by Becky Aikman
Widowed the longest, aside from me, Lesley seemed to take it as her duty to set an example, to demonstrate that a widow doesn’t have to be a saint. She also seemed to have gotten the memo from George Bonanno that humor is the best balm for grief, and Dawn was only too happy to follow that lead. High spirits aside, I saw that they were both competent cooks. After years of meal prep for their families, they had the most confidence and the loosest posture, joshing and wielding their tools with abandon as the room filled with the tantalizing scent of baking chocolate and we turned to chopping onions, smashing garlic cloves, and whisking salad dressing. Marcia and I, more accustomed to surviving on takeout, mimicked Lauren’s motions with serious concentration in an effort not to embarrass ourselves. Only Denise, with that Mona Lisa smile, remained impossible to read.
We stationed ourselves at cutting boards while Lauren circled us like a border collie, prodding us with suggestions and correcting our techniques. “Keep your shoulders down when you chop,” Lauren advised me. “And brace your belly against the counter.” Hands busy, we slipped easily in and out of cooking and widow talk, and I took pleasure in the group’s enjoyment. When I had visited George Bonanno’s emotions lab, the researchers analyzed my expressions, looking for what is called a Duchenne smile, named after a French anatomist who discovered that true, happy smiles always involve contracting the muscles around the eyes. It’s an involuntary crinkling absent from polite, deliberate smiles, and noticeably absent from Denise that night. Bonanno found that the more widows laughed and smiled these genuine smiles, the better they would feel during the early years of bereavement.
Lesley and Dawn would have satisfied Monsieur Duchenne handily, Lesley with her constant look of merry surprise, Dawn with her easy, buoyant laugh. Marcia’s smiles were far more difficult to discern—no eye crinkling, just an infinitesimal upturn of one side of her mouth. Her face barely moved at all. I didn’t know whether Marcia was still grieving intensely, or whether she had always been someone who held her emotions with a tight fist. She kept her distance from the hijinks—hijinks were not Marcia’s thing—but that tease of a smile hinted that she might be amused by others performing them.
At least she was picking up the rhythm of the class. With Denise, the beat was off. While she steered clear of the conversation and made her best effort to remain unobtrusive, our teacher stepped in often with advice and corrections.
“Try holding the whisk lower down on the handle.” Lauren gripped her hand over Denise’s to demonstrate. Denise complied obediently. A minute later, Lauren returned. “You see, you are in much more control. When you do it like this, you become much less timid.”
“I’m not timid,” Denise said, quietly.
“You need to get down farther on the handle again,” Lauren said brightly.
“Get down, get down,” Lesley sang, gyrating along.
“I’m getting distracted by the commentary over here,” Denise said crisply.
The more Lauren intervened, the more disconnected Denise became. Was it the class? Was it us? Something was rattling her.
“Let me show you this,” Lauren said later, when Denise was chopping celery.
“I’m doing it wrong again?” She smiled, her eyebrows still in the woebegone position.
“I think what you need to do is slice it a little closer together.”
“I can’t do it that way.” Denise kept working without further explanation. I said nothing but kicked myself for pressing Denise into a Saturday night of enforced activity when she probably would have preferred a solitary yoga marathon at home.
“Maybe it’s because you’re left-handed,” Lauren concluded, moving on. She addressed us in the spirit of a pep rally. “You guys are doing great! I have to tell you, I’m so proud of you all. You are doing amazing!”
Denise cut out the chopping, raised her eyes to meet Lauren’s, and smiled with particular care. “What happens when people aren’t doing amazing?” she asked faintly. “What do you say then?”
Our knives stopped tapping and our whisks stopped swirling. Dawn wiped her hands on her apron and chuckled nervously. Lesley leaned over and gave Denise a squeeze.
Lauren, perplexed, said, “I … I always say that.”
The kitchen filled with a bosky plume of smoke from the lamb chops as we plated the food to carry into the dining room. I untied my apron and stood aside for a moment, watching the scene and thinking about the lesson. Denise seemed to wish she could disappear. And the more she did, the more Lauren tried to make her more visible, to pull her back into the lesson. Lauren couldn’t stop trying to help. She seemed to be driven to it, like a herding dog nudging a wayward lamb back to the flock.
Then it hit me—the Help Me look. Those were Steve’s last words, but they also described the expression on Denise’s face, the mournful expression that I’d employed once to great effect myself. Lauren was hardwired to react to it, to help Denise any way she could. As long as Denise had that Help Me look, people were going to try to help her, whether it was by sending her fruit baskets, inviting her out on the Widow Tour, offering wacky reassurances about her future, or showing her how to hold a whisk. Human beings are programmed to help those in visible distress. It’s an emotional symbiosis, as ingrained as attraction or a mother’s care, and it is probably one of the more admirable characteristics of the human race, even though it may not always seem that way to the person on the receiving end of the cooking tips or the Harry & David Deluxe Sympathy Basket With Pears and Havarti Cheese.
Whether she was aware of it or not, Denise was sending the Help Me signal, and people were going to respond. Whether she wanted to or not, she was projecting a message: Take care of me. Make me safe.
chapter
EIGHT
denise broke her silence during dinner, but it wasn’t until afterward that I understood. That all the nourishment on the table could do nothing to fill the void she was feeling now. That her grief was stronger than I knew. It humbled me.
Lauren worked overtime to make us comfortable in her family dining room, her husband banished to the multiplex for the night. She presided at the head of a long, formal table set as if for a state dinner, with pink roses and crystal candlesticks. Denise chose a chair at the opposite end, as far away as possible, and the rest of us settled along the sides.
Lesley was even more animated than usual, flush with the pleasure of having a new man under her roof again, and while the ostensible topic for the night was food, she couldn’t resist the far more enticing subject that filled her thoughts. “I’m a homemaker,” she chatted up Lauren as we began the meal. “That’s what my job is, and I love my job. But after my husband died, I stopped cooking. Now that I’ve met somebody else, I’ve been able to experience being in love again in a different way, and I’m cooking again. I’ve found that part of me again.” She radiated such happiness—sitting across from her, I lapped it up.
Caring for a family, Lesley had told me, was her life—her vocation and her joy. I wasn’t surprised that she wanted to fill her new house and feed that part of her again. “This is what I do,” she said to us. “This is what I do well. It would be a shame to waste it.”
Lauren warmed to parallels between cooking and romance. “Cooking is a connective sport,” she said. “There are not many things in this world that you make with your own hands and ask somebody to put into their mouth, roll it around, and swallow. How many things are there? That are that intimate?”
Lesley nodded. “This guy thinks I’m so much sexier when I cook for him,” she said.
“That’s because of what you’re thinking about when you’re doing all that cooking,” said Dawn. They grinned at each other like co-conspirators.
“It’s such a gratifying thing. I did it for twenty-seven years, because I loved it and my family enjoyed it. But now, the second time around, the pleasure, the intimacy …”
“You lost it and now you’re getting it back,” said Dawn.
I knew when I started the gro
up that some of our members might fall in love, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. I peered around the table to assess how the others were taking the news. Clearly, Dawn was as glad for Lesley as I was. Marcia, inscrutable as ever, was harder to read, and Denise, nearly lost at the distant end—I wondered where this development would leave her.
Lesley’s fast-moving love life underscored for me how everyone here was at a different juncture, how there were disparities that could make us root for each other or allow jealousies or resentments to intrude. My plans for this particular Saturday night had been motivated by the connection between food and comfort, but I’d overlooked that there was a flip side to this connection, too. Food shared and food unshared were two entirely different meals. There were those of us who had someone to share their tables—Dawn with her children, for example, and now Lesley with her new love—and those who did not.
“I really am enjoying cooking the second time around,” Lesley chattered on. Her husband, like her, had been South African, she said, and South African men, at least back when she got married, tended to expect home-cooked meals from their women. “Now I’m with an American man—he’s never seen anything like this. Seriously, I can cook nothing and he thinks it’s fabulous.”
Dawn and I laughed heartily. Dawn’s husband had been South African, too, as it happened, so she understood the different mentality. Marcia chuckled, and Denise executed one of her careful smiles.
Thinking of Denise, I asked Lesley how she had felt about food in the early days of her loss, in the more uncertain state where Denise still resided.
“I didn’t even want food in my house, and I sure didn’t want to cook,” Lesley said. At first she lost a ton of weight. But then she and her girls sank into the big, soft living room couch for what seemed like weeks, while their Jewish friends carted in copious provisions every day. Lesley called it the Sitting Shiva Weight-Gain Program. She never changed out of a pair of sloppy sweatpants.
“Then one day I woke up and said, ‘The dryer is shrinking my underwear!’ I couldn’t understand it. Because of those sweatpants, I had no clue that my waist was widening and my panties just didn’t fit anymore.”
That got the rest of us talking about our own experiences with eating or not eating, the changes wrought on our bodies by the physical impact of grief.
“I had lived a traditional Manhattan life where you go out to dinner all the time,” Marcia said. “Or my husband made food and I’d eat when I got home. So nothing has changed.”
“Except that now you’re eating alone,” I said. “The social element is gone. When I started eating alone, I read a magazine to keep from going bonkers with boredom.” For two decades, dinner had been the time to talk over the day with someone who cared about my take on the Iowa caucuses or the new Terrence McNally play. Bernie’s empty chair mocked me with an indifference that all the come-ons in Condé Nast Traveler couldn’t dispel.
“Read a magazine, that’s what I do,” said Denise, taking an interest.
“I eat in front of the television,” said Marcia. “The news, whatever. I don’t even use my dining table.” I envisioned her alone in the apartment that she found so small and isolating, grimly absorbing updates from the Weather Channel. “I don’t even like to watch TV.”
“It’s company,” said Lesley. “It’s the jibber-jabber in the background.”
“I fall asleep with the radio on now,” said Denise. “If I fall asleep, that is, which I don’t. I can’t sleep, and I can’t eat. I’ve lost twenty-seven pounds in the last six months.”
We gasped. I’d been attributing Denise’s all-yoga-wear fashion choices to her all-yoga fitness regimen. Now I realized that the stretchy gear was low-maintenance camouflage, like those sweatpants of Lesley’s. I should have known. In the first months after Bernie’s death, I switched to nothing but dresses after a pair of pants dropped right off my bony hips. Food tasted like ashes to me then. I needed big glasses of water to flush it down my throat.
Dawn told us that she had lost weight, too, but food was re-emerging now as a source of pleasure. “The widower I just met is a good cook,” she said. “We met at a sports program where I take my children. He says I should come over to his house and bring the kids, and he’ll make dinner for us.” She turned the color of the tomato salsa she was spooning onto her lamb chops. Lesley clapped and made little fox terrier sounds.
“A widower!” I said, as if she’d drawn four aces. “I always thought it would be nice to meet a widower, somebody who understands what we’re going through.”
“I dated a divorced guy before this,” Dawn said. “He said that in some ways I was better off than he was. I don’t want to say it’s better, but it is different. We don’t have to deal with the ex—who’s got the kids, who got the house, all the stuff that people get so worked up about.”
“We have all kinds of roiled-up emotions, but they aren’t angry emotions,” I said.
“I hope never to know what a divorce is like,” said Dawn. “I’m sure it’s horrible. But when you’ve gone through what we have, it’s hard to tolerate people who are caught up in pettiness. You want to say, ‘You know, you could die tomorrow.’ ”
“Nobody else looks at things like us,” said Lesley.
“It’s funny …” Dawn said. She often started sentences with “It’s funny.” Like Denise’s smile, I noticed, the phrase often preceded a sentiment that was anything but. “It’s funny, this widower’s wife died nine years ago in an accident, when their kids were toddlers, a boy and a girl. When he said that to me, it took my breath away.” She made a horrified face and quickly shook her head to fend off the memory. “Now I can relate to how people react when I tell them about me. I’ve never been on the other side like that.”
We all nodded. We’d all seen the look. We knew our power to strike the fear of early death into everyone we met.
“I met a widower, also.” Denise resurfaced at the far end of the table, where she had been picking here and there at her dinner.
“Woo-hoo.” Lesley nearly jumped out of her chair like a kid who’s opened a present, her eyes and lips forming perfect circles.
“Completely, completely randomly,” Denise added quickly. The peculiar smile had washed off her face, and she looked pleased, in a careful and tentative way. She was supposed to meet a friend who never showed up at a restaurant, Denise said, so to kill time, she started speaking to a man at the next table. “His wife died four years ago. He has a twelve-year-old daughter. He loves to bring me groceries every day.” She glanced around the table, almost sheepish. “Nothing has happened between us, but he brings me groceries every day.”
“I’m liking this twist,” Dawn said, grinning.
“He’s worried that I don’t eat.”
We had met only a month ago, and already more was going on with this crew than with all my other friends combined. Lesley had moved Craig into her new house; Dawn had found a promising widower; and now Denise, fragile Denise, had met someone who brought her groceries every day.
“He’s not being pushy. Or being sexual.”
“As a widower, I suppose he knows what it’s like,” I said, feeling protective. “Sex may be too much to handle right now.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Denise said, half apologetically. But still she looked half pleased, maybe a little more than half.
The widower and his groceries reminded me of Denise’s first encounters with her husband, Steve, how he had cared for her when she was sick and fixed her faulty wiring. Denise was projecting a quality of wanting to be cared for again, and why not? She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t escape the pressures of money and work. Plenty of faulty wiring to fix, more than ever before. This widower of hers sounded nurturing and caring. He brought her stinky, runny cheeses and Kalamata olives and crusty baguettes, tempting snacks, because he knew she didn’t want normal meals.
“That’s really good,” said Dawn. “Take it slow.”
Co
uld it be that Denise had achieved what many a widow dreams of, finding a simpatico man, a no-pressure man who could fill some of the emptiness so that she didn’t have to endure a protracted span alone? Could she even cope with it now if she did? Hard to say.
I couldn’t help worrying about her. “Why are you still losing so much weight?” I asked.
She performed one of those seismic mental shifts I’d seen her make before, lost in her thoughts while we waited for a reply. The widower and his groceries were forgotten.
“I always used to cook for Steve,” she said finally, driftily. Then she took a detour into another story about food and the weight it can bring to bear on a psyche. It was a couple of months after Steve died. A friend, going through a divorce, was staying with her, and the atmosphere in the apartment was heavy with doom. How to dispel it? The friend had a magnanimous idea. She’d roast Denise a chicken. It would be ready by the time she got home.
Denise took one look at that succulent bird and broke into tears. The aroma of rich melting fat mingled with lemon and garlic, so reminiscent of candlelit Sunday dinners, hit her with a force that shattered all of her carefully cultivated poise.
“That was the last thing I made for Steve before he died,” she gulped.
Denise smiled again, that mirthless smile that I had come to know, the smile with the pleading eyes, only this time tears poured down her cheeks. Instead of wiping them away, she sat at the end of the table with her perfect posture, hands folded in her lap, smiling, the tears flowing, unashamed.
“I can never eat roast chicken again,” she insisted.
