by Anne Roiphe
The last time I saw those lights was the summer before I was seventeen and left camp for the last time. Perhaps I could go to Maine and find them again.
And so I am alone. Not really all alone. My children are a phone call away. Friends are near and available if I need them. But I am mateless and that changes everything. I have always, all through our marriage, been a writer, a professional woman who might lunch with an editor, breakfast with an agent, have appointments to keep, a destiny of my own, separate from H.’s, separate from my children, a place in my head where I had my own thoughts and obligations. But I overestimated my independence. I now suspect it was never there at all.
When I’m alone without a destination, a friend to meet for lunch or dinner, the hours drag on. I know how to fill them. I could go to the gym and exercise. I could read a book if my concentration were better. I could invent a story or write an essay or clean my closet of unwanted clothes. I could go to a movie alone. I do none of these things. I hang suspended over my life. The phone rings. I come back into my body. I am interested again in the elections, in the grinding byways of Israeli politics, in the value of this or that commentary, TV series, theater. I hang up the phone and within a short time I have faded again. Is this the thing about being alone that I must get used to—I am not here if no one sees or hears me. Like the proverbial tree in the forest I neither fall nor stand unobserved. But I am observing myself and that should be enough.
It isn’t.
There is a weight in my stomach as if I had swallowed a burned-out log: a taste of ash in my mouth.
H. returned home from his office around seven each evening. I would stand at my window on the fourteenth floor and watch him walking down the street. He wore his trench coat and an Irish wool cap in the winter. He walked fast. He was coming toward me. He would have his drink and we would talk. Not about his patients, that he would never do, although I would have listened. Instead we talked about our children, what worried them, what obstacles lay ahead. We talked in shorthand, whole paragraphs were left out but understood, whole pages quickly turned. We listened to the evening news. Then he would fix dinner. I stood at his elbow while he chopped or stirred. Now I don’t know when it’s time to eat. I don’t know what to eat. The day has no appointed end. It drifts off into the night.
In my cabinet I have a huge bulging blue plastic file folder in which I put the condolence notes I received. The most valuable of these are the letters from former patients whose names I did not know, whose stories I will never know. One after another they spoke of how much H. had meant to them, how he changed their lives, made it possible for them to marry, to have children, to make good on days that had gone bad. They spoke of his smile, his way of listening, his caring, his way of noticing the smallest changes in their manner or look. One man wrote of the support H. gave him for his homosexuality in an era when other psychoanalysts were trying to change sexual wishes, erase sexual dreams, turn people into pretenses of themselves, carrying painful or shameful secrets that H. knew should be neither painful nor secret. One man wrote of his long-held hope that one day H. could be the best man at his wedding to his partner. There were dozens of photographs enclosed in these notes, snapshots of little children, families on a picnic, girls in ballet shoes, a boy with a bow and arrow and an older one seated at a piano, an adopted Chinese child smiles and waves to the camera. In one way or another each of the photos said, “Not without him.” And now I am without him.
We had talked about this. He was born twelve years before I was. He was in good health and good mind but the possibility of widowhood haunted me. He said that it would be a compliment to our marriage, to his love for me and mine for him, if I managed this widowhood well and was able to enjoy my life with another partner or without. He expected that of me. He told me a dozen times in the last few years that I had made him happy. This was comforting but not comforting enough. The ash was still in my mouth. The log remained in my stomach. I considered that he had asked too much of me.
We had argued about the bedroom wallpaper. It had been on the walls when we moved into the apartment some eighteen years ago. The pattern was of repeated small bunches of flowers, blues and yellows, little touches of roses, and they were on a background of ivory and very dense, so that they seemed at a quick glance like a field full of wildflowers. This wallpaper spoke of New England inns and farmhouses in the plains. It was already dingy at the edges when we moved in. Increasingly the background turned to gray and there were peeling strips along the baseboard. I wanted to change the paper. H. wanted to leave it be. He was attached to it. He didn’t want to spend the money. He liked it. He saw no reason for change.
I think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book The Yellow Wallpaper, written in 1899. A woman suffers from a terrible grief after giving birth to a daughter and is confined by her doctor to a bedroom with yellow wallpaper where she goes gradually mad until she kills herself. This novel is considered a primary feminist text. This is a story about how men impose literal and symbolic immobility. Here is a woman deprived of her own volition, chained to an infant, subservient to a husband and without hope. True, I said, dear Charlotte Perkins Gilman, true. I had been an early feminist. My mother had hobbled about on her Cuban heels while I had a first serve that whizzed past the boys. But I always had a tendency to wander from the political line. In the seventies I never considered that men were to blame for all oppression and I never believed that children were a burden. Mine sometimes were and sometimes were not.
I was raised, child of the forties, girl of the fifties, to flirt, to flatter, to flutter about. Those are traits that are hard to remove just because the climate changes. I admit to a desire, lifelong, to put my hand in a man’s hand and let him lead me through the thicket of taxes and insurance and such. I want to go walking in the woods with a man pushing aside the heavier brush. I want a man to call a taxi or help me over a fence. I have always thought of men as the necessary other. The only question in my mind has been which man and when I married H. the question was answered. Still drifting, avoiding memories, sitting on my bed and not moving, finding it hard to go to the store and buy the barest of necessities, I was aware that in this widowhood I could use a sharp infusion of feminist pride, a sense of my own power, a disinterest in attachment, a venturesome soul daring to walk my own path. My first not-so-firm step was to remove the old wallpaper.
A painter comes. The wallpaper is stripped and gone and in its place a new lemon wall shines in the morning sun. I wish H. could see it. He would have liked it after all. Now I have to decide if I am going to stay in this apartment or move, to a new city, to a little town, to a new apartment, near or further from my children and my friends. I make no decisions at all.
Except that I take an armful of H.’s suits and bring them down to my doorman to take to his church. I take H.’s old coats, the raincoat with its lining, the down jacket for weekends and country wear, and make a second trip. I don’t think about each jacket, when he wore it last, the blue suit for the wedding of one of the daughters, the white suit for summer occasions, the heavy wool sweater worn to the office on cold winter days, I push away any images that dare to approach. I carry the clothes in my arms as if they were old newspapers. Then I am exhausted and fall asleep on the couch. I am not so sentimental that I would keep clothes in a closet that might warm another man on a bitter winter’s night. I am not so intent on keeping the past in my closet that I would indulge my wish to keep everything just as it is. Nevertheless as I ride down the elevator with suspenders, shirts and tweed vests on my arm I feel robbed, absolutely robbed.
I remember the photographs of widows after World War Two, women in Florence and Sienna in black robes, with black scarves tied under their chins, with bent backs and heavy wool stockings, collecting wood or coal in baskets, or sweeping the steps or throwing buckets of muddy water into the streets. Today widows dress in their best clothes, wear all their jewelry and go out into the world to find a new mate, preferably one who can still
drive at night. Will I join them? On the one hand I think it noble to attempt to regain what was torn away with the death of a partner, the sweetness of old love and the comfort of worn stories. On the other hand I may prefer to shut my door, play with my grandchildren, learn how to work my coffeemaker, also the Cuisinart, both jobs my husband considered his own.
A friend tells me that she has a friend whose widowed mother met a man at the 92nd Street Y senior club. They have been happily together for the last eight years. Of course, my friend adds, this mother is very beautifully dressed and is very careful with her appearance. I sometimes look like I slept in the woodpile behind the house. I live in an apartment, not a house, but all the same.
The moon pulls up as I watch it, from behind the apartment building on the east side of Broadway. It moves slowly into the center of my window and hangs there round, pocked, surrounded by space, black sky. A burst of smoke billows up and spreads out over the rooftops from a furnace in a building a few blocks away.
I was given by the funeral parlor several tall frosted glasses decorated with a blue star of David and containing memorial candles. I lit them. They burned for a week. At night I would sit in the dark and watch the light of the wick flicker back and forth. When they burned out I went back to the funeral parlor and asked for more. They gave me as many as I could carry. But when these burned out I put the glasses in the pantry cupboard on a shelf I can barely reach. Enough sentimentality.
What could be purer than death? There, not there. Fort, da, as Freud described a little boy throwing a ball under the bed and pulling it out again and again, attempting to understand his mother’s appearance and disappearance as she moved through her day. Despite all the poetry and all the melancholy sighs, death is simple, here, not here, not returning. I wonder if everyone leaves a trail behind when they go into the grave, a trail of resentment, financial knots, undone, unresolved matters, lunatic ex-spouses, unreconciled children. No matter how fiercely loved the children are, no matter how tenderly the relatives gather in a circle around a table, things go wrong. When a family contains stepchildren and divorced ex-spouses one always discovers mold in unexpected places. My love for H. cannot alter the fungal spread that stains our photo albums. The angels accompanying him to the throne of heaven are playing atonal music on their harps, although he loved Mozart and deserves Mozart, an eternity of Mozart.
The discordance comes from a lawsuit. I cannot write about why I am being sued for a considerable amount of money stemming from something in my husband’s past. I cannot write about this or else I could be sued. I will settle. My lawyer thinks I must. His brain is not unbalanced as mine may be. Nevertheless in my fantasy I take a sailboat to the Cayman Islands and live outside the law, an old gray-haired lady, browned and wrinkled, who arrives each day to pick up books she has ordered from Amazon. com. There at the sun-drenched dock by the turquoise sea in which coral reefs shimmer as fish of every rainbow color dash about, I will write postcards to those I have left behind. I will befriend drunken sailors, ex-cons, fugitives from white-collar investigations, and little children who dive for pennies when the cruise ships arrive. Or not.
My lawyer calls. Do I have any secret bank accounts? We went to psychoanalytic meetings in distant places. We spent summers by the beach, all the years of our marriage. We were content but the rugs were ragged, the house needed a new roof, the bills for crooked teeth were paid slowly and every once in a while the car insurance payment was late. We could have used a secret bank account. When my husband sent me flowers or brought out from his pocket a piece of costume jewelry he had found in a yard sale, there was always an accompanying card; it said, “From a Secret Admirer.” That was our secret, our only secret.
Something about this book that I must say here. It is a well-known fact that when anthropologists study some isolated native tribe on an island in the middle of a distant ocean their very presence on the island alters what occurs to the people they are observing. There is no such thing as pure observation uncontaminated by the act of observing. I am writing this book as I am living my days but the act of writing adds a flavor, a possibly distorting factor to the story. Sometimes I have a thought while I am having my morning coffee at our local Starbucks and I decide I want to write that thought down. The fact that I have a purpose, that I have a plan, which is to write, changes the experience I am having in Starbucks. Writing this book provides a floor under my experience. Having used writing to hold myself erect all my adult life, I am bold enough to believe that I cannot fall because of this word scaffolding that, all invisible, props up my days. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the fact of writing a book is not so life-saving as it seems. But it was necessary to acknowledge the fact of the book I am writing as I am living because without the book that I am writing which is the one that you are reading I would be a sorrier woman, a shell of a woman, lingering on.
THE MOON IS SHRINKING. IT IS THE SHAPE OF A FACE WITH a bulge on one cheek. Its color is faint. Clouds drift across it. It hangs above the sliver of the bridge I see in the distance out my bedroom window. The bridge has a small red light on one of its high points. I hear a dog barking on the street below, a deep and angry bark. I think of werewolves. If men can be turned into devouring wolves by the light of the moon, then women too can alter their shape. We can all become weretigers, werecats, werefrogs. Perhaps we do allow some beastly creature to emerge in our civilized breasts by the light of the moon. I feel tugging inside, a fury, a fury to slash, to harm, to run wild through the streets. I look in the mirror. I see only my familiar face. It is hubris to imagine the moon and its gravitational pull, its tidal forces, its mineral, gaseous, rocky back turned to our sun, would disturb the protein amino acid magnetic frictions of my human brain. But if I were a werewolf I would hunt down H.’s killer and rip him or her or it to bits. I would be ruthless, canny, foam at the corners of my mouth. I would do it. But a heart attack has no form, exists nowhere but in the arteries of its victim. I can neither slay it nor forgive it. I bite at my thumb as I do when I am angry: a bad habit.
I have an e-mail pal who lives in Fort Lauderdale. He sent me a letter in response to the personal ad in the New York Review of Books. We began a correspondence. He is a seventy-nine-year-old divorced ophthalmologist. He is retired and fighting a weight problem. His e-mails make me laugh. He’s a tough, odd, curmudgeonly old bird, that he tells me himself. He grew up in an immigrant family in Buffalo and went to New York University. I understand where he came from and how hard it is to move in America away from the family of the first generation into the world at large. I’ll call him L.D. He tells me that I should vacation in Florida and find a rich old man with a large paunch who will buy me baubles and such. I don’t mind paunches but I have no interest in baubles. He tells me I should come to Florida and he would take me to the Everglades to see the alligators. He says he has no hair. I don’t mind that he has no hair. He says he wants to leave Florida and live in a small town in New England and watch the leaves change color in October. He invites me to join him. I point out that we haven’t even had dinner together. L. walks along the beach in the mornings. He reports on his diet and his lapses from his diet. He spends his mornings in the library reading. He is a fan of Elmore Leonard. After a while he sends me e-mails with group addresses. I become one of a gaggle of his female online friends. I like his grouchy manner but he is too far away for a real friendship. That requires a face and a hand and the sight of a broken tooth at the back of a smile. L.D., I send my regrets but we have to stop e-mailing.
The moon hovers over the water tower across the way. Low in the sky. It looks like a clown’s teardrop. Tears are an interesting matter. I didn’t flood with tears when we stood by the open grave. I was too shocked, too numb, and besides I wasn’t sad, it seemed as if someone were operating on me and I was awake. I was without pain but without volition, without self. I didn’t flood with tears at home when all the friends and family arrived with food and wine and concern. I was watching that no one felt left out
, that strangers were introduced and could talk to each other. I was making sure that the platters of sandwiches and cookies appeared from the kitchen and fresh coffee was brewing and I was not crying. Sometimes when I read the condolence notes, especially from patients who had loved H., tears welled up, some escaped, but mostly they were denied, a shift of place, an opening of the cabinet for a glass, a phone call, they disappeared.
Before H. died tears used to erupt from my eyes at TV commercials with children running into their father’s arms and dogs licking the hands of their owners. Tears used to flow at happy endings in movies and at sad endings at movies and many of my book pages are stained with tears. Tears apparently are easy when the situation that evokes them is pretend. Girls after all are allowed to cry even if it turns the nose red and the eyes become swollen. But when something shocking, real, happens it isn’t so easy to let tears fall. H. used to say that women often cried when they were angry. I suspect he’s right. But I am angry and I still don’t cry. I also haven’t torn my clothes or shaved my head or bayed at the moon. I understand those gestures belong to grief but they seem as alien as if I were to paint my body blue and dance stark naked down Fifth Avenue with bells on my toes. Tears seem to be unrelated to sorrow, at least my sorrow, which I feel like a weight in my chest, like a knot in my stomach, a dull pounding in my head. I wonder what other people’s sorrow feels like. Is it like mine, evasive, boarded up, avoided, ready to burst out, curled up, hidden even to the self? Also as I feel tears appearing at the edges of my eyes I become afraid. Is it possible that I could dissolve in tears? The body is 90 percent water, they say. What if all the inner structures, all the sinews and arteries and brain tissue collapsed as I cried, what if I couldn’t stop if I started? My task at the moment is not to float away, not to crumble or dry up or rot with water damage. My task is to manage.
