Walking on Broken Glass (13 page)

“We’ll shut down introductions for now. Let's review some ground rules for these group sessions. First,” and this time Mr. Doctor smiled, “would someone mind elbowing Doug over there?”

Journal 6

“You need help.”

Oh, yes, I thought, more than you could possibly imagine. But the words that danced from my mouth wore different clothes. “You’re probably right.”

He stopped counting the pairs of folded socks stacked in the corner of the suitcase to turn to me. I stood behind him. Out of arm's reach. “Probably? No, that's where you’re mistaken. There's no probably.”

The suitcase yawned on top of the tightly made bed covered with a cranberry silk quilt and a floral embroidered duvet. Carl's lips made an almost perfectly straight line between his nose and his chin.

“I’m going out of town for over a week. I told you last night I needed you. In fact, I told you even before I left for work yesterday I couldn’t wait to get home. And you? You won’t come to bed with me.”

She flinched as the raw disgust in his voice crawled down her back.

“You watch some stupid shows on television, read. I never know what you’re up to out there while I’m in here waiting. Waiting for you. When you finally get yourself in bed, you won’t let me touch you. How's a husband supposed to survive like that?”

She stilled her body and waited. This would not be the end of the tirade. I knew he must punish me as he felt I ’d punished him . At least this was familiar. I knew what to expect.

He walked over to me. His meaty hands filled the hollows of my shoulders. He leaned over. His mouth pressed against my right ear. I focused on the Miersdorf watercolor hanging on the wall. Painted with jazzy reds and inky blacks and sapphire blues, the piano grinned at the shadowy figure perched on the piano stool. I made myself tiny inside the shell of my body. His moist whispers coated my neck. The clammy wetness reminded me of the mulch in my father's backyard and how, when he’d turn it over, a manure-heavy steam would rise from the pile.

“I’ll be home on Sunday. We can make up for all the lost time. I know you’ll be ready then.”

D
o you know what's worse than group with Dr… . ? Oh—I know. Nothing,” I said to Jan, whose afternoon shift started while I suffered in the Little Shop of Therapy Horrors. Actually, I was talking at her since I didn’t want or ask for a response. Judging by the lazy grin on Jan's face, I wasn’t the first trauma victim suffering from post-group syndrome.

I power-walked around the nurses’ station, grateful for the locked windows that kept me from leaping—of course, how much damage could I do to myself from the second floor—but also to outrun the cigarette smoke wafting from the rec room.

“There are no windows in that room. That's perverse. And it's freezing in there. Nobody told me I’d need a coat. Walking out of that place …”

“Hey, at least you didn’t have to be carried out.” Jan's smile betrayed her attempt at sounding serious. “Anyway, think about this,” she said, scooting her desk chair over to reach the ringing telephone, “visiting starts on Sunday.” She was laughing by the time she answered the call.

The weekend morphed into some never-ending story of impending doom. First, when we leave the group session we’ll board a bus Friday evening for our first AA meeting away.

Then I’m pummeled with the thought of visitors. The army of ants that paraded through my stomach decided to pitch tents.

It's almost time for another meal. Here, meals have little or nothing to do with hunger. Maybe, before I’m totally sober and completely, certifiably ready to leave here, my stomach will adjust to this schedule. Not that it matters. I’ve already learned to eat on demand. When I’m hungry, I hope there’re enough Nutty Buddies or Blue Bell mini ice cream sandwiches in the freezer to stuff into the empty rumbling cave.

Today, though, it seemed pointless to even try eating. I was sure some reverse gravitational law would kick in—and whatever I sent down would reappear. Already, I couldn’t believe there was a time when I used to pray to not have to cook yet one more meal.

Mom always said to be careful what you pray for—you might just get it. “But,” she’d be quick to warn, “it may not come wrapped in the package you’re expecting. Remember that before you start asking God for all kinds of foolishness. Sometimes you’re just borrowing trouble.”

The yellow bus coughed its way out of the parking lot, entering Trace Street with just enough energy to squeeze into the snarling early evening traffic. This pumpkin was not the carriage I expected. But then, I wasn’t headed to the ball either. Maybe school buses were used as part of the aversion therapy. Don’t make us too comfortable, or else we may not want to leave.

We arranged ourselves like so many strangers, careful not to invade one another's space. The bus leveled the playing field. No one person had authority in this territory. Even Doug sagged a little less—which was Doug-ese for saying he was actually sitting straight. All eyes seemed focused on the shifting shapes of cars and glass buildings that, as the sun set, blazed like fingers of fire sprouting from restaurants and strip shops and gas stations. Each of us viewed the city through a window of our own. Protected from noise for so many days, hearing only the hum of florescent lighting, the drum roll of central air conditioning, the cafeteria clatter, and the thumping of doors as they opened and closed, the assault of traffic surprised us. We were so reverent we could have all been in silent contemplation for a spiritual retreat or holding a memorial service for a mutual dearly departed.

Myrtle, the bus driver, who could have been a not-so-distant relative of waitress Tina, was a burly, plum-faced woman. Her faded magenta hair poked straight out from the back of her head like a squirrel's tail. She was decked out in a sunflower yellow and blue plaid cotton housecoat snapped up the front, brown men's socks, and slippers. If this was the
attire de rigueur
for AA meetings, Molly and I had spent way too much time in my closet.

After a chorus of adolescent whining and begging Myrtle tuned into the rock station. Mick Jagger's static voice scratched and screamed through the radio. Benny and Vince started singing, Theresa chimed in, and their voices rose to meet Mick's.

I gripped the seat in front of me as the bus lurched and belly-flopped its way to its destination. I think the place was called Serenity. There's something bizarre about us having to be transported to serenity.

The kids and Theresa laughed as they joined Mick, and then I watched as, one by one, everybody in the bus picked up the tune. Even Doug choked his way through a lyric or two, his emphysemic rock-tumbler throat singing sounding like Keith Richards.

So, there I sat and wondered why I felt like an idiot. Why was participating in this song fest so difficult for me? I couldn’t allow myself to act silly even when there would be no real or lasting consequences. Though in my impulsive, spontaneous moments of the past, I’d be loud or brassy, like when I started “Second Lining” at one of the company dinners. Carl had reminded me of the definition of low profile. But in three weeks, I’d never see these people again.

When I drank, I imagined myself like Julie Andrews singing on a mountain top, twirling and twirling, facing the heavens, arms outstretched. I could be delightful and deliriously goofy when I filled myself with enough beer or wine or vodka or whatever. The alcohol bashed the self-imposed emotional straitjacket the sober Leah would be terrified to remove. Drunk Leah felt light, almost ethereal. Eventually, I had the best of both worlds—a fun-filled Leah who, the next day, couldn’t remember the havoc she wreaked or the embarrassing improprieties.

But no booze, no coping mechanism. I didn’t know how to act like a truly sober person. And I didn’t know I’d have to actually start feeling—feeling scared and angry and sad—and I’d have to start remembering.

Less than an hour ago, I had to be coaxed onto the bus. Jan's voice echoed Mom's when she had scrunched her body on the floor to peer under her bed, negotiating with Edison, our neurotic thunder-shy cat. Mom's fleecy-warm voice belied the verbal assault.

“Edison, if you don’t crawl from under this bed in the next thirty seconds I’m going to shave all of your hair and pierce your ears.”

Now Mom was gone, Edison was hundreds of miles away, probably looking over his shoulder for Mom, and I was the one who wanted to stay under the bed. All dressed up, my neatly creased khakis and my white button-down Gap almost starched blouse. My white canvas backless sneakers. And I couldn’t, wouldn’t, budge. My body froze. I didn’t want to leave the center. I didn’t want to walk through those doors. I wasn’t afraid of going to the AA meeting. I wasn’t afraid of getting on the bus. I wasn’t even afraid of coming back. I simply couldn’t leave what had come to mean security. I was safe here. No one could hurt me or force me to do anything.

The only other time I experienced this terror was when I woke up and found Alyssa, so still in her crib, so agonizingly still. They pulled her away from me, and she never returned. The overwhelming frightfulness of that moment gouged my soul—emptiness I tried to fill with Robert Mondavi and Johnny Walker and Miller Light.

When Jan said it was time to leave, my legs refused to transport me. I scratched the back of my hand, watching those familiar snail-like welts return. Maybe Carl felt tiny shifts in his universe with every motion of my fingernails urging the redness on.

“What will happen to me? How will I know I’m coming back? What if there's an accident? Please, please don’t make me go. I want to stay. I’ll stay in my room. Just don’t make me go.” Thankfully, everyone else had been escorted to the bus, missing my unscripted, irrational performance. How did she know to send everyone away? What had she seen in me? What part of myself had I unknowingly given away?

I pleaded with her. I grabbed her hand. She pried it loose, leaving the indentation of a halo pressed into my palm from her diamond ring.

I made her promise nothing bad would happen to me. That I would come back.

“Leah, breathe. You can do this. Just put one foot in front of the other.” Jan pointed me in the direction of the bus. She walked so closely behind me that our bodies made one lumpy shadow.

I felt like I was in one of those recurring dreams where I’d end up in school without wearing my Peter Pan collared button-down shirt, or I’d be wearing the shirt but not have a navy blue knife-pleated skirt to tuck it into. I looked around the bus. No one pointed or laughed, so I must still be fully clothed.

Not one of them looked at me.

They sang in one loud voice now, knowing, of course, that Mick was absolutely right. What we wanted, we could not have. What we wanted was alcohol or sex or drugs or money or any combination of those. What we needed was sobriety. That search for sanity linked the construction worker, the physician, the loan officer, the high school students, the housewife, the thief, and the waitress.

Mick's song became our anthem.

W
e arrived.

Cars littered the blacktop slab like grown-up Hot Wheels tossed from the sky by careless children of the gods. The bus nosed its way along a chain-link fence, separating the parking lot from the painted white brick church that hovered on the edge of the street.

Myrtle leaned over, tugged on the black handle, and the bus doors yawned opened. “Party's over. Time for me to grab a Subway before the meetin’ ends.” She stood and swiped her hands across the front of her housecoat, wiping off some invisible gunk from her lap. “Three twelve-inch subs only $11.99 tonight,” she announced to the backs of the newly and begrudgingly sober riders who shuffled down the bus steps.