Grief's Country Read online

  A dynamic town pulses a few blocks outside the gate, but where am I going to go? With whom? And how? The prospect of venturing out alone in a taxi is so confusing that I quickly abandon it. I realize I feel trapped, paralyzed in paradise.

  Another Christmas floats behind my eyes, in another tropical latitude. Bob was working in Massachusetts then. He rented a place in Marathon, halfway down the Florida Keys. I spent Christmas with my parents, planning to fly down to join him the next day. Out of nowhere some savage intestinal ailment attacked, and I spent Christmas Day in the bathroom while it tore through my system. Refusing to consider postponing my flight, I loaded up on drugs and told myself it had been a twenty-four-hour demon.

  Bob picked me up in Miami, where he’d spent the night in his car in a parking lot (after having secured the permission of the local police, as only Bob would do). After the long, slow drive down U.S. 1, we arrived in Marathon around dinnertime. I’d eaten nothing since noon on Christmas, so I was hungry.

  “What about your stomach?” Bob asked.

  “I’m fine! It’s over, really!” He looked doubtful, but damned if I was going to spend my first night on vacation in a motel room drinking microwaved chicken noodle soup.

  At the seafood restaurant, I quickly decided that what was required was a banana daiquiri. Again, Bob looked skeptical. I was nearly done with the tomato bisque when I understood that Faulkner was right about the past. I went running for the restroom and made it just inside the door before my stomach took itself back to zero. Back at our table, Bob was already laughing, generating jokes that would last beyond the length of the trip about my knocking over waiters and giving it all up to a potted palm.

  We spent a day strolling the street circus of Key West. We met friends there and toasted the sunset on the wharf. We visited Hemingway’s place and met the six-toed cats. We rented a motorboat and took off across the silvery water. We talked to fishermen and ate conch fritters at a waterside bar. We made love in the afternoon on the big bed in the air-conditioning. Bob bought fresh-caught grouper and cooked it in the tiny oven in our closet-sized “kitchen.” We watched stars and waterbirds and other tourists.

  Travel: I should have known not to try that. I am a woman alone in the world again, unable to move with the security a man provides. Without the particular joy and comfort Bob generated. I will never move with that ease again. In seven months I have aged ten years; I feel shrunken and vulnerable.

  And so I pass my ten days in Jamaica doing exactly what I did all summer at home: reading, staring out at the world, and drinking. I am in a place so beautiful that I feel like an oily blot on the landscape, a human sinkhole. A place so insanely romantic that it seems a cruel joke I have played on myself. I am lost. I need my little brick house urgently, viscerally. I want my cat, the television. Within the first two days I am counting down until I can go home. To Michigan, God love its dark, icy heart.

  *

  Of course the January weather ensures that my flight into Grand Rapids is rerouted to Detroit, where I arrive too late for anything but resigning myself to a night in the airport. I’m told I may not retrieve my luggage, for what reason I can’t fathom and am too wiped out to try. It will go on to Grand Rapids without me. I wait around the airport all night, and just as the blue air is lightening to gray I phone Bob’s brother, who lives half an hour away. Brian is a very early riser and a true child of the Motor City in his eternal readiness to hop in the car and drive for hours. He scoops me up and ferries me across the state. In his car, with his solicitous, comical company, I breathe easier than I have in ten days.

  And of course my suitcase has not reached the airport in Grand Rapids. I will have to return for it the next day. Right now, climbing into my frozen Honda, I don’t even care. The thin sun has broken through, the mercury is up, the roads are dry, and I am on my way home. I stagger into my house an hour later with a shudder of deep relief, like one who has narrowly escaped harm.

  The world out there has changed. Its roads are peppered with explosives. Best to stay in, lock your doors, I tell myself. Since May my house has been my outer layer, and I pull it in around me again. For a long time I don’t travel, and in the middle of even pleasant social engagements I find myself anticipating being home and what I will do when I get there.

  It occurs to me that I have veered from escapism to agoraphobia, centripetal to centrifugal energy, in a very short space. But they amount to the same thing—running from danger versus cowering from it. I worry about myself: am I turning into a timorous old lady who lives behind her curtains with her cat? Will I never travel again? Is this quietude, this retreat, the beginning of decrepitude, step one of the death march? Is my life over too?

  And I can’t do anything about any of this. This grief is a beast I must ride where it takes me, and I must learn to live where it drops me. The fantasy of self-creation—so youthful, so American—has met its death blow. Profound grief is a formidable force; like a storm it reshapes the landscape. I will have to live it out and see what I have to work with.

  In my misbegotten Christmas flight, I wound up in two successive havens, two dreamworlds, one lurid, one lovely, places where carefully crafted illusion offers itself to tourists for a price. Both were constructed as escapes or, depending on your angle of vision, retreats—from lives of enormous privilege and wealth within which nightmares lurked. I have fled back to the solidity of my home with its earth tones and replacement windows and insulation, cardinals in the snowy trees outside, and a zillion channels to choose from. It keeps me warm and dry and quiet and safe. I know it’s another illusion. Maybe a time will come when I can think about that.

  The Line That Carries on Alone

  Single ___

  Married ___

  Divorced ___

  Widowed ___

  Again the multiple-choice test. This time I’m at my ophthalmologist’s office. What is the difference between divorced and single, in ophthalmological terms? How does the distinction between single and widowed matter to my dentist? They both want to know, and I might as well tell them—again. I’m not married; in fact I had barely accustomed myself to the fact of being married when I suddenly wasn’t, and I am not given to the notion of marriage enduring beyond death. According to these categories I can’t claim to be single, although of course that’s what I am. I’m not divorced and therefore starting over. I’m the other thing, the final option, the sad story. When I check the box, I always see a figure in the corner of my eye, shrouded and silent. She is alien, the black fairy crashing the party. I don’t recognize her.

  *

  The morning following the night they dredged Bob’s body from the river, I scanned the universe, looking for something sufficient to hold together the shards of me for a while. But that force was unavailable—my mother, not four years gone.

  In those hours of moving very slowly, pulling myself from one moment to the next, hand over hand as if time were a rope, I felt her absence as a roaring vacancy where the magnetic core had been. It came as another outrage, for on top of shock-lightning shooting through me and the maelstrom of grief, there was anger, waves of it that kept breaking over my mind: my mother was not on the earth.

  She could and would have held it all with me, I was sure, as she had held me gently before her on my stomach in the water, floating backwards while I learned to swim. If ever I had needed her fund of compassion, the sense of endurance and hope she could convey, her practical genius for sweeping into a scene of chaos and setting it to rights, it was on that May morning as I stood alone in the violent light. But before too long, I would have hit a vein of cold steel. I knew this even in my longing for her. It would be a matter of days, maybe weeks, but not months before she would remind me of what she had survived, and it would come at once as command, dare, and threat. In short, the message would be: Do not be one of those women who crumble.

  Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe this time she would have bowed to superior devastation. This thought actually veered ac
ross my mind: I’ve finally beaten her.

  *

  She was warned by her father that she would be a young widow. Her suitor was fifteen years older and maybe he appealed as a fatherly figure to a twenty-four-year-old who adored her own father. He was certainly paternal, my dad—paternalistic, patriarchal, pick your adjective. When I asked her why she married him, she said it was because he treated his mother so beautifully. An old litmus test, I guess, from the days when women didn’t get to know suitors very intimately: if you want to know whether a man will be a good husband, watch how he treats his mother. My father was a walking American Dream: blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed, Germanic, he left college when his father died and went to work in the steel mills of Chicago. A white boy with an unrelenting work ethic and a mother to support, he pleased the powers that be and his collar turned white for good. A self-made man, as they used to say. When they married he was thirty-nine, a well-heeled businessman selling steel in Detroit—not a bad line to be in as the city became the Arsenal of Democracy for the coming war. If his bride saw the rigidity and conventionality in him, she chose to overlook them or spun them into gold: He’s solid, reliable, principled.

  When I asked her if she ever thought of leaving him, she reacted as if I’d suggested she go to the moon. “No one got divorced then!” Meaning no one of our class. “And I had no money; what would I have done? I would never have gone home to my father.” Never mind her mother: she would have felt ashamed to burden her father, financially and otherwise, with a daughter who had failed at the career women were permitted to succeed at: making a marriage.

  By the time I was in second grade my father was dying of colorectal cancer. My memories of home are filled with his absences—stays at Mayo, trips to hospitals in Detroit—and with resentment of his presence, always severe, critical, chilling. To me he was generally gentle and loving, but it got him no points because I witnessed his effect on my mother and my brother. He died three days before Christmas in 1959, at fifty-eight. My mother was forty-four: a young widow.

  His death came as a sad relief after years of caretaking. But now she found herself in a financial and legal wilderness. Her husband had kept her in complete ignorance about finances, one of those ancient patriarchal traditions in which “protection” is the veil thrown over a tangled mass of anxiety, pride, and the need for control. He had taken care of his mother; now he was taking care of his wife. Unexceptionable manly behavior. So she spent a year or so untangling accounts, interpreting numbers, consulting lawyers and bankers, figuring out whether she could keep the house, whether my brother could stay in college, whether I could go to camp. The nadir came when she had to petition the court for legal guardianship of her children. In those dark days this was not merely a matter of filing papers; she was required to demonstrate, before a judge, her moral fitness to care for us: “my own children!” as she always put it, outraged all over again, retelling this story regularly as both cautionary tale and exorcism. For my mother, widow meant warrior.

  *

  An odd word, widow. It seems to echo like a vault, its w’s closing around it like shutters or heavy wings. It is both noun and verb, but the transitive verb form—to widow—is all but extinct. The only form we use is the reflexive: to be widowed. To have something radical done to you, by a power not your own. To be changed, made different, by a death. To become not single again, or unmarried, but something else altogether. To be propelled into difference and cast into an outer darkness.

  Widow has no synonym. It is also one of very few words in English whose masculine form, widower, derives from the feminine. That’s how deeply widowhood has belonged to womanhood and how powerfully it has affected a woman’s status. But what it lacks in synonyms widow makes up for in metaphors:

  Widow’s weeds: the reverse bridal gown, the manless woman darkly revirginized.

  Widow’s peak, said to derive from the cap or hood worn by mourning women, which dipped to a point over the forehead.

  Widow’s mite, linking manlessness and impoverishment.

  The widow hand in a card game: the superfluous hand dealt and set aside as an option for a player with a bad hand.

  Grass widow: an archaic term for an unwed mother (no husband but the grass she lay down on).

  Merry widow: the long-line bra-corset introduced by Maidenform in 1955 and named for the 1905 operetta by Franz Lehar. The woman delighted to be disencumbered of a husband, probably having inherited his money.

  Five-fingered widow: a British soldier’s sobriquet for his masturbatory hand.

  And of course, the spider with the telling red figure on her back who monstrously widows herself.

  At the top of the house is the widow’s walk, where she paces off her scanty space, scanning a vacant horizon, waiting for her life to return.

  Widow evolved from Sanskrit and Latin roots meaning empty, void. A woman unmanned: a nothingness.

  *

  My mother was what was known as an eligible widow—attractive financially and physically. As the 1960s blew away the dust of the ’50s, she met a man who presented the antidote to my father. Warm, funny, fun-loving, childlike in many ways, slightly irresponsible, he brought the party into every room he entered. Above all, he adored my mother. She was suddenly having an extremely good time—traveling, drinking stingers, going to the racetrack and out to dinner, dressed beautifully and colorfully. I remember her laughing more than I’d ever known.

  Thirteen months after their wedding, one night early in January, his heart stopped. It turns out that his doctor had told my mother he had perhaps five years. She jumped in anyway, betting everything against the odds. But in the long winter months after his death I could smell the outrage roiling through her grief.

  With this second widowhood she ascended into myth. She had suffered through my father with a relentlessly stiff upper lip in true devoted-wife style, and then the man who redeemed her heart had lasted just over a year—it was grossly unfair. From that moment until the end of her life, people regarded her with at least a soupçon of awe. The first adjective people used to describe her was strong. My word is formidable, French or English. She and her noble suffering significantly defined the story of our lives. Other people had mothers; I had an epic warrior queen.

  It will perhaps seem paradoxical that she told me more than once that she was “a man’s woman,” despite my horrified protestations. “No,” she said, “no, I’m happiest with a man.” In any case, she wasn’t alone long. Within sixteen months she was married again, to the brother-in-law of #2, and this one stuck for nearly forty years, until her death. They made a rich, satisfying life together, and she did not have to bury him.

  Yet even the satisfied calm of her third marriage did not quell the old outrage. What ignited her furious judgment seemed to be the struggles of a younger generation of women. Daughter, stepdaughters, daughters-in-law took the brunt. We had not suffered as she had; we were not bucking up and holding it together; we did not comprehend what life demands of women. If we brought her our dilemmas or sorrows, we never knew which of her faces would meet us: the earth mother or the imperious wicked queen of Disney’s Snow White. Sometimes they merged just at the point where her endless competence and good sense measured our fallibility.

  Just once I got her to admit how much easier she was on men and boys. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “I guess I always thought they needed it more.” This was a major epiphany for me: women’s lenience toward men, their willingness to make excuses for men and do their work for them—which had riled me since early childhood—came not from respect but from a sense of men’s weakness, their incompetence, their dependence (which, of course, it also serves to reinforce). Hers was a generation of women who saw men as requiring looking after, even though (or perhaps because) they were running the world. It was easy to extrapolate: she was hard on women because she thought we could take it—because we must be able to take it. She had had to woman up to get through twenty years of terrible marriage, two widowh
oods, and a heartbreak; we were expected to do the same.

  So when my first important adult relationship was shattered by infidelity, she was compassionate for about ninety seconds, and then time was up. “Don’t you think I’ve been hurt in my life?!” The question shot out from nowhere; neither of us had mentioned her or her life. Somewhere inside my anguish I was furious: how could she switch the subject from my life to hers and then make me out to be the unfeeling one—me, the sufferer in the present case? The mother I needed was gone, replaced by the Witch of the West.

  I look back on that moment and wonder what my pain triggered in her. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to know that she had endured my father’s infidelity. But the size of her response suggested more, as her responses to me tended to do. I think that of all female suffering, mine roused her to greatest combativeness because it drew on her deepest love and fear. I was not to be a woman who allowed my life—and certainly not the men in it—to damage me. For me to become anything approaching a victim was not an option, ever. She would burn it out of me with maternal fire.