Saturday Night Widows (26 page)

Then we turned to the lingerie. Lesley flapped her wings with delight when she spotted a hanger holding a garment, if that’s what it was, assembled from strips of nude-colored mesh and a few
strategically placed feathers. It could have been the illegitimate love child of a slingshot and a feather duster.

“That makes a statement,” I said.

Lesley lifted the item off the hanger with a finger, one eyebrow raised. “Yes, it says, ‘You are a new woman.’ ” Indeed. “It says, ‘Try having sex with someone new, after thirty years with someone else.’ ”

She held it over her T-shirt and gave a wiggle. “Craig tells me the only place for sexy lingerie is on the floor,” she mused. “But he did ask me to look for a teddy. Is this a teddy?”

I didn’t answer, too busy trying to envision the
Belle du Jour
lifestyle of the woman who on a daily basis wore underpinnings that cost more than a trash compactor. Surely no one in the feather getup would ever have to shovel a driveway or meet a payroll. Just as surely, that was part of the appeal. I had to hand it to Tara. The La Perla shop, with its soft-core allure, captured her aesthetic of subtly withholding chic. No bordello décor, nothing sleazy or garish. The place had the spare ambiance of a first-class lounge at LAX. I felt a kind of dull lust kick in, a lust for objects of desire way beyond my financial standing. This place was a total tease.

Dawn was savvy enough to ask for everything that was on sale in her size. Then she and Lesley disappeared into dressing rooms in the center of the store with an ample stash. It wasn’t long before they whipped aside the curtains and flaunted their finds to appreciative shrieks.

“Dawn, you can’t buy that,” Lesley said. “You’re going to give some guy a heart attack.”

She was right to worry. Dawn’s look-at-me figure strained inside a black mesh slip with a few satin ribbons slashed across some
high-risk territory. I remembered some dialogue from
Body Heat
, when Kathleen Turner wondered why William Hurt suggested she shouldn’t wear an outfit and he answered, “You shouldn’t wear that body.”

Lesley pirouetted in a silver bra and panty set that had us
sh-bopping
like the Shirelles.

“Oh, mama!” Tara said.

“This one’s headed for the bedroom floor,” Lesley announced, all cocky confidence.

The rest of us clucked around the racks while the two of them ducked in to change again, speaking through the curtains as the lace flew. They kept Maria, the assistant manager of the store, hopping, sending her to the stockroom for more sizes. She had opened early to give us the run of the place and won our hearts by admitting she had a complex about her thighs.

“Is this what you expected from a group of widows?” I asked her.

She put down a box of panties. “I get it,” she said. “I lost my mother. It’s not the same, but when you lose someone you love, you have to put on a face every day for your work, for your kids. Beautiful lingerie is another kind of mask. It’s a mask that says I feel sexy, I feel beautiful.”

Meanwhile, Dawn was saying, “I’m going to want way too much stuff.” She whipped aside the curtain to show us a clingy champagne-colored nightgown trimmed with a suggestion of lace. “I need a little piece of lingerie for when I go on a trip.”

“You’re going on a trip? A trip where you need lingerie?” I asked.

Dawn let loose one of her throaty laughs. “I don’t have one planned. I’m trying to project one.”

In fact, she had scheduled a getaway with Adam, the widower
she’d been seeing, in conjunction with taking their sons to camp. But once again the relationship had hit turbulence, and they were planning to drop the boys and turn right back. The drive alone could make or break the situation.

This lingerie wasn’t for him, she said; it was for her, a reward for getting in the best shape she’d achieved in years. Denise had inspired her to commit herself fully to yoga, Dawn said. “I realized how good I’d feel if I got stronger.”

She turned this way and that in front of the mirror to evaluate the nightie that Adam was destined not to see. If this was what strength looked like, I made a note to spend the summer strapped to a cross-trainer.

The second anniversary of Andries’s death had just passed, and in some ways, to Dawn, it was worse than the first. It was especially hard on the kids, and it made her suspect that they had been putting on a brave front for her sake up to now. She imagined they associated the time of year—school concerts, the last weeks of classes, the onset of summer weather—with his death, and her daughter had become moody and withdrawn. The other day, out of the blue, she shouted and pounded her fists: “I want my daddy back! I want him here
now
.”

Dawn gave a last twirl in front of the mirror. “Ooh, it would be nice to wear this for someone,” she said. “But this is for me. If I can grab five minutes of feeling good for myself, I’ll take it.” She slipped back into the changing room.

“You should be the official La Perla spokesmodel,” I said.

Tara looked after her fondly. “I was describing Dawn to a friend the other day,” she told me. “I said she’s like every man’s fantasy … and seemingly every woman’s nightmare competition. But she isn’t, because she’s so sisterly.”

I couldn’t help but notice that after pushing us to schedule this fling for months, Tara was hanging back, lingering by the dressing rooms, unable to focus. Yet there was a radiance about her that was impossible to ignore. She grabbed me by the arm to explain. It seemed that everything was changing for her just in the few weeks since our spa weekend. The curtain that had been blocking her had opened, and she was stepping out. She had sold her family’s house and bought a new one, a smaller one—happily, a few blocks from where Lesley lived.

“Hooray,” Lesley called out from the room. “We can hula-hoop together.”

Tara smiled. More requests were coming in for voice-over work, she added. And the guy Tara had just met when we visited the spa, the guy who sent all the text messages—she could barely contain her astonishment at how their dates had evolved.

“You’re getting along?” I asked.

She widened her eyes in amazement. “Yeah.” She paused to collect her thoughts, but they scattered like mercury. “Really, out of nowhere,” she began, barely audible. “Like a bolt out of the blue. There are connections and feelings there … and equally on his part.” She looked off to the side, unable to meet my eyes. “I don’t know whether it’s because I’m feeling better and I’m embracing life and it’s coming through to others, but … all this stuff is coming my way. I’m sort of overwhelmed by this guy.” She turned back to me, genuinely flustered. “Not sort of overwhelmed.
I am overwhelmed
.”

Boy, could I relate. After all but giving up hope of finding passion again, to feel a connection with someone—someone
male—
was a shock. I saw it all in her face, the thrill and the trepidation over what might unfold. This man was coaxing feelings to life
in Tara that she had nearly forgotten, that she thought she might never feel again.

Lesley returned to the mirror in a cream-colored gown, form-fitting but not transparent. It came with a matching robe, the better to wear with Craig’s son in the house. “This is kind of virginal,” Lesley said, pulling a face. She was distracted by Tara’s flustered demeanor. “Tara, what’s
with
you? What happened after the sexting?”

“It wasn’t sexting. It was flirting via text.”

“Did it get better? Did you go on a date? And?”

Tara didn’t speak for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Finally, she said, “He is … an amazing man. Lovely.”

“She’s been so quiet about it,” Marcia said.

“Her socks have been knocked off, girls,” said Dawn. She peeked out from behind the curtain.

Will was going through a divorce, Tara told us when we pressed for details. He was fifty-eight, almost four years older than Tara. “He’s very … we both love words. He’s got a great brain. He’s an amazing father. His daughter is seven.”

“Seven!” Lesley exclaimed. “I thought I was mad with a thirteen-year-old boy.”

Tara hadn’t met the girl yet. “We’re taking it slow. He’s very respectful. I didn’t see it coming. I feel completely giddy.” She waved us away and squeaked out a giggle, bordering on the hysterical. “All the things I didn’t think I’d feel, I feel all of them. Unbelievable.”

Tara’s good news gave us a helium lift, and we returned to our flighty mission. Marcia corralled Maria and disappeared to a dressing room in the back. Denise and I turned to helping Tara. Her daughters had been urging her to “get out of those microfiber, flesh-colored whatevers,” so she sought one special piece, a piece that would make a statement and give a boost of confidence, something
subtly seductive, “not too tarty … because I am not a tart.” We hit upon it, and I laced her in: a black silk bustier with corset stays up the back. Tara planned to wear it under a black tuxedo. It was classic. It was smoldering. It was Tara all over. No one understood better than Tara that elegance is refusal.

“Go, baby, go,” Dawn said. “Lady, this looks beautiful on you.”

“It’s a fortune,” Tara said. “I have never, ever splurged on myself on something like this.” She closed her eyes and handed a credit card over to Maria.

I breathed deep to savor the vicarious shopping high. It pleased me to think how different we were from the pitiful widows in a Dickens novel or even from a real-life widow of fifty years ago; how, within reason, we could spoil ourselves if we chose. We had made our own way and could spend our own money however we wanted, and who was to tell us otherwise? For the most part, we modern women hadn’t been financially dependent on husbands. Some in the group had been the big earners in their families. No one, I thought with pride, was lost without a man.

Tara still looked guilt-stricken, whether over the expense or something else, I wasn’t sure. I thought of a theory Camille Wortman, the grief researcher, had put forward when I pressed her to think harder about why my group wanted to perpetrate this spree together. “Maybe it helps a widow overcome inhibitions,” she said. “Maybe going with a group makes it less like she’s buying something intended for someone who is not her husband. It’s more acceptable, because she’s doing it for the group.”

Imagine my surprise when Marcia headed toward the cash register with a little cache of unmentionables.

“Talk about being out of your comfort zone,” she said with her suppressed smile. “This is it for me.”

“Marcia, you’re blushing!” Dawn said.

Marcia’s cheeks burned deep red. “I have to do this gradually,” she said. She stuffed her purchases quickly in a bag.

“This was something I would never have done if I hadn’t been with this group,” she confessed to me while we waited for the others. “But now that I’ve been here, I would probably come back. It’s another thing to learn. I’m changing, partially because I have to. And partially just for the hell of it.”

Marcia became positively talkative. During her marriage, she said, she had become set in her ways. “You develop a lifestyle, perspectives, likes and dislikes. I got into a pattern. When everything got pulled out from under me, I thought, here’s an opportunity to change some things.”

In her wildest dreams, I doubt Marcia would have chosen to spend a couple of hours in this saucy shop. All her life, she said, people were drawn to her for her personality and intelligence, certainly not her bona fides as a girly-girl. It was hard to envision young Marcia at a slumber party, mooning over David Cassidy and the latest colors of lip gloss. “The girly-girls weren’t the ones I was friends with. But this group is giving me another dimension.”

Marcia had another motivation as well. A new boss had entered her workplace, a woman, a very capable one, for the first time ever. She was assigning Marcia more responsibility, giving a reason unheard of when Marcia got her start: to offer the female perspective. It was a tidal change in an office where Marcia’s ability to talk sports with the guys had always been an asset. “I can start to show more femininity.”

She gave a crisp nod around the store. “It’s easy to re-evaluate with this group. They’re not like anybody I’ve ever been friends
with before, but they’re very accepting and open. Otherwise, you get stuck, and your life continues just as before, only without your spouse instead of with him.”

She was right. So much had changed for me since Bernie’s death, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still shake myself up. I asked our guide, Maria, to strip the mannequin of the one item in the store that was least likely to be worn by somebody like me. It was a corsetlike novelty straight out of a Feydeau farce, with a tiny skirt attached, barely enough to cover
le derrière
. The Aphrodite Skirted Bustier, according to the tag. It took some advanced work in spatial relations, but I tucked myself into it, hoisted everything into place, and stepped out to applause and wolf whistles. Then I took a good long look in the mirror. I will be honest: I thought I looked ridiculous. I also thought I looked great.

And not just because my friends said so. Although that helped. I had gained back the weight I lost when Bernie died, but I still had a pert little waist, a nice curvy tush. Not much going on up top, but not sagging up there, either. No way was I going to buy the Aphrodite Bustier, but it had done its work.

Then I took a good long look at my crazy, carefree companions, passing around their selections while making final choices. None of them were kids anymore, but they still looked smokin’. Lesley chose a black mesh negligee with peekaboo bubbles all over it; Dawn an abundance of flamboyant feminine froth; Tara a sultry, sophisticated masterpiece of simplicity. Marcia kept her choices pretty much to herself. Denise, well, Denise didn’t need enhancement. These women were supple, fit, healthy, and in the prime of their lives.

Lesley might say, “Try having sex with someone new, thirty
years or twenty years or even one year after someone else.” But, take it from me, this crowd had the figures for it.

Walking into the store that day, I had assumed I knew the underlying reason why a bunch of widows would band together to try on underwear. They were uncomfortable with their bodies, I presumed. They needed reassurance that they still had the requisite allure. Women are always hearing about how insecure they are supposed to feel about their physiques, and I had bought into the line. In fact, everyone looked fabulous, better than most men our ages. I didn’t know what the others were thinking, but if anyone was concerned about body issues, she shouldn’t be. No, I thought, it wasn’t our bodies we were most concerned about. The insecurity was over what to do with them.