ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part Two, Chapter 40: After-Yoga Talk
I go to a late-morning yoga session at Gilda’s Club, but I don’t go for the yoga, which I don’t like. I go for the after-yoga lunch with Jeanette and Peggy, my grief-connection mates.
We pull food from Gilda’s well-stocked refrigerator, take our loaded plates outside to the deck, and settle at a table under a red awning, with birdsong and baskets of flowers about.
It doesn’t take me long to start talking about my marriage.
“I mourn what I didn’t have that I could have had,” I say. “A deeper love. A more honest relationship. Nothing held back. Ernie finally let me gaze into his eyes, but he shielded his mind and heart even as he said to me: ‘You know everything about me.’ But I didn’t. He didn’t want me to know how scared he was of dying, and that was my big fear, too — that he would die and leave me. How could I survive without him? I couldn’t talk to him of this, either.”
“We understand our husbands better since they’ve died,” Peggy says, “but we also understand ourselves better.”
“It hurts,” I say, “what I’ve come to understand.”
“Growing pains,” Jeanette says.
I know a little about Jeanette and her Jim. I don’t know anything about Peggy and Daniel.
“We became engaged when we were both twenty,” Peggy says. “We spent that summer on a commune in New England — he wanted to practice self-sufficiency. A noble idea, but the reality was too harsh for me. It turned cold, and we had no electricity. I wanted to leave. I asked Daniel to leave with me. He thought about it for an hour, then said: ‘I’m staying, Peggy.’ So I left. He stayed. He married, had children. I didn’t marry. He divorced. Thirty years later, we meet again. He thought I’d broken the engagement, and I thought he had.
“This time we marry, and four years later he finished his novel. I’d just read it. I was bringing home a bottle of champagne, to celebrate. I came through the kitchen door. He was at the sink.” Peggy’s eyes water; her nose reddens. She dabs her eyes with tissue. We widows try to remember to carry tissue with us. “He turned around, and drool was running from his mouth. I thought he’d had a stroke, but that wasn’t it. He had the worst kind of brain tumor — inoperable.”
For long moments Peggy, Jeanette, and I are silent with each other. I want to reach out to Peggy, to touch her hand. Jeanette does.
“I’ve asked Daniel to forgive me for whatever pain I caused him. I know he’s forgiven me. He always said: ‘Peggy, I’m glad you aren’t perfect. That takes the pressure off me. I’m not perfect, either.’ ”
Peggy plays with the diamond ring on her left hand, moving it back and forth. She and Jeanette both wear their wedding rings.
I look down at my ringless hand. Early in our marriage, Ernie and I sold our pewter wedding bands and the diamond ring he’d given me. Now, I think: Were we so out of money that we had to sell our wedding rings? Or did that show just how out of love we were?
