The Widow Waltz

by Sally Koslow

“Are you okay?”

  In the lingua franca of Luey, I am so not okay. “Don’t mind me,” I answer as I pour water into mugs. I have already placed an assortment of tea on the table next to the sugar. “I don’t have fresh lemon, but there’s lemon juice in the fridge. And milk.”

  Why did I invite this Ben-knowing stranger into my home? I want her gone. I want her to never have been born.

  “Just sugar is fine.”

  I rip open a Splenda and swirl it into my tea, happy to not have to look at her.

  “You were saying?” she asks.

  I have not forgotten. “Yes, my husband.”

  “I know him. From the pro shop.”

  “You knew him?”

  A pause hangs in the air like a grenade. I believe she may have caught the tense I used. I search her tone and come up blank while a second Georgia realizes that she will have to phone the private golf course ten miles from here and cancel Ben’s membership. This Georgia has forgotten he belonged there and she hadn’t seen a notice for yearly dues.

  “I see,” I say wearily. “Then I guess you haven’t heard.” I feel hollow and shivery. “My husband has passed away.”

  Clementine DeAngelo takes in a breath as sharp as a scythe. Freckles stand out on her ashen face. I’m almost ready to reach forward and comfort her when she turns back toward me and says, with complete composure, “Excuse me. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Silver. What—when did this happen?”

  “Beginning of last month.”

  She shakes her head. The cheeks that looked chapped when she entered my kitchen are drained of color. “I had no idea.”

  “It was sudden.” And none of your business.

  “I wonder if my mom knows, and if she did, why she never mentioned it,” she says in barely a whisper. I can hear the wall clock ticking and outside, the wind continuing to blow, as if the weather is angry. Clementine DeAngelo stands, her mug in hand, and glides toward the sink, where she pours the tea down the drain. “I think I better go. Thank you.”

  “But your mother isn’t here yet. And it’s started to drizzle.”

  “Thanks again.” She slips her jacket. There is grace in her simple movement. “I’ll be back to finish.”

  To finish what, I am unsure, but I tell Clementine DeAngelo that tomorrow is fine. I return to the table to drink my tea. That damn ticking is louder than I have ever noticed.

  It is fifteen minutes later when I hear a vehicle come up our driveway. I watch as the girl standing in the hard rain bolts to the car. I crane to see the driver, but all I can make out is a baby in the back, strapped into a car seat, a child who Clementine DeAngelo reaches to hug.

  13.

  Buffalo Bob r u out there? @feralkitty pressed Tweet. The last time Luey had been at this bar, she’d downed four dirty martinis and was wearing her shirt unbuttoned to flash a lacy black pushup bra. Today she was in the same jeans she’d had on every day for the last week and the only thing good she could say about her underwear was that it was clean.

  She had never sat alone at a bar in the afternoon, an act of slutty defiance that Luey could have gotten off on if demons hadn’t been line dancing in her belly, announcing either morning sickness or garden-variety panic. As she sipped a second ginger ale, she wished she could puke. Or at least make up her mind.

  Luey would have liked to dissect her quandary with a female that she felt bonded to beyond all others—her mother, a best friend, her sister—and arrive at a reasonable resolution. But this wasn’t, unfortunately, a YA novel, so instead she had called several crisis hotlines, and hung up each time she heard the overly solicitous purr on the other end. Luey decided it would be better to simply walk into Planned Parenthood, which was nearby, and try to trick herself into believing that if she was facing a live body, she wouldn’t have the nerve to bolt. From going through this drill with her college roommate, Luey knew it was early enough for her to swallow a pill. In a few days she, too, could be sitting on the toilet, doubled over with cramps, wailing for her mother or God, while trying to pretend she was enduring a natural miscarriage of a pregnancy that wasn’t meant to be. And this was considered the easy solution.

  The soft ding of her phone broke her thought. A text: Hey Miz Kitty when can I see u again? Luey could understand why second-rate writers talked about leaping hearts. She could text back, maybe even call, and tell him everything. Or not. If she laid this on him, she’d probably never hear from the guy, and the problem was that Luey liked this one. No thank you, she decided. At least no thank you for now. She allowed herself the privilege to change her mind. Wasn’t that part of a woman’s right to choose? If it wasn’t, it should be.

  “Is this seat free?”

  Luey hadn’t noticed the curly-haired type who was parking his beer next to her glass. Of course it was free, she thought, as was every other seat at the bar.

  “I don’t feel like being alone today,” Curly said.

  I do, Luey thought, and fixed her face in outta-my-space mode.

  “Don’t judge a man by his come-on.”

  How could you not? she wondered, as he extended his hand for an actual shake. “I’m Marc.”

  Mark’s trying to make his mark. Mark drinks Brooklyn Lager, not Maker’s Mark. Mark starts with the same letter as mnemonic. That’s how I’d remember his name if I wanted to, which I don’t, Luey thought, because karma had failed to take into account that this was a highly inauspicious moment to meet a guy with broad shoulders, which topped her list of nonnegotiable requirements. “Mark with a K?” she asked. She wasn’t ready to write him off just yet.

  “M.A.R.C. You?”

  “Caroline.”

  “With a K?”

  “How did you know? Call me Karo. Like the syrup.”

  “Because you’re sweet?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Whew.”

  “Why the suit?” He looked like he’d come from court. Lawyer or plaintiff, she couldn’t say.

  “Job interview.” Marc pulled a tie out of his pocket.

  “How’d it go?” Luey approved of the tie, Rat Pack skinny.

  “I got an offer, but it would mean I have to move.”

  “From where?”

  “Bay Area.”

  The door of the bar opened, blowing in a gust of cold. “Why would anyone move to New York who could be living there?” Luey asked. What, for example, was she doing here in New York when she should be in Palo Alto this minute, improvising a scene in her sketch comedy class? “Whereabouts?”

  “You know San Francisco?”

  “A little.” Enough to love it. She thought of learning to drive a stick shift and chugging up and down the hills, her heart in her throat; biking the Marin Headlands; bowling at Lucky Strike; and Japantown’s cherry blossoms in the spring.

  “I’ve got my own place in the Mission between a Burmese restaurant and a used-book store,” he said.

  Maybe he wasn’t as old as she’d thought.

  “How about you?” Marc asked.

  “Paris.” She went on to describe the apartment where she’d visited Cola, on the sixth floor of a Belle Epoque walk-up with a rooftop view straight from Gigi, Nana’s favorite movie.

  “I was hoping you’d say ‘here.’” He smiled—his teeth were endearingly crooked—and took a business card from his pocket.

  Luey was touched by his complete lack of cool and, hormones be damned, felt dangerously close to tears. “Maybe you’ll hear from me, @notanarcmarc.”

  She scribbled @feralkitty on a napkin. “I’m leaving tonight, but here.”

  “So, bye,” he said, helping Luey into her jacket.

  She left the bartender a five-dollar tip, and thought about giving Marc a kiss on the cheek. “Bye,” she said, and walked out the door toward the clinic.

  14.

  I consider it
a triumph that my family of three has dodged Christmas—yesterday—which neither Ben nor I was raised to celebrate. That is why, perhaps, it became his fetish, no goose or Norway spruce too large, no holly sprig or tinsel wisp too slight. Every year I sent out six dozen cards engraved with a carefully chosen religious-neutral greeting featuring a black-and-white photograph of the Silver-Waltz family. Our clan became a vision of orthodontic splendor grinning from mantels across the land. I squeeze my eyes tight against the memory. It horrifies me to think of the spectacle, the expense.

  This year there were no festivities. I sent regrets to invitations and quashed our own born-again tradition, as well. On the Sunday night before Christmas one hundred of our closest friends used to crowd the apartment for Ben’s glogg, my Kansas City chili, and Opal’s bûche de noël, a cavalcade of marzipan and rummy buttercream guaranteed to fatten our gang for the winter. The presents? I am trying not to think of either the gifts or the orgy I made of wrapping them with a cascade of organdy ribbons and my navy blue paper, starchy stiff. Yes, I had a signature paper, ordered in bulk from Charleston, South Carolina.

  Truly, I was a risible creature, hostage to a religious holiday to which I had no claim. With Ben gone, I’ve done a pretty fair job of leaping right past it. Except for Fred and Opal’s checks, I have pushed my Scroogeness to a craggy low, even taking a pass on the ritual that Ben and I instituted when Nicola and Luey were in middle school: volunteering on Christmas Eve at a homeless shelter. I signed us up this year, but when the moment arrived. I was too forlorn to go. The girls came through, at least, making me proud but shamed by my absence as well as my paltry donation. Lady Bountiful gone frugal.

  “Mother,” Luey says. Her voice is shrill, which is what it takes to rouse me from my funk. “If you sit for one minute more with that crab face, I’m suing you for maternal malpractice.”

  She has an open-and-shut case. In a rare show of solidarity, Cola and Luey had pleaded for a tree, a wreath, or at least a lone poinsettia. Perhaps I was wrong to deny them. Self-righteousness used to top my chart of most despised traits, but self-pity is gaining and the current me has become a bore.

  “Luey, what do you say we take our stroll tonight?” I ask, since there’d also been no window gazing this year.

  I had always looked forward to our walkabout where we sized up the city’s holiday displays. We’d start with the flashy commerciality of Macy’s, proceed to the prim sweetness of Lord & Taylor, then hike north to the Rockefeller Center skating rink before we scoped out Saks. There, one of the girls would say, reliably, “This sucks” or, “I’m freezing,” but I never allowed family members to break ranks. Not that the weather wasn’t chilling and the crowds weren’t thick. I, for one, got a second wind as we progressed to the peacock opulence of Bergdorf, where I scrutinized each diorama as if it were priceless art. Those windows were my secret blankie and my family indulged me as I oohed and aahed over every feather, dripping crystal, vintage leather suitcase, velvety gown, and taxidermy ostrich. Only after a good twenty minutes of adulation would I give our group the green light to hike east to the painful cleverness of Barney’s.

  “Yes, I am definitely in the mood for a long walk,” I say, putting on a smile and noticing that I have devoured two slices of a gift sent by Wally, fruitcake, which I don’t even like.

  I am enjoying the grin that flashes on Luey’s face when Nicola joins us. Had daily exposure to her Uncle Stephan terrified her into skipping meals? Cheekbones have emerged in her rounded face and her stomach appears to be ironed flat, though maybe it’s the contrast to her sister that makes this apparent. Luey isn’t showing yet—by her calculation, she is only seven weeks pregnant—but I see a softness that becomes her, though I am keeping that observation to myself, waiting for my opening. All I know is that Luey has been “weighing her options,” and that I found a drugstore bag that contained prenatal vitamins. The profound explanation for my daughter’s rosy glow tops a lengthy list of untouchable topics: their father, our dashed security, the fact that by mid-January our apartment is going on the market along with the house in the country, Fred’s termination and Opal’s vastly reduced hours, how long Nicola will work for Stephan, whether Luey will be returning to Stanford next semester, and how, if she does, I will find the tuition.

  We can’t talk so we may as well walk.

  “Did I hear you say you want to check out the windows?” Nicola asks, balancing on the edge of an armchair.

  Within the carefully cultivated voice of this woman in her twenties I hear the child. I can see an eight-year-old Cola in flannel pajamas eating cookies after we finish decorating the tree. Ben is lifting her to the top, the angel in her hand. Where is that angel? In tearing apart the apartment I don’t recall seeing any of the yuletide trappings, but trying to solve this peculiar mystery is a distraction that tonight I will force myself to deny.

  Maybe I need a little Christmas after all. “Get your coats before I come to my senses,” I say. “I am having a spasm of cheer.”

  “I’m in!” Luey shouts. She pulls on her Uggs, sleeping like lazy puppies beneath the coffee table, and saunters to the closet, where she stuffs her hair under a peaked knit cap and slips into Ben’s black down jacket. Nicola bundles herself into a red toggle coat that I haven’t seen in years. As she artfully winds an orange scarf around her neck, I grab the worn shearling jacket I use for Sadie’s outings. I consider taking her along and decide against it, in case my mood lasts long enough for us to toast this terrifying year at a real bar. I am eager to leave before I change my mind.

  “That’s what you’re wearing?” Nicola chides in a tone I recognize, same as that which I suspect I inherited from my own mother.

  “Take me as you get me.”

  “Where’s your sheared mink?”

  “Keep up, Cola,” Luey says. “Georgia took that beast to the Ritz Thrift Shop three weeks ago.”

  “No!”

  “Yes,” I say, with no regrets. After I returned from the beach, I went on a tear, ditching the furs and bringing baubles to Stephan. It felt strangely liberating to begin stripping away, although it might be weeks or months or never before I see a dime from the consignments.

  “Nana’s black broadtail, too?” Nicola asks, her jaw dropping.

  “No, darling, I saved that one for you.” Only Nicola fits into this fanciful garment with its bracelet sleeves and tricky frog closures, a coat strictly for show, not warmth, not unlike my mother.

  “Well, then,” she says, half smiling.

  “Well, then,” I say, reaching for my key.

  Two hours later, we have completed our rounds, ending at Barney’s, which we declare to be even more arch than ever. The air has the damp smell of snow. I find myself telling my daughters, “I’m glad you talked me into this.” This is true. “And I’m not in the mood to go home yet.”

  “Neither am I,” Nicola says. I see her hesitate. “We could stop at the Pierre.”

  “Definitely not dressed for the Pierre,” I counter.

  In unison, both daughters sigh, and say, “Not the Plaza,” which has renovated away its Eloise-esque appeal to resemble any upscale condo complex from Atlanta to Santa Barbara.

  “There’s the hamburger joint at the hotel on Fifty-seventh Street,” I say, despite the fact that Ben considered it our neighborhood diner, a no-name, grease-spattered rec room knockoff tucked behind thick red curtains, the Parker Meridien’s idea of caprice. Ben said it reminded him of the places he went to as a kid in Philadelphia.

  “Okay with me,” Nicola says.

  “I have a much, much better idea,” Luey says.

  “Not a hansom cab, please.” A weary horse would make me weep.

  “Or beer,” Nicola adds.

  “St. Patrick’s,” Luey announces, pleased.

  “The cathedral?” her sister asks.

  “Is there a bar by that name?”

&nbs
p; “Why?” Nicola wants to know.

  “I like the place,” Luey says. “I find it soothing.”

  The things you don’t know about your children. It touches me that my prickly girl wants soothing. Which is why I say, “Let’s go.”

  In ten minutes we find ourselves entering the Gothic, marble-clad oasis, and I am sorry the word awesome has been co-opted and forever tarnished. The grand cathedral is quietly swelled with visitors. Many are marveling at the soaring arches and vaulted ceiling, the dozens of red-ribboned wreaths hung high, marching toward the distant nave, and the jewel-hued stained glass, the vastness of it all. Others kneel or sit in pews, one by one or in small groups. I hear the echo of a soft sob, and from somewhere far off, holiday music. I am not sure what to do or where to go within this holy, humbling place of worship that I don’t wish to treat as if it were a hasty pit stop on a traveler’s agenda.

  “Mother, I’m going to light a candle,” Luey says. She gestures toward banks of burning lights. In the dark, they look like a distant village illuminated against a midnight sky.

  “Honey, really. I don’t think that’s right.” It’s one thing to appropriate Santa, another to brazenly trespass on the hallowed. But my daughter has already moved toward the candles.

  “Who do you think she’s going to pray for?” Nicola whispers.

  “Your father, I suppose,” I say and shrug. My gut tells me that Luey has confided nothing in her sister, and that she will be praying for the decision she apparently hasn’t made.

  “I’m going to light a candle for him, too,” Nicola says after a minute of silence.

  I put my hand on her sleeve. She removes it, and half a minute later Nicola is standing next to Luey. My daughters glance to their right and left to size up the protocol before they each kindle a white taper. No harm done, I hear Ben say to me. No harm done.

  Everyone seeking refuge within this fatherly enclosure must have a story of grief and loneliness, but I am thinking only of mine. Plain and simple, I miss Ben. He is gone, my husband who has left me trembling with fear. I hate that he can’t respond when I cry out to him at night, both sleeping and awake. I want explanations and ledgers, anecdotes and apologies. As much as I worry about what has happened to me, in my heart I cannot wholly despise Ben, a man whose absent laughter and touch is more powerful than my beseeching and animosity.