Winnie
My words and Miranda’s labels got some recognition, but they didn’t garner the national attention we were hoping for, and they had the unintended consequence of giving Mom a bright idea.
“If you came home,” she said to me on the phone after our first season of original labels, “it would make all the difference. You could be our head of marketing. You’d be able to make calls, taste the wine, build the connections you need.”
“Doesn’t Miranda do all that?”
“Miranda is a scientist. You are a natural salesperson.”
“That’s not how I see myself.” Sales. I scoffed.
“How long are you going to play house with that boy? He should at least marry you.”
“Neither of us are interested in marriage, Mom,” I replied, though this was a lie. I’d become more and more interested in marriage, as if somehow a ring and some vows could act as a glue to bind the pieces of us back together.
In the first part of 1970, I had a series of bad trips.
Instead of the oneness with my surroundings and the closeness to Lincoln I typically felt, I saw my father sitting at a desk in a room I didn’t recognize, and he was dead, his head cheek-down on the desk, his face stiff and blue, his light brown eyes stark and open.
Then grotesque bubbles formed in the wood on the walls around us, then on my body.
I felt the skin on my arms stretch, then split open like an overripe grape.
I’d spent the second half of the trip sobbing and telling Lincoln I needed a doctor, and my father was dead, and it was all just too horrible to contemplate, until the acid cycled through my system.
The first two times, he held me and whispered reassuring words in my ear, then offered me orange juice and toast the next morning.
The third time, he didn’t do any of that.
I sobbed into my pillow while he strummed his guitar, and when I woke in the morning he was gone.
No orange juice. No toast. That night, he didn’t come home at all.
I stayed up worrying and too ashamed to call Miranda or Bernard for comfort because then I’d have to admit what was going on.
Finally, my pounding head and total exhaustion from the night before sent me to sleep.
The next day, I couldn’t find him anywhere.
The construction company where I thought he’d been working told me they hadn’t seen him in at least six weeks.
I didn’t get it. He’d been taking my homemade lunches with him every single morning all that time and coming home and regaling me with stories about his coworkers.
When he showed up that night, I confronted him about the job.
“I quit,” he said, as if it was no big deal.
“So what have you been doing all day?”
“Rehearsing. What else would I be doing?”
“What are you rehearsing for? Do you have any gigs lined up?”
“Soon.”
“Soon?”
“Soon.”
“Like when?”
“I don’t know. Jesus, Winnie. You’re acting like my mother, and we’re supposed to be free of that shit. Free love, remember?”
“What are you talking about? We’ve never been free lovers.”
“Maybe you haven’t,” he said.
Every atom exploded inside me—BOOM!—and I yelled, “What are you talking about? Who else are you sleeping with?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re the one I come home to.”
My body felt like it was on fire, and the only way I could think to put it out was to move.
“Not anymore,” I said, heading straight for the bedroom and throwing open a suitcase on our bed—our bed!—and tossing clothes inside. I was crying, and I was aware some of these tears and the packing were for show. I wanted him to come and stop me.
But he didn’t.
He fell asleep on the couch.
While he snored, I took my suitcase and backpack with all my notebooks and left.
I thought he’d come after me.
I sat and waited in my childhood bedroom, but he never called, and he never showed up. I asked Bernard to call him about the rent, as an excuse to fish for other information.
“He told me he’s got it covered,” Bernard said gently on the phone, after he’d spoken to Lincoln.
“Meaning he’s got some other girl to cover it.”
“I don’t know because he got off the phone as soon as he could. I’m sorry, Winnie.”
I broke down in tears all over again.
“If it makes you feel any better, I told him he was worse than pond scum and not even a very good musician, and I’d see to it that he would never work in gay San Francisco, ever. Which is basically the whole city, so you’re welcome.”
I laughed and hiccuped. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure. Come back to the city. We all miss you in the office.”
“I can’t,” I rasped.
“Can I come see you? I’ve always wanted to see Hartley Vineyard.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Can I come this weekend?”
Bernard was a huge hit. He showed up in his beat-up old tank of a Volvo with a huge bouquet of blush-pink peonies for Mom (how had he known they were her favorite?), a two-pound box of See’s Candies for everyone, and a baggie of our favorite weed for me and Miranda if she wanted to join us later.
He was even better than Lincoln had been, lavishing praise over Mom’s dinner, a roasted chicken with the first lettuces and shoots from her garden, and she basked in his approval and questions for her and Miranda.
“How did you get the skin this crispy? I can never get that right…. Tell me more about this ambrosial wine!…So what happens if you miss the window for harvesting?…You’re right, Gallo is a travesty.
” At this, he winked at me, knowing as he did our fondness for mixing Gallo’s pink wine with OJ or sparkling water and drinking it with french fries or some other artery-clogging food when we were high.
We used to joke that the Gallo would surely burn away all the lipids.
That night in the hot tub with him and Miranda was the first time I’d done any drugs in weeks, since I’d left the city; the memory of those horrible trips where I saw Dad haunted me and turned my stomach anytime I even thought about drugs.
Under the sparkle of stars above, and with hot bubbles swirling and massaging my skin, I felt relaxed and at home in my body for the first time in ages, especially with my staunchest protectors at my side.
Bernard and Miranda chatted a bit about the daily functioning of the winery, which he seemed genuinely interested in and impressed by.
“Maybe I should hire you and Winnie to work here and help us with our marketing,” Miranda said.
“I don’t know,” he said slyly. “I’m here to convince Winnie to come back to her life in the city.”
Suddenly all eyes were on me. “Come on, you two!” I said. “We were having such a lovely time. Don’t ruin it.” But I was secretly enjoying the tug-of-war. At least two someones wanted me.
“You have to come back, at least for a visit and maybe with your sister,” Bernard added, shooting Miranda a conciliatory look, “because I’m going to be directing a play this summer.”
“Congrats, Bernard! What play?”
“Just a little one act that Julian wrote. You remember him, right?”
“Isn’t he the one who dressed as Oscar Wilde for Halloween?”
“Yes, for three years running. He does Wilde better than anyone else.”
“Don’t tell me the play is about him.”
“No. That would be too on the nose, even for Julian. This is about a boy like us in a boarding school in the ’50s.”
Miranda whistled. “Sounds controversial.”
“I certainly hope to stir up some trouble! There’s no other way to get attention these days. He’s taken quite a Wildean approach to the subject, of course. It’s all oblique and wickedly funny if you know what to listen for.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “I’ll come see it no matter what.”
“Miranda, please take no offense to what I’m about to say,” he said directly to my sister before turning to me and saying, “It’s not good for you to just stew like this out here in the middle of nowhere. You have to get on with your life. Lincoln is one man. There are so many more!”
“No offense taken,” said Miranda. “And in fact, I agree with you about most of it. She does need to move on. She has a choice, though. She can go back to the city and the same people and work she was doing when she was with Lincoln, or…she can get a change of scenery here, writing copy for the winery and meeting new people.”
“Well, well, well.” Bernard whistled. “Competing job offers. Aren’t you a lucky girl.”
“Both of them feel like going backward in different ways,” I said.
“It’s all in how you look at it,” Bernard said, tilting his face up at the canopy of stars overhead.
“I could look at all of that star power and feel small in comparison. Or I can look at it and feel that I’m plugged in to that power, and energized by it.
” He drew in a deep, satisfied breath, and I knew which way he saw those stars.
Particularly with this directing gig on the horizon.
“He’s right,” Miranda said. “You can decide how to view your situation. You can see yourself as hurt, or you can see yourself as free.”
Bernard’s head snapped down and he locked eyes with my sister. “That was deep, Miranda.”
She grinned. “Thank you. That’s not an adjective often assigned to me.”
I closed my eyes and sank deeper into the water, till even my chin was submerged.
I had never felt free of Lincoln and doubted I ever would.
When Bernard left, I mulled over my two options: stay and work with Mom and Miranda, or go back to the city and resume my life there.
I thought and journaled and meditated. I took long walks and got lost and came back with poison oak.
Nowhere felt like home anymore, let alone my own mind and body.
I felt restless all the time, and part of me wanted to say “Neither one! I want to go backpack around Europe instead.” But I had no money for travel like that.
What finally tipped me more in favor of Hartley was Mom, of all people.