If you turn forty shortly after your husband dies, your friends give you vibrators.

​

     These are old friends. Ones who held me, like Kurstin, when I cried in the middle of the bar in Syracuse at midnight because some frat guy said I was not feminine enough to date. They are the ones who watched my husband court me wearing a winter beanie in summertime and told me he seemed great except for the hat. Ones who knew us in Colorado, like Morgan, who had a picture of my husband, Trevor, rolling a keg across the highway in a wheelbarrow to return it to her mercantile. Or Susan, who nursed her baby alongside mine while we ate Twizzlers on sinking couches but talked about drinking wine. And Amanda, of course, cousin-saint. They are the ones whom Trevor called, personally, in the fleeting hours when he felt his clear brain present cancer clouds. He called to explain how they would help me go forward.

 

     Apparently, he wanted them to carry me forward with vibrators. 

 

     I got three. 

 

     Kurstin held up a mechanical device that resembled a swollen, pink-rubber ginger root and we examined it under the bar lights in my kitchen. We compared it against one from Morgan, which looked like a laser pointer. Then another, long and purple.

 

     “Apparently, they are designed to be seen in a snowstorm,” I laughed. “Bright.”

 

     “It’s so you can always find them,” Susan said. “In an emergency.”

 

     We turned the buttons on and cackled while the “J” shape of the big one danced around in circles on the counter and the little one hopped like Mexican jumping beans. We toasted each other with the Dom Pérignon Kurstin’s husband, Dave, sent as a present. 

     

     “To forty,” I said. “I guess.”

     

     “Technically,” Kurstin grabbed Big Pink from dancing on the counter and held it up to study, taking a long draw off her bubbly. “This one is a dildo.” 

 

     It had been nearly a year since I had sex. Proximal death inspired a need in me where I eyed passersby like an awkward, pervy caveman. It simply had nowhere to go. I felt terrified I’d never be with a man again. Like somehow, I emitted a death-radar that rendered me incredibly old, dried up, and un-fuckable.

 

     Touch hunger is a real term given to those who are used to being held, to having sex, to being skin-to-skin with an adult. And then it’s gone and you’re, like, zombie hungry.

 

     The calendar pages I tore off taunted me. “OLD BAG!” Another one. “SPINSTER!” Tore another.

“You’re going to DIE ALONE!” I pictured my future self: a dried-up, apple-faced kitchen witch. Husk-like, bitter, and roar-voiced. Zero percent sexy. My mind raced against my buried youth, embedded inside of dead Trev. As if suddenly, I’d start knitting afghans and sending newspaper clippings from Dear Abby via the US Postal Service to people I loved.

 

     Honey, I would plead with the ether, don’t let me be alone again tonight.

 

⎯

 

“Shhh,” Trevor said. 

 

     We waited to see the doc in an exam room in New York City, the beige hospital walls the only benign part of our life. “The guy dyes his hair. How old do you think he is? Seventy?” 

 

     “Old enough to fix this, I hope,” he said. His eyebrows up, eyes open to hope.

 

     “Do you think he runs out of here to a silver Mercedes convertible, drives out of the city to another house where he keeps a girlfriend? Maybe he has a society wife and a country mistress. Or a country wife and an in-town mistress!”

 

     “Maybe he has a lot of talent and will save my life.” He wrapped his rice-paper-skin hand over mine.

 

     “That too. Of course.”

 

     After an hour’s wait in which I disassembled the intestinal models and gave each organ strangled voices for fun, Dr. Pat arrived. We studied scans of Trevor’s innards from each angle the medical world offered. We studied infected lymph nodes as deliberately as if these were Russian submarines, as if my husband’s abdomen at war was the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

 

     Sir, you’ve sunk my battleship!

 

     The surgeon explained our options. My sophisticated handwritten notes looked like this:

 

Chemo=can’t feel. Surgery=a real pain in the dink.

 

     No one I stood with at the playground swings ever agonized over a decision to hang their husband’s life on one more round of chemo or to cut his groin open. Trevor had taken so much toxic metal from chemo already he couldn’t hold a cup. Maybe I felt a little sorry for us.

 

     If we cut out tumors, we’d sever his vas deferens. We’d never have sex again. I know when you ask a man to neuter a male dog it’s the end of the world to them, so asking my husband, at thirty-six, to leak more of his masculinity to cancer, also cut. Our “options” all gambled on a loss. Loss of sex, loss of grip strength. Loss of life.

 

     “There are other things you can do to continue your marital relations,” the doc said. I studied his hair before speaking. 

 

     “Like what?” 

 

     In the middle of our last act, my intuition told me we were at the end. The sex felt unremarkable. Except we knew it, all the while unsaid. We cascaded over the small current of truth. As we rocked slowly under too many heavy blankets, our skin telegraphed every other time we’d ever had sex, from his cells to mine and then back again, and it became remarkable in the knowing we were a telegraph of skin. We held on to each other, as if the whole world of our intimacy were contained in one final act that we knew guts-deep would be our last. Our heads could not let us know yet. But the skin. The skin telegraphs.

 

     “Other than vaginal intercourse,” Doctor Pat continued. “You can still have sex.”

 

     I couldn’t stop. One glance at Trevor’s grim lips and I let the corner of my lips curl.

 

     “How?” I asked, offering my most plain Jane face. All white lady country club eyes. Trevor shook his head slightly, as if to say, please don’t.

 

     I leaned closer. I wanted to hear something dirty. Potentially smutty. Funny. Something raunchy from our old doc. Something awkward Trevor and I could laugh about later, a shared moment to hold between us like a palmed gem. I hoped he’d pull out a chainsaw-sized fake dick and show us how to strap it on right there in his vanilla hospital office. Take apart his intestinal model and show us how to locate esoteric erogenous glands. Reveal a drawer full of anal beads, cock rings, butt plugs, a sex doll—something, anything that could live in opposition to our despair. Anything that could, in the moment, feel more absurd in the room than young death. 

 

     Please, oh lord please doctor offer me a laugh.

 

     He clicked his pen and put it back in his pocket, folding up his charts. 

 

     “Oral sex,” was all he said. 

 

⎯

 

     We chose surgery. No, I’m forgetting. We chose chemo. His mother begged him in the eleventh hour to choose surgery in a rational, pleading email while she watched our two children and we flew to New York for another exam. We analyzed chemo versus surgery for days in our home, in his parents’ home, argued both ways, a life-or-death committee meeting, a PowerPoint passion plea for life.

​

     “Which one is my best shot to live?” We’d pace the kitchen, a toddler underfoot on the tile floor, baby in my arms. He made a spreadsheet. Nothing made sense.

 

     “Jen, I don’t want to have surgery,” he said in bed. I believed when we slept, I needed to have two points of our bodies touching so that love would flow in a circle, like how an electrical current needs a path. We always slept with our bodies touching, two points. My head rested on his chest with an arm over him and one leg thrown over his legs. 

 

     “We’re like a twisted pair,” he often said, his play off the way electrical wires curl together, how they need each other to build strength. I couldn’t shake off how, when I met him, he bore shoulders round enough I imagined him as Atlas, able to carry the world on his back. I’d been happy to be carried, willing to be held up forever. Until we met, I never knew real, strong abdominal muscles coiled out like little fists. 

 

     Without Trevor’s body with me, there would be no path, no circuit. How could there be love?

 

     We picked the chemo. He chose not to starve me of touch.

     

     Spend your nickel, take your chances, Trevor used to say.

 

     In the end, he had to have surgery, anyway. Just as the skin telegraphed.

 

⎯

 

     My husband donned a hospital gown. Clean, white with blue patterns, crisp lines from folds. As paper-thin and pale as he was. He crawled into his hospital bed. I slept on a foldout vinyl chair beside him. In the un-dark, beeping room, I’d drink an airplane-sized wine. Straight from the plastic bottle, through the too-small screw top, I squeezed the pleasing, plunging plastic for all its non-hospital normalcy. Red drops of life.

 

     I listened to a man die. The wretched noise of the old man in the next bed spilled under the curtain, leaked into my psyche. Nurses came, left. ESPN ever blared. He howled. Base noise erupted from some other place in him, the rotten spot consuming his body, converting it cell by cell into a black hole, a mysterious cave that dug death deep.

 

     Trevor, drugged, slept through the man’s bugling. Brassy, animal calls. His cancer a bolus of blood and hair and scat and filth and all the pulpy parts of humanity that roiled in him to a call so base, so improper it could only mean dying. Trevor slept and didn’t hear it. But I tossed and turned on my recliner bed. I jammed pink earplugs in. 

 

     He’s old, I thought. We don’t die. We are young.

​

 

     The next morning, the man’s bed lay fresh, empty, ready. After he walked, I helped Trevor back into his own hospital bed. I held his tubes and wires up in wide, cat’s cradle fingers. With all these swinging things in his orbit, he now lived as a diagram of an atom.

 

     I did not reflect upon the dead man or his family, his sons, wife, and daughters I’d seen in the halls. I did not think the man was too young to die, nor did I feel sad.

 

     I thought, I am never going to get laid again.

 

⎯

 

     In my small New Hampshire town, on our prom committee, I felt both compelled by tradition and appalled at our approach to our 1990s dance as if we were reenacting a cotillion on the miniseries North and South I watched as a child. Our tradition held us locked into parading in a “Grand March” to open the event, an Axe body spray and claw-hair promenade of sateen and lace through our gymnasium. Parents cheered from the bleachers. Although MTV existed, not all of us could afford cable, thus “Open Arms” by Journey still felt relevant in my town a full decade after its release. I proposed “Dancing with Myself” by Billy Idol.

 

     Clearly, I did not win. It’s like even then, I predicted being alone.

 

     I waited with Trevor’s sister, Emily, in the tidy, respectful private room at the cancer hospital, which smelled of alcohol wipes and carpet. A water feature tinkled in the corner. Free water features in every cancer ward! Memorial Sloan Kettering: the World’s Shittiest Spa.

The surgeon walked in. They couldn’t cut out any cancer. 

“We pulled his intestine out of his abdomen, and then tied it off so it’s small, like a rosebud. That’s where he will excrete. A bag hangs here.” All I envisioned were the attachments to my Dyson vacuum, the most useful hoses I lost.

 

     I don’t think I want his intestines where I can see them.  

 

     “Ok,” I said. 

 

     They called it ‘rosebud.’ This is the sled in Citizen Kane, not a husband’s body.

 

     Dr. Pat described Trevor’s liver: granular, riddled with grains of cancer-sand. There would be no more surgeries, no single spot to cut out and save him. All our shots lay spent.

 

     I focused on the bamboo shoots in the corner of the post-op room. 

     

     Bamboo is the only thing that lives in this godforsaken place.

 

⎯

 

 

     Back at our hotel with Trevor’s sister, we crawled in our separate beds. I shouldn’t have been so stunned to be told Trevor would die after sixteen months of treatment for stage IV cancer. 

 

     But I felt shocked. Trevor could do anything. He taught himself Linux on chemo. At his job as an HVAC engineer for affordable housing in Vermont, he contrived an entire new software system with cheap sensors to monitor energy usage and save money.

 

     “Off to make old ladies cold?” I said as I kissed him before work. 

 

     “Of course, dear,” he replied.

 

     He fixed things. He fixed people’s problems. He fixed cars, he fixed houses, he fixed me.

 

     You know those girl feelings? The unlovable kind? I’m not skinny I’m not smart I’m not good I’m not enough I’m not I’m not I’m not. The stupid stuff young women carry. A good man can love such shit right out of a girl by treating her like a woman.

 

     I couldn’t believe he couldn’t fix dying.

 

     Emily handed me a beer as I laid back on my bed. She likes to be rational, so I tried, too.

 

     “I have to tell Trevor he’s dead,” I said. A practical matter.

 

     “I have to tell my mom,” she answered. 

 

     We drew in half a beer’s worth of silence.

 

     Emotion erupted, though. “I’m never having sex with my husband again.” I blurted. “Ever.”

 

     A long silence elbowed its way between us. 

 

     “That’s terrible,” she said at last. I smoothed my scratchy comforter.

 

     “But.” She took another swig. “I’m only ever going to have sex with mine!”

 

     I sprayed beer out my nose onto the floral bedspread. It stung my nostrils. At last, a sting I liked. Spray lousy with truth.

 

⎯

 

     Six, eight months after my husband died, kids drank warm cider in Styrofoam cups at circle time in the community center. Sitting criss-cross applesauce, I looked out the window. The wind assaulted the autumn leaves on a sugar maple and stripped the tree to naked sticks.

 

     Other mothers bored me. Their interests so labored and mundane: BPA-free packaging, preferred preschool teachers, a kids’ clothing swap. So normal. Had I once been this tiresome? Anxiety sparked my single mom ignition. I felt as likely to drive an SUV over the sandbox and mutilate sacred play as to attend, dutifully, to motor skill milestones.

 

     At last, they started talking about mom-porn. “Outlander.” Hot men in tight pants, swashbuckling time-travel TV.

 

     “I miss having sex,” I blurted. “I’m horny as hell.”

 

     A kid rolled the Fisher-Price popcorn popper between us. Passive-aggression in the form of a toy if you ask me.

 

     “Bitches got itches,” the Playgroup Mom said. Her eyes peeked at me above the Styrofoam cup she sipped from. I regretted my blurt.

 

     Organic Mom said, “You should find a young man to take his shirt off and mow your lawn!” They cackled. “You know, mow … your … lawn …”  

 

     “Uh yeah, I get it,” I said. I really did need my grass cut, though, and began to fret about that. Who could I call to help cut my grass?

 

     “You could be a cougar!” the Young Mom said. Another time, she suggested I take up skydiving to meet people. So.

 

     “Thanks.” I nodded. “Duly noted.”

 

⎯

 

     If I described my closest friends (not the strange mom crowd) as the vibrators they gave me, Kurstin would be the wildest, the loudest. The most fun. She’d make you scream.

 

     But Morgan would always be there. Discreet. Available when you need her. 

 

     Susan would be long, lean, efficient.

 

     Amanda wouldn’t be a vibrator at all. She’d be the one to hold you, afterward. She’d be the cup of chamomile tea.

 

     By late fall entertainment dimmed along with daylight, and with small kids time creaked along at home. I felt swallowed by daylight savings and sorrow. An Unsuitable Man arrived. The right kind of man: good for a time, not a lifetime.

 

     He pulled up in his truck whenever he felt like it with no warning. He stayed too long. He’d bring a strong, hip Vermont microbrew in tall cans that could blind a goat. We talked after the kids went to bed, late and long. He’d recently divorced. I spoke of loneliness like an accessory I wore, a heavy set of chains round my neck, rather than a cheese grater abrading my soul.

 

     When I made an awkward move, I don’t think he had any designs on me, but as a woman in the world, I knew which game of Battleship I engaged in. He hugged me goodbye, and I nestled my head above his shoulder. I clung to him as a neck barnacle. My lips brushed his skin, clumsy with want. He wrapped his arms around my ass and picked me up. I straddled him and he carried me to my own bed.

 

     Husband. Lover. Friend. Unsuitable Man. I don’t care who it is. Whenever a man carries you to bed, it’s sexy. Every. Damn. Time.

 

     The Unsuitable Man suited me fine for a while, for just long enough to assure me that I would not be left to wither or regrow my hymen. Which is not true, you can’t regrow it, the internet says. But I still suspected it may happen. I felt crazy, like a young crush. I zipped around my days, all-consumed for one hot blip of a non-child rearing second. The affair ended about as fast as it started, with zero fanfare and zero guilt, the whole thing briefly colorful then empty like a confetti cannon in a mall parking lot.

 

     An Unsuitable Woman, a friend, came on to me in a hot tub, and added sexual confusion to my already confounding grief. She, as drunk as she was beautiful, crawled over and we made out until a high school basketball team returned from Burger King and torpedoed the pool. We ran away like vixens in a 1990s music video, grasping at loose towels.

 

     A friend asked, “Is she anything like you?”

 

     No. Yes.

 

     When I asked a writer friend how to define the difference between sympathy and empathy she said, “Sympathy is: you have no idea what the other person is feeling but feel bad for them.”  

 

     “And?”

 

     “Empathy is: can we make out because I’m so with you on this?” 

 

     I wanted a make-out kind of empathy. I wanted it from the Unsuitable Woman. She was the only other young widow I’d ever met, although it ended her barely-out-of-high-school first marriage, and now we were both moms. Of course she’d wrap that weighted blanket of lived-through experience around my bucking grief, the intimacy of agonies unsaid. I felt naked, vulnerable in all spaces anyway. What a relief to simply … be naked. Of course I wanted the make-out kind of empathy from the Unsuitable Man. I wanted it from strangers at Trader Joe’s, dads on playgrounds, all the happy people swimming through their young lives like caffeinated porpoises. If they could make out with me, I’d been seen. Hell, I deserved make-out empathy, I deserved everyone in my world to empathetically make out with me, to do whatever I needed of them to make me feel better. Otherwise, only an infinite sinkhole that refilled with a quicksand-like sadness remained in me. Why did the loss of a profound love make me want sex everywhere? So contrary to my own expectations, so counter to heartache. But what else is there to want?

 

     “Here’s my number,” Trevor said as he handed me a ripped slip of notebook paper at the airport. We’d first met only days before at a hot dog stand in a Colorado ski town at midnight. I didn’t give him mine. 

 

     I could have a fling, I thought. Then I boarded and cried the whole flight back east, realizing I did not want to be alone, knowing I already missed him. The beverage cart creeped our way. I wiped my cheeks with my sweatshirt cuff.

 

     “Who died?” the old man next to me asked. He reached across for his ginger ale.

 

     We both did, I think, now.

 

⎯

 

     At the party for my fortieth birthday a few months after my husband died, I imagined an app called MomTinder. “A man comes over after the kids are in bed. You have sex, and then he gets the hell out. But before he leaves, he does the dishes.”

 

     Kurstin raised her champagne glass and eyebrows. 

 

     “Dishes,” she said, “should be the foreplay.”

 

     We shouted approval, and I raised my glass high. I would no longer have a husband who could hold me, but I would be okay enough in the embrace of my friends: the ones who could make me howl, the ones with reason to help me think, the ones who would continue to carry me, and not make me ask, for years. The best defense against a zombie hunger, I figured, would be to assemble my own army of kitchen witches. For a while, anyway, I could find myself a touch less hungry.

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