Saturday Night Widows (12 page)

He asked her about her camera, a Canon ELPH that she’d placed on the table.

“You probably think I’m old-fashioned, because I still shoot with film, not digital,” she said. Of such lines are romances born.

Steve was a professional photographer and a film fanatic, too. Before he left, he took some pictures of Denise with his ever-present Leica. A couple days later, their first date made a detour into home improvement when he stopped at her new place to pick her up and saw that her electrical outlets were shooting sparks. He rewired all the outlets. “Now you’re safe,” he said.

They never made it out of the apartment that night. Nor on the next date, when she had a cold and he brought her flowers and juice. Denise, the girl who had grown up too fast, reveled in being cared for.

That was August. By December, they were engaged. By the next
August they had moved into the apartment of their striving dreams, a neglected mess when they bought it, but with great bones. Steve bought them unisex uniforms, matching coveralls made from stiff gray cotton, and they changed into them when they replaced the wiring, rehung the doors, or installed new ceiling fans. Gradually, they turned the apartment into the showplace the group saw at our first meeting. The next summer they married in a simple ceremony with thirty friends. The decorations were blowups of the photographs Steve took of Denise the day they met.

They hoped their next project would be to have a child. But the following August, a year after the wedding, Steve was gone. “We only got three years, pretty much to the day,” she said. That smile again, briefly, and then another moment lost in introspection.

At five thirty in the morning on the day he died, Steve woke Denise and said he wasn’t feeling well. She listened from bed as he went into the shower, and when he came out, she heard a crash in the hallway. Denise ran out. He gasped out his last words—“Help me”—and collapsed on the floor.

“I knew he was dead,” Denise said. She called 911 and began CPR, but he didn’t respond. Ambulance workers arrived, too late. Police treated her apartment like a crime scene, leaving his body there all day, covered, while they waited for the medical examiner to take it away for an autopsy, required in the case of an unexplained death of such a young person. Steve had been fifty. Once again, Denise kept to the facts in telling me this story, periodically smiling her don’t-worry-about-me smile.

Somehow she had the composure to speak without notes at the funeral. “I couldn’t speak at Bernie’s,” I said. “I didn’t think I had the strength. That took nerve.”

“Or just adrenaline. I felt like I had to. It was my only chance.”

Afterward, wallowing in grief was not an option. Denise had started a job as a senior editor at a publishing house only six months before. Bad timing—it takes at least two years to prove oneself as an editor, and none of her books would come out for another year or more. The pressure was on to find successful books and edit them quickly. She couldn’t let up, forcing herself to concentrate on reading entire manuscripts at a stage of widowhood when I could barely follow a paragraph in the newspaper. I had been able to get by on my salary, but for Denise, the near-impossible burden of paying the mortgage by herself loomed. She stopped eating. She stopped sleeping. Yoga classes helped her hold herself together. They were tranquil, familiar, conducted in the presence of others, but somehow private, too. And she was good at yoga. It gave her a crucial sense of mastery when her husband was lost and everything else that mattered—job, home, bank account—was hanging by a thread.

Meanwhile, her striking outward composure led people to make the strangest comments. Some acquaintance said, “Now you can go out and have sex with whoever you want,” which defied all explanation. Or this: “Don’t you find it disgusting that he died right in your apartment?” And another weird one: “You’ll see, in six months you’ll be pregnant.”

“It provoked a lot of self-analysis,” Denise said. “Have I ever said anything like that to anyone? Ugh, I hope not.”

Impressed by her equilibrium, I invited Denise to join the group. And after the first meeting, everyone else told me they admired her self-possession as much as I did. It hadn’t occurred to me that a cooking class might cause her distress. But what happened that Saturday night at the cooking class would make me doubt what I knew about Denise, about widows, about what constitutes comfort in or out of the kitchen.

L
AUREN, OUR TEACHER
, was eager to embrace our widowhood dilemmas. She had devised a menu with all that in mind.

“It’s unfortunate when people don’t feel entitled to cook unless they have another body around,” she said. She handed each of us an apron in her impeccably equipped kitchen, punctuating a relentlessly buoyant tone with the gestures of a majorette. A rambunctious Labrador retriever, Mango, fishtailed wildly around our knees. “Eating and sharing and smelling good food cooking are incredible pleasures in life.”

Marcia tied on an apron with a brisk tug. “That dog needs a sedative,” she said.

Lauren scooted Mango out the swinging door and described the menu. All the recipes, from lamb chops slathered with a chunky fresh tomato salsa to fudgy chocolate-chocolate chip cookies—just about the right amount of chocolate, as far as I’m concerned—were designed to teach basic skills: measuring, chopping, braising, and grilling. We could make any of the dishes for one or for a crowd, helping us repay the awkward social debts to people inviting us out on the Widow Tour.

First we mixed cookie batter, a deep, decadent chocolate hash made more sophisticated with hints of cinnamon and espresso. It was Lesley’s job to roll the dough into logs. Lauren explained that they could be stored frozen that way, ready at short notice to be cut into individual cookies, the better to accommodate a widow treating herself to a fresh-baked indulgence on her own. She could also pop the whole batch into the oven at once for a party of friends, or mainline the entire stash in one orgiastic bender, I thought, a perfectly plausible option that went unmentioned. Lesley pulled
up the sleeves of her silk blouse and made a show of stroking and caressing the mixture into a long, smooth cylinder, seizing the opportunity for bawdy repartee.

Widowed the longest, aside from me, Lesley seemed to take it as her duty to set an example, to demonstrate that a widow doesn’t have to be a saint. She also seemed to have gotten the memo from George Bonanno that humor is the best balm for grief, and Dawn was only too happy to follow that lead. High spirits aside, I saw that they were both competent cooks. After years of meal prep for their families, they had the most confidence and the loosest posture, joshing and wielding their tools with abandon as the room filled with the tantalizing scent of baking chocolate and we turned to chopping onions, smashing garlic cloves, and whisking salad dressing. Marcia and I, more accustomed to surviving on takeout, mimicked Lauren’s motions with serious concentration in an effort not to embarrass ourselves. Only Denise, with that Mona Lisa smile, remained impossible to read.

We stationed ourselves at cutting boards while Lauren circled us like a border collie, prodding us with suggestions and correcting our techniques. “Keep your shoulders down when you chop,” Lauren advised me. “And brace your belly against the counter.” Hands busy, we slipped easily in and out of cooking and widow talk, and I took pleasure in the group’s enjoyment. When I had visited George Bonanno’s emotions lab, the researchers analyzed my expressions, looking for what is called a Duchenne smile, named after a French anatomist who discovered that true, happy smiles always involve contracting the muscles around the eyes. It’s an involuntary crinkling absent from polite, deliberate smiles, and noticeably absent from Denise that night. Bonanno found that the more widows
laughed and smiled these genuine smiles, the better they would feel during the early years of bereavement.

Lesley and Dawn would have satisfied Monsieur Duchenne handily, Lesley with her constant look of merry surprise, Dawn with her easy, buoyant laugh. Marcia’s smiles were far more difficult to discern—no eye crinkling, just an infinitesimal upturn of one side of her mouth. Her face barely moved at all. I didn’t know whether Marcia was still grieving intensely, or whether she had always been someone who held her emotions with a tight fist. She kept her distance from the hijinks—hijinks were not Marcia’s thing—but that tease of a smile hinted that she might be amused by others performing them.

At least she was picking up the rhythm of the class. With Denise, the beat was off. While she steered clear of the conversation and made her best effort to remain unobtrusive, our teacher stepped in often with advice and corrections.

“Try holding the whisk lower down on the handle.” Lauren gripped her hand over Denise’s to demonstrate. Denise complied obediently. A minute later, Lauren returned. “You see, you are in much more control. When you do it like this, you become much less timid.”

“I’m not timid,” Denise said, quietly.

“You need to get down farther on the handle again,” Lauren said brightly.

“Get down, get down,” Lesley sang, gyrating along.

“I’m getting distracted by the commentary over here,” Denise said crisply.

The more Lauren intervened, the more disconnected Denise became. Was it the class? Was it us? Something was rattling her.

“Let me show you this,” Lauren said later, when Denise was chopping celery.

“I’m doing it wrong again?” She smiled, her eyebrows still in the woebegone position.

“I think what you need to do is slice it a little closer together.”

“I can’t do it that way.” Denise kept working without further explanation. I said nothing but kicked myself for pressing Denise into a Saturday night of enforced activity when she probably would have preferred a solitary yoga marathon at home.

“Maybe it’s because you’re left-handed,” Lauren concluded, moving on. She addressed us in the spirit of a pep rally. “You guys are doing great! I have to tell you, I’m so proud of you all. You are doing amazing!”

Denise cut out the chopping, raised her eyes to meet Lauren’s, and smiled with particular care. “What happens when people aren’t doing amazing?” she asked faintly. “What do you say then?”

Our knives stopped tapping and our whisks stopped swirling. Dawn wiped her hands on her apron and chuckled nervously. Lesley leaned over and gave Denise a squeeze.

Lauren, perplexed, said, “I … I always say that.”

The kitchen filled with a bosky plume of smoke from the lamb chops as we plated the food to carry into the dining room. I untied my apron and stood aside for a moment, watching the scene and thinking about the lesson. Denise seemed to wish she could disappear. And the more she did, the more Lauren tried to make her more visible, to pull her back into the lesson. Lauren couldn’t stop trying to help. She seemed to be driven to it, like a herding dog nudging a wayward lamb back to the flock.

Then it hit me—the Help Me look. Those were Steve’s last
words, but they also described the expression on Denise’s face, the mournful expression that I’d employed once to great effect myself. Lauren was hardwired to react to it, to help Denise any way she could. As long as Denise had that Help Me look, people were going to try to help her, whether it was by sending her fruit baskets, inviting her out on the Widow Tour, offering wacky reassurances about her future, or showing her how to hold a whisk. Human beings are programmed to help those in visible distress. It’s an emotional symbiosis, as ingrained as attraction or a mother’s care, and it is probably one of the more admirable characteristics of the human race, even though it may not always seem that way to the person on the receiving end of the cooking tips or the Harry & David Deluxe Sympathy Basket With Pears and Havarti Cheese.

Whether she was aware of it or not, Denise was sending the Help Me signal, and people were going to respond. Whether she wanted to or not, she was projecting a message: Take care of me. Make me safe.

chapter
EIGHT

d
enise broke her silence during dinner, but it wasn’t until afterward that I understood. That all the nourishment on the table could do nothing to fill the void she was feeling now. That her grief was stronger than I knew. It humbled me.