The Widow Waltz

by Sally Koslow

  Perhaps animosity is what Ben deserves, but my heart argues for a postponement of sentencing, even an ultimate reprieve. Since my dinner two nights ago with Stephan, I’ve doubled my search efforts. “Give me a clue,” I say to the man who cannot reply. “Darling, you owe me an explanation. What is this insanity about a ring? And why did you empty our accounts?”

  I am answered by the wind whistling beyond the window, which is open, blowing a chilling mist into the room. I move one foot and then another, feeling a cramp in my lower back as I force myself out of bed. Floors below, a couple is letting it rip, and words carry into the still night. “Why the fuck did you do that?” a woman screeches. “Again! Every goddamn time!”

  Get away now, when you’re young, I am tempted to shout back. Stick around and in twenty years you’ll be wondering if ghosts are real. I try to convince myself that this is fatigue talking, pull on Ben’s plaid robe and a pair of his warmest socks coiled on the floor where I let them fall last night, and wander into the hallway. A light shines. God forbid anyone in this family should flick off a switch.

  Nicola’s door is closed, as is her sister’s, but when I reach the kitchen, there is Luey, scrunched into the corner of the banquette, her back toward me, idly yanking a spike of hair with one hand, the other cradling her phone. She is speaking in a heated, breathy voice, saying, “I’m not kidding.”

  If I turn to leave, I may make a noise and she will surely accuse me of eavesdropping. I stop dead until she speaks again. “That’s a help.” This is followed by a lengthy silence, after which Luey slams down the phone so hard that she spills a mug of cocoa sitting on the table. She doesn’t mop it up.

  Except for when she visits the dentist, of whom she is terrified, Luey is not a crier. As a child, she would bite her lip to staunch the tears that any other small girl might shed as she would swallow a verbal clobber from a kid who was an even bigger bully than she. But in the lamplight, my daughter holds her knees to her chest and rocks, after which the sobbing comes in gasps. This is Luey very angry or very scared.

  I would not hesitate to run to Nicola’s side, but Luey keeps me at a remove. A minute passes. “Honey?” I whisper hoarsely.

  She looks up, though her arms stay in place. “You’re sneaking up on me now?” I expect a glower, but her face is open for business.

  “Can I help?” I ask.

  Crisis intervention is not my specialty. I’ve never gotten beyond offering balm for elementary boy trouble, if that’s what’s on the table. As far as I know, however, neither of my daughters currently has a boy, least of all a man, in her life. Luey releases romantic information on a need-to-know basis, pointing out that I have no need to know, and when Nicola’s last beau that I knew of started a PhD program in Iowa City, she paid the young brainiac exactly one visit. “Imagine, a college town where you can’t find crème fraîche,” she griped. “Not even a decent baguette.” A week later, she’d enrolled in Berlitz and bought tickets to Paris. Nicola has a way with foreign languages and American Express.

  After a sustained glare, Luey gathers her cell phone, grabs a container of yesterday’s pad thai from the refrigerator, and stomps out of the room. The statement, “You can help by not asking questions,” trails in her wake.

  I picture my daughter pulling noodles out of the box like so many worms and hope she keeps a fork, even an unwashed one, in her bedroom. I fill the teapot, turn on the flame, and search the cupboard for the plastic honey bear and Sleepytime tea. While I wait for the water to boil, my head does a one eighty, hoping for any distraction. I will force myself not to think about Luey.

  The kitchen is a shiny, tidy room, though Opal is now coming in only once a week. “This schedule is temporary,” I stressed when we had our conversation. Opal graciously accepted my lie, saying she’d make up the days by working for the young mother of twins who lives downstairs. I felt grateful that an unknown neighbor has absorbed a portion of my contrition.

  I used to love to read cookbooks at night, planning imaginary parties. But now cooking is almost the last thing I want to do. The last thing is to face my finances. On the desk in the kitchen, unopened mail is stacked in toxic clumps. Somber envelopes, thick and thin, hit the mailbox every day, some for accounts that I’ve never realized we had. Over here! Overdue! The Silver-Waltz National Debt, climbing by the nanosecond!

  For years after Ben and I married, we kept up a financial ritual so precise we might have been Swiss watch parts. The second Sunday afternoon of each month we would write out checks, address envelopes, affix whatever jaunty commemorative stamps I’d selected, and drop the bills in the mailbox as we walked to a theater to reward ourselves with a movie, after which we would eat Chinese. I balanced our joint checkbook down to the penny, and if pop quizzed, I could recite the bottom line of our account as accurately as my daughters’ birthdays.

  Then Ben bought a toy, a personal computer, and became an early adaptor to a genius program that allowed him to manage all our banking, down to printing every check, which he stopped showing me when the novelty diminished. The movies continued, but around the time Szechwan turned to Thai, my attention to fiscal minutia faded away. Every month, my husband direct-deposited a sum into an account he established for me. “The money’s yours—I don’t need to know how you spend it,” he said, with the understanding that I would use this fund for Opal, household expenses, clothes, and other spoils of being in a high-tax bracket. In a glorious spike of upward mobility, I downshifted to the role of a child, though I threw around words like liberation to describe this era when my sense of financial responsibility ended.

  I eye the stack of envelopes as if they might spill out anthrax. Dare you, says a chunky one with the return address of Bank of America. There’s no way I’m going to fall back asleep. I’m up to the threat.

  I use a letter opener to carefully remove the statement. No surprise: the last infusion into my account was seven weeks ago. Since then, there are withdrawals every few days—I have been hitting the ATM like a mother whose children enjoy a bottle of eight-dollar Shiraz with a square meal. I brew my tea and settle in, ripping open envelopes, dividing the big bills from the small. Utility company; telephones; car rentals; mortgages; insurance; mini-storage; dry cleaning; dues to four gyms—everyone in the family had a favorite; doctors; and credit cards—Nicola’s, Luey’s, and my own. I sort the bills right, left, right, left, picking up speed like a cardsharp dealing in a high-stakes game. I toss each subscription renewal in the trash, along with course catalogs from NYU and the New School, but when I see a solicitation for a worthy cause—when did every other friend start supporting a school in Africa, and could the globe please stop cracking with earthquakes?—I flinch. For all their flaws, my parents were charitable, and I’ve prided myself on carrying that torch. It hurts to think of myself as a skinflint.

  Once more, I study the bank statement. In a few months I’ll be underwater.

  I had a life. Now I have a situation. Perhaps I, too, should open a chicken farm and start selling eggs. Isn’t this one of Martha Stewart’s ninety-nine sidelines?

  Suddenly I am too beat to wash my mug or wipe up cocoa, and I tell myself I will think about this tomorrow, though it is tomorrow. I heave myself out of the chair, pull Ben’s robe tightly, and begin to stumble back to my bedroom for a shower. As I pass Luey’s door, the light is creeping through. I think about knocking but keep going, a mother incapable of either wisdom or common sense. Then I hear a voice.

  “Ma?”

  I turn. Luey is standing in the doorway, looking barely fifteen. “Sweetie, you’re still up,” I say, feeling a love rush so strong that my knees wobble.

  “Want to come in?”

  I cross into Lueyland, which smells of bubblegum and patchouli and hasn’t changed in ten years. My daughter climbs under her covers and looks at me with solemn eyes. I am being sized up. I sit at the foot of the bed, longing to reach forward and brush t
he hair out of my Luey’s face, but I am fearful of overstepping, of rejection.

  “What’s going on?” I try to sound less tentative than I feel. Luey cocoons herself deeper into her lavender polka-dot linens and says nothing. “Did you have a fight with a friend?”

  This evokes a laugh. “Oh, yeah.”

  I name every friend I can recall—Emily, Sheena, Amanda, Miso, Madison, Katy and Katie, and Caitlin.

  “Cold, colder, much colder,” she says.

  I wonder if I’m being teased, and my fatigue sucks me into irritability. This is why I say, “Does this have to be a game?”

  “I wish.”

  I’m not going to take another risk, so I offer nothing and wait.

  “It’s a guy thing,” she says.

  “You’re going to have to help me out here,” I say, “because I wasn’t aware you had a boyfriend.”

  “I don’t.” She laughs. “I had a fuck buddy.”

  “Charming.” I regret my sarcasm.

  “It doesn’t matter one way or another. He’s out of the picture.”

  “You broke up?”

  “We were never really together.”

  I want to say, Then why does it matter? But clearly this boy or man counts for something. “Is there anything you can tell me?” Luey doesn’t respond. My nose finds the pad thai, upended into the wastebasket.

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m pregnant.”

  10.

  Louisa, you asshole, how could you? That’s what Luey wished her mother had said, along with Didn’t you use protection? Have you never heard of contraception? This is going to ruin your life. I’m only glad your dad isn’t here to witness your latest dumbass stunt. Instead, Luey could see thought bubbles effervescing above her mother’s head. “Honey bunny, you aren’t the first girl this has happened to. I will support you in this decision. If you want an abortion, I will find a clinic. If you want to keep the baby, I will feed you chicken soup and vitamins. I’d have the baby myself if I could. In fact, let me look into that. I read an article in Good Housekeeping when I was at the doctor’s office . . .”

  Luey stared at her phone, willing him to call. From his Web site, she knew he was in Sydney.

  The thought that within her was human life the size of a sesame seed left her feeling as if she were living in a sci-fi movie. A living thing. Part of her wanted to say, Ew, get it out, yet the rest of her was curious. An online test said her IQ score was 135, not genius but pretty high. What if this child would go on to cure cancer? Invent a new kind of music? Be God’s way of bringing back Daddy? What if?

  Luey clutched her stomach, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.

  11.

  “Sorry for calling this early, but I’m selling the house,” I say.

  “But you love that place.” Daniel’s voice is still tamped with sleep.

  This used to be true. The house at the beach is not fashionably old, fashionably new, or fashionably located. What it has going for it is a sweep of bay view from a broad roof deck where Ben would read a thriller each weekend. There is also a widow’s walk, his idea. What the hell was he thinking?

  From this perch I adored the endless tent of blue sky and the faraway fireworks we watched with the girls and their friends every Fourth of July. But I’m no longer seeing lazy meringue clouds or jeweled bursts against an inky sky. I’m reliving every grain of sand that followed me from the beach into my butt crack and kitchen, every mildewed towel, every gridlocked mile as my car crept to the village to buy a forgotten quart of overpriced milk, every artificially serene face at yoga, and every disturbing freckle on my chest from hours sprawled under the pounding sun. Mostly, however, I’m seeing every mortgage payment coming at me like a breaking wave.

  I can live without this house, which Ben always felt more affection for than I did.

  “Get your tenses right, my friend,” I tell Daniel as I sip lukewarm coffee. “I loved that house.” It is seven-thirty, though I have been up for hours. “But now that I’m done with it, the place may not necessarily be easy to sell.”

  “Weren’t you going to try and rent?”

  “That was last week.”

  “I hope you’ve slept on this decision.”

  I did. It was the backache with which I woke up that convinced me there was no reason to be a halfhearted homeowner whose problem will boomerang the first weekend after Labor Day when renters departed, leaving behind their worn-thin flip-flops and cheap, crusty grill.

  “I’m good with the decision. Except I don’t know a broker.”

  “I can make some calls,” Daniel says, as I hoped he would.

  That was last week.

  Today he and I are on the Long Island Expressway. It’s not a scenic drive, unless you count the car itself, Stephan’s Jaguar. I am dressed in layers of silk underwear topped by wool and puffy down. I look round as a Botero and don’t care.

  The last trip I made here was in October, when Ben ran fifteen miles on the beach and I grilled veal chops with Swiss chard and ridiculously expensive Italian ricotta. That evening I pushed aside the photography books—Annie Leibovitz’s nudes, Bruce Weber’s Newfoundlands—and set two places on the coffee table in front of the hearth. Ben built a fire. I lit my fattest white candles. He poured Prosecco. I wore a moth-eaten Shetland turtleneck and my most sacred, broken-in jeans. After dinner we ate coffee ice cream dripping with hot fudge and had each other as an after-dinner delicacy.

  This is the kind of memory I try to bat away as if I’m taking a broomstick to a spider web. I am entangled in it until, as we slow down and turn onto Route 27, Daniel’s voice erupts with, “What sayeth Fleigelman?”

  “Want a direct quote?” I offer up in my most dulcet Brooklyn-meets-Great-Neck tone, “‘Bubkus, my dear.’” I smile at Daniel. “He promises he’s looking ‘with all due haste,’ but I need to start living as if nothing will come from his efforts.”

  Daniel and I already know that so far Stephan hasn’t found any sign of the storied emerald-and-diamond ring, though he has sent out an all-points bulletin to jewelers to alert him if the ring surfaces. He assured me that if the ring isn’t on someone’s hand, he will find it.

  Daniel turns up the country and western station that Stephan forbids and warbles along with the radio. Stephan’s patron saint is Bach; Daniel’s is Johnny Cash. “I can’t believe that’s true, darlin’,” he says, and when I don’t respond, he adds, “Come on, y’all. Sing it, sister.”

  “If you promise not to sing, I won’t either.” Ben, who searched for karaoke bars wherever we vacationed, could carry a tune. My repertoire is limited to the blessings over the Hanukkah candles, which the whole class learned at my private Quaker elementary school.

  “In that case, get out the directions, will you please? We’re getting close. I can smell money.”

  I put on my glasses and call out street names until we arrive at an East Hampton realty office in a Hansel and Gretel clapboard cottage. “‘Chip Sharkey’ sounds like a bookie. How do you know this broker?” I ask, as Daniel gently slows and parks Stephan’s Jag like the elderly, pampered child it is.

  “Like I find everyone. He’s Pedro’s ex and registered in the official gay underground.”

  “Why is it when men break up, they turn one another into friends? I don’t see that happening with women.”

  “Because men are bigger people, inherently kinder and more beneficent?”

  I think of Ben. “Nah, that can’t be it.”

  We’ve been in the car for two hours. I am glad to stretch. Like a good husband, Daniel puts his arm around my shoulder as we maneuver the icy path to the realtor’s door. Inside, where the temperature is barely warmer than outside, a noisy electric heater glows like a menacing jack-o’-lantern. A receptionist instructs us to wait on a hard bench. Daniel makes phone calls while I page through an oversized magazine from last
September.

  I’m wondering why Chip Sharkey, he of the flawless reputation, is late for an appointment on a slow Friday morning. This gives me time to consider if I’ve made a mistake. The house I want to heartlessly off-load is rife with Silver-Waltz history. Clam bakes, post-prom parties, barbecues for Ben and Luey’s August birthdays—our family has taken its measure here in corn on the cob, fresh basil, and ripe tomatoes; in bottles of chardonnay and tiny bikinis; in guests who’ve arrived for the night and stayed a week. This is where I learned to roll out pie crusts and parse the difference between UVA and UVB. I’m time-traveling back to the summer when Nicola lost her virginity to a riding instructor with a Holden Caulfield-ish name—Montgomery Ward? Ward Montgomery?—when a man who looks to be in his forties, with buttery, meticulously parted hair and round tortoise-shell eyeglasses, who seems to have walked out of a J.Crew catalog, comes through the door. Despite the frost, he wears only a navy blue blazer and a spiffily striped scarf.

  “Chip Sharkey,” he says, extending a hand gloved in tobacco-colored leather. His jeans are pristine but not ironed, his boots too fine for this weather. Under his other arm, he carries a cardboard tray. “Sorry I’m late—made a coffee run.”

  We exchange introductions and follow the broker to a small office in the back fitted with a desk faced by Windsor chairs. Vintage maps of the island cover the walls.

  “I did a drive-by,” he begins. “Your landscaping is excellent. Enough greenery so the house should show well even in this season. Good that the walks are shoveled and the driveway plowed.”