Goodbye Without Leaving (29 page)

“Aren't you a relic,” I said. “It's a little tight under the arms.”

“It looks wonderful,” Johnny said. “Come here, Franklin. Remember that record we listened to with Amos the other day? ‘Jump for Joy'? Your mommy used to sing and dance to that song.”

My hatred, which had begun as a smoldering coal, turned into a veritable barbecue. So my husband had been listening to old Ruby records with my child behind my back!

He threw “Jump for Joy” on the turntable and gave me a significant look. Oh, what the hell, I thought. I could have done that routine in my sleep. My child gaped at me.

“Be the dancer! Be the dancer, Mommy,” said my boy. I did my routine and then I scooped my son into my arms and danced around the room with him. He closed his eyes and smiled a smile of fright and rapture.

By the time we were dressed I had re-metamorphosed into Franklin's mother, and together we walked off to school.

At the school door Pixie Lehar, in her guise as Paulette Goldberg, was waiting for me.

“Are you going to say yes?” she said. “We really want you.”

“I don't know,” I said.

Because we were early, the doors were not yet open and so Little Franklin and I sat on a ledge outside. I watched the light bounce off Pixie's expensive watch, and then I looked up at the pure gray sky. That morning Leo was flying off to Berlin. He had finished his academic year and was off to begin his fellowship. I wondered what Mary was doing at her monastery, and what she would advise me to do. How lucky were people in their vocations! How sweet and easy life was for the
identified
, I thought.

In little Franklin's classroom I watched him and his friends build complicated structures out of blocks, and paint at easels, and do woodworking with real saws and hammers. My child barely acknowledged that I was in the room.

Then it was time for rhythms, a combination of movement, dance and imagination, invented by the founder of the Malcolm Sprague School. It took place in a large, gymlike room made of polished wood. On a small stage was a grand piano at which a woman in a white sweater sat.

I sat on the stage and watched Little Franklin and his classmates file in. Then the music began, a jaunty kind of march. The children knew exactly what to do: they pranced and skipped.

“Hello,” said the rhythms teacher. “Now that you've all marched in so nicely, maybe we should have a little gentle gallop.”

At this the music picked up. The children galloped and skipped in a circle, and jumped in the air.

“Now,” said the teacher. “Once more around, and then trot up to the front.”

When they were assembled in front of her she said; “You know, it's such a cloudy day, I thought it might be nice to have some color.”

“Scarves!” shouted my son.

From a large cloth bag the teacher took a number of long crepe de chine scarves of brilliant colors. “I dye them myself,” she said to me. “It's the only way I can get the colors I want. Now, let's see who wants which color. Franklin, is your favorite color still green? Yes? Then have your mommy tie this one around your waist.”

I tied his scarf and the scarves of several of his pals.

The music began again, and the children were asked to imagine that they were birds. They swooped and glided, and picked up the ends of their scarves and used them for wings.

I sat on the stage and watched my boy. He had forgotten I was there. He twirled and danced and then he and his classmates settled into their nests and draped their scarves around them. When the music changed, they got up and stretched, and little by little they flew again.

I could not take my eyes off these beautiful children. Their skin gleamed in the dark light, and the whites of their eyes were blue. They moved as easily and happily as leaves in the wind, like fish, like birds. That space was theirs to dance and glide through, like water to a swimmer.

I followed my boy, whose coppery hair flopped into his eyes. I thought of what he would be, what I had been, of the old man he would turn into whom I would never know. The journey seemed impossibly strange, amazingly long, and over in a flash.

They were in their element, as free as shooting stars or dragonflies. My boy danced around and waved his crepe de chine wings at me.

I thought to myself that I might as well say yes to Pixie Lehar. Why not? It was an undeniable fact of my life that long ago I had been a singer and a dancer and, in the end, it was certainly something I still knew how to do.

A Biography of Laurie Colwin

Laurie Colwin (1944–1992) was an American novelist and short story author, most famous for her writings on cooking and upper-middle-class urban life.

Colwin was born on June 14 in Manhattan, New York, to Estelle and Peter Colwin. She spent her childhood in Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island; Philadelphia; and Chicago. During her time in Philadelphia she attended Cheltenham High School and was inducted into its hall of fame in 1999. After graduation she continued her education at Bard College, the New School, and Columbia University.

In 1965 Colwin began her career working for Sanford J. Green burger Associates, a literary agency in New York City. From there she went on to work at several leading book publishers, holding editorial positions at Viking Press, Pantheon Books, G.P. Putnam's Sons, and E. P. Dutton. Most notably during this time, Colwin worked closely with Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, editing and translating his works.

An aspiring writer all her life, Colwin sold her first short story to the
New Yorker
in 1969 at the age of twenty-five—an auspicious start. Over the course of the next few years, her work appeared in
Harper's Magazine
,
Allure
,
Redbook
,
Mademoiselle
, and
Playboy
. Many of these early stories were included in a collection,
Passion and Affect
, which was published in 1974.

Food and the act of cooking played an influential role in Colwin's life from early on. During the Columbia University campus uprisings of 1968, she famously cooked for student protestors occupying various buildings. “Someone put a piece of adhesive on the sleeve of my sweatshirt that read:
KITCHEN/COLWIN
,” she wrote in
Home Cooking
, published in 1988. “This, I feel, marked me for life.”

As Colwin began crafting her short stories, she also became a regular food columnist for
Gourmet
magazine, and many of her columns were anthologized in
Home Cooking
. The release of this work secured a fan base of up-and-coming casual gourmands who loved Colwin's unfussy, personal style and who remain devoted to her long after her death. Later in her life, even as she wrote about privileged Manhattanites, Colwin continued to volunteer and cook for homeless shelters in New York.

By the late seventies, Laurie Colwin was writing full time. Her first novel,
Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object
, was published in 1975, and in 1977 Colwin received the prestigious O. Henry Award for short fiction. Her second novel,
Happy All the Time
, was received with much critical acclaim in 1978. By the time
The Lone Pilgrim
—a short story collection—and the novel
Family Happiness
were published in 1981 and 1982, respectively, Colwin had solidified her reputation as a writer to watch. She became known for her entertaining wit and wonderfully complex protagonists, whom readers understood immediately.

Colwin's story collection
Another Marvelous Thing
was published in 1986, and the next year, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1990 she published
Goodbye Without Leaving
, the last novel that would go to press before her untimely death.

Laurie Colwin died of an aortic aneurysm in her Manhattan home on October 24, 1992, at the age of forty-eight. She was survived by her husband, Juris Jurjevics, a founder of Soho Press, and their daughter, Rosa.

In 1993
A Big Storm Knocked It Over
and
More Home Cooking
were published posthumously, serving as final invocations of Colwin's distinct voice and the New York characters she loved.

The author's parents, Estelle Colwin (née Wolfson) and Peter Colwin.

The Wolfsons, Colwin's mother's family, lived in Philadelphia and congregated there for the holidays. Colwin (at front), her older sister, Leslie (at upper left), and their father, Peter, pose by a statue in Rittenhouse Square, Thanksgiving, c. 1950.

Colwin at age seven or eight. As a child and teen, she did print modeling work at her mother's urging.

Colwin receiving an award at Ronkonkoma Grade School.

Colwin as a teenager. Childhood friend Willard Spiegelman, a writer and professor, recalls that Colwin often held “salons” in her bedroom.