Lit (21 page)

I look in the rearview. She ran Dev around so hard in the quad earlier, he’s slumped over in his car seat. So I ask Chris how sobriety’s treating her. This is the cusp of my starting to ask after other people—a change from pouting alone on the porch before.

I’m starting to feel all clean inside, she says.

How does that happen? I want to know, for I keep having dreams that I’m getting sneakily drunk and trying to hide it from people in my group.

I’m making amends to people I’ve screwed over, she says. Like I shoplifted a bunch of stuff from this deli, and so I brought the guy thirty bucks. Korean guy. He was really nice about it.

The snowy roads make us fishtail now and then, and traffic has started to drag.

See, I resent this shit, I say, pressing on the horn, adding, Even the fucking traffic feels orchestrated to fuck me up. Dev needs to eat. You need to get home before dinner curfew or you’re grounded.

It’s funny, she says, how everybody else is traffic, huh?

I laugh, saying, Making amends to other people isn’t high on my list right now. I’m still too pissed at everybody.

Think of all the ways you’ve let yourself down, resentments against yourself, she says, and she looks at me from down her turned-up nose.

I say, I’m too much of an asshole even to contemplate looking at that carnage.

Listen to how you let your own mind talk to you, she says. You’d fight anybody to the ground who said that shit to you.

Just as traffic starts to ease up, the car’s engine light goes on. A mile or so later, steam starts pouring from the hood. I steer to the far lane, cars whooshing past in snow. Dev wakes up blinking and crimson-cheeked in his down jacket, really hungry.

Stepping out of the car, I land ankle-deep in slush and start swearing under my breath.

But no sooner do I pop the hood than a vehicle pulls alongside. Joe and Sam happen to be driving a borrowed tow truck that has—another stroke of fortune—jugs of blue engine coolant. From a paper bag on the dash, Joe’s massive mitt draws out a glazed donut for Dev. He says, Here you go, tough guy.

We all stand on the side of the road in the blue dusk, Dev snug in big Joe’s arm and gnawing the pastry as Sam doctors the radiator. For an instant, I can feel the gratitude seep up from my damp footsoles—one of my first pure instances of it. Back in the car, I announce it to Chris.

Say thanks, then, she says.

I just did. Joe wouldn’t even let me pay for the antifreeze.

I meant, she says, say thanks to your higher power.

I look at her round girlish face. She still has a few snowflakes in her dark lashes.

Thanks, H.P., I say, but it actually shames me, for some reason, to say such a dumb thing.

(A year later, Chris would flee the house to stick up a bank with a machine gun. She’d cop heroin and overdose in a park. I last saw her in a public hospital, where she was blind, HIV-positive, and pregnant with a baby who died—I believe—around the time Chris did. She didn’t make it to twenty-one. Thanks, Chris T., for hauling my ass into the light that day, and still.)

A week before the Whiting ceremony, Lux and I take our kids to the park, settling them in to swing through their low-slung arcs. It’s near dusk when I ask if he has any truck with a supreme intelligence.

C’mon, he says. There’s a force that fuses the greeney flower. Look at these damn kids. There’s an energy that threads through us that deserves your reverence. It’s not all serial killers and Hitlers.

Of course it is, I say.

Ever notice, Tom says, your mind immediately leaps to the most extreme position—like, if you turn to God, He’s gonna nail you to a tree.

I’m scared I’ll drink at the Whiting ceremony. A week away. A year ago I’d have killed to get to go to double-barrel cocktail parties.

Lux looks at me sideways and asks, Want me to go with you?

Though I’m a champion whiner, inclined to blame people for failing to help, I almost never outright solicit a favor. The offer stuns me. I’m teaching in New York that day anyway, Lux says. I could make it to the second party—the big public one.

On the appointed day, I stand before the Park Avenue hotel they booked for me, wondering why it looks so familiar. As I stare up at the facade, it hits me that—at some point in the 1970s, I scored cocaine in this very building.

At the elevator, the numbers glow down to me while I stifle an animal impulse to bolt.

Help me, blind power, I think, get through. (Prayers of real desperation like this—however sparse—are starting to come unbidden. Sometimes one even leaves a sense of peace—or at least hope that peace is coming.)

I fling my hanging bag on the bed and instinctively draw the drapes against light. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I decide that the black dress I zipped on thinking it made me look employable as a professor in fact has shoulders padded like a linebacker’s.

I flop on the bed and click the TV on to channel-surf when I notice that, just under the screen, sits a minibar. I can picture the frosty air it holds, its tidy array of bottles. Eyeing it like I would a crocodile sloe-eyed on the bank, I back out of the room and take the elevator downstairs again.

The desk clerk says housekeeping can take it out eventually, but they’re overloaded. So I sit in the lobby, hands twisting in my lap, until it’s time for the drinks I can’t have.

I
don’t enter the Morgan Library for the second reception thinking, Wow, I’ve arrived, my life will change now. I edge in sweating like a sow, shaking like a dope fiend, and heavy with dread. I feel the paste pearls around my neck and the cardboard soles of my cheap shoes.

The party spreads out inside a book-lined cathedral—forty-foot ceilings lined with volumes. Glass cases around its perimeter glint in the low light. One holds a Bible printed by Gutenberg, another a Shakespeare folio, another etchings by poet William Blake. Standing there, I study a knot of people at the room’s center with no idea how to elbow my way in. Then with some jostling, the crowd parts, and there stands Toby Wolff, looking immensely hearty dead center of that vaulted room. He wears a blue blazer and has a beer in his hand. Hardly anybody reads memoirs much, but I check them out by the armload, including that year Toby’s
This Boy’s Life
, his own hair-raising account of battles with a bullying redneck stepfather.

The fact that Toby’s origins are almost as scabby and unfortunate
as my own partly make him approachable. Plus he taught me in grad school before he was a big deal. I’d even written him for advice on how to rework the discombobulated novel I’d cobbled together into nonfiction. (The concocted protagonist had served as a correction to the real me—beautiful and noble; she’d volunteered at the local nursing home and did differential calculus in sixth grade.) The letter Toby sent back got taped over my desk. It said:

For the unbeliever I am, Toby’s wave in my direction is incalculable shithouse luck. (I’d later call it grace.)

He gives me an avuncular hug and claps my padded shoulder. He’s mustachioed and fit, with a military bearing earned in Vietnam. Good for us, huh, Mare?

I’m trying not to drink, I tell him, a confession he barely registers.

Stand next to me, then, he says, adding, I’ll drink for you.

Toby doesn’t drink for me, of course. But he feels like a pillar propping me up. I woodenly shake hands with men in suits and ladies in cocktail clothes. Who they are, I have no clue, beyond knowing they outearn me. In the midst of this, Lux shows up, and between him and Toby, I manage not to accept a single glass of the nonstop champagne flutes foisted on me from various silver trays.

Later, I’m called onto the stage, where I’m supposed to stand immobile while they read my résumé—skimpy compared to every other. Then I’m meant to shake hands with one paw while I take the check with the other. Instead, I’ve fallen into such a flop sweat that a pause
in the speech causes me to grab the check, thus failing to strike for the photographers the pose of humble gratitude I’d practiced for weeks in front of a mirror.

At the party, Toby introduces me to his agent, a whippet-thin blonde with silver bangles up her muscled arm. She wears a raw-silk size-zero pencil skirt and is almost exactly my sister’s height in pricey heels. She lets Lux and me tag along to the expensive dinner for Toby.

At the table, I feel conspicuous not ordering a drink, and—since water glasses haven’t shown up—as everybody else hoists a glass at Toby, I feebly hold an invisible glass in the air, as my head says,
Do you think they are convinced by the nonexistent drink you are faux-lifting?
I look at Toby, and the fact that his eyes don’t meet mine makes me wonder if he actually asked the agent whether Lux and I could come, or are we crashing? Am I supposed to pay for this meal? Next I know, Toby holds his glass aloft again, saying, And to my old pal Mary.

A few minutes after everybody’s gone back to their conversations, I blurt out to nobody special,
Thanks for having us
. I say it loud enough that neighboring diners look over, but nobody says anything back. Lux keeps talking to the woman on his left. About that time, a passing waiter stops beside me to lift my napkin and lower it into my lap.

I keep sweatily waiting for somebody to ask me why I’m not drinking so I can fire off one of the salvos Joan and I came up with, for to an alcoholic, not drinking is conspicuously freakish. (Now I realize nobody would notice except another sot.) Maybe I’ll just say
Fuck you
or
On second thought, maybe I will…Waiter!

I look at my watch. Fewer than ten minutes have elapsed since we sat down, and the night yawns before me. I slip off to the pay phone to call Joan the Bone—no answer. Ditto Deb. Coming back to face a full wineglass, I see Lux isn’t in his seat. I stare around at Toby, his agent, his editor—their faces are at the pinched end of a telescope. At one point, I think,
What if somebody says something to me?
The next instant,
What if somebody doesn’t?

In the bathroom, I splash some water on my neck and study how pasty I’ve gone. Plus, my nose has grown gargantuan pores—I never exfoliated! And boy am I shiny. I shift the pins at the back of my head around, but a tendril keeps springing loose on one side. I try slicking it down with a few flecks of water. The hair spray in it enlivens it to jut out.

Eventually, I latch myself into a stall, heart thumping, dizzy. It occurs to me I actually need to brace my hands on either side of the walls. My insides are ricocheting around when the old advice burbles up.

Pray. Get on your knees and get still.

So I kneel down, my bony knees in a puddle of Lord knows what. None of the promised quiet comes to me.
Breathe
, Joan tells me all the time.
If you don’t believe in God, you know there’s scientific evidence about the psychological benefits of meditation, even among nonbelievers. Breathe deeply to calm yourself. Then count your breaths to ten, over and over.

But when I start counting breaths—slow, deep inhalations—I almost hyperventilate. Correcting for it, I speed up my breathing till I’m panting like a pooch. After a lifetime of effortless breathing, I’ve forgotten how. For a few minutes, it feels like gasping underwater.

I try to detach from the scattered thoughts that float up in me, and they start to drift away from the small damp spot I’m kneeling in. Silently, I say one of the few prayers I know, the serenity prayer—maybe my second or third truly desperate prayer.

I clasp my hands together before my chest, and where my head has been jabbering, I find unusual space.
Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please please please
. Starting to get up, I kneel again.
And keep me from feeling like such an asshole.

Those of you who’ve never prayed before will cackle like crows and scoff at the change I claim has overtaken me. But the focus of my attention has been yanked from the pinballing in my head to south of my
neck, where some solidity holds me together. I feel like a calmer human than the one who’d knelt a few minutes before. The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away.

I walk back to the table with a pearl balanced in my middle. And Lord am I hungry.

Lux is in place, and my wineglass has been swept away, replaced by ice water. I ask for the bread basket and tear off a piece of the rough Tuscan bread and dunk it in the peppery green olive oil—never has bread tasted so good. I gobble up three pieces before the salad comes.

For most of the meal, I sit dumb as a stump, honestly listening to other people’s tales with little thought for where I can wedge in a comment to justify all the chow I’m wolfing down.

As the dessert plates are being cleared away, Toby nudges me to ask after Mother, whose travails I regaled him with as a student. Since I’ve just been in Texas to clear out her ex-boyfriend’s belongings that summer, her latest romantic misadventure is fresh in my head.

Toby says, This was your mother’s new boyfriend? What happened to the nurse?

She got sober. He didn’t, the nurse. That’s the hell of it. She picked this subsequent guy sober.

At first Mother described the new guy as a boarder. Ben Barker, his name was. I expected some homely local Joe, but in the picture she sent, Ben towered over Mother with the lean frame of a basketballer. He had steely razor-cut hair and deep blue eyes. A health nut, Ben occupied a room in a house whose curtains were saturated with menthol smoke. He introduced to Mother’s kitchen the Cadillac of vegetable juicers along with a flat of wheatgrass for squeezing all the chlorophyll out of.

It’s supposed to clean your liver, Mother told me. It’s filthy stuff to drink.

How can you tell your liver’s dirty? I said.

That’s what I wanted to know, Mother said.

Tell me he’s got a job at least, I said.

He’s retired, she said.

I thought he was, like, fifty.

(Which, by the way, was way younger than Mother.)

She told me Ben had done well farming all over the Midwest, but the crop prices kept dropping and he’d sold out.

He kept his truck parked in the garage but mostly tooled around the county on a racing bike worthy of the Tour de France. He also had a fancy fiberglass kayak he took out in the bayous at dawn among the alligators and morning glories.

He got Mother taking pricey vitamins by the fistful. He wanted her to flush out her nose with salt water snorted from the spout of a porcelain Indian neti pot, but she eschewed that and kept burning cigarillos, though she did sip infusions of Chinese herbs he bought at the Buddhist temple run by Vietnamese monks.

One morning Mother called me to ask a question I found strange.

Did you ever meet somebody you thought wasn’t who they said they were?

I hadn’t. I’d met all manner of strange individuals. But other than a tripped-out guitar player who’d told everybody he was Moses, I’d never met anybody whose stated identity I questioned. How, I asked Mother, had she come to this?

Well, she said, he’ll be telling a story, and he’ll say, “The guy said to me, ‘Bill…’” And I’ll say, “But your name’s not Bill; it’s Ben.”

At that time the sheriff in our town was a guy I used to steal watermelons with named Stooge. On the phone, Stooge didn’t sound overexercised. Ben Barker’s truck was registered legal in the name he’d given Mother. Stooge doubted the guy was some lost gangster.

Lecia told me the guy seemed too well spoken, too well read, to be outright dangerous. (Which, I now think, fails to take Ted Bundy into account.)

Another morning the phone rang early, and Mother whispered that Bill was in the shower, but she’d gotten his license out and his
name wasn’t, in fact, Ben Barker. It was Wilbur Fred Bailey, she said. And his ID was from—let’s say—Kentucky.

At this point Toby interrupts to comment on the poetic perfection of the guy’s actual name. Wilbur Fred Bailey, Toby repeats. It has a Faulkneresque ring.

I notice the rest of the table has gone quiet. The agent has her hand on a glass of water. Toby’s editor is leaning forward.

Fred’s the ideal middle name for the guy, Lux says, who’s heard the story before.
Fred
has that foreshortened, temporary feel to it. A real trailer-park name.

So what’d your mother do? Toby asks.

I briefly stall like an arid engine, for it’s different telling the story sober—and to these people. But Lux gives my elbow the slightest tap, and, since the current of the story has me in its grip, I start right up.

The morning Mother found the license, I told her to run to the library and xerox it, then drop it by Stooge’s office. She did copy it but changed her mind about the sheriff, because—it turned out—Wilbur Fred was paying all her bills.

Which pissed me off, since I was paying her gas bill and grocery bill. As was, it turned out, my sister. I made Lecia go down there and call me with Mother on the line, so we could confront this bookkeeping inconsistency.

Mother elided it by saying, Oh, Ben doesn’t pay those. He helps me out all kinds of ways.

Helps you out how? I wanted to know.

How? Lecia said.

Well, he cuts the grass, Mother said.

I pay Sweet to cut the grass, I said, referring to an old pal of my dead daddy’s.

I pay Sweet to cut the grass! Lecia said.

The agent said, Hilarious. Triple-dipping. What a woman.

Lecia said, Let’s you and me talk after this.

Mother said, If Sweet lets the grass get too long, Ben cuts it. Plus
he edges the walk real straight. He takes the tops off jars. He hooked up my VCR. He takes me out for Mexican food….

You could be in danger here, Mother, Lecia said.

He’s good company, Mother said. Besides, I’d hate to be a dime-dropper.

A what? Lecia said.

A snitch, Mother said. A tattletale.

But drop the dime Mother did, after Ben, aka Wilbur Fred, took out the trash one day, failing—as she’d told him to do a zillion times—to reline the can with a plastic bag afterward. She later said it had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. The very morning of the unlined garbage can, she called Stooge, who called the feds, who descended on my childhood home with dope-sniffing dogs.

What’re you looking for? Mother asked the agent who checked her in to the Holiday Inn, courtesy of the government.

Guns, drugs, and money, he said.

They found none.

Four days after Wilbur Fred vanished back into the penal system from which he’d escaped, Mother got a call from a young woman from Detroit. She was mother to Wilbur Fred’s kids and alleged that he’d left her—hidden in Mother’s house—some much-needed cash.

Sure enough, in Mother’s old magazine rack under a batch of
New Yorker
s, Mother found a paper sack containing ten thousand dollars cash—money Mother decided was hers.

The woman threatened to come down there armed with some of Wilbur Fred’s posse, and Mother told her, Come on, I’m locked and loaded for bear down here.