Chapter Two
IT WAS THE FIRST COLUMBUS DAY WEEKEND THAT we’d not gone away. Instead, we had walked the familiar streets of Amherst and Northampton and picnicked at our usual spot by the lake at NorthamptonUniversity, where I was recently tenured. We were celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. That very night, Sam had planned and cooked everything on the menu—grilled salmon with herbs and garlic, roasted red potatoes with rosemary and thyme, arugula salad, and strawberry cheesecake for dessert. He set the table with the good china and silverware—the stuff we hadn’t used since we got married—and lit the candlesticks, only to realize that he’d forgotten to buy the sparkling cider. I told him that we didn’t need it. Water in wine glasses sufficed, or maybe some flat ginger ale that sat abandoned in the back of the fridge. But no. He insisted, stubborn rat-bastard that he is. Was.
“Shit, man!” he said, half-laughing. He put on his leather aviator jacket.
“You’re going to get it now?” I asked. “It’s almost nine o’clock. We’re already eating so late.”
“There’s something romantic about it, don’t you think? Besides, this has to be perfect, Sweetheart. Five years. I want you completely blissed out so you can be ready for your present.”
“Geez, Sammy. Don’t lay on the pressure. I just got you socks.”
His blue eyes twinkled the way sunshine dapples on a lake. After he grabbed his keys by the door, he then turned and rushed me like a linebacker, pinning me against the wall and kissing me, running his hand along my thigh and up under my skirt.
“Not yet, Studmuffin,” I said. We both laughed. Our mutual disdain for the word actually transformed it into one of our favorites. I wrapped my leg around him, reconsidering. “Ya know we could just skip dinner altogether…give it to the cat.”
“Not a chance—we’re going all the way. Dinner, candles, dessert, and then more dessert.”
He let go of me and banged his head on the wall a few times before leaning in for another kiss. “Woman, we are gonna break the bed tonight.”
“Is that a promise?”
He then took a step back and his ocean blue eyes brightened, as if seeing me in a new light. “God, I think I fall in love with you every day,” he said. “See you in a bit, Sweetheart.” When he opened the door, a whiff of chilly autumn air blew in. He looked at me again, then took off his jacket and hung it from the inside doorknob. “Not gonna need that right now,” he said. After he closed the door, I returned to the kitchen, fanning myself with my hand, and opened the freezer door.
I’d lost track of how long it was taking Sam just to get sparkling cider. When I heard the knock at the door, I’d just assumed he’d forgotten his house key again. Why that boy didn’t put all his keys on the same ring, I couldn’t figure out. He had once rationalized something about everything having its place—that, and he made the crude joke of one bulge in his pants being enough. But I opened the door to find an Amherst police officer towering in the doorway, the smell of hickory and dried leaves wafting in the air.
“Mrs. Vanzant?” the officer asked in a baritone voice.
“Yes?”
“There’s been an accident…”
***
That’s all I remember. Local newspaper clippings filled in the rest of the details. Sam was killed by a drunk driver—a freshman student from NU. It happened around nine-thirty, as Sam was pulling out of the convenience store. The car plowed into him, like he wasn’t even there. A brand new Mustang. The next generation in muscle cars, an ad said. The medics found shards of glass from the cider bottle and broken window all over his body. The driver and his two buddies got out a little battered with a few broken ribs and concussions. Sam was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead in the ER.
***
For the first three months following his death, I cried and wandered aimlessly from room to room in our house and stared out the windows. Dried leaves filled the backyard, only to be covered by an early December snow, which then turned to soggy January mush. Sometimes I slept in his study on the faded brown leather sofa, one of the relics from his bachelor days. For some reason, his presence seemed to be stronger in that room than any other place in the house, even our bedroom. I could smell him in there, that all-too familiar scent of Patchouli oil and plain soap.
I called our voice mail ten times a day just to hear his voice—that mild tenor that reduced me to butter every time he read to me, even sexier when he had a sore throat and his voice took on a rasp. Over and over I listened to the message: Hi, you’ve reached the Vanzants. If you wish to leave a message with the smart one, press One. If you wish to leave a message with me, press Two.
The empty bed was the worst. I stayed up later and later just to avoid going to bed and laying there, having no one to lean my head on or brush my leg against, no one to rest a hand limply across my chest in a protective cuddle, all the special things that had become as regular as breathing. Our cat, Donny Most, had always been denied access to our bedroom. But when I started picking him up and plopping him on the bed at night with hopes that he would keep me company and give me someone to spoon, he leapt off and scatted out of the room. Apparently he didn’t like the empty bed either. Even he roamed the house looking for Sam, meowing in a drawn out moan.
At Christmastime my mother had invited me down to Long Island, but I refused to go. I couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t leave Sam. Instead, Maggie drove up from Brooklyn and stayed with me straight through New Year’s. She didn’t even ask for permission; just called and said, “I’m coming.”
On Christmas Day we had takeout Chinese food. I hadn’t done any gift shopping or put up the tree. But I appreciated Mags’s company. Having lost her lover to leukemia fifteen years ago, she understood my grief without needing to say “I understand” every five minutes. She knew when to say nothing, when to hug me, and when to let me be.
On New Year’s Eve we rented Weekend at Bernie’s, a guilty pleasure of ours. I laughed as hard as I did when Sam mooned Governor Romney at a campaign rally on campus a couple of years ago. Then I cried in agonizing guilt.
“Don’t go back to school just yet,” Maggie said on New Year’s Day. She placed a cup of hot chocolate in front of me, whipped cream melting down the side, and joined me at the kitchen table. “Take another semester off. They’ll let you do it.”
“And do what? Waste away? I don’t think he’d want me just sitting around watching marathons of Sanford and Son on TV Land.”
“I just don’t think you’re ready to be back in the classroom.”
“There aren’t any reminders of him in the classroom.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” she warned.
I scooped some of the floating whipped cream with my finger and licked it. “What am I supposed to do, then?” I asked.
“Stay here and write. Join a bereavement group. Or maybe just teach one section—a night class. Don’t go back full time. You could even come to New York and stay with me. There’s plenty to do there.”
I blew on the hot chocolate, hesitantly taking a sip, and frowned.
“I’m going back, Mags. The work will do me good. It always has before.”
“Losing your husband to a drunk driver is not the same as losing a boyfriend to another woman. The former is far more senseless.”
***
On the first day of the spring semester in mid-January, I arrived at NU around nine a.m. and went to Adams Hall, briefcase in tow, feeling a strange mix of exhibitionism and invisibility as I traipsed through the narrow halls to my office—people were either staring at me or looking away, it seemed. When I reached the English department’s main office, I took a deep breath and entered. You’d think I was getting ready to take the stage at MadisonSquareGarden.
“Morning, Kay.”
Kay Mello, one of the two department assistants, picked up her head and sprang from her desk. “Oh, Andrea! How are you?” She pulled me to her portly body and squeezed the air out of me. She never called me Andrea. No one did, really. Except Sam.
“Okay. You know… one day at a time. That sort of thing.”
“I was so shocked when I got the news. We all were. You know, it’s just so sad.”
“Yeah. Well, you know. It happens.”
Her perfume was so strong I thought I might gag.
“Is there anything you need? Anything we can do for you?”
“Well, um, if you can get me my mail? That would be great. I’m sure it’s kinda piled up, huh. Oh and, um, perhaps you can photocopy my syllabus for me? I haven’t really gotten to that. You can use the one I have on file. Just change the heading from Fall to Spring.”
“Sure thing.” Kay went to a bin under a table and pulled out a stack of envelopes varying in size and thickness and bound with fat rubber bands. “Your mail,” she said. “I think some of them are sympathy cards.” She said the last two words in a whisper.
At that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if I sounded as moronic to those friends or acquaintances that had lost a loved one as Kay did to me. Perhaps this could be a new academic article for me to research and write: the kairos of death. Surely someone’s done it already.
“Thank you,” I said and tried to transport the stack from her arms to mine without any stray envelopes slipping out. “I’ll just go through these in my office.”
“When’s your first class?”
“In an hour.”
“Well, good luck. And Andrea, no one expects you to be here. We wouldn’t think any less of you if you turned around and went straight home.”
“Um, okay. Thanks.”
When I got to my office, I opened the door and met a dank, musty smell as well as a chill. I forcibly twisted the knob on the ancient radiator before sitting at my desk, which was covered with a thin veil of dust. Using one of the envelopes from the mail pile, I attempted to wipe the desk, but the dust just formed a wavy streak across. When I removed the rubber bands, the mail splattered out, some pieces falling to the floor. Indeed, some were sympathy cards. The rest were from textbook publishing companies, a letter from my editor, department memos from the fall semester and winter intercession, and several pamphlets from the organizations M.A.D.D. and S.A.D.D. The pile resembled the one on the judge’s desk at the end of Miracle on 34th Street.
Before I had a chance to sort through it all, Jeff Baxter, the English department chairperson and a good friend of mine, knocked on the door as he opened it. At thirty-eight, Jeff was the youngest tenured professor to ever become chair of our department. He was also one of the first people I had met when I interviewed for the position at NU, and we hit it off instantly. His down-to-earth attitude met my pedagogical sensibility, and we often formed an alliance in faculty or administrative meetings. Outside of school, our shared enjoyment of David Lodge novels, Family Guy, and the New England Patriots made us and our spouses frequent dinner guests at each other’s homes. I think he took Sam’s death really hard.
“Mind if I come in?” he asked, already in the room.
I took another deep breath. “Hey, Jeff.”
“Welcome back.”
“Thanks.”
“How you doin’?”
“Just got here, actually.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
I shrugged my shoulders and avoided his dark, boyish brown eyes, then redirected my attention.
“I don’t know. I’m just sort of here, I guess. You know… one day at a time.”
He sat in the swivel chair next to my desk and quickly ran his fingers through his chestnut-colored hair, revealing a few gray bangs.
“How’d your staff meeting go?”
“Actually, I postponed it to next week.”
“What have you got going on today?”
“My first two classes. And getting back into the swing of things. Catching up.”
“Well, I hope you don’t mind if I check in with you from time to time. There’s a lot going on right now, what with the Chancellor’s Program Assessment Initiative and all that. You’re gonna have quite a load this semester, even under sunny skies.”
“I’m fine, Jeff. Really. The work will be good for me.”
He gave me the Spark Notes version of the department agenda since I’d left, and recommended I read the minutes of the last three months’ meetings.
“You need anything?” he asked.
Man, was that a loaded question.
“Not right now,” I answered.
“Have a good class, then.” We often said that in lieu of “Have a nice day,” even if neither of us were teaching.
“Thanks. You too.”
He left the door open as he left. I stood up, walked over to close it, and returned to my desk. A custodian had moved my garbage pail to the other side of the office, next to the entrance. Sitting behind my desk, I picked up each piece of mail, unopened, and flung it toward the pail until it was time for class. With the memos, I haphazardly folded them into airplanes and sailed them across. Altogether, I nailed twenty-three out of thirty-two shots. At one point, someone knocked on the door; I opened it a crack and peeked out, as if I were in an apartment alone at midnight, answering to a stranger. I saw Kay holding a thick stack of paper.
“Here’s your syllabi.” Her eyes darted from the mess on the floor back to me.
I transferred the stack from her arms to mine.
“Thanks, Kay. Seeya,” I said, and closed the door behind her.
The discarded mail remained on the floor.
As class time approached, the seed of anxiety that I awoke with that morning had germinated into full-blown panic. When I entered the cold classroom—the heat was turned off in there too—my chest pounded so loud I could hear it, and my breathing quickened. I’m having a heart attack, I thought in an ironically calm manner. My heart is going to pop out of my chest, just like the alien in the movie, and I’m going to die. My guts are going to spill out and stain my sweater.
The students had already filled the room. The irony of being tenured as well as a writing program director was that you rarely got to teach the course that qualified you to be a WPA in the first place. Thus, I had insisted on assigning myself one first-year composition course per semester to keep my skills and the program fresh.
“Good morning,” I said, forcing a smile that probably looked more like I was constipated (which, in fact, I was). The students were as eerily quiet as the congregation in the church when I finished the crappy eulogy at Sam’s funeral. Not even the heater vents uttered a sound.
“Well, okay,” I said, attempting to break the ice. “I’m Dr. Vanzant; but from the looks on your faces, you seem to know that already. So, let’s just get the elephant out of the room, shall we?”
The students sat and either stared into their notebooks or past me, expressionless.
“My husband was killed by a drunk driver this past October. I’m doing okay. I’m looking forward to this class and to doing some writing with you guys. So, let’s go over the course requirements.”
I ignored the awkward silence and distributed the syllabus, reading the policies from the first two pages and taking up all of fifteen minutes. And yet, those fifteen minutes passed like a kidney stone. Normally, I would do some freewriting exercises with the students on the first day. Instead, I dismissed them. As the class filed out, one student approached me.
“Professor, I hope this doesn’t upset you, but I just wanted to tell you that my sister goes to Edmund and took your husband’s class two years ago. She said he was her favorite teacher and that because of him, she loves writing now. She cried when she heard the news.”
The girl’s voice wavered slightly. A part of me wanted to take her in my arms and console her and assure her that it was going to be okay.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Hayley.”
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“Heather.”
“Hayley, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a really long time. Thank you. And tell your sister that I’m glad she got to know my husband. She’s a lucky girl.”
The tightness of Hayley’s shy, nervous face softened and lightened. “Thank you, Professor. I’m looking forward to this class.”
“So am I.”
When I returned to my office, I closed the door with my back leaning against it, slid to the floor, and burst into tears. Another class awaited me that day, and I didn’t know how or if I was going to pull it off. Maggie was right: Sam was everywhere, and I was a fool to think that there’d be no reminders of him here. I sat in that spot until my second class, eighty minutes later.