DIED 2018
MY MOTHER HAD FEW close friends who weren’t serious about golf. Also rare among her cronies were large families, professional careers, and divorces, at least in the early part of my childhood. Yet one of her dearest confidantes was a pert brunette with a great figure who had five kids, an ex-husband, a master’s degree in social work, and a full-time job in the field. While this woman thought it was funny that someone as smart as my mother would devote her life to playing games, my mother could not believe that anyone had actually set out to have so many children. Well, the last two were twins. Twins! A prospect almost as petrifying to Jane Winik as stepchildren.
The social worker always made me feel I was one of her favorites, stopping to visit whenever I was home from college. My mother did the same over there. As we kids grew up, we followed the story of each other’s family like a long-running TV series. Her oldest boy got into Dartmouth, my mother would report. His brother had moved to the West Coast with some guys from high school. The cheerleader went into finance, the dancer had a show in the city, the other twin became very Jewish and moved to Israel. Five kids, just like her mother. Oy!
Among the many fascinating details of this soap opera, there is a plotline that remains veiled in mystery. Why did the oldest daughter see “a silver man in a silver car,” revealed to be my dad, in front of their house one Tuesday afternoon? What went on at that discotheque of his, which her mother loved and my mother found utterly ridiculous? Was it all just a rumor, or were the seventies as Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice as people imagine? All we know is that they remained friends for the rest of their lives.
In her last years, the social worker moved to California to be near her oldest daughter and her grandchildren. At a certain point, she forgot she had retired and thought she was seeing patients at the facility where she herself was being treated. I’m not ready for this appointment, she would suddenly cry. Her daughter would calm her by explaining that the client had rescheduled.
Oh, good, said her mother. That will give me time.