Lit (14 page)

I say, I thought you were anti-booze.

Even my religious cousin Delores, she says, drank beer when she was nursing. She actually had to pinch her nose to get it down.

The fizzy sip tastes of roasted grain, tidy fields waving in wind. By the second or third sip, I remember the slosh of lake water against a boat Daddy had rented, how I sipped from a metal can of Lone Star while he picked through lures alongside me. Thus starts—for healing purposes, of course—my daily beer or two.

Within weeks, I stop breastfeeding, partly because I know three or four or five beers could affect Dev’s milk supply. Warren’s at school, so he must miss these escalating beer guzzles.

And that’s how—in some cosmic accounting of our family’s rampant dipsomania—Mother’s recovery dovetailed with the start of my own years’ long binge, for from that day forward, I drank in increasing amounts, as if our gene pool owed the universe at least one worthless drunk at a time.

T
hrough the baby monitor comes a single raspy cough. It barely pierces the heavy sleep that wraps my skull in sodden layers of papier-mâché. Static follows, then a tinny whimper. I fold one pillow over my head. Another gets tucked in my concavities. The husband’s long body unrolls. The white noise machine he’s installed to block out all disturbance makes the brain-sucking racket of a dentist’s drain. It vacuums all consciousness from my head. Sleep.

Till a doubled cough punctures my head like two shots from a nail gun. I blink my eyes open to the room, immaculately black as he likes it, but for the faint luminosity of the upraised clock hands (2:50) and the tiny red snake eye of the monitor. I fix on it to stop my mind’s inward roiling vertigo an instant—a marble looping around a barrel.

My head is grinding out bad news:
That bruise on your shin is bone cancer
…. But one glance at the husband’s profile, and I flash on my only happy thought for weeks, the smooth moonstone of an idea. If I had a rubber bladder under my pillow—the kind that cartoon characters whip from their sleeves—I could muster the strength to rear up
and whack him vigorously about the head. My mouth creaks toward a smile at the prospect, since his sleep has been unbroken now for almost a year. I gaze at him from under the pillow like a rattler under a rock.

A swerving comet’s tail of silence issues from the monitor. I let my eyes seal shut, then inwardly tumble back down the black tunnel of oblivion that’s my one aspiration.

During my teetotaling pregnancy, when my hormonal stupor must’ve helped me sober up cold turkey, I envisioned these night wakings as if sprinkled with fairy dust. Hearing baby gurgle and coo, I’d leap up to float—smiling and moonlit and brimming with breast milk—in frothy gown to the crib in the next room,

Three gasping coughs in rapid succession, rat-a-tat-tat. I blink at the clock hands (2:58). Silence.

I’ll get up, my husband says. His muscular arm starts to feel around the night table for his glasses.

To which a sane woman with classes to teach tomorrow would’ve said,
Thanks, hon
, as she sank back into slumbering meadows. He offers again, and again I say no, which is not—as I mean him to think it is—concern for his obligations. Nor is it maternal love for my blond and improbably blue-eyed toddler, just old enough to be lurching around the coffee table, chortling with every stumpy step. I tell the husband I’ve got it because it ticks another plus sign in my column in this game of shit-eating I have composed my marriage to be. Whoever eats the biggest shit sandwich wins, and I’m playing to justify the fact that I’d rather drink than love.

The times Dev’s spiked a fever, I shook Warren awake and—fearing meningitis—we tore to Children’s Hospital. With medicine, it’d take Dev a week or so to stop coughing himself awake most nights. Then a week to stop nightly wakings, then here came the next cold, invariably flaming into a fever. The doctors agree the infections and fevers are strange but not unheard of. By every yardstick, my strapping son is a developmental champ. His bounce is boundless, but my limbs
are filled with lead pellets, and my head has started to scramble like an anthill.

Another series of whooping lands a hammer blow to my sternum, and I jerk upright. It’s the reflexive, automatic move from some gore-fest movie—that last scene when the butchered killer you think has finally bitten it jolts up. My arm wheels over to smack off the baby monitor. Then, lacking the will to rise (3:07), I plummet back down like a shot bird.

The cough penetrates my dream with the sandpapered force of a chain-smoking speed freak. It’s Daddy’s pneumonia-laden cough, Mother’s emphysema wheeze. Even without the monitor, I can hear the hacking gasps start. My body’s a sandbag, but my eyelids split open like clam shells (3:10). On the table, a tumbler of mahogany whiskey burns bright as any flaming oil slick. Gone a little watery on top, it’s still possessed of a golden nimbus.

That’s the secret to getting up: the glass talks and my neck cranes toward the drink like flower to sunbeam. My heavy skull rises, throbbing with a pulse beat. I grab the drink and let a long gulp burn a corridor through the sludge that runs up the middle of me—that trace of fire my sole brightness. A drink once brought ease, a bronze warmth spreading through all my muddy regions. Now it only brings a brief respite from the bone ache of craving it, no more delicious numbness.

Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation. I rise on rickety legs, dripping sweat despite the air conditioner’s blast across my naked chest. Forgoing bathrobe, I pull on a wife-beater T-shirt. (3:15!)

In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that’s rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt.

He sees me rushing toward him and abruptly drops his outstretched arms an instant to say, No pants? His head’s tilted with bald curiosity.

Which cracks me up, and he laughs till the coughs start exploding through him again, by which point I’ve cleaved him to me, both of us sweating. His diaper’s sagging from the vaporizer’s work, but fresh steam is his lifeline. Carrying him to the bathroom, I crank on the shower.

But before I change him, before I squirt the syrupy acetaminophen into his mouth, I haul him whooping down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the stove where a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge. Needing neither glass nor ice, I press my lips to the cool mouth, and it blows into my lungs so I can keep on.

I
n my thirty-fourth year to heaven, I find myself at the copy machine of an exalted, ivy-embroidered university, pressing down on the spine of a memoir by Vladimir Nabokov. The green light under my hands slides over the book’s face, and the spillage from the edges scalds through my shut eyelids.

It’s seven-thirty a.m., and I can feel the corpse tint of my face: Frankenstein-monster green. The machine goes
whap…whap
at slower intervals than the throb in my head, which sounds like
thunk
. The
whaps
stab me. The
thunks
make my eyes bulge in their sockets like a squeezed rubber doll’s.

It’s my first year teaching six classes, which has freed me from the deeply respectable but non-writer-esque telecom consulting I could
spend eighty hours a week at. Not a new-mom job by any stretch, that work. The sole vestige of the career? I’m on retainer freelancing for a business mag whose editor has left two strongly worded messages on our machine. I’m late with my article on the new Russian perestroika.

Whap…thunk
.

The image of my blond three years’ son this morning, sobbing and holding out his arms to me while Warren strapped him into the child seat, is a hot stove I can’t stop touching.

Warren drops him off at daycare now for reasons that are complex.

Sure, I need to get in early to copy course materials illicitly—an infraction the secretary, who comes in at nine—warned adjunct teachers about back in the August training session, copies being too costly for the sniveling, no-hope-of-tenure human I am.

Also, on the snowy road here some mornings, I stop to puke out the car door, releasing into a snow bank an acidic coffee bile that stays on my teeth despite brushing vigorously enough to bloody my gums, leaving a bile taste no mint can mask. At the daycare center, mommy-vomiting is frowned on.

But even if I didn’t want to vomit before I got to the daycare center—which resembles a modest colonial parson’s house like in
The Scarlet Letter
—the perky bustle of the place would incline me in a vomitous direction.

The last time I did the morning dropoff was right after Christmas break. The director had waved me into her office, walls tacked with the bespattered finger paintings of Harvard’s budding geniuses. I’d sat on a stiff chair while she told me Dev was so anxious he couldn’t fall asleep at naptime.

Is everything okay at home? she asked. She had front teeth like fence pickets, and the reflection on her octagonal wire-rims was my puffy face.

Of course everything was great. I was great and my husband was great. Happiness was the currency we paid to get our kid accepted here.

So I failed to tell her that my husband and I had barely spoken that week, and sometimes, before I made dinner, I considered dousing the oven’s pilot light and sticking my head in. Or that—driving to my in-laws’ for Christmas dinner—I’d risen at four, ostensibly to bake pies but actually to drive around the local reservoir, finishing a six-pack of beer while listening to Argentine tangos.

Wheeling in tight rings at about sixty around the local reservoir—night smearing across the windows as the tangos unrolled—I’d felt myself circling my marriage and being erased with each rotation. Around and around my head I went. My longed-for circle of family is choking me. The silk bow ties on my cheap business blouses—that middle-class disguise I’d wished for—are choking me. The good family name for my son is a strangle, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polite people who never, not in decades, stop being strangers. I’d never have let on when Warren and I married how it tickled me to see our names in the Social Registry, an attitude I now despise in myself, and my sole act of penance had been agreeing with Warren to take us out.

During the war-zone months of early infancy when Warren slept, it was as if every hour of sleep I lost, he’d stolen. Now I’ve placed Warren at the radiant center of my misery, no longer comrade but capo. We’ve devolved into a cold war with a child-centered détente.

Whap…thunk
. The scanning light casts my face the color of ectoplasm in horror films.

Plus, just thinking about the easeful, educated parents at daycare makes my throat sour. Walking up the tree-lined boulevard toward the center always brings out my inner Igor.

I often run into Wincing Evan, so called because of the flinch—bordering on a Tourette’s-like seizure—he goes into whenever he spots Dev and me approaching. Head down, he’ll actually scamper across the street to avoid saying hello.

In some ways, Evan is a figure of the type I aspire to cut. He translates (let’s say) Gogol. He publishes in
The New York Review of Books
and abroad. Unlike the blocky Boston bankers who abound in Harvard Square, he cruises in for Parents’ Day wearing a fluid flannel coat with French tailoring, for he and his professor wife (a comp-lit professor whose easy red-lipped smile could’ve sold lipstick) summer overseas often enough to use
summer
as a verb.

Their immaculately turned-out son—Jonathan, age under four years—has shining hair and a good start on French and German. He’s a chess player with a princely manner. I swear if his voice were a little deeper, he could join the diplomatic corps.

I once saw Dev, whose sandwich that day was, as most days, a peon’s peanut butter and jelly, try to urge Jonathan into swapping lunches. Young Jonathan peeled back one corner of his seven-grain bread carefully enough not to break the crust. Dev peered in. Jonathan said, Mine is brie and kiwi fruit.

Dev reached for it, and Jonathan cupped one hand around it. It has less sugar than yours. His next sentence was so remarkable, I noted it down in my journal: I first had this sandwich in Vienna….

Perhaps Evan’s flinch stemmed from the day Dev had elected to yank Jonathan’s mittens from his coat pocket, bolt up the stairs while Evan and Warren chased after him, and fling them into the toilet.

Warren fished them out with a pencil and offered to launder them. When I got the ziploc bag from my husband, I tossed the mittens into the trash among the potato peelings. I just didn’t want to deal with them—or the whole starchy Cambridge milieu.

So the mittens stop me dropping Dev off, or the puking. My head spends much of its day pumping out reasons for not doing what I should the way a magician draws long strings of scarves from a sleeve. Warren drops him now, an act that brings him endless praise. How great, the teachers say every day when I fetch Dev, that Warren drops him off!

And isn’t it great that I pick him up? Then spend all day and night with him? I once asked.

From their stunned expressions, I could guess that it wasn’t. Not so much.

About once a week Warren asks for the laundered mittens, and I pretend to rummage around before wandering away, giving in to my failure as a laundress—read: mother.

The other couples in the center look so blithe. They plead academic poverty but drive swanky foreign cars and live sweatered in cashmere. They take family vacations in beachy climes with grandparents who plunk seashells into buckets their toddler grandchildren tote while the couple slips off to the local bookstore or bakery to canoodle over steaming coffee.

Our nearest grandparents are assiduously hands-off. Though Mrs. Whitbread had cranked out six kids like linked hot dogs, Warren’s upbringing was almost Victorian in its chill. By his testament, he’d been presented from time to time like a petit four, scrubbed up and bathrobed before bedtime for kisses. Otherwise, he’d been banished to a gulag nursery guarded by some icy servant.

During our own requisite holidays at the great house, we spent hours chasing Dev through rooms big as skating rinks packed with costly breakables, which we weren’t allowed to move out of kid reach. A sofa lined with antique dolls stared at Dev with insouciant porcelain faces he squirmed in my arms to get at. Once, from exhausted spite, I let him smash one.

As for Mr. Whitbread, he seemed to eye Dev’s festive ramblings as he might have a cockroach’s. He once made the boy cry by calling him—beyond my earshot, of course—
an ignorant little crud
. Dev’s teary response, which Warren reported—
You’re a big fat man with a red nose
—proved Dev had enough Texan in him to take the patriarch in a verbal tussle.

Other couples in our orbit had such easeful abundance inside their families. One took a pensione in Rome owned by somebody’s aunt who’s married to Lord Suck-on-This of the foreign service. Another woman’s uncle gave her a house down payment.

It’s the most amazing piece of luck
…

It’s not luck! I want to scream. You’re rich! You’re rich, and your parents are rich. Of course the Whitbreads were, too, and none of them ever had a cavity that ached in the mouth like a rotted cypress stump for weeks on end. Nor did they have to scrounge nursery furniture from a garage sale. The only clothes Dev gets are handed down from my sister’s kid.

That Lecia sends her son’s outgrown slick leather jackets and that fancy loafers come free never strikes me as fortune. Nor does my subsidized rent. Nor the fancy Harvard doctors Dev has through Warren’s job. Nor the Minks’ ongoing calls and letters. I have a gaze that blanks out luck any time I face it, like a black box over the eyes of a porn star.

Whap
and
thunk
. I compose my Christmas list for my in-laws, who always give exactly what you ask for—nothing more, nothing less. This year I’ve asked for a crockpot, but I secretly long for a Smith & Wesson.

The machine jams. I resist the urge to step back five yards and head-butt it repeatedly. By fumbling around on the side, I locate some kind of handle and pull. I stare at the machine’s innards. For one thousand years I could ponder here before any useful action came to me.

There appears behind me another young poet with tortoiseshell glasses and a striped scarf. He’s a real professor with the right to get his copies done who therefore knows how to clear the machine jam with a few arcane moves. It hums to life again.

Celery-green light starts sliding across my face, and I can feel how massive my pores must look—real moon craters.

Exfoliate, I think. When did I last exfoliate? Buy a scrub or grind up some almonds—was it almonds?

An autodidact from a poor Irish family, yards smarter than I am, this young prof sports the countenance of an choirboy.

You can jump in, I say. But he says I should go ahead before the secretary gets in and runs me off.

Then he asks when my poetry book will be out, and it’s like he’s bringing up a wart or goiter I’ve secretly had taken off, since the book came out two years ago, with grossly underwhelming response. Even I barely noticed, being stuck in the muddy trench of Dev’s sleepless infancy when the box hit the porch. Tearing it open, I’d lifted a copy, thumbed it, and tried to tell myself it was some worthy stone added to poetry’s great mountain. But I hid it out of eyeshot in my study—the sight of it made me sick.

First books rarely get the attention they deserve, the other poet says with a kind look.

I explain that virtually all copies sold were, I’m guessing, bought by my sister, who gave twenty or thirty for Christmas that year.

He tells me the story of a writer who—on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore—opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note
To Mum and Dad
….

He gestures behind me, where the secretary is making her way up the hall, and I grab my armload of contraband copies before scuttling off like a burglar with the house silver.

A few people are starting to trickle through the halls, and I seize up, overcome with a sense of inadequacy to teach anybody anything. I simply can’t be the only dumb person in this place one more instant. Before I can stop myself, I loudly say, Let’s start a contest for who hasn’t read the most important book. I raise my hand like a testifying evangelist to shout, I haven’t read Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
. Who hasn’t read a greater book?

A friend pokes his head from an office, yelling, I never read
Moby-Dick
.

Somebody behind me says, I haven’t read Byron’s
Don Juan
.

A passing scholar corrects the pronunciation to what I guess must be super-anglicized Oxfordese, saying,
Don Jew-wan
.

Pompous effing fop, I think. You should be shot.

Another voice hasn’t read a word by Virginia Woolf. Students are starting to gape.

Later, in my shared cubicle along a line of hissing radiators, I spread dozens of copies and start assembly-line stapling Mr. Nabokov’s memoir, the sentences I once worshipped now streaming in a hieroglyphic blur off my eyeballs, flooding me with gall.