Jo Piazza (3 page)

I grinded the gears all the way home. “How long is your license suspended?”

“Ninety days, or until I complete the outpatient rehabilitation program, the AA.”

“Which is every week?”

“Pretty much.”

“And not walkable and we live in a town with no public transportation.”

“You have so much going on?”

That stung. I didn’t. I was able to do my job as a children’s book illustrator from the house, even though before Eleanor died and before the Eric situation turned me into a useless lump on the couch, I had faithfully gone into the office every day to meet with editors and authors and storyboard book ideas. I had initially taken two weeks off to deal with everything in New Jersey, but my boss had been understanding when I said I wanted to work from home to get everything in my life settled.

“I do have to work. I may be a depressive, pathetic shut-in who will die alone, but I have to work during the days and I don’t know if I feel like being your personal chauffeur.”

“Let’s just go to this first meeting and we will figure it out,” Annie said as she twiddled with the radio.

“We?”

“I can’t go by myself, Sophie; come on, just come for moral support.”

I resigned myself to doing exactly what Annie wanted since that is what I have done since we were eight years old.

“I need a drink,” Annie said when we arrived, slamming her car door with a force she rarely showed on her delicate darling of a car.

Not what I wanted to hear. I’m sure you thought stealing the police car and the obsessive text messages were our rock bottoms. Not quite. Prepare for our rear ends to turn to stone.

Annie settled onto the couch with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I hate any brown liquor, so I cracked open a bottle of pinot noir. Two hours later,
Love Actually
was on the television. It had been our go-to romantic comedy for years, I think because it gave you hope that true love could actually happen to just about anyone (even the British prime minister!) when you weren’t even looking for it.

I made Annie stalk Eric’s new girlfriend on Facebook. And then …

I was startled from my red-wine-induced stupor by “All I wanna do is zoom zoom and boom boom, just shake your …” My mouth felt spongy, and I had to run my tongue over my lips to make sure I could make words. I needed a new ring tone.

It was Eric.

This could be it. He was calling to apologize. Floozy had perished in a tragic treadmill accident at the gym and he was already waiting for me at Penn Station with flowers and balloons just like in the final scene of
Love Actually
when everyone meets their loved ones at the airport and you realize that love is indeed all around.

There was a really angry man on the other end of the line.

“Take it down, Sophie.”

“What? Eric?”

“Take my penis off the Internet,” he grunted with a bit of a panicked squeak at the end of the sentence that indicated he thought (no,
knew
) that he was dealing with a person who did not have her marbles intact.

Oh dear.

The night before came rushing back to me in a blur.

After I polished off a second bottle of wine, I made Annie help me make a list of why Eric was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad man. Lists have always been helpful to me. I make them for just about everything, from what to buy at the grocery store to how to decide what to do on a weekend.

“What about the time he got back from Europe and insisted on double kissing everyone hello like he was a count or an Italian supermodel,” I slurred.

“Or how he would never sit at the first table they seated him at in a restaurant,” Annie added. “He would always make the waiter feel silly and then arbitrarily pick a different table to make him seem important and selective.”

“Ooo, ooo, or how about how he never just said, ‘Hey, these are my friends from college,’ or ‘These are my friends from high school’; he always had to say, ‘These are my bros from Exeter.’ ”

Then Annie added the doozy that inspired us to do evil: “Remember how he went through that gross sexting phase where he used to send pictures of his penis to you all the time? Penises are so gross. No one should take pictures of them. They look like sea monsters ready to attack. Ughhhhh, it’s a big reason I like girls.”

Eric had only done that for a week when he learned that I was less than responsive to the modern love declaration of sexting. I tried, but I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of my lady bits and send them over the Internet. They also never looked good in their close-ups, no matter the lighting (and I tried lots of different lighting).

Of course Floozy did it all the time. I found the sexts the same day that I found the incriminating e-mails. It was like
Penthouse
Forum on his iPhone.

Oh, where are you?

I’m at my grandparents’ house.

Look at my boobs.

Or

I’m in a very important meeting with the Japanese. Take a look at my hard, hard cock. Wouldn’t you like this in your mouth right now?

Or

Tee hee, look who forgot to wear panties to the office.

Floozy never seemed to remember to wear panties to the office.

I mused to Annie. “If Miley Cyrus and former congressman Anthony Weiner have taught us anything, isn’t it that sexting will always be made public?”

“Not if you’re not famous,” Annie said.

“Everyone’s a little bit famous these days.” It’s true. We live on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn. Everyone is a little bit famous to the people in their networks.

And then I had the idea—the very horrible idea, my true rock bottom.

“Let’s make Eric’s penis famous!”

Annie snorted. “I think in some circles it already is.”

That would have made me nauseated if I didn’t have an armor of 14 percent alcohol pinot noir and Chianti Classico protecting my feelings.

“Let’s put his penis on the Internet.” I jumped onto the couch and punched my fist into the air. “Let’s put it on his Facebook page!”

Annie hated penises, but she loved a project and she was a wildly productive drunk. “No, no, let’s give Eric’s penis its own blog, Ericspenis.blogspot.com.”

“I don’t know how to make a blog.”

“I do. I made one for the bar.”

And at that Annie was on BlogSpot creating a user name for Ericspenis.blogspot.com (password: Not2Hard).

Then things got blurry. I remembered scrolling through my phone and finding a picture of Eric’s lower torso, leg propped on a stool or a chair and completely average-sized penis poking up between two down-covered thighs. I remembered Annie uploading the picture and I remembered celebrating our creation by sending Eric an e-mail with the link. Then I remembered nothing.

“Who else did you send it to, Sophie? What the hell is wrong with you? Are you a tween girl? Are you a mean girl? A bully? Do you want to ruin my life?”

I was a mean girl. A mean, mean tween girl.

“We didn’t send it to anyone else. I don’t think we sent it to anyone else,” I whispered.

“You don’t
think
?”

I was furiously scrolling through my phone as fast as my hungover fingers would let me. Outbox.

To: Eric (Personal Mail)

From: Me

Take a looooook at this jerkface. www.ericspenis.blogspot.com

SophieSophiemi

P.S. I thought you’d be better endowed, Annie.

And that was it. That’s all there was. It looked like that had been sent just as I passed out.

“Sophie, this is getting sick. I am going to have to call the cops.”

“We’ll take it down, Eric. Please don’t call anyone. No one saw it. Please,” I begged.

“Fine. But leave me the hell alone, Sophie. We had a good thing for a while. I don’t know why you can’t leave it at that and find someone new. I don’t owe you anything. Good-bye, Sophie.”

“Good-bye, Eric,” I said to a dial tone.

I could hear Annie hurling in the guest bathroom across the hall. I was sitting speechless on the bed, head still throbbing, feeling like my brain had somehow disconnected from the bone part of my skull when Annie walked into the room.

“I think I have problem. I need help,” she said with a calm resignation.

“So do I, kiddo. So do I.”

Annie’s mandated AA meeting was in the basement of the Presbyterian church my parents went to for three weeks when I was ten years old. They thought church would be a productive thing for our family unit, but before we made it a month they came to the mutual decision that Dad’s Sunday golf and Mom’s time in the garden were a much more productive thing for the family unit. My brother, Jamie, and I were left to our own devices on the Lord’s Day. Everyone was much happier; Dad’s handicap dropped by three and the roses looked fantastic.

A small group of men huddled chain-smoking outside the side entrance to the basement. The tall, bald guy in the tweed coat with arm patches looked vaguely familiar, but it was dusk and the lighting was bad and I figured it wasn’t polite to stare in these situations. I didn’t know exactly what to expect. We have a lot of neuroses in my family. My dad is OCD, the kind where he has to touch a light switch every time he leaves the room and cut his meat up into exactly eight equal pieces before eating it. My mother was a hoarder before hoarding became a thing that people from the Oprah network came to your homes to fix with hugs and $20 containers from Crate & Barrel. Mom filled closet after closet with old art projects, magazines, horse-jumping ribbons, baby clothes, and dog toys. You name it, we had it tucked away somewhere in our house. She was finally “cured” of her hoarding when Dad bought their retirement house in Clearwater, Florida, and told her she could pack exactly three suitcases or stay in the old house with all the crap. Mom might have been a hoarder, but she wasn’t stupid. She chose the beach over the stuff, and the garbage men had a heyday. We weren’t normal or anything, but we never had an addict in the family, the kind who went to rehab or AA and could tell us about how it worked. But since it’s anonymous, maybe we did and I never knew about it.

The stairs to the basement smelled like fresh coffee and stale smoke. I wasn’t expecting to see chairs set up in a circle, a table of brightly colored donuts, or a decently attractive guy about our age eating a Boston cream.

He looked up a split second before I realized I stared too long. He had a dab of cream on his nose. He gave me this giant smile like he already knew me or something and started walking my way. He looked a little bit like Eric, which made the corners of my mouth turn upward before I remembered that Eric and I were no longer a couple and that he hated my guts for putting his penis on the Internet. I felt a distinct pain in my left side directly under my rib in the top of my belly. What is in that space that causes that kind of physical reaction? Sometimes I wonder if my metaphorical heart isn’t in my chest, if it’s actually just behind my liver. When the Eric doppelgänger was two steps from being close enough to reach out and shake my hand, Annie grabbed my forearm hard and hissed in my ear, “Is that Dr. Jacobson?” Sure enough, Elbow Patches from the parking lot was coming down the stairs, and it was our pediatrician, the very same man who set my broken wrist when I jumped over a tennis court net in fourth grade, took my tonsils out, and prescribed me birth control without telling my parents when I turned sixteen. He looked at me with the same warm smile as Boston Cream, who had now turned his attention back to the coffee.

“Sophie, Annie,” Dr. Jacobson said, giving us each a hug. Then I remembered where we were. Dr. Jacobson must be leading the meeting or something. There was no way he was an alcoholic.

“So good to have you girls. Call me Jack here.” He took a green half-dollar out of his pocket. “Twelve years sober,” he said as he brought it to his lips and gave it a chaste peck. He looked at me. “I’m glad you finally came.”

As he walked away I looked at Annie. “He thinks I’m the alcoholic.”

“You are the needy one.”

“Well, how do I convince him it isn’t me?”

“You don’t. You can’t now. It would be rude. It would be like saying ‘I know you’re an alcoholic, Dr. Jacobson, and I don’t want to be in your little addict club.’”

Boston Cream began clearing his throat, which seemed to be a signal for everyone in the room to start taking seats in the circle of chairs that were obviously meant for people smaller than the adults gathered in the room. By the artwork on the walls, I was guessing this was where the church usually held Sunday school. On closer inspection, Boston Cream looked a lot less like Eric than I thought. His face was friendlier, less severe, and he had more crinkles around his eyes, which meant that he smiled more, or used fewer products. I happened to know that Eric used an eye cream before bed every night. It was lady eye cream, the very expensive La Mer kind that they raved about in
Vogue
. I never thought that was at all odd or strange when we were dating. I thought it was nice to be with a man who took care of himself. In hindsight it was a little dainty. Boston Cream also had a tiny crook in his nose that was saving him from being too handsome.

The white-haired woman next to me offered me a piece of gum. It tasted the way I imagined the inside of the woman’s purse must have tasted, stale and dusty.

Boston Cream was up at the podium, which made him seem in charge.

“Hi, everyone,” he said to the room.

“Hi,” they chorused back in a singsong.

“I’m Joe, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Of course he was, why did I think he was here? It was obvious that I was the only interloper. “I’m four months sober today.” The entire room clapped and cheered, which was a nice touch. It is heartening to have people clap and cheer after everything you say. I could get into this alcoholic thing.

Joe led the group through something called the serenity prayer and then gave announcements. The church would be closed next week for a workshop so they would be switching the meeting to the public library; one of the AA members had been diagnosed with cancer and they would be taking donations for flowers. Then he opened up the room for discussion. This was when things got interesting.