Young Widows' Supper Club

Young Widows’ Supper Club

IJ Sarlon

Copyright 2019 IJ Sarlon

Readers of this title may be especially interested in the supplemental cookbook, Young Widows’ Supper Club Cookbook, featuring recipes inspired by the characters in this book, and traditional recipes of widowhood from around the world.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

About the Author

1

It’s been six months. The laundry is all mine. His side of the bed stays made.  

At first, I forgot to breathe. I’d be at the sink filling a bowl with water, knowing it’s all I will do, that leaving the drying rice to soften will have to be enough. Or I’m at the window, watching the couple across the street dressed for church and see-sawing the stroller down the stairs. Or I’m on my back, on the bed or the floor, daring any of the small bulges along the ceiling to finally split and let the rain in. Or watering the plants. Or at the sink, willing myself to lift the sponge and run the water and finally, finally empty the sink of dishes when there it would be, suddenly, a pinch in my heart, the hot prod of life reminding me to breathe. Breathe in, I’d think, breathe out. Now you have to do that again, and keep doing it.

My mother calls. My sister calls and says, Move home. My mother-in-law calls before she comes over or asks me to come over: it’s unclear who should bring a casserole to whom. There is no word like widow for a mother who has lost her son. My mother calls again from her kitchen where she is making my favorite soup even though I’m over a thousand miles away and can’t eat it; in their bedroom my father forgets to hold the receiver away from his mouth and he clogs the phone with his breathing. It fills the silences when there is nothing more to say. And each time the sound of my phone ringing washes over and around me like a tide that is only foam, exciting as it is irritating, that it lacks the cleanse of water, of substance.

It’s been six months. Sometimes I forget to breathe. My sister calls. My mother calls. My father breathes into the other phone and listens. I answer the questions they need me to, I am what they need me to be. My mother needs to be a mom, licking over me like a cat in worry to make sure her kitten is intact. My father draws a blank. I participate. When it’s snowing there, it’s raining here. When it’s sunny here it might rain there. I picture my high school’s football field only getting greener; people I only sort of knew their dust flecks of sympathy across my online accounts.

I light a stick of incense that’s supposed to smell like camping. I twist open the blinds, then twist them closed again, not ready for the day. I avoid the mirror as I pull on some pants and a sweater. I avoid the mirror as I splash cool water on my face, tug my fingers through my tangled hair.

I open my computer. My sister appears on my screen in her maroon Saluki sweatshirt, the knob of my niece’s head blocking the –OIS in the ILLIN, and it’s to her I can say that life seems suddenly too impossibly long.

I’m watching a baby grow up, Becca says, trust me when I say it isn’t.

My niece appears on the screen, drawing her face so close to the camera that she becomes just a peach smudge on my screen. She babbles some words that my sister insists are a warm greeting to me, and also somehow signifies that she misses me. I know my sister is speaking through my niece—she misses me. My niece finally pulls back, laughs at her snot bubble, and disappears to play with her father in another room.

Becca yanks a flash of strawberry blond and locks it behind her ear—the way she does it is like a warning to the rest of her hair. If I’m talking suicide, she says, be more explicit so that she knows which number to call. I smile, and it makes me remember the time before him: when it was just Becca and me playing pirate on a swing set, when I didn’t know he was out there somewhere.

She climbed the tree and I climbed the tree by positioning a folding chair at the trunk and taking the easy way up. From there the view was new and parentless. Cereal in front of cartoons, the feel of backyard ivy snapping against our shins like we were crossing a thousand tiny finish lines. I was born missing him—I knew that when we met. That’s what I’d been doing all that time before, my life.  

I watch smoke plume from the incense and try to figure out where all the wind in my house is coming from and going to.

.

The funeral was a crowded stripe of black: that’s how I remember it. Black and the loud hollow echo like being behind a waterfall.

He was agnostic but above all practical: his mother wanted it in a church, and he gave her that. The pastor had known him growing up and spoke like he still played baseball on summer nights and collected potato bugs in a jar. It wasn’t the right time of day for the light to come in through the stained glass: Christ stayed unilluminated. Scattered in the pews came a few wimpy voices singing Come Thou Fount freckled in among the atheists.

I ate the slivered almonds I found hiding behind the salad leaves and let my mother answer for me that I was doing as well as might be expected. His brothers, unmatched in height, were pallbearers; one walked in a squat.

The church bathroom—like a middle school bathroom, dingy tile and metal doors chinked by the passage of time, and one sink always running quietly in the corner—was where I wept for the first time since he died. It was right before the funeral began. I bent at the sink to check a zit at my hairline, and as my palms pressed into the soap’s powder residue the sharp granules did their work to awaken me to my present circumstances. I bent. I arced until the middle of my back hollowed and my shoulder blades touched, and I felt this and this was what I was thinking about, the sensation, and how stupid that this was what filled my mind. As admonition I roared—my sister later told me the sound shook the fake candles in their sconces, and for a brief moment the light trembled across my dead husband’s face.

It’s been six months and still I move through mud. It takes so much to lift my arms that sometimes I picture myself wearing him—like a mad Siberian cloaked in the body of a bear, I wear my dead husband’s hands like gloves, his jaw resting on the crown of my head and his cry audible only when I look in the mirror. He is heavy and I lug him.

Each day I swallow a jumble of letters that form ON THE COUNT OF THREE I’LL BE DONE WITH YOU and HOW COULD YOU BE SO WEAK THAT YOU ACTUALLY DIED until I’m sick to my stomach, hiding those letters from the world.

.

Rita says I have to run so I run. She says I need to remind myself that I still live in a body and that the sun is a great distance from the world and comes back each day, that things are cyclical and impermanent. She says when I run I should try to run somewhere like Burke-Gillman or Discovery Park so that I will be surrounded by a green insistence on life and can watch dogs catch Frisbees as if there is nothing else. I am slow and walk most of it, weighted but not just that: when my heart beats fast and the air is cool in my lungs I feel guilty at the small euphoria. I’ll spend the rest of the run walking, reminding myself it’s only chemical, the joy of endorphins a sort of consequence that says nothing about realizing any sort of pinnacle. Like a twelve-year-old’s erection, this is involuntary and does me no real good.

A clutch of eggs, a murder of crows: there has to be a name for days like this when grouped.

.

If the funeral was a long black stripe the sickness was a haze of faded-cotton blue: the gowns. Bile-green. The medicine-pink kidney-shaped receptacle we kept handy to receive the bile. The sound of a flimsy curtain being drawn back along its metal rod. White, white doctor coats and the golf-plaid button-ups underneath. His face like a tobacco stain or ash pile, all blood needed elsewhere in the fight.

.  

And so, I run. And the color of Seattle when it rains is green, and the color of Seattle when it isn’t raining is green, and the rich earth-dank of the park lessens only slightly when I ease onto the streets where people wait in line for a table and take the lids off their to-go coffees and blow. I wonder what I look like to them: another lady of leisure taking care of her heart and thighs. Dogs wind themselves around parking meters waiting for their owners. The door to the pie shop is propped, letting out butter and sugar and rusty jukebox soul. A glint of ocean. In our neighborhood—my neighborhood—there are cigarettes in the gutter. Crowded bus stops and a formidable sense of labor. A refinery tower, defunct. Our apartment—my apartment—is a cheap and crooked paradise.

My mother sent me to college with a philodendron that I killed within a week. Can’t you hear them beg? she asked. They’ll tell you if they’re thirsty, if they miss the sun. Listen. Now the apartment is a greenhouse—this is new since he died. I remembered the philodendron and the talk with my mom and I needed to fill the apartment up with some kind of chattering life. Something to talk to, and I’m allergic to cats.

.

At work I pass the ancient Greek statue in its nippleless sadness, the tiled Assyrian pallet, the mid-nod Ushabti behind a row of scarab. The code to the elevator is B2321B, and as it makes its slow descent I watch my reflection in the stainless-steel doors. I am wide and undefined color. A ting as I pass Floor One, another when I reach the basement. The doors open to a wall of cold air; I realign my scarf and step onto the slick cement. I lean my keycard against the reader and the small light turns green.

The pile of reports climbed steadily to teetering while I was gone, a backlog guaranteed to fill my time—I’ve hardly made a dent since I’ve been back. In most ways I’m still listless. My inbox a dazzling scroll of bolded unreads: I could sit here for hours, still, unbothered and busy. My calendar’s pages not turned since, I notice, displaying the day he died upon which I had written months before that: INVENTORY. I couldn’t remember what exactly that was meant to prompt me to do.   

I’ve been back to work just a week, and each day someone tells me I should be home, and I murmur some lie about how it helps to be busy. Only to Rita do I explain how exactly it helps: to dab a century of dust from the right cornea of a Korean Buddha, to be the first in a thousand years to see that gold leaf shimmer, in that moment I am suddenly connected to the principal of adoration. And thus, to him.

I replace the water in my cup every twenty minutes, never letting it fully dinge. The Buddha is calm or indifferent, I can’t tell. He is feminine beauty and male certainty, something a curator I don’t like might say, those knots meant to represent not hair but cooling snails. The fever of enlightenment, a command of the natural world. There has been some chemical degradation—decaying oil below the gold leaf, presumably—leaving the left cheek and most of the robe naked wood. Light rot, maybe, nothing too serious. Elsewhere over the body there’s been some tenting of pigment, a nod toward total loss.

After lunch the curator comes down, the drama of her heels on the concrete. Curators, directors, most of the people upstairs are ready to greet a donor or board member at any minute. I’m safe down here in sneakers and jeans, the unwashed sweatshirts of grief, lumpily bundled against the basement’s chill. She wants to hug me—widowhood is a friendship barometer, asking everyone I know to assess our actual degree of closeness—but she settles with squeezing my shoulder. We are polite and not friends. I point out the loss of guild, but how it’s shining so much brighter where I’ve cleaned it.

Let’s let time tell its story, she says.  

I’ll clean it well, but we won’t re-leaf the bare parts. She returns to the elevator and then to her desk.

My job is to only ever walk things back from the brink of destruction and no further.

.

Each thing I touch here talks to me. Turning over the Balinese mask I see the ritual fire tap against the color, hear the chant. Or I guess at the donor: wouldn’t Shiva have come from some childless homosexual traveler, the type to chase down the pakora vendor without a hint of self-consciousness? If I’m right about these things I’m psychic, if I’m wrong I’m psychotic, for all the time I spend feeling my way through histories.

My work isn’t lonely. I hear these things the way my mother wanted me to hear plants, and I let them fill me up with noise from nine AM till five PM five days a week.

.

My lunch is the slow curl of plain noodles around a fork while I email Rita.

Three days later, sorry, but to answer your question, of course.

The elevator dings, and a security guard emerges to slowly circle the perimeter: Victorian jewelry will be delivered tomorrow, a real haul of colonial stones for me to clean and condition report. He nods at me and disappears behind a rack of Navajo blankets.

It is helping, I write, which makes me feel predictable. Can we get a drink after? Sharon’s coming by to go through his clothes and I’m going to need a drink after the double wammy of mother-in-law then Group. I tried that thing you said of baking scrambled eggs with healthy stuff in it in muffin tins for the week but I forgot to grease the tin and now it’s back to its original state, scrambled, and in a Tupperware.

I hit send and bring the noodles to my mouth. This is all I’ve wanted: bare noodles, plain rice, bread untoasted and unbuttered and rolled into balls in the palm of my hand. Gentle. Those eggs will go uneaten. She writes back almost immediately.

Yes, yes, yes to the drink. You know you don’t have to give any of his stuff away to anyone, right? Not yet or ever. It isn’t too late to call her and tell her not to come. There’s new bakeware you don’t have to grease first but I think it gives you cancer.

Rita: the only one who would never flinch saying that word to me. I bring up my work email to make sure there isn’t anything pressing. There is, but I open a new window and type BAKEWARE CANCER and then open a new window and type WHEN SHOULD I GIVE AWAY MY DEAD HUSBAND’S THINGS and then a new window and type HOW TO EAT SCRAMBLED EGGS FOR A WEEK. I scan images of strangers folding eggs into tortillas and wrapping them in foil, adding mayonnaise for improvised egg salad. I return to the email to Rita and type:

At least she knows she wants some of them—that’s more than I can say for myself. Can’t I just let other people make decisions until I see one to make? Where should we go? There’s that new thing in Ballard with the white lights wrapped around the chairs or that place in Capitol Hill we like that has Bulleit as their well.

I open a new window intending to find the perfect bar for us, but if I want to put the Buddha away today, which I do to make room for the jewelry, I have to give him time to dry. Without having so much as scanned it, I X the window with the advice about my husband’s clothing. I minimize the rest, intending to check for a message from Rita before I leave for the day, to someday soon actually parse the slurry of work emails, and to read more about bakeware on tomorrow’s lunch break.

2

Ritual died. I can’t remember how I used to do things, which makes me feel unsettled as a toddler might at random and meaningless change: I put a few mugs where the juice glasses should go, our bedspread is now on the couch. I spend a lot of time in the morning finding my keys, which I toss in a new place whenever I feel the need to set them down. The forgetfulness that comes with grief, the therapist said when I had only meant to describe these things as a way of making a joke. I was disappointed that this, too, like everything else, couldn’t be funny just yet.

Your mind is too busy making sense of the shock. You are in survival mode.

This is why I passed the mailbox when I entered my building. Why I made it up the stairs and through the door, emptied myself of keys and spare change and jacket and bra, and was halfway into my pajamas before I remembered to check the mail. I am in shock. I am in survival mode. I am grieving. I am shock. I am grieving. I am survival, only. And then the few wasted minutes deciding which way to assemble myself: whether to reclaim what I’d worn today or fully commit to disassembly and add the stained sweatshirt to my baggy, over-committed leggings. I choose the latter, find my keys on the finger of a dragon tree, and pull the door until it clicks behind me.

The hallway does not allow for the reek of Korean kimchi from the lady down the hall, nor for the scent of dog after rain though there are plenty of those, too: it is antiseptic, the bleach or ammonia that as I child I associated with the dentist, more lately the hospital. Same fear, either way, of the unknown, of pain. I walk quickly, my breath shallow and uninviting as I will myself into the art deco atrium of the lobby, which is scentless or, if anything, smells like the cool nothing of marble and glass.

Constance is there, trying all angles of her eyeglasses to find the right connection between lock and key in her narrow brass mailbox. Her hair is an unfussy grey, usually in whatever shape the wind or rain has just beaten it into. Somewhere beneath her electric pashmina and cotton dress and the hint of leggings at her ankles is a thin, straight-spined body; I caught a glimpse of the outline when we met outside on our way to or from somewhere, when the wind sucked her clothes back. It surprised me that she was still shaped like a woman. Her face is a gather of years, of a life lived richly without regard for sunscreen or cigarettes. I’m sure