by Marion Winik
Having been in a marriage something like hers decades later, I suspect she knew the truth about her husband early on—but as long as she could pretend, she absolutely did. They were the best-looking couple in town, and so much fun. And she had her three darlings; how lonely could she be? The kids were in their teens when she finally cracked. It was the third night of Hanukkah, all of them standing around the menorah wide-eyed as he headed for the door. Go, go, she screamed into the street. Just go.
There was no shortage of suitors for both of them, no shortage of busybodies and bigots, either. It was almost a relief when he moved to an apartment in the city. In some ways, he had picked the best of all times to come out, the Manhattan of the seventies and eighties, the Limelight, the Boy Bar, Studio 54. And also the worst of times: as the eighties ended, he got a sore on his foot that wouldn’t heal. She came as soon as he told her and stayed through the end, grumbling boyfriends on both sides notwithstanding.
After that, it just kept getting harder with cameras and mirrors: once allies, now bullies to be avoided. You don’t want to care so much, but how do you stop? Mom, the kids would scold when she’d try to slip out of a photo or bury her face in the nearest grandchild. Don’t be silly, you look fine. She did adore them all, but when Mr. Lung Cancer knocked on the door, she was ready. Give me a just a minute, dear. I’ll be right down.
The Fourth
died 2014
A CARD TABLE WITH a felted cloth, two brand-new, slippery decks, a long, skinny score pad divided into mysterious quadrants. Folding tables set catty-corner for the ashtrays and glasses, a dish of flavored almonds, a crystal bowl of shiny chocolate balls. These come from the candy store on Route 35 and are only for bridge, which is why they’re called bridge mix. North and South put their kids to bed; East and West ring the doorbell. Drinks are poured. The door to the kitchen is closed. Game on.
The fact that my parents’ best friends were less ferocious than they were doesn’t mean they couldn’t beat them. Two diamonds. Three hearts. Three no trump. Pass. Pass. Pass. Over the whole twenty-year rivalry, which ended only with my father’s early death, I bet they were even. When the game was at their house, I might be taken along: they had a brown-and-white dog named Clementine and a cute son my age. We had a very serious romance when we were eleven.
West was tall, with curly hair, kind eyes, and rectangular wire-rimmed glasses on his excellent nose. He was president of the JCC, had two businesses in Asbury: a carpet store and the U-pedal boats at the boardwalk. I worked at the boats one summer when I was a teenager, then later caused trouble by writing in my first book about how we workers embezzled money to buy beer. I did a lot of stupid things like this in the early days of my writing. That whole first book was what old Jews call a shonda for the goyim.
Poor East: West could not play cards, or drive, or even answer the phone in the very long confusion that was the end of his life, through which East stood unflinchingly by him. The last time I saw him we had to explain who I was. Hy and Jane’s daughter. You remember. The one who stole money from the boats.
The Cat with Nine Lives
died 2016
DISEASES DIDN’T KILL HIM (polio, leukemia, von Willebrand’s), history left him standing (World War II, Korea, market crash of ’87), his marriages proved nonlethal, and one escape was sheer James Bond: a collision between a commuter seaplane and a police helicopter over Brooklyn that killed everyone involved except him and a woman whose life he saved. Just after the plane hit the water, he forced open the emergency exit and pulled her out, then tried to get back into the rapidly sinking plane. The other passenger was his buddy, a fellow stockbroker with kids the same age—but the current tore the door out of his hands, just as it would in his nightmares for years to come. How did he get to shore with a broken back, a split-open head, and an unconscious woman? the reporters asked. We were lucky, he told them. Just lucky.
This modest hero was my mother’s favorite cousin—an old-school gentleman who loved a good joke and a good cigar. He had a seat on the stock exchange for forty years. He called his own mother every morning. His boys were the center of his universe, and they worshipped him in return. He never raised his voice at home, and the first time his older son heard him curse in anger he was seventeen years old: he had gone to work with his father on the trading floor. His ninth life lasted seven years, the long goodbye of losses and forgetting. This is when Sweetums, which is what my father used to call his wife, not to her face, and not because she was, became a hero, too. He would have hated being such a burden, but of course he barely knew about it. The only consolations of Alzheimer’s, and they are small indeed, is that it doesn’t hurt much, and that once the full nightmare is under way, you are long gone.
The Man Who Could Take
Off His Thumb
died 2009
THROUGH THE SIXTIES AND seventies, my father had various businesses, among them a motel, a discotheque, and a small chain of tennis facilities grandly dubbed National Sports Corporation. He co-owned National Sports with his uncle, who was so much younger than my grandfather that he and my dad had grown up as peers.
From our youngest years, my sister and I were in the employ of National Sports, one of us reading numbers off receipts as the other totaled them using a furiously grinding adding machine. We were often taken along when my father went after-hours to the indoor club near our house. Inside the corrugated metal walls that enclosed the three courts hung a second wall of thick green vinyl, creating a darkened corridor around the perimeter of the immense space, full of stray tennis balls. If that were not paradise enough, there was also a sauna.
One of my parents’ friends claimed he could turn you into a puppy, another played a game with stair steps and pennies, and my uncle had a trick where he pretended to take off his thumb. He lived in Rye, New York, and he was married to a woman whom my father referred to as Piano Legs, though whether this was a compliment or an insult, I don’t know. Piano Legs died in the 1970s, and my uncle remarried a friend of hers, a formidable woman who worked for the cause of Israel and that of Soviet dissidents, who knew David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Moshe Dayan. She and my uncle had quite a run, living at the tennis camp in the summers and in winters, traveling the world: Easter Island, Alaska, climbing in the Himalayas, floating down the Amazon.
At seventy-three, my uncle began to have symptoms of Alzheimer’s, and his wife kept a diary of her experiences for the next ten years. She self-published a book about it, and yesterday a copy arrived from Amazon. In it I found pictures of my uncle doing his thumb trick for little kids in Brazil and Moscow. What luck he had, to marry this woman, whose obituary only recently appeared in the Palm Beach Post. Our life together has had its share of pain, she wrote on the last page of her book, but its share of joy as well. Perhaps the greatest reward in this kind of situation is the knowledge that you have not failed the person you love.
The Classmate
died 2010
PROBABLY BECAUSE SHE LIVED in our hometown all her life, I recognize the names in her guest book at Legacy.com. Old classmates have posted reminiscences about driving into school together, about working side by side at the Foodtown. A boy who’d known her since kindergarten tells how they laughed to find themselves in class together yet again at the local college. Many write of her laugh: a throaty chuckle you didn’t expect from that skinny reed of a girl.
She had a long, shallowly sculpted Eastern European face, light eyes and long blond hair, a very Slavic series of consonants in her last name. Whether for her complexion or her disposition or both, she was always called Peaches, even in school. Her older brothers were famous in our town for their basketball feats; she herself made girls’ varsity our freshman year. After her father left, her mom raised seven kids alone, working full-time. My classmate was the oldest daughter, mother #2. When girls who have that childhood don’t start families later on, it makes a certain sense. They’ve done it already.
She worked most o
f her life on displays for department stores, a job she loved: a tall, stylish woman, hair cropped, often amused. She never hid what she really thought; she always had that laugh. She was just fifty-two the day she went home from work early on Friday and was dead by Sunday, a mystery that’s really never been solved. Liver failure, Tylenol, that’s what we heard. There were hundreds of people at the viewing, many of them old classmates, shocked and sad. We had thought we were still young.
Two First Cousins
died 2008, 2012
MY COUSIN AND I are together in the playpen. We wear thick white diapers and rubber pants that leave red circles on our chunky thighs. The game is pull yourself up on the nylon mesh walls and scoot around the edge of the pen. Already my cousin is a gentleman; he lets me go first. Our mommies are pregnant again, standing at the counter in their tented maternity blouses, a cigarette burning in the ashtray. They are stuffing celery sticks with a mixture of cream cheese, Roquefort, and Worcestershire, a recipe left by their own mother before she ran off and died young of a heart attack.
Ten years later. In the half-finished upstairs room on Dwight Drive, my little sister and I are making my cousin show us his penis. We did the same thing the other day to a boy down the street; apparently we are taking inventory. My cousin remains gallant, if red in the face: if we really must see it he will show us. His own little sister watches in awe, half admiring our terribleness, half bristling at her brother’s subjugation.
The big brother did everything right. Worked in his father’s paint store, did pull-ups and push-ups every morning, brought bagels to his parents’ house on weekends. His little sister did not follow his example. She meant no harm and I don’t believe she hurt a soul, but she never escaped the fallout of some early bad decisions involving a glass pipe.
Hearts are a problem in our family: A few weeks after his fiftieth birthday party, at his peak and prime, my cousin went into the bathroom one morning and did not come out. His sister continued paying for her mistakes for another four years. Possessions disappeared, blood sugar spiked, toes were amputated. The night her little dog disappeared, it almost killed her, then all the other stuff actually did.
Since we have to live as if our choices matter, perhaps we should not dwell on the story of my two first cousins. Unless you can think of something else it can possibly mean.
Their Mother
died 2017
TODAY I DROVE TO Delaware to see my aunt buried between the tombstones of her two children. It was a Jewish funeral, so the mourners passed a shovel among them to throw dirt on the coffin. My uncle seemed to have shrunk to the size of a large doll.
In my childhood, we drove to Delaware every Thanksgiving. It was six hours round trip and my father was a total ass about it, but that was just his way. The best thing was my aunt’s stuffed artichokes, packed with lemony, garlicky breadcrumbs. For years I thought stuffed artichokes were like cranberry sauce or sweet potatoes with marshmallows, a special food eaten only on Thanksgiving. She also introduced us to the joy of the miniature dachshund, the official dog breed of our family to this day.
When my aunt was eight years old and my mother sixteen, their mother ran off with another man, leaving them in the care of their father, a terrible tyrant. Even as it dumped on my mother a life-changing overabundance of responsibility, this turn of events so traumatized my aunt that she suffered a period of hysterical paralysis. (I heard this so often as a child that I recite it here with confidence, though I have never heard this condition mentioned in any other context.) From that time on, my aunt was well aware that the universe was against her. What god makes a mother bury both of her children? Still, she had to get through the days, so she doted on my uncle and found joy where she could. Shopping. Lunch. Studies have been conducted to prove that smiling, even if you don’t feel like smiling, will actually make you happier. My aunt could have told them that. I think she could have told them exactly how much.
In later years, I never saw her without a jigsaw puzzle spread out on her dining room table. This was the legacy of the terrible tyrant, who had raised his daughters with strict rules about puzzle procedure. First you find the edges and put them together. Then you sort the other pieces by color. You never pick up a piece unless you already know where it goes. There is a piece for every spot, and if there isn’t, check under the table. There’s no luck about it. Keep going, and you will receive one of life’s few predictable satisfactions, the joy of putting in the last piece.
The Social Worker
died 2018
MY MOTHER HAD FEW close friends who weren’t serious about golf. Also rare among her cronies were large families, professional careers, and divorces, at least in the early part of my childhood. Yet one of her dearest confidantes was a pert brunette with a great figure who had five kids, an ex-husband, a master’s degree in social work, and a full-time job in the field. While this woman thought it was funny that someone as smart as my mother would devote her life to playing games, my mother could not believe that anyone had actually set out to have so many children. Well, the last two were twins. Twins! A prospect almost as petrifying to Jane Winik as stepchildren.
The social worker always made me feel I was one of her favorites, stopping to visit whenever I was home from college. My mother did the same over there. As we kids grew up, we followed the story of each other’s family like a long-running TV series. Her oldest boy got into Dartmouth, my mother would report. His brother had moved to the West Coast with some guys from high school. The cheerleader went into finance, the dancer had a show in the city, the other twin became very Jewish and moved to Israel. Five kids, just like her mother. Oy!
Among the many fascinating details of this soap opera, there is a plot line that remains veiled in mystery. Why did the oldest daughter see “a silver man in a silver car,” revealed to be my dad, in front of their house one Tuesday afternoon? What went on at that discotheque of his, which her mother loved and my mother found utterly ridiculous? Was it all just a rumor, or were the seventies as Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice as people imagine? All we know is that they remained friends for the rest of their lives.
In her last years, the social worker moved to California to be near her oldest daughter and her grandchildren. At a certain point, she forgot she had retired and thought she was seeing patients at the facility where she herself was being treated. I’m not ready for this appointment, she would suddenly cry. Her daughter would calm her by explaining that the client had rescheduled.
Oh, good, said her mother. That will give me time.
The Mensch
died 2011
WHEN IT CAME TIME to describe her father’s achievements in his obituary, my oldest friend wrote this: He spent much of his life in New Jersey, providing for his family and relaxing at local beaches. Indeed. Her handsome, dark-eyed father was one of the most solicitous and generous people I have ever met. You must be thirsty; let me get you a glass of water. Wine? No? How about a snack? After my parents were gone and the house on Dwight Drive sold, I could show up down the street and get a hero’s welcome. Then we’d hit the beach in Asbury, and he would take the kids swimming so we lazy mamas could lounge around and read.
Most of his life he was a car dealer, selling British Leyland imports, and despite my friend’s prescient badgering about the environmental cost of automobiles, her first car was a 1972 baby blue MGB Midget that shut her mouth. Then, the summer we were eighteen, he won a red Triumph convertible in a sales contest and arranged for us to pick it up at the factory in England. Somewhere south of Paris we rolled the car into a ditch in the process of pulling over for the cyclists of the Tour de France. It seemed just fine when it was dragged out by a tractor, but the next day as we left, weeds tangled in the undercarriage caught fire. But even then, it got us all the way down to Nice, up through the Alps, into Berlin, and back to Calais. The only time I can remember her father being angry was upon that car’s return to the United States.
When you’re
eighty, a lot of things are long ago: tough decisions, hard times, regrets, all far away now. Watching him in his garden, or with our little girls in the shallow water, you could get the idea he’d been waiting all his life just for this. To be a deeply tanned, slightly stooped old Jewish man, standing at the water’s edge in turquoise trunks and a white terrycloth bucket hat. Surely if he’d been given the chance, he’d be standing there still.
The Thin White Duke
died 2016
THERE ARE TWO KINDS of rock star: the kind you want to sleep with, and the kind you want to be—though in most cases either would be fine. A poet friend told me that the high point of her life was when she appeared as Ziggy Stardust at a twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of the album at Yale. (A second-generation fan, she was not even born when we were listening to Hunky Dory on endless loop in 1971.) She cut off her hair, dyed it red, wore a jumpsuit and silver platform boots. She sang every song on the album. Though this was the entire history of her career as a vocalist, she was so carried off by euphoria that she married the drummer.
In my early adolescence, I had a kind of mild gender dysphoria, though I have only learned that term relatively recently. Nagged by the feeling that things would be working out better for me if I’d been born a boy, one summer at camp I told people my name was Mike. It wasn’t that I was attracted to girls. In fact, the teenage me was more interested in gay men than gay women, making continual heroic efforts to be admitted to El Moroccan Room, a drag club in Asbury Park. Gender, sexuality, art, music, rebellion: all of this made more sense because of him. He gave us a bigger space to decide who to be.