by Marion Winik
After he died, I read passionate remembrances by other authors and former students. There was nobody who didn’t wish they’d had more time with him. Though he did not publish until his mid-forties, there were seven books I hadn’t read yet. Our relationship was really just beginning.
The Belle of the Ball
died 2012
IN BETWEEN MY FIRST marriage and my second, a big green-eyed food writer with wavy hair and a mustache caught my eye. One day I was discussing the pros and cons of this guy with my good friend when her mother, an exquisitely preserved woman of seventy-some with sparkling eyes to match her sparkling jewelry, spoke up. That’s a good-lookin’ man, she said in her deep Texas drawl. If you don’t want him, I’ll take him.
As a girl who loved to dance, my friend’s mother had in her youth dated some fine young fellows; what she loved most was to drive into Austin or San Antonio to see Duke Ellington or Count Basie. I was wild, she later conceded, but I had high standards. It was interesting when, at twenty-one, she returned from business college to marry the man who later became my friend’s daddy. This was a man who didn’t dance at all, and didn’t exactly have a profession, either. Since her mother was about to take over the town credit union, the money thing wasn’t an issue, but how did The Belle of the Ball marry a man who didn’t dance?
My friend got an inkling when in her early adolescence, she was given the sex talk by her daddy, who had been put in charge of most of the upbringing while her mother was at work. When he explained the situation to her, she said, That sounds like it hurts. He said, Oh yeah, at first. After that, you’ll be chasin’ him around the room to get your hands on him.
These days, my friend and I love to raise a glass to our mothers, both of whom loved to raise a glass. We discuss their fashion convictions: her mother’s went right down to the skin. If she wore a pink dress, you could be certain she was also wearing a pink bra, pink slip, and pink panties. She had a drawerful of filmy nightgowns to sleep in and even in her nineties would not put on a pair of pajamas without a little lace on them. Neither my friend nor I ever dressed properly, and we were often told as much by our mothers. Yet we both know how it feels to have a very particular woman with whom you didn’t always see eye to eye admire how you turned out and what you’ve accomplished. It’s pink silk lingerie for your soul.
The Rancher
died 2012
MY TEXAS-SIZED CRUSH ON the state of Texas, founded in Austin circa 1976, got its spacious western annex in 1988, when a good friend took Tony and me and our six-month-old baby out to visit her mother in Odessa, a six-hour drive that took four in her BMW. They were a family of cattle ranchers, her mother the sixth generation, and they still owned a nice-sized piece of the Permian Basin, though they’d given a chunk away to build the university. My friend’s childhood residence was a beautiful, relaxed family home, not overly formal as such a place might be up in Yankeeland. There was a mezzanine that ran around the second floor, and I could picture her three older brothers racing around it with their chaps and pop-guns.
We couldn’t wait to strip off our infant son’s diaper and put him in the hot tub, a plan my friend’s mother—perfectly coiffed and dressed, yet somehow slightly, endearingly gawky—at first found alarming. But when she came out to check on us, she was tickled to death. Why, look at that! she said, blinking her big brown eyes. He’s practically swimming! And every time that boy’s name came up for the next twenty years, my friend’s mother would proudly recall that he was the smartest baby she had ever seen.
As much as I loved anything about the Lone Star State, I loved this family, their stories, their accents, their cooking, their generosity, their incredibly good taste in clothes and furnishings and art. For years, my greatest joy was to be invited to the birthday party my friend and her mother threw themselves every other year at the Gage Hotel, out in the great nowhere bordering Big Bend National Park, where we would drink margaritas and eat Mexican food and dance under the stars for two days.
I’m having such a hard time getting to the sad part—maybe that’s her doing. To bury two sons in two years, to struggle so long with that damn disease taking everything you have left—Shh, y’all hush now, she says. Come over here and look at this sunset. Is that not the most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen?
The Father of the Bride
died 2012
HE IS SLIM, STRAIGHT, and smiling in a black tuxedo jacket; she is a cloud of organza, a single pale hand resting on his upturned palm. These two have been practicing this dance since before she could read. Off to the right, fine young men in bow ties stand like a barbershop quartet, arms outstretched, mouths wide. Waltz across Texas with you in my arms, waltz across Texas with you. The one with the boutonniere has just become her husband.
By the time I met her at the software company, that wedding photo had become a painting above the grand piano on the wall of her living room. Behind the bridal mufti, she had perfect posture, a steel-trap mind, and a no-bullshit attitude; he was an excellent if not very humble writer who barricaded the house during football games. There were many good parties there, but the marriage had no more luck than his Houston Oilers, and before long the song we were dancing to was “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette. My friend’s daddy danced at her wedding, he danced at her divorce party, and he’d dance at her next wedding, too. Whatever makes you happy, honey. You go right ahead.
My friend’s father was from a town that no longer exists called Concrete, Texas. He grew up speaking German, picking cotton, plowing fields, and riding a horse to school. Then siphoning gas out of the tractor to start the truck. His mama got one of those female cancers and died when he was fourteen; long after he grew into his Stetson, he still wept to think of it. By then he could talk to anybody about anything, sell them a mule, beat them at poker, and congenially mispronounce their name throughout their entire acquaintance. He taught three daughters to dance; my friend was the baby.
But I don’t know how, I protested the first time my friend grabbed my hand for a two-step. Pshaw, she said, steering me out on the floor. For a hapless East Coast shimmy-shaker like myself, dancing with these people is like embracing a moving tree. You just hang on to the branches as they dip and whirl. Don’t be fooled by the cloud of organza—the girl in that painting has all her daddy’s moves. All the time he was training her to follow, he taught her to lead.
Portrait of a Lady
died 2017
MOTHER ABHORRED VIOLENCE, MY pal from East Texas begins. Probably because the love of her life, her first husband, died in World War II. Then her second husband, my brother’s dad, knocked her teeth out. My father, who was ten years older than she was, was an alcoholic womanizer. You know, the type that would go out for a loaf of bread and come back Tuesday.
I was four and my brother fifteen the night he picked up a couple of floozies in a honky-tonk in Kilgore, she continues. They convinced him to drive them to Dallas to party, then stole his cash and his car and threw him out on the side of the highway. He walked to the nearest house and asked to use the phone. The operator who connected his call turned out to be his niece. What happened, Uncle Carl? she asked.
I got rolled by barflies on the Dallas highway, he said. Tell Larse—that was his twin brother—to come get me.
He had planned to tell my mother a brawl had broken out at the sawmill, but by the time he got home, it was too late. Get the hell out, Mother said.
Well, Judy, he answered calmly. I need a shower. And some supper.
She picked up the .22 and aimed it at him. My brother grabbed me as he went for cover. Later he explained: you always want to be behind the one with the gun. A shot cracked, and a bullet zinged into the wall over the refrigerator.
Yep, said my dad. I’ll be in the shower.
Two years later he died of a heart attack, then she married Jim. Jim never laid a hand on her in fifty years. Mother carried a pistol in her apron all her life, just in case of intruders, but as far as
I know she never shot a living thing. She was a nurse, and an animal lover. Every morning she went down to the creek with a china cup of coffee and her dogs, maybe the llama, a few cows, a chicken or two. The mockingbirds, she said, were the most social of the birds. Her favorite to see was the heron.
After their mother’s death, my friend and her brother walked along the creek one last time. They kept stumbling over china cups. As they were leaving, she hung one in a tree.
The Statistic
died 2018
IN THE MONTHS IMMEDIATELY following her mother’s death, my pal from East Texas really got clobbered. One of her oldest friends committed suicide; another, a powerhouse who’d been a speechwriter for Ann Richards, was treated successfully for cancer—then died. Next came an even lower blow. A guy she saw every day, another East Texan, a work friend who ended up becoming much more.
He was a wild child, no doubt, but these days it was down to getting a little carried away at office parties. He was forty, with two kids and a job he loved. He would do anything for people he cared about, and he cared about everyone.
The guys got a house in the French Quarter for a bachelor party. Started with a long day of barhopping. Somebody knew somebody knew somebody who could get some coke. For old times’ sake. Three of them left the club and went back to the house. While one met the dealer in the front room, the wild child and the other guy waited out back. The exchange was made; the dealer left. Before he called in his friends to get started, the guy took a little taste. Whoa. Nuh-uh. He ran out the front door and down the street to catch the dealer before he got away. Left the baggie on the counter.
By the time he got back, there were two bodies on the floor. Thirteen hours later, the other guy woke up from his coma. The wild child never did. My friend went to New Orleans to say goodbye. The doctor told her fentanyl—so much cheaper to fill a baggie with than cocaine—causes fifteen deaths every month at that hospital alone.
How do you say stop, enough?
Right. You can’t.
Two Slips of the Knife
died 2008, 2012
FORGIVE ME FOR PUTTING two of them together, as if I could lure this story once and for all into a very small pen, shut the gate, and run away. It’s the one where the highway and the weather, the big cars and the tiny errors steal her forever, our precious golden girl with a heart full of good. One was a sixteen-year-old on her way to a birthday party, a dear, down-to-earth philosopher-tomboy who loved summer camp and golf. One was a twenty-year-old driving to her job at Francesca’s at the mall, saving for a move to Montana. She was an artist, a dog lover, and a tree hugger, the beloved baby of her family. They both were. And their mothers—one my sister-mom in Texas, one my student in an MFA program in Pittsburgh—got the same phone call. The one where they tell you there was nothing that could be done.
After the moment when nothing could be done came the avalanche of doing. People sent messages and placed phone calls and made pots of chili and bought boxes of scones. They pushed back the furniture, filled plastic cups with forks and spoons. They went to the drugstore, they booked airline tickets, they went through photographs. They went to buy tissues, retrieved crumpled tissues, pulled white tissues like doves from the box. Some people were just doing their jobs: conducting investigations, delivering flowers. Finally all that was over, and everyone went away. Back to their unharmed children, their familiar tasks and uncomplicated conversations, back to the world where even the T-shirts insist life is good.
Oh my sweet ladies, friends of my heart! Broken like a vase or a bone or a car, broken beyond full repair or even the desire for it. If you wait long enough, I’ve heard, the pain somehow eases. Very slightly, very slowly, one notch at a time. I will be there, I swear. I want to see.
The Old Rake
died 2017
TEXAS LOVES ITS LEGENDS, and he was a legendary Texas legend-maker, a hard-living gonzo journalist from an oil town called Royalty, famous for articles about sports figures and strippers. On the road home to Brownwood in her green ’74 Cadillac with the custom upholstery and the CB radio, clutching a pawn ticket for her $3,000 mink, Candy Barr thought about biscuits. A heart attack, he explained after he survived one, felt like a bear sitting on your chest reading the sports page.
I read him long before I met him, and the only time I spent with him was when we all went to Venice for a wedding, during which he played an unwitting role in a moment that changed my life. He was with his third wife, a real estate agent who would soon help me sell my last place of residence in Texas. I was with the man I would leave it all and move to Pennsylvania for, starry-eyed in love. During a layover on the way back, my sweetheart recalled my attention to a good-night kiss I had given this writer in a hotel bar. He had seen the twinkle in the old man’s eye, and he had a pretty good idea what it meant. Oh, Jesus. What it meant was that the clock on this marriage was already ticking; the first green shoots of the plant that would strangle us had already poked through.
Which is not to say the guy wasn’t trouble. He was not good to wives, as his third wife’s best friend put it. After the fourth one left him, he finally had to learn to work the dishwasher. One day in his early eighties, he fell coming out of the shower. He lay there for four days before someone found him, then died a week later in the hospital surrounded by old friends drinking tequila out of Styrofoam cups.
That sounds like a story he could have written. Funny thing is, his editor had recently asked him to keep a “death journal,” a diary that would run in the magazine after he was gone. A final farewell, a macabre honor—but this old pro saw the flaw in the plan. How you gonna pay me? he said.
The Mother of Four
died 2008
MY SECOND MARRIAGE TOOK me from Austin, Texas, to rural Pennsylvania, leaving a twenty-year cache of friendships and a house near the neighborhood school for a hermit husband in a place so isolated I had to drive my kids to the bus stop. The only people he knew were his former neighbors, and the only reason he knew them is because he’d had to go over and tell them their barn was on fire. They were a family of six, and they hadn’t been in the area long. This meant they socialized with people they weren’t related to and were not afraid to try my spicy Thai noodles. Then my son formed a band with their son and I spent much of the next six years sitting in their kitchen. We were moms: we loved our chardonnay.
Our friendship had a certain counterintuitive magic. She was six years younger, with perfect nails and makeup, and tailored slacks—like a stewardess from the sixties or a dreamy first-grade teacher. She was Catholic, Republican, and pro-life, had married and had her first baby around twenty. When she told people we were like sisters, I felt a blush of pride. We had some fine times together as groupie moms, the two of us in our T-shirts at the so-called gigs, gingerly swaying due to our various back and knee troubles.
When her back troubles led to surgery, when the surgery didn’t work, when it turned out the back pain had only been camouflaging the kidney cancer—by then she had been in bed for months and it was too late. My mother was dying in New Jersey, my marriage was in freefall, my forty-three-year-old friend was in mortal agony: there wasn’t enough chardonnay or Vicodin in the world. I relentlessly cooked Thai noodles and pot roast and spaghetti, and I drove around in circles dropping them off.
So much of motherhood turns out to be about letting go. The way she had to do it, all at once and much too soon, is unimaginable and impossible and happened anyway. Eight years after her funeral, I saw her beautiful children assembled at her daughter’s wedding. Never have I seen more clearly how my world will go on without me.
The Man of Honor
died 2009
DEAR MARION, THE PURPOSE of this email is to tell you that my son, a former student of yours and your ex-husband’s, drowned around midnight on August 17 while canoeing under a full moon on Lake Champlain in Grand Isle, Vermont. Earlier that day, he had been man of honor for his sister at her wedding.
; The ceremony was absolutely beautiful, outdoors in a little cove on the lake. Afterward, my son, who lived nearby in a cottage with his girlfriend, had invited two friends to spend the night. We planned to drive them home if they had too much to drink, but he hadn’t. He took his job as man of honor seriously. We still asked him to call us when he got home, as parents tend to do.
He called our hotel, I answered, and I told him to enjoy the night with his friends and check out the beautiful full moon. I went to bed thinking all was right with the world. Around 1 a.m. we got the hysterical call from his girlfriend. As soon as she said the boat had capsized, I knew it would not have a good outcome. We drove back the twenty miles, we got lost on the island, Sarah kept calling in tears. When we finally got there, there were lights all over. Ambulance, police, media, helicopter, boats up and down the shoreline . . . the dive team came at daylight.
Today I was trying to remember important people in his life who might want to know about what happened. His two years at Penn State Harrisburg were quite lackluster, except for the two of you, and the man who owned the hot wing place up in the Poconos where he worked. He ended up in Vermont, where he lived with his sister, and became a brewer at Magic Hat, a job that he loved. They loved him too. I hear they are going to bronze his brewing boots and keep them on display at the brewhouse. Marion, I am not sure if you remember my son, but I felt the need to let you know, just in case you do.
The Little Bird
died 2016
I HAD MY LAST baby at forty-two, having just moved to a big house in the middle of nowhere. While everyone in the family got a life, I remained depressed and friendless through my pregnancy. Sure, the birth of my daughter was a brief pick-me-up; then I was desperate for a sitter. The headline Beautiful Blond Baby on my sign on the grocery store bulletin board drew the attention of a mother with just such an infant in her cart. She was a tall drink of water, a chatty Texas blonde.