Good Grief: A Novel Read online

  “Sorry to be nosy.” I pour her more wine and pile salad onto her plate. “But is he really your type?”

  Ruth stops chewing and narrows her eyes. “I guess I don’t have a type.”

  I shrug. “It’s just that he’s not very nice to Simone.”

  Ruth puts down her fork and folds her arms across her chest. “Yeah, he’s far from perfect.” She pushes her plate away.

  “I’m not saying you need someone who’s perfect. But you and Simone need someone who’s good for you.”

  “Good for me? Mark was supposedly good for me.”

  Mark was Ruth’s first real boyfriend. In college, he won her over essentially by wearing her down—filling her dorm room with roses, singing to her from under her window. A month after graduation they were married. Now, Ruth seems worn down by everything, raw and brittle. It’s mind-boggling why Mark took off with his hygienist, Missy, who’s the opposite of Ruth—a silly laugh that bubbles over without cause and a childish collection of stuffed animals in the back window of her car.

  “I don’t need you critiquing my love life,” Ruth says.

  “It’s just that I’m sure you’re the most eligible woman in Ashland, and—”

  “Right. With a four-year-old!” Ruth clears her plate. I’m a little hurt as she shoves her casserole down the disposal.

  She’s hardly aged since school—beautiful smooth skin, two rosy knobs for cheeks, thick blond hair the color of corn. We nicknamed her Dove for that perfect skin. Tony or no Tony, I want to start the evening over. When you live far away from your best friend, all you remember are the General Foods International Coffee ad moments. You forget that you ever had the capacity to fight.

  “You’re a snob,” Ruth continues. “Just because Tony didn’t go to college—”

  “It’s not about him going to college. It’s about you and Simone having someone you deserve.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I deserve. MIT graduates aren’t strolling the streets of Ashland, Soph.” She faces the sink with her back toward me, scrubbing her plate. “I would rather be with Tony than be alone. I know you find that despicable, but it’s the truth.” She sighs, sets the plate in the drainer, and drops her hands at her sides.

  “I’m not saying you have to date Einstein. But what about Simone? He yelled at her.” My hands tremble as I clear my plate. I haven’t been this forceful in a long time. “Tell me you disagree with me. Tell me that Tony’s good for you and Simone.”

  In the next room, a group of syrupy children on a Barney video sing a song about Mother Goose, and Simone giggles.

  Ruth turns toward me and brushes tears from her cheeks.

  “Yeah. He doesn’t seem crazy about kids.” She pours her wine down the drain.

  “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “All right. Point taken.”

  I sleep in the guest room at the back of Ruth’s old Victorian until I can find a rental of my own. The room is spinsterish, perfect for a widow, with its prim lace curtains and yellowing doilies on the dresser, the faint smells of mothballs and stale rose sachets. The arthritic wood floor that creaks under my bare feet. It’s as unsexy a dwelling as you could possibly find. Which is good: Nothing about the place reminds me of Ethan. It’s hard to miss the absence of his weight in the single bed that droops like a hammock. And I can’t really imagine him showering in the old claw-foot tub in the adjoining bathroom.

  Still, I dream about Ethan every night. He’s always sick in the dreams, and it seems as though I’m not dreaming about my husband, I’m dreaming about cancer. While Ethan was dying I hid my fear, worrying that it would only make him feel worse. You constantly try to be optimistic when someone’s sick, to look on the bright side, even if the bright side is only their ability to swallow a spoonful of applesauce or walk to the bathroom. After they’re gone, you’re left with endless fodder for nightmares.

  In one dream Ethan’s driving us across the country.

  “You don’t want to live in Oregon,” he says. “It rains all the time.”

  There’s something wet, warm, and sticky on the seat. I look down and see that it’s blood, as slick and dark as motor oil.

  Some nights I can hear Ruth and Tony on the other side of the bedroom wall: low voices, giggles, the steady bump of the headboard. Intimacy. Then there’s the swell of TV show music and laughter. The top ten reasons why you should get a job and find your own place.

  I stash my boxes in a storage facility out on I-5, figuring I won’t need them until I find my own apartment or house. But after a week at Ruth’s I begin to miss Ethan’s belongings. I buy an X-Acto knife and drive out to the locker and cut through the layers of cardboard and packing tape back into his world—closing my eyes and inhaling the smells of his musty old textbooks and leather belts and shoes.

  Sitting on the cold cement floor, I flip through Ethan’s high school yearbooks, running my fingers over the spidery ballpoint inscriptions from his classmates. One of the smartest kids in his class, he obviously helped a lot of pretty girls with their homework. Dear Ethan, wrote a girl with feathery blond hair and lots of mascara, thanks for helping me with my trig! Someone named Emily wearing a puka shell choker scribbled, Hey, Ethan, thanks for showing me how to work the Bunsen burner. I have the urge to look these women up and see if they remember my husband. I’m afraid the fickle world will forget him entirely.

  I rescue Ethan’s flannel shirts, sweatpants, and baseball caps, packing them into grocery bags to carry back to Ruth’s house. Finally, I find his ski sweater. As I pull it on over my head, the tightly knit wool is like armor against the damp Oregon air.

  “I have sweaters you can borrow,” Ruth says, eyeing Ethan’s boxy sweater skeptically when I get back to her house. I haven’t had it cleaned since he died, and there’s a long teardrop-shaped tea stain in the middle of the yellow stripe.

  “I like this one,” I tell her.

  It’s an easy walk from Ruth’s house to downtown Ashland, and the town is much prettier than the strip mall landscape of Silicon Valley. The Siskiyou Mountains scoop around East Main Street, shrouded with capes of cottony clouds and sprinkled with sugary snow. Colored flags for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival top the lampposts lining the street.

  I discover Kit Whittaker, a realtor who handles rentals in town, in an upstairs office across from the Chamber of Commerce. Kit’s friendly and handsome—olive skin, green eyes flecked with gold, and thick, curly brown hair. But I find filling out his rental application form daunting. I don’t have enough of a life to answer the questions. No employer or set annual income. For references I put down my father, which seems childish. Then there’s the worst part: Person to contact in case of emergency. I pause, then fill in Ruth’s name. Next to Relationship, I write friend, hating the absence in my life of the word husband.

  I look up at Kit, who sits behind his big oak desk, peering thoughtfully through wire-rimmed glasses at paperwork. There’s a picture on his desk of a pretty woman with long black braids standing beside two little girls.

  “Twins?” I ask him. He smiles and nods, and I have the urge to write his name down on the form in case of emergency. I imagine him stooping over the gurney in the emergency room, green eyes glittering, and whispering, Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.

  Kit picks me up at Ruth’s house the next morning, bringing me a cup of coffee with milk and sugar and a fresh pile of rental listings. The real estate market is slow in Ashland in the winter, so he has time to point out landmarks and actor hangouts and fill me in on town gossip—the rivalry between bed-and-breakfasts and the story of a terrible flood that ruined much of East Main Street one winter. The coffee is hot and sweet, and Kit’s car door is heavy and a little difficult to close. I feel safe inside as he snaps the locks shut.

  After two days of touring rentals with Kit, I’ve got a crush on his whole life. His corduroys and cable-knit sweaters, his appreciation for wood floors and French doors, his conscientiousness for always calling
his wife when he’s running late, his two little girls, even his car: the sweet cowboy smell of new leather seats.

  I imagine that Kit becomes a widower, his wife and girls suddenly gone somehow. Poor Kit! Then I’m bringing dinner to his house—maybe Bolognese sauce—and then, don’t ask how, we wind up making love on his kitchen floor. I imagine Pergo cold and hard against my back. No, this is plain crazy! I would never have an affair! Besides, Kit’s married. I’m married. Was married. Still love Ethan. It’s just that Kit has this calm, thoughtful expression and broad shoulders punctuated by a narrow waist. A waist you could curl your arms around while skinny-dipping in the ocean. That’s all I want. Not to have an affair. To go skinny-dipping in the ocean, just once, with my realtor. Loneliness. This must be loneliness talking. As much as I hated my job, suddenly I wish I were trapped back in the office, the fluorescent lights and bad coffee sucking the vitality out of me. Now that I’m regaining my energy, I’m not sure I like how it makes me feel: alive again, with all the weaknesses of the living. Realtor lust! Surely this isn’t a stage of grief.

  It’s not just Kit. Suddenly I’m noticing guys everywhere. Even Tony’s denim-clad rear is something to consider, despite his weaselly face. For months, men have been genderless blurs, nondistinct shapes orbiting around me, occasionally moving close enough to give off heat or the soft brush of a cotton sleeve.

  I feel guilty because I don’t miss just my husband. I miss men.

  The truth is, I developed little crushes on other men while Ethan was alive. The attentive guy at the nursery who knew the names of all the salvias (unlike Ethan, who couldn’t tell a plastic palm from a blooming rosebush). The cracks of the nursery guy’s palms were caked with soil. Once, as he loaded gallon containers of lantana into my trunk, I imagined helping him wash his hands. That night I dreamed about the hands—that his fingers swept up under my shirt, calluses tickling my belly. Then there was nuzzling and necking, and I awoke next to Ethan, gasping for air.

  “Are you okay?” Ethan asked tenderly.

  “I’m fine!” I shouted, clutching the duvet under my chin and telling myself: You did not just have a lusty dream about that twenty-something nursery guy. You’re married.

  Kit must think I’m a little off, because now when he picks me up in the morning I don’t want to look at him. Shyness envelops me, and small talk sticks in the back of my throat.

  “Not changing your mind about Ashland, are you?” Kit asks as I stare pensively through the rain-splattered windshield.

  “Oh, no,” I assure him. But the truth is, I want to go home. I feel the way I did as a kid at camp, with a pit of homesickness in my gut that no amount of s’mores or bug juice could fill.

  10

  Dr. Rupert gave me the name of a shrink in Medford, the next town over, but the new doctor doesn’t take my insurance, which I’ve extended through COBRA. I call around and find that none of the psychiatrists or psychologists in Ashland seem to take insurance. It turns out that COBRA is an ill-tempered snake who wants to cover only 50 percent of “allowable” charges for out-of-network doctors, which is much less than what the doctors actually charge.

  I meet with the Medford doctor once and he agrees to refill my prescription for antidepressants as long as I see him every three months and attend a weekly grief group in Ashland, which is free.

  The group meets Tuesday evenings at the Ashland Community Center, a log cabin across from Lithia Park that looks as though Daniel Boone should live there. The first meeting is on Valentine’s Day, and I feel grateful to have a date, even if it’s with a room full of strangers.

  Inside, a fire burns in the fireplace and there’s the familiar circle of folding aluminum chairs and bitter coffee served in Styrofoam cups, clumps of stubborn nondairy creamer floating on top, and little heart-shaped sugar cookies with pink icing.

  The leader’s name is Sandy, and he’s good-looking in a sandy sort of way—tousled blond hair, as though he just got out of bed, golden skin, two apricots for cheeks, a sandy goatee. A silver wedding band flashes between his tanned fingers. He asks us to take our seats. He’s tired, he explains, because he was up late last night with his daughter, Emma, who has a cold. Perfect name for a daughter, Emma.

  “Hello, everyone, let’s get started,” Emma’s dad says.

  We go around the room introducing ourselves. Since I’m sitting next to Sandy, we start with me. I tell the circle of faces that my husband died of cancer seven months ago. I used to feel faint whenever I told someone that Ethan died—as though I were floating above the earth, watching a movie of two people talking about his death. But now I’m able to state the fact as though someone merely asked what kind of car I drive. I’m surprised at how Ethan’s death is no longer a cruel impossibility, but rather an inherent part of my life, like my address or middle name (Enid, horrible, after an aunt). Sophie Enid Stanton: widow. Starting over.

  “Tell us something you miss about Ethan,” Sandy says.

  This seems too big a question to answer. Besides, wouldn’t we make it easier on ourselves if we tried to recall something we didn’t miss about our loved ones? If we tried to remember the time they locked the keys in the trunk or forgot our birthdays? But that’s the problem with dead people. They’re perfect. They never argue or chew with their mouths open.

  Actually, it bothered me the way Ethan chewed. He ate quickly with big bites, his cheeks bulging as he stared vacantly into space, his mind spinning around some piece of software code.

  Sandy clears his throat, leans forward in his chair, waiting.

  “His hair,” I tell the group softly. “Going to sleep with him at night.” I feel myself blushing, hoping they don’t think I mean just the sex part. “Someone to put down in case of emergency.”

  People smile and nod encouragingly, and we move on to the man sitting next to me, Al, a piano instructor who’s been a widower for nearly a year. “It’s just not the same,” he says, shaking his head and tugging at his black beard. He looks at the coffee urn on the table at the back of the room. “Are there doughnuts?” he asks.

  Then there’s an older man whose wife recently died of Alzheimer’s. She didn’t recognize him anymore, and when he visited her at the rest home she yelled at him to get the covered bridge out of her room.

  After we finish introducing ourselves, Sandy wants us to write letters to our loved ones. He passes out yellow pads and Bic pens. More hard work! I concentrate on shredding my cuticles.

  The empty pad stares up at me coolly.

  Dear Ethan, I begin. I look around the room. Everyone’s bent over, scratching away with their pens. Where are we going to mail these letters—to the North Pole?

  I moved up to Ashland and I’m staying with Ruth until I can find my own place and we sort of had a fight. It’s beautiful here, but it’s lonely. I thought I could leave the loneliness in San Jose, but it followed me up here like a stalker. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?

  I should probably tell Ethan that I sold our house. Oh, screw it. He can’t read this. I tear the sheet off the yellow pad, crumple it, and start over.

  Dear Sandy. Can I sleep with you? How come none of the grief books talk about how widows get crushes on everyone? Anyone who’s even remotely kind or good-looking? You become like the bird in that children’s book that loses its mother and starts thinking everything is its mother, even a steam shovel. Are you my mother? it keeps asking. Are you my husband?

  I look up, watching everyone writing. Sandy clears his throat again and shuffles some papers. Finally he asks if anyone would like to read their letter aloud. People squirm, glance at the door.

  “We’re doing some hard work today,” Sandy says, looking around the room, smoothing his goatee. “I understand if you don’t want to read your letters. Would anyone like to?”

  He turns toward me, eyes big and brown. My heart speeds up. I fold my letter and stuff it into my jacket pocket, then look at the floor. My anxiety-rattled brain expresses a sudden desire to run a hand
over the golden hairs on Sandy’s arms. A desire to have sex with him in a sleeping bag under the stars. He’s not even my type! I don’t go for earthy goatee guys. Still, sitting this close to Sandy, I can’t help but notice that he smells earthy in a good way, like potatoes. It would be a down sleeping bag and we would be naked and I’d have my flat stomach back. We’d be on another planet where there’s a lot more to console a person than an empty legal pad.

  A woman whose husband fell through the ice and drowned on an ice-fishing trip reads softly to the venetian blinds. Her letter is all about how her husband never should have gone fishing in the first place. It wasn’t cold enough for the ice to be solid and they already had a freezer full of fish at home and it was dumb to drink and fish and be so careless when he had two kids and a whole family who cared about him.

  “And hello!” she says, her quavering voice getting louder. “They have fish at Safeway. We didn’t need any more fucking fish out of that cesspool of a river!” She looks up at us and says, “That’s as far as I got.”

  Sandy says thank you and it’s okay to be angry and keep going, don’t be afraid to keep going.

  After the meeting, Gloria, an older woman in a black wool cape whose daughter died of leukemia, crosses the room toward me.

  “You remind me of my daughter,” she says, giving me a hug. “She had curly hair, too.” I feel her knobby vertebrae under layers of cape and sweater. She smells spicy, like cinnamon and cloves, like apple pie, and I don’t want to let go of her.

  Gloria takes a step back, looks at me, then touches my curls. “You take care,” she says. “See you next week.”

  Then the piano teacher is at my side. “Is it Sophie?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  He extends a hand. “Al.” The hand is damp, a little slippery.

  “Hi, Al.”

  “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” He wears a Mr. Rogers cardigan sweater, and his wiry black hair is combed over in a swirl from the nape of his neck, like a shadow across his head. He’s probably at least ten years older than me. “You mentioned not liking to eat dinner alone,” he explains sheepishly, “and I’m trying to get out of myself by reaching out to others.”