by Zaina Arafat
“They’re for when we do inner child work,” he said, picking up a stuffed turtle from beside him. It was awkward, the sight of the furry innocent thing in his rough, cracked hands. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your own soon,” he continued, “and they’ll make you bring it everywhere.” He rolled his eyes and jutted his elbow in my direction. “I know it seems silly. But trust me, you’ll grow to love it.”
He looked down at his turtle and gave it a tender squeeze. Just as I was wondering if I could leave and still get my money back, the doors leading from upstairs opened and about twenty or so people streamed into the living room. I looked to Greg, who called out, “Dinnertime! Sloppy Joes tonight.”
I thought back to my pre-treatment phone call with Nancy; apparently this counted as gourmet dining. I reluctantly followed the stream to the cafeteria, where I scooped fluorescent orange meat onto my plate. I added a little salad and then sat down at a table with Greg and a few others. “Sloppys taste a lot better with buns, you know,” he said.
I lied and told him there were none left. I was too uncomfortable to eat, especially bread that looked like the cotton stuffing inside of furniture. Instead I stabbed at a browning piece of iceberg lettuce, zigzagging it across my plate. After dinner, Richard came over and knelt beside me with a clipboard. “You’ll be going in the blue van to the Al-Anon meeting in Bowling Green,” he said. “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous only meets in Louisville.”
In addition to having no idea that Twelve Step meetings would be a part of this, I was surprised that they didn’t have their own Ledge members-only meetings on site, that we’d be mingling with locals. Apparently, that was the point: to humble us, so we’d avoid feeling special and distinguishing ourselves from other addicts. I wondered why Nancy hadn’t bothered to mention any of this to me before I’d signed up.
“What’s Al-Anon?” I asked Richard.
“That seems right,” he said, ignoring my question as he scribbled something on his clipboard, beside my name. He then directed me to the van that was going to the community center, where the Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon meetings took place. Greg was already buckled up in the back row, and I was glad for it. He was the only person I’d spoken to so far, which made me feel disproportionately close to him. On the way to the meeting, I learned that he was a surgeon at one of South Carolina’s top hospitals. He was married to Vivian but sleeping with his intern, Jill. “The thing is,” I heard him saying in the row behind me, “I love Vivian, but she treats me like shit.”
“Could it be because you’re fucking someone else?” I asked without turning around.
As the van pulled up to the community center, I realized that I had goose bumps and was frantically tapping my foot. Half of us spilled out of the van and into the center, which was one big sparse room containing a gray folding table surrounded by ten folding metal chairs. A coffeemaker with a brown-streaked carafe and powdered creamer sat on an aluminum-rimmed table in the corner. When we arrived, it was mostly women, only a few men, including Greg. Once we were all seated, a woman with an authentic beehive hairdo opened the meeting, introducing herself as Bonnie. “Hi, Bonnie,” everyone echoed.
•
“I’m Anna,” Anna said, though I already knew her name, we’d been in treatment together for a month by then, learning why food and fullness weren’t our enemies. When I confessed to the group that I had developed feelings for the center’s nutritionist, after an all-night G-chat correspondence precipitated by her filling in the second half of a Shins lyric that I’d posted as my status, Anna approached me. “It was brave of you to admit that to everyone,” she said. She had wolf-blue eyes and golden retriever warmth. She then handed me a scrap of paper. “Here’s my number, if you ever want to talk.”
I felt seen, in that moment. I also felt curious. I called her that weekend. “Want to meet for coffee?”
•
The topic at the Al-Anon meeting that night was detachment. How to detach from your alcoholic with love. From your drug addict, with love. From your personality-disordered relative, with love. As people around the room shared stories of sons’ arrests and daughters’ relapses, husband anger, parental neglect, panic crept up inside me. Those weren’t the kinds of stories I’d expected to hear, and they were resonating a little too well. I felt embarrassed by the similarities of our experiences, the way they overlapped, the banality of what had been so painful to me. I also felt an unsettling disgust with the presumption that I could relate to these people in some way, in any way at all, really. When Bonnie asked if I wanted to share, I chose to pass. “I’m just listening tonight,” I said, and a round of “glad you’re here” sounded throughout the room. The woman sitting beside me reached out and pressed her palm against the back of my hand.
We waited in the parking lot after the meeting. Some people wandered off and smoked, others ran to the Walgreens across the street. Greg ranted to no one in particular. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that meeting was just a bunch of horny housewives who probably drove their husbands to drink.”
He was still going on about the meeting when the van pulled up, everyone piling in with contraband sodas and a lingering smell of smoke. “They should change their statement,” Greg said. “Al-Anon: friends and family of alcoholics who wouldn’t need to drink so much if their friends and family weren’t so goddamned whiny!” He chuckled and snorted a little. I turned around and glared at him. He shut up. I then looked straight ahead, through the windshield, and smiled. He didn’t need to know that I thought he was kind of funny.
EVERY JUNE THROUGHOUT OUR CHILDHOOD, KARIM AND I were loaded onto a plane, our mother seated between us, our suitcases stowed in the plane’s underbelly, and hauled across the Atlantic Ocean to Jordan, not to return to the States until Labor Day weekend. We’d arrive exhausted at Queen Alia Airport, named after King Hussein’s third wife, who was, ironically, killed in a helicopter crash. We’d hire a taxi and ride along the airport road, past Bedouin tents and the occasional herd of goats, to Teta’s home in the Shmeisani neighborhood of Amman. Just like Karim and me, my cousin Reema and her sisters were hauled to Amman at the end of every school year. Reema had light brown hair and green eyes, and was five years older than me. She lived in Paris during the year and spoke with a French accent, which I and Karim both deemed to be exaggerated. One particular summer, her parents got two suites at the InterContinental, one for themselves and the other for Reema and her sisters. We spent all of June at the hotel pool; me, Reema, and our other cousin, Nour, occasionally allowing Karim to hang out with us. Everything I did was designed to win Reema’s approval. I drove the bumper car out of the ring and around the lobby at the hotel’s fun fair, until the manager dragged me back in by my ear. I knocked on room doors on every floor and ran away. When one door that I kept knocking on opened and a woman’s hand emerged, promptly smacking me across the face, the game ended. I tortured the pool staff; Reema bought itching powder and I was tasked with slipping it down the lifeguard’s shirt, which angered him so much that he beat me with a flip-flop. That time I cried and threatened to call child services, to which Nour, who lived in Amman year-round and was my main competitor for Reema’s attention, smirked and said, “Do you really think we have such things here?”
Every summer I was forced to see my father’s side of the family—his sisters, brothers and their kids. I’d pout all morning as I packed my bag and during the car ride to their neighborhood, which was far busier, noisier, and dirtier than Teta’s. They’d take me to the community pool, and I usually enjoyed it, but not that year—not compared to the hotel pool. I hesitated to get in the water, which was full of undiapered street kids, something that had never bothered me before. My paternal cousins and I weren’t allowed to order poolside entrees and Pepsis like at the InterContinental. Instead, we had to wait until we got back home to eat. As we scarfed down hummus and pita sandwiches, I sat there wondering what my mother’s cousins were doing. How much fun were they having that I was missing ou
t on?
Finally, one of my dad’s bearded brothers drove me back to my grandmother’s apartment. I leaped from the car, entirely forgetting to say thank you or even goodbye, and rang the bell. The haris let me in. I rushed upstairs to the apartment, where the red and yellow lights above the hot water switches were both lit. My grandmother told me to hurry up and get in the tub: my mother had requested to see me at the hotel. I quickly peeled off my swimsuit and bathed, washing off the filth of the day. Afterward, Teta combed my hair as I chose an outfit. The sun was setting just as we arrived at the hotel’s terrace, where my mother and her aunts sat sipping rosé, a tray of sliced mangoes and melons in front of them, a waiter refreshing the coals in their shisha, which sent off little flecks of red embers. “Hi, mama!” my mother called out to me in the traditional, self-referential way Arab parents refer to their children: as mama and baba. My walk became a run as I dived toward the table and attempted to kiss her. But she wouldn’t stop talking long enough to let me, everyone laughing at the story she was telling, which I couldn’t understand: she was speaking too fast in Arabic, a language I was still struggling to grasp. For the majority of my childhood, I only ever understood a third of what anyone was saying. “Come,” one of my great-aunts said, waving me over after noting my disappointment. I wandered to her and received conciliatory affection before I was patted on the behind and sent off to play by myself.
At the time I didn’t realize what it was that separated the two sides of my family: that my paternal cousins did not live in the noisy neighborhood, go to the community pool, and wait to eat hummus sandwiches at home by choice.
5
IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ONE MORNING, AFTER MY ALARM had been ringing for twenty-seven minutes, my father blasted into my bedroom, grabbed the clock off the nightstand, opened the window, and hurled it into our front yard. This occurred after numerous attempts to wake me up by song; he’d float into my room in his flannel pajamas, singing “Ya madrassa, ya madrassa,” which means, “School, O school” in Arabic, or, depending on which dictionary you consult, “terrorist training camp.”
Though as an adult waking up hasn’t gotten much easier, on my first morning at the Ledge I was wide awake and at the main lodge in time for coffee. I wanted to get as much caffeine as I could. At seven thirty exactly the kitchen door opened and a bald man with bright eyes and a warm smile emerged, carrying three carafes. He put them down and then checked to make sure the sugar tray was full. I pawed through the pile of mismatched mugs, chose the tallest, and pumped the carafe until my cup was full to the brim, sitting down carefully so I wouldn’t spill.
The night before, I had stayed up late chatting with my roommate, Molly. “I’m not sure I belong here,” she’d said.
Molly was a love addict, too. Tucked into bed, her makeup still thick on her face, she told me about the meth lab she and her boyfriend ran out of their kitchen in Chattanooga. Her instincts were screaming at her to get out of the marriage and the meth, but she couldn’t bear to leave him. The thought of disappointing him was just too much. He couldn’t bear it either, and when she once attempted to leave, he threw himself in front of her moving car, breaking both of his legs and relegating her to be his caretaker. “It’s how I was raised,” she told me. “To please others. You know?”
I did know. “I think you’re in the right place,” I’d said before drifting off to sleep.
As I sat in the lodge lapping up coffee, I looked around at the posters on the walls. There was one with a gnome walking down a long fairy-tale trail. Beneath him was a quote by Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Something about it unsettled me. I figured it was supposed to make us feel better about being in Bowling Green, Kentucky, rather than elsewhere. I was thinking of the other places I could be when Greg walked into the living room carrying Why Men Love Bitches, a contraband item, as we were only supposed to be reading self-help literature that Nancy had sanctioned. His blond hair was slicked back, making it hard to tell where his forehead ended and his hairline began. He was wearing white patent-leather loafers and a T-shirt that said, “Your Village Called, They Want Their Idiot Back!” After he poured himself a cup of coffee, he sat down beside me and snapped his book against my thigh. “Hey, baby girl!” he said. “How you doin’ this morning, you sleep well?”
He smiled a big game-show-host grin. Was this an attempt to flirt? I raised an eyebrow and sneered in return. “Yo, Miami Vice,” said a guy with a lip ring, tapping his foot against Greg’s, “are those your dancin’ shoes?”
“These bad boys?” Greg said, pointing down. “They better do more than that, I paid three hundred bucks for ’em!”
The guy with the lip ring shook his head and laughed. Greg laughed along earnestly, unaware that he was being mocked. I gazed at the pine trees outside, and as the sun rose, streams of light poured in through the windows and illuminated the dust in the room. Greg looked at me and smiled again. “It’s your Higher Power saying ‘good morning,’” he said.
“Yeah, right.” I smirked. He seemed momentarily deflated. I realized I had mistaken his earnestness for sarcasm, and I immediately regretted mine.
I had breakfast; a glass of water and half a grapefruit. Afterward, I was about to step outside when I heard a cowbell ringing. Then someone called out, “Phase Two in the big room, Phase One in the small!”
Phase One. The newbies, lumped together in one group with our various addictions and afflictions. There were four of us: Greg; my roommate, Molly; another guy, named Alex; and me. I appeared to be the youngest. Following the three of them, I made my way upstairs to the small room. Richard stood in the doorway, waving us in. I chose a seat against the back wall. As Richard shut the door and walked toward the whiteboard at the front, I felt as if the room were shrinking, the walls zeroing in on me. I was terrified by the prospect of sharing anything vulnerable with these people, of being in such a confined, intimate space with them, every day for a month! I raised my hand and Richard nodded at me. I looked at Molly, then squinted at Greg. “Will the four of us be doing all of this together?” I asked. “As a group?”
•
My resistance to groups is likely a response to my culture’s fervent embrace of them, which locates value not as much in the individual as in the cohort they belong to. “Why don’t you be friends with her?” my mother would suggest, speaking of a friend’s daughter. “She has a nice crowd,” by which she meant “she has a crowd,” the distinct identities of its members less of a concern. Indeed, cliques are the norm among Arabs, but they are never easy to break into. I know—I tried, and failed. Even my cousins wouldn’t have me. After each day at the InterContinental hotel pool that summer, Reema invited Nour to sleep over, but never me. They acted as if I didn’t notice, but of course I did. Though I usually wouldn’t find out until the next morning, when I’d interrogate my mother about whether she’d seen Reema and Nour together at the hotel the night before while she dined with their mothers on the terrace. Yes, she’d respond, she’d seen them. And I would cry, because I desperately wanted to be closer to them, to stay up until dawn playing cards and watching rom-coms. But I was the American cousin, which inspired a resentment that my mother, depending on her mood, promised me was rooted in jealousy or lambasted me for, as though I had chosen to grow up in the States. Being regularly excluded, I developed a preference for solitude, one that I wasn’t so ready to exchange for the incessant company of complete strangers. I chose careers accordingly. DJing was one that worked well with my need to be alone, and also with love addiction: it limited my time with Anna and introduced me to a swathe of people who adored me, or some version of me, without expectations. With gigs on prime socializing nights I got used to skipping nights out with her. Besides, I didn’t need a partner to feel loved: I was a DJ! I was loved from a distance, the safest way to be loved.
•
“I’m afraid you don’t get much alone time here,” Rich
ard said. “We’re modeled on a group system. So the four of you better get comfortable—you’ll be getting to know each other pretty well.”
Before I could respond, he walked over to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. He drew a rudimentary tree, and at the tips of its various branches he wrote Alcohol, Drugs, Food, Sex, Love. At the tree’s roots, designated by hyperextended squiggly lines, he wrote in big block letters: CODEPENDENCY.
“Can anyone tell me what that word means?” he asked.
I raised my hand but didn’t wait for him to call on me. “It’s an inability to be in a healthy relationship with the self.”
“Right,” he said. “How’d you know that?”
In her book, Pia Mellody had made a significant effort to distinguish codependency from love addiction: While love addicts turn to a person as a drug of choice for soothing the pain of their difficult relationships with themselves, the absence of healthy self-love is itself codependency.
“I read it somewhere.” I shrugged. “I remember things.”
“That’s one definition of it,” he conceded. “Here we like to think of it as the pain from childhood that manifests in adulthood.”
“So unless you grew up in a 1950s sitcom,” I said, “you’re codependent?”
Richard forced a laugh. “It’s true that most people have unresolved pain from childhood. But not everyone ends up self-medicating with one of these.” He ran the capped marker back over the words at the ends of the branches. “The goal is figuring out how we got from the root of the tree to the branches. From codependency to addiction.”
We began by telling our life stories. “There’s no time limit on how long you have, just however long you need to take,” Richard said as I clenched the edges of my chair. Having known these people for less than twenty-four hours, I wasn’t too enthused about hearing their entire personal histories. I assumed everyone else must’ve felt the same way, but to my surprise, they seemed engaged, leaning forward attentively to listen to one another. Though I mostly scribbled in my notebook and did equations, calculating the cost per hour of being there, I picked up bits and pieces.