Chapter 7 / Witches

While I waited for work, on the off chance that some college an hour’s drive away would want me part-time, I said yes, I wanted to learn all about the workings of a dental office or yes, I would take a course in spreadsheets. 

But people didn’t trust me. They didn’t know what to make of me when I walked in the door, despite my sad story, which was something of a classic around here in any case: woman left stranded, needs income desperately. 

Finally the law office in Schuyler called on a Monday to ask me to come back the following Monday to meet one of the name partners. This for a job that paid $9 an hour for 20 hours a week. But I let myself dream. It would be nice to work in Schuyler, with its courthouse square and one decent restaurant. I couldn’t afford the restaurant, but maybe a lawyer had something else in mind. Maybe he needed a tax write-off and instead of gentleman farming or offshore oil drilling, he would fund a writer. It was no more preposterous than Jaime’s and my design office.

The local paper came in the mail that day and I made myself look at the classifieds again, even though I knew them practically by heart—

—and there was a new ad. The ad of my dreams. I stared at it for a long time, reading it twice. Every word. 

The newspaper itself needed a managing editor, someone who would also cover meetings and write news stories and features. That should be good for about 80 hours a week, but the pay was listed right there: $40,000. Forty thousand—more money than I had ever made in my life. 

I fired up the computer and started another resume. I had managed a chronically depressed man. I managed two insane dogs. For five years I had managed two homes, one here and one in the city, until we gave up the apartment. I could manage a couple of reporters. I left all of that out and emphasized instead my writing and editing experience. I dragged out my team spirit, bloody but unbowed. 

I put the letter and resume in an envelope and gave the dogs their watch-the-house biscuits and set out to drop off my application at the newspaper office in East Wynham, which, since we were centrally located in the middle of nowhere, was about 15 minutes away in the opposite direction from Schuyler. Then I stopped in the garage, thinking, and, confusing the dogs completely, came back inside to change my clothes. What if they decided to see me right away? Or what if they just happened to walk by the counter in the moment I was there? Every second counted. I found my suede skirt and a heather sweater that went with it. Happily, the weather was cool enough for tights—I didn’t want to go off the deep end here, with stockings—but warm enough to skip a coat, just to run into the office. 

Or to stand in the office literally six seconds, taking in one huge, two-storied room divided into three sections downstairs and with a balcony upstairs on the right that ran the length of the building, with three doors suggesting offices. 

“Thanks,” the tall, dark-haired woman at the front counter said kindly. “I’ll be sure the editor gets it.” 

“Thank you!” 

Low buzz of voices, people sitting at computers, daylight on either side of the building but not in the middle. I couldn’t pause any longer, so I left.

That night I called Jaime; she had worked there briefly as a typesetter. The production crew wasn’t a very happy group, she said, but maybe the reporters, with more interesting work, were more cheerful. Two sisters owned the paper, she reminded me—Tina, who was the editor, and Wendy, whose title was publisher. 

“You know what they’re called,” said Jaime. “The wicked witches of East Wynham.” 

“I have to try to get an interview.” 

“They’ll call you. They must be desperate, to offer so much money. Make sure you get it.”

Wendy called the next day. The witches, both of them, wanted to meet me at the diner between my house and their office for coffee on Thursday. I wondered why I didn’t just come to the office for an interview, but I would have met with them in the deep end of the high school swimming pool, if that’s what they had wanted, so I didn’t ask. 

At the diner, the witches—two slim, handsome women, whom I gauged late forties, early fifties—sat across from me in a booth.

“You have never worked as hard as you will work at the newspaper,” said Tina. 

I paused, my coffee cup at my lips. I have always been too literal. Did I have the job already? We hadn’t even been served our toasted muffins. And second—

“How do you know?” I said. 

“You won’t have time to write the opinion pieces you’ve sent in,” she said. 

“Or the fiction listed in your resumé,” said Wendy. “We have no lives but the paper, seven days a week.” 

“—You’re very tan,” I said, thinking of my pale, anxious self, seated across from these two robust blonds with awfully good tans for this time of year. 

“Well,” they said. Wendy played some golf. Tina had tried a tennis camp last month. They had their children, of course—Tina had two, Wendy three. I knew one of them was married to a lawyer, the other to a surgeon, but I could never remember which was which.

“You wrote a very good cover letter,” said Wendy. 

“And you write good presses releases,” said Tina. “That’s how we remembered you—from your releases for the library and the Central America group.” 

“You’ve also published every letter to the editor I ever wrote,” I said. 

“Well,” said Tina—a little sadly, I thought—“we publish every letter that comes in.”

“Almost,” said Wendy. 

They offered me a job, but not the one described in the ad. “We’ve decided to restructure slightly,” said Wendy. “Your title will be senior editor. One of the reporters is moving up to news editor, and the two of you will manage the reporters and the story flow, so that Tina and I can focus on long-term projects and planning. 

“The office is open every day except for major holidays,” she added proudly. 

“We rotate covering weekends,” Tina said pointedly.  

It was probably dreadful, but it didn’t sound impossible. I took a breath. “What’s the salary for the restructured position?” 

“Oh, it’s the same,” said Wendy. “Thirty thousand, cash.” 

“—The ad in the paper said forty thousand.” 

“That’s the total value of the package,” said Wendy, not missing a beat, “including benefits—health insurance, Social Security, paid vacation.” 

I gave Wendy and Tina the first of many long stares I would give them, individually and collectively, over the next couple of years, as I admired their gall, was infuriated by their boldfaced lie, protested mentally at the unfairness of it all, and felt helpless before it.  

“I have to bring my dogs to the office,” I said. 

Copyright © Debby Mayer

Chapter 6 / Goats

I had lived alone before Ed, on even less than I earned now. But I didn’t have a house then, and a car, and two hungry dogs. 

“You could sell the house,” said my mother in one of her daily phone calls. “That would give you plenty of money to get back on your feet.” 

“—Where would I live?”

“—Well, you could stay in our house while we’re in Florida, then by spring you’d be able to find an apartment, or something.” 

Would it happen? Would I have my furniture in storage and drive around with a car full of suitcases? I swallowed back bile. “I thought widows weren’t supposed to make any changes for a year.” 

“That’s if you can afford it.” 

She was right. Make no changes for a year was starting to sound very middle class. But my renegotiated mortgage was probably comparable to any rent I’d pay for a habitable place around here, one that allowed dogs. On the other hand, I needed heating oil for the winter and Ed had totaled our “good” car, the one with only 60,000 miles on it; mine had 120. I made a round of calls to the people I freelanced for.

“Yes, the annual report is on schedule,” said John. “Look for it the first week in November.” 

October stretched ahead, vast and uncharted.

“I meant to call you,” said Lois. “That book’s been postponed. Why don’t you get back in touch”—she sighed—“after the first of the year. Maybe by then I’ll know the new schedule. Everything’s hell around here, waiting to see what happens with the election. How’re things with you?”

“—Ed died,” I said. I had to get used to telling people. “Car crash." 

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” 

“Thank you. Do you have anything else for me?”

“I’ll see. I’m so sorry. Maybe some proofreading. Oh, Annie, what are you going to do?”

It went on like that, as I called people and spoiled their day. I said yes to writing the chapters on African American history for a textbook, a project I knew I’d end up paying for—the fee would cover the writing but not the research—and yes to a young adult biography of Irving Berlin, even though the advance was stingy and the royalties probably wouldn’t come through. Everyone else said they would keep me in mind. 

I took a deep breath and tried not to panic. I had always been good at short-term solutions. I dug out the last couple of issues of the local newspaper, an invisible Ed scoffing at me: You’ll never find anything there. I shook open the paper and sharpened a red pencil. 

Three different restaurants needed wait staff, but I had been a waitress during college and hated it. Bartender, short order cook; not me. Plenty of social work positions for which I wasn’t remotely qualified; carpenter, cabinetmaker, nope, but here, Camphill Village needed an office assistant. I did not have a “minimum of one year’s experience in a secretarial position dealing with the public,” and I did have a momentary twinge about taking the job away from a young person who had a “high school diploma or GED,” but I needed a job too, so I circled the ad. 

And here, Blue Ribbon Chèvre had openings for full-time workers, either taking care of their 100 dairy goats or helping in the creamery. They even offered benefits—vacation, life and health insurance, a 401K. What luxury! Maybe I’d be outdoors sometimes, maybe I could wear jeans. I would write about the experience. “Call for an interview,” you bet. 

Under part-time, a dentist, a lawyer, and an insurance agency each needed office help. It wouldn’t pay enough, but I would apply anyway, just to get something going. 

I felt better than I had in days. I wrote myself a new resumé, leaving out my master’s degree in creative writing, remembering all the secretarial kinds of experience I had ever had, back through high school. I got into the theater aspect of the project, responding to each ad exactly as instructed, to show I was a team player who could follow instructions. The exception was the law office, which had given only its street address. I piled the dogs into the car and drove to Schuyler to take down the name of the firm at that address, to show that I was a team player who could do her own research. 

Back home I sat quietly for five minutes, thinking about goats and my experience in farm work. I had picked cotton for two weeks in Cuscutlan, on a volunteer brigade during the contra war, and I had done trail work in Wyoming, which mostly consisted of digging trenches and moving rocks. That was before we moved to the country and started digging our own trenches and moving our own rocks. And there was hiking, bicycling, canoeing. I called Blue Ribbon Chèvre. 

“Starting pay is minimum wage and you have to work some weekends,” said a woman who didn’t sound at all happy about spending her days with a hundred goats. “The health insurance starts after three months and the rest of the benefits after you’ve been with us for a year. Do you still want an interview?”

“Yes,” I said firmly in my role of job seeker. I could use the practice pitching myself.

“Come at 10 o’clock tomorrow.” 

The next morning I brought the dogs along for the ride and arrived at 9:30 so we could take a walk and check out the place. Three huge barns—red, white, and blue—were set well off the road and below it, down a little hill. I wondered if they had trouble with run-off, the way we did.

As I walked the dogs up the road, a herd of goats started out a door at the end of the blue barn into the yard. The goats didn’t trot so much as flow, a school of white, four-legged fish, all moving in the same direction, parallel to us. At least 50, they just keep coming out of that door, following the goat in front of them, or maybe following what they saw in the distance, a human with two small, curly-tailed goats who in turn were wildly excited, pulling at their leads, whining, wishing to play with or snack upon these bearded dogs. I put up with this for a minute, then turned around and started back to the car. The goats all turned around then too, the lead goats first, bumping into the later ones, who pushed into the last ones, until they had all gradually reoriented themselves to head in the opposite direction. “Cute but dumb,” I told the dogs. 

I parked the car exactly where I had been instructed, in the lot across from the blue barn. A heavyset woman strode out of it, shaking her head. 

“We can’t have dogs on the property.” 

“—They’ll stay in the car. I’ve locked it.” 

She shook her head again. “No. We can’t have it.” 

“I'm sorry. I’ll park up on the road.” 

“No. It’s still too close, and it’s dangerous to park there.”

“—What do you suggest I do?”

“That’s up to you. Dogs are not allowed on this property.” Her broad face, her whole body stood guard for the goats. 

“All right. I’ll park in the lot for the town hall down the road and walk back.” I looked at my watch. “I’ll still be on time.” 

She was appraising me, my brown corduroy pants, my one pair of tie shoes, brown suede, my red sweater and blue waterproof shell, all carefully chosen to combine respect for the interview with common sense and practicality. 

“Why do you want this job?”

She already disliked me, so I might as well be honest. “My husband died,” I said. “I need a job. I like animals.” 

“Ever done farm work?” 

“I picked cotton in 100-degree temperatures. I moved rocks in Wyoming in the rain. I take care of five acres. I’m strong, and I’m patient. I can learn goats.” 

“This isn’t a lark,” she said, and the word, lark, was so odd coming from her thin, unpainted lips that I knew she must have heard it from the Blue Ribbon bosses. “City people think goats are cute,” she said, “but they’re a business here.” 

“I’ve lived in Smokey Hollow for seven years. My husband died in an automobile accident. I need a job. That’s not going to change.” 

We have had this conversation eye to eye. Now her gaze flickered as she thought. “The one a couple of weeks ago? On the parkway?” 

“Yes.” 

“—Sorry.” She was single too. Her husband had left her, or he drank and she left him. “I’ll call you if we need you,” she said. 

“Thank you,” I said to the back of her faded red sweatshirt. 

“You don’t want that job,” Jaime said that afternoon. She had stopped by on her way to Schuyler, where she worked part-time as a graphic designer for the county’s one printing company. She had a harvest soup for me, filled with vegetables from her garden. 

“There was something appealing about goats, instead of paper,” I said. “If only I hadn’t brought the dogs, I would have at least got into the barn.” 

“They run that ad all the time. The turnover there is like a hundred percent a year. Maybe you should take a course in graphic design, on the computer. There’ll be enough business around here for the two of us—we could open a studio together!”

“No, Jaime. I know how things should read, or sound, but I never know how anything should look.” 

“Your house looks great.” 

“That was Ed.” I followed her eye to the framed T-shirt hanging by the staircase. “OK, I had his SoHo Weekly News T-shirt framed, but he knew where to hang it.” 

“And this is your fabric sculpture, Satin Manhattan, right?”

“A friend made it for us. But Ed realized these two fabric paintings from Cuscutlan went with it, and he hung the three of them as a group.” 

“Who hung this mirror?” She cast a critical eye at the Mexican pressed-tin mirror by the door, which Ed had hung vertically.  

“He did. . . . I always thought it should be horizontal.”  

“It should be.” She was taking it off the wall. “Got a hammer?” 

We rehung the mirror, horizontally, at just the right level for my face. Immediately the whole house felt tidier. 

“This must be how people feel after they’ve been to a chiropractor,” I said. 

“Exactly!” said Jaime. “Write that down. I gotta go.” 

 “Let me pay you something.” 

“Get a job.” She hugged me good-bye. “Then we’ll talk.” 

I went back to work on my latest idea, which was a mailing to all the colleges within a 50-mile radius of my house, pitching myself to their communications offices. There were a surprising number, if I went north as far as Albany; too many, really, and the writing of yet another resume, to show that I was the perfectly experienced staff member for an academic setting, the crispness of my best white paper underneath my best grade of printing, the confident hopefulness of my cover letters, made me unbearably tired. I should take a run, get the endorphins moving. Instead I found the dogs, curled like Cheerios on the bed, and wrapped myself around them. Jethro moved away, but Chloe stayed with me, as needy for shelter as I. 

It was dark when I woke, the dogs staring balefully at me from the floor, late for their walk, their dinner. Ed had always walked them at four, fed them at six, summer and winter. I was inadequate even to them. 

Copyright © Debby Mayer

Chapter 5 / Desk

As far as I can tell, Ed kept every birthday card and Valentine that he had received for the last fifteen years. Dozens of them—every expression of love or affection, any remembrance or acknowledgment, from anyone. I’ve kept all the cards he gave me because each one is unique—beautifully made, with a special verse. But I keep few others. Looking at the cards I gave him, I repeatedly told him that I loved him. “I love you,” I wrote. “Know you are loved,” I wrote.  

Ed’s desk sits in the back room of the house, overlooking the garden and the meadow beyond. The desk is five feet wide by three feet deep, so it makes sense that the drawers would go all the way back, but I had never really thought about it: that you could stuff years of written memorabilia into them. But Ed the pack rat had got ahead on me on several fronts:

Stacks of magazines in the attic, created by Ed, the man who worried about fire. I recycle them immediately. 

Fifty-one pairs of socks in a drawer, two with the label still on them. Four black, eight blue, thirteen brown, twelve “other,” and fourteen sport. In the back of the sock drawer is $42.50 in fives and ones in a Ziploc baggy, and $100 in twenties, held together with a paper clip. I transfer this money to my T-shirt drawer.

Twenty-two wine bottle corks in the kitchen miscellany drawer. Most of them French, but one each Budapest, Geyser Peak, Julius Echter Heffe-Weissbier, anonymous. Did he think he would use them again? Was it a reference library? 

Fourteen shopping bag handles. I set out to keep a couple, then throw them all away. 

But the desk, the desk. My thinking is I’ll use it now, I’ll start a real business, the way Ed did, and this will be my action central, as it was his. But I had no idea what an archaeological dig this old wooden desk would be, the desk that he bought at an auction one evening, back in the day when auctions sold furniture we could use and afford. On the left side, instead of drawers, is a contraption, an inner table on a spring on which you can keep a typewriter; this allowed the inventor of this desk to store more papers on its surface, I guess, and it’s a fortunate invention because it means there are only three drawers, on the right side of the desk, into which Ed could pack stuff, along with the vast top of it. We bought the computer together, ostensibly for both of us, though Ed used it most of the time. And surrounded it with his piles of paper.   

I remind myself that my desk, upstairs, is something of a mess too, but I think my piles of paper go back only six weeks, not six months. Probably these papers are duplicates of what his clients have, but I should ask, be ready to mail things. “Maybe they’ll hire you,” my mother said on the phone from Key Biscayne, optimistic in her off-the-wall way. Ed’s clients would never hire me as Ed, but maybe if I’m helpful and well organized, I could pitch myself as a proofreader. 

I’m labeling stacks of paper, whom to call about what, when at the bottom of a pile of stuff at the back of the desk I find a color printout. It’s smeary—color is not the strong point of our printer—but it’s clearly a boy, a young boy, in the nude, facing the camera. 

Blond hair, brush cut, standing in the sun in the nude, full front, smeared, the colors haven’t come out well, there’s a lot of red, of blue. A thin boy, narrow chest, a boy, with a small prick, for peeing, not a teenager, younger than that, but not a little boy either, somewhere, somewhere in between, he stands there, staring at the camera, squinting into sun, smeared in color. He does not look comfortable; neither does he look surprised. 

I do not know him. I take in his blurry face, his squint, his lips. This is no one I recognize. 

I crumple the paper. I smooth it out again. I take it to the kitchen trash and look at it one more time before I tear it into tiny pieces. 

I go back to the desk. My eyes are tearing, my throat aches, but I touch every single sheet of paper on the desk, all over again. An hour passes. There is nothing else like it. 

What in the name of God was he thinking. We gave each other privacy. The picture lay on the desk. He counted on me not to look. He left it for me. He forgot it was there.

All those nice cards I received. “He called you ‘my Annie,’ wrote a physician on the EMT book. 

No one said he loathed me. 

I get up, stare out at the garden, the meadow. His Annie wasn’t enough. Is any of us ever enough? He would be mowing the meadow this month. He is gone. No discussion. No fight. 

One picture does not make a pattern. But he printed it out. The computer may hold secrets. Up to me to find them, delete them; no one, not Jaime or Kathleen or Dave, can help with this.

Right now, no more secrets. I am terrified of the computer. I would put it onto Ed's office chair, wheel it to the trash can in the garage, but I can’t do anything to it until I look into it. Instead, I clean off his bulletin board, with its public display of schedules, letters, a few mementos, like the faded fortune from a Chinese cookie: “Many pleasurable and memorable adventures are in store for you.” We always added “in bed” to make the fortune more interesting. I crumple the slip of paper. And then I remember—

I worked the table for our Central America solidarity group at the county fair this past Labor Day Weekend. Taking a break, walking around the fair, I passed the gypsy fortune-teller booth. I’d never had my fortune told, mostly because I was too much of a chicken, but that day I felt ready, curious. I sat down and the man looked at my left palm, but before he said anything he got a call on his portable phone and began a conversation with someone in San Diego. I waited, sitting across from him, but he continued to talk, with no sign that he would ever stop. Finally I put a couple of dollars on the table and got up. I’ll do it, I’ll do it! called a woman sitting in back of him, but I was annoyed, so I left. 

That evening I described my non-fortune to Ed. “He just kept talking,” I said, “as if I weren’t there.” 

“Maybe he saw something he didn’t want to tell you,” said Ed. 

Copyright © Debby Mayer

Chapter 4 / Mail

I returned from Ed’s funeral to a shopping bag full of mail. Our neighbor Nancy had picked it up at the post office and left it on the back deck. Bank statements, Christmas catalogues. I put it in the mudroom, curled up with the dogs. 

The next morning I poured a second cup of coffee and, out of habit, divided the mail into two piles, his and hers, on the kitchen table. We had never opened each other’s mail. If one of us received something we both wanted to see, the other one would say, Open it! Open it! and stand next to the recipient until we knew what was inside. The most obvious junk mail lay on the table until the addressee threw it into the recycling bag. 

In fact, there was nice mail here, lovely mail.: people sent condolence cards, or even letters they had written themselves. I opened each envelope carefully and read the notes slowly. I examined the cards and tried to imagine the person—the freelance graphic designer in San Diego, whom I had never met, Ed’s high school friend from Portsmouth that we exchanged Christmas cards with—driving to the mall, entering a card shop, choosing something to send me. The local library would buy a book in Ed’s memory. Perhaps something about the Hudson River, wrote the board president, since Ed loved to explore the flats in his kayak. 

And a friend—someone I wished we saw more—typed out six lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets that he said had served him as an “emotional mantra” during “unutterably” difficult times. “So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” I stared at that, unable even to  imagine it. But that was his point, wasn’t it. Mantra. You asked for it. You prayed for it. 

Then I opened Ed’s mail. Bills he would have paid, a confirmation of his order of a barn jacket—we didn’t have a barn, but as Dave said, Ed was something of a clothes pony—a paycheck I couldn’t cash, a pitch from the Democratic party that he support Bill Clinton. They must be after everybody; we were both enrolled as independents. I opened all the credit card offers, just to make sure they didn’t, by accident, contain some cash. 

I saved for last a business-size envelope addressed by hand to Ed from a post office box in Truro, on Cape Cod. We had spent a week in Truro each summer for the past three years, but we hadn’t begun to talk about next year’s trip. Chloe was sitting in my lap by then; I turned over the envelope, let her sniff it. Finally I slit the side with Ed’s letter opener and pulled out a copy of a one-page contract for the rental of a house in Truro and a receipt for payment in full for a week’s rent. The receipt was made out to Ed. The contract was cosigned by Ed and the owner of the house. For the last week in July. Next year. 

A week’s vacation. All planned, all paid for. I knew the house. We had rented it the summer before this past one. Three stories high, glass all around, it was like living in the tops of the trees—the most beautiful house I had ever stayed in, anywhere. This past summer the owner had caught on and raised the price to well above our budget, and we rented another house, nowhere near as nice. Next summer, I see, she’s holding steady at the new price. 

That must be it. She’s confused the summer tenants, pulled Ed’s name out of her files, sent a receipt to the wrong person. Not that Ed’s last name, Tuczinksi, was a common one, but there had to be a mistake. I picked up the portable phone, which I now carried with me at all times, and called the number on the contract. 

“No,” she said, “it’s not a mistake.” I remembered her voice as soon as I heard it—I was usually the one who made this kind of booking—and from it her small, energetic, efficient self. In the summer she lived in a cabin at the edge of the property, one room no larger than a potting shed. She cleaned the house herself between rentals. Got it as part of a divorce settlement, we figured. 

“Your husband called me,” she said. “I’m so sorry, about his accident. So sorry. The contract I use says no refunds, but in this case, and since it’s so early in the season, I could make an exception.”

The money would support me for a month. “Can you make the check out to me?” I asked. 

“—I guess so,” she said. 

Again, so completely unlike him. 

Yes, he could be manipulative with his surprises. Guess what! he would say, when I was exhausted or distracted, not ready for games. Don’t you notice anything different? he would ask about some miniscule change he had made in our house while I was out. 

But to spend so much money without saying so, or, rather, without complaining about it, several times. To plan something like this without consulting me, much less even telling me. 

Now a vacation waited out there in July. Paid for with money I had never seen. It might support me for a month, that money, but then I would just need more money, and there would be no prize, no rest, no splendid house in the trees, down the road in July.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll keep it. I’ll come.” 

“It’s a big house,” she said. “You could share it with friends.” 

She was right. I could see who else might show up. 

Copyright © Debby Mayer

Chapter 3 / Aria

I had no money with which to grieve. Like Ed, I freelanced as a writer and editor. Unlike Ed, I had no special area of expertise. When he died, editorial work was halted on two different textbooks, one in emergency medicine, the other in American history, while harried editors sought—and could not find—an editor with the same combination of intelligence, skill, and speed. 

I applied for food stamps. Two-thirds of my “family income,” as the form described it, had disappeared. In its place I had an expanding accordion file, into which I organized, in separate slots, papers representing my growing financial problems. For example, the $11,000 Ed had in his checking account. Since we weren’t married, I couldn’t touch it. We had discussed this, once. If anything happens to you, your mother will get everything, I said. He had looked appropriately horrified, and given the opportunity—a small life insurance policy, his Keogh account—he left it to me. But he had no will.  

His mother took the $11,000, saying simply, I raised him. 

“She said that?” Jaime stared at me, then mimed closing her mouth with her hand.

“When Ed was little,” I said, “he decided to run away. But he told his mother first. She said OK, but he couldn’t take any of his stuff. I think he was wearing his cowboy suit, and she said she’d bought it for him, it belonged to her.” 

“Jesus.” Jaime looked aside, out the window, then back at me. “He should have gone anyway.” 

“I know. But he hadn’t even started his paper route.” 

He did get away. Through a mix of brains that led to scholarships and the paper route that turned into selling tickets at a movie theater, followed by summer jobs at a Coca-Cola factory and a hospital, he got away. Now he was back there again, reclaimed by the rocky Portsmouth soil. His mother took his body, too, and buried it next to that of his father in a New Hampshire cemetery twenty minutes away from her and more than three hours from me. He was buried after a Catholic Mass, a ritual I took some comfort in, though it would have infuriated Ed. By that point I was too desolate, frightened, and angry to care what he thought.  

I did have friends. They caravanned in three cars to the funeral, transporting me and the dogs. Back home, they wanted to hold a memorial service, for us. “Just tell me whom you want to invite,” said Kathleen. “We’ll write it together. All you’ll have to do is show up.” 

“Thanks,” I said. “Not right now. I have to think about some things.” 

“It could help you think,” she said. “That’s the last thing I’ll say about it.” 

“No,” I said. “But don’t leave me.” 

“Never,” she said. “If you won’t let us mourn, we’ll organize.” 

Kathleen supervised the food. I had always joked that if it weren’t for Ed, I would be trying to live on coffee and breakfast bars. Now that menu was staring me in the face, except for Kathleen, who like Ed, was a terrific cook—they connected that way—and who put together a food chain that brought me a soup or a casserole each week. By myself, I could make it last for days.

Jaime took me to the bank. She had a disabled brother in assisted living, so she was accustomed to dealing with people who couldn’t quite take care of themselves. “She needs to renegotiate her mortgage.” Jaime told the suited woman in an office at the bank.

“And the line of equity against the house,” I said softly. 

They both looked at me, the bank lady through cheerful eyeglasses with leaf-green frames. 

“We took it for the renovations.” 

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” said Jaime. “I’ll be right outside.”

“What else,” said the bank lady gently. 

“The car loan,” I said.  “On the car that was totaled.”

She got out pieces of paper and we talked about them and I tried to listen to what she said. I tried to listen to what everyone said and to read the papers they gave me, which I kept in the new accordion file, one slot for each problem, but I wasn’t listening carefully and I couldn’t make my eyes focus on the papers. 

What I had to think about was this: On that rainy Tuesday morning, exactly one week after my 40th birthday, Ed drove off at 8 o’clock on his way to Dave’s house for their regular weekly meeting. He and Dave functioned as a kind of freelance editorial company without offices, meeting weekly in each other’s houses, and it was Ed’s turn to travel. 

But when Ed’s car skidded off the road, he was 10 minutes and three parkway exits beyond the turnoff for Dave’s road.

He should have turned right, but he didn’t. He kept on going. What haunted me then was not why he went off the road—he braked for a deer, he was changing a cassette tape, he was testing the brakes on the slick road, something he had confessed, out loud, to doing in the past, or he had, for the third time ever in his life, given in to an urge to smoke a Gauloise cigarette while he was driving—but why he was driving where he was. 

“There are a lot of ways to get there from here,” said Dave. It was eight o’clock again, 12 hours after Ed had left the house. Dave and I had sat at the kitchen table while Lauren, his wife, fixed spaghetti with clam sauce. There hadn’t been time for a picturesque covered dish, steaming under a towel; she had grabbed ingredients off shelves and thrown them in a bag.

“He might have decided to double back on one of the town roads,” said Dave. 

He might have. He liked to drive the back roads. He might have found he was running early, decided to check out a new route. The day was misty, with a spitting rain, not a great day for exploring, but not impossible either. He often glanced at a map, even as he drove, never trusting my directions.

He might have been distracted by the radio. He loved music—all kinds, except for the trashy oldies station I liked—and he always listened to music in the car. Just last week we had sat in the car in our driveway five minutes or more, listening to “Un bel di” from Madama Butterfly, my favorite aria in the world. Ed might have figured he couldn’t do something like that in Dave’s driveway without Dave coming out and interrupting the music, so he was going farther south to double back while he listened to something he loved. 

Or, he was driving away. He had left us and was going somewhere else altogether. So unlike him as to be incomprehensible. Not the leaving, but the leaving in silence. I am running away, he told his mother. This time, no one could stop him, if he wanted to. But slipping off, hoping no one would notice, sounded like me, not Ed. He was honest, and more, he knew—didn’t he?—that he would be missed. Not only by me, but also by Jethro. He might have hurt me, figuring that I’d recover and go on, but he would have never, ever, hurt his dog like this.

I thought he was coming to the house, said Dave. That’s all I know remained unspoken between us. If Ed had confided an affair, a dream, an escape plan, Dave wasn’t going to offer it, and I didn’t ask. 

Why do I even think about this? Why ride this train of thought? 

The mail, the desk.

Copyright © Debby Mayer

Chapter 3 / Road Kill

We lived on a road where the women drove faster than the men. 

The women drove what people around here refer to as “vehicles.” These women zipped down the hill above our house and around our curve in their Chevy Blazers or their Ford Expeditions, as they ferried their kids to school or set out on errands. 

The men drove pickup trucks with elderly brake linings and stiffer steering. The speed limits were set for the pickup trucks. We learned this our first year here, when Ed got his second speeding ticket in six months and I had to take charge of drives into town for a while. Obey the limits in a vehicle, or even in a Honda hatchback like mine, and they seemed out of date, a throwback to 30 years ago, when the county was truly rural, dotted with family farms. Or even 10 years ago, when our neighbor Thompson still rode his tractor to the post office to fetch his mail. 

Borrow a friend’s truck to pick up a load of topsoil and you fit right into the pace. 

So we suspected our neighbor Sally and her red Jeep as responsible for the death of the peaceful stray cat that our neighbor Nancy had been feeding for a month. Ed imagined the old guy wandering around, or distracted by a field mouse, not having learned to be fast enough to stay out from under Sally’s wheels. Nancy buried the cat more or less where it fell by the side of the road, in a final act of charity mixed with her Scots practicality.

For Bob’s calico cat, I blame Grace in her black Chevy Blazer. 

I was driving home one Saturday morning from my twice-a-month trip to Shop Rite when I saw the cat lying in the other lane of our road, its calico coat still fluffy, dead but not yet squished. It lay across the road from Thompson’s house, and I thought it must be his. I pulled over just past his door and knocked. Thompson’s given name was Peter, but Ed and I always referred to him as Thompson or in public, Mr. Thompson. He went to school in our house, back in the day when the building was the one-room schoolhouse for this area, when his family’s farm would have been one of the three properties on this three-mile stretch of road. 

“Water was always silty,” he said about our well, trying to reassure us, but Ed, trusting no one, had a new well dug.  

Thompson had an ancient, agreeable black dog and a turquoise barn out in back of his house, so I figured he would have some cats. But he said, “Nope, must be Bob’s.” So I ran down the road a few hundred feet and up Bob’s 45-degree driveway, praying that other drivers would steer around the cat and not mangle it, and hoping Bob was home. 

Like Thompson, Bob greeted me with bewildered suspicion—this was the bachelor farmer end of our road. 

“Do you have a calico cat?” I said. “I’m afraid it’s been hit—”

Bob was out the door, past me like a shot, his tanned, moon face creased with fear. “Thank you—” he called over his shoulder.

I followed slowly, not wanting to see this. I knew Bob only slightly, to wave to as he passed in his pickup truck. We met up with him sometimes at the post office or the dump or when a local issue brought us all to a town board meeting.

When I got to the road, Thompson had scooped up the kitty in a shovel and deposited it on the shoulder of the road. He leaned on his shovel as Bob kneeled over the cat, his back to me. I left, feeling I had done my part and not wanting to see the dead cat. Driving away, it occurred to me that Bob probably thought I had hit it. 

“That was nice of you, Annie,” said Ed as we put away the groceries. 

“If my dog were lying in the road, I’d sure want someone to tell me,” I said, momentarily irritated with Ed because he would have felt the same, even more, and why couldn’t he put himself in Bob’s shoes, etc.

Years later—the field of coneflowers that Ed had planted around our new wellhead was waning but still beautiful, and even Ed was mildly optimistic about this new presidential candidate, Bill Clinton—September then, three years later, a state trooper came to the door to tell me where I might find Ed’s body, and I thanked him. 

I had been puttering around the house, feeding the dogs, not trusting my voice to talk to them. Afraid to use the phone, I still called Kathleen, who always knew what to do. I’m on my way, she said, so I sat and worried, trapped in a paroxysm of indecision about whether I should wait for bad news or go out and look for it. The officer arrived first, and I thanked him the same way Bob had thanked me—as an afterthought, appreciating an effort made and remembering not to kill the messenger.

What I saw in my mind’s eye as I put on shoes, found a jacket, was Bob’s calico cat, still clean and combed in the northbound lane of our road. And that reminded me of the red fox that Ed and I had seen just down the hill from Bob’s house one Sunday morning—one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever encountered. It lay stretched on its side in the early sun on a county road, its pelt perfect, full and rich and glowing auburn as if it had just been curried.

“Oh no,” said Ed. For as he slowed the car, a smaller fox came out of the brush and sniffed the dead one, nudging it a little. 

In the back of my mind, as Kathleen drove me through the darkening countryside toward the hospital, lay years of road kill—the dog with its head severed from its body, the half-dead deer struggling to rise—but they were still in my subconscious, waiting till I slept. After 15 years with Ed, what I thought of when he died was the calico cat and the red fox.

Copyright (c) Debby Mayer

I'd Rather Be Writing My Novel

I have a sweatshirt with that inscription. It’s white, with black typescript. That’s how old it is: from back in the day when typewriters were the technology. In my attic, I have two typewriters, which I actually moved with me to Hudson because I wasn’t ready to let them go: the pale blue Royal Futura portable my parents gave me when I graduated from junior high school, and another one, very lightweight, that I took to Costa Rica when Dan and I spent a month there. 

This was before there was a laptop on every desk. Certainly not on my desk. I was happy, then, also to have an electric typewriter; we clattered our way through at least two novels, one published, and several short stories, but I gave it away when I moved to Hudson. Fond of it as I was, it didn’t hold the same history as the Royal and was much heavier than the lightweight, which doesn’t require electricity or a battery so I save it, in case of world disaster. 

Anyway, I would, now, rather be writing my novel and so that’s what I’m going to do, and post chapters of it on this blog for you, dear reader, who might think of it as a magazine serial, albeit online. This is a dangerous thing to do and it makes me very nervous, but I think I will do it anyway. I’ll try to be consistent with characters’ names and you can tell me if I get something wrong factually. The novel remains untitled, not to mention mostly unwritten. So far the chapters are short and each has a title. I’ll run the chapters in the order that I see them, but the story goes back and forth in time. Don’t worry; just relax and enjoy it (I hope). OK, here goes, with the first chapter. 

Chapter 1 / Pot

They live in a house by the river. The Hudson River, about two hours north of the salt point, a narrow stretch that offers all the possibilities of an expanse of water along with the reassurance of another shore. The house is sturdy—brick, nothing elegant—with two big bay windows, one on either side of the front door, and it’s set just far enough above the water to avoid being swamped but close enough to be flooded with river light. Only the weather alters the light here; neither shore has changed in a hundred years.  

On this day, an afternoon in the middle of September, late in the twentieth century, the sun shines behind a thin cloud cover, casting a hazy, golden glow off the river and into the house. 

In one of the front rooms overlooking the river is a piano, a baby grand covered with a multicolored cloth woven in Cuscutlan. Every day a woman takes the cloth off the piano and plays it. Earlier this afternoon she practiced a Bach prelude in D, a ragtime song, and the second movement of Metamorphosis by Philip Glass. 

A man often listens to her play, lying on his back on the couch, legs crossed, eyes closed, in the room across the hall, or sitting in the dining room out of sight of the piano. When she finished this afternoon, he laid his cheek on the top of her head for a moment and told her, again, that he loved to hear her play. He sat next to her on the piano bench and they went over parts of what she had practiced. As a young man, he was an accomplished pianist—not professional, that wasn’t the point, but if Metamorphosis had been around then, he thinks now, it might have saved him a lot of wasted time. Now he doesn’t play it. He plays “Stardust” or other jazz songs he knows from memory, but not Metamorphosis. Not only does he think of it as hers, but also he has no interest in hearing how it would sound coming from him. 

He likes the piece though, and later when she goes out to her piano lesson he puts on the CD and sits on the broad flagstone deck at the front of the house in a metal armchair with a scalloped back. He smokes a cigarette and gazes at the river, marveling at the honeyed light and the fact that the house is theirs and he’s in it with her, not in prison or a psychiatric ward or dead half a dozen times over, but that he survived all that and now belongs here, sitting on their deck, in a comfortable lull, watching for her return. A year and a month before, she had an accident on her bicycle and was in a coma for three days. He stayed in her hospital room every minute he was allowed to, holding her hand, alternating between willing and asking that she not leave him then. She didn’t, but now in her absence he finds himself—not uneasy, but alert. 

The CD continues; the piano ripples, the river flows. A small dog trots onto the deck, a small but long-legged dog that hops onto the man’s lap in one leap. She does not curl up but sits on the man’s knee and stares in the same direction, out at the river. Pleased, the man rests his free hand on her flank. The dog belonged to the woman first, and he refers to her as his step-pet. 

A boy walks over to the porch from the house next door—for this is a row of mismatched houses built years ago on a street called Riverview. Man and boy acknowledge each other with a look, but they don’t speak. The boy pats the dog’s back, then sits on the stone steps, facing the river. He knows that if he speaks, the man will shake his head—he doesn't talk when he listens to music. 

The boy, who is 9 and called Kenny, thinks this is silly. If creepy were part of his vocabulary, he would probably use it for this music. But he finds the rest of it intriguing—the man, who has a gold tooth in the side of his mouth that flashes when he smiles, and the woman, who died but woke up again because it wasn’t her time yet, and even the dog, which has eyes like almonds and never barks. And the night before, as he played Oregontrail on the family computer, he overheard a snatch of conversation between his parents in which the man’s name, Andrew, and the words drug dealer were spoken in the same sentence, and now Kenny finds Andrew fascinating. He imagines himself asking Andrew if he is a drug dealer, if he smokes pot. That scene of Kenny’s goes no further, because he can’t believe, much as he might prefer it for the drama, that Andrew would answer yes.

He’s right. If he were to ask, Andrew would look at him directly. He would smile slightly as he shook his head and say, “No . . . why do you ask?” Kenny would shrug, his brown eyes wide, unable to convey whatever it was that made his father suspicious. 

If Andrew and Kenny could discuss this, Andrew would explain that he is not a drug dealer but a marijuana farmer—a distinction important to him—and that is why he and Annie and the dog named Chloe moved into the house by the river. 

Copyright © Debby Mayer

The Widow's Birthday

If you Google 2becomes1, the first thing you get is my blog. I’m ahead of a wedding planning service in Leeds, West Yorkshire, and a Spice Girls YouTube video.

Hoo-hah!

Nevertheless, I found out recently that in the realm of circulation—attracting more readers—I’ve done this blog thing all wrong. The problem is, no one has any reason to Google 2becomes1. Unless they’re looking for the Spice Girls or a wedding planning service, in which case they aren’t thinking about widowhood. 

If I want widows all over the world to read this blog, then I should have put widow in the blog title and I should have the word widow in the title of each post. 

I worried about this for about 24 hours before assigning it to the category of Things I Don’t Have Time to Worry about Now. 

D kindly put a link to the blog on my website (debbymayer.com), and I have a Facebook page, but I’m afraid that if I started to tweet no one would follow me and I’d be crushed, so that’s as far as I’ve gone with social media. 

In the meantime, May is my Birthday Festival Month, and as always, people sent me cards with dogs on them. Can’t imagine why . . . 

One came from Lulu . . . 

Copyright (c) Ron Schmidt
looseleashes.com

Inside, she claims to have read the books she’s sitting on. 

This one came from my brother and sister-in-law. My brother is something of a card, so to speak. 

Copyright (c) Molly & Fig
Photo copyright (c) Kim Levin
calypsocards.com

That’s all! As you were.

The Four Questions of Widowhood

It’s become a sort of Ma Nishtana of widowhood, says L, whose husband, P, died in February. The Four Questions, that is, usually asked by the youngest child at the Seder and here asked by adults who might, sometimes, know better.

L, always kind, adds quickly that no one’s out of line, no one’s mean. It’s just the impact of the queries in the raw immediate aftermath. These days, she says, she can bat them back, without feeling punched or overwhelmed.

1.How are you? 

Said in earnest tones with pleading eyes, as in please be all right. And L would sometimes think . . . relative to what?

But, paradoxically . . . 

2.What are you going to do now? What's next? Nothing mean was intended, L says again, but it sounded as if I had closed a chapter and was now ready to move on . . . not true at all, and surely going through a terminal illness with a beloved spouse is not a chapter, to be opened and closed at will.

  

3. Are you going back to Hyde Park?

(Back story: L was a longtime archival volunteer at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, NY. She had an extra security clearance. She was their top volunteer; they gave her a plaque, they took her picture, they would have sent her to Washington for more awards, more pictures, but she’s too self-effacing for such events and didn’t go.)

That’s the one that got me in those first weeks, she says. I haven’t been to HP in almost two years . . . leaving there was propelled by a crisis in P’s health . . . again, the unintended harshness, as if I could just go back to where I was before . . . as if I have not been altered . . .

4. Are you selling the house? Are you going to move?

 L offers no comment on this, and it leaves me speechless too. One, it’s none of your business. Two, unless you’re standing there with cash in hand, it’s none of your business. Three, P died on February 23; not 100 days have passed! Yes, the house is large, but it’s paid for. The widow sits in familiar surroundings, closes her eyes, takes a breath.

In fact, L doesn’t sit around much and she is starting to reach out, to think about what to do next. She decided against taking the training to be an ombudsman for nursing home residents; too close. But a book club sounds interesting, and she’s having lunch with a friend from the Roosevelt library . . .

                           *                  *                  *

It’s been a hard year so far, for men in particular. I write condolence notes in batches. Five new widows (to quote myself, we are legion). And R’s father, a widower. And M, widowed in ’07. I have no guidelines for talking to the survivors; silence often works.