Saturday Night Widows (41 page)

The camels, tethered end to end, swayed silently beneath us into the dunes, and we patted them with unexpected affection. They were male, but their demeanor had a subversive feminine side, thanks to tender lips, big dreamy eyes, and long lashes, not to mention soft camel toes padding gently forward. The sky was huge, and the sun began to settle into scattered bands of wispy clouds, gilding the sand to a high burnish, highlighting every ripple. The camels’ rocking gait made us feel like sailors on a patchy sea, where the dunes, seemingly permanent at first, were shifting imperceptibly around us.

Ali stopped us at the foot of an enormous peak and helped us dismount, indicating that we should shuck our boots and clamber barefoot to the summit in the yielding sand. Breathless, we perched at the lip of the towering wave, clasping each other for balance, although if we had tumbled no harm would come to us as we sank into the most forgiving of landings.

“It’s like nothing … nothing I’ve ever experienced,” said Lesley, and no one disagreed. We stretched our arms over our heads toward the sky. Ali spread blankets on the sand and gave us privacy by moving away.

“Sit, quickly,” Saida said. “The sun will be setting soon.”

Shafts of pink and orange pierced the clouds, lighting up the sky like the aurora borealis, as sand in every direction began to turn from gold to orange. The atmosphere itself took on a sudden wash of color, imparting the suggestion that we were suspended between earth and air, nothing but pure radiance above and below. I had wanted time and distance from our everyday world, and here it was, a place out of space, out of time, where the past and future couldn’t touch us.

I thought of Bob, my new love, far away. I thought of Bernie, forever out of reach. Both would have loved this place. For the first time, I could imagine both of them present together, in this place where space and time had no meaning. I thought of everything I wanted Bernie to know, everything he had missed. How much I missed him. How much I loved him still. How sorry I was for what he had suffered. How happy I was with Bob, and how I treasured Lily. I felt the presence of them all in the absence of the desert. They filled this empty place.

Here in this place out of space and time, I realized that it was
possible to love two men at once, one who was present and one who lived only in memory. They were both very much with me now, and I was the better for them both. I looked at the sweeping dunes, unconnected from everything familiar, and realized that I had failed at my misguided goal of a life detached, that my attachments surrounded me, even here. Yes, I still knew, attachment can be suffering. Attachment can be scary. Attachment can be messy. But attachment is life.

The pigment that surrounded us deepened into reds and purples, like a Rothko painting, seemingly spare, but practically vibrating with intense color and meaning. I remembered my other attachment, my newest attachment, to the Blossoms, and looked at them, all of them—transfixed. The desert silence didn’t stifle our communion. I knew their thoughts. Tara, with her eyes shut, was seeking peace. Denise repeated
Here we are
in her head like a mantra. Dawn prayed to her God. Lesley vowed always to look ahead. Marcia seized the fleeting opportunity, calculating aperture settings and shutter speeds, greedily capturing pictures before the light was gone.

Denise touched her fingers to her throat, where Steve’s wedding band dangled from a leather cord. I knew that Steve was here along with Bernie, and David and Andries and Kevin and Martin. They would never be gone entirely as long as they were here in memory, as long as we created new memories that included them. Bob and Will and even Collins were here, and children, too, and stepchildren, moms and dads. Quite a turnout.

After nearly a year during which the number of times any of the Blossoms cried when we were together could be counted on the fingers of a single hand, everyone cried now. Except perhaps Marcia—
I couldn’t tell with the camera in front of her eyes. But I could see that she finally had ditched the crooked ambivalent grin and fully committed to a smile, spread clear across her face.

Finally, as twilight fell, we ran down the dune to our camels, who carried us to camp. Colorful kilims covered the sand between a cluster of tents made of rough fabrics in primitive patterns. A fire burned in the center to ward off a fast encroaching chill from the vastness on every side. We surveyed the layout.

“Well, Marcia, are you going to survive?” I asked.

“I have to say, this is one of the highlights of my life,” she admitted. “I’d come back in a minute.”

Everyone threw back their heads to ululate.

Once again, it was Saturday night. Our night, as it had been all year long. Three Blue Men picked up instruments—a lute, a castanet, and a drum made of goatskin—to play traditional music by the fire. The musicians earned their pay that night, if only for keeping straight faces while we improvised dorky dance moves, ejected any lingering genies, and let loose with our patented harbor-seal madrigals. The stars overhead? You can only imagine. After polishing off a rustic lamb tagine by lantern light, we retired to our tents and slept like babes. Denise dreamed that her camel tucked its head inside her tent to nuzzle her and make her feel safe.

Before sunrise, everyone mounted the camels in the dark, eager to go on one more trek. Atop another truly big kahuna, we nestled together under blankets for warmth until the sun shot up quickly, bathing our faces. The wordless exchange at sunset had given way to our usual clowning and talk. “I’d like to dream about something more than camels,” Dawn said.

“Oh,” Denise cried, “we forgot to put our notes in the fire!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tara said. “I got the feeling we all took care of what we needed to do at sunset.”

It was true. I caught Lesley watching me. “I tend to forget that this whole group started with you and your experience,” she said. “I think you put a lot of things to rest here.”

“Yes,” I answered. “I feel far away from where I’d ever imagined, yet exactly where I should be.”

“Sometimes,” Lesley said, “all we need is a little perspective.”

I waited at the pinnacle, reluctant to leave, while everyone dashed to the base of the dune, their light steps leaving footprints in the sand. A faint wind began to fill them in. Tomorrow, they would be gone. By the next week or the next month or certainly the next year, the dunes themselves would flow into new surging and receding shapes. Nothing lasts, except in memory. I ran down the dune, following the tracks. The tribe moves on.

chapter
THIRTY

e
ndings are also beginnings. Nobody knew that better than the Blossoms, which may be why emotions were all over the map at our last official meeting.

I arrived at Marcia’s bearing a covered dish and none of the trepidation I’d felt on a Saturday night in January exactly one year earlier. There wasn’t any question that our utterly amateur widows’ support group was a smash, that our theory of companionship without gloom had flowered into friendship, that everyone had thrived along with it.

“Becky, this guacamole is over the top,” Dawn declared.

We clustered by the window, where the pulsing Manhattan vista was as changeable as the desert. Everyone, it turned out, was wearing black, our chicest black, and what Lesley would call kick-ass boots. We looked forward to an evening of fond reminiscence, all those shared memories we’d racked up while scrupulously ignoring the five bogus stages of grief. When suddenly: waterworks. Tara read aloud a note she’d written to me just after we met, full
of hope and anxiety about what was next for her. “My new life is taking shape … rather like a hurricane … after years of dark days,” she read. “For some, the weight of unfilled hopes and accumulated responsibilities could be crushing. For others, thank goodness, this could be a moment to reconnect with an earlier, younger, less compromised self.”

We all got weepy along with her. A release, a year’s worth of emotions, several years, really. Tonight was an ending. Another ending.

“Look how far you’ve come since you wrote that,” I said.

“How far we’ve all come,” Tara said. “We all lost our footing for a time. But we found our footing together.”

Denise and I put salad and chicken and couscous on the dining table. It was time to eat again, but as usual, the others were too caught up in conversation to take a seat.

“Marcia! Down!” I ordered. A year ago, she might have shot me a look like I was one of her lackeys, but her face cracked into laughter along with everyone else’s. “Well, it worked in Morocco,” I said.

“I never laughed my ass off like I did in that
hammam
,” Dawn marveled.

“The amount of time we’ve spent laughing—it’s ridiculous,” Lesley said. “And the
stuff
we talk about.”

“I talk about stuff with you guys that I have a hard time bringing up … even to my family,” said Tara.

We tucked into the meal. I looked at each woman individually, each face so intimidating a year ago, so familiar now. I knew that Tara didn’t eat shellfish, that Lesley took her mint tea with sugar, that Marcia couldn’t stand
The Sound of Music
. We plucked lint off each other’s sweaters and fallen eyelashes off each other’s cheeks.
I thought about my meeting with Professor Bonanno at the grief lab, about his theories on overcoming loss, the novel experiences he recommended, the fun, the ties with friends. He might have years of study under his belt, but tonight I wanted to hear from my own experts.

“Why do
you
think this has worked?” I asked.

“We’re not best friends,” Marcia began, “we’re all
very
different, and yet there’s a …”

“… a bond,” Tara and Lesley said simultaneously.

“Yes, a bond we’ve created.”

“Tara said it once before,” said Lesley. “We feel safe.”

“We can say, ‘That guy is cute’ without feeling guilty,” said Tara. “We can say ‘I want to have sex again’ without feeling guilty. We can say ‘I feel like crying’ without feeling like we’re dragging in somebody who doesn’t want to hear our story.”

“I learned that grief is a process, and you can choose how to handle it,” Dawn said. She inhaled a sharp breath. “I can’t talk about it, because I’m so emotional, but I just want to say how grateful I am for each and every one of you.”

“We’re the blubberers on this side of the table,” Lesley, seated next to her, apologized.

Dawn changed the subject, asking Denise for the recipe for her salad dressing, which she’d made with capers she’d brought from Morocco, and then admiring her ring. “My wedding ring,” Denise said. Lesley had expressed interest in seeing it, so Denise wore it on her right hand that night, for the first time since the funeral.

“I’m a private person,” Denise said, as if we didn’t already know. “This group was so out there—it was freeing.”

Marcia agreed. “Becky and I were the only ones of us who joined
a typical bereavement group,” she said, “but it was so depressing compared to this. Still, I think if we had been in a typical group, our personalities would have come out eventually.”

Tara grimaced. “Sorry, but I wouldn’t have lasted a week,” she said. The rest of us laughed. She summoned all her powers of vocal drama to add, “I … want … to … live.”

We passed around seconds. “But we
did
all talk about our losses,” I said.

“Sometimes,” Lesley said, “but nobody ever said, ‘Let’s talk about Kevin,’ ‘Let’s talk about David.’ It was never about how they died. I remember at our first meeting my heart was going like crazy, because I was going to have to say that my husband committed suicide. But it didn’t matter. This was about us.” She started to blubber again. “You are my soul mates. I love you all.”

Others joined in, except, as usual, Marcia.

“Marcia,” Lesley said, “do you ever cry?”

“I do. I just do it in private, that’s all.”

It was so unlike Marcia to concede that much, as unlike her as getting on a camel and trekking into a sea of sand with women she didn’t know a year ago.

“We’ve influenced each other, don’t you think?” I said.

“I like to think that I convinced you all that we should be having more sex,” Lesley said, and we all agreed.

“I have a serious answer,” Tara announced. “This group has made me braver. My journey would have been a lot more tentative without you. You convinced me to listen to myself, first and foremost … and stick with what I heard. You gave me courage when I needed it.”

We recalled how full of fear Tara had appeared at our first meeting, how she found the nerve to raise the subject of alcoholism to
the Moroccan widows, how her honesty gave them strength in turn to tell their stories, too.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” she said, “without the courage I got from this group.”

“All I can say is, thank God I made the cut!” Lesley said. “But what about you, Becky? What did you get?”

I busied myself pulling cookies out of the oven, the chocolate cookies with the molten centers that we had learned to bake at our cooking class, while I weighed many possible answers. “This recipe,” I could have said, but I knew I owed them a thoughtful response.