Sweet & Crazy - Hardcover

Patty Dann is the author of Mermaids, which was turned into a film starring Cher and Winona Ryder; and of The Baby Boat: A Memoir of Adoption. She lives in Manhattan with her son.

AUGUST 2001
The cricket hot night my husband died, my four year-old son, Pete, looked at me and said, "Now you're a window," and I did not correct the child. I was thirty-nine years old and worked at the local YMCA, which meant I gave workshops on how to record your life story. Pete said I taught "scribble scrabble." My students were butchers and bakers and confused people. I also worked in the library at the community college where Ed taught world history. The night Ed died, I stayed up weeping and ironing his shirts.

We lived in a little yellow house in Ash Creek, Ohio. Ash Creek is not a suburb of anywhere. It's a mostly white town, but the two gas stations and cleaners and pizza place were owned by Indians from India. There's an air force base not too far away. I'm a homing pigeon. I grew up in Ash Creek, went one hundred miles west to college, and I came back.

***
I'm not quite sure what to do with this widow thing. Some people turn away when they see us on the street, and others give Pete and me a look that makes me feel like we're supposed to be inside with the shades down.

Last night Pete lay in bed, kicking his sheep and-donkey sheets off him, and said, "Why don't you get to be a baby twice?" I lay next to him for a while after he fell asleep. Then I got up and threw a pair of my husband's old shoes in the garbage.

This morning when Pete saw the shoes in the garbage, he pulled them out, brushed off the eggshells, and said, "Don't you ever throw anything away of Daddy's ever." He dragged a chair to Ed's closet and yanked down all of Ed's shirts, then hauled them to his own closet and hung them on the pole next to his little shirts on little hangers.

One of my students confided to me, "I stopped lying when I turned seventy." I feel like I'm seventy. My aunt Barbara says loss doesn't make you stronger like they tell you in books. She says loss makes you weaker. I wouldn't say that, just that when I walk down the street, I'm stunned there are so many people who are alive.

Ed died at five thirty in the afternoon. Pete and I were sitting on the couch watching a Blue's Clues video from the library. The tape was a little wobbly. I got up to adjust the tracking, and then I went in to check on Ed. He lay there still as a board in his hospital bed. I ran in to get Pete. "Daddy is going to stop breathing soon," I said.

"How do you know?" said Pete.

"Come here." I held out my hand.

"Don't rewind it," said Pete, pointing to the video.

We went into the room holding hands, and Pete climbed onto his father's bed. He climbed up on Ed and kissed his face. I held Ed's hand, and he stopped breathing.

"He stopped breathing," I whispered.

Pete didn't look at me. He just kept kissing Ed's face and said solemnly, "I guess you won't be having any more birthday parties."

I called the funeral home, and they said, "We can be right over, ma'am."

"No, please," I said. Now a thunderstorm was crashing outside. "No, please give us two hours."

I cannot account exactly for those two hours. There was a time in the Middle Ages when the king decided to change the calendar and people marched around with signs that said, "Give us back our twelve days." I had the sense that someone had altered time like that in those two hours. I do know that Pete kept doing cartwheels, over and over.

Two men in suits and hats, who appeared to be from the 1950s, showed up, shaking rain off themselves. Pete kept saying to them, "How are you going to fit Daddy out the door?" but they did not respond.

We have a narrow front door and back door, and the hallway hooks around so that we had to return a refrigerator we'd ordered, because it was too big.

They told us to leave the room while they wrapped him up, and then they put him on what looked like a hospital gurney and wheeled him out. They tipped him up around the corner. They managed. Pete and I stood out in the pouring rain as the men in suits placed Ed in the back of a black van.

Our neighbor Thomas came out and stood on his porch with a coffee cup in his hand. He has prematurely white hair and blue eyes and was wearing muslin clothes because he works as a cooper at Hill House, the eighteenth century colonial restoration outside of town. When Ed was fading, Thomas used to leave things on our porch. Once he left a wooden bowl he'd made full of fresh strawberries. Another time he left a small burlap bag of a colonial pancake mix. Unfortunately one of the dogs from down the street chewed on the pancake mix in the night.

After the men from the funeral home left, I picked up Pete and carried him back inside. He was a big kid, but there he was in my arms, like a baby. I made peanut butter sandwiches, and we watched the rest of the Blue's Clues video.

"Now we're two," said Pete.

"What?"

"Now we're two people," he said.

***

I'm Jewish, which means that for two thousand years my family always married Jews, until I married Ed, who was the son of a Mennonite minister. It does not mean that I'm religious. One year I did make a messily braided challah bread for the annual bake sale at the library. Although I heard several people walk by it displayed on the table filled with Rice Krispies treats and pumpkin bread and say, "Isn't that interesting," I ended up taking it home for Ed and myself at the end of the day. It means that every so often when I look out the front window, I imagine I'm Anne Frank, but it doesn't mean I know Hebrew or am opposed to Christmas trees. In my case, it means I have olive skin and big breasts, even though I'm only a little over five feet tall.

My father died soon after Pete was born. He was a pharmacist in town and my mother was a homemaker. Every time my father met someone new he'd say, "My bride's so neat. When I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, she makes the bed." He always called her his bride. She died ten months later, the day after Pete began to walk.

People kept bringing food after Ed's funeral. Casseroles were stacked on top of the refrigerator. It looked like I was going to have a Tupperware party. Each night I stood at the sink wolfing down different desserts: a cheesecake, a cherry pie, gooey chocolate chip cookies. And when I couldn't stand it anymore, I threw platefuls out the back door for the birds and the raccoons.
Pete said, "When will everything be regular?"

Last night a telemarketer called and Pete answered the phone, "ThisisPetewhoisthisplease?" he says in one breath. I believe it was a telemarketer, because he replied, "No, he died."

When we knew Ed was going to die, we went to the cemetery and checked it out. We left Pete with a sitter for the afternoon. The man who showed us around held a transistor radio to his ear and was listening to a Reds game as he showed us around.

"Do you want a two plot or a four plot, or a six-pack?"

I grabbed Ed's hand tightly and said, "We'll just get a double for now."

"Now, do you want to be buried foot to foot or head to head?"

That afternoon we went to a coffee shop and ordered cheeseburgers for both of us, shared a chocolate milk shake, then went home and made love before I went to pick up Pete.
I've been doing widow research at the library. In India, Hindu women really are supposed to "manifest inconsolable grief for the rest of their lives" after their husbands die. In Swaziland, widows wear a heavy saddle of twisted grass. Here, people came to the door with pesto sauce and gift certificates for massages, but sometimes I feel like I'm wearing a heavy saddle of twisted grass.

In a town in Ireland, widows wear black for one year and then lavender for another after their husbands die. That might solve my clothes dilemma, because I have never quite gotten the hang of it. I would like a uniform of some kind, although lavender might make me look washed out.

Pete got into bed with me this morning and said, "I want to be a veterinarian. We could keep the animals in my room in baskets. But mainly I want a pig."

"A pig."

"I want a real pig to pick me up from school."

"But he couldn't carry your lunch box the way I do while you play on the playground."

"He could just hook it on his ear," said Pete solemnly.
Copyright 2003 by Patty Dann