Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  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.”

  Jesus is in the veins on the leaf. Jesus is in the veins on my foot. Jesus is in the paint drips on the windowpane.

  “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.

  Jesus is in the hollows of my temples. Jesus is in the cracks in the ceiling. Jesus is in the dust in the corners of the room.

  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 di
sappears 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?”

  I said something real. Susan should put a gold star in my folder. I never know what to follow it up with, though. I say something that is true but is a bummer and then it just hangs there and I am supposed to offer a solution but there isn’t one. “Anyway, glad to be here. Grateful to be sober today.”

  Susan Schmidt looks at me pointedly from her perch on a hard-backed chair she brought in from the kitchen. God, I loathe her.

  “Oh, yeah, and I’ve been feeling kind of lonely lately. Thanks for letting me share.”

  “Thanks, Bebe,” choruses the room.

  Violet goes next. She sits cross-legged on a floor cushion. A deep purple, handmade velvet skirt pools around her legs. She hangs her head and her black hair falls like drapes on either side of her pale, sharp-featured face.

  “Hi, I’m Violet and I’m an alcoholic.” I can always count on Violet’s share to make me feel like I am positively bubbly. I am a cheerleader compared to Violet.

  “I just feel sad and I can’t get rid of it. I’m grateful not to be smoking speed today and making decoupage lamp shades for ten days on end, but I feel so heavy from the minute I open my eyes.

  “When I was tweaking I was so motivated,” she goes on. “I never actually finished anything but at least I started. I started all kinds of artwork and I was so thin and I had so many ideas. I guess that’s what I miss the most. That feeling like I had something to say.” Violet sniffles back that first drip of teary snot, but she pushes the lid down. “Now all I can do is smoke and watch TV. And I want to kill myself. I’m sorry but I do. I think about it all day long, about how I would do it and who would find me and that I wouldn’t want to do that to any of you and, y’know, ruin your life from having to see something like that.

  “I know I was a disgusting mess before and that it’s better now. But before at least I felt some relief, and this.” She puts her hands out to indicate everything. It’s her only gesture; other than that she’s been a statue. “This is just relentless.”

  Violet folds her hands back into her lap and drops her head even further so her hair almost entirely covers her face. “Yesterday I was looking at my sewing needles and I felt an overwhelming compulsion to stick one directly up inside my vein and let the ugliness flow out. I know that’s totally gross. I want some relief, y’know? Just for a minute. I want to figure out a way that I can live sober like this and it won’t break my heart. But I didn’t hurt myself. Instead I used the sewing needle to sew up a tear at the seam of my mom’s old costume so I could go and make those little girls happy. And I remembered my mom and how she used to dress up for my birthday parties, you know? All the other girls thought I was so lucky that I had a princess for a mom. I think she would have been proud of me yesterday. I think she would have loved to see me dressed up like that. I miss her.”

  The tears boil over. We all sit back and breathe and let her cry. No one holds her hand or jumps for the tissue box because it’s not the way we do it in this group. In our group therapy they tell us not to interfere with anyone’s expression of emotion; that if you hand her a tissue it’s like asking her to stop because you’re uncomfortable with her sorrow. If she wants a tissue she’s capable of getting one herself, is what Susan would say. Which is pretty cool, actually.

  Sometimes there are these Zion phrases that come back to me and reinsert themselves into my life. Like the one I think of here is “bear witness.” We’re here to bear witness to each other’s sorrow. Because no one else cares about our poor-prognosis, likely-recidivist asses except us. To most people outside of places like Serenity, lives like ours are a statistic and the statistic doesn’t tell a very hopeful story. So why listen? So why care? But we who are thrown here together by court order or probation requirements or various diagnostic criteria, we’re here to bear witness to each other’s lives, each other’s stories, to make sure we don’t disappear unheard, unseen. So it sometimes makes me ashamed, how Violet tells the truth and I’m so full of shit.

  Violet adds, “Oh, and also I finished my third step and I guess it was okay. Oh, yeah, and someone’s eating all my food and it’s really pissing me off, but I’ll bring that up after as a house issue. Thanks for letting me share.”

  “Thank you, Violet.”

  It is me, by the way, who eats all of Violet’s food. Late-night compulsive binges where I sit on the floor with someone else’s labeled jar of peanut butter and a spoon until there is no thought and no me anymore, there is nothing but eating. Every night I vow to stop and every next night there I am again. I don’t confess.

  Candy tells an inappropriate compulsive lie, as usual. This week she insists she caught a guy looking up her skirt with a shoe mirror at the library and had him arrested. She says that she plans to keep up a correspondence with him while he’s in prison because she felt a mystical bond with him as the police were hauling him off. Last week she shared about having sex with a strange woman on the Zipper at the carnival. She tries to corner me at beauty school and tell the same kinds of stories. When I have nothing else to do, I listen.

  Buck and I have started to bet whether Althea will mention Joseph Campbell or pre-Christian goddess worship in her share. Tonight she goes for Joseph Campbell. I win. Buck owes me a chore.

  Missy, our doe-eyed, fragile blonde, shares about her brother in the Air Force and her boyfriend who is in his twelfth treatment center. Missy has Tourette’s on top of about fifteen other diagnoses, so her sentences are peppered with a sound that is kind of like a hiccup mixed with a bark. She weeps into her hands. I can’t stop looking at her. She’s so cracked and beautiful, all crumpled like that.

  Missy has worse problems than her tweaker boyfriend. She’s a lifer in these kinds of places. I have caught her many times frozen in the middle of the upstairs hallway, her pupils dilated with terror. With a little prodding she admits that voices drive her out of her room. They speak to her through the heating vents. There are no vents in the hallway, so that’s where she goes to escape them. The demons chase Missy wherever she goes, but she doesn’t talk about it too much on a group level because she knows how it sounds. That’s the difference between her being here and being in a lockdown facility.

  Chandra is our equivalent of the captain of the cheer-leading squad. Her being a black girl, ex-hooker cosmetologist is enough to make her the coolest person here, but on top of that she is our resident AA expert, with the most time sober (two years) and the most steps completed (all twelve). So Chandra is the one who settles disputes and doles out late-
night tough love. She’s the one you want on your side.

  “Hi, I’m Chandra and I’m an alcoholic. I suffer from the disease of alcoholism and I am feeling it today. I am feeling the cunning, baffling nature of this disease like a worm in my brain. Because my disease is telling me that it’s okay to be with Robbie, because he’s supposedly clean and he supposedly loves me and I have been waiting all this time for him. But he tells me yesterday that he is dealing some weed on the side, just to help him transition into going straight, right? And my disease is telling me, what’s so wrong with a little weed? He’s just selling it, not smoking it. We all need to get by, okay? But I know that I got to be more vigilant than that. By God’s grace and by the program of Alcoholics Anonymous I have a daily reprieve from my obsession to drink and to smoke crack cocaine. And I’m not going to be fucking with that. I know I can’t be fucking with no weed dealer.”

  I wait for Chandra’s shares. I count on her. I count on her to believe in this.

  “I love him,” she goes on. “I do. But I love myself more. I love God more. And God will put another man in my life who isn’t a drug dealer. I have faith. I am grateful to be sober and to be here with all of you beautiful, strong women today. Thank you for letting me share.”

  “Thanks, Chandra.”

  I think about how I saw Chandra crying in Robbie’s car the other night. She pulls it together quick.

  Everyone’s always sharing about love in group. It’s the golden ring and it’s the suicide mission. Me, I’m not on the prowl for love like everyone else here. I’ve done my time with wild love and I used it all up, I think. I tried with Aaron but never could figure out how to live with love pressing in around me all the time. I was shot through with poisonous jealousy every moment. Now he’s dead and I wish it were me.

  Living with a bunch of mental patients on parole is its own kind of safe wavelength. But love is treachery. Love is Aaron and my pop and everything already lost before I figured out what to do with it. First few months after Aaron was gone, I rolled out of bed onto my knees every morning with my fists pressed into my belly, unable to stand. All my support beams tumbled. Nothing held me up anymore. I was like one of those babies born with no bones.