Good Grief: A Novel Read online

  Now, thirty minutes into the party, I feel a slow leak of crazy juice seeping into my brain. My palms sweat and my throat squeezes shut. It’s hard to talk or swallow.

  I work a splintery wedge of spanakopita down my throat as a marketing communications director tells a funny story about her Emma’s play date that morning.

  “Chocolate pudding. In her ear!”

  The other mothers hoot and toss back their heads. I laugh, too. But the thing is, Marion’s coming over in the morning to corral Ethan’s earthly possessions for the Great Goodwill Giveaway, and suddenly I can’t breathe.

  I lurch into the powder room, lock the door, and stand at the sink, peering into a china saucer of pumpkin-shaped soaps. Their cinnamon smell burns in my nose. I could call Marion and tell her I’m sick, but she’d drive over anyway and let herself in with her key. Stamp her little brown loafers on the front mat, roll up the sleeves of her pressed white blouse, and get to work packaging up Ethan. I’d like to get that key back from her, but I’m not sure how I’d ask, so I burrow into the medicine chest, finding baking soda toothpaste and unopened toothbrushes, then the Xanax. I have my own prescription at home—from Dr. Rupert—but I’ve taken it only once so far, preferring to rely on frozen waffles instead of pills. This is the guest bath and clearly the toothbrushes are for guests, so maybe the Xanax is, too. Probably not, but my throat is so tight and the air in the room is so thin.

  “What’s your number?” the hostess asks as I emerge from the bathroom.

  Why? Does she need to give it to her lawyer so he can call and sue me for stealing her drugs? I stutter out my home phone number.

  “No, silly,” she says, caressing my arm and leading me back into the crowd. “Your raffle ticket number.” I remember that when I arrived at the party, her daughter handed me a curly pink ticket, dropping its twin half in a paper bag.

  “Oh.” I dig into the pocket of my slacks, pull out the ticket, and hand it to her.

  “Read the number again,” she tells her daughter, a pretty girl with long strawberry blond hair.

  The girl reads the number, and her mother hugs me and says, “It’s you, Sophie. We have a winner!” She smells good and I would like for her to keep hugging me, but she pulls away, raises my arm over my head, and spins me toward the crowd. Everyone claps and I feel my face heat up. It turns out the party prize is a week’s worth of free home-delivered meals from Waiters on Wheels. If anyone sees the irony in the fact that it’s “dinner for two,” they don’t let on.

  At home, even though my brain is a dim wad of Xanax and red wine, I can’t sleep. I miss having Ethan to gossip with about the party. It was kind of a mean game, but sometimes we’d play Who am I?, imitating the guests.

  I sit up in bed with a family pack of Oreo cookies, twisting them open and licking the cream filling until my tongue feels raw. The walls around me creak and sigh, as if the empty house can’t settle down and get comfortable. I stack the cookie shells on the clock radio, then get to work on the pile, chewing and swallowing without pleasure until I can’t really taste the chocolate anymore—until the cookies begin to seem more utilitarian than sweet, more like glue or caulking that welds things back together.

  I dig two, four, six more cookies from the family pack, noting that in a normal family, each person would eat maybe four. I chew and chew until my gums burn and my head tingles from the sugar. Sandy crumbs spray the sheets, and chocolate collects in the corners of my mouth like potting soil.

  It’s morning and I’m dreaming that I’m getting up and then I’m down again and then I’m trying to lift my head and arms but they are as heavy as logs and then I’m underwater and then I am not underwater, I’m just perspiring under this quilt, which is like a lead blanket. Finally I’m awake. My mouth is filled with moss. No, that is my tongue caked with cookie sludge. A crack of sunlight shoots through the blinds and slices into my head. The morning is uninvited and overly cheerful, like a Jehovah’s Witness ringing the doorbell. I shield my face with my arm. Sorry, nobody home!

  I roll over and an Oreo crunches beneath me. The TV’s on and cartoon characters chatter. Damn. Marion’s due at ten-thirty.

  I get up, shower, dress, fix coffee for Marion, and defrost blueberry muffins I find in the freezer. I arrange the muffins in a circle on a paper plate, wondering if Marion’s going to make me give away all of Ethan’s belongings. Even his books? In my nervousness, I eat all the muffins. Blueberry. Soft, sweet, cakey, crumbly, gone.

  I lie down in a patch of sunlight on the sofa in the living room, bracing myself for Marion’s burst of efficient energy. I always suspected that she didn’t approve of me but was nice in order to be supportive of Ethan, the way a parent would try to accept a child’s pierced nose or decision to join the Peace Corps. Still woozy from last night, I drift back into a syrupy sleep.

  “Dear?”

  I awaken to Marion hovering over me and furrowing her brow, her arms embracing an empty cardboard box, her pretty white hair curling around her freshly powdered face. She always smells flowery and clean, like the first floor of a department store.

  “I used my key,” she says brightly.

  I remember Ethan telling me that his mother was “remarkably together” after his father’s death, tending to all of the necessary details and procedures, soldiering on with an eerie resolve.

  Now I follow Marion as she heads for Ethan’s office, drags his suitcase out of his closet, and parks it by the coat closet in the front hall.

  “I might need that,” I tell her, pointing to the suitcase that I bought for Ethan last Christmas. We made a jaunt that spring to Napa and shared the bag. I vowed never to share a suitcase with Ethan again, though, because he didn’t have a system for separating his dirty laundry (muddy socks on top of clean underwear!). But we never traveled after that.

  “You have a suitcase, don’t you, dear?” Marion asks, looking up at me impatiently. “You don’t need two.”

  I stand with my arms at my sides and watch as she fills the bag with Ethan’s coats. Oh! The suede jacket with the lamb’s-wool lining that we dubbed the Marlboro Man coat. She tucks the arms inside the suitcase carefully, as though she’s making hospital corners. You don’t need a coat when you’re dead. It’s that simple.

  I reach into the closet, pull Ethan’s ski sweater off a hanger, and curl it against my belly, massaging a pinch of the wool between my fingers. The familiar scratchy fabric is as soothing as a hot bath. I didn’t know how to ski when Ethan and I first started dating. He patiently rode the T-bar up the bunny slope with me for hours until I could make a parallel turn and graduate to the chairlift. “Take your time!” he called up the hill as I doubled over my skis, rear in the air, eight-year-olds whizzing past me.

  Now, Marion takes the sweater from me and folds it into the suitcase. When she reaches for Ethan’s down parka, a spider lurches out of the sleeve. Marion smacks it with her bare hand, making me jump, then brushes the creature onto the floor and gives it one swift stomp.

  “They bite, you know,” she says, returning to the coats with dour concentration. She is a first-rate widow. Not a woman who needs a man around to kill her insects.

  We lug the boxes into the garage, creating stack after stack, and pretty soon I have to move my car into the driveway to make more room. The concrete is cold and gritty on my bare feet, and Marion says why don’t I put on some shoes. Then she tells me that the Goodwill truck is coming Monday morning between eight and noon. Can I be home then? Yes, yes, I nod, and smack invisible dust from my hands. I survey the boxes, locating the one with Ethan’s ski sweater.

  After we finish packing Ethan’s belongings, Marion takes me to a salad bar restaurant for lunch. I drizzle nonfat ranch dressing onto nonfat honey corn muffins, spoon nonfat sour cream into a steaming baked potato, munch Chinese chicken salad, and sip diet soda. I’ve always enjoyed food, especially lobster, blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup, and beer, but I’ve never felt so compelled to eat. In the year before Ethan di
ed, food actually seemed like a nuisance—having to worry about what to make for dinner or where to find take-out lunch close to work. But now eating’s like crawling under the covers, food a tunnel to burrow into. The green salad is cool and soothing—the kidney beans as soft as felt.

  Marion eyes my salad, which is loaded with raisins and croutons and chopped eggs. “Looks like you haven’t lost your appetite,” she says, her tone of voice somewhere between talking and singing. “I lost fifteen pounds after Charlie died. Couldn’t bring myself to eat alone.”

  Marion’s right. All of the grief books say that widows lose weight. There’s nothing in any of the chapters about wanting to devour a minimart.

  I dab my mouth with my napkin and fold my hands in my lap. “It feels good to eat and sleep,” I try to explain.

  Marion nods and butters a ladylike corner of corn muffin. She has never lost control, of course, never ransacked the host’s medicine chest at a party or inhaled a box of Thin Mints. She probably thinks I’m not a very good widow. I wish I could be. I want to be a classy widow—a Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Slim and composed, elegant and graceful. White gloves and a string of pearls. But I seem to be more the Jack Daniel’s kind of widow—wailing in the supermarket and mowing through the salad bar, hair all crazy like an unmade bed.

  Lately, life requires so much self-discipline. While most people have a to-do list, I have a don’t-do list. Don’t eat Oreos until your gums bleed. Don’t sleep in your clothes. Don’t grab the produce boy’s teenage wrists and sob.

  Marion excuses herself and heads for the fruit. I get to work on the potato and then the gluey soup. But I’m interrupted by a chubby toddler who stumbles up to the table and rudely points a waxed-bean finger at me. He blurts something incomprehensible, foamy spittle bubbling up around his pacifier.

  It sounds like “How come you don’t have a baby?”

  On Monday morning I stay home from work to wait for the Goodwill truck. I figure I’ve got a few hours to rummage through the boxes and retrieve Ethan’s ski sweater and those wool socks that I like to wear to bed and the Marlboro Man coat. But the doorbell rings just after eight and two guys are standing there, ready for business. There’s a tall, lanky man with a mustache that’s got a bit of scrambled egg or something in it, and a squat guy who looks as if he could move pianos. The skinny one has a clipboard.

  “Stanton?”

  Nope, I want to tell him.

  “Yes, hi, come in.”

  We stand in the entryway while the guy studies his clipboard.

  “Boxes?” he finally says.

  My palms are damp. “Furniture, actually.” I lead them to the living room and point to the burgundy tapestry sofa that Ethan and I bought on sale at Macy’s along with a matching armchair. The pieces are fairly new and don’t feel like part of the house yet; they’re guests rather than family members. Still, the furniture was expensive, and we coveted and saved up for it.

  “Take the armchair and the end tables, too,” I tell the man, waving at the whole ensemble. “And the lamps.” I unplug the lamps and wind up the cords.

  The skinny guy raises his eyebrows as if to say, Crazy, fickle lady.

  The stocky guy pulls the cushions off the sofa, and the skinny one jogs back to the truck and returns with sheets of plastic for wrapping everything. As they grunt and shove the sofa through the front door, Ethan’s money clip falls out from a crack, clanging to the floor. I gave it to him on our first anniversary, and we hadn’t been able to find it for the past year.

  “There that thing is.” I shove the clip into the pocket of my jeans.

  The mustache guy points to the coffee table and raises his eyebrows. I nod and he passes it through the door to his partner. Then he hands over the clipboard for me to sign and they’re off, their truck rumbling down the street.

  I stand on the front porch and look at our neighborhood, quiet, since everyone is off at work or school, then turn back inside. The sound of the front door closing echoes through the empty living room, making the house sound hollow. I close my eyes, dip my hand into my pocket, and run my fingers over the engraving on the money clip—SS loves ES—the bumpy writing like Braille.

  That night Waiters on Wheels shows up with my first free dinner. The waiter is dressed in black pants, a stiff white dress shirt with too-long sleeves, and a slick black vest. A red bow tie hangs askew at his neck.

  “Evening,” he says, bumping past me into the hall, a red insulated bag tipping him to one side. “Living room, dining room, or kitchen?” he asks, mopping his brow with his free hand.

  “Kitchen, I guess.” I stand in front of the living room door, hoping he won’t notice the lack of furniture.

  He quickly unpacks the dinner and sets two places at the kitchen table, the oily-looking vest making swishing noises as he works. There’s even a little vase with a red carnation and candles in plastic holders.

  “It’s just me,” I tell him.

  He looks around the room helplessly. “Should I put the other dinner in the fridge?”

  “No, leave it,” I tell him. “But I don’t need the extra setting.” I wonder what it’s like to have a job delivering fancy restaurant dinners to the Valley’s high-tech workers, many of whom have gourmet kitchens—six-burner Vulcans, Corian counters, and gleaming stainless appliances—but rarely cook.

  The waiter’s neck is red and bumpy along the collar of his shirt. I consider asking him to sit down and eat the other dinner with me, take a break, but I worry this will come off as a romantic advance. Besides, I’m sure he’s got more food to deliver.

  “I won the dinners,” I try to explain in case he thinks I’m crazy for ordering two meals when I’m only one person. “At a party.”

  He smiles weakly and I tip him. Then he’s gone.

  Instead of sitting, I stand at the table and eat, the earnestness of the red carnation breaking my heart. It’s trying too hard. The foil-wrapped butter patties glitter like gold coins. I unwrap one and place it on my tongue. Eating plain butter! But a “Why bother” mantra prevents me even from buttering a roll. Besides, the yellow tabs are soothingly smooth and sweet and salty. I eat another, then another, and then the rolls, followed by the risotto, then the second serving of risotto—Ethan’s risotto—finally sitting down.

  The truth is, I often ate alone when I was married, when Ethan worked late. Sometimes he’d get so sucked into writing software code that he’d forget to call or show up in time for dinner. I bought him a watch that was water-resistant up to 330 feet and told time in five different time zones. I set the alarm for six-thirty P.M. and insisted he call home even if he was at the bottom of the ocean or in Paris.

  The first night after I gave him the watch he called at six-thirty sharp, then at seven, eight, and again at nine. At ten he strolled through the door, laptop tucked under one arm. As I jammed wilted asparagus down the disposal, he tried to hug and kiss me, but I was not talking to him. I slammed pots and pans into the dishwasher and lusted after my next husband, an attentive podiatrist who’d always arrive in time for dinner, because no one really needs their feet tended to after five.

  Ethan hovered behind me, his belly warm against the small of my back. Lifting my hair, he kissed the nape of my neck and cheeks, nibbled at my ears.

  “Quit it,” I grumbled, swatting him away. But he moved in closer. As I felt the thump of his pulse in his neck and breathed in the cottony smell of his shirt, I was soothed by his significant otherness.

  He said he was sorry and suggested we both work from home the next day.

  “Maybe,” I mumbled, still refusing to turn from the sink.

  “I can’t guarantee you won’t get sexually harassed in the workplace,” he teased, pulling my arms against my sides so I couldn’t fuss with the dishes anymore.

  I tried to suppress a giggle, forcing a cough instead. Ethan’s arms were strong and certain as he steered me down the hall to our room, his mouth warm, salty, and familiar.

  Now, as I swallow
more gummy risotto, I imagine that Ethan and I dined together every evening at a table like this. But a post- Thanksgiving dinner sort of cramp starts to rise up in my throat, and I have to push the food away.

  The next time I see Dr. Rupert, I explain that I’m always tired yet never sleep well and that I can’t stop double-checking things. Before I can go to sleep at night, I have to circle through the house and check the locks on the doors two, three, four times. Whenever I leave a restaurant or coffee shop, I have to go back and touch the table and look under the chairs in case I’ve forgotten something. When I’m taking aspirin for a headache, I have to spit the pills back into my palm and double-check, making sure they’re not buttons or pebbles.

  “Obsessive-compulsive behavior,” he explains calmly. “It’s part of working through the loss. It should subside.”

  But I feel too exhausted to work through the loss. I’d rather outsource working through the loss. That’s what you do in Silicon Valley: hire help. A nanny to look after the kids, a nutritionist to plan the meals, a gardener to tend the wisteria, a trainer to monitor your workouts. I need a grief underling. This is Helga, and she’ll be working through the loss for me. Helga, before you leave today, please touch all of the doorknobs and locks and eat all of the Oreos in the house. I’m going to sleep now.

  Dr. Rupert laughs nervously when I share this idea, sliding a little pad from his desk drawer. “Grief-caused depression,” he explains, writing a prescription for an antidepressant. “These will help. But they may take up to six weeks to really kick in.”

  On Halloween, angels and ghosts and pirates flock to my doorstep. A tiny pumpkin hoists her leg over the threshold and clings to my calf like a koala bear.

  “No, Jenny,” the baby’s mom says, and laughs. “We don’t live here.”

  This is a busy year for trick-or-treaters. It’s only seven and I’m already running low on candy, since I never made it back to Safeway to load up. Every time I passed the store my throat tightened, and I decided to make do with the limited selection at the drugstore by my house.