Epilogue by Anne Roiphe Read Free Book Online Page B

book. This bird has an unlovely voice, his call is loud and grating but his mate appears from the other side of the garden and sits on the branch nearby. Evolution has programmed her to admire his voice. H.’s voice when he spoke to patients was gentle and soothing. You could lean on that voice, you could depend on that voice. It was a big voice although he was not a big man. Under the words lay a melody, a promising harmony.
    People come from time to time to see the house, potential buyers. When they come I leave and go sit in my car in the parking lot near the beach. I inhale the salt smell. I watch the mothers carrying wet and sandy children in

    their arms. I note their buckets and shovels and towels and f lip-flops and beach chairs. I see the teenagers f lirting with each other near the ice cream truck. I let my arm hang out the window and later I see that my elbow has turned red. The tip of my ear is also burned.
    No one makes an offer. The market is bad, there are fourteen houses for sale within a four-block radius. I worry I won’t be able to sell the house. I worry I will be able to sell the house. I worry that I will lose my friends who live nearby. I will lose some of them. But I know from experience that with change other people will cross my path, other people with stories and bad habits and children who do or do not bring them pride.
    The broker comes and goes and replaces his sign with a larger one. We are at the end of a dead-end street. No one sees his sign. The days are gold and the light is warm and silken. I should sit on the patio at my table where the umbrella with a print of roses going round will protect me from skin cancer while I watch the bees swarm and the black crows hang in the branches above. But I don’t go into the garden. Instead I sit on my bed. I wait until a decent hour to call my daughters. I also tell myself old stories. I embroider them with slight untruths. I wallow. This is unacceptable.
    A friend asks me, “Are you used to your new status yet?” What does this mean? I would check the box that says widow if presented a form at a doctor’s office or the Department of Motor Vehicles. I no longer have a joint bank account. The joint is gone. I have changed our credit cards into my name. But status? Could it be true that a woman without a man is always at the edge of appearing

    as a figure of fun, a disappointed person like a nun or the obese girl who stays home the night of the senior prom?
    There are millions of women who live alone in America. Some of them are widows. Some of them are divorced and between connections, some of them are odd, loners who prefer to keep their habits undisturbed. They like the way they keep their cupboards, feed their dogs, stretch out on the couch, wash the ring off the tub, put the coffee cup in the dishwasher, always on the left, handle-side out. Never mind the howl of country music’s unrequited love, someone stamping around after midnight, lots of people are unmated and comfortable, feel no need to swoon into a microphone. Someone in a marriage must die first and many people live in single space peacefully.
    But how do they do it?
    I go to a luncheon. The guests stand on the lawn, glasses in hand, gazing down at three egrets who stand each poised on one leg at the water’s edge. I am introduced to a widow of some five years. “It’s horrid,” she says, “and it’s going to get worse. They don’t know, they with their husbands, they don’t know.” I nod. I know about some other horrid things too, that have nothing to do with losing a spouse, things that hover about the garden casting shadows here and there despite the high sun and the perfect weather.

    • • •

    A builder over the last two years has been constructing a huge house behind ours. Now it towers over my house. It looms above my red maple tree. The workers’ voices rise across the property line. I hear saws, hammers, small backhoes dipping their steel jaws into the dirt,