Winik - Highs in the low fifties: how I stumbled through the joys of single living

for Beau

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

Copyright 2013 by Marion Winik

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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, American21st centuryBiography. 3.

Single womenUnited StatesHumor. I. Title.

PS3623.I66259Z46 2013

818'.603dc23

[B]

2012050338

O gods! Who ist can say I am at the worst?

I am worse than eer 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

prelude: things fall apart

the mattress professionals

One afternoon in the summer of 2008, a Sleepys mattress truck driver turned down my driveway by mistake, then reversed and backed over my mailbox. Without a moments 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 Sleepys 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 husbands 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 drawbacksa wood-burning furnace, a long, rugged driveway, no air-conditioning. It was a Georgian-style house, the young real estate agent explained, and they dont 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 deckbut first, I got pregnant and added a baby girl named Jane to the menagerie. I hadnt 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 Sleepys 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 hadnt been taken out of my hands.

Perhaps a wide-open extrovert who had made a career of publicly blabbing about every wild thing shed 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 relatively 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. Theres 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 itits next months cover of Relapse Monthly. alcohol saved my marriage .