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(04/14/98)

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THE LUNCH-BOX CHRONICLES: NOTES FROM THE PARENTING UNDERGROUND | MARION WINIK | PANTHEON BOOKS

BY JENNIFER REESE | When I read that Texas writer and National Public Radio commentator Marion Winik aspired to become the Erma Bombeck of the baby boomers, my first reaction was: No way, Winik is far too hip. The late Erma Bombeck was a favorite of middle-class grannies everywhere, including my own. Winik, on the other hand, was the loud, smart, over-the-top New Jersey girl who caroused from a semiotics degree at Brown University to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where she met a gay bartender, introduced him to heroin and married him. Though Winik was occasionally reduced to calling gorgeous, screwed-up Tony a "junkie faggot with AIDS," their marriage was essentially loving. Tony fathered her children and left her a widowed soccer mom in 1994. She described it all in her riveting and strangely sweet 1996 memoir, "First Comes Love."

"The Lunch-Box Chronicles" is a sequel of sorts, the story of a day in Winik's life as the single mother of Vince, 6, and Hayes, 9. It's a fairly conventional life: Since Tony's death, she has evolved into a bill-paying, football-loving earth mom whose idea of big fun is an occasional cigarette and gin martini. Her boyfriend is a heterosexual golfer with two children of his own, "a whisky drinker, something of an old-fashioned guy on gender and lifestyle issues ... A person who would never, for example, pierce his ear." "Lunch-Box" is Winik's progressive attempt at the frazzled woman's domestic comedy in the tradition of Bombeck.

The book begins '90s-style, as Winik collects her sons at school in her sport utility vehicle: "I can't wait to see them, to repossess them, to get them back on my territory, whole, healthy and breathing." The narrative follows the family through the next 18 hours: the Shake 'N Bake pork chop dinner, the bedtime struggles, the microwaved bacon and cartoons in the morning. It ends as Winik drops them back at school: "I bet this is what it's going to be like when they leave for good, too. I bet you never get your kiss," she writes. "I bet they never even say goodbye."

It was one of the great strengths of "First Comes Love" that Winik could describe herself as an out-of-control mess -- chasing Mr. Wrong because he was just so damn pretty -- and still come off as enviably sane. There is something singularly cheerful about her that bursts through in her writing. This is no neurasthenic, victimized memoirist: Winik is a sanguine and gutsy survivor, a little bemused by her reckless past, if unashamed. While this upbeat style helped ground the memoir of her funky marriage, it's only partly successful here. One of the conventions of the domestic comedy is the cultivation of a sense of wry ambivalence on the part of the harried mom: the trying quirks of the kids, the husband who won't change a toilet paper spindle. For all the lip service Winik pays to the madness of child-rearing, she never appears even faintly ambivalent.

Maybe because she was once so wild, she can't repress a palpable love for the ordinariness, the rhythms, the casual sensuality of children and domesticity. She revels in her sons' physicality: "Until Hayes was 7, we still took baths together, slipping and sliding around the soapy tub. At night, both of them would toddle, later tiptoe, into my bed, clinging like barnacles to the mamaboat until dawn," she writes. "I had mixed feelings about this practice, as Vincie had the habit of wrapping his little hands around my neck, rhythmically clutching and unclutching, and Hayes would often wake me with a hot stream of pee." Gross? A little, but Winik makes it seem practically cozy.

N E X T__P A G E: Sex and drugs and kids