Husband Stealer
I have a vivid memory from the year right after Anson died. I was returning home from a trip, riding in the airport shuttle back to long-term parking. The man next to me was leafing through a folder of papers with the Duke University logo at the top. My brother-in-law had recently started teaching at Duke, so I asked my seat mate if he worked there. “No,” he said, “I’m writing a proposal for them for my business. We moved down to Durham a few years ago. We really like it, my whole family. We had been in New England for years, and it’s nice and warm down there.”
After a few pleasantries, our conversation ended–typical traveler talk. But what struck me and stays with me was the repetition of “we” so clearly and almost awkwardly. It’s a conversation I think of often as I try to decipher the responses of men I interact with. It’s as if, when a man sees a woman without a wedding ring, alarm bells go off and they become deer in the headlights.
In one of my favorite documentaries, “The Science of Sex Appeal,” psychologist Martie Haselton refers to studies showing that men tend to overestimate women’s interest in them, unconsciously trying to avoid a missed mating opportunity. Understanding this evoltionary tendency is all well and good intellectually, but the real-time effect of this behavior is…..bewildering, at best, and downright hurtful at worst.
On the bewildering side, there is the young man who posted a picture of a cougar on his Facebook news feed after I complimented his sense of humor. Seriously? Did he honestly think that one compliment was a sign of my desire to ravage him with my deadly claws?
On the hurtful side, there is just the unending feeling of loneliness that comes from striking up a conversation with an adult male and having the “we” shield thrown up immediately. Or the completely out of context comments about how lucky they are to be married to such a wonderful woman. Then there is the response of women, who seem to think that any conversation with their husband is a sign that I’m going to break apart their marriage. I am not that woman. Why do I need to say that so often? There are men out there who want to cheat– trust me, I’ve met my fair share. I wish all of the married men who have propositioned me could testify publically to my refusal to be that woman.
Widows are human, and as humans, we need social contact. We need to talk to people– male and female. We also need to know we are still attractive. And we are capable of limiting it to just that– just the acknowledgement that we are still interesting to other people. Relax, ladies and gentlemen. I’m not a husband stealer.
Silver
I sat down today to look at my silver. I have two sets now– my mother’s tarnished silver, which I inherited last year when she died, and my mother-in-law’s set, which she gave me after her daughter and son said they didn’t want it. My in-laws are moving from their home of more than 30 years, passing on and throwing away bits and pieces of their past.
My mother’s set is incomplete and very plain– “Hannah Hull” is the style, and like my mother was, it is very practical and unadorned. It came in a beautiful dark, wooden box with my mother’s initials– JNH–in felt on the inside of the lid. My mother-in-law’s set is more delicate and has fine ornamentation– nothing ostentatious– and I feel it is more like me. The box it comes in is cleanly organized, but the bottom is falling out, and my plan was to switch the two sets so that my mother-in-law’s set is in my mother’s box.
The flimsy box has a pamphlet in it from the early 50’s when my mother-in-law got married. “The Care of Your Silver” from the International Silver Company of Meriden, Connecticut. It is basically an advertisement for International Silver Polish. There is also a small card from some relatives– “A Wedding Gift” with a blonde bride in flowing white half obscuring the groom’s face. A small silver insert shows through the cut-out church window and the inside reads: “To shower you with wishes / For happy years together, / And sunshine always in your hearts / No matter what the weather!”
It is raining today. It has been raining since last night, and it is cool for July 4th. The room I sit in is filled with the few possessions I brought back from my mother’s apartment in New Mexico a year and a half ago. I have a picture of her and my dad on their wedding day framed and sitting on the dresser here. They look like teenagers to me in that picture, so young and so thin and so innocent. This room also holds the files of my late husband– the paperwork he had in his apartment when he died. His ashes still sit in the box from the funeral home.
I look at the wedding card and the silver in my mother-in-law’s box and I look at my mother’s plain and sturdy silver on the floor next to it, and I start to cry. I wonder if those women– both married in the fifties– felt that the weight and richness of this silver would sustain their marriages? The idea of marriage seems so simple in these images from the 50’s– get a husband, get a set of silver, have children– and everything else will fall into place! My husband and I shunned these kinds of gifts when we were getting married– saw them as materialistic and unnecessary. But how many times have I wished I had this nice heavy silverware for my table! It seems so solid and long-lasting– is that what my marriage lacked? Tradition? Stability?
My mother, with her no-nonsense approach to life, left my father when I was thirteen, thumbing her nose at the 1950’s era model of family life and insisting that women don’t need a man in their lives to be happy. For her, the weight of the silver was a burden that connected her to her past– the snobby east coast, Vassar, and her parents’ expectations. She lived alone in New Mexico for twenty years, painting the landscape and smoking like a chimney until her silver became tarnished from lack of use and the box it came in became sticky from the bacon-greased, cigarette smoky air of her apartment.
My mother-in-law’s silver is clean and polished. We used it at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the 20 years she hosted them. How can she part with it? I do know that her heart was not always filled with sunshine in the almost 60 years she has been married. But the silver served her well. That I cannot deny. She has taught me more about love than anyone else in my life.
And did my mother’s austerity serve her well? I think I am crying because I do not believe it did. I see my mother’s plain silver and remember her eyes rolling at other people’s frivolity. Then I remember her cramped and dirty apartment, so far from the people who loved her, and I wish, instead, that she had used the silver, polished it, laid it out on the table and invited us in for dinner. She was not meant to be June Cleaver, that I know. But I wish she had not shut herself away in a box.
So, I will take her silver out of the box and I will put my mother-in-laws silver in. I will take my mother’s no-nonsense grit and strength as I navigate my own years of loneliness since my husband’s death. I will take my mother-in-law’s delicate, well-used silver and I will use it– that’s all– just USE it, to serve my children a meal when they are home. To share food with good friends. To be with people with love.
Fuddy-duddy
Being a 49 year-old high school teacher has its pluses and minuses. The kids do keep me young– they are funny and energetic and curious– most of them. But as I age and go through the hard knocks of life, they never get more than four years older. My students are always between the ages of 14 and 18– I’m always swimming in the same adolescent stage– the crucible of conformity, identity formation, and burgeoning sexuality. The older I get, the further away I get from their hormonal, anxious lives.
When I first started teaching, I felt young. I was 32 and I had a 3 year-old son, a 6 year-old daughter, and a teenage step-daughter. I remember supervising detention and listening to the high school kids talk about their plans and dreams and complaints about life. One young man was talking about his dream to open up a clothing store that would sell only “cool” clothes. “Like what?” I asked. And he said “Nothing these people are wearing.” I looked around and saw a room full of denim and sweatshirts, and said “What do you mean? You’re all dressed in jeans.” He rolled his eyes, pointed to the person next to him, and said “You don’t get it. My pants are NOTHING like his. Look at the hem on his pants!” Then he mumbled to himself, “Old people, jeez…” I realized at that point that aging is not a choice; no one wakes up one day and says, “I’m going to be a fuddy-duddy from now on!” The young people come up underneath you and push you into that status. They think they’ve invented the world, and your insistence that you will never get old means nothing to them. Our music, the rebellious rock-and-roll that made Tipper Gore’s hair stand on end? They’ve never heard of it, or they think it’s “boring.” The dancing that made parents in the fifties keep their daughters home at night? Child’s play.
That first year of teaching, a student wrote an article for the newspaper in which she used the term “clueless adults.” I had to chuckle in a stupefied way– clueless? Really? Had this high school junior ever applied for a mortgage? Bought a car? Paid her taxes? Now, at the age of 49, the idea that I’m “clueless” seems even more sadly comical. I’ve been through a 21-year marriage with a man who struggled with many demons. I’ve raised two children and watched them learn to crawl and walk and face the world, fail, get back up, cry, and move on. I’ve seen a man broken by love for his daughter and I’ve seen people being horribly mean to the ones who love them the most. Nasty politicians, hypocrisy, senseless wars.
I chaperoned the prom last weekend, and I couldn’t stay in the room with the dancers because their dance moves were so sexually suggestive. My colleague told me “You’re getting old!” and I agree that I am. But why is that statement tinged with a warning? I don’t want to get old and obsolete. I want to stay in tune with the world and its changes. But getting older is not simply a series of losses. I have gained such insight from what I have been through.
I see subtlety and nuance in the world that I would never have seen in my twenties. As I search for “true love” since my husband’s death, I am surprised by the way my concept of love has changed. I love my husband in spite of his demons and in spite of the pain we went through together. I love his parents and sister and brother. I love the men who dance with me, who are willing to share an embrace with me on the dance floor even though I am not young, not their spouse, not the best dancer in the world. I love the women I tutor who endure hardships that Americans do not understand. I love my father with all his eccentricities, and I forgive him for his human frailties.
The smallest gestures of kindness can have such deep meaning– a thank you, the holding of a door. The smallest details can be masterpieces of beauty– the fog on the river in the morning as I drive to work and the perfect V of ducks parting the water.
And then there’s sex. After 21 years of marriage, sex took on many different meanings. It was passionate, athletic, fun, and sweaty, but it was also tender, deeply loving, and vulnerable. As a non-religious person, I found that my sexual relationship with my husband was the closest to a spiritual experience I had ever had– a feeling of unity with something greater than myself and the most profound sharing of love I had witnessed. To make love to someone who is attractive and loving, who makes you laugh and who shares in life’s joys– that is easy. To continue to make love to a person with whom you fight, argue, cry over, who frustrates you, who knows how to push your buttons– to continue to LOVE that person–that takes great strength and maturity. Our sex life was a reflection of all that.
One year, when I taught the novel Catcher in the Rye, we discussed the scene in which Holden sees a couple in another building spitting water on each other. Holden says “I really don’t understand sex,” and a young man in my class said “How can he not understand sex? What is there to understand?” I just shook my head. These are the things I want so badly to explain to my students but just can’t. I said to him “Come see me in 15 years and tell me what you think.” Watching my students “grinding” on the dance floor makes me feel the same way. They lack subtlety; there’s so much they have to learn about intimacy and tenderness, about fog on the river, about love.
These are the appreciations of life that only experience and age can impart. This richness is the prize for aging. It is not flashy, it is not loud. It would not make a good music video for Beyonce. But I would never trade it for youth.
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