Dawn
The Matriarch’s decree made it clear that no one was to threaten or say any other word against Morbus. “Each of us must find it in our hearts to love him,” she wrote.
—Saving Vineland
Meet me at the car in an hour? We’re driving to Mendocino.
Mendocino, as in Mendocino Books of Winnie’s email address?
Yes. I’ll explain everything in the car.
Audrey handed me a huge tumbler of coffee, and I handed her the printout of Winnie’s journal and said, “I’ll drive, you read.”
Best-case traffic scenario, it was an eight-and-a-half-hour drive to Mendocino, and it was 10:00 a.m. when we left.
I wasn’t sure we’d make it all in one day.
I was so nervy while driving, thinking through everything I’d read and felt since I’d started reading Winnie’s journal, time flew by.
Mom and Winnie were both right about me having questions, despite what Mom had said in her preamble email: “I promise you she captured my thoughts and emotions with startling accuracy. I felt such relief at being seen by my sister in this way.”
I’d gleaned that most of what Winnie had written about Mom she could have picked up from conversations with her, and that the rest had been filled in by newspapers, magazine articles, and Bernard.
Uncle Bernie. But still—what had it really been like for Mom to lose her sister?
Had the contact the two of them had in the last few days completely healed them?
Winnie had clearly forgiven Mom, and it looked as though Mom had forgiven Winnie, but what was that going to mean for us going forward?
I was deeply relieved that Mom obviously loved her sister despite the substance abuse; it helped me see that I could reveal myself to her, too.
And I understood that as the secret keeper of the family, Mom felt like she had to be strong and independent, to the point of pushing people away…
to her own detriment. She’d always struck me as a bit lonely, and now I understood why.
I wondered, too: Why hadn’t she ever gone out with anyone else, after enough time had passed?
Was the Tom in the journal the same one Mom had casually mentioned having dinner with a few weeks ago? “My old friend Tom was in town…” I’d been so mired in my own shit I hadn’t really paid much attention. I hadn’t been in the moment.
And also: Where was Lincoln now? Would he want to meet me?
As I drove, periodically Audrey would gasp and we’d make eye contact, and she’d say something like, “I want to kill Lincoln,” or “I had no idea about your grandfather!” or “Poor Winnie!”
She’d want to dissect what she’d just read with me, and I’d put her off. “You have to get to the end before we can talk about it.” And then she’d refasten her eyes to the pages.
We stopped once for a quick lunch and walk for Alfie, then got right back in the car again.
To make good time, we took the dull inland route, and the empty stretches of land flew by because I was so lost in my thoughts and feelings.
By the time we hit some unusual traffic south of Tracy, my back was screaming and Audrey had reached the end of Winnie’s journal.
“Oh my god,” she breathed.
“I know,” I said.
“Winnie is your mom,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“And Lincoln is your dad.”
“I know,” I said.
“And all this amazing, beautiful stuff about love at the end…I feel…lifted up by it. How do you feel?”
“I feel lifted up, too,” I said, and I did now, recalling the words I’d now read dozens of times.
The greatest of these is love… “And as much as I want to keep going, I don’t think I can get to Mendocino tonight.
My back is killing me, and…I feel like I need a little more time to process.
How about we stay at my place in the city, then start again tomorrow? ”
“Whatever you need. This is entirely your show now. Speaking of which, what is the show? We’re heading to Mendocino to…”
“See Winnie, I hope.”
“We’re assuming the bookstore in her email address knows where she is?”
“That’s exactly what I’m assuming. I’d like to try and talk to her first.”
“Before your mom? Miranda? What are we calling her?”
“Mom still feels right for Miranda,” I said.
In my mind, I couldn’t stop referring to her as Mom, and it made sense.
“She did raise me,” I thought aloud. “She has been and is, for all intents and purposes, my mother. And I can’t imagine calling Winnie Mom.
But aunt doesn’t feel right, either. So it’s Mom and Winnie, at least for now. ”
Audrey nodded and said, “I’m surprised you don’t want to talk to your mom first.”
“Something is telling me to talk to Winnie first. I’ll talk to Mom soon. ‘What you seek is seeking you,’ remember? I think that Winnie and I have been looking for each other for a long time.”
“Wow, yeah.” Audrey leaned back in her seat. “God, Remi is so good. And you know I’m a big believer in intuition, so let’s go with yours.”
“My intuition is also telling me,” I said, feeling hesitant about saying the words out loud. “Maybe we could go to a meeting together? Do you know any good ones in the city?”
“Oh, yes!” She clapped her hands together. “There is a great one in the Mission! And we can get burritos. I’ve missed San Francisco burritos.”
“Perfect,” I said.
Audrey checked her phone for the meeting time, which was in less than two hours.
We’d have to hurry. On the remaining half hour of the drive, I said, “So last night when I read the truth about Winnie, and Mom, and Lincoln, and the whole incredible thing, I left the house and bought a bottle of wine. Two, actually. And I sat in the parking lot wanting and not wanting to drink them. In the end I left them on the front steps of the store.” I kept my eyes fastened to the road because I didn’t want to see Audrey’s expression.
Then I went on. “I just realized…I didn’t want to feel the way I felt when I was drinking.
Not ever again. Like Winnie wrote in her pages, I don’t have to feel that way ever again. ”
“Dawn, you thought through the drink!”
“What?”
“Think through the drink. It’s a twelve stepism. When you have a craving, think about where that drink will take you, and not just that one night, but a week, a month, a year down the road.”
“So it’s not bad that I wanted a drink so much I actually went and got one?”
“First of all, there is no good or bad here. Turn that sword away from yourself. And second, it’s totally amazing that you bought it, the wine was right there, and you didn’t drink it. So badass. Congratulations.”
Her reaction buoyed me. Maybe I was getting the hang of it after all. “Thanks,” I said.
“Are you still feeling drinky?”
“No, amazingly. But a meeting still feels like the right thing to do.”
“I’m going to try hard not to gloat.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you did.”
“You sound remarkably chipper for someone who’s just discovered she’s not who she thought she was.”
“Yeah, it’s…I mean, last night, I was furious.
I wanted to drink to tune it all out. I did not want to feel how I was feeling.
But this morning, and now all day, I’ve felt different about everything.
Like suddenly, so many things make more sense.
The anxiety I’ve felt my whole life…that had to come from Winnie and Lincoln, right?
Obviously the two of them used each other and drugs to numb the difficult parts of themselves just like I did.
And this impulse I have to make movies…I mean, come on!
My mother is a writer, and my dad is a musician. ”
“Nature isn’t destiny, though.”
“Of course not, but…I don’t know, in this case, I find it comforting to know this about my parents. It makes me feel like less of a black sheep.”
“There’s also the fact that Winnie must have been, what? At least forty when she published the first Vineland book, right?”
“Yes! Exactly. She was actually fifty-three, by my calculations.”
“So you’ve got thirteen years left to make that movie.”
I laughed.
“Maybe I’m just a late bloomer.” Like my mom. This felt so amazingly good to think to myself, instead of I’m such a fuck-up, unlike my mom.
“And also,” I added, “I’ve been walking around feeling so ashamed of the secret I’ve been keeping from Mom about my drinking. I felt like I was betraying her and the family, but all of this releases me from feeling that way.”
“Because it turns out your mom was keeping a whopper from you, too?”
“That, and also…it means that Mom and I both need to get to know each other again, and we can do it honestly. It’s not one sided. I’m not wrong. She’s not wrong. Life is complicated.”
Audrey whistled, impressed. “You’re really not mad at anyone?”
“Maybe I’m a little mad at Lincoln.”
“Yeah, he was a bit of a Jed.”
I laughed. “So you saw something of yourself in Winnie’s story, too?” I asked.
“Oh god yes. The addiction to a person is so much like the addiction to a substance. It’s like they say in meetings, ‘You can never get enough of something that almost works.’ Winnie and Lincoln almost worked.
Jed and I almost work. Booze almost works to take the pain away.
And we go back and back and back to the well, thinking, Maybe this time it’ll be enough. ”
“Exactly.” I loved conversations like these—the ones where I felt so completely seen and understood. “I love you,” I said to Audrey.
“I love you, too. And I’m really grateful to be on this journey with you. I am not sure I would have understood my situation this well if I hadn’t read Winnie’s story. I feel…kind of freer for having read it.”
“Yeah. Freer,” I said.
There was a lull in our conversation; then I asked, “Do you think alcoholism, or addiction, or whatever this is…Do you think it’s a disease, like people say?”
“If it is, it’s the only disease I know of that’s cured by storytelling.”
—