Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  We sat on another bench, this one overlooking the water, and he started to kiss me again. I took off my sunglasses and put them on the bench beside me. That was the last I would see of those sunglasses, and I didn’t even care. I was glad to leave them there, a memorial to abandon.

  He had told me earlier that he would have to leave at 5:00 p.m. to go to a friend’s kid’s football game back down in Northern Virginia. Now it was very close to 5:00, he apologetically pointed out. I couldn’t imagine at that point that he would really go, or that he wouldn’t take me with him. A high school football game? Don’t they have motels in Annapolis? But he was looking at his watch and heading to the parking area. It seemed we were going with Plan A.

  Two motorcycles were parked next to each other. He asked me to guess which one was his, the blue one or the red one. I said the blue, but it was the red. Perhaps this was my big mistake.

  Or maybe he had somehow determined that I weighed 132.

  On the ride home, I could have driven to Kankakee and not have known it. It was a damn miracle when I saw a sign that said I was coming into Baltimore. I had been on the phone to Sandye the whole time, raving about the kiss—how it was like heaven, like heroin, like a perfect poached egg on toast. Sandye seemed to enjoy my elation to some extent, but entered a plea for caution. “You know how you are,” she said.

  When I got home I had a drink and a cigarette and anything else I could find in the house to bring me back to earth. It didn’t work. I had to call Ken right away, and a couple other friends, and then I went on and told the story to the next dozen people I encountered, even a few I was meeting for the first time. Some were endeared to me instantly; others have never spoken to me again. I also told the story to my creative writing students at school, which many of them mentioned as a positive in their post-semester course evaluations.

  Some people I was scared to tell, such as my sister, who was well aware of my behavior when under the sway of mad lust. We had had a tug-of-war with a sleeping bag that nearly turned into a fistfight shortly after I met Tony in New Orleans; she could not believe I was throwing myself at a gay man with such utter and humiliating flagrancy.

  Even though I was vindicated then, I held off burbling to her this time—at least, for a while. I also avoided telling Jane about Brett. Everything that had happened up to that point in my new dating career had been harmless and basically nonsexual: Uncle Norm, Arnie, even Humberto the Tortilla Man. But the thing with the race-car driver felt red-hot and dangerous—PG-13 on its way to X. It had quite a ways to go before it would be something in which one would involve one’s fourth-grade child.

  Meanwhile, Crispin had recently notified me that he and his girlfriend, an Italian-Catholic woman who was an aide in a school for autistic kids, were going to take Jane to the Philadelphia Zoo for the day. I was blindsided by this development and handled it badly, freaking out at the infamous Hereford Exxon. Once her father and I were screaming at each other, Jane burst into tears. She could not bear even one more second of conflict between us.

  Though I claimed it was because I had been peremptorily notified at the last minute of the trip, which involved sleeping over at the girlfriend’s house, it was obviously more than that. This would be Jane’s first experience of seeing one of her parents with a new romantic partner, the beginning of a new phase for our atomized family. This girlfriend had been in the picture for quite a while already, so the outing was not inappropriate. But it was enough new information for the moment. Brett would have to stay undercover.

  No matter how crazy I was going in my head, my first e-mail to him was relatively restrained. “There was no traffic at all going home,” I wrote. “Took forty minutes—good thing, because my mind was hardly on the road. How was the game, and the rest of your night?”

  “Broke down on the side of the road on the way back—just got in,” he replied. “Thought about the kisses a lot.”

  Though his e-mails were less frequent than the first week—he said he was “having trouble getting to Gmail”—he was still flirting when he did. But then he wrote something troubling. “You have beautiful eyes, Marion. I have to say that the depth of them is a little frightening to me, coming from where I have been. It almost seems too easy to fall into them.”

  Uh-oh. It was starting already. I felt the floor beneath me begin to give. Soon I would fall through a trapdoor in my psyche to the place where crazy girls boil bunnies and make hang-up calls and stalk the Internet at 3:00 a.m.

  Despite every single person I knew warning me not to, I wrote and asked when I would see him again. Then Wednesday morning I went to the mall before my yoga class. At the Clinique counter, I spent $108 dollars on antiaging cream. Just as I was stuffing my iPhone into my purse before entering the yoga studio, an e-mail arrived. It put a huge smile on my face.

  I had recently forwarded Brett some of the funny messages I’d received from when I had a profile up on Match, the dramatic proposals of my ESL suitors. This inspired him to write one of his own:

  marion,

  your eye like beauty and mouth appreciates. Together we have fun much and play. For sure you and me absolutely lovers forever with great time and fun. All you must do is only tell me and I will be man for you. I make you happy and smiling all day long, marion. Please please let me meet out with you sometime soons! My mother want meet you too, she thinks you have smarts. How can’t you see the niceness we can get? The big pennis in my pants want to make to love with you and you will always be liking it for always. I must have seen with you. please.

  Bill

  I was beside myself—not only because it was funny, but because I naively believed that he couldn’t have written those things if he didn’t feel some version of the sentiments described. But on the way out of yoga, going immediately for the phone, I found another e-mail.

  This one said good-bye.

  I am torn between wanting to see you again and wanting to stop before it is too late. My instinct says to stop and I have to follow it. If I don’t now, I could end up stopping when it is much harder for us both, and we would both likely be hurt.

  I was so wide open emotionally and physically after all that had happened, not to mention an hour and a half of hot yoga practice, this message hit me like a wrecking ball in the chest. I could barely get to my car. Through my tears I typed back on my phone: “Is this because I brought up the second date?”

  Good thing I hadn’t told my sister.

  My friend Nancy Raynovich and her daughter Tess came into town for the weekend; I was unable to talk or think about anything but Brett. That kiss really was worse than heroin, and rejection was the cocaine that made the speedball. No matter how normal I might look on the outside, the truth is I was a sick, sick woman, and this guy was playing my mazurka.

  I took my houseguests shopping in Hampden, a quintessentially quirky Baltimore area. Tess got a vintage gold gown to wear to her high school homecoming dance, and I bought two things for Brett, things that jumped off counters into my hands even though I had never conceived such items existed. One was a package of gum. On the back of the silver box a disclaimer read, “By accepting wanna-hook-up gum, receiver agrees to enter into sexual relations (i.e., to “hook up”) with giver. It is mutually agreed that relations are limited to acts of sex and do not include exchange of phone numbers, first or last name(s), or inner feelings about anything deep and meaningful. Void in France.”

  In a shop down the block, I found a card with a deep scarlet envelope. On thick, creamy stock it said don’t be a, beneath which was a line drawing of a chicken. The inside was blank. I paid for the card and right there at the counter wrote in careful cursive, I will keep my eyes closed so you won’t fall into them. Then I put the gum in the envelope and went to the post office, before I myself chickened out.

  Seventeen-year-old Tess was getting a very unusual impression of the romantic practices
of older women, but she seemed to be enjoying it. I certainly was. It’s a high point of bipolarity when you can take people on your manic ride with you.

  The next weekend, now two weeks from our meeting in Annapolis, I was down in D.C. and I e-mailed Brett to suggest we meet for coffee on my drive home to talk things over. He was dubious, saying it was forty-five minutes out of my way. Finally we agreed to meet at a Starbucks he found on MapQuest that would be sort of in the middle.

  Sometimes the Internet just doesn’t know what it’s talking about. There was no Starbucks in this devastated former mall; there were no retail outlets of any kind. Instead there were drug dealers, drug buyers, gang members, and immense black SUVs idling in odd places around the parking lot. I waited in my car.

  Finally Brett showed up on his motorcycle, handsome and smiling as ever. He was perfectly friendly and normal in his greeting, much as he had been in Annapolis. He regretted leading me to this unwelcoming spot and suggested I follow him up the road until we found something suitable.

  He got back on the bike and I got in my Yaris and we headed out. One of the first things we went by was a roadside motel, but he passed it up and pulled into a T.G.I. Friday’s. It was only about 3:30 or so, but we didn’t order coffee. He had a beer; I had a glass of wine. I tried to make a case. He was scared mainly because he was inexperienced, I said; he had no idea of the wide variety of arrangements people could have between marriage and a one-night stand. There was really nothing to worry about.

  He was pleasant but stood his ground, and I began to feel sort of tenuous, overheated, and overexposed. “Maybe we should leave,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I had one more question. “Will we kiss in the parking lot?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Let’s go see.”

  The kissing started where the kissing in Annapolis left off and went about as far as you can go in the parking lot of a T.G.I. Friday’s: a very, very frustrating place. I remember standing on his feet to even out our heights, every inch of our bodies touching through clothes and jackets. I lost all self-consciousness, all inhibition, all sense of my age and geographic location. I did not understand why we hadn’t gone to that motel. He said he’d seen it, too, with a wistfulness that made no sense.

  This kissing had to stop before we got arrested; anyway, I still had to drive back to Pennsylvania to get Jane. I said into his neck, “Are you going to tell me tomorrow that you can never see me again?”

  “You never know with me,” he said.

  But actually you do.

  Instead of just throwing him back into the big ocean he’d come from, I suggested we become friends. (Yay! More friends!) I read some of his creative writing and I sent him more books to read. We exchanged long e-mails every day; I usually wrote back to his instantly and then spent the next twelve hours awaiting his reply. I saved all the e-mails in a folder—there were dozens, then hundreds—and reread the old ones while waiting for the new ones. Oh, I was hooked all right. By Halloween, I was back to wondering if we would see each other again.

  Then suddenly he sent a flirtier e-mail, including some romantic song lyrics and mentioning kissing. When I hopped on that idea, he immediately backed off. Then, a little over a month after our first meeting, he announced that he was going into therapy and cutting off communications with me.

  I decided to go into therapy, too. God knows I needed it.

  “He’ll be back,” predicted Ken gloomily, and my son Hayes also weighed in on the matter. Though Hayes doesn’t like to hear about my romantic exploits, I did find myself telling him a bit about Brett at some point.

  “Oh my God, this guy is a total doucher,” he said. “Forget about him, Mom.”

  Dreamboat or doucher? Or just another wacky CL poster?

  You decide.

  my life in therapy

  While I was looking for a therapist, Ken had some news about Jack, the old friend he’d thought of fixing me up with back in February. Somehow in all these months I’d never completely given up on Jack, and asked Ken about him regularly between dating disasters. He had been off the market, having moved in with the woman he started dating back in March. Now that had ended, but unfortunately it was because he had recently gotten not one but two DWIs, leading to his losing his job. That did sound disturbing, but perhaps I would meet him anyway. So what if he had a breathalyzer on his car ignition? That could be a good thing, really. And someone being out of work had never stopped me before.

  Ken said he’d give him a call, but the next evening came over looking pale beneath his perennial five o’clock shadow. He went straight to the kitchen and made himself a large rum and Coke. “I have bad news,” he said.

  “What? Jack already has another girlfriend?”

  “No,” said Ken. “He committed suicide.”

  I almost felt like I should go to the funeral. It would be our first date.

  I have been in therapy on and off since seventh grade. But finding a therapist is not that much easier than finding a boyfriend, it turns out, and often “help” is not what you get.

  The first psychiatrist that I ever saw was a Chinese-American woman with a son in my middle-school honors science class. I was sent to her after I wrote a long, spooky, cry-for-help type poem and swallowed a bottle of Excedrin. Getting a C in seventh-grade English (I think we would now call this a Jewish F) and a broken heart were the nominal causes of my nervous collapse, but I was also fascinated by mental illness as portrayed in books like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Bell Jar. Ah, that Sylvia Plath. An ongoing danger to America’s young romantics.

  I would later realize that by limiting her responses to Mmm-hmm and tossing any question I asked back to me, my inscrutable therapist was following classic psychoanalytic procedures. At the time I thought she was one of the most annoying people I’d ever met. To her credit, she did manage to explain some of my self-esteem issues to my bewildered parents, who were as always just trying to help me. But the approximately fourteen doctors I was seeing at the time, including a speech therapist, were making me feel like the Elephant Man instead of just a somewhat chubby, slightly pigeon-toed, crooked-toothed, lazy-eyed preteen. The physical issues were all eventually fixed or went away on their own; my sad little soul would prove more intractable.

  My teen years featured an old hippie psychologist my sister Nancy and I both saw, sometimes together. He said we could bring as many friends as we liked. He smoked bidis with us—Indian clove cigarettes rolled in leaves, very popular in the ’70s—and hypnotized me to help me lose weight. One session involved me descending into an imaginary theater and visualizing my favorite food making an entrance on the spotlit stage. My favorite food was Dannon vanilla yogurt.

  This, he explained, symbolized the male orgasm.

  Also around this time I participated in a therapy group run by the mother of one of my high school friends in her basement. Grassroots-style group therapy was quite a craze back then, as were beanbag chairs, blond-veneer paneling, and shag carpeting, and everyone in our drama-club clique crowded down the stairs to the biweekly meetings, not wanting to miss a moment of the action. “Group,” as it was known, was less like therapy than like an MTV reality show thirty years before its time, with all the parties to every slight and betrayal on hand for its confession, a domino-effect freak-out waiting to happen.

  For example, when I stupidly messed around one night in a red Chevy Nova with Billy Donnelley (who was not my boyfriend, but who reportedly had porn-star-type anatomical equipment so often discussed by the boys in our crowd that it was difficult not to be curious about it), the big showdown occurred in a room that contained Billy, my boyfriend, me, all of our various siblings, other girls who had had indiscretions with Billy Donnelley, their menfolk, and our well-meaning, middle-aged group leader. Though Billy and I had not gone all the way, things were never the same again
for me and my sweet, young boyfriend. Ah, those stupid ’70s. Like Sylvia Plath, another wellspring of dubious inspiration and poor moral guidance.

  In college, where I had developed a pioneering case of bulimia, I saw a Student Health psychiatrist who made me so mad with his insistence that my eating problem was really a sexuality problem that I threw my purse at him in our second session. (I think I was still a little edgy after the vanilla yogurt thing.)

  Still, I wasn’t completely discouraged, even though I continued to have only meager success on the therapy front. More obsessive love, more body-image issues, now throw in substance abuse . . . In my twenties, I practically drove a young Jungian therapist into another line of work. I was losing patience, too. At one point, I actually threatened to sue a guy who listened to me for a couple hours, diagnosed me with ADD, wrote me three prescriptions, and sent me a bill for $1,369. Multiple couples counselors threw up their hands at both my first and second marriages. When I started to believe one of my kids was a dangerously manipulative charmer who had everyone around him bewitched with his lies, I of course sent him to see a therapist as well. She called me after a few visits to tell me that I shouldn’t worry about my son. Everybody lies a little! And he was so charming.

  Unbelievably, none of these experiences had destroyed my faith in therapy, and so I set out once again to be healed, this time in the living room of an elderly, cadaverous, former Episcopal priest whose main advantage was that he was right in my neighborhood. On our first visit, he said he wasn’t sure he could help me with my problems, since they were so severe. On our second visit, he decided he’d rather not hear the pages and pages of dreams I had written down at his suggestion (though they seemed at the very least to be full of lottery number picks). On our third visit, he pulled out his Bible and started reading aloud. When I called him the following week to cancel our next appointment, I got the impression I had barely beaten him to it.