Good Grief (10 page)

“Not changing your mind about Ashland, are you?” Kit asks as I stare pensively through the rain-splattered windshield.

“Oh,
no,
” I assure him. But the truth is, I want to go home. I feel the way I did as a kid at camp, with a pit of homesickness in my gut that no amount of s’mores or bug juice could fill.

10

Dr. Rupert gave me the name of a shrink in Medford, the next town over, but the new doctor doesn’t take my insurance, which I’ve extended through COBRA. I call around and find that none of the psychiatrists or psychologists in Ashland seem to take insurance. It turns out that COBRA is an ill-tempered snake who wants to cover only 50 percent of “allowable” charges for out-of-network doctors, which is much less than what the doctors actually charge.

I meet with the Medford doctor once and he agrees to refill my prescription for antidepressants as long as I see him every three months and attend a weekly grief group in Ashland, which is free.

The group meets Tuesday evenings at the Ashland Community Center, a log cabin across from Lithia Park that looks as though Daniel Boone should live there. The first meeting is on Valentine’s Day, and I feel grateful to have a date, even if it’s with a room full of strangers.

Inside, a fire burns in the fireplace and there’s the familiar circle of folding aluminum chairs and bitter coffee served in Styrofoam cups, clumps of stubborn nondairy creamer floating on top, and little heart-shaped sugar cookies with pink icing.

The leader’s name is Sandy, and he’s good-looking in a sandy sort of way—tousled blond hair, as though he just got out of bed, golden skin, two apricots for cheeks, a sandy goatee. A silver wedding band flashes between his tanned fingers. He asks us to take our seats. He’s tired, he explains, because he was up late last night with his daughter, Emma, who has a cold. Perfect name for a daughter, Emma.

“Hello, everyone, let’s get started,” Emma’s dad says.

We go around the room introducing ourselves. Since I’m sitting next to Sandy, we start with me. I tell the circle of faces that my husband died of cancer seven months ago. I used to feel faint whenever I told someone that Ethan died—as though I were floating above the earth, watching a movie of two people talking about his death. But now I’m able to state the fact as though someone merely asked what kind of car I drive. I’m surprised at how Ethan’s death is no longer a cruel impossibility, but rather an inherent part of my life, like my address or middle name (Enid, horrible, after an aunt). Sophie Enid Stanton: widow. Starting over.

“Tell us something you miss about Ethan,” Sandy says.

This seems too big a question to answer. Besides, wouldn’t we make it easier on ourselves if we tried to recall something we
didn’t
miss about our loved ones? If we tried to remember the time they locked the keys in the trunk or forgot our birthdays? But that’s the problem with dead people. They’re perfect. They never argue or chew with their mouths open.

Actually, it bothered me the way Ethan chewed. He ate quickly with big bites, his cheeks bulging as he stared vacantly into space, his mind spinning around some piece of software code.

Sandy clears his throat, leans forward in his chair, waiting.

“His hair,” I tell the group softly. “Going to sleep with him at night.” I feel myself blushing, hoping they don’t think I mean just the sex part. “Someone to put down in case of emergency.”

People smile and nod encouragingly, and we move on to the man sitting next to me, Al, a piano instructor who’s been a widower for nearly a year. “It’s just not the same,” he says, shaking his head and tugging at his black beard. He looks at the coffee urn on the table at the back of the room. “Are there doughnuts?” he asks.

Then there’s an older man whose wife recently died of Alzheimer’s. She didn’t recognize him anymore, and when he visited her at the rest home she yelled at him to get the covered bridge out of her room.

After we finish introducing ourselves, Sandy wants us to write letters to our loved ones. He passes out yellow pads and Bic pens. More hard work! I concentrate on shredding my cuticles.

The empty pad stares up at me coolly.

Dear Ethan,
I begin. I look around the room. Everyone’s bent over, scratching away with their pens. Where are we going to mail these letters—to the North Pole?

I moved up to Ashland and I’m staying with Ruth until I can find my own place and we sort of had a fight. It’s beautiful here, but it’s lonely. I thought I could leave the loneliness in San Jose, but it followed me up here like a stalker. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?

I should probably tell Ethan that I sold our house. Oh, screw it. He can’t read this. I tear the sheet off the yellow pad, crumple it, and start over.

Dear Sandy. Can I sleep with you? How come none of the grief books talk about how widows get crushes on everyone? Anyone who’s even remotely kind or good-looking? You become like the bird in that children’s book that loses its mother and starts thinking everything is its mother, even a steam shovel. Are you my mother? it keeps asking. Are you my husband?

I look up, watching everyone writing. Sandy clears his throat again and shuffles some papers. Finally he asks if anyone would like to read their letter aloud. People squirm, glance at the door.

“We’re doing some hard work today,” Sandy says, looking around the room, smoothing his goatee. “I understand if you don’t want to read your letters. Would anyone like to?”

He turns toward me, eyes big and brown. My heart speeds up. I fold my letter and stuff it into my jacket pocket, then look at the floor. My anxiety-rattled brain expresses a sudden desire to run a hand over the golden hairs on Sandy’s arms. A desire to have sex with him in a sleeping bag under the stars. He’s not even my type! I don’t go for earthy goatee guys. Still, sitting this close to Sandy, I can’t help but notice that he smells earthy in a good way, like potatoes. It would be a down sleeping bag and we would be naked and I’d have my flat stomach back. We’d be on another planet where there’s a lot more to console a person than an empty legal pad.

A woman whose husband fell through the ice and drowned on an ice-fishing trip reads softly to the venetian blinds. Her letter is all about how her husband never should have gone fishing in the first place. It wasn’t cold enough for the ice to be solid and they already had a freezer full of fish at home and it was dumb to drink and fish and be so careless when he had two kids and a whole family who cared about him.

“And hello!” she says, her quavering voice getting louder. “They
have
fish at Safeway. We didn’t need any more fucking fish out of that cesspool of a river!” She looks up at us and says, “That’s as far as I got.”

Sandy says thank you and it’s okay to be angry and keep going, don’t be afraid to keep going.

After the meeting, Gloria, an older woman in a black wool cape whose daughter died of leukemia, crosses the room toward me.

“You remind me of my daughter,” she says, giving me a hug. “She had curly hair, too.” I feel her knobby vertebrae under layers of cape and sweater. She smells spicy, like cinnamon and cloves, like apple pie, and I don’t want to let go of her.

Gloria takes a step back, looks at me, then touches my curls. “You take care,” she says. “See you next week.”

Then the piano teacher is at my side. “Is it Sophie?” he says.

“Yes.”

He extends a hand. “Al.” The hand is damp, a little slippery.

“Hi, Al.”

“Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” He wears a Mr. Rogers cardigan sweater, and his wiry black hair is combed over in a swirl from the nape of his neck, like a shadow across his head. He’s probably at least ten years older than me. “You mentioned not liking to eat dinner alone,” he explains sheepishly, “and I’m trying to get out of myself by reaching out to others.”

“Um . . .” I am searching for an answer. Looks aren’t everything, after all, and it is Valentine’s Day, and maybe it’s a good thing to have a friendly dinner with a man I can’t possibly lust after. Besides, Al’s a musician and he’s probably talented and sweet and interesting. Lonely, like me.

“Sure,” I say, trying to smile. Al reminds me of my geometry teacher, Mr. Rowinson, who wore similar brown polyester pants but was kind and patient and let you retake quizzes to bring up your grade.

After the meeting, Al and I walk to the warehouse-type brewery in town that serves gourmet pizzas and beer. I order a wheat beer and vegetable pizza for dinner; Al orders pasta and wine. As we’re sipping our drinks, he leans over the table and tries to take my hand. My arm jerks back instinctively and Al gets only two fingers. He squeezes them and gives me a mournful look.

“I know it’s hard,” he says.

“For you, too,” I tell him, unlooping my fingers and folding my hands in my lap.

Here’s what happens in the movies: A single woman moves to a small town in the country to start over, and a rugged Sam Shepard kind of guy—lean and muscular, a cleft chin, and a thirty-three-inch waist in faded Levi’s—finds her. He’s got an old Ford pickup with a friendly black Lab in the back and a big, soft bed with a brass headboard and miles of flannel quilt you could hide under all day.

Here’s what happens in real life: A single woman moves to a small town in the country to start over, and Professor Tweedly—his breath smelling faintly like the cat box, his hands as oily and plump as sausages—finds her. Despite his feeble comb-over, she figures maybe he’ll offer a bit of benign companionship, a bit of dreamy Mozart that will take her mind off things.

But no! After dinner I agree to walk the four blocks over to Al’s house for coffee and he seats himself at the piano in his living room and begins playing a Barry Manilow song.

“‘I write the songs that make the young girls cry . . . ,’” Al swoons, closing his eyes and swaying. Suddenly I can imagine why Ruth lowered her standards for Tony. If this is the alternative! The wheat beer makes my head throb. I curse myself for agreeing to this evening. My weak spot: desperate for a dinner mate.

“Al?” I say, raising my voice over the second chorus. “Al, I have a migraine.” I clutch my temples.

He stops playing, quickly pulls the cover down over the keys, and rushes to my side on the sofa.

“Let me give you a massage.” He reaches for my shoulders.

“No.” I squirm away. “I need to get going.”

“Of course, let me drive you.”

It’s pouring now, and I’m exhausted and don’t have an umbrella.

“All right.” I grab my coat. As Al tries to help me into it, I duck my head, fighting back tears.
Ethan, I need a ride!
Wherever my husband is, however dark that place might be, I want to go there, right now.

Al’s car is parked in the street in front of his house. We get in and he starts the engine, then he puts his hands in his lap instead of on the steering wheel.

“I was hoping . . . ,” he says, looking down. But then he stops speaking and lunges across the seat, trying to kiss me. His beard is coarse and scratchy, like Easter basket grass. I turn my head, and his lips, warm and sticky, brush my cheek. Then his arms are around me and his grasp is firm. I spot a tennis racket in the backseat and reach over and grab it, smacking the window as I try to hit him with a cramped backhand swat.

“Quit it!” The racket bounces against the back of his head with a
twong!

“Yeow!”

I hold the tennis racket in the air between us, watching him through the squares in the netting. He slides back against the door.

“Okay. Sorry! It’s just that you’re so beautiful. And I’m so lonely.”

“Well, get a
hold
of yourself.”

Just then a woman in a yellow slicker rounds the corner by Al’s house. When she sees us in the car, she speeds up, swinging her arms and huffing, her scarf flying in the wind behind her.

“Al!” she screeches.

Al sinks to the floor of the car, the upper half of his body folded over the seat.

“Shit! My wife!”

“Your wife? Your
dead
wife?”

“She’s not exactly dead,” Al moans. Then he grabs a piece of newspaper—the “Local and State” section—and pulls it over his head.

“Dead or alive, she already
saw
you.”

“Al!” The woman charges toward the car and raps on the window with her umbrella. “Where’s the check, Al? We’re on instant oatmeal, Al. And I don’t mean for breakfast. I mean your daughter, who you can’t be
bothered
to call on her birthday, is eating instant oatmeal for dinner!” She gives the window another smack with the umbrella.

“And who’s this? Suzie Coed? One of your piano students? Did you take her out for a nice roast beef dinner while your daughter ate instant oatmeal?” She looks at me. “Honey,” she says, poking the umbrella toward my face, “this man couldn’t even get a job playing the piano at Bob’s Bar.”

“You’re a deadbeat dad?” I ask Al.

“It’s a long story,” Al says.

“You posed as a widower to get a dinner date?”

“I am filled with pain and loss,” he says, pulling the paper farther down over his head, trying to get smaller on the floor of the car.

I open the passenger door and get out.

“I’m not his student,” I tell the woman. “I met him at a grief group. He said he was a widower—that his wife was dead.”

“Yeah, well, he’s killing me all right.” She leans into the car and beats at the newspaper with the umbrella. “You worthless man. You worthless bad comb-over bastard!”

I realize I’m still clenching the tennis racket. I use it to give the newspaper over Al’s head a good swat, then hand it to his ex-wife.

“Liar!” the woman shrieks, whacking the paper with the racket and then tossing it into the backseat.

“Liar!” I agree.

“Ow. Yeowch!” Al hollers.

“See you in court, Al,” the woman says. She slams the car door and the engine stalls, then quits. The woman and I look at each other for a moment. She seems to decide that I am no threat. Then we head off down the street in opposite directions.

Al. As in
no alimony.

Droplets of rain dot the rhododendron bushes like glass beads. As the wind blows, water from the trees stings my scalp. It is a different kind of rain in Oregon, sharp, cold drops that seem to find a way of getting
inside
your body, of seeping through your clothes into your blood and bones and making everything ache.