Winnie #2
“I used the last of it in a salad tonight. You missed it.”
“Any leftovers?” He opened the door of the fridge and took out the salad bowl I’d covered with a plate. “I’m starving.” He dug into it straight from the bowl and asked, his mouth full, “Do we have any bread?”
I handed him half a baguette, then I folded my arms across my chest.
“Win,” he said, pausing in his ravaging. “I’m sorry you don’t remember, but I did tell you. Maybe you’d had a little too much of something that night?”
“You’re hardly one to talk about that,” I retorted, stung not just by his accusation—which might unfortunately have been true—but by the sense I had that he was using a possible truth to get out of something he had done.
Drunk or high, I would have remembered if he’d joined a second band, because it would impact our life dramatically.
We already didn’t see each other enough. And who the hell is Sarah?
He whistled and laughed again at my retort before going back to the baguette he stuffed with soggy salad.
This was not the guy who had framed my Jerry Garcia interview. This guy couldn’t even take my anger seriously.
I went to bed and waited and waited and waited for him to climb in with me, but he never did. When the place got very quiet, I peeked in the main room and saw him on the couch under the afghan my mother had crocheted.
I managed to get to sleep myself, but when I woke in the morning, he was gone.
I could never understand why Miranda stopped drawing and painting.
She was so good at it, and it used to make her so happy.
No, more than that. It made her complete.
Content. The only time I ever saw her fully uncoil, her shoulders come down from her ears, was when she had a brush or a pastel or pencil in her hand.
Once upon a time, when she took art electives in high school or summer classes in town or just lazed around in the hammock with a sketch pad after working hard with Emilio all morning, she would spend hours trying to capture the rind of an orange or the crack on Mom’s old teapot.
She’d emerge from those sessions calmer, and her smiles would come more easily.
I used to ask her why she’d chosen science over art, and she’d protest that “enology is an art just like painting or writing or making music.”
And I’d reply, “But the bottle of wine you make is gone in an hour, whereas a book or a song lasts forever.”
“How many books and songs actually last forever? A tiny fraction of the ones that get made.”
We’d had so many versions of that conversation. I wish it had dawned on me that I was really asking her to validate my choice, not hers, but my sister and I had never been very good at meddling in each other’s lives—which I didn’t realize until I was much older, when it was too late.
Early in 1969, we were on the phone and Miranda was telling me how worried she was about money.
She’d just agreed to give the workers a raise, which of course I was all for after she told me about her many conversations with Emilio on that subject, but then she said, “We’re barely in the black.
I don’t know how to push us further. We can’t raise our prices yet without a good reason, so we need a reason. More press, an award…something.”
“What if you put out a limited-edition wine?” I suggested, thinking of the unlabeled bottles that were Mom’s favorite.
“It doesn’t even have to be that different from what you already make, but calling it limited will make it feel special and rare.
Oh! And you could even paint labels for the bottles.
Each bottle could have an original work by Miranda Hartley herself! ”
“The limited-edition wine is definitely an interesting idea. But why would anyone care about the label?”
“The kinds of people you want to drink your wine and pay good money for it are the kinds of people who go to art galleries and museums. People with taste.” I was on a roll; it was like all the complaining I’d heard Mom do about American wine drinkers was finally coming to something.
Ironically, I was using it to bring Miranda back to what I thought of as her true art.
“I could even write a press release for the bottles,” I added, wondering if that might sweeten the deal.
“You mean you’d do actual work for the vineyard?” Miranda sounded shocked.
“I mean I’d do actual work for my sister, the repressed artist.”
I could just see her rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. “Jesus, Winnie. Give it up.”
“Okay, fine. I know I can’t convince you to be a painter for real, even though you should.
I go to galleries all the time and the artists have less talent than you have in your pinkie finger.
Let’s make a deal. I’ll write some ad copy and a press release about the special wine, if you do the labels. ”
“You know…” And now I could practically hear the gears in her head grinding.
“Those pictures Amado Gonzalez painted for the California Wine Advisory Board promoting local wine did a pretty good job of boosting sales a few years ago. I’d want ours to have a different aesthetic, though.
Maybe I could do the view from Spring Mountain Road.
Or the hammock outside our bedroom windows. Maybe both.”
I held my tongue and my breath.
“Okay,” Miranda finally said. “Deal.”
“Yes!” I actually punched the air with my fist. “The author and illustrator of Leoland reunite!”
Miranda laughed. “I miss you,” she said.
“I’m right here,” I said.
“I know. It’s not the same as having you living at home, though. Are you happy in San Francisco? With Lincoln?”
“I really am.” I must have been, that day.
“That’s what’s important, then.”
“I want the same for you, Sister.”
“I’m happy,” Miranda said, but I wasn’t convinced.
Beneath the surface of my sister’s most joyous moments there was always a sludgy undercurrent hastening it out of sight.
I hoped that picking up a paintbrush for those labels might wash all that away, just like I hoped that music and poetry would save me and Lincoln from destroying each other.
And writing would rescue me, it turned out, but not for a very long time.