by Marion Winik
The Wunderkind
HE WAS NOT supposed to go home from the hospital, he was not supposed to live past the age of two, certainly he would never finish grammar school. The doctors had never seen a heart so large, so flawed. Operations with little hope of success were performed, and succeeded. Impossible recoveries were predicted, and completed in no time. All bets were off. There are basically two ways to interpret a situation like this: you are the victim of cruel destiny or the unexpected holder of a ticket to ride. He took the ticket and rushed to the station. At nine, had a little enterprise selling coffee to people waiting in line at the Southern California gas pumps. At fourteen, learned the printing business. At fifteen, finished high school. At nineteen, married a hardworking hippie girl with long blond hair.
By the time he moved to Texas to work with us at the software company, this skinny, bespectacled, prematurely bald wisecracker with his permanent smile and insane capacity for labor was a father of three, a computer whiz, an unsinkable buoy in the raging seas of ’80s and ’90s technodrama. He survived layoffs and buyouts and mergers that flung others into unemployment lines, graduate schools, and ashrams; spun off some cast-aside department of the original company into an independent concern, became the CEO. The wife quit homeschooling and came to work full-time, and so did the neighbors across the street and a dozen of the last survivors clinging to the wreck of the original firm. The pacemaker operation at forty seemed like no big deal. Like the others, it succeeded brilliantly. The sneaky infection afterward probably surprised him least of all.
The Dentist
EVERY HALLOWEEN I think of him because he gave out holographic slap bracelets and bouncy balls instead of candy. My kids actually looked forward to it; they already had ten pounds of sugar in those pillowcases by the time they got to his house.
It was funny to meet someone my age who had become a dentist, a dentist with shoulder-length hair, Hot Tuna on his CD player, a redwood hot tub, unselfconscious ’80s-style narcissism spiking the stolid, beleaguered-but-amused demeanor I more often associate with Jewish men of our parents’ generation. His prices were high and we had no dental insurance, so we didn’t see him professionally, but prices were low in the beauty parlor my husband ran out of our mudroom. Both the dentist and his wife came in. Until she got a little crazy about her highlights, and it turned into something of a catfight. Then it was just him.
After their divorce, the dentist had the kind of sudden insight into his life that requires shiny vehicles and foreign travel. He started a tour company that led motorcycle trips through the Copper Canyon in Mexico, where the Tarahumara run their famous runs and drink their famous beer. God forbid you meet a Mexican driver on one of those roads.
He didn’t—it was a white bird, or a black bird, or, depending on whom you believe, not a bird at all that snapped his head back as he came down the mountain into the sun with his twelve-year-old daughter riding behind him. He was killed almost instantly; she was fine. Fine, but 112, because that’s how fast you grow up when you are alone on a road in Mexico and your father is dying in a ditch beneath his motorcycle, killed by a white bird. (She, at least, was sure of this.)
One can only hope the rest of her life has continued to unfold like a myth of the Tarahumara: that the hands that were wrapped around her father’s waist cannot feel heat or cold, that white birds appear at times of mortal danger, that she receives a visit from her father every year on El Día de los Muertos. That the light from the mountains keeps coming down.
The Second-Grade Teacher
BY THE TIME my older son was in fourth grade and my younger in second, I had come to believe that their birth years had identifiable personalities. As a group, the children of ’88 were among the best anyone had seen: polite, friendly, earnest, their backpacks zipped, their smiles bright. Every teacher, every coach, thought so—and would, all the way through their graduation from high school in 2006. The children of 1990, however, were just the opposite, inspiring rue, exasperation, retrenchment, and the invention of new disciplinary measures wherever they went. As the Chinese zodiac tells us, Horses want things their way and they will become aggressive when all else fails.
Because she was pretty and blond and young, I at first took Vince’s second-grade teacher for a marshmallow, one of those pushovers whose perfect letterforms and shining teeth and multiple Miss America exclamation points are such a balm to the elementary school soul. But she wasn’t much like that at all. She had a formal, almost nineteenth-century quality, a seriousness about phonics and place value, a certain gravity to her bulletin board displays. She signed the reminders sent home with her first initial and last name, C. Green, and that was what I always called her in my head.
By the time she got to Vince, C. Green was at the end of the alphabet and long hours of coming up with encouraging things to say, penned in careful cursive on carbon-paper layers. “Vince has a beautiful spirit and enjoys school. At times moody or negative in contrast to usual good nature. Something of a ‘rebel, ’ for example about Valentine’s dress-up. (Where does he get this?)”
After we moved across the country and my children merged into different groups of squeaky-clean ’88s and troublemaker ’90s, I heard that C. Green had died of breast cancer, leaving young children of her own. It seemed impossible. Aren’t elementary school teachers eternal and ageless—like Santa Claus—holding open the heavy steel doors to the future as the babbling river of children runs through and through?
The Realtor
IF YOU LIVE long enough, life sends you plenty of indignities to rise above. Hangovers, cheap workmanship, the faithlessness of men, the death of loved ones, the signs of aging, the vicious pettiness of people when it comes to real estate. You must focus instead on the joy. To sail through life as she did requires a rare combination of high standards, low expectations, and undimmed enthusiasm. A thick, tough, yet beautifully moisturized and preternaturally radiant skin. The first time I saw her at a party, a tiny woman with a big Texas accent and a fine purple wool coat, it was clear she had it all figured out. I asked for her card. It said Realtor, but might as well have been Realist. For many years it remained in my pocket, an ace in the hole.
When we got into so much trouble selling my house, a crazy mess of misunderstandings and buyer’s remorse that spawned a lawsuit of Dickensian absurdity, she took it in stride. She knew the exact way to manage these things: big smile, great insurance, leopard-print suit, and high-heeled boots. This was a gal who had twirled flaming batons for Wetumka High. But our day in court would never come, instead a stupid settlement that gave me a permanent rankle in my justice-bone. Ah, let it go, honey, she told me. The house is crooked, you’re not. She opened a bottle of wine she and her writer husband had brought back from Europe and we drank it in her cool, leafy backyard. Tell me allabout him, she said, meaning the guy I was moving across the country for. She knew there is little that can’t be fixed by a glass of Bordeaux and a juicy love story.
If you live long enough, life sends you the indignity you can’t rise above: cancer that kills you in three months, with so much pain you could eat your own pillow. Her dapper husband and ancient mama at her bedside in the hospice, praying her out. Ah, honey. I’d rather think of The Realtor as I saw her in Venice, at a good friend’s wedding, giggling with her best friend in the ladies’ room of a castle, a silver head and an ivory one bent together, still girlish at sixty-some, though both knew how much hurt a woman can bear.
The Competition
WE WERE the same age, we went to the same college, we both wrote for alternative newspapers, and we each, in 1996, published a memoir about our troubles so far. I did heroin, she drank vodka; I had bulimia, she had anorexia; I was widowed, she was in recovery. First I heard of her was when her book arrived on the New York Times bestseller list, “a remarkable exercise in self-discovery.” Mine was too, sort of, “if you can imagine Edie Sedgwick mutating into Donna Reed.”I stared at her author photo—her high, clear forehead, her mane of blond h
air. The beginning is terrific, I told people after I’d read it, the stuff about the glasses and the ice cubes and how much she loved to drink, but after she got sober, it was kind of boring. Could you tell those boyfriends apart? My next book was about single motherhood; hers about how much she loved her dog.
When I heard the eulogy on NPR, saw the obituary in the Times, I was blindsided. Lung cancer, 42, are you kidding me? Now she was on my mind even more of the time. When I fell in love with a miniature dachshund a couple years later, I finally read her chronicle of interspecies passion, but all I could do about it now was hug my dog. That summer I was back in Providence where we’d both once gone to school. It was June and the students were moving out, their belongings in piles on the sidewalk. There among the stereo speakers and economics texts, I found a miniature Blue’s Clues armchair for my daughter and, on the ground beside it, a paperback copy of Drinking: A Love Story. I snatched it up and hugged it as if it were written by my sister. The one I never met.
The Quiet Guy
A TRULY HAPPY marriage is much rarer than anyone admits. In fifty years, I’ve seen no more than four or five. I think the secret is this: you are connoisseurs of each other’s faults. The quirks, the glitches, the annoying habits, the obvious complaints that would drive anyone out of their mind in a couple of months only become more precious to you over the years. The in-laws of my first marriage, The Skater’s mother and stepfather, were the real McCoy.
She, a little Italian-Catholic ballbuster, and he, the original geek who never said a word. His idea of a good time was to come home from work in the IT department, fix a pitcher of martinis, and crack open the new Tom Clancy. Her idea of a good time was sitting right there beside him. She had a PhD in his likes and dislikes and her greatest pleasure was to display this knowledge. He never drinks more than one cup of coffee in the morning. Or better yet, in first person plural. We love the Joan Baez Christmas album. We go to Disney in the spring.
They had it all figured out—early retirement, the long-awaited, hard-earned twenty years side by side in their A-frame in the Poconos, on the deck of their Marriott timeshare in Hilton Head, in the cocktail lounge of a ship cruising Alaska. And time with their grandsons: right around then, I moved up to Pennsylvania with the boys. But on a golden October evening during a little bus trip down South, he collapsed at a TGI Friday’s. They brought his dessert, he asked for the check, and he put his head down. Not the worst way to die, but a cruel way to leave. She paid the bill and took the bus home.
Tell me, where does the doting go? And the bossing? And the right way to cook the steak? How can a house be so much quieter without the quiet? She will never get over it, in fact she wouldn’t if she could. Which might be considered something of a consolation by the less perfectly wed.
The Man of Letters
MY DEAREST FRIEND has had extremely bad luck with men. While some seemed dubious from the moment you saw them—the uproarious painter who ordered whole bottles off the bar, the unkempt, paranoid “filmmaker” in combat fatigues—this guy had a certain appeal. He was a surrealist poet from outside Los Angeles, with smooth, California-colored hair, a feline languor, a good vocabulary, a pack of Marlboro reds, a gentlemanly addiction to whatever anyone might have on hand. At the time, my husband had Vicodin, Klonopin, and sublingual morphine tablets, so the two became close. Look, here we all are on the boardwalk in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, the summer my boys were one and three. The sun is an orange-brown pill bottle in the sky. Lounging on a bench, the men squint through the taffy air at little hands waving from the Ferris wheel.
“The folly of mistaking a paradox for discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us, ” wrote Paul Valéry, apparently a realist after all. Along these lines is the folly of mistaking a deluded alcoholic kleptomaniac for the love of one’s life. He probably had slipped in his own mind from being a good person to a bad person long ago, but we didn’t know it until we took him to a weekend-long birthday party near the Big Bend and so many fine lighters and sunglasses disappeared. Back in Brooklyn, he turned violent and she had to call the police to get him out of the apartment. Eventually the pleading, remorseful letters petered out and the next thing she heard he had overdosed in Europe, his head on the desk between a bottle of wine and a baguette of nearly surreal staleness.
The Bad Brother
ON MY SECOND DATE with the man who would become my second husband, which took place partly in a diner in downtown Philadelphia and partly in a hotel room around the corner, he told me about his brothers. Though he started out with just one brother, two years younger, he acquired a couple more when his mom remarried.
Since the older of the two was in jail (and their own mother was in the bin), only the younger one moved in with them at first. This was, he said, something like having Brad Pitt with fetal alcohol syndrome living in your house. This boy smoked every bowl, downed every drink, wrecked every car—like by driving them into the Washington Monument the first day he got them—fucked every girlfriend. He was a hopeless badass idiot, the crown prince of the hopeless badass idiots, and my husband couldn’t resist him, no one could. Even if he was ruining your life and screwing your girl and tormenting you through all your formative years, he was doing it with a big toothy movie-star smile, so you might as well move right into his apartment when your parents kicked you out.
His death was the fucking mess to end all fucking messes. It was the day their parents moved from the city to the farmhouse they’d built in the Blue Ridge. He’d been camping down there for months, working on the house with the builder, which was viewed as part of his turning his life around after all. On moving day he showed up in a pickup loaded with their father’s hand-built shelving, his records, his wine. He was with a friend from DC, and they were dusted out of their minds, arguing violently in the driveway, in fact they pulled back out without unloading the car.
Fifty yards down the road, the dope-crazed friend shot my husband’s stepbrother, pushed him out onto the asphalt, and drove off. Another mile away he slammed into a tree and died as well. This is where my husband found them, his brother motionless, caved in. The first murder in that county since anyone could remember. Typical, says my husband, the old sorrow and rage still knocking wearily around the back of his throat.
What about the stuff in the truck, I asked stupidly, the records and the wine? Oh, he said, we went over to look at it the next day. Everything was ruined.
The Little Brother
CAN’T GET ENOUGH of that Sugar Crisp, I was singing in the babaloo Sugar Bear voice as I poured a bowl for our six-year-old daughter. My husband picked up the box and looked it over. This was my brother’s favorite cereal, he said. For a while, I thought he was Sugar Bear. So I added Sugar Crisp to the list: chess, fireworks, Lord of the Rings, ’80s synth-pop, a deejay booth, an Asian girl, a bottle of champagne or Bombay gin. A gray silk robe in our closet. A certain hospital in Washington, DC.
That night in the diner he told me about this brother, too, this intense, smart, sardonic, elusive little brother, and I could see it was almost like losing a child (you were responsible for them), like losing your parents (they are never the same), like losing your mate (you are alone with the memories). You are not the fair one without the dark one, the loud one without the quiet one, the big one without the little one, so in a way it was like dying yourself.
We have the copy of the Narcotics Anonymous blue book all his friends at rehab signed the day he got out to go to his court appearance. I would like you to leave me a recipe for that secret charisma you have, wrote Wayne. From Candy: I saw a great change in you, you’ve started to laugh. Back in DC, he immediately went to the neighborhood to score, then to his grandmother’s empty apartment to get high. His grandmother was in the hospital and would die herself a few days later.
My husband wonders still if he did it on purpose. If there was no such thing as heroin would he have found some ot
her way to go out at thirty-one? They buried him next to The Bad Brother on their parents’ farm, and he and the brother who was left held a two-man twelve-step meeting beside the hole in the ground. Two older brothers as powerless as older brothers have ever been.
Remember the ten-gallon bottle of liquid Demerol he made when he worked at NIH? These legends are nothing but torture now. It is impossible to feel this is not partly your fault.
The Conscientious Objector
ACTUALLY, I always wanted to be a farmer, said the social studies teacher to the English teacher, as she wheeled his chair into the park so they could make out. Ever since I was a boy. The New Hampshire he’d grown up in was what was left of the whole idea of this nation. Straight and true, tough-minded, hard-ass. One day on a country road, he fought his good friend, as boys will sometimes do. Sickened by it, he decided never to fight again. Halfway through college when the war started, studying history, playing lacrosse, he refused the call to kill. Got sent up with the other COs—12, 000 out of 34.5 million—for alternative service, a logging camp in Oregon, a road crew in Michigan. Caught polio, spent a year in an iron lung, left in a chair. Twenty-two.
