This Angel on My Chest

by Pietrzyk, Leslie

  He went on for another few minutes, talking and crying and sniffling, dragging his sleeve across his face, his nose turning red, the words muddled and virtually without sense. Of course, none of it made sense, right; why they were here? Because their husbands had died. Because they were young widows. “Widow,” a word that was wrong to begin with, and then “young” tacked onto it, emphasizing how very and totally wrong this was.

  She was thirty-five and her life was over, almost as much as her husband’s was. Maybe she would rather have died. If the choice were offered, she would not recommend being the one left behind.

  The woman with the white-blonde hair was next. “Hi, everyone,” she said, with a twangy accent. “I’m Jayne with a Y, and I moved here about six months ago, and my boyfriend Sam drowned in the Potomac River out at Great Falls when he was trying to rescue a little boy who’d fallen in and who also drowned.” There was a long, lingering sigh of sadness. The story had been in the newspapers, and the local news channels led with it for several days. There had been follow-up stories about how many people drowned each year in the Potomac River, the dangerous, swirling currents.

  Jayne said, “That was April 7. A Saturday. A really beautiful, perfect, sunny Saturday.”

  Were you there? she wondered but didn’t dare ask. With him? Watching? Which was worse—to be there, tearing along the riverbank screaming for help, or to be running errands at Home Depot, imagining that he was going to love the stone birdbath you picked out, planning what you were going to cook for dinner that night, which bottle of wine to open?

  Other people spoke—a lawyer whose husband dropped dead of a heart attack while playing racquetball, and someone whose husband died of lung cancer, and a man hit by a car while on vacation, and an ex-husband who had been bipolar and killed himself. The names blurred, the widows and their men—Doug-Josie-Sarah-Philip-Eman—one long name, one long string of loss and sadness. There was so much sadness that she imagined herself drowning in it, as if in the Potomac, dangerous currents sucking her under. Why would anyone want to win? There was one woman whose husband had died two years ago, and she exploded into tears the moment she said his name and couldn’t stop crying while she talked. Through it all, Ruth with her fabulous hair, was calm and serene, nodding gently, as if nothing she heard surprised or shocked or hurt her. She was immune to sadness. No doubt Ruth, leader of all her groups, knew the story that would win.

  When it was her turn, she said, “Andrew had a heart attack one day at breakfast. He was thirty-seven and had been in perfect health.” That explained nothing. Those were “just the facts, ma’am,” the “what happened” of what happened, the barest outline of the emptiness inside her. “Nine weeks ago,” she added. Nine weeks, nine innings to a baseball game, married nine years, nine people in this room right now, nine thirty in the morning when he died, nine minutes for the stupid ambulance to pull into the driveway of the ER, nine people who spoke at the wake, nine, nine. Like the man’s lost credit cards, that had to mean something. Otherwise—what?

  Don’t think about that, the false hope of that empty, useless word: otherwise.

  Or its hand-in-hand cousin: If. If only.

  After the meeting, the group—minus Ruth—went out to Pizza Hut, which wouldn’t be her choice, ever, of where to eat, but she went along, maneuvering herself into the spot across the table from Jayne. “Where did you move here from?” she asked Jayne after the orders had been placed—pepperoni and onion, and veggie. She and Jayne were the only ones to get Chianti; it was iced tea and Diet Coke for the others. The waitress looked annoyed to have such a large group and had preemptively warned that there would be no separate checks. Tom offered to pay for everyone, which either was extremely nice or extremely show-offy.

  “Columbia, South Carolina,” Jayne said. “Teaching biology at Midlands Tech. It’s a community college.”

  They talked about details like that for a while—siblings, South Carolina, biology, where Jayne lived now, how Jayne liked DC—but all the while, she was thinking that she didn’t know anyone else who taught biology or who thought about the presence of biology in the world in any particular way. We wouldn’t have met, she thought, we wouldn’t have crossed paths except for this one irrevocable fact, this single word our lives boiled down to, widow. Our carts might have been in the same aisle at Safeway, and we just would have walked on, grabbing our carton of milk, our apples. We wouldn’t have known.

  As if her mind was being read, a woman kitty-corner butted in to say, “I think they should go back to the days when widows wore black so everyone would know. I hate when I’m having a bad day and someone’s mean to me. If I were wearing black, I really think people would be nicer. I know I would be, now. Now that I know.”

  Widow. She looked at this woman, admired her bravery for speaking the word out loud. She planned never to do that.

  At the far end of the long table, the two-year woman was sobbing and shredding her napkin, dropping the tiny bits into her water glass.

  Jayne’s blue eyes followed, seeing the same thing. “I won’t stand it if I’m like that two years from now,” she said quietly. She picked up her wine glass, swirled the liquid around before finishing it off.

  The black-clothes woman said, “She’s a mess,” but then she laughed. “Probably we all are, just in different ways. Like, when I look at Doug’s tuxedo, I just lose it. A guy buys a tuxedo and the plan is to wear it for years and years. This thing’s practically brand new, and now what? I donated sweaters and T-shirts, but it’s wrong to get rid of this stupid tux.”

  She nodded. There was a tux zipped up in a garment bag in her closet that she planned to keep forever, that she planned to cram into the trashcan the minute she got home tonight. They were all a mess. She was as messy as any of them.

  The waitress brought another glass of water for the two-year woman.

  Jayne said, “It’s boggling how much stuff one person accumulates, how many things. Now, I’ve got his collection of antique cameras.”

  This is something she has thought many times—staring in the closet, staring at the bookshelves, staring at the photographs on the walls—but there was comfort in hearing her thoughts in Jayne’s South Carolina twang.

  “His suits were also really nice,” the black-clothes woman said. “Made to order. How’m I supposed to find a 44-short guy to give them to?”

  Jayne shook her head mournfully, and the black-clothes woman brayed out a laugh that was also a cough that was supposed to cover a tiny choking sob: “Guess what I really mean is how’m I going to find another 44-short guy? How’m I going to find someone else to wear those damn suits?”

  Like dogs barking, she thought, or babies crying in church; one started, and the rest jumped into the chorus of howls. By the end of the night, each of them had cried several times and laughed several times and said, “I know exactly what you mean,” over and over. She and Jayne exchanged cards and promised to get together, and the black-clothes woman also handed each of them her card. Her name was Suellen, which seemed like the least likely name this woman would have, and that made it easier to feel fond of her.

  Ruth Feinstein is on the treadmill, and she hates the treadmill. Because she hates the treadmill so much, she only works out in the early morning because that’s when her friend Charlotte works out, and the only thing that makes the thought of thirty minutes on the treadmill palatable is thirty minutes spent talking to Charlotte. The two women met almost twenty years ago in a group house in the Adams Morgan section of DC. After losing touch for a while, they reunited—surprisingly—four or five years ago, in the waiting room for the DMV, each with complicated, car-related paperwork that couldn’t be handled online. The tortoise pace of the DMV gave the women time to navigate apologies to each other, made easier when they realized neither remembered exactly what bad thing had transpired between them all those years ago. Then they blew off the rest of the day with a long, late lunch and a bottle of wine. This health club has been chosen because it�
�s equidistant from their condos.

  “I’ve got someone for you,” Charlotte says, breathless from walking with the incline.

  “Not this,” Ruth says.

  “I met him at a networking thing two days ago,” Charlotte says. “You should have come with me.” She’s always going to networking things, always wanting to drag Ruth along.

  “Grieving people find me,” Ruth says. “I don’t have to network for them. My job’s very safe.”

  “Nothing’s safe,” Charlotte says. “But this guy is perfect for you.”

  “He’s a six-foot-one, gorgeous Jewish doctor with a beach house and no mother issues?” As soon as the words are out, Ruth knows she shouldn’t have said “doctor.” So she quickly adds, “I don’t know, maybe. Tell me more about him,” with tell me more about him being the only words that might possibly stave off Charlotte’s inevitable questions.

  “Well,” Charlotte says. “He has a boat. So think about watching July Fourth fireworks on the Mall from his boat. But how come you never told me what the doctor said?”

  Ruth is a licensed MSW who almost became a practicing therapist before deciding to make grief work her specialty. She knows very well that it’s hurtful to lie to her friend. “The doctor didn’t say anything.” So not exactly a lie.

  There’s a pause, and Ruth hopes it’s the exertion of the treadmill that’s silencing Charlotte. Ruth asks, “What’s the guy’s name?” and when Charlotte doesn’t answer, Ruth says, “Better not be Stuart. That’s a loser name.”

  Charlotte flips off the machine, grabs for a towel. “Your grandmother died of breast cancer. Your aunt. They saved your mother because they caught it in time. What are you doing?”

  Ruth looks forward, keeps walking at her brisk pace, one foot in front of the other.

  “Did you even have the biopsy? How come you don’t have stitches or something?”

  “Minimally invasive breast biopsy,” Ruth parrots. “Minimally invasive.” Haha. Who came up with that one? Who knew the word “minimally” could be such a knee-slapper?

  “Am I going to have to call Noah?”

  Ruth’s ex-husband. She can only imagine what he will do or say. It shouldn’t be the case—not after how he treated her—but she’s still a little bit in love with him. Yes, she thinks, that’s exactly what you’re going to have to do, call Noah, but she says, “Don’t be ridiculous. Whatever you do, don’t drag him into this. I’m calling the doctor first thing today. The minute the office opens.”

  “Or I could call your mother,” Charlotte says.

  “I’d like to see that,” Ruth says. “She’ll eat you alive.”

  “Then promise.”

  Ruth promises. Upon demand, Ruth even crosses her heart, right there in the health club at six fifty in the morning. Then she spends the rest of the day doing everything except calling the doctor.

  Something about the young widow group the other night has disturbed Ruth. Not the woman who, for whatever reason, hadn’t done any grief work in two years and who’s still about as gaping wound raw as the day it happened. Not the woman who talked about moving to Florida the second her house sold so she can forget everything. All that’s normal. People ramble through grief at their own pace—tiptoes to raging bulls—and Ruth does not judge. It’s not a race.

  No, what Ruth finds disturbing is the steady gnaw of anger as she listened to the widows speak that first night. She’s been tired lately, maybe, or about to get her period. Maybe that ill-advised Mexican meal. But today, home after work, after not calling the doctor, she realizes why: those bitches are alive, and she is dying.

  She hates them for it, even as she hates herself for hating them, even as she knows she is supposed to be open to feeling. “Stay with the emotion,” is her mantra, and that’s why she can admit to herself—if not to anyone else, not even Charlotte—that she is still a little bit in love with Noah. But this. She can’t admit this—even though, sort of, apparently, she just has. And exactly what is it she has admitted? That she is angry at the young widows? Or that she’s dying?

  She was meeting Jayne and Suellen at the mall at Pentagon City. She didn’t like malls, and neither did Jayne, but Suellen did, and shopping together seemed like something to do on a Saturday afternoon, to keep her doing something. The three of them had met for drinks (too many) downtown last Friday after work, which had seemed slightly illicit, the three of them sitting in the bar at Morton’s along with lawyers and lobbyists, as if they were normal women sipping cabernet at a Friday happy hour. Instead of flirting or dishing office gossip, they talked wills and insurance and paperwork. Possibly an eavesdropper might have mistaken them as lawyers, until Jayne said, “Well, I don’t care. He’s dead, and there’s no law that says I have to pay off those credit card bills.” Her boyfriend had no will, and so everything—technically—went to his parents, who blamed Jayne for dragging their son up north where he drowned, though, actually, he was the one who had dragged her up north. “They raised him,” Jayne said, “making him think being a hero is ever any kind of a good idea. It’s a stupid fucking bad idea if you ask me.” They laughed at that, the cabernet taking effect, the freedom to say whatever the hell they wanted—to blame their stupid men for their stupid deaths—and when they got puzzled looks from the men and women in suits, who cared?

  She was early—as she typically was—and Jayne was next and then Suellen. And there they were, standing at the coffee café in the concourse outside Nordstrom, and Jayne said, “I haven’t gone shopping with girls since maybe high school.”

  “Probably works the same way,” Suellen said. “Look at clothes, buy clothes, return clothes two days later.” Suellen always spoke as quickly as possible, so no one would beat her to the same words. She was the youngest of the young widow group, only thirty-one, and she had been engaged to Doug for a month. They had expected that he would wear that new tux in their wedding, which they had started planning. Doug had been eleven years older than Suellen; they’d met by hooking up at a weekend business conference, but then were seated next to each other on the plane home, which sat on the tarmac for two hours, delayed: “forced to talk,” Suellen said. Unfortunately, Doug had been married, but that ended quickly, though messily. Suellen was one of those people who seemed destined to thrash her way through a lot of entanglements. There was a raw edginess to her, so it was easy to believe Suellen when that night at Morton’s she told them she struggled to keep female friends, even growing up.

  “I’m a biology teacher,” Jayne said. “It’s not like I need clothes.”

  “Retail therapy is good for everyone,” Suellen said. “Even biology teachers.”

  It turned out that Suellen had a personal shopper at Nordstrom and had made an appointment for the three of them to try on evening wear and cocktail dresses. “Who doesn’t like looking at themselves in pretty dresses?” Suellen said, leading them through a glass door at the back of the store and into a hushed salon decorated in muted tones, cast in flattering light. The personal shopper was a tiny Asian woman named Mei who radiated cheerfulness and poured them each a small flute of not bad champagne that they sipped nervously. (“Told you,” Suellen whispered. “This is how to do it, ladies.”)

  She felt Mei’s cool eyes skim her body, appraising her, and while she knew the assessment was professional—considering dresses; possible shapes, colors, cuts, lines—it had been nine weeks since anyone had regarded her body with such frank interest, and she blushed under the blatant scrutiny. Her body had become now nothing more than a pile of flesh, dully maintaining its various functions, the way a refrigerator hums in a dark kitchen.

  Mei had already set aside some dresses for Suellen to try on, but Suellen refused to peek until each of them had a pile, so off went Mei.

  “I should have worn my good underwear,” Jayne said.

  “Yeah, because what are you saving it for now?” she asked.

  They laughed. It was these comments that no one else would think were funny that they laughed
hardest at. As if there was something to prove that could only be proved by laughter.

  “Really,” Suellen said. “I’m so spending as much money as I want to on whatever I want to. It’s not like I’m saving up for kids’ college funds any time soon. Mei is going to earn a big old commission today, that’s for sure.” Suellen lifted her champagne flute. “Here’s to the good underwear.”

  They toasted. It was nice to feel a glimmer of a buzz on a Saturday morning, to luxuriate while someone took care of them, a professional devoted to making them feel pretty. She told the others what she was thinking, adding, “I guess in a terrible way she’s like our prostitute,” and they all laughed again, and she thrilled to the sense that no one else on Earth would understand what she meant.

  Eventually, Mei returned with an armload of dresses, each color richer than the last, plum, turquoise, fuchsia, orange, ruby red. It was as if Mei had been privy to Suellen’s comment the other night about wearing black and was determined to remind them that there were still colors in the universe, that there were two parts to “young widow” and one of the parts was “young.” Jayne, the oldest of the three, was only forty, which might mean sixty more years ahead.

  They tried on the sparkling dresses, keeping up a conversation with Mei about the imaginary dress-up event they were all attending at the Willard Hotel, a birthday party for a rich friend who lived now in New York City, but whose parents were too frail to travel. She had been in a number of Broadway shows, and the chef at the Willard was a buddy of hers, and there was going to be a ten course tasting menu—“so nothing too tight!” Jayne joked. “I’m not skipping even one of those courses.”