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DENIAL

1

How can I be a widow? Widows wear horn-rimmed glasses and cardigan
sweaters that smell like mothballs and have crepe-paper skin and
names like Gladys or Midge and meet with their other widow friends
once a week to play pinochle. I'm only thirty-six. I just got used
to the idea of being married, only test-drove the words my
husband for three years: My husband and I, my husband and
I...after all that time being single!

As we go around the room introducing ourselves at the grief group,
my heart drums in my chest. No wonder people fear public speaking
more than death or heights or spiders. I rehearse a few lines in my
head:

My name is Sophie and I live in San Jose and my husband
died. No. My name is Sophie and my husband passed away of
Hodgkin's disease, which is a type of cancer young adults get.
Oh, but they probably already know that. This group seems up on its
diseases.

A silver-haired man whose wife also died of cancer says that now
when he gets up in the morning he doesn't have to poach his wife's
egg or run her bath, and he doesn't see the point in getting out of
bed. He weeps without making a sound, tears quivering in his eyes,
then escaping down his unshaven cheeks. He looks at the floor and
kneads his sweater in his hands, which are pink and spotted like
luncheon meat.

We sit in a circle of folding chairs in a conference room at the
hospital, everyone sipping coffee out of Styrofoam cups and hugging
their coats in their laps. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. They
are bright and cruel, exposing the group's despair: the puffy
faces, circles under the eyes like bruised fruit, dampened spirits
that no longer want to sing along with the radio. There should be a
rule for grief groups: forty-watt bulbs only.

The social worker who leads the group balances a clipboard on her
knees and takes notes. She has one tooth that is grayer than the
others, like an off-color piano key. Is it dead, hollow? I want to
leap up and tap it with my fingernail. Surely she's got dental
insurance. Why doesn't she fix that tooth?

My name is Sophie and I've joined the grief group because... well,
because I sort of did a crazy thing. I drove my Honda through our
garage door. I was coming home from work one night and- even though
my husband has been dead for three months-I honestly thought I
would run inside and tell him to turn on the radio because they
were playing an old recording of Flip Wilson, whom he just loves.
Loved. Ethan had been trying to find a copy of this skit for years,
and now here it was on the radio. If I hurried, we could tape it.
Then I had the sudden realization that my husband was gone, dead,
and the next thing I knew the car was lurching through the door.
The wood creaked and crunched as I worked the car into reverse and
backed through the splintery hole; then Flip Wilson got to the
punch line, "And maybe we have a banana for your monkey!" and the
audience roared. My shrink, Dr. Rupert, pointed out later that I
could have hurt myself or someone else and insisted I join this
group.

The Indian woman sitting next to me lost her twin sister, who was
hit and killed by a drunk driver. Her long black braids hang like
elegant tassels down the back of her pumpkin-colored sari. She says
she and her sister shared a room until they left home, and after
that they talked to each other every day on the telephone. Now she
dreams that the phone is ringing in the middle of the night. But
when she awakens the house is silent; she picks up the phone and no
one is there and she can't fall back to sleep and she's exhausted
during the day. She hears phones ringing everywhere, in the car, at
work, at the store. Now, she shudders and cups her ears with her
slender brown fingers. I want to get her number and call her so
that when she picks up someone will be on the other end.

Suddenly everyone in the circle is looking at me expectantly, and I
wish I'd had a little more time to prepare for the meeting before
racing here from work. I can feel my uncooperative curly brown hair
puffing in crazy directions, as if it wants to leave the room. On
some days it forms silky ringlets, on others Roseanne
Roseanna-danna frizz.

"My name is Sophie Stanton and my husband died of cancer three
months ago...," I stammer, tucking my fingers into the curls. My
voice sounds loud and warbly in the too bright room. I try to talk
and hold in my stomach at the same time, because my slacks are
unbuttoned under my sweater to accommodate a waistline swollen from
overmedicating with frozen waffles; I think I feel the zipper
creeping down my former size six belly. That seems like enough for
now, anyway. "Thank you," I add, not wanting to seem
unfriendly.

"Thank you, Sophie," the social worker says. Her voice is as high
and sweet as a Mouseketeer's.

Maybe later I'll tell the group how I dream about Ethan every
night. That he's still alive in the eastern standard time zone and
if I fly to New York, I can see him for another three hours. That
I'm mixing chocolate and strawberry Ensure into a muddy potion that
will restore his hemoglobin. When I wake at three or four in the
morning, my nightgown is soaked and stuck to my back and the walls
pulse around me. But by the time I get to Dr. Rupert's office, I've
sunk into a zombie calm. It's sort of like when you bring your car
into the shop and it stops making that troublesome noise.

Dr. Rupert says to keep busy. For the past three months I've been
rushing from work to various activities: a book club, a pottery
class, volunteer outings for the Audubon Society. We rescued a
flock of sandpipers on the beach. Something toxic had leaked from a
boat into the water, and the birds reared and stumbled and flapped
their wings as we scooped them into crates. I rented a Rototiller
and turned over the hard, dry earth at the very back of our yard
and planted sunflowers and cosmos that shot straight through the
September heat toward the sky. Everyone said how well I was doing,
how brave I was.

Then I drove my car through the garage door. "Screw the birds!" I
yelled at Dr. Rupert in my session that afternoon. "Screw the
books, screw the sunflowers!" He scribbled on his little pad, then
told me about this group.

There are fifteen of us in the circle. My eyes scan the sets of
feet, counting: two, four, six, eight, ten. Two, four, six, eight,
ten. Two, four, six, eight, ten. Thirty feet. Fifteen people. Hush
Puppies and Reeboks and penny loafers.

The group meets at the hospital where Ethan died. I haven't been
back since his death. But I remember everything about this place.
How Ethan lay in bed, gray and speckly as a trout. The smells of
rubbing alcohol and canned peas and souring flower arrangements.
The patients, wrapped like mummies, being wheeled on gurneys
through the halls. The monotone pages over the PA, the operator
saying things like "Code five hundred" and "Dr. So-and-So to
surgery" as calmly as if she were reporting a spill in aisle
six.

Great idea! Let's go back to the hospital once a week. You
remember the hospital.

Now everyone is looking at me again, and the social worker is
saying something.

"Pardon?" "What did your husband do, Sophie?"

I push my glasses up on my nose (a little problem with oversleeping
prevents me from wearing my contact lenses these days) and peer out
at the circle of forlorn faces. "He was a software engineer." "I
see." She adds that to her yellow pad.

How odd to reduce a person to a job title. While he didn't like
sweets, he did eat sugared cereals, I want to tell her. His feet
were goofy. A couple of those toes looked like peanuts, really. And
what a slob. You would not want to ride in his car, because it
smelled like sour milk and you'd be ankle-deep in take-out wrappers
and dirty coffee mugs. He loved Jerry Lewis movies. One movie made
him laugh so hard that beer shot out of his nose. I fight to
suppress a giggle as I think of this. Or maybe it's a scream. A
dangerous tickle lurks in the back of my throat, and I check to see
how close the door is, in case I need to escape.

"And how did you two meet?"

Unfortunately I am clear on the other side of the room from the
door, stranded in this circle of feet. A pair of laid-back
Birkenstocks scoffs at my uptight career pumps. I clear my
throat.

"While I was visiting college friends here for Thanksgiving." I
think of how Ethan sat beside me at dinner, moving someone else's
plate to another spot while the person was in the kitchen and
wedging himself in beside me. Geez, I thought. Strangely
overconfident software geek.

"How nice. Did you date from afar at first, then?" "Yes, we had a
long-distance relationship for a year, then I moved here and we
lived together for a year and then we married." "Very good."

I feel as if I could have said we were embezzlers and the social
worker would have thought that was nice.

A few of the other women are widows, too, but they're older than
me. One has white hair and glasses with lenses as big as coasters
that magnify her eyes, making them look like pale blue stones
underwater.

There's a man whose wife was killed in a car accident on Highway 1,
and his ten-year-old daughter is having her first sleep-over party
this weekend. She told him this morning that she hated him because
he didn't know what Mad Libs are, and she wanted Mad Libs at her
party, and why did her mother have to die and not him since he's so
stupid? The man's voice speeds up and his Styrofoam cup cracks as
he squeezes it. A dribble of coffee leaks onto his khakis. He tells
us about the dozen girls coming to sleep in his family room this
Saturday night and how he wants to surprise his daughter with an
ice-cream cake; he's pretty sure that's what she wants, but his
wife didn't leave any notes about the party and he's afraid to ask
his daughter because he doesn't want to upset her any more.

"I think she likes mint chocolate chip," he says, looking down, his
pink double chin folding over the stiff collar of his white
work-shirt, which looks impossibly tight.

I want to squeeze his plump hand and tell him it's going to be all
right. I know, because I was thirteen when my mother died in a car
accident on her way to work, and my father and I were left to fend
for ourselves.

That was my first experience with death, and I wished then that I'd
gotten a dress rehearsal with a distant, elderly relative. A
great-aunt Dolores whose whiskery kisses I dreaded. The only death
experience before my mother was my hamster, George, who somehow got
confused and ate all of the cedar chips in his cage. I came home
from school to find him lying still as a stuffed animal, his water
bottle dripping on his head. But there was a new hamster by that
weekend who performed all of the old hamster's tricks: running in
his wheel and fidgeting with his apple slice and popping his head
through a toilet paper roll.

"The death of a loved one isn't really something you ever get
over," the group leader explains, leaning forward in her chair. She
wears a fluffy white angora sweater with a cowl neck reaching to
her chin, so it looks as though her head is resting on a cloud.
"Instead, one morning you wake up and it's not the first thing you
think of."

While I know she's right, I can't imagine that this morning will
ever come to my house.

By now, everyone in the group is sniffling and honking, and a box
of Kleenex is making the rounds. As the gold foil box comes my way,
I pull out several tissues and hold the wad in my hand like a
bouquet. But I'm the only one in the circle who isn't crying. You
don't cry at a scary movie, do you? Dr. Rupert thinks the group
will help me move from denial to anger to bargaining to depression
to acceptance to hope to lingerie to housewares to gift wrap. But
it seems the elevator is stuck. For the past three months I've been
lodged in the staring-out- the-window-and-burning-toast stage of
grief.

Now my cuticles demand my attention. Pick at us, they
insist. Yank away. Don't mind the blood. Keep going. At
last, a use for Kleenex. As I blot at the blood, the counselor
glances my way and says you have to find ways to release your
anger.

"Keep a box of garage-sale dishes you don't care about," she
suggests. "And break them when you're upset." She says you can lay
down a blanket and throw the dishes at the garage, then roll the
whole thing up when you're done. She's enthusiastic about how easy
this is, as if she's relaying a remarkably simple recipe. It's hard
to imagine her stepping on an ant, let alone breaking a service for
twelve.

Would it be all right if I threw dishes at my former
mother-in-law?

I want to ask the counselor. Marion, Ethan's mother, calls every
other day now to insist that she come over and help me pack up
Ethan's stuff for Goodwill. I dread the thought of her snoopy paws
all over his Frank Zappa CDs and Lakers T-shirts. She'd probably
want to chuck his frayed flannel shirts, which I've started
sleeping in because they're as soft as moss and smell like Ethan.
Marion's house is as neat as a museum. The only trace of the past
is one family photo on the baby grand piano. It was taken the day
of Ethan's college graduation, and he stands between Marion and
Charlie, his father, who died a few months later of a heart attack.
Ethan's smiling and the tassel on his graduation cap is airborne,
as if it might propel him through the future. Marion looks up at
him, bursting with awe.

Marion's always needling me to get ahold of myself. "You have to
get back on the horse, dear!" she'll chirp. "Chin up, chin up!"
Get-your-act-together euphemisms that say, Look, I'm a widow,
too, and now I've lost my only son, but you don't see me driving
through my garage door or inhaling pralines and cream out of the
carton for break-fast.

I would like to bean Marion with a gravy boat.

Now, even the men are weeping. I'll bet the counselor feels she's
making real progress here. I'll bet tears are to a grief counselor
what straight teeth are to an orthodontist.

Still, dry eyes for me. Maybe I need the remedial grief
group.

Maybe there's a book, The Idiot's Guide to Grief. Or Denial for
Dummies.

Maybe this is going to be like ice-skating backward, which I never
got the hang of. Or like Girl Scouts, which I got kicked out of for
having a poor attitude. I didn't have any badges and wasn't
enthusiastic about making my coffee-can camp stove and wouldn't
wear that Patty Hearst beret while selling cookies. (It was hot and
made your ears itch!) The troop leader, Mrs. Swensen, called my
mother to say that I should find an after-school activity I was
more enthusiastic about. She didn't know that I had been working on
the cooking badge. I'd written a little report on paprika-although
it was mostly copied out of the encyclopedia-and learned to make
pie crust, rolling out the dough until it was as thin and
transparent as baby's skin. "Too thin, sweetie," my mom commented,
pointing at the huge disk of dough glued to the countertop. Anyway,
I was relieved to be free of Girl Scouts, preferring to lie on my
bed and listen to Casey Kasem's countdown, chewing banana Now and
Laters and reviewing the repeats in the daisy wallpaper pattern to
soothe my nerves. Flower, flower, stem. Flower, flower, stem.

Now, it doesn't look as if I'm ever going to get the grief badge. I
look out the window at the brittle, leafless trees, their branches
like bones in the sky.

And that's all the time we have today.

"The warmth of the body causes the patch to adhere," I explain to
the Herald health care reporter who's interviewing me by telephone
for an article he's writing. As public relations manager at
Gorgatech, I'm supposed to improve the image of a scrotal patch
product that's prescribed to men whose testosterone production is
off-kilter on account of illness. A scrotal patch! Why can't I work
on the headache product? The problem is, the patch doesn't always
stick. Just imagine some poor guy in a sales meeting looking down
and suddenly discovering a thing like a big square Band-Aid
clinging to his sock.

"For some patients the patch may not adhere completely," I admit.
"In which case it should be warmed gently with a hair dryer before
application."

The reporter snorts. He points out that another company markets a
gel. The disdain in his voice suggests he'd rather talk to a
used-car salesman than a PR flack.

"True, but the patch provides a steadier dose," I explain. I look
over the padded beige walls of my cubicle at the pockmarked ceiling
tiles. Someone's piping sleepy gas into the office. I want to curl
up on the floor with my head on my purse and just sleep.

My boss, Lara, a size two Armani jackhammer, says I have to get two
positive media stories on the patch-one local and one national-by
the end of November. That leaves about five weeks for me to redeem
myself. Lara's quick to point out that there haven't been any media
stories on our company or products since she hired me. She says
that if I don't nail the two stories, she'll slam my hands in her
desk drawer, severing several fingers, and I'll never be able to
type again. Then she'll fire me, and the mortgage company will
auction off my house. She didn't say this with words. She said it
with her eyes, with the quick cock of her head, her lips pursing
into a little red knot. If this guy writes a positive story, I'll
be halfway through my quota.

"Most patients aren't bothered by the minor inconvenience of using
the dryer," I tell the reporter, reading from my tip sheet,
"because of the benefits of the product." I imagine my mailbox at
home stuffed with property tax statements and soaring electric
bills. The problem is, I like to keep lots of lights on at night so
it seems as though people are home. "On low heat, though," I tell
him. "Never high."

The clacking of the reporter's keyboard and his intermittent
chuckles make me nervous. He wants to know if I really think guys
travel with blow dryers, if they own blow dryers. "We provide
complimentary dryers upon request." At least I think we do. I
probably shouldn't stray from the tip sheet.

The reporter says he has to go so he can meet his deadline. As I
listen to a long silence and then the dial tone, I think of how my
other English major friends have more noble jobs: one's a travel
writer in Paris, another teaches creative writing to women
prisoners. Finally I hang up the phone and get back to work on the
press release I'm composing about the patch. It's nearly lunchtime
and I've made little progress. There's a pea-size hole in my panty
hose just under the hem of my skirt, and I've taped it to my leg so
it doesn't head south.

I think of the white-haired lady in the grief group whose husband
drove her everywhere. I picture them in a Chevy Impala driving
forty-five on the freeway, two cottony heads peering over the
dashboard. I wonder if it is worse to be widowed later in life,
when you and your spouse are as attached as roots to a tree. The
cursor on my computer screen blinks: mort-gage, mort-gage,
mort-gage.

When I first moved to Silicon Valley to be with Ethan, I found a
job I liked editing university publications. I had my own office,
with ivy growing along the windows, and went home every night by
six. But at parties, other women in their thirties compared BMW
models and how many direct-reports they had at work, and I decided
I needed a higher-paying job with stock options. What kind of loser
worked at a place without stock options?

I got this job during Ethan's remission, after he'd finished his
radiation therapy and it seemed that he would be all right. This
gave me a brief surge of confidence, during which I drove down the
freeway at eighty miles an hour with the moon roof open, the wind
in my hair, old songs like "I Will Survive" and "A Girl in Trouble
(Is a Temporary Thing)" blasting on the stereo. Then the cancer
came back, this time as a tumor in Ethan's chest. It was the home
wrecker that stole my husband. I almost wished it had been another
woman-a slutty thing in a miniskirt whose tires I could have
slashed.

I hardly took any time off after Ethan died-just the three allowed
bereavement days and the two sick days I'd accrued. Coworkers
stopped by my cube and asked, "How are you doing?" I wanted to tell
them not to worry; my husband was only out of town, maybe at a
trade show. He'd be back.

Ethan's presence in our house was palpable, his loafers and
sneakers lined up in the closet and his Smithsonian and
Wired magazines still arriving every month. But all too
soon floury dust coated Ethan's shoes, and his toothbrush grew dry
and hard in the cup on the sink, and his pile of unread magazines
toppled over.

People stopped saying, "How are you doing?" and Lara started
assigning the black diamond projects again. This damn patch.

Lara whistles into my cube now. "Don't bother with a press
release," she says, looking over my shoulder at my keyboard, hands
on little StairMaster hips, blond hair pulled into a high, tight
ponytail.

"Just get a story. Call The Wall Street Journal." I cower
at the keyboard, thinking of the leak underneath my house. A few
weeks ago a plumber in coveralls crawled through a trapdoor in the
front hall closet and reported that it would cost $2,000 to repair
the leak and install a sump pump. Money I don't have right now.
"You folks need a pump," he said. "It's just me," I told him.

If you reach behind the coats and lift the slab of wood, you can
see the black puddle, which smells like iron. My car would like a
piece of my paycheck now, too. It's been making a grinding noise
and pulling to the right, as though it would rather drive through
the trees.

"Okay? Okay?" says Lara. Although she's only five-three, she
somehow manages to tower over people.

"Okay." I flip slowly through the Rolodex on my desk. Later, when I
can breathe, I'll tell her about the Herald story. She huffs a sigh
of exasperation and leaves me in a pit of Willy Loman cold-call
despair.

On my way home from work that night, I get in an accident: I'm
broadsided by the holidays. It happens when I stroll into Safeway
and see the rows of tables by the door stacked high with Halloween
candy: Milky Way, Kit Kat, Butterfinger. Halloween, Thanksgiving,
Christmas. Stop, turn, run! I try to shove my cart toward produce,
but it won't go. One stubborn wheel tugs like an undertow toward
the candy. I kick the cart and focus on my shopping list: eggs,
milk, ice cream.

I make it safely to produce, but there the pumpkins lurk. Look!
they shout. The holidays are coming! I spot the bunches of brown
corn you can hang on your door and the tiny gourds-the bumpy acne
ones and the clown-striped green-and-yellow ones. I lean into the
cart for support. How can a place called Safeway seem so
dangerous?

Last Halloween Ethan and I took Simone, the daughter of my college
girlfriend, Ruth, trick-or-treating. Ethan dressed up as Yellow
Man, his own made-up superhero. He wore a yellow T-shirt, yellow
rubber gloves, and a yellow rain poncho for a cape. He made Simone
laugh so hard, she choked on a Gummi Bear.

I remember the yellow yarn dust mop bobby-pinned to his head. I
remember his hair-the sweet, almost eggy smell of Flex shampoo.
Beautiful hair! Thick, straight, shiny, and brown. The hair I
always dreamed of having instead of my wiry curls. Sometimes a
Dennis the Menace piece stuck straight up on top of Ethan's head,
which is probably why he got carded. He was thrown together in a
boyish way-baseball caps and too-big sweatshirts, Converse sneakers
with no socks, dirt on his knees from crawling around in the
backyard looking for his Frisbee. Why did I ever sign that paper to
have him cremated? That's what he wanted. To have his ashes spread
at Half Moon Bay, where we went for our honeymoon.

It made sense at the time. But now there isn't even a grave to
visit. How can I be a widow when there's no grave? "Miss?" A clerk
clutching a bunch of basil stands beside me. "Are you okay?"

"Yes." He said miss and not ma'am. Sweet. There are streaks of
cranberry red spots on his cheeks, and his nose shines. I try to
think of something to say, a vegetable to inquire after. Instead I
blurt: "My husband died." Maybe this is the first time I've said
this. I'm not sure. I think it is. Suddenly I'm crying, that
little-kid gulping kind of crying, where you can't catch your
breath. The morning after Ethan died, I resented the mourners
collecting in my living room. How could they fall into the role and
accept Ethan's death so readily? While they wept and carried on, I
cleaned the house.

Scrubbed the shower grout with a toothbrush and Clorox. Now I'm one
of the howling mourners. But they've wrapped it up already, moved
on.

The clerk touches my elbow and leads me through the big swinging
double doors by the coolers with the chicken. He says, "Careful,"
as we walk up a narrow flight of stairs. There's a leaf of lettuce
on one stair. We shuffle into a break room and he seats me at a
long brown Formica table. He's probably only in high school or
junior college. He sets a cup of tea and a box of tissues on the
table. "You take your time," he says.

I'm suddenly embarrassed and want something to do to look busy. I
grab one of the tissues and begin cleaning my glasses. Okay, so
Ethan isn't coming back. The sympathy cards reverted to phone bills
months ago. Even telemarketers have stopped asking for him.

Oh! The tissues have lotion for sore noses, and the lenses of my
glasses now look as though they've been dunked in salad dressing.
The room is blurry. The boy is gone. The holidays are coming. Can I
stay in this break room until after New Year's?

At home the phone rings as I'm peeling off my coat. I let the
machine pick up.

"Hello? Sophie?...Dear? Are you there?" It's my mother-in-law,
Marion, who's not really comfortable around answering machines,
VCRs, and other newfangled devices. She clears her throat.

"Well, I'm calling for two reasons. One, there's a sale at
Talbot's, and I'd like to take you to buy a few new things. I
thought that might cheer you up." Marion always seems to wish I'd
shop at Talbot's, that I'd dress more like a country club wife than
a frumpy neo-hippie-frayed jeans and clogs and my husband's too big
sweaters. Once in a while Marion wears jeans, "dungarees," she
calls them, but she irons stiff creases in the legs that stand up
like little tents. "The other thing is, dear, I'd like to make a
date to come over this Sunday and pack up Ethan's things for the
Goodwill. Remember, we talked about that? I really feel it's time,
and it'll be a breeze if we work on it together...."

A breeze?
A tornado.

There are no groceries to unload, since I abandoned my cart at
Safeway. I head straight for the bedroom and crawl under our
king-size quilt, choosing to sleep in my clothes to ward off the
icy corners of the bed.

I dream that I run into Ethan in downtown San Jose by the
convention center when I'm on my way to the library. His hair
glistens like a mink coat and I want to touch it. He's with a
policeman. They explain that Ethan's been in a car accident and the
officer is trying to help him find his way home. I look down and
see the edge of Ethan's hospital gown hanging out from under his
parka, the little blue snowflakes on the fabric fluttering in the
breeze. I want to tell him that he wasn't in a car accident. He had
cancer and now he's dead. But I'm afraid I'll hurt his feelings,
like telling someone they could lose a few pounds or their clothes
don't match.

When I make it to work the next morning, the Herald is spread
across my desk. I'm supposed to read the paper every morning before
getting to work, so I'll know if the company has been in the news.
I'm also supposed to scan the national press and be up on current
health care issues so I can pitch stories relating to our
products.

Spins, pitches, angles. I always mean to do this. But mustering the
courage to leave the house every morning leaves me too enervated to
lift the pages of Time or Newsweek. I read the
health care reporter's lead for the patch story. Gentlemen,
start your hair dryers.

I can't read the next line, because there's a Post-it note stuck
over it with a note from Lara: See me.

The bum fluorescent bulb over my cube ticks and buzzes like a
cicada.

I head straight for Lara's office without taking off my coat. Lara
and I are opposites, and in our case opposites deflect. She's only
two years older than me-thirty-eight-but she's already a vice
president.

She's as polished as a lady news anchor, and her whole being seems
dry-cleaned. She meets her personal trainer at the gym every
morning at five, arrives at work by seven-thirty, eats lunch at her
desk-peeling the bread off her turkey sandwich to avoid the evils
of carbohydrates-and leaves at seven-thirty in the evening. I get
up at five in the morning, too, but only to pee, my sole workout
being a shuffle to the john. The next time I wake it's ten minutes
before I'm supposed to be at work, never mind the forty-minute,
second-gear commute and the fact that my hair is in one long snarl
like the Cowardly Lion's in The Wizard of Oz.

As I stand in the doorway to Lara's office, she's on the phone.
"Un-huh, un-huh, un-huh," she says impatiently, punching her
PalmPilot, sipping coffee out of a giant mug, and checking her
e-mail. She motions me in. I hover at the threshold. Simon says: Go
into your boss's office! I take a big step in. She yanks off her
headset and tosses it on her desk. Her expression is in the fully
upright and locked position.

For the first time, I almost wish I'd get fired. I would probably
be eligible for some kind of severance or unemployment. I could get
roommates to help pay the mortgage. We could do the Jumble together
and cook pot luck suppers. I can live off a couple weeks' salary
for a little while. I actually like chicken pot pies....

"Sit," says Lara. I sit. Good dog? Bad dog.

"We'll get a correction printed." She smiles, containing her
irritation. Her teeth are so white, they're almost transparent; I
think she used her bleaching trays a few too many nights.

"Right," I tell her, as though I've planned this all along. I
realize I'm still wearing my coat. "Did you take this reporter to
lunch?"

Lara has a real thing for taking reporters to lunch. She thinks you
can control the media with smoked turkey and fusilli salad. I shake
my head. Bottom line: The patch doesn't stick. "I'd like to be able
to tell Ed by noon that a correction will be printed tomorrow
morning."

Ed's the CEO. Turn down your teeth, I want to tell Lara. I
can't hear you. Instead, I nod. "I'll get on it." First, get me out
of this oxygen-depleted room.

Of course, this doesn't count as one of my two media placements due
by the end of November, since it didn't even mention the downsides
of the competing product. But when I get back to my cubicle, I
realize there aren't any errors in the story. It's all about tone.
It's a tone piece. Tone, voice. This reporter has found his voice!
It is the voice of an asshole.

The phone rings. I pick it up. "Hello?" a man says.

I know he'll ask a question I can't answer. I'm supposed to be able
to remember scads of facts for this job: each product name, its
generic name, its indication, whether it has a trademark or service
mark, how long it's been on the market, whether it's part of a
joint marketing and distribution agreement. Then there are the
common side effects, adverse reactions. But since Ethan died I can
barely retain a seven-digit phone number. I slide one finger over
the button on the phone, hanging up. The man will think we got
disconnected.

When the phone rings again, I let it drop into voice mail.

I open a new file on my computer and start typing what to say to
the Herald reporter about the patch story. This is a trick I employ
when I have to make a nerve-racking media call: Type my story pitch
or sound bite in all caps, then follow the script.

MUST PATCH THIS ALL UP. HA, HA, HA!

I remember when I first joined the company how I felt I was finally
making it in Silicon Valley. I stood in the coffee line chatting
with the women from marketing, all of us wearing cute but sensible
chunky black pumps, my day planner bulging, my checkbook balance
growing, my self-esteem swelling. But now I feel like an impostor
in a cubicle-like the artificial crabmeat of public relations
managers. Then there's the fact that I have to say "scrotum" to
people all the time. Is this really the color of my parachute? If
Ethan were alive, I'd call him and we'd meet for lunch. We often
did this when one of us was having trouble at work. We had a knack
for solving each other's job quandaries, maybe because our
ignorance of each other's fields made us objective. Sometimes he'd
pick me up after work and I'd be so flustered by this new job, I
was ready to quit and start a yard service. By the time we got
home, though, Ethan had me laughing and contemplating a
solution.

Of course, I can't call my husband. (But why not! What good is all
this technology if you can't call a deceased loved one? Who cares
if you can buy movie tickets and bid for antiques on-line if you
can't dial up your dead husband?)

The cursor on my computer screen pulses impatiently, and the red
voice mail light on my phone flashes. My stomach growls and my head
throbs. But I can't call my husband. Because, here's the thing: I
am a widow.

Excerpted from GOOD GRIEF © Copyright 2011 by Lolly
Winston. Reprinted with permission by Warner Books, an imprint of
Hachette Book Group USA. All rights reserved.

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