DIED 2000
THERE WAS A PICTURE of me in the Austin Chronicle in 1988, nursing my infant son at a picnic table in a beer garden with a paper bag over my head, mustachioed drinkers on either side. “Hey forget the titty bar, I think I’ll just stay here at La Leche League,” the caption read. It was taken by a photographer friend I had asked to do me a favor.
She was a rich lady from Corpus with corkscrew curls, button eyes, and skinny rag-doll limbs. She had run away from her husband’s ranch at thirty-five to see the world, or as much of it as you could see from a pretty little house in Austin. Motherhood had taken a lot out of her: one disabled son, the other his father’s macho mascot, and all she could do and buy and say would never be enough. Finally it was expensive schools, phone calls, and guilt.
She appeared in our world as a wonderful oddity—dry humor, big accent, rooms full of elegant furniture, real art on the walls, and flourishing plants. Way out past Fredericksburg she had another house she called Wit’s End. She found our little cadre of artists and hairdressers just as exotic and amusing as we found her; Yankees! Jews and Italians! Members of the middle class! Though she had a deep appetite for solitude, every once in a while she would throw a party at which her banker friends from Dallas stared at other guests in eyeliner, coming in groups out of the bathroom.
All these people were “cute,” and the Mexicans on the East Side were “cute,” but the pictures she took of them showed more than that. She was the best student I ever had, her old photography teacher told me, too bad she had so much money or she might have had more drive. Her teacher and I had less money but better luck: we lived to meet again under the arch in Washington Square Park and talk about our old friend, who died of cancer in her late fifties. How cute she had been, and how much more than cute as well.