Labor Day weekend

Labor Day weekend is a turning point in Eve Fletcher’s newly exposed solitude: after concentrating on getting Brendan Fletcher off to school, she looks up to find three days with no plans and no ready companion. The holiday also anchors the reported death of Hal Briggs, whose absence reshapes a class Eve attends at ECC.

An Empty Calendar

On a sleepy Friday afternoon at summer’s end, with no meetings or activities left on her schedule, Eve shuts her office door, turns off the light, and weeps. Her distress is fed by the demands of working with older people—the losses of independence, frightening diagnoses, chronic illness, and funerals—as well as the sense that her own life is rushing past. Against that background, the three blank squares of Labor Day weekend seem less like leisure than a stretch of desolation.

Eve has been so occupied with the logistics of Brendan’s departure for school that she has not made holiday plans until the day before. She calls Jane Rosen, her most reliable companion for dinner, movies, and walks around the reservoir, only to learn that Jane and Dave have spontaneously decided to spend a couple of days at an inn on Lake Champlain. They have recently dropped off their twin daughters at Duke and Vanderbilt, and hope the trip will rekindle their marriage as they contend with empty-nest concerns of their own.

Jane confides that she fears there may be no spark between them, or nothing left to talk about. She is also second-guessing a pale-pink, diaphanous nightgown, worrying that its shade will not suit her skin and that frequent hot flashes make her feel unattractive. Eve listens and reassures her that Dave adores her, drawing on the support Jane gave her through the worst days of her separation and divorce. Yet Jane’s worries also expose a sharp contrast: what feels like a crisis to her friend is, to Eve, an almost absurdly enviable problem. The conversation offers companionship, but it cannot fill Eve’s own empty weekend.

The Holiday as a Time Marker

Labor Day also dates a loss in the ECC writing class. Three students have transferred from Hal Briggs’s popular course, The Modern Coliseum: Sports in Contemporary Society. Briggs, a former sportswriter for the Herald, died of a heart attack at a Labor Day barbecue in front of his wife, children, and neighbors. Eve has read his obituary in the newspaper; in class, the news is recalled with sadness, and his age—forty-nine—makes his death seem especially premature.

The weekend thus gathers two kinds of absence without equating them: Eve’s unplanned solitude after Brendan leaves for school, and the sudden, irreversible loss that has emptied Briggs’s classroom. In the first, the blank calendar gives shape to an unsettled transition; in the second, the holiday becomes the date attached to a death.