Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  for Beau

  skirt!® is an attitude . . . spirited, independent, outspoken, serious, playful and irreverent, sometimes controversial, always passionate.

  Copyright © 2013 by Marion Winik

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  skirt!® is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  skirt!® is a registered trademark of Morris Publishing Group, LLC, and is used with express permission.

  Text design: Sue Murray

  Layout: Casey Shain

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Winik, Marion.

  Highs in the low fifties : (how I stumbled through the joys of single

  living) / Marion Winik.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-7627-9479-9

  1. Winik, Marion. 2. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. 3.

  Single women—United States—Humor. I. Title.

  PS3623.I66259Z46 2013

  818'.603—dc23

  [B]

  2012050338

  O gods! Who is’t can say “I am at the worst”?

  I am worse than e’er I was.

  And worse I may be yet: the worst is not

  So long as we can say “This is the worst.”

  The lamentable change is from the best;

  The worst returns to laughter.

  King Lear, Act IV

  William Shakespeare

  Contents

  Copyright

  prelude: things fall apart

  desperate housewives of roland park

  my first life

  match dot bomb

  the summer of our discontent

  dreamboat

  my life in therapy

  little sweetheart of the boston strangler

  the ambassadress of the white race

  dear answer lady

  the five guys you meet in hell

  the boomer and the boomerang

  brown lips

  love in the time of baltimore

  the decline and fall of the party people

  the fixer-upper

  afterword: where are they now

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  prelude: things fall apart

  1. the mattress professionals

  One afternoon in the summer of 2008, a Sleepy’s mattress truck driver turned down my driveway by mistake, then reversed and backed over my mailbox. Without a moment’s pause, he zoomed off down the road. Surely this man had goods to deliver, a time clock to punch, beers to drink, bets to place, maybe someone waiting for him in a darkened room at the Rocky Ridge Motel, so hastily did he race away.

  My estranged husband Crispin and I witnessed the felling of the mailbox through the windshield of my car while heading out of our once-shared driveway, a roller-coaster-like, quarter-mile-long lane on which we had squandered a small fortune for paving and plowing in our ten years together. We rural Central Pennsylvanians faced a preexisting mailbox problem, as smashing them with baseball bats from moving vehicles was one of the few interesting pastimes available to local youth. This made it all the more discouraging to see ours once again flattened, this time by someone who had better things to do. Now, rather than giving my ex a ride to pick up his car at the mechanic, I was involved in a high-speed car chase over the country roads of Glen Rock. We tailgated the Sleepy’s truck furiously, honking and shouting at every stop sign, but the guy never even slowed down, rumbling past red barns full of staring cows like Steve McQueen in an eighteen-wheeler. At least it brought my ex and I together in an invigorating moment of shared outrage and vengefulness. At someone else.

  It was up this very driveway our wedding guests had rolled in the magical May of 1999, back when gas cost less than a dollar, when the sky was blue, and the corn was high. They brought crawfish from New Orleans and hot sauce from Texas and tomato pie from Philly. They put on neon Afro wigs and sang and danced in the fields. They heard the bridal march played on accordion by the groom himself; they ate cream cake baked and brought in from the Poconos by my late first husband’s mother. Many of them stayed at the Rocky Ridge Motel, which was in such poor repair that my childhood friend Carolyn Mahoney, now an interior decorator, had to go and buy new linens at Wal-Mart.

  Crispin was a philosophy professor and a politics junkie, an op-ed columnist, a blues harmonica player, and a tattooed, pony-tailed nature boy. He was a bewitching combination of intense and laid-back, Redskins fan and intellectual, anarchist and libertarian. I went crazy for him after I met him in a bookstore in Maryland, and we had been long-distance lovers for over a year. We wrote impassioned letters, we wrote two million e-mails, we wrote poems and pornographic essays on nerve.com, we made up languages and countries. I lay in my bed in my underwear and read his published volumes of philosophy as if they were romance novels: Obscenity Anarchy Reality and Act Like You Know. As far as I could see, the whole point of the first forty years of our lives had been to bring us together, to merge our bodies and souls and vocabularies for all time.

  When my boys and I moved from Texas to Glen Rock to live with him and the children of his first marriage (they visited each weekend), we obviously required something bigger than the little house he rented on an emu farm. I bought an imposing four-bedroom mansion on a hill that had just a few rustic drawbacks—a wood-burning furnace, a long, rugged driveway, no air-conditioning. It was a Georgian-style house, the young real estate agent explained, and they don’t have air-­conditioning in Georgia.

  Ultimately, I planned to fix the driveway, replace the windows, put in central air and heat, and tack on a back deck—but first, I got pregnant and added a baby girl named Jane to the menagerie. I hadn’t planned on more children, but now I was married to a man who liked kids so much he could have been a birthday-party entertainer. He even did magic tricks. He was certainly doing one on me: Abracadabra, a whole new life in a whole new world.

  By the time the Sleepy’s mattress truck rolled over our mailbox, my luck had changed. For one thing, the greatest love ever known had slid gradually and then more quickly into the biggest mess you ever saw. Pretty early on, the brilliant blue-eyed professor, who had deep, long-standing trust issues, had decided I was not to be trusted. In fact, during one of the many long, late-night phone calls we had in the early months of our relationship, he told me that he had a “black hole in his heart” from all the losses and betrayals he had endured. Did this discourage me? Oh, no. I was going to fix all that in a jiffy. A few months later, there was a brouhaha about my going to a matinee of Shakespeare in Love with a writer friend. Soon after, it turned out that my shirts were too low-cut. By then, I was so caught up in convincing him he was wrong about me that I would still be there doing it now if the situation hadn’t been taken out of my hands.

  Perhaps a wide-open extrovert who had made a career of publicly blabbing about every wild thing she’d ever done was not the most likely to succeed as the wife of a jealous man. Perhaps a girl who loves parties and restaurants should not marry a committed recluse. Perhaps an approval junkie should not pledge herself for life to a professional critic. But those are relat
ively good ideas compared to a union between a devoted drinker and a recovering alcoholic.

  When I met Crispin he had been sober for nine years, and I thought that was very refreshing. I would quit drinking, too, just to be closer to him. Unfortunately, for the reasons suggested above, I gradually lost my enthusiasm for being quite so close to him, and I wanted a drink. So I had one.

  A few years later, at a party in a palazzo in Italy where champagne flowed in icy rivers, he decided to join me.

  When I saw him for the first time with a glass in his hand, I was horrified, assuming disaster was imminent. But for a while it seemed like everything was going to be fine. He was relaxed, gregarious, even flirtatious. There’s a photo of him taken that night by one of his dance partners. He has a James Bond leer on his face and his bow tie is askew. Look, I exclaimed in delight when I saw it—it’s next month’s cover of Relapse Monthly. alcohol saved my marriage.

  The next three years offered a strong counterargument to that proposition.

  And, as it turned out, the collapse of the greatest love the world has ever known was just one part of the stinky package that would be stuffed in my mailbox before the man from Sleepy’s put it out of its misery for good.

  2. big jane

  Moving from Texas to Pennsylvania to marry Crispin was a version of coming home for me, since I grew up outside Asbury Park, New Jersey, in the house where my mother, Big Jane, still lived. Now that I was back in the East and living three hours away, she could pop in anytime—pulling into our driveway in her silver SUV, honking for us to come out and help with her bags and golf clubs and coolers full of nova and shrimp, ready for a drink, a cigarette, and the ritual denunciation of the traffic on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  In August of 2007, Big Jane felt a little strange on the last hole of the Better Ball tournament she had just won. She went into the hospital with breathing difficulties and was there for ten days. During this stay, they diagnosed her with lung cancer and put together plans for radiation and chemo. She had already survived two heart attacks, a quadruple bypass, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and surgery on her digestive system. No doubt she would conquer this as well. We Winiks are a hardy people; we face illness with disbelief, brute resistance, tenacity, and, if that fails, in the words of my mother, “fucking disgust.”

  During the nine months of what turned out to be our mother’s final illness, my sister and I spent a great deal of time in our childhood home, a fifty-year-old ranch house at the Jersey shore. It was an hour and a half for Nancy from Suffern, New York, and three hours for me from Glen Rock, but we came as often as we could. It was surely one of my mother’s last pleasures—as golf, bridge, theater, books, and even Jeopardy! were taken from her (the theme song was playing on her TV at the moment she died)—to see us mutate into The Winik Girls again.

  As Nancy and I spelled each other at doctors’ appointments, in the hospital, and at her bedside, our mother gradually turned over to us not just medical and household decisions, but also the management of the intricate, ruthlessly organized empire we referred to as Jane Winik, Inc. My CPA sister was appointed treasurer, and I became secretary. In general, and as always, both of us were killing ourselves to please our mother, and we mostly succeeded, but there were a few things she didn’t quite trust us on.

  Even before the days of handing over safe-deposit keys and signing powers of attorney, my mother feared that my sister and I did not appreciate the value of the small number of artists’ prints and oil paintings she and my late father had collected.

  For one thing, she knew that this art was not to either of our tastes. There was the depressing Modernist cityscape, the twirling, impastoed tango dancers, the ‘‘cubist’’ snow-roofed barn, the obligatory Don Quixote in the powder room. But, she would point out, the Vasarely certainly is worth something! And the Calder!

  My mother’s Alexander Calder print, which hung in the living room under its own art lamp, was a large red, blue, and yellow abstract lithograph titled Caracol, No. 65 of 75, bought by my parents in 1980. On the day of the home sale we held to sell her remaining furniture and possessions (we’d already given thirty-seven bags of perfectly kept, size-six-petite suits, dresses, and golf attire to Jewish Child and Family Services), both it and the Vasarely were stowed in my old bedroom with other items not for sale.

  The sale was to begin at 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday, and neither my sister nor I made it in time. When the real estate agent who was selling the house for us arrived at 8:30, there were already a dozen people waiting, and when he unlocked the door they streamed in. By the time I arrived at 10:30, my sister was on the front lawn with one of my mother’s best friends, discussing the theft of my grandmother’s silver flatware. It had been in the drawer of a highboy, also not for sale. I went straight to the back bedroom and determined that the Calder was gone as well.

  The rest of the day was a blur. The poor flummoxed real estate agent thought he might have sold a painting for $5 to a blonde lady who worked at Home Depot—he saw it only from the rear, while conducting another transaction. However, when we tracked her down, the blonde lady assured us that she had purchased the Toulouse-Lautrec knockoff, and that there was no Calder in the house by the time she got there. She surely would have known. Meanwhile, she asked, were we definitely not interested in selling the Vasarely?

  By this time we felt we loved the obnoxious op-art Vasarely as much as anything we’d ever seen, and would no more part with it than we would our own children. As we discussed the mysterious thefts with the home-sale habitués who were present, we found ourselves deep into a sort of Agatha Christie-meets-Danny DeVito scenario. There were helpful neighbors picking through earrings, a ridiculously young cop scribbling on a notepad, a handsome junk dealer hauling out the living-room set. Everybody had a different opinion, another line of speculation. Meanwhile, my mother’s size-six-petite ghost seemed to float in the background, fingering the discolored rectangle on the wood paneling beneath the disconnected art lamp.

  My mother had been dead six months and already so much had happened that she would have hated. Some of it was Wall Street’s fault, some of it was the government’s, but some of it, Nancy and I knew, was ours. Of course she would have forgiven us, but it’s different when you have to imagine your own pardon.

  My house is filled with my mother’s things now: her bedroom set, her coffee cups, her bridge score pads, and her nail files. Each of these items sat in its own particular spot in that house on Dwight Drive for decades. What would my mother think if she could see them now in their strange diaspora, scattered around rooms she never saw in a city she never visited, a house where her cheesy tango dancers hang on a crimson wall and her Vasarely has a place of honor at the top of the stairs?

  3. the rime of the ancient marion

  Some of the bad things that happened to me in this awful period were completely my fault, results of my decaying mental state as an older single mom living in what had come to seem like a Georgian airplane hangar with my daughter and my dog. I had said good-bye to my husband and my mother, my boys had left for college, my stepchildren were gone, people were dying right and left . . . What else could I pitch into the trash?

  Late that summer, Jane and I went to visit her best friend, Rachel Bacha, whose family had a summer place in Idaho. The mom, who had been having marital troubles as well, was a sturdy Glen Rock farm girl, easy on the nerves. A couple weeks in Elk City with her and the wildlife seemed like a good idea.

  When Jane and I got to the Boise airport, I went to the Avis counter to pick up my rental car. I handed my Priceline.com confirmation to the agent. A perplexed look came over her face. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Winik,” she said gravely, “this reservation was for June fifteenth.” It was July.

  Things went downhill from there as she explained that I had paid Priceline, not Avis, so only they could refund my money. Reached by phone, Priceline’s representative
said that while unused reservations could be refunded in certain circumstances, this one—the customer is a moron who doesn’t know the difference between June and July—was not among them. She could only suggest that I go on their website and contact Customer Relations.

  It was at this point I realized I had left my computer charger plugged into the wall in the gate at the Baltimore airport. Of course I had!

  Now I had a whole new reason to live, a fresh impetus for placing desperate phone calls to persons unable to help me. Northwest Airlines. Airport Lost and Found. Basically, my life was now devoted to solving problems of my own creation.

  Just a week earlier, I had spent the night in an airport hotel with my seventeen-year-old son Vince so he could make a 7:30 a.m. flight to Amsterdam. We stayed overnight in an airport hotel and got up at 4:30 that morning so we could be at the airport on time. But when Vince handed his e-ticket to the woman at the counter, she made the very face I would soon see on the Avis lady in Boise. The flight was 7:30 that evening. Vince would now have to spend fourteen hours in the Baltimore airport and had no way to get in touch with the friend who was meeting him in Europe. It was very nice of him not to just kill me right there.

  If he had, at least he would have prevented the subsequent catastrophe.

  Having totally screwed up Vince’s departure to Europe, I moved on to fail his stepsister Emma, who needed to catch the Megabus to New York. This bus leaves from a Park ’n’ Ride near the Ikea in White Marsh, a suburban outpost of Baltimore. Emma, Jane, and Beau, my beloved black-and-tan miniature dachshund, were in the car. We got there early, so hopped out of the car to wait and let Beau take a pee. We waited and waited, until it was obvious something was wrong. Turns out I had gotten confused about the time and had gotten us there twenty minutes late. The next bus wasn’t until evening, so I decided to take the girls up to their dad’s in Pennsylvania.

  It wasn’t until I had dropped them off and returned to my Georgian mansion that I realized the dog was not in the backseat. Nor was he at my ex-husband’s when I called. Which meant we had left him at the Park ’n’ Ride two hours earlier.