Good Grief: A Novel Read online

  “Most patients aren’t bothered by the minor inconvenience of using the dryer,” I tell the reporter, reading from my tip sheet, “because of the benefits of the product.” I imagine my mailbox at home stuffed with property tax statements and soaring electric bills. The problem is, I like to keep lots of lights on at night so it seems as though people are home. “On low heat, though,” I tell him. “Never high.”

  The clacking of the reporter’s keyboard and his intermittent chuckles make me nervous. He wants to know if I really think guys travel with blow dryers, if they own blow dryers.

  “We provide complimentary dryers upon request.” At least I think we do. I probably shouldn’t stray from the tip sheet.

  The reporter says he has to go so he can meet his deadline. As I listen to a long silence and then the dial tone, I think of how my other English major friends have more noble jobs: one’s a travel writer in Paris, another teaches creative writing to women prisoners.

  Finally I hang up the phone and get back to work on the press release I’m composing about the patch. It’s nearly lunchtime and I’ve made little progress. There’s a pea-size hole in my panty hose just under the hem of my skirt, and I’ve taped it to my leg so it doesn’t head south.

  I think of the white-haired lady in the grief group whose husband drove her everywhere. I picture them in a Chevy Impala driving forty-five on the freeway, two cottony heads peering over the dashboard. I wonder if it is worse to be widowed later in life, when you and your spouse are as attached as roots to a tree.

  The cursor on my computer screen blinks: mort-gage, mort-gage, mort-gage.

  When I first moved to Silicon Valley to be with Ethan, I found a job I liked editing university publications. I had my own office, with ivy growing along the windows, and went home every night by six. But at parties, other women in their thirties compared BMW models and how many direct-reports they had at work, and I decided I needed a higher-paying job with stock options. What kind of loser worked at a place without stock options?

  I got this job during Ethan’s remission, after he’d finished his radiation therapy and it seemed that he would be all right. This gave me a brief surge of confidence, during which I drove down the freeway at eighty miles an hour with the moon roof open, the wind in my hair, old songs like “I Will Survive” and “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)” blasting on the stereo.

  Then the cancer came back, this time as a tumor in Ethan’s chest. It was the home wrecker that stole my husband. I almost wished it had been another woman—a slutty thing in a miniskirt whose tires I could have slashed.

  I hardly took any time off after Ethan died—just the three allowed bereavement days and the two sick days I’d accrued. Co-workers stopped by my cube and asked, “How are you doing?” I wanted to tell them not to worry; my husband was only out of town, maybe at a trade show. He’d be back.

  Ethan’s presence in our house was palpable, his loafers and sneakers lined up in the closet and his Smithsonian and Wired magazines still arriving every month. But all too soon floury dust coated Ethan’s shoes, and his toothbrush grew dry and hard in the cup on the sink, and his pile of unread magazines toppled over. People stopped saying, “How are you doing?” and Lara started assigning the black diamond projects again. This damn patch.

  Lara whistles into my cube now. “Don’t bother with a press release,” she says, looking over my shoulder at my keyboard, hands on little StairMaster hips, blond hair pulled into a high, tight ponytail. “Just get a story. Call The Wall Street Journal.”

  I cower at the keyboard, thinking of the leak underneath my house. A few weeks ago a plumber in coveralls crawled through a trapdoor in the front hall closet and reported that it would cost $2,000 to repair the leak and install a sump pump. Money I don’t have right now. “You folks need a pump,” he said.

  “It’s just me,” I told him.

  If you reach behind the coats and lift the slab of wood, you can see the black puddle, which smells like iron. My car would like a piece of my paycheck now, too. It’s been making a grinding noise and pulling to the right, as though it would rather drive through the trees.

  “Okay? Okay?” says Lara. Although she’s only five-three, she somehow manages to tower over people.

  “Okay.” I flip slowly through the Rolodex on my desk. Later, when I can breathe, I’ll tell her about the Herald story. She huffs a sigh of exasperation and leaves me in a pit of Willy Loman cold-call despair.

  On my way home from work that night, I get in an accident: I’m broadsided by the holidays. It happens when I stroll into Safeway and see the rows of tables by the door stacked high with Halloween candy: Milky Way, Kit Kat, Butterfinger. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Stop, turn, run! I try to shove my cart toward produce, but it won’t go. One stubborn wheel tugs like an undertow toward the candy. I kick the cart and focus on my shopping list: eggs, milk, ice cream.

  I make it safely to produce, but there the pumpkins lurk. Look! they shout. The holidays are coming! I spot the bunches of brown corn you can hang on your door and the tiny gourds—the bumpy acne ones and the clown-striped green-and-yellow ones. I lean into the cart for support. How can a place called Safeway seem so dangerous?

  Last Halloween Ethan and I took Simone, the daughter of my college girlfriend, Ruth, trick-or-treating. Ethan dressed up as Yellow Man, his own made-up superhero. He wore a yellow T-shirt, yellow rubber gloves, and a yellow rain poncho for a cape. He made Simone laugh so hard, she choked on a Gummi Bear.

  I remember the yellow yarn dust mop bobby-pinned to his head. I remember his hair—the sweet, almost eggy smell of Flex shampoo. Beautiful hair! Thick, straight, shiny, and brown. The hair I always dreamed of having instead of my wiry curls. Sometimes a Dennis the Menace piece stuck straight up on top of Ethan’s head, which is probably why he got carded. He was thrown together in a boyish way—baseball caps and too-big sweatshirts, Converse sneakers with no socks, dirt on his knees from crawling around in the backyard looking for his Frisbee. Why did I ever sign that paper to have him cremated? That’s what he wanted. To have his ashes spread at Half Moon Bay, where we went for our honeymoon. It made sense at the time. But now there isn’t even a grave to visit. How can I be a widow when there’s no grave?

  “Miss?” A clerk clutching a bunch of basil stands beside me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” He said miss and not ma’am. Sweet. There are streaks of cranberry red spots on his cheeks, and his nose shines. I try to think of something to say, a vegetable to inquire after. Instead I blurt: “My husband died.” Maybe this is the first time I’ve said this. I’m not sure. I think it is. Suddenly I’m crying, that little-kid gulping kind of crying, where you can’t catch your breath. The morning after Ethan died, I resented the mourners collecting in my living room. How could they fall into the role and accept Ethan’s death so readily? While they wept and carried on, I cleaned the house. Scrubbed the shower grout with a toothbrush and Clorox. Now I’m one of the howling mourners. But they’ve wrapped it up already, moved on.

  The clerk touches my elbow and leads me through the big swinging double doors by the coolers with the chicken. He says, “Careful,” as we walk up a narrow flight of stairs. There’s a leaf of lettuce on one stair. We shuffle into a break room and he seats me at a long brown Formica table. He’s probably only in high school or junior college. He sets a cup of tea and a box of tissues on the table.

  “You take your time,” he says.

  I’m suddenly embarrassed and want something to do to look busy. I grab one of the tissues and begin cleaning my glasses.

  Okay, so Ethan isn’t coming back. The sympathy cards reverted to phone bills months ago. Even telemarketers have stopped asking for him.

  Oh! The tissues have lotion for sore noses, and the lenses of my glasses now look as though they’ve been dunked in salad dressing. The room is blurry. The boy is gone. The holidays are coming. Can I stay in this break room until after New Year’s?

  At home th
e phone rings as I’m peeling off my coat. I let the machine pick up.

  “Hello? Sophie? . . . Dear? Are you there?” It’s my mother-in-law, Marion, who’s not really comfortable around answering machines, VCRs, and other newfangled devices. She clears her throat.

  “Well, I’m calling for two reasons. One, there’s a sale at Talbot’s, and I’d like to take you to buy a few new things. I thought that might cheer you up.” Marion always seems to wish I’d shop at Talbot’s, that I’d dress more like a country club wife than a frumpy neo-hippie—frayed jeans and clogs and my husband’s too big sweaters. Once in a while Marion wears jeans, “dungarees,” she calls them, but she irons stiff creases in the legs that stand up like little tents. “The other thing is, dear, I’d like to make a date to come over this Sunday and pack up Ethan’s things for the Goodwill. Remember, we talked about that? I really feel it’s time, and it’ll be a breeze if we work on it together. . . .”

  A breeze?

  A tornado.

  There are no groceries to unload, since I abandoned my cart at Safeway. I head straight for the bedroom and crawl under our king-size quilt, choosing to sleep in my clothes to ward off the icy corners of the bed.

  I dream that I run into Ethan in downtown San Jose by the convention center when I’m on my way to the library. His hair glistens like a mink coat and I want to touch it. He’s with a policeman. They explain that Ethan’s been in a car accident and the officer is trying to help him find his way home. I look down and see the edge of Ethan’s hospital gown hanging out from under his parka, the little blue snowflakes on the fabric fluttering in the breeze. I want to tell him that he wasn’t in a car accident. He had cancer and now he’s dead. But I’m afraid I’ll hurt his feelings, like telling someone they could lose a few pounds or their clothes don’t match.

  When I make it to work the next morning, the Herald is spread across my desk. I’m supposed to read the paper every morning before getting to work, so I’ll know if the company has been in the news. I’m also supposed to scan the national press and be up on current health care issues so I can pitch stories relating to our products. Spins, pitches, angles. I always mean to do this. But mustering the courage to leave the house every morning leaves me too enervated to lift the pages of Time or Newsweek.

  I read the health care reporter’s lead for the patch story.

  Gentlemen, start your hair dryers.

  I can’t read the next line, because there’s a Post-it note stuck over it with a note from Lara: See me.

  The bum fluorescent bulb over my cube ticks and buzzes like a cicada.

  I head straight for Lara’s office without taking off my coat. Lara and I are opposites, and in our case opposites deflect. She’s only two years older than me—thirty-eight—but she’s already a vice president. She’s as polished as a lady news anchor, and her whole being seems dry-cleaned. She meets her personal trainer at the gym every morning at five, arrives at work by seven-thirty, eats lunch at her desk—peeling the bread off her turkey sandwich to avoid the evils of carbohydrates—and leaves at seven-thirty in the evening. I get up at five in the morning, too, but only to pee, my sole workout being a shuffle to the john. The next time I wake it’s ten minutes before I’m supposed to be at work, never mind the forty-minute, second-gear commute and the fact that my hair is in one long snarl like the Cowardly Lion’s in The Wizard of Oz.

  As I stand in the doorway to Lara’s office, she’s on the phone.

  “Un-huh, un-huh, un-huh,” she says impatiently, punching her PalmPilot, sipping coffee out of a giant mug, and checking her e-mail. She motions me in. I hover at the threshold. Simon says: Go into your boss’s office! I take a big step in. She yanks off her headset and tosses it on her desk. Her expression is in the fully upright and locked position.

  For the first time, I almost wish I’d get fired. I would probably be eligible for some kind of severance or unemployment. I could get roommates to help pay the mortgage. We could do the Jumble together and cook pot luck suppers. I can live off a couple weeks’ salary for a little while. I actually like chicken pot pies. . . .

  “Sit,” says Lara.

  I sit. Good dog? Bad dog.

  “We’ll get a correction printed.” She smiles, containing her irritation. Her teeth are so white, they’re almost transparent; I think she used her bleaching trays a few too many nights.

  “Right,” I tell her, as though I’ve planned this all along. I realize I’m still wearing my coat.

  “Did you take this reporter to lunch?”

  Lara has a real thing for taking reporters to lunch. She thinks you can control the media with smoked turkey and fusilli salad. I shake my head. Bottom line: The patch doesn’t stick.

  “I’d like to be able to tell Ed by noon that a correction will be printed tomorrow morning.”

  Ed’s the CEO. Turn down your teeth, I want to tell Lara. I can’t hear you. Instead, I nod. “I’ll get on it.” First, get me out of this oxygen-depleted room.

  Of course, this doesn’t count as one of my two media placements due by the end of November, since it didn’t even mention the downsides of the competing product. But when I get back to my cubicle, I realize there aren’t any errors in the story. It’s all about tone. It’s a tone piece. Tone, voice. This reporter has found his voice! It is the voice of an asshole.

  The phone rings. I pick it up.

  “Hello?” a man says.

  I know he’ll ask a question I can’t answer. I’m supposed to be able to remember scads of facts for this job: each product name, its generic name, its indication, whether it has a trademark or service mark, how long it’s been on the market, whether it’s part of a joint marketing and distribution agreement. Then there are the common side effects, adverse reactions. But since Ethan died I can barely retain a seven-digit phone number. I slide one finger over the button on the phone, hanging up. The man will think we got disconnected. When the phone rings again, I let it drop into voice mail.

  I open a new file on my computer and start typing what to say to the Herald reporter about the patch story. This is a trick I employ when I have to make a nerve-racking media call: Type my story pitch or sound bite in all caps, then follow the script.

  MUST PATCH THIS ALL UP. HA, HA, HA!

  I remember when I first joined the company how I felt I was finally making it in Silicon Valley. I stood in the coffee line chatting with the women from marketing, all of us wearing cute but sensible chunky black pumps, my day planner bulging, my checkbook balance growing, my self-esteem swelling. But now I feel like an impostor in a cubicle—like the artificial crabmeat of public relations managers. Then there’s the fact that I have to say “scrotum” to people all the time. Is this really the color of my parachute?

  If Ethan were alive, I’d call him and we’d meet for lunch. We often did this when one of us was having trouble at work. We had a knack for solving each other’s job quandaries, maybe because our ignorance of each other’s fields made us objective. Sometimes he’d pick me up after work and I’d be so flustered by this new job, I was ready to quit and start a yard service. By the time we got home, though, Ethan had me laughing and contemplating a solution.

  Of course, I can’t call my husband. (But why not! What good is all this technology if you can’t call a deceased loved one? Who cares if you can buy movie tickets and bid for antiques on-line if you can’t dial up your dead husband?)

  The cursor on my computer screen pulses impatiently, and the red voice mail light on my phone flashes. My stomach growls and my head throbs. But I can’t call my husband. Because, here’s the thing: I am a widow.

  OREOS

  2

  Ethan’s former boss invites me to a party at his house. It’s nice of him and his wife to include me. What do I do to thank them? Drink too much Cabernet and swipe Xanax from their medicine chest.

  The problem is, it’s a family-friendly party, and everyone seems to have a baby. Babies with sweet doughy arms and tiny toes like erasers. Ethan an
d I tried for two years to have a baby, up until his prognosis was terminal.

  Month after month, I peed on the drugstore pregnancy test sticks while Ethan pretended to be busy in the next room. I closed my eyes, listening to the clanky whir of the bathroom fan, trying to will the second pink line into the result window. But it was always empty. No one home. Like the vague Magic 8 Ball message: Try again later.

  I felt duped by my body. What’s going on in there? Who’s in charge here! Ethan held my hands in his, rubbed my neck a little too hard, and said not to worry. There was always next month. Then he’d come up with a fun, kidless activity: a late-night dinner at a French restaurant or an R-rated movie or a pitcher of beer and game of pool.

  I studied fertility books until their diagrams haunted me. The vines on our quilt turned into fallopian tubes and the inverted U shape of a papaya half in the refrigerator looked like a uterus, its slick black seeds a crazy wealth of eggs. Our sex life, dictated now by the coy, shadowy purple line on the ovulation test sticks, suddenly seemed like work.

  We went to a fertility specialist, who concluded after several tests that I was ovulating but possibly had an “egg quality issue.” Suddenly I felt about as feminine as a log. I imagined my ovaries shrinking like those little Japanese roasted peas, my eggs reduced for quick sale. Neon orange stickers shrieking Half off!