Caren Lissner - Starting From Square Two

Another thing about Marc was that he was big on looking after his friends. He consistently went out of his way to help them move, to study, to work on projects. A year after graduation, his best friend, the baby-faced Craig, was in Illinois at graduate school teaching economics to freshmen. Marc and Gert took a road trip out there. Marc forced Craig to bring them to one of his classrooms to give them a mock lesson, so they could see exactly how Craig taught his students. Marc delighted in other people’s fancies. But at the end of the day, when he needed someone to rest his head against, it was Gert. Heading back in the car, she would look over at him, his Red Sox baseball cap hovering over his tired eyes, and she’d squeeze his right shoulder.

Now she would never go to the steakhouse in Pennsylvania. She’d never get to reach over and squeeze his shoulder while he was driving. And she had no reason to head up to Boston to visit the warm house with the fireplace and the huge slurpy couches.

“It’s like you don’t just lose him,” said Brenda, the nurse, at the support group that weekend. “You lose his whole family. You see them at services and memorials right after, but if you didn’t have a baby with him, your in-laws stop needing to see you. It ends up being an exchange of cards on holidays. It’s like, for years they cared about you, but it was only because you were part of him.”

“We never had kids,” Gert said. “I always think that if we’d had kids, I’d still hear from them all the time. They’d be inviting me up there or coming down to visit. Now they act like we were never even related in the first place.”

Arden looked angry. “We have this society that makes you feel like it’s okay to defer everything,” she said. “I have a friend who’d been living with her boyfriend for almost six years. They lost him in the Pentagon, and the two of them hadn’t even gotten engaged yet. Six years. Now the relationship counts for nothing in anyone’s eyes. She feels like she doesn’t even have a right to the memories.”

Gert thought again of Chase, who’d lost her fiancé in the towers. Chase hadn’t been there in six weeks now. Gert wanted to ask Brenda if she had her contact number, so she could make sure Chase was okay. But she knew she probably wouldn’t ask.

“You put things off, and poof, you wish you hadn’t waited so long,” Michele said. “But I have friends who got married and had their kids young, and they always tell me they think they gave up their youth too soon. You never know what’s going to happen. You just have to do what you feel is right and not sit around having regrets.”

Stephanie, who was a personal trainer, said, “What about my biological clock? I’m thirty-five, and I still can’t imagine when I’ll be psychologically ready to date again. If I start two years from now, and I meet someone, it will probably be at least a year or two before we get married. By then I’ll be thirty-eight. Too old to have kids. For the rest of my life.”

“Honey, you can have kids these days till you’re fifty,” Brenda said.

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“That’s a medical falsehood perpetuated by the media.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. It’s…”

Gert wasn’t in the mood for this debate. Her gaze moved to the wall of the community center where the meetings were held. There were finger paintings all over it from the daycare program that was in the building. One of the paintings said in round, childish letters, “TODD.” Gert smiled, thinking Todd was actually a little innocent and childlike.

She thought of telling the women in the group about going out with him. But she was feeling guilty about it. The women always talked about how they couldn’t imagine dating someone again. What right did she have to have dinner with a man—and what right did she have to actually enjoy it?

“Having a baby alone just isn’t something I’m going to do,” Arden said.

Everyone else got quiet.

Gert found the silence uncomfortable.

“Well, let’s move on,” Brenda said. “What else happened this week?”

Gert saw no volunteers among the ten women there. She started reluctantly. “I had dinner with someone,” she said. “On Saturday.”

The other women leaned closer. “A man?” Brenda asked. Gert nodded. “Your first date since…?”

“Yes,” Gert said. “But it wasn’t really a date. Just a friendly dinner. I met him when I was out with friends, and he asked me to dinner, and I figured I might as well try, just to see what it was like.”

“And how was it?”

She shrugged. “His name’s Todd. He seemed nice….”

“But he’s not your husband,” Brenda said.

“No,” Gert said, shaking her head. “No one could be. And he’s very different from Marc. But in a way, I was glad. If he was anything like him I’d have felt like I was cheating.”

“Don’t ever feel like that,” Brenda said. “Don’t any of you feel like that.”

“There’s at least room in our hearts for new friends,” Michele said.

“Are you going to see him again?” Leslie asked.

“I think so,” Gert said. “It’s strange, but I feel like I want to learn more about him. But just last week we were all saying how we couldn’t possibly imagine dating again. What right do I have to go out with anyone when it’s only been a year and a half?”

They all got quiet.

“I have a confession,” Michele said. “I know I said I couldn’t date for years. But sometimes, when I’m in bed at night, I miss being held.”

“I do, too,” Leslie said.

“It’s odd,” Brenda said. “I think the better your relationship was with your husband, the more you probably will need to find that closeness again. It’s just that the idea of being with a stranger repulses us. What we really want is to be with our husbands. But it’s impossible. Right now, a fantasy seems better than a real person.”

“When are you going to see him again?” Arden asked.

“Next weekend,” Gert said.

“Those friends you mention,” Brenda said, “make sure you don’t let their notions of dating and five-nights-a-week partying push you. If you need four months to get to know this guy, to get to the point when you so much as want to kiss him, you take four months. Gert has to do what’s right for Gert.”

Gert smiled. Brenda often lapsed into social worker–speak.

“Are those girls younger than you?” Michele asked. “When you talk about them, they seem like it.”

“No,” Gert said. “But sometimes, I feel about five years older than them.”

“It’s not that you’re five years older,” Arden said. “It’s that they’re emotionally five years younger than you. If you’re between twenty-five and thirty-five and you’ve never been married, you get to subtract five years from your age. So your friends are twenty-three or twenty-four. And if you have children before you’re thirty-five, you add five years to your age.”

“What if you’re a widow?” Brenda asked.

“You add a hundred,” someone said, and all the women laughed.

At work, someone had left a card on Gert’s desk. It was a congratulations card for a guy who worked on a different floor. Gert was supposed to put ten dollars in it for a wedding gift.

Gert hated these cards. Hallie had told her once that in China, it was the opposite. In China, if something great happened to you, you took everyone else in the office out to dinner; they didn’t take you. That made sense—after all, you were the lucky one. You were the one who was getting married or promoted.

Marrying the person you loved was not a struggle. The struggle was being able to keep going after you’d lost yours, or not finding one at all. The people who needed cards were those who weren’t engaged, those who weren’t about to have a baby—those who were miserable, single, alone.