by Marion Winik
The Grandmother-General
died 2013
THE VERY DAY WE moved to Baltimore, my nine-year-old daughter met the girl across the street, and the two have been an item ever since. These days they are big girls, playing big-girl games; I think they will be friends for life. Back when we all met, the little neighbor came with a pack of siblings, and also a rather impressive grandmother. She was a tall woman, with a lot of pepper remaining in her salt-and-pepper hair, and hastily applied but never omitted fuchsia lipstick. She had a gruff, impatient manner, and strict rules for the children, whom she shepherded every day in summer to the neighborhood pool. Sometimes I would sit with her on the bench outside the gate and smoke a cigarette. We usually discussed the novel her book club was reading; she had been in that book club for forty years. Often as we sat there, a small person would approach to report an infraction or that someone had gone missing. General Patton swung into action. Having raised six children of her own, she was a believer in the decisive response and the stiff penalty.
After putting up the fight you would expect from such a woman, she died of cancer at eighty-one. That summer, her leaderless troop drooped around the pool. It was not until I read her obituary in the Baltimore Sun that I really knew whom I’d been sitting next to on that bench. After graduating from college in the fifties, it said, she had hitchhiked around the U.S. and Europe, then went to work as a reporter in Connecticut. There she fell in love with another reporter; they spent the early years of their marriage running a printing press in Woodstock, New York, then moved to Baltimore so he could take a job at Hopkins. A staunch progressive, always volunteering for the Democratic Party, for local schools and liberal causes, she was deeply drawn to rural life and frugal values. So after the kids were out of the house, she and her husband bought a country store in New Hampshire. In her third act, or maybe her fifth, after he died, she came back to Baltimore to help with her grandchildren. She took in boarders, rejoined her book club, tended a garden.
Now I picture myself, blathering on about Jeffrey Eugenides or Ann Patchett, thinking I’m the one with something interesting to say.
The Role Model
died 2013
I WAS STANDING ON the corner, suitcase in my hand.
I hitchhiked my way across the USA.
I put the spike into my vein.
And then things weren’t quite the same.
To me, his songs were pure inspiration. In one early study of this gospel, my boyfriend and I made a 16mm black-and-white film with “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” as the soundtrack. It featured a tennis match where the main character turns from a man to a woman with each volley. I hand-colored the ball yellow in every frame; when you ran the film, it wobbled and jumped as if possessed by the devil. The point was obvious. Just as easily as a man can become a woman, a ball can become a grapefruit. And in the eighties, my friends and I would sing along to “Heroin” as we cleaned our shared syringe with a little water and passed it around.
I was standing in the lobby at some writers’ event in 1997 when I heard of Allen Ginsberg’s death from hepatitis. By then, I’d known I’d had the virus for about three years. It was a number on a lab report to me, nothing more. But if Ginsberg’s death didn’t puncture my sense of immortality, I did begin to understand something important, how big ideas about art and revolution were so easily infected with the stupid romance of self-destruction. In 2011, I suddenly got very sick, so weak I couldn’t get off the couch to drive my daughter to school. In 2012, I took the cure. Not the easy, quick thing we have now, but it worked. And while I got better, Lou Reed died, as did Gregg Allman and David Bowie, as had Ken Kesey and Jim Carroll years before. Keith Richards, Steven Tyler, and I live on.
After his death, his wife, Laurie Anderson, published an article about him in Rolling Stone. How strange, exciting, and miraculous, she wrote, that we can change each other so much, love each other so much through our words and music and our real lives. Yes, I thought. What a beautiful couple they were. Too bad some of us were so determined to get the wrong idea.
Every band should have a cover of “Sweet Jane.” This is mine.
The Talent
died 2015
DEAR ELLA, LESLIE DIED last night, after a sudden, sad decline, which began about a week ago when I was cleaning her bowl and she jumped out of the strainer. How I wish I had been more careful! She injured her fin, and I think it got infected. Over the next few days she bloated up, her sleek golden body covered with an ugly red rash. When we got home from dinner last night, we found her floating upside down, stock-still and drained of color. Yet as soon as she saw me, she tried to pull herself up and wave.
The goldfish Leslie Knope began life as Pretzel and had already been through an unsuccessful adoption when a college-bound neighbor left her in our care. We changed her name and her presumptive gender, bought her an Eiffel Tower, and came to realize what a very special fish she was. As soon as she spied a visitor approaching her bowl, she would swim up, stand on her tail, and do a charming little cancan, her diaphanous, peach-colored caudal and dorsal fins sashaying as she twisted from side to side, fixing her guest with a frank and friendly gaze. She never seemed to tire of this routine, nor did I.
When I learned that under the right conditions, a goldfish can live up to fifty years, I had visions of carting her with me into assisted living. I knew that little bowl was terrible for her, and I was planning to move her into a proper tank, with a water filter and a special light, when unbelievably, accidentally, I killed her. There is no other way to say this. I could tell that night would be the end; I held the bowl in my arms and murmured soothingly. Twice I thought she was gone and took her out, only to have her wriggle back to life in my hand. I had to turn off the lights and go up to bed before she would let herself go. What a shame. But what a fish!
The French Horn Player
died 2014
PERHAPS YOU DON’T THINK of Baltimore as a world capital of classical music, but it is home to a fine symphony and many smaller ensembles and orchestras, fed by a conservatory of some renown. For 150 years, the Peabody Institute has drawn young musicians to a city they’ve barely heard of, which turns out to be an easy place to stick around. This is how two curly-headed brothers, French horn players from South Carolina, ended up here, sharing an apartment with a view of the skateboard park. The younger one, a radiant free spirit, became friends with my son, and their love of music was not the only thing they had in common. Both were little brothers, but my son was one year older, so he considered himself the big brother in this pair. He took the young French horn player under his wing. Many long nights turned to dawn as they rocked on the porch of the apartment, like old farmers with tall tales and big schemes.
Then the boy got sick, a nasty throat infection that led to the removal of his tonsils. These days, a tonsillectomy is an outpatient procedure, forty-five minutes under anesthesia, a few hours for observation, then off you go with your antibiotics and pain medication. I was surprised to hear this, having spent days in the hospital eating lime Jell-O back in 1965, and I will not be able to tell you what happened next because all we know is that when the older brother got home from work, the boy lay dead in his room. How can that be? Every person who loved this boy, among them my son, wondered why they hadn’t been with him that day. It would have been so easy. It would have been their pleasure.
The boy was buried in the foothills of Mount Catoctin, in Frederick, Maryland. A quartet of young French horn players in their concert suits performed Mahler’s requiem, then his brother played an arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine” on a single horn. The notes leapt into the sky. The sun, that oldest patron of the arts, came out from behind the clouds to hear.
The Big Man
died 2016
DESTINY LOVES TO PLAY games. Like making my son’s unhappy and very short-lived employment at Guitar Center the secret doorway to the future. One afternoon, a shy giant appears in the store, six foot ten in
his Phillies cap, to trade in some microphones. My son races out of hiding to nab this customer—and abracadabra, our lives are changed. He entered our world like an undiscovered planet, pulling my son, his band, his friends, his mother, into his orbit. My hands are so high, my hands are so big, just hand me that mic, I’ll rock this whole crib. A rapper is both a memoirist and a poet: I didn’t get it until then, but fifteen-year-old boys all over the world were already annotating the lyrics pages on the Internet.
He had a titanic work ethic and an Olympic play ethic, he was an artistic madman with a medicine chest from hell, he had a broken biological clock that ran on breakfast sandwiches from the gas station. He had rhymes for days and stories for weeks and charms against despair: the reset button, the gray scale, the two-tone rebel, the mysterious black paisley. Mr. Sunshine, Mr. Rainstorm, meet me in the conference room, we got to brainstorm. After he was dead, I asked my son if he understood these metaphors. He was quiet a moment, thinking. Then we opened some beers.
Right before he went to the emergency room to see what was up, he posted a picture of his swollen hand on Twitter. That turned out to be goodbye. Like a giant in a fairy tale, he was felled by the tiniest of foes, a microorganism, a rogue in the bloodstream. We sent flowers but only his parents and sisters, tumbling through space like lost astronauts, ever saw them. Still a Wallace in the afterlife. Music lives on, never gone, no half-life. Why are so many of the songs about this? Even his beloved golden mutt—part retriever, part greyhound, part muse—listens to his voice over and over, wanting to believe.
The Assistant Superintendent
died 2012
MY BOSS AT THE university is a woman about my age, a slender, ukulele-playing poet with curly blond hair, a woman who governs with an unusual combination of whimsy and steel. When we met ten years ago, we both still had mothers walking the earth, and when she told me her mother had lung cancer, my mother was four years gone the same way. She had hesitated to tell me and she was right: I burst into tears. Not because our mothers were so alike, but because they were our mothers, and they were gone. Gradually, then suddenly, then completely.
A few years after her mother’s death, my boss came out of her office to receive a young woman who had an appointment to discuss our program. Then stopped in her tracks. Her visitor looked as if she were already very disappointed about something, and the little girl she’d brought along seemed no happier. My boss continued straight down the hall to the ladies’ room to collect herself. When she looked in the wide mirror over the sinks, her mother was there. If you have lost a parent, you probably know: that physical sense of their presence, not as a separate entity or a ghost, but as a sort of layer under your own skin. In your facial muscles, or your shoulders, or your hands. Something you would never imagine in the anguished days of your early grief; such a comfort as time goes on.
My boss’s mother had worked all her life in the Baltimore schools, first teaching kindergarten and first grade and later, after earning a PhD in her spare time, as a champion of early childhood education. Before she was done, kindergarten—the true basis of social justice!—was mandatory in Baltimore. Another part of her job was to meet with various disgruntled people: parents, principals, teachers, all taken aback to see the lady with the big smile coming down the hall in her bright red suit, so happy to meet them and hear their concerns.
And so my boss left the bathroom that day, accompanied by her mother. They made a beeline for the visitors. What did she say to them? She doesn’t even know. Sometimes, you just have to let them take over.
The Very Tiny Baby
died 2010
I JUST WISH THIS week could be erased from the calendar, says my cousin on the phone. It has been eight years since her baby was born too early. She weighed two pounds, lived two months, had an infection, a blood clot, and a stroke, then was gone.
When a woman loses a baby, it can go different ways. Some hold it close, keep that empty space warm forever. Others push it far away and fill the hole in their hearts with other things. I am in the second group, but my cousin is in the first. Not a day goes by, she tells me. Not a day.
My cousin looks like a girl in a Rembrandt painting with her alabaster skin and pink cheeks and corkscrew blond tresses. She has had more than her share of drastic diagnoses: dyslexia, diabetes, disability, digestive diseases. Schedules and regimes and rules that are hard to follow; a big mess when they are not. When she turned up pregnant at twenty-four, everyone agreed she should not keep it. Everyone but her.
She made it thirty-two weeks before things started to go wrong, and she ended up on the operating table with an emergency C-section to save her own life. Her baby was whisked off to the NICU, the only home she ever had. No one can possibly imagine how hard it is to unplug the machines that are keeping your daughter alive, even if she is the size of a Coke can and they tell you she is brain-dead.
Tomorrow’s her birthday, says my cousin. She would be eight. We go to the cemetery every year.
His Dog
died 2016
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a woman who wanted a dog, but her husband said no. A dog is too much trouble. We have enough to worry about. Then some friends had triplets and someone had to take their black Lab. The Lab, it turned out, was an impeccably trained dog who never needed a leash, never barked or whined, let little girls put their hands in her mouth and ride around on her back. But as well trained as she was, the Lab would occasionally run away overnight, and the man would suffer unbearable anxiety. So when the woman wanted to get a second dog, he said definitely not.
Then his brother gave them a puppy for Hanukkah, an eight-week-old ball of white fluff with pink bows on her ears. Immediately she started following the big dog around, chasing her long black tail. One wag would send her flying across the room. Then she’d come back for more. Who says no to that?
The years went by. The big dog died, the daughters grew up and went away, and the woman was busy, too. She was never as crazy about the miniature poodle as she had been about the Lab, and the husband, who was an emotional guy, felt the dog was a little bit lost. He started taking her with him into his studio all day. She became his assistant director, his sous-chef, his sidekick. Some people may have thought he was obsessed with the dog. As she got older and increasingly fragile, he worried about her more and more. Then, at thirteen, she developed a serious heart condition and had to wear diapers. The wife said it was time to put her down. But he just couldn’t.
When they left for Europe the wife said, Say goodbye. He tried. Then he got the text from the house sitter as soon as they got off the plane in Amsterdam. He called me from the airport. What do I do now, he said, and he started to cry.
This is why he didn’t want a dog.
The Pirate
dead to me, 2017
AFTER MY DIVORCE, I got disillusioned with the dating sites and went on Craigslist, where I found an intriguing post with a photo of a recently divorced, good-looking guy running on a beach. One hundred and thirty-eight emails later, I drove to Annapolis to meet this man, who lived on a sailboat. That day, after a long, adolescent kiss on a park bench, I became obsessed with him. Unfortunately, this caused him to flee from me entirely.
I forgot all about it, except I didn’t. Every October 3, the anniversary of the kiss, I would think of him, and some years I would write and say hi. In 2016, he suggested we meet again, and we returned to Annapolis, where we made out in a parking garage. This time he was very clear that he was not looking for a relationship. Neither was I, at least not with him, because now I had enough distance to realize what a player he was. I didn’t care. In this stage of my life I was much less motivated by desire than in my younger years, but somehow this particular bug bite was still very itchy.
Eventually plans were made for an indoor meeting. They fell apart repeatedly, but I bided my time. One morning in early December, three minutes after my daughter had left for school, he showed up at my door. One thousand butterfli
es flew all through the house. And I have never seen him again, though appointments were made and cancelled. Then he mentioned that he was involved with someone else. I bid him adieu.
In September 2017, I received the first phone call I ever got from him. My wife would like to speak to you, he said. Then a woman got on the phone—his second wife, I would imagine, though I’m not completely sure where she fits in the timeline—who had just read 573 emails between her husband and me. She said she just wanted to tell me that he had herpes, but he probably got it from his other girlfriend. Yes, she shouted, there’s another one. He’s cheating on you, too! I had a few things I wanted to say, like I didn’t know he was married and I’m sorry, but before I could open my mouth, she hung up. I wasn’t all that sorry, anyway.
He probably isn’t dead, but if he is, I hope she has a good lawyer.
The Happy Man
died 2017
YEARS AGO, A STUDENT in my journalism class chose an interesting Baltimorean for her profile assignment. A guy whose passion for social justice had led him through career number one, criminal law, to career number two, public health, to career number three, Importer of Magnificent Treasures and Patron Saint of Nepalese Villages, to career number four, dress designer. On a soul-searching global sabbatical in his early forties, he’d had a vision: a store that would sell crafts produced by third-world people, funneling its profits back to their villages to fund schools. By the mid-1990s, he’d made that happen; even more successfully, he developed a line of women’s clothing made from handmade textiles. His shop in downtown Baltimore had a reputation not just for fine merchandise but also for uncanny powers of mood enhancement. Half the time people come in here just to cheer up, one of the employees told my cub reporter.