Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  favorite hot spots:

  Austin, New Orleans, Mexico, France, Montreal, the Caribbean, and my hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey.

  favorite things:

  I love books and talking about books. I love Prince, Neil Young, the Talking Heads, the Dead, Lou Reed. I don’t watch TV much but can get into a football game. Breakfast tacos. Cocktails. Not together. Usually.

  last read:

  Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Tony Hoagland, Michael Chabon, J. D. Salinger, Garcia Marquez, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers. Also the Sunday Times and The New Yorker.

  my pets:

  I am a dog lover.

  about my life and what I’m looking for:

  I’m a very real, very open person with energy and passion to spare. I love to laugh, and I can see the lighter side of almost any situation—an ability I’ve had plenty of chances to hone over the years. A super-loyal friend and companion, I still am very connected to many of those I’ve crossed paths with in this life. My sons are in college and my ex has our daughter on weekends, so I have some time on my hands. I need someone to show me my new neighborhood.

  about me:

  Hair:Dark brown

  Eyes:Blue

  Exercise:Exercise 3 to 4 times per week

  Politics:Very Liberal

  Sign:Taurus

  Pets I have:Dogs

  Pets I like:Birds, cats, exotic pets, fish, horses, other

  As soon as I posted my profile, I started hearing from prospective suitors. Some wanted to “challange” me to a game of “Scrable.” Others were more romantic: “marion, I am going to be up front with you. I want to become your man in life. I am not kidding. So what do i have to do to date you and start hangout with you for fun. so please talk to me marion. I could be yours.”

  Unfortunately, the forty- to fifty-seven-year-old age group seemed to be full of seventy-year-olds. Hair was rare. Guts were expansive. Complexions were pasty or suspiciously rosy, and spelling was surely a lost art. I learned to scout the background of the self-taken cell-phone photographs for the rigging: In Baltimore, the sailboat is everything.

  Even after ruling out the grammar abusers and other nonstarters, including the three people on Earth who don’t enjoy walking on the beach, I found myself skittish. Just being over fifty seemed to have reduced the pool to a puddle, and a scary part of it was composed of twenty-one-year-old perverts. The screen names alone—Passion4U and SuperGrande and BBQRavensMan—scared me off. I was easily spooked by phrases like “Christian/Catholic,” and “I’ll tell you later.”

  But people were skittish about me, too. Several times, after I’d told a man I was a writer and he’d looked at my website and read my life story, he would stop writing to me altogether. It might have been my résumé. It might have been AIDS or atheism or Jane. Still, I found myself unable to withhold the information. I was already such a public person that withholding details seemed coy. I couldn’t grasp the fine line between advertising and self-exposure.

  The first man I made a date to meet had many good points. He was not only an excellent speller, he was a doctor. He had graduated from Brown the year before I got there. He was a dog lover who lived just a few blocks away. Before we met in person, he wiped the floor with me in a game of online Scrabble, playing words like hm and feal (both legit, as it turned out). It was hard to set up a meeting due to his professional responsibilities, golf games, and stringent TV-watching schedule, but we did finally manage to schedule an 8:00 a.m. breakfast before his Sunday tee time, at a restaurant down the block.

  My pal Martha chose my outfit for the occasion—actually, Martha supplied the outfit, since she had all that retired First Date wear. She gave me a pair of hip-huggers, a wide leather belt, and a soft, heather cashmere sweater. Dressed as Martha, I strolled into Miss Shirley’s and found the man I’ll call Uncle Norm.

  Though Uncle Norm was only six years older than me, my first impression was that he was from a different generation. He reminded me so much of my parents’ friends, the funny, amiable Jewish golfers I had grown up with—i.e., old people—that I panicked immediately at the thought of us as a couple. Within moments of sitting down I had enthusiastically blurted, “Oh, we can be friends!”

  Uncle Norm looked taken aback. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s a pretty clear reaction.”

  We managed to have a nice breakfast anyway, but our relationship devolved immediately into phone calls, e-mails, and online Scrabble games. Soon we dropped the calls and notes and just sent Scrabble moves back and forth. Then I invited him over one night to watch American Idol with Jane, Ken, and me. That worked well for everyone, and we settled into a spot on his TV-watching roster that we have occupied ever since. He would bring with him his cute little black-and-white dog, who was so smart he got you a tissue when you sneezed, and a Styrofoam box of healthy Asian takeout. He would usually come barging in after the show had started, still talking to a patient on his cell phone. After a while, he was talking to his new girlfriend, a yoga teacher from D.C. he had met on Match.com.

  Uncle Norm disappeared from our lives completely when the American Idol season ended, but has faithfully returned each season since. “Uncle Norm!” shout Jane and Ken and I in unison when he suddenly appears with his takeout and a big pack of Twizzlers during the season opener.

  It doesn’t sound so terrible now, but this first Match date shook me up. I hated walking into that restaurant, having a negative reaction, and feeling compelled to let the other person know. Moreover, I did a lousy job of it. And though Uncle Norm actually was friend material, I could see myself ending up with quite a number of unneeded new friends, dragging behind me like tin cans on a wedding car, except without the wedding or the car.

  What I didn’t yet realize is that something even less pleasant could happen.

  Jane and I were visiting Sandye and Mr. Wright at her place in Brooklyn one night. We were sitting around drinking bourbon and talking about my troubles after the kids had gone to bed. I told them there was no one online in Baltimore—no one. They felt I was being too picky. So I logged them into my Match account and they did some searches for me. They were too un-picky, I thought, showing me all kinds of drab-looking weirdos, where I was screening for someone more like Brad Pitt. Squinty eyes, low-hanging ball caps, dramatic overbites and underbites: None of this bothered them.

  “This dude sounds like fun,” Mr. Wright said, and read aloud. “I am a Tall, Outgoing, Athletic, ‘Down-To-Earth’ Guy who would like to meet an Attractive ‘Down-To-Earth’ woman who has some similar interests as mine and enjoys making the most out of every day. I love to Travel (All 50 States, 48 National Parks, and 91 Countries so far), Road Trips, Playing All Sports! (GO Ravens/Orioles /Terps! I am Originally from Baltimore!)”

  I looked over his shoulder. It was a photo of the young Matthew Broderick, I believe. Unfortunately, the capitalization and use of quotation marks alone made this candidate out of the question for me. Reading online profiles was a very unfortunate way for a writing teacher to get to know people. It was much better if they turned up plastering her basement.

  “Okay, what about this Bmoreguy?” said Sandye. “He’s cute, he can spell, and he has a job!”

  Hmmmm. Yes. Bmoreguy had decent pictures, including one of him jumping off a cliff into a lake that I liked a lot. His profile was literate and funny, including dialogue and sly humor. I shot him a message, he wrote back, and we eventually set up a time to meet for bagels at a corner cafe in my neighborhood. From the outset, he didn’t seem quite as enthusiastic as I was, but perhaps it was just his style.

  In person, Bmoreguy resembled his pictures, which was a good start. He had brown hair and blue eyes. He wore glasses, a tweed blazer, and jeans. He was a nice size—maybe five-foot-ten, with a little extra around the middle. Not full-on teddy
bear, but teddy bear lite. He talked mostly about his daughters, his big, alcoholic Irish family of origin, and his social activism, which had turned from a hobby into a full-time job, though his other career was investing. I was intrigued by that paradox. He was extremely opinionated, and hated many things most other people in town love, like the television show The Wire. According to him, it was a derivative commercial rip-off of a genuine Baltimore identity. I was interested in all this passion, although sneering and disdain were specialties of my ex-husband and still made me nervous.

  Since we were so close to my house, I suggested he walk me home. Then he came in. My son and his girlfriend were in the kitchen making a late breakfast. Hayes, now a junior at Georgetown, was on his way to an internship at Goldman Sachs that summer, and Bmoreguy gave him some thoughts and encouragement on that topic. He seemed completely relaxed in my house, petted my dog, and kissed me on the lips on the way out the door. I felt a little tingle.

  I didn’t hear another word from him for a week. I knew he was going on a road trip with his daughters, but I also knew there were Internet connections in South Carolina. Uncoolly, I wrote several messages without hearing back, and about ten days out, I wrote the uncoolest message of all. “Is just disappearing the usual way of saying ‘I don’t think so’ in these parts? I thought I felt a little click there, but perhaps it was just the result of your having good ‘people skills.’ ”

  Uncool, but it got me an answer. He agreed that I was probably just confused by his excellent people skills. “You are a very interesting woman,” he wrote, “but I didn’t respond to you carnally.”

  My feelings were badly wounded by this—carnally, I kept saying to myself, feeling like a crossed-off sexless old crone, but also thinking of meat and flowers and the old movie with Ann-Margret and Art Garfunkel.

  I couldn’t believe I had given a total stranger a free ticket to do this to me. I decided I was finished with Match.com. One way or the other, it was just a machine for rejection. They smacked you or you smacked them; either way it sucked. Meeting people in real life might be difficult, but it seemed much less risky.

  However, I still had a few days on my one-month membership, and my thriftiness got the better of me. Jane was very interested in helping me look, but she wasn’t much better at finding gold among the geeks and grandpas than I was. I think it was hard for her to believe that people this old even had love lives. (Can you imagine helping your mother shop online for a boyfriend? What the hell is this world coming to?) Finally, an eleventh-hour search turned up an attractive screenwriter named Dogsong. Though he was ten years younger than I, everything he said he wanted in a girl was . . . me. I wrote a clever e-mail about singing dogs, urging him to check out my profile and see how perfect I was for him.

  “Thanks, but I don’t think so” was all he wrote in reply.

  Oh! That wasn’t good. But to make sure he was really rejecting me—me?? Really??—I wrote again. “Are you sure? Aren’t you blowing me off kind of quick?”

  “No, I am not interested, and if you are so thin-skinned, you shouldn’t be on Match.com,” he replied.

  Almost in tears, I had to admit that “thin-skinned” was right. One month on Match and I was practically cellophane. Any free-range Internet dickhead who took it into his head had the power to make me feel worthless. No more Dogsong for me. I went to a Leonard Cohen concert with one of my girlfriends and cried my eyes out on every song. “I’m your man,” he sang, and I sobbed so loudly that people in surrounding rows began to give me the evil eye.

  By now my thirty days were up, anyway, and I turned my sights to the real world. At a party at work, I met an impoverished, unsuccessful musician with a shock of white hair and black Johnny Cash clothes. The poor man had a rough audition when he came out for a burger with me, my three kids, and Ken one afternoon—admittedly, an unusual first date. For one thing, he was extremely worried about being followed, watched, robbed, or written up in the tabloids. His address was a secret, and he did not use his real name. But other than the fact that he lived in a really bad neighborhood, we could see no reason for his paranoia. Hayes and Vince, who were home for spring break, forbade me to ever see him again, not least because their sensibilities were deeply offended by his see-through vinyl backpack. Furthermore, when I walked him to the car, he told me he had a live-in girlfriend with a shotgun.

  Meanwhile, Ken still hadn’t gotten me a date—the realtor was all wrong, he’d decided, and Jack, the newly divorced hottie, was already seeing someone. Damn, Ken! To make it up to me, he took me out to Jay’s on Read, a gay piano bar I love. Honestly, I love all gay piano bars. At this one, the piano player looks remarkably like Bill Murray, and he does songs like “I Say a Little Prayer for You,” “I Feel Pretty,” and “New York, New York.” I sing my heart out, and all the old gay guys there love me much more than anyone on Match ever did, or will.

  the summer of our discontent

  I turned fifty-one, Jane turned nine, and our first summer in Baltimore began. I didn’t see any romantic prospects at the swimming pool, the wine bar, or in the parking lot outside Jane’s theater camp. Maybe I needed to look farther afield. One June weekend Jane, Beau, and I drove up to Woodstock, New York, to visit our hilarious friend, journalist and memoirist Martha Frankel, and her husband, visionary artist and vintage car buff Steve Heller.

  Alas, even Martha (who knows everyone, including Robert De Niro, Jane Smiley, and God) and Steve (who has built a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex out of rusted spare parts) couldn’t think of anyone for me. But while I was up there, we went out to visit my old summer camp, and this mission led to a confusing non-situation which took up most of the summer. When it was over, I had two new brassieres, a pair of lacy black underpants, and the remnants of some pretty sky-blue nail polish on my toes, none of which had even been given a test drive. Beau was the true beneficiary, having been switched to a more natural, delicious, and expensive brand of dog food and a more humane style of leash as a result of this odd liaison.

  As children, every summer my sister Nancy and I were shipped off for a month to some nightmarish hellhole with no indoor plumbing; our bitter complaints never convinced my mother to let us stay home, but we did manage to get switched to a different camp every year. Eventually, she thought, one of them would be right.

  Amazingly, one was. It was a camp I found in the classified section in the back of the New York Times magazine. In contrast to the other camp ads, which contained black-and-white photos of leaping youths and dreaded terms like archery, this one was two simple lines of sans serif type in a small white box, followed by an address.

  for young people

  interested in doing things

  Camp Greenfields, as it was called, was located on a beautiful piece of land just outside Woodstock, New York—the town’s name alone was magic. It took ten boys and ten girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen, and we lived in long, bungalow-style dormitories with flush toilets and hot showers—a spa compared to the other camps I had seen. No sports of any kind were required except hiking and Frisbee; our days were spent taking classes from local craftspeople in stained glass, copper enameling, and jewelry making. At night, there were outings to the theater and rock concerts. We had definitely found our place in the world of sleep-away camps, and both of us attended for several years, around which time the camp closed anyway. It was really just too good to last.

  Rudy Hopkins—the man who ran this place for those five years in the early seventies, who shepherded us through our Boone’s Farm and marijuana experimentation, our teenage melodramas, and our training in cooking, cleaning, and other “community service” activities, who dragged us up the side of Slide Mountain and into Devil’s Kitchen and off the edge of the Spillway—was still there on the property when I showed up that weekend, now operating a craft gallery out of the various buildings. In the thirty-five years since I’d seen him, his wild curly hai
r had grayed and his face had creased and weathered, but his leonine demeanor had lost none of its roar.

  “How is your head?” were the first words out of his mouth once we had confirmed that yes, it was me coming up the walk. He was referring not to the contents of my skull, but to my scalp, which had suffered an injury my last summer there that had apparently been as unforgettable to him as it was to me. Bent over a bracelet I was working on with a silver-polishing tool running in my hand, I had thoughtlessly reached up to brush back my hair and the spinning shaft had wound my long locks round and round, tighter and tighter, right off my head. Our instructor had just warned loudly against this exact maneuver, I was later told. I was half-bald for many months (one of two times in my life, actually; a few years later I would have a very unfortunate permanent wave immediately before leaving the country and spend three months in East Germany with no hair . . . a story for another time, children).

  I was so happy to be reunited with Rudy, and to show him my hair, and to find the place filled with as many utopian vibrations and floating lily pads as ever. After a few glasses of mint lemonade followed by a few glasses of white wine, we decided that I would try to organize a Greenfields reunion. It might be difficult to find some of the old campers—at this point, Rudy had no more than a few e-mail addresses—so we decided to delay until the following summer, giving us more than a year to track people down.

  There were two former Greenfielders that Rudy had seen recently and would be easy for me to connect with, as they lived in New York City: Peter and Arnie. Peter, whom I had always adored, was the cool and witty son of a well-known poet. Back then, he was a heartthrob with dark eyes and luxuriant masses of dark-brown hair. Now he was bald and gay, but as delightful as ever when I met him for dinner in Brooklyn. He came over to Sandye’s and made excellent margaritas and we planned to create a Facebook page to gather our old compadres.