She nods at the door through which Leo and Britney have disappeared.
“You, though, you are lucky as shit. It was my courtroom they brought Juni to. I’m on your emergency list, with your signature and everything, so it was legit enough, but if I hadn’t known everyone in that room when they called her name, she’d be in some state-run nursery now, twenty babies in a room.”
“There were some near misses,” I say.
“And some direct hits, Mellie. I don’t doubt how you feel about her. And it’s worth something that you came back. There’s some other you out there who’s headed for California, headed for the next high.”
Emily begins to dab at her wound again, even as the bandage on her skin shows a bright, new blotch of red. I watch how delicately my toddler plays in this injured woman’s lap, the terrible evidence of her instinct to be careful around broken things. Everything is so vivid, like the taste of sugar after your mouth heals, like that terrible sweetness. This is the pain you live inside.
“I stayed clean,” I say.
“Yeah, Mellie. You have the worst sixty-two days I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some bad sobriety. But, it’s still sixty-two days.”
She relinquishes my child and I reach for her.
Juni feels heavier, and the same, and she smells of unfamiliar bath products, but she rests her mouth near where my necklace falls on my collarbone, and breathes into my skin. Then I hear it again, her clear words.
“Mama. Mama.”
I look at Emily for confirmation.
“Yeah. She said it. She said your name.”
The hour begins to chime.
“Get your ass in there,” says Emily. “You need to find yourself a new sponsor.”
Maybe only at the DMV, but not even there because really marginal people let their registrations lapse, or get their cars repo’d, so actually only at an addiction recovery meeting, do you meet such a cross-section of humanity. Gathered today, there are lawyers, and there are homeless, and there are sanitation workers and there are college kids. People are brown and white and straight and trans, and they are sixteen and they are sixty and they are Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baha’i. Some, like Emily and I, used to be friends. In this room, you might meet your ex-stepbrother from the side that got the money, or a boyfriend who doesn’t make his support payments; Paul could walk through the door; even Lew. There’s no immunity from personal bitterness just because you’re sober, but still, we all hold hands when the time comes. It’s not so different from cloud in that: here, your mistakes do not condemn you. It’s amazing.
The van from Independence pulls in a few moments after the meeting begins and then Marisa and the gang file in the room, along with the woman who took my place. All of them coo over Juni, pass her around, and then they turn to me. Marisa chucks me on the shoulder, hard, and tells me I can go fuck myself. They call me Wellesley, junkie, and a new one, based on my internet activities, porn star. Even so, I have to run a gantlet of perfumed hugs before I take my seat. There’s N and Noreen and all the rest of the Monday usuals, none of them very surprised at the revelation of my daughter. There are new folks, too.
“Keep coming back,” I say to the young woman with the black eye. I can tell she thinks she doesn’t belong here, that she’s got some other ticket to a better life, but there’s no direct route—we zigzag in and out of redemption.
Everything around me seems too colorized, bright with significance and meaning and right next to me, there is an empty seat, and I see a million shadows of a million people who might be there, but missed their chance. Then, someone is sliding in to take the chair. Judah looks at me.
There’s an awkward thing where we go to hug, and then stop.
“Give me thirty or so years,” he says.
“Count on it,” I say.
Juni fidgets and babbles in my lap. A woman rabbi takes the mike and begins to talk about a Bat Mitzvah she had presided over while high.
“You are not really supposed to freestyle the Torah,” she says. “But there do turn out to be a lot of great words that rhyme with Yaweh.”
Without Emily, there’s no one to push me to talk. It’s me against me, like it always was and I know I have to stand up anyway. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy. Which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a tab or two of cloud to get me through the sweaty-palmed nerves. I rehearse in my head: my name is Mellie, and I’ve been sober for sixty-two days, and sometimes my life doesn’t feel like my life. Sometimes I feel like I veered into some other universe where I am in a life I am unable to bear. There is vertigo. And I could tip backwards, to the moment when I raised my hand for my thirty-day chip, to any of dozens of moments when despair seemed my path. Too often, the ones we love suffer without mercy. Too often, the actual villains go free. But this is the world we’re given, where we must make our way.
The Rabbi is finishing up. “In our faith, we believe there are thirty-six Tsaddikim Nistarim. These are hidden people, righteous people who appear at critical moments, and save the rest of us idiots from ourselves,” she says. “We can never know who they are, or that they’ve touched us, and once they do their good, they put back on their disguises and become secret again. And yet, I believe I must have met each and every one of them to make it here today.”
Who knows? I think and hand my baby into Marisa’s lap, and stand to tell my story, but they might not be here among us now? Leo pushes the wheelchair to the front of the room as I take the stage. Emily nods at me. Judah leans forward. A magic stone around my neck, a boy in a dark forest, a woman in a red pickup. Who knows, but that they might have been here all along? Even my enemies have, in moments, reached out a hand. There have been irrecoverable losses, but also in the cruelest hours of my life, I have been visited by something like the Tsaddikim. Perhaps others, even, have been visited by them through me. I am not strong enough on my own, and yet I have ended up here anyway, and so, I decide I can believe in this one irrational thing: a secret tribe of saviors who surround us, me and Juni, here in the actual world.
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without the intervention of my own tribe of people who appeared at critical moments. First, my mentors, whose assistance long outlived my time in their classrooms—Peter Ho Davies, Elizabeth McCracken, Chang Rae Lee. My readers, some of whom have pored over as many versions of this book as there are worlds within it, Jen Savran Kelly and Bob Proehl most especially. This manuscript was also read by Charles King and Sonya Posmentier, the latter of whom is also my lifeline and my external moral compass and my favorite person to meet at a hotel bar. I’ve had the good fortune to encounter some terrific writers during my directorship of the Trias Residency for Writers, most especially Mary Gaitskill who told me about the bruise on Linda Lovelace’s leg and agreed to read my book. Julie Remold, my friend since 1983, gave me permission. This book was found and shaped by Bill Clegg of the Clegg agency and Kate Gale and the talented team at Red Hen Press. It could not have been luckier.
I have been supported for many years by my academic home and my inspirational department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where I had the particular great luck to encounter Tina Smaldone and Deborah Tall. Over the years, I’ve done work at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, UCROSS, and the New York Mills residency, for which respite and inspiration I am grateful. The Tompkins County Public Library also often served as my informal retreat, backup bookshelf, and occasional babysitter. When I worry about the world, the fact of libraries’ continued service is an absolute comfort.
My participation in the Trampoline story slams taught me incredible things about how nonfiction works and doesn’t work, and I’m indebted to its organizers and participants.
My dear, dear family. None of them ever suggested I should be anything other than a writer. My mother, Lynne Conroy, raised me to think art was important. My father, Joshua Goldman, has read everything I’ve ever written, no matter how weird. My stepparents, Marcia Landa and Bob Colford, not only believ
e in books, but also taught me how to be a stepparent with their graceful navigation of the family ecosystem. My sister, Arielle Goldman, read part of my book and additionally provided useful insight into the world of recovery. My brother, Evan Goldman, is the person I know in the world who is living best, and when I am not, I have taken inspiration from his path. Also, sorry about forgetting birthdays.
I have three grandmothers, Barbara Cameron, Eleanor Landa, and Harriet Teller. They’re all in here, a little bit, are the book’s angels.
Although in my tradition, we are not supposed to brag about our children, mine make this avoidance impossible. My daughter, Coco Hamilton, and stepdaughters Clio and Dorothy Hamilton are brilliant and gorgeous and powerfully their own people, and their light continues to sustain me. This book was born beside my love for my husband, Charles Hamilton. There were days we had that transcribed themselves right into these pages. All the good parts, my love, are yours.
Some parts of this book are collaged from other texts. These texts are fictionalized, and altered freely from the original, but I’d like to acknowledge my sources here. SpongeBob SquarePants Season One. Created by Hillenburg, Stephen and Jennings, Nicholas. Written by Hillenburg, Stephen, Drymon, Derek, Hill, Tim, Tibbett, Paul, Burns, Peter, Fonti, Steve and Mitchell, Chris. Nickelodeon, April 30, 1999–April 8, 2000. 1 Night in Paris. Directed by Saloman, Rick. Red Light District Video. 2004. The Glenn Beck Program, Premiere Radio Networks, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2007–2013. I have also drawn on my own diaries. Additionally, this text owes a debt to Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Shields, David. Vintage, 2011). I was intrigued, in reading this book, by the presumed organic link between reality-based art and the genre of nonfiction, and the question of what would happen to a fictional text created through similar processes as those discussed in this work. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge two artworks which are used in a more traditional fashion in this text, “This Must be the Place (Naïve Melody)”. Talking Heads. Speaking in Tongues. 1983, used by permission. The cover art was provided by permission, as well: Cao, Yang. Liminal IV. Oil on Canvas.
Biographical Note
Melanie Conroy-Goldman is a professor of creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges where she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers, which has hosted such notables as Mary Gaitskill, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Jeff VanderMeer. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Southern Review and StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s, and online at venues such as McSweeney’s. She also volunteers at a maximum security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. Her work is represented by Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, daughter, and stepdaughters.
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