Rich died in June. Now here it is midsummer. She gets out of bed early and washes herself and dresses in anything that comes to hand. But she does dress and wash, and she brushes her teeth and combs her hair, which has grown back decently, gray around her face and dark at the back, the way it was before. She puts on lipstick and pencils her eyebrows, which are now very scanty, and out of her lifelong respect for a narrow waist and moderate hips she checks on the achievements she has made in that direction, though she knows that the proper word for all parts of her now might be “scrawny.”
She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herbal tea that is now her substitute for coffee. At one time, she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it was really just the large warm mug she wanted in her hands, that was the aid to thought or whatever it was she practiced through the procession of hours, or of days.
This was Rich’s house. He’d bought it when he was with his first wife, Bett. It had been intended as a weekend place, closed up in the winter. Two tiny bedrooms, a lean-to kitchen, half a mile from the village. But soon Rich had begun working on it, learning carpentry, building a wing for two new bedrooms and a bathroom and another wing for his study, turning the original house into an open-plan living room, dining room, kitchen. Bett had become interested; she’d claimed in the beginning not to understand why he’d bought such a dump, but practical improvements always engaged her, and she bought matching carpenter’s aprons. She’d needed something to become involved in, having finished and published the cookbook that had occupied her for several years. They’d had no children.
And at the same time that Bett had been busy telling people that she’d found her role in life as a carpenter’s helper, and that it had brought her and Rich much closer, Rich had been falling in love with Nita. She’d worked in the registrar’s office of the university where he taught medieval literature. The first time they’d made love was amid the shavings and sawn wood of what was to become the house’s central room with its arched ceiling, on a weekend when Bett had stayed in the city. Nita had left her sunglasses behind—not on purpose, though Bett, who never forgot anything, could not believe that. The usual ruckus followed, trite and painful, and ended with Bett going off to California, then Arizona, Nita quitting her job at the suggestion of the registrar, and Rich missing out on becoming dean of arts. He took early retirement, sold the city house. Nita did not inherit the smaller carpenter’s apron, but she read her books cheerfully in the midst of construction and disorder, made rudimentary dinners on a hot plate, and went for long exploratory walks, coming back with ragged bouquets of tiger lilies and wild carrot, which she stuffed into empty paint cans. Later, when she and Rich had settled down, she felt somewhat embarrassed to think how readily she had played the younger woman, the happy home-wrecker, the lissome, laughing, tripping ingénue. She was really a rather serious, physically awkward, self-conscious woman, who could recite not just the kings but the queens of England, and knew the Thirty Years’ War backward, but was shy about dancing in front of people and would never learn, as Bett had, to get up on a stepladder.
The house had a row of cedars on one side and a railway embankment on the other. The railway traffic had never amounted to much, and by now there were only a couple of trains a month. Weeds were lavish between the tracks. One time, when she was on the verge of menopause, Nita had teased Rich into making love up there—not on the ties, of course, but on the narrow grass verge beside them—and they had climbed down inordinately pleased with themselves.
She thought carefully, every morning when she first took her seat, of the places where Rich was not. He was not in the smaller bathroom, where his shaving things still were, along with the prescription pills for various troublesome but not serious ailments which he’d refused to throw out. Nor was he in the bedroom, which she had just tidied and left. Not in the larger bathroom, which he had entered only to take tub baths. Or in the kitchen, which had become mostly his domain in the last year. He was of course not out on the half-scraped deck, ready to peer jokingly in the window—through which she might, in earlier days, have pretended to be alarmed at the sight of a peeping tom.
Or in the study. That was where, of all places, his absence had to be most often verified. At first, she had found it necessary to go to the door and open it and stand there, surveying the piles of paper, the moribund computer, the overflowing files, the books lying open or face down, as well as crowded on the shelves. Now she could manage just by picturing these things.
One of these days, she would have to enter the room. She thought of it as invading. She would have to invade her dead husband’s mind. This was one possibility that she had never considered. Rich had seemed to her such a tower of efficiency and competence, so vigorous and firm a presence that she had always believed, quite unreasonably, that he would survive her. Then, in the last year, this had become not a foolish belief at all but in both their minds, she thought, a certainty.
She would deal with the cellar first. It really was a cellar, not a basement. Planks made walkways over the dirt floor, and the small high windows were hung with dirty cobwebs. There was nothing down there that she ever needed. Just Rich’s half-filled paint tins, boards of various lengths, tools that were either usable or ready to be discarded. She had opened the door and gone down the steps just once since Rich had died, to see that no lights had been left on, and to assure herself that the fuse switches were there, with labels written beside them to tell her which controlled what. When she came up, she had bolted the door as usual, on the kitchen side. Rich used to laugh about that habit of hers, asking what she thought might get in, through the stone walls and elf-size windows, to menace them.
Nevertheless, the cellar would be easier to start on; it would be a hundred times easier than the study.
She did make up the bed and tidy her own little messes in the kitchen or the bathroom, but in general the impulse to take on any wholesale sweep of housecleaning was beyond her. She could barely throw out a twisted paper clip or a fridge magnet that had lost its attraction, let alone the dish of Irish coins that she and Rich had brought home from a trip fifteen years ago. Everything seemed to have acquired its own peculiar heft and strangeness.
Carol or Virgie phoned every day, usually toward supper-time, when they must have thought her solitude was least bearable. She told them that she was O.K.; she would come out of her lair soon. She just needed this time to think and read. And eat and sleep.
It was true, too, except for the part about reading. She sat in her chair surrounded by her books without opening one of them. She had always been such a reader—that was one reason, Rich had said, that she was the right woman for him; she could sit and read and let him alone—but now she couldn’t stick to it for even half a page
She hadn’t been just a once-through reader, either. “The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “The Wings of the Dove,” “The Magic Mountain,” over and over. She would pick one up, planning to read that one special passage, and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction, too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She once might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But real life had become too important to argue about.
And now, most strangely, all that was gone. Not just with Rich’s death but with her own immersion in illness. She had thought that the change was temporary and the magic of reading would reappear once she was off certain drugs and exhausting treatments.
But apparently not.
Sometimes she tried to explain why, to an imaginary inquisitor.
“I got too busy.”
“So everybody says. Doing what?”
“Too busy paying attention.”
“To what?”
“I mean thinking.”
“What about?”
“Never mind.”