Hours of Grief

My hair is below my shoulders—the way I wore it when Wayne and I met. The way I’ve mostly worn it. Sometime in our first year together, he told me he thought short hair was charming, so I spent an experimental morning on a stool, draped in a black cloak that smelled of hair spray, and watched wet blonde snips slide to my lap and fall in limp clumps to the floor. I used to run my fingers through the chin length bob and feel, when the ends slipped so quickly through my fingers, that some big part of me was gone. But my hair is long again, unkempt. Size two, slim-styled jeans I got from the bargain bin of a discount store drape in loose folds around my legs. I stand in line at a market, a thousand miles from home, waiting to buy a drum of dried algae recommended by a nutritionist whose smile had remained placid and fixed like a doll’s, even as she proffered her diagnosis of my problem: deep, profound grief.

 I consulted her a few days ago, about how simultaneously to refrain both from eating and losing weight. I put vitamins, gallons of milk and juice, strawberries, bananas and a package of pre-baked egg rolls on the conveyer belt and clamp an arrangement of irises wrapped in cellophane under my arm. The flowers are for my best friend’s housemate. It’s her birthday. I chose long stems, bound by a rubber band, from buckets alongside the checkout stand. I think of an evening after Wayne’s death, of looking around my living room and feeling suddenly claustrophobic among the many vases stuffed with wilting blossoms and dark, stiff greenery. They were like sad-faced people in starched clothes, quietly sitting in the fading light, unsure of whether to stay or go. I thought I could never again stand the sight of fresh cut flowers.

“How are you today?” the young fellow bagging my groceries asks. His hair is the color of sunburned wheat and gelled into a halo of black-tipped spikes. I stare at the miscellany of small trinkets embedded in his face and wonder how anyone musters the nerve to subject tender folds of flesh around ears, mouth, and nose to repeated impalements with a needle.

“Oh, fine,” I say. “How about you?”

“Good,” he replies and ventures a joke. “Do you want me to try to throw the flowers all the way to your car, or should I just stuff them in the bag with your milk?”

I give an obligatory smile. “Gosh, you know, I don’t have a car. I wish I did. I’m traveling by bicycle.” In preparation for my escape to Suzanne’s, two months after I had stood in the snow and watched my husband’s ashes lowered into the red mud of a cemetery plot, I dismantled my bike, crammed it in a cardboard box and shipped it to her subdivision on the outskirts of Boulder. I get to town by peddling across a six-mile swatch of land euphemistically called “green space” by local conservationists. It’s a long dusty field, stippled in prairie dog hills and creased by a trail running along a shallow creek. Negotiating the turns compels my unwavering attention to the rocks and ruts that constantly jar the bike tires. When I can occasionally glance up, I am sometimes actually startled to see the Rocky Mountains, looming over me like a convocation of brooding priests in white ceremonial robes.

“I don’t have a car, either,” the boy says, eyeing me with sympathy. “I’m saving for one, too.” Impulsively he adds, “Here, you want these eggs for free? Someone left them.”

“Umm, Okay. That’s very kind of you.” I take money from my wallet, wondering how old he thinks I am. Boulder is a Mecca for professional skateboarders, poets, hot stone masseurs, and astrocartographers. Being middle aged and relegated to a self-propelled means of commuting probably doesn’t seem strange in such a place.

I lug the groceries and my knapsack to the bicycle rack, where I unpack the bags on the sidewalk and study the oddly shaped items, trying to decide the best way to strap them with bungee cords to the rack on my bike. When I finish, I have a precarious tower over the back tire, and the bananas are splayed on the slender seat. The bike lurches back and forth as though a chimpanzee is swinging behind me as I peddle away.

Please don’t let the wind blow, I half-heartedly pray, weaving through cars and intersections toward the field. The winds sweep through Colorado in early spring like massive freighters, screaming and whipping sticks, dirt and branches to a frenetic aerial dance. Under a bleak sky that sporadically issues a quick spattering of rain, I ride across the city and thread my bike through narrow gates meant to discourage motorized traffic on open spaces. The weight of its burden makes the bike shudder violently on uneven ground, and with every bump and rock I hit on the trail, I imagine an egg breaking.

At Suzanne’s I discover to my astonishment that the eggs, all twelve, are intact. The bananas, however, are quite mangled. Wedging the milk and juice into an already full refrigerator, I again feel bewildered by what my life has become. I used to scan Bon Appetite and Gourmet for recipes that would inspire a mission to several grocers for special ingredients—candied ginger, oyster mushrooms, Turkish apricots, fresh bulbs of fennel. My ideas didn’t always justify the effort. For an inexplicable reason, I made everything match in some unappealing category. No matter how hard I tried for the variance in shape, texture and color which elevates a meal from simple consumption to an artistic experience, Wayne and I would inevitably have cutlery poised over a plate upon which everything was round, or everything was mushy, or everything crunched. Once, when we closed our eyes for the blessing of a garden salad, broccoli and pasta tossed in basil sauce, Wayne solemnly said, “God, thank you for this green food Mary has made.”

Grief forces a confounding regression to basics, stripping away our busyness and layers of urbanity. There’s no place in grief for fennel or candied ginger, no purpose in rushing, no relief in unwinding with the news and a glass of wine before dinner. I feel like a person who graduated from college and was sent straight back to grammar school, wedged into a tiny chair and left to practice cursive writing and cutting shapes with blunt-nosed scissors. The days and nights pass slowly, as though walking barefoot on gravel, one after another.

Back at my own house, away from Suzanne, apart from her determined hugs and pumpkin muffins, I am jarred by Wayne’s things. His ties, still neatly strung from the rack in his closet; his change, still on the dresser; his new shoes, still in the box. I wonder how much time has to pass before the rote motions of daily living will cease to require my exclusive concentration—when I can feed the cat without having to think, when I can water plants without spilling puddles on the hardwood floor.