Epilogue (3 page)

• • •

After great sorrow a formal feeling comes, so said Emily Dickinson. I think she must have been talking about the quiet and stillness that fills the mind, protecting it from in-ner storms, from bouts of fear. Not thinking is like pulling the blanket up over one’s head to avoid seeing the monsters in the room. It is like being on a train and watching the landscape sweep by, farm, granary, woods, path, road, hill, mountain, stream, bridge. While in a trance, boredom vanishes, time is brought to heel.

Also not sleeping. I have never been an insomniac. I have a peasant woman’s constitution or at least I used to. My soul goes to sleep at night and sometimes has bad dreams but has never tossed and turned till dawn. Until now. My legs move across the bed, searching for H. My mind races toward him but he is not there. I think of trivial things like where I put my sunglasses and whether or not my granddaughter at age two and a half understands that her grandfather cannot come to see her anymore. I take a Tylenol. I take two. I do not sleep. A great roaring is in my brain—it is as if I were trying to nap under the stars on the

veldt as an approaching lion pawed the ground beside me. I tell my doctor. He sends me away with a prescription for Ambien. It works. I sleep an untroubled sleep all night but three nights later I wake at four and am unable to return to sleep. And then I wake at two and then I increase the dose of Ambien and I sleep again and a few days later at a higher dose I wake after a few hours. I become obsessed with sleep. I spend the day avoiding my exhaustion, afraid to close my eyes in case I steal sleep from the nighttime hours. My doctor switches me to Lunesta. It works on night three but by night five it is less effective than hot milk, which really doesn’t work no matter how many people vouch for its soporific powers. All I can talk about is sleep. Some weeks go by. I decide to go without any sleep medication, to recover my memory of what it was to sleep without fear of not sleeping. The first night without any Ambien at all I am up all night, and for five days afterwards I move like a zombie, sleepwalking in the daylight, haunting myself in the night. I go to a hypnotist who says he can help. I try his relaxation methods, thinking myself into a gentle place, but while I can calm my excited heart I cannot fall asleep.

And then finally I sleep again. I just sleep.

• • •

The shock has begun to wear off. I feel it recede. There are many hours of the day that I inhabit my own body, that I am not made of wood or stone. There are hours of the day when I talk on the phone with a friend and laugh at a story or absorb myself in the editorial pages of the paper just as if I were the same person I had always been. I turn off the

lights at night. I am not uneasy in the dark. I rub my cat’s head as I always did. He sleeps in H.’s place beside me. I am not surprised when I wake and find him there. For days after H.’s death he sat on H.’s side of the bed and let out a strange sound, a cat sound, a small repetitive shriek. I remember to go to the grocery store. I buy supplies. Without the shock I feel exposed, as if I were a mollusk without a shell, a formless thing, veins showing, trembling naked on a rock, a predator’s next meal. My friends have all called and invited me to dinner. They have assured me that nothing has changed. They say it doesn’t matter if we are nine for dinner instead of ten. But now the phone is not ringing and I realize that I must call, arrange things, plan to go to the theater with someone, suggest a movie, go out into the world on my own.

But if I am out on the street I want to be home. If I am at dinner with a friend I keep glancing at my watch, how soon can I leave, how long until I am back in my apartment. If I am in my apartment I am anxious. I should go out. I need to be out. I need to go somewhere. If I am downtown I worry about the subway on the way home. Will it come? Will I be safe? I go to the theater with friends. I want to leave at intermission. I can’t concentrate. I am worried about how I am going to get home. If I am in my neighborhood I still worry. How many blocks away from my house am I? This anxiety, anxiety about nothing, no reason or sense to it, f lows in and out of my mind all day. Did I lose my wallet? Did I leave someone waiting for me at a lunch I forgot? Do I have enough money in my bank account to pay my bills? Am I sick? Is my heart beating too fast? Will I have a stroke? Are my children unhappy? Do they need me?

When I was a child I went to a camp in Maine. In August on a clear night we would stay awake, singing songs and playing jacks on the bunk f loor until the moon was high in the sky. Then we would put on our uniform blue sweaters and bring our scratchy wool blankets out to the f lagpole, and slowly, as we leaned against each other, staring at the stars above and the moon making its way toward dawn, a pale light would appear at the northern end of the sky. It would grow higher and higher by the moment as we watched. It would now be tinged with pink and blue—or was it green?—and then perhaps purple as the lights shot up into the sky: Northern lights high above the pine trees. I was not frightened by the strange sky. I knew just where I was, on the damp ground of a camp by a lake in the woods. I was not afraid of the enormity of space or the smallness of my bones, although I was aware of both.

A counselor told us that the lights were the fingers of God, touching His creation. I was more impressed by the facts. Lights shone in my sky because in August the position of the moon was right, the stars in their constellations had moved, the weather was good, the North Pole was made of ice, white ref lective ice. I understood that death was real and there would be no appeal when my time came. I did not know that it was someone else’s death that would shatter me, leaving me afraid of lost wallets, loud noises, strangers in the street.

The last time I saw those lights was the summer before I was seventeen and left camp for the last time. Perhaps I could go to Maine and find them again.

And so I am alone. Not really all alone. My children are a phone call away. Friends are near and available if I need

them. But I am mateless and that changes everything. I have always, all through our marriage, been a writer, a professional woman who might lunch with an editor, breakfast with an agent, have appointments to keep, a destiny of my own, separate from H.’s, separate from my children, a place in my head where I had my own thoughts and obligations. But I overestimated my independence. I now suspect it was never there at all.

When I’m alone without a destination, a friend to meet for lunch or dinner, the hours drag on. I know how to fill them. I could go to the gym and exercise. I could read a book if my concentration were better. I could invent a story or write an essay or clean my closet of unwanted clothes. I could go to a movie alone. I do none of these things. I hang suspended over my life. The phone rings. I come back into my body. I am interested again in the elec-tions, in the grinding byways of Israeli politics, in the value of this or that commentary, TV series, theater. I hang up the phone and within a short time I have faded again. Is this the thing about being alone that I must get used to—I am not here if no one sees or hears me. Like the proverbial tree in the forest I neither fall nor stand unobserved. But I am observing myself and that should be enough.

It isn’t.

There is a weight in my stomach as if I had swallowed a burned-out log: a taste of ash in my mouth.

H. returned home from his office around seven each evening. I would stand at my window on the fourteenth f loor and watch him walking down the street. He wore his trench coat and an Irish wool cap in the winter. He walked fast. He was coming toward me. He would have

his drink and we would talk. Not about his patients, that he would never do, although I would have listened. Instead we talked about our children, what worried them, what obstacles lay ahead. We talked in shorthand, whole paragraphs were left out but understood, whole pages quickly turned. We listened to the evening news. Then he would fix dinner. I stood at his elbow while he chopped or stirred. Now I don’t know when it’s time to eat. I don’t know what to eat. The day has no appointed end. It drifts off into the night.

In my cabinet I have a huge bulging blue plastic file folder in which I put the condolence notes I received. The most valuable of these are the letters from former patients whose names I did not know, whose stories I will never know. One after another they spoke of how much H. had meant to them, how he changed their lives, made it possible for them to marry, to have children, to make good on days that had gone bad. They spoke of his smile, his way of listening, his caring, his way of noticing the smallest changes in their manner or look. One man wrote of the support H. gave him for his homosexuality in an era when other psychoanalysts were trying to change sexual wishes, erase sexual dreams, turn people into pretenses of themselves, carrying painful or shameful secrets that H. knew should be neither painful nor secret. One man wrote of his long-held hope that one day H. could be the best man at his wedding to his partner. There were dozens of photographs enclosed in these notes, snapshots of little children, families on a picnic, girls in ballet shoes, a boy with a bow and arrow and an older one seated at a piano, an adopted Chinese child smiles and waves to the camera. In one way

or another each of the photos said, “Not without him.” And now I am without him.

We had talked about this. He was born twelve years before I was. He was in good health and good mind but the possibility of widowhood haunted me. He said that it would be a compliment to our marriage, to his love for me and mine for him, if I managed this widowhood well and was able to enjoy my life with another partner or without. He expected that of me. He told me a dozen times in the last few years that I had made him happy. This was comforting but not comforting enough. The ash was still in my mouth. The log remained in my stomach. I considered that he had asked too much of me.

We had argued about the bedroom wallpaper. It had been on the walls when we moved into the apartment some eighteen years ago. The pattern was of repeated small bunches of f lowers, blues and yellows, little touches of roses, and they were on a background of ivory and very dense, so that they seemed at a quick glance like a field full of wild-f lowers. This wallpaper spoke of New England inns and farmhouses in the plains. It was already dingy at the edges when we moved in. Increasingly the background turned to gray and there were peeling strips along the baseboard. I wanted to change the paper. H. wanted to leave it be. He was attached to it. He didn’t want to spend the money. He liked it. He saw no reason for change.

I think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book
The Yellow Wallpaper
, written in 1899. A woman suffers from a terrible grief after giving birth to a daughter and is confined by her doctor to a bedroom with yellow wallpaper where she goes gradually mad until she kills herself. This novel is consid-

ered a primary feminist text. This is a story about how men impose literal and symbolic immobility. Here is a woman deprived of her own volition, chained to an infant, sub-servient to a husband and without hope. True, I said, dear Charlotte Perkins Gilman, true. I had been an early feminist. My mother had hobbled about on her Cuban heels while I had a first serve that whizzed past the boys. But I always had a tendency to wander from the political line. In the seventies I never considered that men were to blame for all oppression and I never believed that children were a burden. Mine sometimes were and sometimes were not.

I was raised, child of the forties, girl of the fifties, to f lirt, to f latter, to f lutter about. Those are traits that are hard to remove just because the climate changes. I admit to a desire, lifelong, to put my hand in a man’s hand and let him lead me through the thicket of taxes and insurance and such. I want to go walking in the woods with a man pushing aside the heavier brush. I want a man to call a taxi or help me over a fence. I have always thought of men as the necessary other. The only question in my mind has been which man and when I married H. the question was answered. Still drifting, avoiding memories, sitting on my bed and not moving, finding it hard to go to the store and buy the barest of necessities, I was aware that in this widowhood I could use a sharp infusion of feminist pride, a sense of my own power, a disinterest in attachment, a venturesome soul daring to walk my own path. My first not-so-firm step was to remove the old wallpaper.

A painter comes. The wallpaper is stripped and gone and in its place a new lemon wall shines in the morning sun. I wish H. could see it. He would have liked it after all. Now

I have to decide if I am going to stay in this apartment or move, to a new city, to a little town, to a new apartment, near or further from my children and my friends. I make no decisions at all.

Except that I take an armful of H.’s suits and bring them down to my doorman to take to his church. I take H.’s old coats, the raincoat with its lining, the down jacket for weekends and country wear, and make a second trip. I don’t think about each jacket, when he wore it last, the blue suit for the wedding of one of the daughters, the white suit for summer occasions, the heavy wool sweater worn to the office on cold winter days, I push away any images that dare to approach. I carry the clothes in my arms as if they were old newspapers. Then I am exhausted and fall asleep on the couch. I am not so sentimental that I would keep clothes in a closet that might warm another man on a bitter winter’s night. I am not so intent on keeping the past in my closet that I would indulge my wish to keep everything just as it is. Nevertheless as I ride down the elevator with suspenders, shirts and tweed vests on my arm I feel robbed, absolutely robbed.

I remember the photographs of widows after World War Two, women in Florence and Sienna in black robes, with black scarves tied under their chins, with bent backs and heavy wool stockings, collecting wood or coal in baskets, or sweeping the steps or throwing buckets of muddy water into the streets. Today widows dress in their best clothes, wear all their jewelry and go out into the world to find a new mate, preferably one who can still drive at night. Will I join them? On the one hand I think it noble to attempt to regain what was torn away with the death of a partner, the