#it made him so self-conscience that he wore a hat even in his sleep poor lamb

[thesquireinvictus]

If I started to lose my hair I would probably start wearing a hat at all times.

[firstjustgoin]

An extreme act

7. Start with an act of extreme love or extreme hatred (or both).

Naome had never wanted him to die, not really. Yet here she sat in the kitchen of their shared home –– the walls a shade of pale yellow she abhorred, surrounded by casseroles and pies that only he would have found edible. At least the people were gone now. She hated how they doted upon her, wore their faces and bodies slack like an affectation of sadness. They arrived in a sea of black –– her favorite color, never his –– and she knew then that the wave of their protracted pain would wear away at her for months, even years to come, like a boulder against the ocean.

“Can I get you anything?” A mutual friend of theirs from college asked, his eyes darting from one tupperware to the next, his fingers desperate to be needed for something, anything at all. She said nothing. She did not feel the need to alleviate any of his “living” guilt. He quickly skulked away, perhaps thinking about how much more graceful under grief Leo would have been.

An aunt, the black bow upon her hat as audacious as her conversation topics, approached her next. “Oh you poor darling, sweetheart. I cannot imagine how you must feel right now.” If Naome was still writing, this moment would have felt ripe for character development. How helpless acquaintances feel in the face of another’s grief! We are prepared for so much by good socialization, but rarely this. So we frantically arrange plates of charcuterie and cheeses, dust bookshelves, offer up inoffensive condolences with the hope of being remembered as one of the good grievers. She would not give any of these people the satisfaction of succeeding at this. If she could be a horrible widow, and an even worse wife, they could all feel like fuck-ups at funerals.

Now that the troops had retreated, leaving behind only whispers of upcoming lasagna drops offs and walk-around-the-block dates, Naome could spend the requisite hours appreciating the full scope of the dark humor of her current situation. She loved dark humor: a quality that Leo professed to love about her, but never fully understood. She cackled during horror movies and stayed up late reading websites about the goriest serial killings. Her favorite joke was about a man trying to find a book about committing suicide at the library and the librarian telling him to fuck off since he would never return it. 

There were many qualities about Naome that Leo claimed to love. But each one of them mystified her. Leo brought home fresh-cut daffodils for her every Wednesday of their first year of marriage because he said that they brightened the room just like Naome brightened his life. What a load of bullshit. Leo kissed her hand before he fell asleep and texted her the mornings after they had sex to thank her.

He wasn���t perfect, no, and she wasn’t the kind of person to romanticize things from her past but even Naome couldn’t find anything to laugh about now. For Naome had a secret –– one that pulsed inside her gut, buzzed through her fingers, seethed in her skull. Nearly every moment they had spent together of the last six years of marriage and four years of dating prior –– every Sunday night they cuddled on their shared couch watching political docu-dramas, every time they had sex (usually no more than once a week) and he whispered you like that? You like that, baby, every night when she came home from work full of righteous anger about yet another injustice –– Naome had wished her dear husband would just die, that perhaps it would make things a whole lot easier than having to break his heart and get divorced.

And now Leo, her dear husband, was dead. So far, it had not been easier.

*** (some things should probably go here) ***

Day eight of widowhood arrived with a hailstorm. Ice fell from the sky in the thick, chaotic clumps. Naome had started to get her appetite back and was working her way through Leo’s Aunt Caroline’s chocolate chess pie, when the doorbell rang. The sound echoed through the entryway, muffled slightly by the piles of clothes and towels littering every flat surface in the house.

Strange, Naome thought as she consulted the calendar hanging on the fridge, there’s no one scheduled for this morning. A group of neighbors had banded together to force themselves into her self-imposed solitude. Becky, or a woman by a similarly grating name, had organized the junta.

On Mondays, Next-Door-Widow would bring by three tupperwares of homemade soups, of various flavors and styles. Nothing spicy, Next-Door-Widow promised, because she remembered when she lost her husband, her stomach somersaulted for months and couldn’t keep down the spice.

On Thursdays, Mr. and Mrs. 241 Hamstead Drive and their corgi would pop by and ask if she would like to take a walk with them after dinner. “No pressure,” 241 Hamstead quipped, when they knocked on her door last Thursday, “but you’d be amazed at what a little movement can do for your body in moments like these.” Amazed, indeed. Naome planned on answering the door in a leg brace next Thursday.

Friday was Becky’s day and she took her responsibilities as head of the Let’s-make-sure-Naome-doesn’t-kill-herself committee very seriously. Last Friday, although Naome turned off all of the lights and hid with a bottle of Merlot in her closet until Becky stopped ringing the door, she found a frosted three-layer cake on her front porch when she ventured outside. She thought of many evil things she could do with that cake, including writing Fuck off on it in pink icing and returning it to Becky’s house, but honestly wasn’t even sure which of the cream-colored split levels she lived in.

But today was Sunday and there was no agenda for anyone to come by on Sundays; Naome’s cold grief was too extensive to let it infect the Lord’s Day for anyone on the neighborhood coalition. She strongly considered not answering the door, but the lights were on in the hallway and she didn’t feel like having to explain herself later on when confronted.

When she opened the door, a girl, probably not older than fifteen, stood before her with the knees torn out of her jeans and a sweatshirt that screamed NOT TODAY in neon green lettering.

Naome first considered asking her where she had gotten that sweatshirt, but instead just cocked her head to the side, narrowed her eyes (puffy from lack of sleep, not crying) and said, “Yes?” Barely a question, something that might have scared off Next-Door-Widow but not a punk teenager like this. One-word sentences are the quotidian language of a punk teenager.

“Hey. Um, I’m Jackie. I, uh, go to school at Franklin? I was in your, in Leo, I mean Mr. Cheever’s class. I was in the room when he…” The periphery of Naome’s eyes went fuzzy so it looked like the girl was hovering in mid-air before her. As the adult, she knew that she was responsible for rescuing Jackie from this traumatizing sentence, but she could only wait, needing the confirmation that that was indeed where Jackie was headed. “So, yeah, I was in the room when your husband had the, well, when he died. I was there.”

Naome was always fascinated by Leo’s teaching career. He was such a bleeding heart (a turn of phrase perhaps made less appropriate by his recent heart attack). That thought almost brought a smile to her face. What a weak, bleeding heart. Leo began teaching less than two years ago, in a pre-midlife crisis of conscience. He had always been a lover of history –– how trends and movements transformed and changed shape over centuries, that whispers of a world war or bloody coup could be traced back to a moment from the long past, like an anthropomorphic butterfly effect. But loving history and teaching history to tenth graders are two very different skillsets. She didn’t understand someone’s compulsion to do good being so strong that you would choose to leave a cushy data analysis job to shut down spitball attacks while imparting teenagers with the facts of the Red Scare.

Standing on the threshold of her home with fifteen-year-old Jackie quivering in front of her, Naome knew that she should act maternally. But she was frozen in place, examining the person who last saw her husband as a living, breathing, human being with functioning organs and pink skin. She did not invite her in or offer her a cup of tea or ask how she was feeling. She was not Becky; her job was not to ensure that everyone around her felt emotionally comforted. How dare this girl come here seeking support for witnessing her husband’s death?

“Mrs. Cheever?” Jackie’s voice, suddenly more forceful and clear than before, cut through Naome’s hot rage. “Mrs. Cheever, I’m sorry to come here like this. I know this is weird, or whatever, for me to be here. But I just wanted you to know that I know. I know you wanted Mr. Cheever to die.”