What Can You Do?

Last December in a thrift shop in Silver City, New Mexico, I noticed among the dreggiest of dregs something red and sparkly. Immediately it occurred to me that I should not be interested in such a thing just two months into widowhood. But I was interested. I loved the tomato-red gauzy material, the thousands of sequins and beads glittering in a broad swirly pattern. I loved the wide zigzagging borders on both skirt and blouse, echoing the blouse's low V-neck. I could picture it all on Bessie Smith, but also, maybe, on paler, more diminutive me.

"Fabulous," Laura said when I held it up. We were both on a thrift store high, freed for an hour or more while our teenaged boys and her husband were roaming the streets in search of cheap cds and cowboy memorabilia. This impromptu vacation had been Laura's idea, a way for my son, Sam, and me, and all of us really, to begin to heal from Sandy's long illness and death. Sandy was my same-sex partner of twenty-one years, my legal "wife" of four months, Sam's other mother since the day he was born. Our families, Laura's and mine, had been friends since the boys were in day care.

"Try it on," Laura said.

I think she was hoping it would be too big and she'd get a crack at it. But it fit me-well enough. The top had a tendency to slide off a shoulder, a nice touch, I thought. As for the skirt, the elastic waistband needed to be replaced and the whole thing taken in, but at four dollars (marked down from eight) I figured I could spring for some serious tailoring and still come out way ahead. And if nothing else, I could wear it to the "Red and Green," the annual party our friend Kathy had been hosting for some nineteen years. Originally it was a Christmas affair, but each year, because of everyone's jammed schedules, it was nudged further toward spring. This year, it was scheduled for April; even so, the food would be mostly red or green, and the getups-often retro, thrift store numbers-the same two colors.

October, November, December. The first few weeks and months after Sandy died, every glance into our shared closet was difficult. Her belongings . . . I thought maybe they'd exude some sort of sheepishness for having outlived her, but every skirt, blouse, scarf, belt, shoe presented itself exactly as before. Maybe that's why I was so eager to get rid of most of it, relentlessly pondering which item would look well on which friend, which friend had the constitution to actually wear the thing, on whom could I bear to see it?

By January, when we returned to Massachusetts from our trip, only a handful of Sandy's things remained in that closet: the boxy, black and white checked blouse she'd worn during much of our honeymoon to Venice; the soft, squirrel-colored "chemo-shirt" she wore for infusions; a couple of pairs of jeans too worn to give away but impossible to throw out, so filled they were with her shape, her sweat, her determined, responsible caulking and spackling, her joyful digging and planting, her patient weeding and mulching, her ever increasing hours on the couch without even a book, just the dog stretched out on her chest. Also, I kept the crinkly, lilac tunic she'd worn so radiantly for Sam's Bar Mitzvah and again at our June wedding in the Cambridge City Hall. But when I hung up my new red dress and my eyes skimmed across Sandy's remaining stuff, I was already pretty good at feeling nothing. I'd had a lot of practice in steeling myself. So many calls to make-insurance, mortgage, credit card companies; so many telemarketers asking for her. "She died," I'd say. The hard thud of those D's satisfied me in a way that the spineless "passed away" did not. Not for this Jew, the comforting notions of meeting again in a fluffy...