Unremarried Widow

For Miles
and
my mother

Parts of this book originally appeared in a Modern Love column first printed in the
New York Times
and later reprinted in
Reader's Digest.
A section has been taken from a piece printed in the online literary journal
Common Ties
and several lines were inspired by an op-ed article written for the
Fort Myers News-Press.

This is a work of nonfiction. Some of the dialogue has been pulled from written transcripts, some is the product of recorded interviews, and some has been re-created from memory. There are no composite characters, although some names have been changed. The chronology of certain events has been altered. As with all memoirs, this story is seen through a specific lens—mine. I have told everything as accurately as I can, to the best of my ability, and in the most generous way I know how.

Do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

—Sullivan Ballou to his wife, Sarah, from a letter found in his personal effects after his death at the Battle of Bull Run, 1861

My husband Miles dreamed of
his death in the fall of 2005, nine months before he deployed to Iraq. He was twenty-three years old.

He told me about the dream on a Saturday morning as he dressed for work at Fort Hood, and I listened from the bed while he pawed through the BDUs hanging in the closet.

“Our helicopter crashed,” he said.

He took a pair of camouflage pants off a metal hanger, shook them out by the waistband, and stepped in one leg at a time.

“John Priestner and me.”

Already the Texas day was warm and our air conditioner chugged an unconvincing stream of cool air. I squinted at Miles as he talked, trying to shake the sleep from my brain, while he disappeared back into the closet and returned with the jacket to his uniform.

“We floated above the helicopter,” he said, “while it burned to the ground.”

He pulled a pair of socks out of the dresser and sat on the edge of
the bed. He turned to look at me and I rested my fingers against the side of his face. He covered my hand with his, and we sat for a time without speaking. Then he pulled on his socks, laced up his boots, and walked into the living room. I heard the metallic clink of his dog tags slipping around his neck and the front door opened and a shaft of sunlight spilled in. The door closed and I was alone.

The late-morning sun slanted through the windows when I awoke the second time that day. I pushed back the comforter and swung my feet to the ground, working out the stiffness in my back. In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth and leaned closer to the mirror to get a good look at the bottom row. How is it that despite a lifetime of good orthodontics my teeth could already be sliding together? I inspected where they jostled for space behind my lower lip, then shifted my eyes to the window over the shower where the light streaming in made me blink. I felt old for twenty-four.

The AC unit in the living room cranked and cranked but the sun radiated a heat that was palpable in the small space of the apartment. I felt it on the couch as I spooned cereal into my mouth, felt it in the kitchen as I rinsed my bowl, felt it is as I walked into the shadows of the bedroom to put on real clothes. When I had dressed, I turned on the television and opened the front door. A car cruised past playing Kanye West's “Gold Digger.” On the TV a news report from New Orleans gave an update on the wreckage from Hurricane Katrina. I changed the channel until I found Judge Judy lecturing a plaintiff about courtroom manners. The man gripped the edge of the podium and shook his head, and I lay on the couch and wondered what to do with the long hot hours of the day.

In the late afternoon, I stood in the kitchen with my hands on my hips, surveying. I owned four wooden spoons, a complete silicone bakeware set, and—somewhere packed away in the boxes from college—a laminated copy of NOW's feminist manifesto.
Because woman's work is never done,
it began. After a long minute, I pulled down a set of
mixing bowls. I stirred together cornmeal and oil and eggs, filled two muffin tins I'd inherited from my grandmother, and slipped the trays in the oven. While I moved through the kitchen, looking for oven mitts, setting the hot pan on the stove, I sensed the air in the room change, a subtle shift I felt first with the fine hairs on my arms. I turned to the open doorway and there was Miles, his hair plastered to his forehead, his rucksack slung over one shoulder. He dropped the bag and stepped into the kitchen. He smiled and I smiled and then he had his arms around me. I breathed him in—the fabric of his Army fatigues, the mechanical grease on his hands, the soap smell still on his neck.

He stepped back. “Are those corn muffins?”

I smiled and my cheeks glowed.

He popped a muffin out of the tin with a knife and took a bite as he headed into the bedroom, shedding his uniform, last night's dream already forgotten.

But I did not forget.
I thought of the dream often as the unit counted down to the deployment. In the mornings the sound of artillery from the base rumbled long and low, and I imagined distant thunderheads as I lay beside Miles in the smoke-colored light of dawn. Sometimes I placed a hand on his back while he slept. I faced into his sleeping form and turned the dream over in my head. I took it as a warning, an admonition to care for Miles well. If I loved him enough, I reasoned, he would come home.

Just as I started to
worry about the direction my life was taking, Psychic Suzanna came to Tallahassee. It was late January and my breath fogged the interior of my Saturn as I turned on the radio and waited for the engine to warm. The announcer ran through the morning's news—the war in Iraq now in its tenth month, the bird flu outbreak in Asia, the upcoming Olympics in Athens—before shifting tones.

“Up next we have Psychic Suzanna taking your calls,” the DJ said.

Another DJ, a woman, spoke. “I understand Psychic Suzanna will be in town next week to give readings.”

“That's right,” the first DJ said. “Five minutes for five dollars.”

I scrambled to find a pen in the console next to the driver's seat. My fingers had stiffened in the cold but I forced them to hold the pen as I wrote down the name of the hotel where Suzanna would appear. A psychic? Ridiculous, I know, but here's the truth: I needed some good news. I was twenty-three, working forty hours a week for a U.S. senator, twenty as a staffer and twenty as an unpaid intern. I
was broke, or I felt broke, lonely in a new city where the only people I knew were the married women I worked with and the three college boys whose apartment I shared. I spent my weekends at the library paging through travel guides and back issues of
Food & Wine,
and sometimes in the evenings after work, at a stoplight or stuck in traffic, I cried in my car. As long as I could remember, I wanted to be a writer. I had this Hemingway-inspired fantasy of living overseas and writing, and I imagined a life filled with art and literature and well-traveled friends. But I was slowly finding out that people like me, people from where I'm from, we don't live that life. We don't become writers. We don't move overseas. We grow up to be teachers or nurses or we work in an office somewhere.

My widowed mother, a teacher, took a second job to put me through college. I studied business at Wharton because my fear of being poor outweighed any of my dreams. The idea was that someday I would work on Wall Street, although anyone who knew me—anyone from back home—would have told you that was the most unlikely place for me to end up. Many of my classmates' fathers worked in finance and for the first time I understood what it meant to be middle-class. My clothes were never right. I could never afford the expensive haircuts the other girls wore. I spent all four years living in a dorm. Sometimes I made furtive visits to the writers' house on campus but the students there wore trendy glasses and discussed the finer points of books I'd never heard of. They cited the latest issue of the
New Yorker
and talked about all the talked-about authors. Once a friend of a friend who was briefly in the running for an editorial position at the school's alternative weekly had an idea for a relationship column. A mutual friend suggested my name. I was known on campus as someone with strong opinions on gender politics and women's sexuality, mainly because I was always talking about how women get the short end of the stick. I belonged to one of those groups that handed out condoms on the walk, and I encouraged young women
to dictate the terms of their lives. My mother always taught me that a woman makes her own way. The friend of a friend running for editor asked me to write a few sample columns and over lunch at a chic restaurant near campus he said he thought I'd be a good fit. But in the weeks that followed, another candidate beat him for the editorial position and the column idea disappeared.

In the midst of all this I headed to the south of France on a six-month semester-abroad program. The streets of the old French village where I lived smelled like lavender and fresh-baked bread, and fountains gurgled beside the streets on my way to class. The school drew students from across the U.S. and I finally made friends who were like me. We lingered over lunches on the school's terrace and I learned to drink strong black coffee. We traveled together—to Venice, to Fez, to Arles—and I couldn't remember a time when I was so happy.

During my senior year back in Philadelphia, I stayed in contact with those friends and held on to the memories of my time in France. The scent of espresso or lavender could make me weak with nostalgia. I applied to be a teacher in Paris for the fall after I graduated, and I spent the next year living and working in the City of Light. I bought a pair of black leather boots and learned to smile coquettishly at men on the
mé
tro.
I liked that they called me
charmante.
I spent weekends at the Louvre and drank bottles of wine in outdoor cafés with my friends. But I was homesick. And lonely in a way I had trouble explaining. When my teaching contract expired the next May, I decided to come home, to Florida, to take a job in an office somewhere. The senator's office, in fact. But I was certain it would be temporary, that I would soon be back overseas. I even kept my bank account in France open, I was that sure. I still envisioned a life abroad filled with people who had traveled widely, who loved talking about books and gourmet food. I imagined museums and marketplaces, cherries in spring and figs in fall, fields of sunflowers under a blue sky. In all of this, I never saw myself married.

The sun had set by
the time I left the senator's office, and as I drove across town the stoplights glowed red against the night. People were already gathered in the hotel lobby by the time I arrived, and they sat silently, anxious and expectant, as if in a physician's waiting room. When my turn came I approached Suzanna's handler, a graying man who took my cash and pointed to a low table in the bar where Suzanna sat across from an empty red chair. She looked exactly how I imagined her: a blond bouffant, wispy at the top, large framed glasses, painted fingernails. When she said hello, I recognized her voice from the radio program, all smoke and ash, the kind of voice that comes from nicotine over many years. I imagined her vocal cords dried and yellowed like tobacco leaves hung in the fields of North Carolina. She pulled out a blank scrap of paper and positioned a ball-point pen over the sheet as I sat.