DIED 2017
IN OUR SALAD DAYS, in the bloom of health and talent, early on our paths, headquarters was a sprawling stone rancher in West Austin, a long, low, Frank Lloyd Wright–looking thing that stretched out beside a turquoise pool as if it were a movie star. Inside, young women were writing poems and playing music, having long conversations that turned into romances that turned into friendships that turned into a lesbian folk-rock band that was a little bit famous at the time. She was the elfin blond in John Lennon glasses, on guitar.
I wandered into her little bedroom, walls covered with her brightly colored scritch-scratch paintings, and found her eating a hard-boiled egg. You’re always eating hard-boiled eggs, I said, and she told me in her matter-of-fact tone that she had eaten only hard-boiled eggs for the past two weeks. As a young mother, very concerned about what people ate, this did not seem right to me. But asceticism came to her naturally.
So did anger. Hypersensitivity. The first gnawings of mania and delusion. A group house, a democratically run band, a hazy poolside bacchanal could only last so long. She made two records by herself, but as the years went by, the static in her head drowned out everything. The salad days were long past when some of the old friends learned she was living in a storage unit. The bandmates gave a fund-raiser; another couple took her in. Eat, they begged her, sleep, take your medicine. Instead, she would tear off on some frantic mission, winding up in the hospital when bystanders called 911.
When death came to her at sixty-one, alone in a rented room, I had not spoken to her in more than twenty years. But always with me has been one of her beautiful-mind paintings; she probably traded it for a couple of haircuts from my husband. A wide, black frame is painted around an intricate, kaleidoscopically colored-in doodle. Part of it appears to be a psychedelic hard-boiled egg, its yolk exploding with arrows and shazam lines into its white, which is orange. Around the image in a careful square she lettered a line from a children’s story. For where the tear had fallen a flower grew out of the ground, a mysterious flower, not at all like any that grew in the garden.