Starting From Square Two. Caren Lissner

      “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.

      “Congratulations,” Gert wrote unenthusiastically in the card, and stuck in her ten dollars.

      She got up, sauntered down the hall and pitched the card onto the desk of Leon, the long-haired fiftyish nihilist proof-reader. “No backs!” Gert said, and raced back down the hall.

      “Awww, I hate these!” she heard him say.

      As she ran, she looked at the tops of buildings: The GE building, the Paine Webber building, some brown towers she didn’t know the name of.

      At work, the people were mostly older. She had always been glad that she’d been married and hadn’t counted on work as a social outlet. No one in her office went out after hours. The only person there whom she really had thought of as a friend was her boss, but even that had changed over the last few months. Missy was in her mid-forties and still dressed sexily, always in skirts and off-black panty hose. She had an evil sense of humor. But for the past few months, she’d had mood swings that could have registered on the Richter scale. Gert thought it had to do with relationship issues. The rumor was that Missy was having an affair with the chiseled young guy on the ninth floor who worked in the mailroom. There were elevators near the back of the building that could be stopped between floors without setting off alarms.

      What else could she say about Missy? Missy had been saying for years that she was going to get separated from her husband, Dennis, but she never had. Gert had met Dennis at the office Christmas party. He was a sad sack. He hated dancing, so he always stood near the buffet table watching Missy dance up a storm with every guy in the company. Gert wondered why Dennis didn’t try a little harder to keep up with Missy, looks-wise. Not that he should have had to. But he could have at least tried.

      After fobbing off the congratulations card, Gert sat back down and stared at her in-box. The accounts that her boss handled involved baldness remedies, skin creams and hemorrhoid preparations. Not really Gert’s preferences, but she had, from time to time, thought up some pretty funny campaigns for all of them. Watching British comedies with Marc often got her thinking creatively. Someday, Gert could take over those accounts if Missy moved to others. Or she could move to other accounts if she had a portfolio of creative work. But Missy was there to stay, and Gert had put off starting creative work for a long time. There were only so many things you could do at once. She’d been fulfilled enough in the past and had never really expected to get most of her satisfaction nine-to-five, anyway. She went out with Marc’s co-workers, took road trips to see friends, celebrated milestones with both of their families—siblings’ graduations, new babies—cooked together, bought a condo. She had felt feminine doing these things, even. Now she felt like she had to be the man and woman in dealing with every daily chore and struggle.

      Before Marc died, she had been toying with some portfolio ideas that he’d encouraged. But after the accident she’d been uninspired to do anything that disturbed the stasis of other facets of her life, particularly work. Tragedy could certainly make you lose interest in the fast track.

      “Oh my God!” Hallie sang into the phone to Gert that night. “You have to get over to Erika’s apartment. We’re reading Challa’s Web site!”

      Gert was in bed, kicking her heels and watching a romantic movie that was making her feel more depressed than romantic. She had to be careful with forms of entertainment these days. Things that were romantic made her miss Marc. Things that were witty made her miss Marc. Things with action made her miss Marc. She was on a long main course of light and fluffy.

      “I was watching a movie,” Gert told Hallie.

      “What movie?”

      “Before Sunrise,” Gert said.

      “Oh my God, you never saw that?” Hallie asked. “That was ten years ago.”

      Marc would never have seen an Ethan Hawke movie. Especially one about Ethan taking his brooding self on a train through Europe. Gert thought about all the movies she could catch up on now, and then hated herself for the thought. She often thought about the movies Marc would have wanted to see, the ones that were coming out that spring: Both the Matrix and X-Men sequels. Every single time she heard about them, she felt bad, thinking about how excited Marc would have been. If he were there, they’d be strategizing about how to get to see them both on their opening days.

      “I guess I just never rented it,” Gert said of Before Sunrise.

      “Well, I don’t want to take you away, but you have to see the Web site,” Hallie said. “We’re going to order dumplings for dinner and plot strategy.”

      Gert was getting tired of the movie, anyway. Maybe watching other people’s evil machinations would take her mind off her pain. She was going to have to force herself to recover, even if it meant pushing herself into uncomfortable