Fear of Dying (7 page)

“Why don't you get some sleep?” she says. “We'll take good care of her.”

“Go, Mommo, I'll be okay. I promise.”

Much of the building we're in seems to be an underground earth burrow. Perhaps we'll turn into hobbits here? I love hobbits. I am escorted down a long underground corridor until we come to a warren of doors—all locked. Where is my earth burrow? Where are the friendly hobbits? My room is spartan—a single bed is bolted to the floor, as are the lamps. The bathroom has a paper bath mat and two tiny white towels, hobbit-size. I shed my clothes and crawl into the narrow bed. I am shaking.

“God help me,” I mutter. “God, please be there, please.”

*   *   *

There have been lots of times in my life when I felt I had hit bottom, but this is the lowest. Glinda is my future, all the dreams I have not fulfilled. I need Glinda to live more than I need to live myself.

When I wake up at five in the morning, I find my room looks out on a frozen lake. Little huts are set up on the ice. Small bundled figures are walking across, leaving tracks in the snow. It is the quietest place I have ever been. You can listen to your thoughts here. I quickly dress—my clothes are all wrong, of course—and walk outside in the snow. My thin shoes crunch and I can feel the cold straight through. Still, I find a path between the tall firs and I follow it as long as I can stand the cold. Then I reverse direction and come back. In one of the lounges of the building where my room is, I find a fire going in a stone fireplace and coffee and doughnuts laid out. I get some coffee and sit in front of the fire drinking it. I pick up a book called
Serenity
from one of the tables. Here are the words I open to: “When we stop thinking of fears and doubts, they begin to lose their power. When we stop believing good things are impossible, anything becomes possible.”

“Did you find something interesting?” a fiftyish man asks me.

I look up. He has straw-blond hair, an unshaven jaw, and a stump where his right hand should be. I stare at it too hard.

“I'm sorry to stare,” I say.

“How did I do it? Well, I was high on coke and hallucinating that God was telling me to cut my hand off. I did it with a Chinese meat cleaver—messily—my son found me losing blood, flesh dangling by a thread. I now think it was the best thing that ever happened to me. By the way, my name is Doug.” He extends his left hand. We shake.

“Because it saved my life. It woke me up. Some people can only do it that way. What brought you here?”

“My daughter.”

“Well, she's come to the right place. And you?”

“This is the most peaceful place I've ever been.”

“It makes it clear how much of the noise is in your own head, doesn't it?”

“What do you do all day here?”

Doug laughs. “Believe me, you don't get bored. Chores, meetings, meals, talking to people, writing about your life for your counselor. The days fly. I've been here two months already. I never want to go home. I suspect I will, though.”

“Are you afraid of a relapse?”

“That's why God gave me such a visible reminder.” He shakes his stump. “Some of us can't do with subtle reminders.”

“Do you really believe in God?”

“What's my choice? If there were no God, I would have died. Nobody would have found me until it was too late. There has to be some reason I'm walking around with this stump, don't you think? It sure gets everyone's attention. Look—everyone here has trouble with the God stuff. They come here after having demonstrated to themselves that they can't manage their own lives and then they go around bitching about whether or not God exists. This is the proof.” He shakes his stump.

“Maybe you were meant to lead a choir,” I say.

“Touch it,” says Doug.

I am taken aback by the offer. Then I realize I do want to touch it. The knob of flesh is smooth as a newel post.

“Thank you,” says Doug. He takes his coffee in his good hand and walks away.

When I see Glinda later, I still have the sensation of Doug's stump on my fingertips.

“How do you feel, darling?” We are sitting in the little television room behind the Detox unit.

“They woke me up three times last night to monitor my heart and breathing. I guess they were afraid of convulsions. I was also taking lots of Valium to come down and apparently the Valium withdrawal is worse than the coke. Last night I was really scared.”

“But you slept?”

“In between being woken up.”

I am careful to say very little to Glinda about the rehab. If I say it's peaceful, I may make her want to run. I express no opinions to her about anything. I try just to listen.

“I'm going to get so fat here, Mommo. The food is so caloric. It's gross. Everybody eats candy all the time.”

“There's a nice gym and pool.”

“I'm not allowed to use them till I detox.”

“That'll be soon.”

“Not soon enough. And it's freezing. Will you send me a parka and boots?”

“Of course.”

“And will you call all these people and tell them I'm sick in the hospital but don't tell them where?” She hands me a scribbled list.

“Yes.”

“I love you, Mommo,” Glinda says, like a baby. “I really do.”

*   *   *

I think of Glinda when she was a baby. At five months her favorite toy was something called a Jolly Jumper. She would push off from the floor with legs that couldn't walk yet and bounce and bounce for hours. She had such exuberance and joy. Even then she was getting high.

All through her childhood, she seemed to run on sheer adrenaline. She told stories for me. She entertained everybody with her funny monologues and songs; she bewitched everyone. Then, at thirteen, she became a teenager and I seemed to lose her. There would be crises—pot, alcohol, suicide threats—then they would seem to pass. There were expensive shrinks, but they didn't seem to realize she had a drug problem. Then, at sixteen, Glinda was offered a role in a movie and she had at last found something she loved. Acting seemed to stabilize her, and I couldn't have stopped her anyway, so I let her pursue it. I was always frightened for her, but she was driven to act and she was successful. I stupidly assumed she had the drugs under control. I had become an actress at sixteen too. I thought it was normal.

“Do you know when I knew I had a problem, Mom?”

“No, tell me.”

“Last summer I tried to walk through the Holland Tunnel. I was high on coke and I thought I could kill myself easily that way. But I couldn't. After that, I went to a few NA meetings, but I couldn't stick with it. I hated all the sanctimonious higher power stuff. I fell asleep in the meetings. I wasn't ready. Then when the big movie came through and I moved to L.A. it got worse. I would wake up and find myself on the beach in Malibu and not know how I got there. I would find myself wandering on the Pacific Coast Highway in the dark. It was a nightmare.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” Even as I asked this, I was looking for ways not to believe it. Like all parents, I wanted to deny the truth. Then I said to myself: Shut up and listen. Just listen. If love is listening, it was my turn to listen to her no matter how guilty I felt.

“I was ashamed. Even I didn't realize how bad it was. I didn't think you'd understand. I didn't understand myself. Finally I reached a point where I wanted to die all the time. I kept thinking of ways to die. I kept deliberately overdosing. And then not dying. That was when I decided to come home.”

“Glinda, you're in a safe place now. I promise you are.”

“God, I hope so. I can't be trusted on the outside anymore. I know that.”

“That's a lot to know.”

“Are you going to stay another night?”

“I don't know what the rules are. If I can stay, I will. I have a meeting with a counselor this morning.”

“They tell you it's voluntary here, but the truth is you can't leave if you want to.”

I don't say anything.

“Supposedly you can get a car to the airport anytime, but that's not true. You're in the frozen tundra, the wastes of America,” Glinda says.

“Glinda, remember how you always wanted me to take you to spas where there was no alcohol?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think about that?”

“I wanted you to take me away from temptation. I wanted to be safe.”

“So?”

“Are you trying to say I belong here?”

“What do you think? It's not my decision, it's yours.”

Glinda's counselor is called Rae-Lynn and she's short and muscular and dark. She has a weight lifter's body. Her office is full of stuffed animals and saccharine greeting cards. She is wearing a pink sweatshirt with a red heart made of glitter in the center.

“I used to be a hooker and a street junkie,” she says. “If I can get sober, anybody can. Listen, I talked to Glinda early this morning and I read her intake interview from last night. Here's what she has going for her: She knows she needs help. She asked for help. Here's what's against her: Most people don't make it. The best thing you can do is look at your own relationship to substances and let her recover in her own way. We're all different. I suggest you do the family program here—if you want to. And get some support from Al-Anon.”

“How do you know what Glinda's chances are?”

“I don't. Nobody knows. It's good that she asked for help. But some people are brought in against their will and recover anyway. There's no way to predict. Miracles happen. It's not in our hands. If you want reassurances, you've come to the wrong place.”

Right place, wrong place, not in our hands, miracles happen. What kind of language do they speak here?

“What can I do to help?” I want to know.

“I told you. After that, you just have to let go.”

“I've never let go in my life.”

“Maybe that's why it's time to start.”

“Can I stay another day?” I ask.

“Of course, but you won't be able to see Glinda much. You can visit with her occasionally.”

“I just want to stay another night to clear my head.”

“Good idea,” says Rae-Lynn.

*   *   *

I never thought my idea of a sanctuary would be a room with a narrow cot bolted to the floor and a paper bath mat on the bathroom floor. No telephone, no TV, no radio. But I liked my room. Nobody could reach me there. Not my sisters, my parents, my husband, my friends. I could think about my life.

What had I done wrong with Glinda? When she was little and her father walked out, I decided I would be both mother and father to her. He wouldn't pay child support? Well then, fuck him. I would take care of her. And that was when I got the role of Blair the bitch on the nighttime soap opera
Blair's World
and I was making tons of money. But what I didn't realize was that Glinda needed more than money. She needed a father. A mother and nanny were not enough. I was so busy making a living, dealing with my romantic life, that I hardly had time for Glinda's life. I was forever buying her things she didn't want and didn't need.

I belong to the generation that believed children could survive anything. We got married and divorced as if we were only moving from one apartment to another. But the truth is children can't survive everything. Glinda took everything personally, suffered over everything. I should have been listening, but I was working all the time.

The character of Blair on
Blair's World
is the one that has clung to me. Blair was the original scheming bitch—a woman who married again and again and got richer with every divorce. Of course everyone thought that was true of me. In the eyes of the public I
was
Blair. Villains are always more memorable than angels, and Blair was an archvillain. She was like the queen in
Snow White
. You really believed she was capable of poisoned apples.

I never thought I was Riverside Drive's answer to Meryl Streep, but I loved being on a soap opera. It organized my life. You got to the studio early and the whole day was just crammed with work. You rehearsed in the morning and taped in the afternoon. There was no time to worry about your own life. The character you played consumed you. Blair was a thoroughgoing psychopath. She had no conscience. She never worried about the needs of others. Women loved her because she was the opposite of everything they had been taught to be. Men were intrigued by her for the same reason. Asher fell in love with me when I was playing Blair. I think he may have been disappointed when he discovered I wasn't as evil as my character. Some men need tough women to prove themselves. Asher had had a tough mother and a disappointing father. He liked the challenge of wooing me as Blair. But underneath my tough exterior I'm a softie. Like him. Was Asher disappointed to find that out? If he was, he never showed it. And I took care to hide the softie part of myself.

I borrow a parka and boots from one of the people who work at a desk near my room and I venture out into the cold again. My breath puffs white in front of me. There are soft brown pine needles on the path around the lake and my feet sink into them. The blue spruce along the path tower above my head as in a fairy tale. The frozen lake absorbs the meager sunlight into its slate surface. The ice fishermen are still out there, patiently waiting. If I were to sit in one of those little huts on the ice and put a line down into the frozen lake, would I come up with anything that might nourish me?

I am thinking of the things Rae-Lynn told me and remembering all the nights my mother came home from parties horizontal. We never thought of her as an alcoholic, but the truth is she couldn't think of how to celebrate except to get loaded. I remember a time in Paris with my family when I drank so much—at eighteen—that I went into the bathroom and lay on the floor with my cheek to the cold white tiles. I could not move my limbs. I was paralyzed. I thought nothing of this, nor did my mother, who had been in that condition many times herself, but looking back, it seemed I should have been concerned about it. My parents would have said “Nonsense!” They hated people who didn't drink. My mother looked upon a vodka martini as a magic elixir. It turned day to night, sadness to joy, storms to sunshine.