The Widow's Season

by Laura Brodie

  Together they visited sorority houses, administrative buildings, and academic offices. They packed the van so full, it sank down like a low-rider, then they drove to the basement entrance of the local Catholic church, where red double doors opened upon a library of food, thousands of tin cans stacked row after row. There were shelves of tomato paste, shelves of green beans, shelves of peas and corn and beets. A complete Dewey Decimal System of vegetables, and a reference section of cereal.

  Here was the practical counterpoint to the world of libraries that Sarah had occupied since high school. She smiled at Zack’s open mouth, and pointed to a gray-haired woman at the top of a stepladder.

  “Molly was a middle school librarian before she retired.”

  Zack nodded. “Cool.”

  The woman examined them through half-moon glasses. “Hello, Sarah. Let’s see what you’ve got for me.”

  Outside, when they opened the van’s back doors, a white Lincoln town car pulled up beside them and a bald man in his fifties stepped out of the driver’s side. He opened the passenger door and extracted an elderly woman in a long purple coat and red sequined hat. Sarah recognized Adele, from Margaret’s widows group.

  “You’re looking wonderful,” Molly said as Adele smoothed her coat.

  “I’m meeting my red-hatted ladies,” Adele explained.

  Her driver opened the trunk, revealing rows of cardboard boxes filled with mason jars, each one topped with green-checkered cloth and a red ribbon.

  “This one is for you.” Adele handed a jar to Molly.

  “Adele makes the best strawberry jam,” Molly explained.

  “Raspberry this year.” Adele winked at Sarah. “I’m full of surprises.” She gave Sarah a jar, then nodded at her driver. “This is my nephew Fred. This is Molly, and this is Sarah.”

  Fred tipped his hat, lifted two boxes from the trunk, and carried them inside.

  “Come with me, dear.” Adele took Sarah’s elbow. “We should leave the lifting to the men.”

  In a back room with fluorescent lights and wood paneling, one hundred and twenty Thanksgiving dinners waited in cardboard boxes on rows of folding tables. Sarah surveyed the water-packed turkey breasts and stiff cylinders of cranberry sauce, generic cans of sweet potatoes and twenty-cent cartons of macaroni and cheese. Fred settled the boxes of preserves on a table against the wall, and Adele began unloading the jars one by one, packing them carefully inside each dinner.

  Sarah paused to admire the handwritten label on one jar. “You made all of these yourself?”

  “Oh no.” Adele chuckled. “There are six of us. We go berry picking together, with plenty of grandchildren to help, and we play bridge while the preserves simmer.”

  “You do this every Thanksgiving?”

  Adele nodded. “We like to add a personal touch to the dinners. Canned green beans can get so depressing.”

  Sarah wedged a jar between boxes of stuffing. “I was thinking that I should do more volunteer work. Get out of the house more, out of my own thoughts.”

  Adele held a jar to the light and straightened its checkered cloth. “It took me four months after Edward died—to get out of my house, back into town. And it’s important. Otherwise you just get stuck in the past.” She smiled at Sarah. “You should come here at Christmas. We have three times as many meals then, and we need lots of drivers. I can’t drive.” She nodded at Fred as he carried in another box. “My vision is too cloudy.”

  When Fred was gone Adele placed her arthritic fingers, glittering with rings, on Sarah’s hand.

  “Have you seen your husband lately?”

  Sarah had been expecting the question. “I saw him on Halloween . . . He showed up at the house and talked for a long time . . . And I imagine that I might see him tomorrow, on Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh yes.” Adele smiled. “They always come on the holidays. My Edward makes an annual appearance around Christmastime. Last year I only caught a glimpse of him, walking through the hallway. But usually he stops for conversation, and I can see the stitching in his uniform, and the expression in his eyes.”

  Sarah contemplated Adele’s foggy pupils. “Do you ever think it’s just a dream?”

  “Of course. At my age, anything is possible. But I also saw him when I was younger. He would come when I was feeling most desperate. We had a son who died in Vietnam, you know.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I didn’t know.”

  “I have a daughter in Charlotte and a son in Richmond. Five grandchildren and one great-grandson. But our youngest boy was killed in 1969, and once, when I was miserable, sitting in my kitchen, I felt Edward standing behind me. He wrapped his arms around me like this big, warm necklace.” Adele pressed her crooked fingers to her throat. “I’ve read that when a person is emotionally vulnerable, that’s when they’re most likely to feel the spirits. And that’s how it was for me. I couldn’t see him that day, but I could feel the weight of his arms, and it was as if my whole body was being heated. I felt completely reassured.”

  She stood there with her hands poised around her neck—like she’s strangling herself, Sarah thought. What a pair they made, two solitary widows, nurturing their private lunacies.

  “Everything with me is still confused,” she murmured.

  “You’re newly widowed, my dear.” Adele patted her hand. “Give it time.”

  • 23 •

  The next day Sarah prepared her own donations, clothes and books and music for her newly needy husband. She had reserved eight cardboard boxes when organizing the food drive, expecting to take most of David’s belongings to Goodwill. Now the boxes lay on her bed like a nest of gaping baby birds.

  Inside David’s closet, she ignored his slacks and jackets, linen shirts and silk ties—all the accoutrements of his medical career. What he needed now were flannel shirts, blue jeans, and long underwear. Much of his winter wardrobe was an homage to L.L. Bean, Polartec pullovers and fleece vests, a Teflon-coated anorak. In the back of the closet she found a yellow Gore-Tex parka with matching yellow pants. The outfit had made her wince when Helen sent it as a Christmas present; it seemed like an oversize version of a child’s duckling rainwear. But now the color struck her as a shield against hunters. She stuffed it into an empty box, then added all of the woolen souvenirs from David’s youth—socks, caps, and scarves, some hand-knitted by his mother. She regretted that Nate had taken David’s favorite Scottish sweater, but she compensated with a bulky Nepalese pullover thick as a buffalo hide.

  Downstairs in the basement she packed David’s art supplies—paints and chalk and charcoal and a multitude of brushes. She found a few blank canvases stapled to wooden frames, wrapped them inside his sweatshirts, and carried them to her wagon. Finally, she rummaged through the tools in the garage.

  The chain saw was the first to go; she would never dare to use it. Next went the Weedwacker, on loan for a few weeks. The staple gun caused her to pause for a few seconds before she stacked it next to the blowtorch. She filled half of a cardboard box with wrenches, hammers, nails and screws, sandpaper and Spackle. A not-so-subtle hint that the cabin needed work.

  Upstairs she stood before her living-room shelves, formulating a reading list for David’s long winter. Dante’s sojourn into the underworld seemed fitting for a dead man; Thoreau, Ammons, and Dickey were good companions for the woods; Thurber might lighten a dark winter evening, and Ruth Rendell was always welcome. She topped the pile with The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, before turning toward the stereo.

  Sarah chose CDs as if arranging a wine tasting—a drop of fusion, a splash of blues, a hint of Oscar Peterson. In keeping with the nature theme, she chose Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Viv aldi’s Four Seasons, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. She packed them in a box with a portable CD player and carried everything to the car, congratulating herself on her thematic wit. But when she stood before the open hatch, admiring the boxes full of books and music, she realized that all she had managed was to gather her own favorites. This w
as not an offering for the dead, it was a collection to carry her through her own dark season, with David nothing more than a peripheral thought.

  Early on Thanksgiving morning she returned to the Food Lion for the first time since her episode with David. She was afraid to shop at the local Safeway, where Margaret might appear and see the turkey in her cart. Here, on the outskirts of town, she had no fear of detection; her only question was whether the manager with the patriotic name tag would remember her face.

  Winding through the store aisle by aisle, she bought piles of bananas, apples and pears, sweet potatoes, zucchini, and broccoli. She stocked up on cheeses, nuts, and bagels, frozen shrimp, fresh sirloins, and a sixteen-pound turkey, enough leftovers to feed David for weeks.

  Gathering these objects made her feel that she was giving substance to his life. He was the merest outline of a man, a blank page that she was coloring in with red potatoes and green beans, yellow squash and blue tortilla chips, all of which she unloaded into the backseat of her car. Driving through the woods with her edible bounty, she imagined herself as an early Santa, bringing Christmas in November, and at the cabin, David greeted her with the joy of a child.

  “This is fantastic.” He laughed, placing bags of fruit on boxes of fleece and lugging them all inside. While Sarah unpacked groceries he carried the clothing and art supplies into the corner of the spare bedroom.

  “Tell me what to do,” he said when the last box was stored.

  “Choose a jazz CD. And open a bottle of wine.” Even before noon, a glass of Chardonnay was a prerequisite for her cooking.

  When David handed her the glass, she gave him a bag of apples. “Peel and core and slice these. I’m making an apple pie.”

  His paring knife made long red-and-white spirals that dangled in twelve-inch strips before falling into the trash can. “Do you remember our first Thanksgiving?”

  “At your parents’ house?”

  “Yes. When we got engaged.”

  She remembered it well—the Vermont college town with its boutiques and galleries framing a gently sloping green. The church with a tall white steeple, not Presbyterian or Methodist, but Unitarian Universalist.

  “I remember your mother’s church, and seeing your house for the first time.”

  She had never before seen black window trim. Something about those dark rectangles reminded her of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  “Your father kept the thermostat at a constant sixty-two, and I wore thick socks and stayed in a chair by the living-room fire.”

  Sarah didn’t say what she remembered most—standing at the kitchen window that overlooked the backyard, watching Nate throw a Frisbee to their black Lab, Pilgrim. Four weeks had passed since the Halloween party, and in that time she had often thought of David’s younger brother. It was partly David’s fault; he told so many stories about Nate, so many recollections of how girls flocked to his brother but never made him happy. Nate was always seeking something unexplained, the handsome prince with his impossible glass slipper.

  Watching Nate from the window, Sarah had tried to define his appeal. Beautiful was not the right word. Neither was cute, an adjective for dogs and teddy bears. Handsome would not apply for a few more decades. Perhaps lovely was the best word. Nate had a face that inspired love, the face of Helen’s son.

  When he came inside, his cheeks were flushed.

  “Your hair,” he said to Sarah, “looks much better without the lightning bolt.”

  “And yours looks better without the Vitalis.”

  She was pleased that she could speak to him without a tremor in her voice, that she could slide her hand around David’s waist and gaze upon Nate with something akin to defiance. She told herself that her fascination with this bright-eyed fraternity boy was purely aesthetic, but still she couldn’t quell the ache in her chest every time he looked at her.

  That Thanksgiving evening, as she and David sat opposite Nate, with the parents flanking them at the table ends, the ache had pressed against her lungs like a fist of pneumonia. When the family raised their glasses to toast the holiday, David had announced their engagement, prompting Helen to rise from her seat and approach Sarah with arms outstretched. Next came David’s father, and finally Nate, who slid his chair back slowly and walked to Sarah’s side. With one hand in her hair and the other in the small of her back, he had held her against his warm body. When he pulled away, it was like the disconnection of an electric current.

  Now, as Sarah looked out the kitchen window, those memories seemed tied to another life. Nate’s face had changed in the past decade. Two years in business school and ten on Wall Street had robbed his expression of its vulnerability. He was more polished now, a shining stone, and she wondered if she could have spared him that hardening—if the right woman could have softened his edges. But she had never been the right woman. Not then, not now.

  “Here.” She handed a bag of sweet potatoes to David. “Peel these.”

  When she and David sat down to dinner, the meal was so excessive it seemed almost grotesque—the turkey basted to a sweaty perfection, the marshmallows oozing across her yams like a seven-day mold. Sarah envisioned Jackson’s poorest families opening their tin cans, cutting their cranberry sauce into slices thick as hockey pucks.

  “Shall we say what we are thankful for?” David asked.

  Sarah had not felt thankful for the past three years.

  “I am thankful for your paintings,” she said, “and for Margaret’s cooking.”

  David laughed. “Fair enough.”

  “And what about you?” she asked.

  “I’m thankful that you haven’t given up on me.”

  “Not yet.” Sarah poured a stream of gravy across her plate, then stared at her food, wondering why she held herself so aloof from her husband. “There’s something else,” she said after a moment. “I’m thankful to have been given this second chance with you, just for a little while.” Once she had spoken she felt relieved, as if the glacier in her chest was beginning to melt. She looked into David’s face and saw that he was smiling at her in the old way, the way they both had smiled in the earliest years of their marriage, when they had been able to look at each other and feel—what was it? Delight. Sarah reached across the table and for a few seconds she rested her warm palm over David’s hand.

  Then she lifted her fork. “Let’s eat.”

  After dinner David carved the turkey down to its skeleton, segregating the white meat from the dark and wrapping it all in plastic. He wiped the wishbone with a paper towel before handing one end to Sarah, and she snapped it with a twist. Looking at the large, splintered piece in her hand, she realized that she had automatically wished the same wish for the past five years, the one desire lavished on every coin thrown in a fountain, every eyelash blown from her fingertips. She had wished for a child.

  “I have a request,” David said.

  “What is it?”

  “I was wondering if you would model for me? I’d like to paint you.”

  Sarah winced. She hadn’t posed for David since the earliest years of their marriage, and she wondered if it wasn’t better that way. Perhaps she should leave him with the idealized vision of his charcoal nude, so wistful and compliant. What might he see now if he stared at her for too long?

  “What did you have in mind?”

  David surveyed the room. “Why don’t you sit in the rocking chair, by the hearth?”

  She obeyed, folding her hands in her lap.

  “Look into the fire,” he said, and she turned her face to the flames. Inside the coals, she heard the hissing of a dozen cats.

  “It’s too dark,” he said. “Could you stand at the window?”

  “Which one?”

  He wasn’t sure. She moved from window to window, looking north, east, south. One view was too shady, another too bright. The multiple panes on the doors to the deck cast shadows across her face.

  “Would you mind coming into the bedroom?” She followed his hand, which pointed down t
he hall to the room that faced the river. There, the four-paned window was covered by thin lace curtains that hung to the floor, filtering the afternoon sunlight. As she walked to the window she reached up and pulled the lace aside, as if brushing a child’s hair out of his eyes. Beyond the tall grass she could see a flock of Canada geese, floating by the dock.

  “That’s perfect. Don’t move.”

  “I can’t hold my arm like this for long.”

  “I’ll sketch your arm first.”

  He retrieved his drawing pad from the living room, along with a jar of pencils and charcoal, and a chair from the table. Spreading his supplies across the foot of the bed, he propped the pad on his knee, then watched Sarah for a long time without lifting his pencil.

  “I have one more request.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Your sweater doesn’t look quite right; it’s too bulky. Would you mind changing into your nightgown and robe?” He pointed toward the opposite corner, where her suitcase lay open on a chair, her gown folded on top, and her robe visible beneath.

  She hadn’t worn that white cotton nightgown in years; its collar of forget-me-nots seemed too childish. Neither had she worn the white silk robe that David bought her ten years ago for Christmas. It was a remnant of their early marriage, when she still cared about looking pretty. Of late, she had cared more about the dry-cleaning bill.

  But why had she packed them for this visit, except as an act of contrition? An apology for all the months that she had padded around their house in T-shirts and underwear, wrapped in a thick green terry-cloth robe designed for a man. It was warm, she had explained whenever David flinched. It was soft, it was comfortable, she could throw it in the wash. But in recent weeks she had seen the robe’s hideous message, the sluggish hausfrau’s flag of surrender.

  How strange it seemed to undress in front of David. He had seen so many women’s bodies—young, collegiate girls with firm thighs, cherry lipstick, and painted toenails. Variations on herself twenty years earlier. Now, as she covered her skin in white silk, she felt that she was becoming insubstantial, the pale counterpoint to her spectral husband.