The Widow’s Husband

by Sheila Evans

  Zack has indulged in false advertising. But what about me in my sexy Chinese dress? I, too, have engaged in a lie, because I don’t feel a damned thing for any of these people, except a simmering dislike for Zack.

  Jeff, the new one is Jeff something or other, Jeff asks me to dance. It’s an ABBA number, smooth and slow. He is warm in his scratchy suit—I sniff a faint deodorant scent on him—and his body has a tough meaty feel under my hands. “My daughter used to play this song,” I say. “She didn’t believe me when I told her the group is Swedish, none of them spoke English.”

  “I’ll be darned. I didn’t know that. How old’s your daughter?”

  “She’s twenty-four. I missed her music when she moved out and took it.”

  “A daughter that old?”

  “That’s not old. I’m twice that, well, almost.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  I laugh. “You don’t have to look it. That’s not part of the requirement.”

  “Say, I don’t know how connected you are to Zack—”

  “Not at all. Just met him tonight.”

  “’S’pose I could get your number? I saw you come in, and I thought by George, this might not be a waste of time after all.”

  “Sure,” and I rattle it off for him. “You can’t remember that.”

  “You wanna bet? Thanks … Peg?”

  “Yeah, Peg, that’s me. Thank you, Jeff. Who’d you come with?”

  “No one. I’m on my own. This number’s about over, too bad for me. See you later.”

  He returns me to Zack and I look at my watch: almost eleven-thirty. I may live. After a bit, the lights come up, those unforgiving fluorescent lights that show us to each other exactly as we are. The fixture above our table buzzes and crackles like a bugzapper. Zack’s face ages ten years, his skin acquires a bluish pasty look; dark bags hang under his eyes. He has a surprised expression, a bemused look, as if he’s taken aback at life’s injustice. Well, he has suffered random hurts and pains, an ordinary man coping with what he sees as unearned tragedies. I soften my opinion, view him with a condescending sympathy. After all, I must look as old to him as he does to me.

  It’s not just us. Everyone in the room fades and droops; it’s obscene: the clown, the movie star, the performer take off their makeup, and like magic in reverse, they turn into ordinary people. It’s like seeing a candid photo in the Enquirer of Elizabeth Taylor, or Julia Roberts without the airbrushing, the cosmetics, the plastic surgery. We’re embarrassed with and for each other. We quiet down except for an occasional self-conscious twitter. Ordinary people, tired and faded, up past our bedtimes.

  Like kids on the playground, we’re instructed to make a circle and parade around the room while the president of the singles’ club judges us for best, most original costume. For the first time I get a full look at the other outfits. The Far East has come in for a big play. Besides me, there’s a sari, a Punjabi-type outfit, the hula girls, a Crocodile Dundee in an Aussie-style hat, like the one I dreamed of on Emmett. I hear the wearer scatter “g’day, mates” around the room like tips for the caterers.

  The winner in the female division: a woman done up as Glenda, the Good Witch of the West (I think that’s what she is) with a sorcerer’s pointed hat and luxurious long flowing sleeves. The winner in the male’s: the man impersonating a computer, which should have won—the poor fellow has suffered with that box over his head. The winners make an odd pair, but that’s why we’re here: we’ve displayed this proclivity for unwieldy combinations in our outside lives, and it has landed us in a pickle. The prize: a pair of tickets for dinner and a movie, following the group’s rationale that all creatures, like those crows in my parking lot, should be mated. For every pot, there’s a lid.

  The buffet is a nice assortment spread out on a couple of tables. Finger foods predominate: fried chicken nuggets (KFC?), riblets, which prove to be messy—the women avoid them, but not the men. Hors d’oeuvres aplenty, pickles, olives, cheeses, ham and salami, crackers, sliced veggies, which are rather universally ignored. Cakes, cookies, chips. The last time I ate a buffet was at Emmett’s funeral supper, and I’m apprehensive that a rerun of that miserable experience will ruin my appetite. But it doesn’t happen, and I wolf down a surprising amount of food, including the ribs. What the hell.

  That night at home again, stripping off the sandalfoot nylons that I ruined early on, I think, Well, that wasn’t so bad, although maybe I won’t do it again soon. There’s not much danger of that. Zack will not call me. Are all guys named Zack assholes full of bullshit, I wonder; and my goodness, I scold! Where does this awful language come from, although it’s all in my head and not out loud, not even to PawPaw, who has waited up for me.

  Zack and I were finished before we started, which shows me what a poor eye Frieda has for what’s right, fitting, and proper. Good coffee, yes. Match-making, no.

  The next morning I have a mild hangover—thick head full of cobwebs. Tendency to become dizzy. Scold myself for the abuse, but laugh, too. I remember an old joke of Emmett’s, one he stole from W.C. Fields. A man sits next to a woman in a bar, turns to her, says, “You’re ugly.”

  “You’re drunk,” she says.

  He responds, “Tomorrow I’ll be sober, but you’ll still be ugly.”

  Tomorrow I’ll be sober, but Zack will still be Zack, full of what I think are misplaced values, and bitter judgements about women and their proper places. None of that is going to help him get on in this new age. If Emmett had lived, I wonder if his true nature wouldn’t have manifested itself and gotten in his way with Maggie Quinn. Suddenly I’m sure it would have. This ought not to make me happy, but it does.

  I take a couple of aspirins, drink a gallon of water and go back to bed. Such are the pleasures of the single life.

  Jeff, the guy at the dance in the army getup, did call, but I was gone. If he’d called sooner—I suspected someone else stood him up—things might have gone differently. Then again, it was already too late, because I had no control over forces that were beginning to operate in my life.

  (And what a crock that is, to make such a statement: “… I had no control over forces …” blah, blah, blah, what a stuffed shirt thing to say. As if anybody has control, as if life’s a checker game, there’re rules, and a plan. That’s a naïve, cop-out of an attitude, and I apologize … but it was what I felt at the time.)

  CHAPTER 11

  Helen trudges up from the warehouse where she’s swamped with work. “TGIF, cubed! Let’s go for a beer tonight. Oops! Sorry,” she says, seeing me on the phone. Zack, fired for using cocaine on the job, has left us reeling from the fallout, agog with scandal.

  I nod yes around my headset, while listening to another irate customer carp about the injustice of her cable bill. “I realize …” a quick glance at my computer screen … “Mrs. Stocker, I realize that this seems like quite a hike in your bill. It’s not a hike, it’s just that your introductory period has expired, and I’m sure you want to keep all those good channels.… Yes, I know some of the movies on HBO are risqué, and you’re not into prison dramas, or Mafia stories, but there are so many.… Yes, I know, but there’s the BBC channel, have you seen the one where they come in and redo your garden? And ENCORE with all the good old shows, well, not old in the sense of dated, but the ones that people like. And the History Channel, the Learning Channel … oh, well, sure, I’m glad you enjoy them. Thanks for calling, Mrs … uh … Stocker.”

  I’ve been dealing with an avalanche of unhappy people. Over and over I explain the rates, I explain the difference between Basic and Expanded and Premium. I don’t blame people for being shocked at how much just Basic costs. I am paying the price, too, and I don’t like it, either. I have considered doing without, but I’m addicted to my TV and I don’t think I can give it up. Some days I report for work with my eyes shaped like little TV sets, having sat up half the night in front of the tube. Not that TV is so good; it’s that I’m having trouble sleeping again.

 
; Staggering around at work, edgy, nervous, out of kilter. I’m not alone. We’re all wiped out. Tiffany rampages around, alternating loud nastiness with cold pouts in the bathroom. While Vi was here, delivering the coup de grace to Zack, Tiffany maintained a smooth exterior, projected her usual unflinching efficiency, but as soon as Vi left, Tiffany went back to what’s become her normal, which is unpredictable vindictiveness. She’s taking it out on us because she thinks we snitched on Zack. I know I didn’t, can’t tell cocaine from baby talc; and I doubt Helen can, either. Bruce? No. Not Bruce. I see him as too timid and pussy-whipped (a phrase of Emmett’s I deplored, and still do) to effect such a heroic deed as ratting on Zack. I’d put my money on one of the installers, Al or Eugene; one of them blew the whistle. They called him Zack the Jerk, my private name for him, too. In any case, as a group, we’re irascible, upset, stretched thin.

  Then too, people are unhappy with us because a pre-Thanksgiving Sunday storm took down cable lines. The timing couldn’t have been worse: this knocked out a big football game; Emmett would have been livid. I was, too, because I had to forego my beloved ice-skating special. In general, an increasing number of people are griping about their service, are threatening to quit us. Some days I want to shout, “So, cancel the damn cable, just do it!” But such honesty I can’t afford.

  People don’t limit themselves to phoning; they come in to personally chew me out. “Robber barons, that’s what you are!” said one woman, plunking down her payment. Another one brought in her black box, the digital equipment, thumped it on the counter. “I quit! I want you out of my house. Take your stuff and shove it!” A man threatened, “I’ll show you, I’ll get a satellite dish.” I’d had the same idea myself, but found out that signing up for all those channels would cost me the same as cable, and I’d have to buy the dish, too.

  Waiting on all those angry people. Answering the phone, listening to them. Explaining, cajoling, accounting to them their charges. Nerve-wracking.

  Later at the Jolly Roger, our neighborhood saloon, Helen agrees. “That place is hell these days. Did you see Raoul when he came in? I swear he rolled his eyes like a horse that smells fire … really spooked. Funniest damn thing now that I think about it.” Helen lets out a belly laugh. “I mean for even Raoul, the stone man … for him to feel it.”

  “Yeah, Jerry didn’t hang around long, either. Say, do you think Bruce—”

  “What? That he ratted? Nah, he’s too nice a guy, I mean, really. He’s so nice his face hurts. But here’s the part that gets me. Whoever would have guessed it was Zack keeping us balanced.”

  “What! No way.”

  “It’s true. See, when Tiffany had Zack to jolly her around, she’d go along, do her part with customer service. But now that she spends half her time sulking in the bathroom, it’s up to you and me to do the work of four people.”

  While I consider this idea, she adds, “Listen, you never know who’s in control. In school, didn’t they ever ask you to list the two people you wanted to sit next to? And the teacher makes a grid of it? And then the teacher—because we kids never saw the results—could map out ringleaders, chart classroom dynamics. See who’s pushing the buttons, or who’s an isolate; I forget how it works.… You never did that? I guess that kind of thing came along later.”

  She trails off, embarrassed for me, for my aged backwardness. Young woman like her: I wonder why she never married, or if she has a boyfriend. Then I wonder whom I’d have picked to sit next to, if Emmett couldn’t have been one of the choices. Or who would have picked me. Had I been an isolate? Am I still?

  “Listen, Peg, it’s not worth brooding over. You know the really weird part? I suspect Tiffany turned in our coke-head. Just the bitchy kind of thing she’d do.”

  “Whatever for? They were friends.”

  “Friends? Don’t you think they had a thing going? And it blew up? Besides, she’d have done it just to keep us off balance, so we can’t gang up on her. Divide and conquer.”

  “Oh, come on.” But Helen has a point. The way Tiffany and Zack were always canoodling, laughing in corners. Then, too, Tiffany is smart, plays both ends against the middle.

  While the beer gives me a warm rush—it’s dark, heavy, and cold—I play with my glass, make an interlocking design of wet circles on the bar. We’re sitting at the bar, perched on a pair of barstools. We never take a booth. Helen has explained the fine points of bar etiquette to me. You don’t take up a booth unless you’re a foursome, or at least a pair. You keep your eyes to yourself, and do not let your look linger on a person who is obviously already paired up. You leave your drink and your change (but not your purse) on the bar when you go to the john, or off to dance; no one will mess with your stuff. You do not talk across someone. You do not join in someone else’s conversation unless invited to do so. An invitation can be delivered in a variety of delicate ways—a smile, a subtle posture, a glance, a tone of voice—and a bar patron who’s mastered the code will know what he or she is about. I appreciate Helen’s tutelage because I’m a raw greenhorn, although I don’t plan to make a habit of this TGIF stuff. I believe Emmett had it right: the bar scene is no good. Nothing good happens in a bar.

  “I’m serious,” says Helen, and laughs. She’s feeling the beer, too. “Tiffany could play world class chess. That convoluted thinking. Didn’t Vi lay that bit on you about how messed up the kids are? That they can’t even give blood because of what they’ve done to their bodies? But she idolizes Tiffany despite her being a poster child for exactly what Vi campaigns against. Didn’t Vi preach to you that bit about thinking in ones-and-zeros bit, which, by the way, exactly personifies our Tiffany?”

  “Well, yes, she did. But I don’t see Tiffany as—”

  I sense a presence at my elbow, and at first I think oh, shit, Tiffany. It could be her, because this place, the Jolly Roger, is a local watering hole, an outpost that serves the small army laboring in our industrial park. Industrial park. What a joke. Military intelligence. Giant shrimp. Dress loafers? Married love?

  Besides the cable office, this complex houses a locksmith, a chainsaw outfit, a boat works, a flooring store, an upholstery shop, a sheet metal shop, a storage unit complex. So there’s nothing “jolly” about the Jolly Roger’s neighborhood, or the establishment itself. It’s just another rectangle in a cinder block row of rectangles. For ambiance, for something to help it live up to its exotic name, it depends on a few faded skull and crossbones flags, a plastic “treasure chest” behind the bar, plastic treasure spilling out of it. Since it’s almost Thanksgiving, the owner, a Filipino guy with a glib but unintelligible style of English, has enlivened the décor with cutouts of improbable turkeys, Pilgrim hats, and autumn leaves—although there are no trees within a half-mile of here.

  There’s no reason for Tiffany of the black clothes, green and white makeup, safety-pin earrings to show here. This is a blue collar, mainstream, workin’-bloke hangout, and the locals turn out, especially on Fridays. It’s not Tiffany at my elbow. It’s Bruce. What’s he doing here?

  As if to answer that, Bruce says, “Helen mentioned you guys dropping in, so, I decided to join the crowd.” He shyly glances at Helen, and I get it. Bruce and Helen. Well, why not? Except doesn’t this make me the odd one? The extra? But if we were to do a grid of the two people we’d want to sit next to, surely I would be their second choice. In that sense, I belong, and I make Bruce welcome, raise my beer glass to his, which the Filipino’s bartending wife has already brought him: a toast to Fridays.

  I laugh at their jokes. I add my own. We assemble, then dissect the office personnel. Tiffany takes her knocks; we love to hate Tiffany. Vi is a peach, we agree—cautiously. Because we don’t really know Vi. The installers, Al and Eugene, I admit that I can’t tell them apart; wouldn’t know them if they were to come in the door right now.

  The talk turns to other jobs we’ve worked; sour, disgusting, difficult jobs, which, in comparison, make Mountain Valley Cable a piece of cake, a slice of pie (Helen’s ph
rase). Bruce describes working as a roofer, hot-mopping tar on a flat-topped California bungalow in the middle of August. “But it was the best I could do. Jan was expecting Isabel, I was going to be a father in a matter of weeks, we needed the money. I would have done anything for my family.” Here his voice breaks, and I feel that twinge of irritation, prickle of exasperation, and I’m glad when Helen jumps in.

  Helen’s been on her own for a long time, and has done a lot. Early on she prepped for a house painter, thinking, what a blast, masking off woodwork, priming miles of backbreaking baseboard. She finally woke up to the raw labor, the boredom of it. Then she wandered around, clerking, waitressing, even did a stint as a hairdresser. Her worst job had been driving a school bus for special ed kids, retarded, handicapped. So depressing. Some wet their pants, or worse. They cried, they wouldn’t sit still, ran up and down the aisle while the bus was moving; some didn’t know their stops, or even their last names. She had to keep checking to make sure she wasn’t missing any kids, or letting any off at the wrong stop—the school district could have been sued. She didn’t get sued, but she did wipe out a bus bench, cut a corner too sharply and ran over it with her van, the kind with the lift for wheelchairs. She drove back to the bus barn and quit. Just recalling that afternoon when she killed a bus bench makes color mount in her cheeks, the nervous sweat pop out.

  Me, I don’t have those kinds of dramas to relate, because, I explain, I had Emmett to count on; I didn’t have to make my own way until he died. Bruce’s eyes fill with tears for me, which makes me want to act tough and reckless.