Good Grief: A Novel Page 4

  I wish Ethan were here now, because he always dressed up on Halloween and made the kids laugh. During a lull, a Butterfinger burst of energy inspires me to dig my witch costume out of the basement: pointy black hat, black cape, rubber nose, and green makeup. I add a little water to the makeup to get it working again and blacken one of my front teeth with an eyebrow pencil.

  Next time the doorbell rings, I throw open the door and let out a cackling laugh. A tiny cat and ladybug shriek and hide behind their mothers’ legs. The ladybug sobs and tears off her antennae.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” I pass out handfuls of Baby Ruth bars to show I’m not one of those just-pick-one ladies. The mothers chuckle and say not to worry. But one of the mothers doesn’t want the Baby Ruth.

  “Little ones can choke on nuts,” she says primly. She’s wearing khakis, white ankle socks, and loafers. I feel as if I offered the kids Drano.

  After the group is gone, I crack open a beer and sit on the living room floor, leaning against the wall where the sofa used to be, unwrapping and eating Baby Ruth bars. My witch’s hat hangs over my eyes. I knew it had to be too good to be true: this fleeting feeling that the holidays could be fun.

  As I’m working my way through a peanut-butter cup, the phone rings and I climb up to answer it.

  “I’m a ticky tahk,” a small voice squeaks.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m a ticky tahk!”

  Then there’s a grown-up voice. “She’s a kitty cat,” says Ruth, my college friend. Ruth lives in Ashland, Oregon, now, and she’s called me at least once a week since Ethan died. “Sorry, she’s got candy in her mouth,” she adds, laughing. “We lost her tail.”

  “I’m a ticky tahk!” Simone squeals in the background. Then she says, “Uncle?”

  “No, Auntie,” Ruth says, and sighs. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine. Good!” Then I confess that I’m flubbing up at work and driving over curbs and mailing letters without stamps and I’m afraid to go to the store.

  “Get out of there, Soph. Come and stay with us. Live with us. Honestly, I could use the help.” Ruth’s ex-husband is a flake who rarely visits Simone.

  “I’d have to sell the house.”

  “So?”

  So. I’m already one living room ensemble closer to leaving Silicon Valley. A step toward escaping my mortgage and that deadline at work. Part of me wants to say, Screw this place. Another part of me still wants to make it here for Ethan. Yet another part of me wants to get back to work on the Oreos.

  While Ethan was sick, all I thought about was whether he was comfortable—whether he wanted a malted or a pain shot or a cool cloth for his forehead. As soon as the memorial service ended, though, it was time to think about the future. Suddenly what to do with the rest of my life and what shirt to wear became equally daunting decisions. Gradually I was able to think ahead a little bit: Maybe in a few minutes I’ll get dressed. Maybe in a few hours I’ll get dressed. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get dressed. But nothing like moving to a new state.

  “I don’t know,” I tell Ruth.

  “You’ll love it up here.”

  “Thanks, it sounds great. I’ll think about it.”

  After we hang up, I open the front door and peer out at the street, flashlights bobbing in the night. The air is cool and moist against my face, and overhead Venus glitters and blinks as though it’s breathing.

  3

  “You would not believe how the smells of cinnamon and vanilla draw in a buyer,” says Melanie the realtor, pivoting on one pump and surveying my living room. “Hmm, you don’t have any furniture in here, and that’s a problem.” I got her name from a SALE PENDING sign in a neighbor’s yard on a day when selling the house and moving into a condo with no memories and a smaller mortgage seemed the only logical thing to do. But now I’m not so sure. Melanie’s making me a long list of chores before the place can go on the market: replace drapes, buy houseplants and throw pillows, rent living room furniture. She’s already sold four houses on our block and she drives a champagne-colored Lexus, but she looks young, maybe only thirty.

  “Buy scented candles or bake a pie or something,” she says, waving a hand in front of her face and wrinkling her nose. “This place smells . . . musty.” Cancer. Maybe three months later my house still smells like cancer.

  Ethan and I never discussed selling the house. During his last visit to the hospital he rattled off reminders for taking care of it: repair the sagging fence, hire a chimney sweep before lighting a fire this winter, schedule the tree pruner. I sat on the edge of his bed, even though the nurse said not to, and listed the chores on a yellow pad, pretending to be concerned about them. We had worked hard to buy our house, so I didn’t want to tell him that after he was gone I didn’t care if I lived at the YWCA.

  I had imagined there would be Love Story speeches by Ethan’s deathbed, like in the movies, but mostly we just held hands and talked about the house and whether he wanted Chap Stick or a sip of milk, and I realized that this is what happens when someone’s dying. It’s not like a soap opera, where the patient clutches your arm and rasps, “My whole life I have loved you the most,” or, “I have always wanted to tell you that you have a sister living in Albany.” Your loved one is more apt to remind you to feed the cat when you get home.

  Melanie says we have to stage everything, whip the place into shape. Her diamond earrings shimmer against her downy pink earlobes. She frowns at my empty living room, indents in the carpet marking where the furniture once was.

  “I’ll bake,” I promise.

  The first week of November brings gusts of wind that send lawn chairs tumbling across the patio, dead leaves swirling, and garbage can lids clanging against the side of the house. The autumn sky is a bright gray that hurts to look at. I imagine the earth tilting on its axis away from the sun and feel dizzy and weak and wonder when the pills will start working. Of course, the fact that I sometimes forget to take them probably doesn’t help. Also, I’ve started playing grief group hooky, dreading the bitter coffee, bright lights, and public speaking at the meetings.

  Medical bills and insurance statements continue to arrive in the mail, the “Explanation of Benefits” as nonsensical to me as Ethan’s death. I try to read the “Description” column, but everything’s abbreviated: “morphin inj 10 M, Elctrd EKG 3, Ans breath cir, SPNG 4x4 TRI10.” Finally I give up and just pay the patient responsibility portion, my checkbook balance waning, the vague medical terminology bringing back images of Ethan’s hospital days. The cool, damp sheets and ammonia smell of his bed. Dry, thin flamingo legs.

  Melanie’s sign on the front lawn says FOR SALE. The ad in the paper says Perfect for a growing family! It rains and rains, and the puddle under the floor in the coat closet creeps higher, a few skeletal leaves floating at the top.

  I attend a day-long meeting with a committee writing the label for a new drug. The wording on the label is important, because that’s what you have to work with in the promotional materials that follow. The FDA is touchy, though, and won’t allow any promotional-sounding language. Each word has to be debated. Reduces versus prevents. May cause versus has been known to cause.

  As I’m trying to find my place on the handouts, the tag in my sweater jabs the back of my neck. I raise my hand to adjust it.

  “Sophie. Question?” the vice president of marketing asks impatiently. His legs are crossed, and one slick loafer shines under the bright lights. Everyone in the group turns to look at me. Obviously I haven’t been paying attention. Worrying about the leak under my coat closet!

  The VP drums his fingers on the table.

  I want to explain that I wasn’t raising my hand, but suddenly I’m overcome with stage fright. Meeting fright. Trying to take a deep, cleansing breath, I discover that thin-air feeling again, my lungs shallow and woolen. Stars shimmer up the wall. My only thought is: I need a sump pump.

  Lara leans toward me, her eyebrows raised so high that they look as though they’re trying to crawl under her
hair. Clearly they didn’t cover nut jobs like me in her MBA program.

  One guy—a product manager who wears an earring in his tongue when he’s not at work—laughs, but everyone else is quiet. I excuse myself and then I’m out of there. Down the hall, down the stairs, papers flying behind me. May cause? Has been known to cause?

  As I run past the receptionist in the front atrium, forgetting my coat, I tell her I have a dentist’s appointment.

  She points a red fingernail at the sheet on the counter and calls after me, “Sign out!”

  The next day I set out to shop for the houseplants, pillows, and curtains Melanie wants for “staging” the house, even though the thought of going to the store fills me with what I know is an irrational sense of doom. I haven’t been to a real store since I fled Safeway before Halloween, limiting my shopping since then to the less overwhelming inventory at the 7-Eleven—squishy wheat bread and bologna and only one kind of eggs to choose from.

  It’s not even Thanksgiving, but there are already poinsettias and Christmas decorations for sale at the nursery. A big spruce towers above me, choked with garland and winking white lights. I must write a memo to the Minister of Happier Days requesting that the holidays be canceled this year. As I browse for paper whites and amaryllis, Nutcracker Muzak rushes to a crescendo, all those violin strings screeching at me. I give up on the flowers and race to get out of the store, knocking over a display of potted African violets on my way. I stumble to my hands and knees, gathering up clumps of soil.

  “I told Renaldo we shouldn’t put those there,” a voice behind me says. A slender man in a green apron stands with his hands on his hips. “Don’t worry,” he adds. “I’ve got it.” But it is better down here on the floor with the brown-speckled tiles and thin layer of dirt. Not overly festive like the rest of the store.

  I can’t get up because the air’s too thin and my head’s too light. But I need to get out of the nursery now. The floor is cool and chalky against my palms as I crawl toward the exit.

  “Ma’am?” the salesman calls out.

  Surely this is worse than crying by the acorn squash at Safeway. If I hurry, I’ll be out of here in no time. I scuttle faster, passing a dirty noodle of a rubber band, my coat hiking up around my waist.

  “Ma’am?” The salesman’s voice is farther away now. Grow lights buzz around me.

  “Sophie? Dear?”

  Marion! I crouch lower and peer up at her. Of course. She lives right near the nursery. She clutches a wicker reindeer lawn ornament by the neck. He has a big plastic cherry nose. It looks as though she’s choking him.

  “Did you lose a contact lens?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I begin to get up.

  “But you’ve got your glasses on.”

  “Right. Gosh.” I am on my knees, at eye level with the hem of Marion’s loden jacket. She reaches a small hand down for me. The fingers are pink and gnarled with arthritis, and there are no rings, just fingernails rounded into white crescent moons.

  “What did you do with your wedding ring?” I ask her. “Where do you keep it?”

  ANGER

  4

  Thanksgiving is on its way now, like a storm pumping across the weather map. I’d like to hide under the covers for the four-day weekend, but I’m determined to keep busy and get in the spirit. I decide to take off the Wednesday before the holiday and bake pies. Lure those buyers in with the smells of cinnamon and vanilla.

  While I’m nowhere near placing two media stories by the end of the month, I call Lara and tell her that I’m making progress working from home. Then I flip through cookbooks and bookmark recipes, comforted by the ingredients as I read them aloud: flour, eggs, butter. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg. I decide to bake a pecan pie with the top almost burned, the way Ethan likes it, and a sour cream apple and a pumpkin cheesecake with gingersnap crust. And a pumpkin pie. You have to have one plain pumpkin.

  When I finish the pies maybe I can deliver them to a homeless shelter. One Thanksgiving, Mother and I bought store pies and took them to the veterans hospital. A man with scissors-sharp stubble on his chin wept and grabbed my arm and hollered, “Marjorie!” I knew then that the holidays spelled trouble.

  The year Ethan and I were engaged, we volunteered as Meals on Wheels drivers, delivering dinners in Styrofoam cartons in East Palo Alto. I baked pies at Thanksgiving and we brought slices to everyone on our route. One woman, Mrs. Tucker, didn’t want to let us in. She peered warily through the crack in her door with one glazed eye. “I’m not celebrating this year,” she grumbled. Her two tiny nostrils flared at the smell of the dinner.

  Ethan pulled off his baseball cap, smiled, and said that it was okay not to celebrate the holidays. “But you gotta eat, right?” he asked. “So why not let us in and we’ll sit with you?” His voice was a low, smooth ballad, and pretty soon Mrs. Tucker’s face loosened and she opened the door.

  We sat at her kitchen table as she ate turkey and cornbread stuffing, and Ethan poured her a glass of milk.

  “Madam,” he said as he spread the napkin across the lap of her quilted robe, and she giggled. In the car on the way to the next house, Ethan said thank God we had each other to grow old with.

  Now, as I unpack cans of pumpkin and condensed milk that I ordered from an upscale shop that delivers, the phone rings.

  “I’m buying you a plane ticket to come home,” my father insists. He has called me once a week since I left home and has always offered to buy me plane tickets for the holidays, even when I was married. I picture him across the country, sitting at his kitchen table in his retiree uniform—blue chamois shirt and khakis speckled with paint.

  “Oh, no, Dad. I told you, I can’t take time off from work.” I cut open a sack of flour and pour it into the canister.

  “It’s a long weekend. You could leave tonight and be home on Sunday.”

  After years of living alone, Dad recently remarried and seems happy at last. He and his new wife, Jill, do everything together. He washes and she dries. They split restaurant entrées and share a suitcase when they travel. I don’t want to bring grief back into his house. I’m afraid it will linger after I leave, like cigar smoke clinging to the drapes.

  “I have to work this weekend,” I tell him. A lie. While some people are going into the office Thanksgiving weekend, Lara hasn’t asked me to. She probably figures I’ll do more damage than good. “I still have so much to learn.” The truth.

  “Working through the holiday doesn’t sound fun.”

  “Fun?” My expectations are much lower than fun. “Maybe for Christmas,” I tell him.

  After we hang up, I get to work on the pies, creaming butter and sugar, sifting flour, scalding milk, chopping nuts. My feet ache as the hours drone by. Pretty soon pies are spread everywhere, cooling on the kitchen counters and table, even on the washer and dryer. As I’m eating a slab of apple crumb over the sink, the phone rings and I hope it’ll be Dad again. Maybe this time I’ll give in. It’s only a long weekend, after all; I can’t pollute his whole life in one weekend. But it’s a telemarketer who wants to know if I’ll switch long-distance phone companies. In my married days, I would have hung up quickly. The nerve! But now I ask questions. Maybe I will switch. Is it cheaper on the weekends? I want to know more. But I have to say good-bye and hang up, because the doorbell’s ringing and I hear a key turning in the lock.

  “Hel-l-o-o-o!” Melanie the Realtor calls out. I hear a baby squawk and a woman trying to comfort him. Melanie peeks around the corner into the kitchen. Her cheery expression suddenly rolls up like a window shade.

  There’s a snowfall of flour across the floor and a tower of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. My arms and hands are caked with bits of pie dough, and I’m not officially dressed yet. I’m wearing Ethan’s clothes: baggy jeans that are more forgiving of my new Oreo waistline and a T-shirt with no bra.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” the wife says, the mommy. She cradles a chunky toddler around her hips and is clearly pregnant with her second. T
he husband wears a T-shirt with a company logo, and his hair is tousled.

  “We can come another time,” he offers.

  “No, please, have a look,” I insist, wiping my hands on my jeans, hoping they’re taking in the cinnamon and clove aroma.

  Where’s your husband? the toddler seems to say with his relentless stare. Where’s your baby? How come you didn’t fix the fence out back? How come you’re selling the house? Are you sure your husband would want you to sell your house?

  I offer the baby a plastic measuring cup to play with. He shrieks with glee and chomps on it.

  “It’s an adorable kitchen,” Melanie coos, splaying a hand across her chest, talking to the couple as though I’m not there. “Just look at this breakfast nook.”

  Ethan and I made love once in the breakfast nook, before we bought a table. It was during a heat wave before we installed air-conditioning and it was too hot to sleep and we found that the only way to keep cool was to lie naked on the kitchen floor with ice cubes on our foreheads. We got to laughing and tickling each other, and one thing led to another.

  The oven buzzer goes off and the baby starts to cry.

  “There’s a room upstairs that would make a wonderful nursery,” Melanie says, herding the couple out of the kitchen.

  “Really? Which one?” I ask her. But she is already heading up the stairs.

  “Have a look and I’ll be right there,” she tells them. Then she turns back toward me. “What about the new living room furniture?” she hisses through the banister.

  “I got a reindeer,” I whisper. I did. I bought one of the reindeer lawn ornaments that Marion found at the nursery and jammed it into the ground next to the FOR SALE sign. Surely it adds cheer. Melanie looks quizzically at my hair, which I’ve pulled into a ponytail with one of Ethan’s stretchy black dress socks.