Our Town (22 page)

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Once they returned from their honeymoon, Dorothy’s emptiness only doubled. Then tripled. And quadrupled after that. She began to drink Shiraz or Pinot with dinner—sometimes even Merlot—even though Gary forbade drinking. Even though she wasn’t supposed to. She’d hide it at first. She’d siphon it into quarter-full Diet Cokes. Then sometimes she’d call her old boyfriend, Seth—old meaning not recent,
because he was still then not even thirty. But sex in parking lots didn’t quell her nervous energy. Or her fluttery hands and feet. Birdlike forever but never able to fly. Neither did a slipped disk in her spine that required—required?—she take OxyContin. They didn’t specify how, and they worked faster if she crushed and snorted it, and she liked the way they tasted, so that’s what she did. On top of everything else. She began to feel disabled. What she was getting just wasn’t enough.

So, one day, Gary slapped Dorothy. He was angry. She’d begun to disobey. She’d begun to outwardly question his authority, from the way she was supposed to dress to the penance she was told to inflict upon herself to the tithing. This, the percentage of her paycheck, he felt he was due. Her money, now, was accrued as such; from her grandfather, once he’d passed—he, worried, allowed for a trust wherein once a month she got some of his leftover retirement—enough to spend but hardly anything to save—that was an easy rationale, though, especially when you were born a junkie. Oh, and something still came in from the divorce. Palimony, or alimony, or whatever. Whatever the difference is. It didn’t matter. No matter what she always spent it all. Always believed she deserved to feel better. No one should feel this bad. And never much on anything important. Unless, that is, you’re into alligator-skin belts. Or monogrammed emu loafers. Or drugs. When all this was through she’d eventually be supported by her daughter. But that’s not ’til later. Now, though—but now—she began to cough on Gary’s message. She refused to swallow. Any of it. Any of it at all. Gary was old—let’s say sixty—and his slap just didn’t hurt her. She was tougher than he was. She’d been through more. It’s like, fuck him, you know? So Dorothy, high as a kite, slapped him back. Once in the ear, once on his cheek. And his fat, red face was throbbing. She packed her things in black garbage bags, wished herself a traveling mercy, and got in her car and drove east, to Palm Springs, to a rented condominium her daughter had helped her find. And she started smoking again—sigh—and drinking whenever she wanted. But at least she could say she was her.

She’ll live here for the rest of this, until this whole thing is finally over.

ACT 3

1982-1990

AND I ARE ALL

S
lowly, over the next few years, Clover gave up on Mama—even though Clo still paid for everything—because she just wouldn’t quit the drinking. Or the wrong men. Or the strong men. Or the everything else. Or the always and obvious everything else. Back when Clover turned eighteen, it wasn’t up to the courts anymore whether or not she was allowed to see Mama. It was no longer her father’s say where she went and what she did, although to be honest he’d given up those duties quite a long time ago. She was now, technically, allowed to visit her mother. She was an adult. If she wanted to go she could. But she didn’t want to. It hurt too much. At a certain point, to survive, Clover decided she couldn’t leash her happiness to her mother’s well-being. After a party she’d thrown in high school, one of the many weekends when Clover ran away to her mother’s, Clover was downstairs drinking boxed wine and telling her friends not to tell her mother. Dorothy was upstairs drinking boxed wine and asking Clover’s friends not to tell her daughter, please. Eventually they both ended up asleep with boys in beds they didn’t belong in, and when she woke up, to her mother still sleeping, she realized that Mama might never get better. That there might be no such thing as better. That this might be, and perhaps always was, just her. And then suddenly Clover was free. And Clover was happy. And she just lived. She just was. But
that didn’t last long. It didn’t suit her. She found it unbecoming. But throughout this—Clover referred to the times when she felt forced to cut her mother off as being “without her”—Clover never stopped thinking about Mama. She never stopped wondering why she was the way she was. She never stopped guessing what she was doing and wondering how she lived. Even day-to-day things, like whether or not she went to Starbucks or the Coffee Bean. But, in a bigger way, she wondered why she made the decisions she made. She wondered why those decisions always seemed misthought, or skewed. Without any perspective. Without much interest in the truth. In the end, Clover finally just realized that her mother was unreliable. Well, beyond unreliable. Out of step. Without footing and afraid. Toothless and hairless. Untethered, in every sense of the word. But Clo also decided that that wasn’t Mama’s fault. That it wasn’t anyone’s fault. That it just was. That she just was. Hope and hope swallowed.

Clover eventually got married. At twenty-one, she married young, just like Do. She was beautiful, like Mama, too. And thin, once she discovered cocaine. And a model. Eventually an actress. And good. So she had her pick of the litter. After an audition in New York, she went to a party at a club with the city’s movers and shakers. A real who’s-who. The word “bougie” comes to mind. She went with some friends. Or some other models. Not really friends. Competition breeds resentment. In the corner of the room, in the section roped off for those considered VIP, she saw a tall, strapping, oh-so-handsome man hunched over a table. He was chopping glassy cocaine shards into a powder across a mirrored coffee table and pulled that powder into lines, approximately the length of a snow pea. Long, thin lines, like canes, or poles. Lowercase
l
s. She walked over to him and asked if she could have some. He, of course, said yes. Coke-talk for hours—what else is there to do? She found out that he was the starting quarterback for the New York Jets. He saw her and knew that she was beautiful, and once he spoke to her he found that this was true of every part of her. He particularly loved her voice. One month later they married. His name was Jack. They’d move to New York, and
then divorce in eight years. They’d also have a son. His name’s Jack too. Well, technically, his name’s Jack Jr. Sometimes they called him J.R. I hated that.

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Clover lives in Manhattan. This is while they’re still married. They also have a country house in Long Island. That’s where she and Dorothy would stay. But not yet. That’s a little later. When Clover got pregnant, she got sober. The coke got her skinny enough to get the guy, but now that she got him, what did she care? She romanticized the idea of being a mother, and also, if she didn’t quit, Jack swore he’d leave. This is how he got her off drugs. How romantic. She wasn’t a fun cokehead. Sort of a pain-in-the-ass cokehead, eventually deciding upon it in lieu of morning coffee. But when she got pregnant, she got sober. And she was happy to be sober. As an athlete, Jack wasn’t always home. So she spent her days at the gym in the morning—endorphin addicted, which is I guess as good as you can do—and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at night. Sometimes Narcotics Anonymous. Sometimes the other way around. When she was feeling indulgent. In fact, she’s at a meeting now. Drew Barrymore was there, and she used to take thirty Vicodin a day. Five in the morning, ten with lunch, and fifteen at bedtime. Or something like that. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe it was someone else. Obviously. Dorothy was coming to visit Clover soon, and she’d never visited her home before, and she was nervous. Both of them. It’s been years. But Clover, sober and happy enough, had just had her baby boy, and she decided it was time for Mama to meet her baby.

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Tinkerbell was Dorothy’s new toy terrier. She thought he looked gay, so she made his name Tinkerbell, even though he was a boy. And she needed something, you know? The two pals sat uncomfortably on a
plane from Los Angeles to New York in the fall of 1983. She was on her way to see her daughter, and she couldn’t find anyone to dog-sit Tink.

Dorothy’s knees ground against the polyester of the seat in front of her and she pulled down the plastic window cover to her left. She didn’t like that she had the window seat because she liked to have room to cross her legs. And the fat person next to her walked onto the plane with a white sack of McDonald’s. The whale had already asked Dorothy if she wanted a bite of her McRib, and Do looked past her pores and into her eyes and declined, as politely as she could. She opened the window cover again as the plane sat on the tarmac. The pilot had said that they were sixth in line to take off. Outside was bright and the sun shone into her face, but she looked into it, and then back down at her seat, but then back into it, and smiled, because she liked the way the sun hurt her eyes.

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This is the Christ Church meeting on First Avenue and First Street. It’s on Thursdays. It’s in the morning—seven, sharp!—because it’s a meeting for the types of people who need two meetings a day. Today, too, Clover was the meeting’s moderator. She made the coffee, bought the Styrofoam cups, and chose which chips and pretzels and crackers to bring. She also brought cookies and Hostess cakes and candy for those who liked candy—she’d found that sobers, when recently sober, broke down into sugars and salts, and so she offered everyone a chance to get what they wanted. Everyone needs something. She aligned, and realigned, the hollow tin chairs, and she gathered the literature and stacked it, neatly and with reason, next to the wooden stirrers beside the Mr. Coffee machine.

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The sky was bus-station bright outside the plane. Above the white clouds. Cozy. So cozy. The fat ass beside Dorothy took a portable tube of
lotion from her purse and squirted some into her hands before she dug into the rest of her French fries. She stank like lemonade, lard, Lysol, and petroleum. Maybe that was partly the plane. Maybe not, though. When she cracked open the white bag that housed the rest of her lunch—she’d saved some—Tinkerbell started barking from the traveler’s bag she was housed in under her seat. As the people around her began to stare, Dorothy got nervous and grabbed up the carrying case with Tinky and put it on her lap. She unzipped the front and Tink’s head popped out. Dazed—Dorothy had fed her baby Benadryl to keep her calm on the plane—she opened her mouth and rolled out her tongue and stared at the fries. Her ears went back like a rabbit and her blonde bangs hung down into her eyes and she began to fidget her way out into the world. “Oh, well isn’t she cute,” Do’s seatmate said, spilling over into their seat. She finished her fries and licked her greased and salted fingers clean and then pet the hairs out of Tinky’s eyes. The grease and spit from her fingers slicked back and clumped together Tink’s bangs. Dorothy’s mouth furrowed. It was disgusting. Dorothy got out the baby Benadryl and gave her another teaspoon. Tinky coughed, then stared a beat, before dropping back into the bag. Tired. Again tired. Do zipped the carrier and pushed it, again, beneath the chair in front of her. The doctor said up to two tablespoons of baby Benadryl was acceptable. But Tink was acting disorderly, so Dorothy gave her a third.

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Clover already knew all the literature. Backward and forward and frontward and back. Red Ricky got his nickname from the way his cheeks looked, mornings, before he’d given up drugs. Extreme dehydration due to Riesling, over-exercise, and amphetamines. He always called it Tina. He learned that from a masseur. When he went out—the good old days—he didn’t even iron his jeans until midnight—his own special routine. He loved his little routines. The real parties don’t start until after, but you already knew that. Ricky walked up and stood behind the podium. He’d been assigned to speak first.

“This week, I just wanted to thank everyone for sticking with me and being here. Thank you guys for showing up. I know people can get tired of me. I know I don’t have the cleanest résumé in the group. But I’m trying. I’m trying as hard as I can. This past week, I went out to eat—a Japanese place that I hadn’t been to in a while. The last time I remember going—with friends I don’t even see anymore—I remember doing sake bombs, cheap sake and cans of Sapporo. And more sake bombs. And more sake bombs. And then I’m drunk and tired, so then I call for blow. Oh and sheesh, I don’t remember much after that. I think we drank more. Definitely more drugs. I remember that. I remember trying not to be tired. But, anyway, they let me back in to eat. And I made it all the way through dinner. All I drank was ginger ale. So I just wanted to thank you all for supporting me and believing in me, ’cause I think, maybe—just maybe—I’m finally starting to believe in myself.”