She said, “Winkie is dead. Winkie.”
He was moving toward her. She tried to extend the Alumnae Bulletin to him. Her arm stretched far out from her body but her fingers couldn’t maintain their grip on the paper and it fell, fell so slowly toward the floor.
Then the fog got thicker and covered everything.
In her first year at Bryn Mawr Andrea had shared a room in the freshman dormitory with a girl named Pauline Spooner. Pauline’s father was a Unitarian minister in Three Rivers, Delaware, and Pauline was assistant freshman coordinator of a campus organization called Liberal Religious Youth. She was tall and stoop-shouldered and had bad skin and went out on infrequent dates with a young man from Haverford who looked enough like her to have been her brother. At first Pauline had found Andrea very interesting on account of her being Jewish. “I’ve always hoped for an opportunity to talk with Jewish people,” she’d said. “I hope it’s not a sensitive subject with you?”
Andrea hadn’t thought it was.
“Then tell me this. Do you often feel aware of an enormous inner void in your soul resulting from your denial of Christ?”
They were not destined to become close, and Pauline did not return to Bryn Mawr the following year. In the course of her first year Andrea met and became friendly with the two girls with whom she was to share rooms for her remaining three years. They were Dana Giddings and Winifred Welles.
Dana was from a suburb of Boston. She was of old Massachusetts stock on both sides and her father was a partner in a Boston advertising agency. Dana was a very slender girl with deeply set dark eyes and a manner of quiet assurance. She had entered as a political science major but changed her major to history midway through her second year. An attractive girl, there was nothing striking about her beauty, perhaps because her shy manner did nothing to call attention to it. She had a dry acerbic wit which was commonly expressed in an undertone audible only to those in close proximity to her.
For three years Dana had never dated the same boy more than twice. She was not unpopular, and it was hard to know whether she actively discouraged boys from developing relationships with her or whether her aloofness somehow put them off. She seemed content enough. Then, in the fall of their senior year, Dana met a graduate assistant in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania. She met him on a Friday and was not seen again until the following Monday.
Andrea was alone in their apartment when Dana returned. “Thank God,” she said. “We were trying to decide whether to call the police. Don’t look at me like that. I’m serious.”
“How often do you two stay away for a weekend?”
“But that’s us. You never stayed away like that. You had us worried. I’m not kidding.”
“We’re going to be married in June,” Dana said quietly, matter-of-factly. “He’s from New Mexico. He says I’ll like it out there.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I suspect he’s right,” she said.
Andrea thought of any number of remarks and didn’t make any of them, and in June Dana was married and went to live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
That was Dana Giddings. And Winifred Welles was Winkie.
Remembering Winkie:
“Hey, Kleinman? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Alive.”
“Seriously. Here we are with all these roads stretching out in front of us and I get to wondering if maybe they all lead to Rome.”
“You lost me.”
“Well, what if whatever we do we wind up in exactly the same place? Or to put it another way. How would you like to wake up one fine morning and discover you have turned out to be a road company version of your mother?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s anything to worry about. Anyway, my mother’s all right.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t. I’d like nothing better than to trade mothers with you. I’ll throw in the good ten of diamonds and my pearl ring. That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“Well, you don’t want to grow up to be your mother, do you? Oh, I’m not coming across, am I?” Head cocked to one side, eyes (blue now, but sometimes they verged on green) glinting under uneven never-plucked brows. “I don’t mean you’ll marry a dentist, and don’t interrupt, I’m not criticizing dentists, but I don’t mean you might marry one, or that you’ll wind up in a house on Admirable Road—”
“Admiral Road.”
“Whatever. Oh, shit, Andrea Beth. You know what it is? My awful secret?”
“If it’s something you did after lights out at Foxcroft—”
“Shithead!”
“Tell me your awful secret, Winkie.”
“Damn straight!” And then, in a little-girl voice, “I wanna be somebody. That’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
“You mean famous?”
“No, I don’t mean famous.”
“Well, you can’t mean rich. You’re already rich.”
“Yeah, and big hairy deal to being rich. And I know it’s easy for me to say, and that’s why I get to say it. I will tell you, Andrea Beth. I want to be somebody. But I don’t know who. And I want to do something.”
“But you don’t know what.”
“Yeah. I can’t even talk like this to Dana. She’d give me that number with the eyes and I’d begin to wonder if maybe I forgot how to speak my mother tongue. You think I’m crazy too but at least I can talk to you. But you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Sort of.”
“I don’t mean a meaningful career. Shit, the last thing I want is a meaningful career. Doesn’t this get to you, Kleinman? Where you could spend hours staring at the wall and looking at your future and it’s all these roads leading to Rome?”
“I don’t know.” Pause. “I guess not.”
“You know what I’ll do? I’ll trade selves with you, and I’ll throw in the ten of diamonds and the deuce of spades and my pearl ring and all my cashmere sweaters and two Princeton boys and that schmuck from Villanova, who incidentally called again.”
“I told you he would.”
“Uh-huh. God, I wish I was Jewish. Can I be Jewish, Andrea Beth? Please?”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious.”
“Well, I guess a person can convert. People do when they get married.”
“I don’t want to get married. If I get married maybe I’ll marry a Jew but who cares because I’m not going to get married. And I don’t mean converting. I don’t want any religion, for Christ’s sake. Hey, did you catch that one? ‘For Christ’s sake.’ I like that.”
“If you were Jewish you couldn’t say that.”
“I could live without it. I wanna be Jewish. Please?”
“But how can you be Jewish without the religion?”
“You’re Jewish, right? And you’re about as religious as I’m Episcopalian, right?”
“That’s different.”
“That’s the whole point, you dumb Jewess. That’s the whole point!”
“Wink, I’m beginning to think maybe you’re crazy.”
“Well, I know that, silly. But what I want is to be a Jew the way you are and screw the religious part.” She sighed theatrically. “But it’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“I couldn’t go out and get circumcised or something like that, could I?”
“Idiot.”
“Well, you ought to be able to, dammit. I don’t want to wake up one morning and there I am being my goddamn stupid shithead mother, and I don’t want to be Bette Davis, and what other choices have I got?”
“Where did Bette Davis come from?”
“Oh, you know. In all those movies with the bitchy career girl who makes it in a man’s world but her blood dries up along the way. You remember all those movies, don’t you, daahling?”