Pretty (9 page)

Billy Coyote. Son of a bitch. Of course after all of it, he's the one who reinvents himself.

“H
ello, Beth,”
says Susan Schmidt, our director of counseling here at Serenity. Susan Schmidt insists on calling me Beth because my born name is Beth Baker. She has this theory that nicknames reinforce “old behavior,” even though I've explained to her that my own mother calls me Bebe. It's not like it was my gang name.

Susan is always calling a meeting with me about some concern she has. “Concern” is her favorite word. I can't figure out why she doesn't like me. Why I don't like her is that she is a big rich phony who looks at us all like we're a bunch of derelicts and thinks of herself as some heiress Mother Teresa, when really she's a control freak with the tiniest sadistic streak. Like she enjoys it when she has to kick someone out of the house for an infraction. I've noticed a glimmer of pleasure in her eyes when she alters someone's life completely with a stroke of the pen. I saw it when she cajoled my friend Tammy into coming clean about her stash of diet pills and then gave her the boot.

“Come in, please.”

The office is set up faux cozy. A framed print of a sunflower with a Maya Angelou quote underneath hangs over a wall of mismatched filing cabinets. I sit on a lumpy thrift store love seat facing a new brown leather chair. I can tell Susan Schmidt thinks her chair is very therapisty. All of this crowds into what may have been a walk-in closet when this place was a grand Victorian house, before it was a haven for half-crazy drug addicts.

I look around at the same crap I have looked at a hundred times—potted plants, a crystal paperweight, a wooden plaque that says
Keep It Simple
—just so I don't have to look at Susan. The air hangs thick with awkward static, like it usually does around the endless parade of therapists, social workers, and grief counselors. Does anyone feel comfortable in these tableaux of forced intimacy where you're meant to shine a light in your darkest corners for someone who is supposed to be nonjudgmental? As if there is such an animal.

Today, Susan Schmidt wears a blazer and riding boots and some kind of khaki leggings that might, God help me, be jodhpurs, but I can't tell for sure because she's sitting down.

She leafs through some papers in the manila folder on her lap. “I see here that you've been with us for over a year now and that you're nearly done with your cosmetology training. That's just wonderful.” She crosses her legs, looks up, and smiles. “How do you feel about this accomplishment?”

When Susan Schmidt talks she gesticulates with her left hand, her chunky diamond engagement ring catching the light with dramatic flashes. I bet she sits at home in front of the mirror and practices making that ring sparkle.

“I feel fine. Grateful to be alive and sober today.”

It's the truth, you know. I am. I mean, if I have to be the one left alive, I'm grateful to have at least done this one thing. At least I've looked life straight in the eye for a year and haven't once taken a drink or a drug. Maybe you think that's sad, if it's the only thing valuable I've ever done. Maybe you think that's pathetic. Like some people are born to win gold medals in the Olympics and some people go to medical school and then help little kids with cancer. But the truth is that was never going to be me, accident or no. Some people are just trying to learn how to not want to die all the time. Some people don't have a whole lot to be proud of, but I'm proud of me for this. I am. I just don't go into detail with the likes of Susan.

“You really have a wonderful tenacity, Beth.”

Along with the word “concern,” Susan is fond of “wonderful.”

She shifts her facial muscles into a more somber configuration, indicating that the real reason for our meeting is coming up.

“You've been through a great deal. A profound tragedy. I suspect you have more feelings about it than you seem to be comfortable expressing to me or to your peers on a group level. I imagine that could feel terribly lonely,” she says, swinging her shiny brunette bob around like a hair commercial as punctuation.

Wow. They give you a degree for such staggering insight? But what I say is, “I guess we all get lonely, sometimes.”

“I'll be honest with you. I'm concerned with some of the things I've been hearing. Have you ever heard of the ‘fear of success'?” she asks, making those little bent bunny ears with her fingers.

“No. What's that?”

“You're so close to completing this program and finishing up your schooling. You've come so far. It concerns me that you might be jeopardizing all of this wonderful hard work you've done with some careless behavior regarding one of the residents at the men's facility.”

“Who do you mean?”

“You're only as sick as your secrets,” she says. This is the recovery one-liner that she regularly uses to pump us for information.

“My heart is an open book, Susan.”

Susan Schmidt sighs and shuts the folder in her lap, looking at me levelly.

“Consider this a friendly warning. I will not hesitate to take disciplinary action against you if I find out you're violating the terms of your contract here with us. You well know that your voc-rehab funding requires my signature. I like you, Beth. I really do, but you've got to work with me a little more here. I'm on your side.”

“I appreciate that. I need someone on my side.”

“Why don't you try to share some of your lonely feelings in group tonight? The hole inside you that you tried to fill with drugs and now are trying to fill with an ill-advised intimacy, that hole can't be filled by your self-destructive acting-out. There is only one thing for that hole and that's God, Beth. It's a God-sized hole.”

“Thanks for this talk. I'll work on putting God in my hole.”

She nods. “You may go. See you in group.”

I stand, walk down the hall to my room, and toss myself onto my bed, where I curl into a ball on my side and lie there with my hands between my knees and my hair falling over my face like a veil. I'm not sure why these conversations with Susan Schmidt always pitch me down the ravine. MDD, PTSD, CD, ADD. Are the letters in your chart, the corresponding diagnostic numbers, supposed to free you? Are they supposed to make it easier for you to get better? Or do you walk around for the rest of your life carrying them like a sack of mail addressed to no one? Can I deliver this somewhere? Is there a doorstep I can drop it off on?

JAKE lights up the phone on the nightstand, the vibrations rattling the particleboard. I press Mute.

I am a loser, I think. I lose things. Aaron, love, keys, jobs, father, Jesus, earrings, cameras, bank cards, friends, sunglasses. And I could lose this so easily. This tiny thread of hope, this tiny foundation of a new life.

MDD PTSD ADD CD stop it stop it stop thinking stop thinking.

I don't call Jake back right away. I don't feel like talking. Instead I fall asleep on top of the covers with the early evening light fading on the other side of my eyelids as L.A. changes seasons as much as L.A. ever changes seasons, which is only by shades of blue and gray in the sky and sometimes by the rain and the temperature of the nights. It's warmer. Just slightly, but it is.

I dream I'm with Aaron on a street corner that looks like the ones in the black-and-white footage of the civil rights marches in the South in the sixties. We cross the street to order a soda from a counter at a drugstore. Behind the counter stands a black woman with enormous arms who says to me angrily, “What am I thinking? You think you know what I'm thinking? What am I thinking? What am I thinking?”

Poor me. Poor baby. What do I know about suffering? I'm such a victim. I'm all sick in the head. I had a tragedy. Poor me. I remember the glares I got from some black women when I walked down the street with Aaron. I imagined those glances said what the woman with the big arms said in my dream. They said you don't know shit about being a victim of anything. It's true I guess. I don't know shit about being a victim of anything. But still, this is enough. My suffering is enough.

I wake and the first thing I feel is fucking starving. I'm always fucking starving.

I walk woodenly downstairs and into the kitchen, hoping no one is in there to view the impending carnage. The house is alive with early evening bustle. I hear clomping around on the wood floors and voices echoing through the hallways and the shower running. The kitchen smells like someone recently heated up ramen noodles.

I park myself in front of the toaster oven with a package of tortillas and a tub of margarine. I eat, like, seven tortillas smeared with the yellow grease, toasting the next while I shove each one in my mouth. I only stop when I am nearly ready to barf.

Buck and Missy each walk in and grab a snack out of the cupboard and say hi and I say hi but pretend like I'm in another dimension and really they can't see me standing here with the wad of tortilla in my cheek and margarine on my face. They're too busy thinking about themselves to care, anyway.

Afterward, I sit with my legs tucked underneath me in the threadbare orange recliner while my housemates start to file in for group. I wish I could go and puke, but someone would hear and probably snitch and I don't really need them to add any more initials, any more twelve-step meetings to my regimen. Hi, I'm Bebe and I can't stop eating till I barf.

Some awards show plays on the TV. A dark-haired chick in a simple burgundy dress sings at a piano and she is lovely. She is curvaceous and her voice is earthy and she sings something like a jazz song except it is a pop song and the faces in the audience watch her, quiet and rapt. It occurs to me that there was something I wanted to do once, and it was to shine like that.

Everyone arrives on time and Missy begins the meeting by reading from a black three-ring binder. Then we go around the room reading a paragraph each from the Big Book. Today we read about some Native American guy who drinks too much, causes havoc, gets arrested on his reservation, then gets sober and helps little Indians learn to read or something. It's one of those later edition stories that try to modernize and diversify a book written by a couple of white Christian guys in 1939. Looking around the room you would deem it to be successful, or at least no one complains.

After the reading, we each check in about how we are doing this week; it's called “Here and Now.” Then we pray and then we discuss house issues. All seven of us attend these weekly, mandatory meetings. We crunch in together on the nubby seventies couch and lean on pillows against the bookcase. Three seven-day candles with saints on the front from the 99¢ Only Store flicker on the coffee table and light up the room pretty cozy. I stare at everyone's feet or sometimes I stare at their faces until they look back at me and then I look away.

Buck kicks off the sharing.

“Hi, my name is Buck and I'm an alcoholic. Today I'm feeling fucking pissed. Today was really fucked. I ran into my ex–old lady while I was working. She was, like, getting a fucking frozen yogurt or something and she looked really pretty and really stoned and when I told her what was up with me, that I'd been out a few months, her eyes lit up all interested. Then I told her I was sober and living in a sober-living house and shit and she was, like, looking over my shoulder and couldn't get away fast enough. She looked at me like she felt really bad for me. That fucking bitch. When I was inside she wrote me, like, two letters in two years anyway.”

Buck pauses and looks out the window even though the curtains are closed and I suspect it would be a crying pause if she was a crying kind of guy, but she isn't. Instead, she crosses her muscular arms, covered in dense sleeves of tattoos, and goes on.

“Then she tells me that she met someone. Some, like, documentary film director or some shit who got a prize for a documentary about a guy trying to make ferrets legal in California. Fucking ferrets.”

Everyone laughs. Buck disappears further into herself, but only I can tell because I know her. From the outside it looks like she's squaring her shoulders for a fight.

“Anyway, I really hate you all right now. Fucking uptight weirdos.” She always says this kind of thing. How much she hates us. “I am so out of here. I want out of here, okay. But I can't because of my fucking parole conditions. So I'm staying but I still hate you right now so fuck you all . . . Thanks for letting me share.”

“Thanks, Buck,” we all say.

Buck sits on the floor next to the recliner. She turns to me and gives me a half smile, the candlelight glinting off her gold incisor. She picks at the loose shreds of denim edging the holes in her jeans. From this angle, it strikes me how handsome she is, in a redneck kind of way.

I sit directly to her left, so I pick up the sharing. “Hi, I'm Bebe and I'm an alcoholic. I don't have too much to say. Just want to check in with everyone.”

“Check in” is a good thing to say when you want to say nothing.

“I'm finishing up my last hellish two weeks at beauty school.” Everyone claps for me. Buck whistles through her teeth. “Thanks. I have a ways to go still with the State Board and all that but still, it's something. I guess I am afraid of what my future is going to look like. You know, how it's going to be when I move out of here and try to live like a real person. What I really feel is, I shouldn't be here. Not here like here in this house but here like here on this earth. But here I am so what do I do now?”