Saturday Night Widows (31 page)

Faced with this menacing man and his more menacing rifle, I found myself rooting for the coyote. But Tara had raised children there and felt no such hesitation. She pointed out the coyote’s last location and left Will to help the sniper with his mission. They didn’t find the coyote, but Tara learned that it met its fate a week later.

Meanwhile, back in her decorous parlor, she showed us that the only items marked to move with her were a zebra rug and some framed family photographs of David on a beach with the girls. “I will absolutely have a place for these in the new house,” Tara said. “All the happy memories.”

“Do you feel awkward about Will seeing them?” I asked.

“I never talked to him about it. But he thinks it’s healthy that we … talk about David. It’s part of who my girls are … it’s part of who
I
am.”

Most everything else in the parlor was for sale, lots of dark wood end tables and stout upholstered chairs. “That’s not me anymore,” Tara said. “None of these things would look right in the new house.” Her attitude was brisk, unsentimental. This new Tara was shedding an old skin, becoming looser, freer, unmoored from the strictures applied to the wife of a more conservative man, but the transformation had demanded a series of tough decisions over the last two months. She had uncovered everything she owned from long-forgotten drawers and backs of closets, and every bit of it, from salad forks to scrapbooks, had been examined, appraised, and rated for its importance and its worth, every object a repository of memory, happy or sad, significant or banal. A whole life summed up in its things, each of them put into perspective and accorded its place in a new life.

Some decisions were easy. We came to a tiny study where a chintz sofa faced a fireplace. She chuckled. “This is the room where David would always say, ‘Let’s go have a drink in front of the fire,’ ” Tara said. “It really meant, let’s go discuss how Tara is spending too much money.” The recollection at this remove seemed to amuse more than rankle her. Most of the stickers in this room seemed to be yellow—sell.

Some decisions were more complex. David’s desk, in an office with hunter green walls, was a ponderous mahogany beast from the nineteenth century. I could imagine generations of owl-eyed men poring over ledgers at this desk. Practical? Hardly, but her daughters laid claim to it.

Finally, she took us to a corner of the basement behind the furnace. I wondered why, until Tara made a sweep of her arm around racks of clothing and plastic storage boxes. “This is the last of David’s stuff,” she said. “Clothes, sweaters, sports equipment. I asked the girls what they wanted.” One took his hunting jacket to remember their backyard safaris. Otherwise, they wanted some T-shirts and a couple of sweaters.

“The same thing happened with my kids,” Dawn said. “They only wanted Andries’s T-shirts.”

All of us confessed that we had saved some odd piece of well-worn leisure wear, still infused with memories of touch and smell. Tara had given away David’s good suits, and now everything left of value was here behind the furnace, an ignominious location, I suppose. But that’s what happens with the stuff of the missing. What else would we do with it—put it on some kind of permanent museum display, a diorama of the useless?

Getting rid of the husband’s things—all of us had pushed ourselves through the onerous task, Denise with the help of friends
in the first month, Marcia over several months with her nephews. Dawn pointed out that Adam still hadn’t faced up to the disposal of his wife’s possessions, after years. “I think it’s a classic case of not dealing with your past, not dealing with your loss—not dealing!”

“It’s a matter of forcing yourself,” I said. People tend to think of transformation as organic, I thought: baby birds flex their wings and leave the nest; caterpillars transfigure into butterflies; plant shoots unfurl from tiny seeds; maple leaves wither and fall. In the natural world, reinvention may be driven by the tides or the seasons. But for women in our position, rethinking our way of living, the process was more deliberate, a series of hard choices—what to leave behind, what to keep. That included possessions, of course, but also all that they represented: patterns, habits, actions, traits of personality.

Sometimes those decisions felt brutal. Upstairs, we had seen Tara’s ornate Scottish sideboard, the first antique she ever bought, a beautiful piece and loaded with memories. Now it wore an ignoble sell sticker: it wouldn’t suit the new house. I thought about photographs of homes in magazines, where rooms are edited of any objects that don’t fit the scheme. The owners must possess a savage lack of sentiment in order to create a space that looks forward rather than back. Here in the flux of Tara’s place, we saw the process in action. She was trying to balance sentiment and brutality to bring about the transformation she sought. It took the cool resolve of a sniper.

Pulling her aside, I asked if she had any final words of advice.

She performed one of her trademark theatrical pauses and said, “Let’s go to the beach.”

We followed her back upstairs, but there it was again, the unmarked
cardboard box, the one decision yet unmade. Tara regarded it as if it were the coyote.

“Yesterday, I was up in the attic,” she said, “and I found this.”

We stood still for a moment, staring down the box. It held its ground, like a live thing. For the first time that day, Tara became a bit overcome.

“What is it?” asked Denise, voice lowered to a reverent hush.

Tara looked at her hard, and then spoke in her slowest, clearest voice. “My … wedding dress. I didn’t open it.”

We circled the box, according it a respectful distance.

“What will you do with it?” I wondered.

Tara didn’t answer. She looked at me through pooling eyes that signaled this decision was beyond her. In a houseful of memories, here was a package too sensitive to open.

chapter
TWENTY-TWO

t
ara and David had been the golden couple. Everyone said so. She was a prize catch, a college student, a classic beauty with a Garbo voice, when they met on a blind date. He was a find himself, handsome, whip-smart, halfway through an MBA at Harvard. I heard the whole saga the first time Tara and I met, over lunch in her family room, more somber back then, before the makeover. A real estate agent had told me about a young widow who was house-hunting, and Tara agreed to speak with some reluctance.

She seemed tense and listless eight months after David’s death, engaged in a standoff with gloom and unsure what to do with herself. “I’m putting one foot in front of the other,” she said, rebuffing me at first. “I don’t need anything else in my life right now.” Nevertheless, she had pulled herself together in jeans and a twinset, black cashmere of course, and served a ladies’ lunch—zucchini bisque, chicken panini with pesto and red peppers, and a chocolate brownie.

Tara and David had it all before it went wrong. She was a bit of
a bohemian who loved to dance and write, a senior at a women’s college that emphasized the arts, the daughter of a civil engineer. David was more conventional, old-school, with courtly manners and a penchant for business. “It wasn’t love on the first date,” she admitted. “He was buttoned up and well dressed, and I was into self-expression and … a bit dramatic.”

After she graduated, Tara took an advertising job in New York, and David had a summer internship at an investment firm. They continued to date long-distance during his last year at school.

It was a heady time for Tara. She felt lucky to land a spot on Madison Avenue in its heyday, when the ads were well written and the art direction flawless. It was glamorous, fizzy fun, and Tara looked the part, thanks to a sister in the fashion business who outfitted her in free-spirited samples at wholesale prices from Giorgio Sant’Angelo and Calvin Klein. Tara had taste even then. Money was always short, so the sisters shared a closet-size Upper East Side apartment that they carved up with room dividers.

When David graduated and started full-time at his firm, marriage followed, when he was twenty-seven and she twenty-four. They squeezed into a charmless one-bedroom walk-up awkwardly split between two floors. He jokingly called it “a top-floor duplex penthouse.” They had no furniture to speak of, just a table from her mother and a chest of drawers from his. “It was our first place, and the happiest,” Tara recalled. “Really happy times.”

She gladly followed him to London when his employer asked him to relocate. “I looked forward to the adventure of living somewhere else,” she said. When the firm offered a shipping container for their things, they had to laugh. The entire household fit into a few suitcases.

Tara discovered soon enough that women execs were scarce in British advertising. Finding a spot comparable to the one she’d held in New York was next to impossible. In the meantime, she proceeded to walk everywhere in the city and snag cheap flights all over Europe, often meeting David on his business trips. Eventually, she landed a job. She wrote the agency’s maternity leave policy when she had her first child, and the golden couple continued to shine. “My God, David was so handsome,” she said. “So stunning and elegant in his suits. We had … so much fun. I threw wonderful dinners with his mover-and-shaker friends and my creative friends.” Tara rose through the ranks to become the agency’s first female head of new business and board director.

When they moved back to New York after nine years, they bought the house. He launched his own firm while she headed a foundation that awarded grants to college students. Throughout it all, working and raising two daughters, Tara clung to her bohemian identity. When she met me at the train, I grinned at the big green peace symbol on the side of her car.

About five years before he died, David began to withdraw from family and friends. Tara knew that he was under unspoken strain from work and the death of his mother, but she also recognized a snowballing depression, and soon she noticed that he began to drink more frequently and furtively. “Substances became a way to dull the sadness,” she said. “It was a slow, insidious change.”

Over the next four years, the drinking surged out of control, and Tara struggled to protect her family from the toxic fallout. One daughter had left for college when the troubles began, but the other was still finishing high school. Life at home became unmanageable. “We sought help from treatment programs, therapists, doctors … 
with little success,” Tara said. Prescription drugs only magnified the effects of alcohol.

David was fifty-six when his heart failed; Tara was fifty-three. She grieved for what could have been, a golden existence squandered, and for her daughters, suddenly fatherless as they entered young adulthood. Tara, alone among our group, had watched her marriage dissolve during the course of her husband’s illness. Any grief is layered with regrets, remorse, and contradictions, I thought, Tara’s possibly more than most.

She was in a tight, dark spot when we first met, out of place in her home, out of place in her town, out of place in her social circle, where nuclear families prevailed. More than once, at the hair salon on a Saturday afternoon, someone would ask, “Are you going to so-and-so’s tonight?” Tara would have to explain that she hadn’t been invited. Even at the first meeting of our group, Tara told me afterward, she worried that the others wouldn’t think her worthy to join because of the divorce proceedings. “I loved David as much as the others loved their husbands,” she said. “I just lost him sooner than death took him.”

In some ways, Tara seemed to be the saddest one at the outset of our group. Over time, however, I saw that she possessed a flexibility, a willingness to make the hard choices it takes to start over, and the backbone to call in a sharpshooter if necessary. By the time our group met at her house, she had succeeded in finding new work doing voice-overs, a new man, and a breezy new house near the sea where she could breathe. I recalled, from our first meeting, how she said, “You can’t go backward. You’re never going to have what you had. You need to create your own life.” Now, somehow, she was pulling it off.

Tara didn’t look that day like someone who had spent the last several years in chaos, with the chaos of the move still to come. She looked impossibly assured. She had a color-coded system for it all; she had control. For the first time since—when? her youth?—she alone was in charge. She alone—the casual one, the one who had fulfilled her formal obligations and could live now as she pleased.

At the beach a mile away, we changed into swimsuits—bright bikinis for Dawn, Denise, and me; a sturdy black one-piece for Marcia, and a more modish one for Tara, with black net edging that resembled chiffon, the nylon-Lycra equivalent of black cashmere. We ate lunch on a shaded deck overlooking Long Island Sound. Will joined us after a quick swim and submitted to questions about his family. He had introduced his seven-year-old daughter to Tara the week before.

“She’s a little sweetheart,” Tara said, smitten.

Later, after Will wandered back to the beach, Tara got a chance to dish about him. “In some ways, he’s more like me than David was,” she said. “He’s scrappy, a free spirit.” We the jury murmured our approval. “I was dubious that something like this could even exist. If I had written the script myself, I’d have thought, well … maybe after I get settled in my new house … maybe I could go back to the kind of work I used to do, put my heart and soul into it. After all that, I thought,
maybe
it would be nice, if it exists at all, to find … this kind of relationship. And maybe I never would. The funny thing is, this started the weekend we were all at the spa, when I least expected it.”