Winnie #2
It started with me feeling at loose ends at 4 p.m. every day, and wandering into the kitchen to ask Mom if she needed any help with dinner.
She’d pour me a glass of something cold and delicious, hand me a big knife that sliced through anything with no effort at all—even tomatoes—and set me to work on whatever was going into our dinner: onions, carrots, arugula, eggplant.
She usually had some kind of music on in the background, either a radio station playing big band jazz, or a Frank Sinatra record.
Innocuous, upbeat tunes that made us sway as we cooked.
Nothing that reminded me of Lincoln, thank god.
I graduated from chopping to kneading and sautéing and even souffléing.
As we worked, she’d tell me stories about me and Miranda as kids, and even about growing up in Lafayette with her own sister, whom we barely saw, though she lived only an hour and a half away, with two children close to me and Miranda in age.
By marrying my dad and moving to what her doctor father saw only as “a farm” and a backward way of life, my mother had chosen husband over parents and sister.
“That must have been hard,” I said to her.
Keeping her eyes on the dough she was kneading, she replied, “I came to terms with it a long time ago. My sister and I never had much in common anyway. She dropped out of college to get married, and I finished my degree in history at Stanford and even taught for a few years before I met your father at a college reunion.”
“You went to Stanford?” I was shocked.
“I’ve told you that before.”
“I don’t think so! And you let me go to Berkeley?” Not that I went to any of the football games to chant “Boo, hiss” at my alma mater’s biggest rival.
“Your heart was set on it.”
I accepted this generous notion, though part of me thought, My heart was set on writing, too, but you tried to dissuade me from that—until it became useful to you.
This closeness with Mom felt precious and new, and I was starting to see Joan Hartley in a new light. I wanted more. I also sensed that the wine was making that possible, and wondered if maybe there was something to life on the vineyard after all.
By the time dinner was ready, we were usually pretty deep into a second bottle. I noted that Miranda only poured herself a small glass at dinner, and rarely drank all of it.
“Why don’t you drink more? I mean, isn’t it your job to know wine? Don’t you have to drink a lot of it to do that?” I asked her one night as we sat in the hot tub.
“I only drink on special occasions.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.”
“So concerts are special occasions?”
“Yeah, and I only have like one or two glasses even then. I just…I’ve trained myself to enjoy the attributes of wine, to understand what it’s trying to express—in the same way you might look at a painting and ask yourself what it’s really about—but I don’t actually enjoy the way it makes me feel. So out of control.”
“Oh god, I love it.”
“You love feeling out of control?”
“I don’t really feel that way. I feel more relaxed. Able to set aside my worries. Or if I’m happy and I drink something like champagne, it turns up the volume on that happiness.”
“What about acid or dope?”
“Well…each one gives me access to something I didn’t have without them.
But”—I shivered, thinking of those last few trips in San Francisco—“I’m off acid now.
They say that once you’ve had a few bad trips, there’s no going back.
It’s ruined, unless you get a guide to lead you back to the happier places in your mind. ”
“A guide?”
“Someone to talk you through it, you know? There are loads of shrinks who use acid to unlock people’s minds.”
“I’ll just throw away the key to my own mind, thank you very much.”
I giggled. “It’s not for everyone.”
“Definitely not for me.”
“That’s cool. I’m not a pusher.”
“So…when you drink wine, it’s got nothing to do with the taste?”
“Well, when I drink with you it does. Because you talk about the flavors and notes and bouquet, and then I can taste what you’re talking about.
But when I drink somewhere else, like a party?
No. I drink for the feeling it gives me, which…
now that we’re talking about it, is also about togetherness.
When we’re all sharing a bottle, or a few bottles, while listening to music or arguing about Chekov, or just enjoying the sunshine burning off the fog, there’s a way that the wine binds everyone together.
I feel like I belong to them and they belong to me. ”
“While arguing about Chekov?”
“He’s very popular right now. He saw through things, you know? The bullshit of domestic life.”
“If you say so. I think I slept through the second half of The Cherry Orchard.”
We laughed, and it felt good to be at ease with my sister about how different we were.
“What about when you drink with Mom?” she asked, and I detected a note of jealousy in her voice.
“It’s weird. Wine helps me feel closer to Mom. I definitely enjoy the way it tastes when we’re cooking, and the way certain wines go perfectly with certain foods.”
Miranda nodded. We were quiet for a minute or two, then she asked, “Have you given any more thought to what you want to do? Stay here or go back to the city? I don’t know how much longer I can hold Mom off.”
“I don’t want to go back to the city.”
“Okay. And?”
“I guess I’ll work here. But can you promise me I’ll still get to write poetry? And can we agree to a schedule that doesn’t include fieldwork? A schedule that gives me real time off every day to write what I want to write.”
Miranda’s wide smile was almost enough to banish my doubts.
“No problem,” she promised.
“I’m serious about the fieldwork, Miranda. Every single grape I picked when we were kids was a promise to myself that I would never do that when I grew up.”
“Are you grown up?”
“Do you want me to do this or not?”
“Alright, alright. I promise. No fieldwork.”
I smiled.
She smiled.
“Deal.”
“Welcome home, little sister.”
If only it had been enough.