considered smuggling in my own stash of bourbon and Mallomars.

I wasn’t opposed to healthy per se. I knew that healthy was crucial for anyone overcoming the loss of a spouse, because such a loss can have devastating consequences for the survivor. Men and women who have experienced the death or divorce of a partner have more chronic health problems later, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, even if they remarry. The stress of uncoupling damages chromosomes all over our bodies—researchers have seen it through their microscopes. So I recognized the value of spoiling ourselves a bit, eating properly, maybe even getting slimed with a soothing algae wrap or two. Our chromosomes might thank us.

Nevertheless, normally when I traveled, I chose options not likely to extend my life for long. Back when I vacationed with Bernie, if I wasn’t faceup on a beach somewhere with a book, I might fancy a dose of Paris, where the regimen was more my style than the soy-based menu at the spa. But experts had told me about the benefits of novelty in breaking the cycle of grief, and my own experience reinforced that message. In fact, there was one particular exploit that had turned me into a convert, in large part because it was unlike anything I’d ever done before. It was the single episode most responsible for helping me to turn a corner and heal. And it was truly, at least for an office-bound city girl like me, a far-out adventure on the far side of the world.

I
T HAPPENED A FEW MONTHS
after my misadventure with the widows’ support group that rejected me, a far-out experience of a different sort. There I was, a year and a half after Bernie died, still out of place among my contemporaries, out of place among other widows, too. Maybe that’s what led me to sign up for a trip to a place that I’d never considered visiting before, a place, in fact, that had never interested me in the least.

I had worried that my first vacation alone after Bernie died might be not only lonely but boring as well. I didn’t care how empowering it was supposed to be for a woman to dine alone in a restaurant—I’m a slow eater, and I like having somebody to talk to. And group travel? I envisioned myself stuck on a bus with Iggy Pop and Mrs. Schreckengost, my high school home ec teacher. Breezing around the Internet, I came across one last opening on a trip to the
Galápagos Islands. I saw beaches and a sailboat. I somehow overlooked the fact that the water temperature was fifty-five degrees.