Lit (20 page)

R
ather than rejoice about the grant, I start to steel myself against the ceremony now rushing toward me like a jail on wheels. David and Jack convince me to join their Sunday study group at a shambling halfway house. The place sits on hospital grounds across from a methadone dispensary. A favorite joke of the residents is to use magic markers to manufacture a
closed
sign on the clinic, so eventually the panicked methadone addicts holler and pound the door.

Walking into the house, I expect to find tattooed thugs and strippers and former felons, which I do. But most are working stiffs, plus a professor. There’s even a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated—a fairly common injury among the homeless, it turns out.

On my first afternoon there, David bends over a former hooker’s study guide for her high school equivalency exam, and I see the hooker
later help a Boston banker handle his own toddler during a visit—the same unlikely, democratic exchange of skills as my Cambridge meeting.

The house director is a woman I hate on sight: a stork-thin blonde with manners that strike me as prissy, like she’s instituting a no-cussing rule for the house, for one: say a bad word, you chip in a buck to the party fund. Save for a slightly spastic right hand, she looks like a runway model, being nearly six feet tall with long hair the color of sunflowers. In the recovery community, she’s legendary. Mother Teresa with altitude, I overhear one resident say. She did biochemical research for NASA before her career in chemical dependency. The white Mustang convertible she drives has a high-test engine, and I once heard a felon remark she looks like a dentist’s wife, i.e., never done a day’s work in her life and somebody always taking care of her teeth.

Her name is Deb, and when I whine about how hard it is not to drink on afternoons alone with Dev, she invites the two of us to stop by the house for a snack. I can bring a video for him. She’ll even personally counsel me if she has time.

Fat chance, I think at first, but the lure of a sober hangout proves too great to stay away. The writers I once passed flasks of vodka back and forth with have been scarce since I pledged off.

On Dev’s first visit to the house, he passes two residents exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke, transfixed by a Thai kickboxing movie. I tuck Dev’s head under my coat, and he says, What’re they watching?

Grown-up show, I say.

In the director’s office, Deb stands to greet us, and her shaggy dog licks Dev’s face, almost knocking him over. She holds out her slightly drawn-up hand for him, and he wastes no time in asking what’s wrong with it.

She bends to fix her brown eyes level with his blue ones to explain that she got drunk and overdosed on a nasty drug called cocaine.

I try to steer Dev off the subject, but Deb says, It’s normal to be
curious. Anybody with a disability needs to be comfortable with answering questions about it. She holds out her arm, saying to Dev, You can touch it if you want to.

He pinches it like a melon, then grabs her wrist and pulls it away from her body, as if to straighten it through his own grunting will, saying, Does that hurt?

Deb says, No, it just feels tight.

You were drinking cocaine, and your arm just spronged up that way? Dev wants to know.

Oh, no, she says. The stuff kind of poisoned my head, and I fell down and hit it. I woke up and I couldn’t move at all. Paralyzed. Couldn’t talk, either, not even yes or no.

Which dramatic bottoming out is hard to assign to one so put together as Deb. You can believe that she was married to an Oxford biochemist, that she modeled, that she ran a lab—all true. But that she drank like me and couldn’t quit? Impossible to picture.

I was four or five years in and out of rehab, she tells us. On the night of my head injury, a cabdriver—actually an Indian guy I’d met in one detox—found me passed out in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. He’d driven by the house and seen my car parked sideways in the driveway, gotten worried, and broken in.

Dev says, What did you think when you woke up and couldn’t move?

I’ll tell you exactly what it was, she says.
Boy, do I need a drink
.

Dev giggles at this. Part of me thinks, Maybe if I’d heard this at his age, I wouldn’t have wound up such a sot.

It took me a long time to learn how to talk again, she says. I could show you how to eat with a spoon, but I couldn’t say the word
spoon
.

Over months and months in long-term rehab, she learned to speak again, then read, then write with her left hand.

Let me see you walk, Dev says.

She rises, and the dog rises. She walks across the room, doing a kind of swaying swagger to heft the less mobile right leg forward
apace. She does it with a rock star’s prance, adding a runway spin at the end.

Dev says, You walk pretty good. That leg goes a little crooked, but you go fast.

She looks at me and says, Do you need to have a grown-up talk?

It pains me how visible my shakiness is, but it touches me also. (Such small kindnesses—so commonplace in my life now—dismantled me then.) I’ve spent so long hiding how I really feel; now that my brassy attitude’s stripped off, I feel naked as a frog.

She tells Dev to put in the video we’ve just picked up. I tell her the guys in the front room are in the middle of kickboxing, and Deb says, They won’t mind. From her doorway, she announces to the two guys on the sofa that the afternoon movie is a cartoon of a Rudyard Kipling story from India about a mongoose who has to fight a cobra.

Picture the blond tyke on the couch with a paper plate holding potato chips in his lap. He’s flanked by two muscled and tattooed guys named Sam and Joe. (I’ll later learn that black-haired, wasp-waisted Sam was a former Mob henchman who once trafficked in pallets of stolen government cheese.)

At a nearby table, I ask Deb how she came back from the head injury. Looking at her, I figure rich parents bailed her out.

Both my parents had just passed, she says, about a year apart, and I was an only child. Then my doctor husband divorced me the second I woke up.

Told she’d never walk again, by month three, she wowed the once skeptical staff by using a brace and a cane to perambulate around.

And when I came to this house…

As a resident? You were checked in here?

Yeah, she says, from a public detox, because all my insurance had run out. I got here still not quite mobile, and my counselor told me I had one day to feel sorry for myself, then I had to get to work. I started praying all the time, took a clerical job at a bookstore. Soon as I had enough money, I bought a broken-down Mustang convertible, hiring
guys in the house to rebuild it in bits and pieces. The doctors had told me I’d never use my right hand again, and I knew the stick shift would loosen my arm up.

I’m staring at her as if for the first time, for it would never occur to me that somebody as well turned out as Deb had suffered trials that dwarf my own.

Part of me clings to the idea that
I
am the most disadvantaged person trying to get sober—a joke, given that I’m thin and white and employed, HIV-negative, with insurance and reasonably straight teeth. Before I judge somebody or indulge a groundless fear, Joan says I’m supposed to ask myself:
What is your source of information?
If the answer is—as it usually is—
I thought it up
, I should dismiss the idea.

Deb sips her coffee as I say, A head injury and a divorce—what an excuse to drink.

The head injury convinced me I had to get sober or die, she says. I was on the surgical table twenty-four hours. If the cabdriver from rehab hadn’t come by, I’d have died for sure—a lot of coincidences went into getting me here. Plus, they said I’d never walk again. Those things were gifts.

A gift? I say, blinking with disbelief, for this is the kind of shit people said that makes me nuts.

Without my brain injury, Deb says, I’d never have quit drinking. It saved my life. It was a higher-power thing.

I don’t get that stuff, I say.

You’re not praying yet? Deb wants to know.

I am…well, barely. I figured out that asking for relief from the craving every morning seemed to make it go away. I figure it’s like I mesmerize myself. But God? No way. I’m an agnostic.

A spike-haired blonde passing by with a cup of coffee says, Another intellectual? Lucky you.

Janice, this is Mary.

Janice slides next to me, saying, Like the Blessed Mother, huh? She gives off the kind of outlaw ethos that appeals to me.

Deb says, Mary’s reluctant to get down on her knees because she doesn’t believe in God.

I add, What kind of God wants me to get on my knees and supplicate myself like a coolie?

Janice busts out with a cackling laugh, You don’t do it for God! You do it for yourself. All this is for you…the prayer, the meditation, even the service work. I do it for myself, too. I’m not that benevolent.

How does getting on your knees do anything for you? I say.

Janice says, It makes you the right size. You do it to teach yourself something. When my disease has ahold of me, it tells me my suffering is special or unique, but it’s the same as everybody’s. I kneel to put my body in that place, because otherwise, my mind can’t grasp it.

Out of the kitchen holding a crockery mug comes a lady with cropped dark hair and eyes the color of fresh-dug earth. Liz has the frank, inquisitive gaze of a trained scientist, but softer in its aspect. The clubhouse/college-dorm feel of this place suggests a camaraderie lacking with my writer pals.

Can we help her not drink? Deb asks, Liz. And it appears a sincere question.

Absolutely, Liz says, pulling up a chair. We’re all about the not-drinking thing.

From the TV in the living room, the mongoose is announcing his name in a chittering falsetto: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi!

Deb explains that Liz had run a lab at MIT, adding, She had a hard time with the higher-power thing, too.

I stayed sober a year, but I was white-knuckling it, Liz says. It was hell, and I drank again. Second time around, I started the prayer stuff. You get miserable enough, you’ll take suggestions.

Liz envisions her higher power as a sober part of herself—some saner, more adult aspect of her own psyche. She says, It’s not so different than Freud’s superego—or healthy ego.

I tell her maybe I could pray easier if it was a positive-thinking exercise.

From the next room, Sam says, The smart money’s on the cobra. Wanna make a gentleman’s wager?

Two’ll get you four for the mongoose, Joe says.

Dumb money, Sam says, but I’ll take it.

I’m thinking, This doesn’t seem like a cult or a trick, there’s something—I don’t know—
realistic
about these women. They don’t seem misty-eyed or drippy. So I tell them how shaky I am inside, afraid my marriage is a mistake, and how I can’t even read anymore.

Liz says, Try lying in bed, picturing yourself held by two giant hands.

Giant hands?

Liz says, I know what you’re thinking.
That’s idiotic
.

For some reason, my eyes well up, and I find myself saying to women I just met, I’m afraid I’m not a good mom.

Dev runs up to me, announcing the victory of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

While Sam is fishing bet money from his jeans, Joe says, Never mess with a mongoose.

Sam drops quarters into Joe’s open palm next to a wadded-up dollar, adding—genially, it seems—Eff you, brother.

Deb shoots him a look. Joe pockets the change, then pulls it back out. He offers to buy Dev a soda.

Can I, Mom? Dev says, for soda is contraband in our house, and I say sure, and later in his life, Dev will remember the chesty rumble of the soda machine in the basement of that place, the faded tattoos on the bulging biceps of Joe and Sam. He’ll also remember the claim of Philosophy David (who’s working a security job while trying to start a novel) that a doctor made him keep the bandana on his head else it might explode. Several afternoons a week we spend with this company.

Let go, they urge me. Let go. I have no idea what this letting go means beyond surrounding myself with sober women—I mostly talk to women—and grouchily taking their suggestions.

But each sober day seems to widen the chasm between Warren and me. The halfway house is another hiding place from our troubles. With our therapist, I sit across the room and rail. Rather than scrutinize my own absence—first via booze, now via recovery—I devote each session to old grievances. How Warren went running during Daddy’s funeral, took his paternity leave when Dev and I were still in the hospital, left every single late-night feeding for me to handle alone. Not that these complaints don’t have weight, but I nurse my grudges like foundlings.

For his part, he succinctly itemizes the shrewish railings I’ve unleashed on him. Eventually, he says, I can’t undo the past, Mare. What about now?

Surely you’re not gonna be one of those women, the doctor says, who gets her husband’s attention and then bails out just when there’s a chance to get a marriage she wants?

But I am. I say, I just don’t trust that he cares for me the way I want.

What you want, nobody can give you, he says.

Intimacy exercises that involve backrubs and kissing, I flatly refuse to do. There’s a door slammed shut in me that I’ve barred. And Warren says—on the topic of our nonexistent sex life—
One day you’re gonna reach for me, and I won’t be there
. (From today’s vantage, my withdrawal and coldness seem so corrosive and mean, I want to shake my young self.)

Prayer isn’t patching up the marriage yet, though applied to small problems from time to time, it sometimes yields up a feasible idea.

Stranded without child care once, I figure out after a prayer—it comes to me—that I could slip Chris, an ex-hooker from the house, a few bucks to hang out in the quad with Dev for a spell, which seems safe enough for an hour or so.

After, I snap Dev in his car seat and drive Chris home. She’s nineteen, six months clean, with lush dark hair and the pink cheeks of a
cheerleader. In the car, she talks about heroin as a devious lover. Her voice is smoky as a lounge singer’s, a real Billie Holiday rasp.