* * *
A few days before Thanksgiving, I find out I’m pregnant. There is never a question about what we will do. Craig takes me to the clinic and we sit together silently, staring at old magazines, naked strangers again. Eventually Craig looks at me sideways and whispers, “You okay?”
I nod. “Yeah. Totally. Really, I’m fine.” We leave it at that. When we approach the receptionist to prepay, Craig pulls out his credit card and I wave him off. “No. I’ve got it,” I say. I don’t want to put him out. I want to be independent about this. We have not yet become comfortable splitting a restaurant bill so we are certainly not ready to split an abortion. An unsmiling nurse calls my name and I follow her into the back for the procedure. It hurts more than I expect it to.
Then Craig is ahead of me on my front porch, unlocking the door to the home I share with Dana and Christy. I follow him inside and let him lead me to the couch, where he covers me with a blanket. We sit together for a few minutes, talking about other things. He tells me that his buddy is throwing a big party that night but he’s not going because he wants to stay with me. I wonder why he’s mentioned this at all, but I don’t ask. Instead I say, “You should go. I’m totally fine.” I expect him to ignore this ridiculous suggestion.
Instead, he looks at me and says, “Are you sure?”
This is the wrong answer to the question today is asking of us. I feel my stomach clench but I smile and send my representative forward to say, “Totally. I’m fine. Go ahead. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Craig brings me a glass of water, kisses me on the forehead, and walks out the door. Through the front window I watch him drive away from me, my abortion, this uncomfortable day and toward the better, easier night. I am so alone inside the quiet that my ears are ringing. I want to run to my car and follow Craig but I can’t because it’s bad manners to have an abortion and party plans on the same day. I am supposed to be sad, somber. So I will sit here in the quiet and do my time while Craig goes free because there is no abortion etiquette for him. And because he doesn’t know that whatever just happened is something that happened to both of us. I wonder for the first time if maybe Craig isn’t so golden after all.
I sit as still as possible on the couch and decide that there is nothing more intolerable than silence. Until there is. Music starts blasting from upstairs and it startles me into a sudden sweat. My heart thuds as my mind scrambles. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s Christy’s alarm, and then another moment to recognize Stevie Nicks’s voice. Oh, my God, her voice. Her voice is worse than the silence; it’s a siren, an insistence. Her voice makes my whole body ache, like she’s holding me down and operating on me without anesthesia. Her voice and the music are true and deep with longing and both seem directed straight at my heart. This is not a day, or a lifetime, in which I can tolerate remembering my heart. I need to turn her off. I wrap my blanket tighter around me and start up the stairs. The blanket keeps tripping me so I give up halfway and crawl to the top. I stand back up and run to Christy’s room and Stevie’s voice is getting louder and closer like she’s inside of me asking terrible questions. Can I handle the seasons of my life? I find the alarm and I yank the cord out of the wall and then there is nothing but silence again. Just like that, music to quiet. Everything to nothing with the pull of a plug. Thank God. I lie flat on my back on Christy’s floor. I stare up at the ceiling and try to breathe, try to steady my heartbeat again. I hold my stomach because it’s cramping badly. But it’s better than the heart pain. This is better. I lie there for a minute and wonder how people can possibly listen to music sober.
Music is an invitation to feel but the quiet is an invitation to think. No thank you to both. I need a drink. I need a drink. I need the opposite of music and silence: booze. I make my way back down the stairs and into the kitchen, still clutching my cocoon of a blanket around me. I panic when I find only three empty wine bottles, but when I see the bottle of whiskey on top of the refrigerator I feel safe again. I pull a chair over and climb up, grab the bottle, descend quickly, and shuffle over to the counter. I fill my cup halfway with whiskey and the rest of the way with flat, warm, weeks-old Sprite. I’ve already cut this whiskey with water so frequently I’m afraid it won’t work anymore, but the first swallow tastes like straight sugar and burns exactly right. The whiskey warmth starts in my mouth, travels down my throat, pools in my belly, and now my insides are also wrapped in a blanket, hushed, quieted, rocked gently to sleep. I breathe deeply and my whole body stops clenching. My hands are calm, steady now. I don’t need my outside blanket anymore so I let it fall to the kitchen floor. I lean against the counter and keep pouring. I finish three drinks in five minutes and now here it comes, my favorite part, the storm after the calm. I’m starting to light up. My scared, anxious, awkward self has been put to sleep and another me has been awakened. Here she is. Here I am. Powerful, carefree, bulletproof. Look at me, I say to myself. Everything was awful and I fixed it, I made it better. I am an artist and my medium is me. I’m not afraid anymore.
I hold the whiskey in my arm like a dance partner and I smile and spin my way back to the living room, my insides warm and my outside hurting less and less. This is better, so much better, than even if Craig had stayed. I remember the second question Craig ever asked me: Want to see my place? This is my place: drunk and alone. There is no pain here at my place and there is no one to perform for but me. Every feeling is approved here and I am the music.
Two hours later, the front door opens and Christy and Dana walk inside, laughing and holding brown bags full of groceries. When they see me, they both stop laughing and stare. I am alone on the couch, curled up inside a cloud of smoke, clutching my empty whiskey bottle. I can tell by their expressions that I look worse than usual. I stare back at them and start crying because that seems like the right thing to do. I need an excuse for being this drunk, this alone, this early in the evening, so I hold my bottle toward them like I’m about to make a toast and I say: “I had an abortion today.” I feel like I’m acting sad instead of feeling sad. I wonder if I look glamorously tragic, like Marilyn Monroe. I’m going for “A Candle in the Wind.” I need Dana and Christy to keep wanting to rescue me. That’s important here.
Dana drops her bag in the foyer, sinks into the couch, and wraps her arms around my whole body. She rests her head against my head and says: “Oh G, Oh G.” Christy stands and stares at us, coat still on, bag still in her hands. She looks furious. Not at me though, never at me. These two are forever on my side. Christy says, “Where the hell is Craig? He just left you here alone?” I tell her it’s not his fault, he didn’t know I was upset. “I told him to go,” I say.
“I don’t care what you told him. It’s common fucking sense,” she says. “He has no common fucking sense. I am going to kill him. I am going to fucking kill him.” Okay, I think. Yes. This is good. Let’s be mad at Craig. Just don’t be mad at me. Don’t be mad at me for having an abortion and don’t ask me why we keep ending up here on the couch with all the booze and the tears again and again. Just sit and drink with me. Just please sit and drink with me. They do. That’s how we love each other through this day. They drop their groceries in the foyer and nobody ever puts them away. We drink together for hours—until dawn cracks open the long night. When the sun rises, Christy calls Craig and curses at him. I think he comes back and apologizes, but it’s possible I dreamed that. None of us remembers for sure. Not remembering is the point.
* * *
After that night, I don’t stop drinking often enough to maintain a life. I start missing work. My bills get forwarded to my parents. I stop calling home. My car breaks down and I abandon it in a parking lot. When the police find it, they call my parents. When my parents ask what happened, I lie. When my dad goes to retrieve my car, he looks in the glove compartment and finds DUI court papers. He comes to my work to tell me he found them. He says that when he read the papers he was so terrified and angry that he went to see a priest. He didn’t ask the priest to help
fix me. He asked the priest to help him survive being my father without being able to fix me. This is the most startling news I’ve ever heard. My dad went to see a priest? To help him accept my alcoholism? Who is going to keep trying to fix me then? I’ve driven my father to beg God for help. For himself. I am afraid because my dad is threatening to stop being afraid. He asks me to come over after work to talk. I say, “Okay, I will.” I don’t go. Instead, I go out and get very, very drunk.
My phone rings the next morning and keeps ringing all day. Sometime during the late afternoon, I roll over in bed, pick it up, and say hello. It’s my mom and she sounds terribly angry when she says, “Come now, Glennon. Come over right now.” Her voice is insistent, scary. I stand up and look around my room and I know I should change, but I’m dizzy and I can’t remember how, so I decide to go as I am. I’m still in my outfit from the night before, including four-inch stiletto heels. This is ridiculous but also convenient. I teeter into my car and chew gum to try to mask the smell of smoke and booze. I drive to my parents’ house on autopilot.
They meet me at the front door and I walk into my childhood home with my head down, ashamed of what I’m wearing, ashamed of what I smell like, ashamed of my red eyes, ashamed to bring so much night and filth into this bright, clean place. I sit down on the couch and I look up at the walls covered with my school pictures. I search all my faces for clues about where it went wrong. There I am in first grade, second grade, third grade—I’m wearing pigtails and smiles, but I look sad compared to my sister’s pictures, which hang right next to mine. Why was I sad? Why am I sad now? I wonder if my parents wonder the same thing when they sit here in the evenings, watching the news, wondering where I went then and where I am now. We have given up looking for a solution and now we will settle for an explanation.
The sun flowing in from the huge windows pierces into me. My head is pounding and I have to hold my hand over my eyes like a visor in the middle of the living room. My parents sit on chairs across from me looking sad, angry, and helpless. My mom’s voice quivers as she and my dad ask the usual questions: Why do you keep doing this to us? Why do you keep lying? Do you even love us? I sit on the couch and I try to receive their questions, but I’m a catcher without a mitt. My face is neutral, but the part of my heart that’s not spoiled is aching.
I do love them. I love them and I love my sister and I love my friends. I think I love my people more than normal people love their people. My love is so overwhelming and terrifying and uncomfortable and complicated that I need to hide from it. Life and love simply ask too much of me. Everything hurts. I don’t know how people can just let it all hurt so much. I am just not up for all this hurting. I have to do whatever it takes not to feel the hurt. But what I have to do to avoid the hurt for myself hurts everyone else. My survival means I have to keep harming my people. But it is not because I don’t love them, it is because I love them too much. All I can say is “I do love you,” but it sounds weak, like a lie, and their faces don’t soften when they hear it.
I sit and stare at my hands and I remember a story I saw on the news about a woman who had a stroke and lost all her language overnight. When she woke up, her mind functioned perfectly, but she couldn’t speak. So she just lay there and tried to use her eyes to communicate her terror about being trapped inside herself. Her family couldn’t translate what her eyes were saying. They thought she was brain-dead. It’s like that for me, too. I’m in here. I am good on the inside. I have things to say. I need help getting out. I do love you. My secret is that I’m good in here. I am not heart-dead. This is a secret that no one knows but me. And now, even the people who love me the most are tired of searching for me inside here. They are giving up hope that I’m still alive. They are thinking about calling off the rescue effort. Because even if I am still alive, I am not a sympathetic case. I did not have a stroke. I’ve done this to myself. I’ve trapped myself. And maybe I’m not in there after all. Maybe this me they can see is all there is, all there ever was.
My dad is still asking questions. “Who is it that you want to be, Glennon? You know you’ll never be a six-foot-four blond Barbie doll, right? Do you have a single hero in this world?” I am confused by these questions. What does a Barbie doll have to do with me? But then I look down at my fried, bleached platinum hair and my sequin tube top and padded bra and stiletto heels. Why do I look like this? Why am I dressed like this, with hair a color not even close to my own? Why must I always try to be taller, blonder, thinner, drunker? I don’t know how to answer. I wish there was something to reveal, some horrible secret about my childhood so we would have our explanation and they could feel sorry for me. I wish someone had hurt me, so I could say, This is why. But I’ve never had an excuse for being me. So I try to answer the hero question. I whisper, “I want to be like Mom.” I am humiliated by my own answer. My mother is kind, good, beautiful, honest. My wanting to be her is laughable, but none of us laughs. Because what I said was pathetic and impossible, but it was also true. It came from the inside me. So I scramble to say another true thing. I tell them about the abortion. This comes from the outside me, my representative. It’s manipulation, an excuse. The abortion doesn’t explain the past fifteen years of my nonlife, so I have not offered them any kind of truth really, just more pain. My parents hang their heads lower. Their shoulders sink deeper. They don’t come over to me. They don’t hug me and pat my head and cry with me. This is how I know my search crew is calling off the dogs.
They stand up and leave the room together and I’m left in the terrible quiet again. I sit and stare through the windows at the painted, wooden playhouse that my father built for me when I was eight. The first time I played in it, I saw a spider and never went back inside. For decades it has stood there in our backyard—empty and wasted. Looking at the playhouse now, I feel like the ache might destroy me. Why was I always too afraid to play? Why can’t I appreciate anything I’m given?
My parents return and my mom says, “This is it, Glennon. If you don’t stop drinking, we can’t be in your life anymore. We can’t stand by and watch you kill yourself or someone else. We can’t continue to be destroyed by you.” My mom is the good cop, so her playing the heavy is a message to me. I nod. I understand that we’re in the middle of an intervention. Then my mom says they’ve just called the priest my dad told me about. They tell me he’s expecting me, so I’m to drive straight across town to the local Catholic church. I’m always sad, but I’m rarely surprised. I’m surprised now.
God is a fresh approach to the problem of me. Other than our obligatory weekly attendance at a Catholic church, my parents haven’t involved God often in our family affairs. It strikes me that if the only card we have left to play here is God, we must be desperate indeed. My parents’ last effort is, quite literally, a divine intervention. “Okay,” I say, “I’ll go.” I stand up and leave the house. I drive to the church because I know that my parents will call to make sure I’ve gone. I hope they will, at least. I drive to the church because it feels official that neither Craig nor my friends nor my parents are going to be able to rescue me. I have run out of places to go, so I drive toward God.
3
IT’S DARK AND I DRIVE SLOWLY. When I see the steeple, I turn toward it and park in the gravel parking lot underneath a streetlamp. I sit in my car for a while and try to muster up some feelings. I’ll need to cry for the priest, I’m sure of that. I open the car door and climb out. I stumble through the gravel in my heels. While I’m walking, I try to smooth down my ratty hair, wipe off my smeared eyeliner, and stretch my tube top to cover my belly. I’ve been wearing these clothes for twenty-four hours now. I make it to the front of the church, and, as I put my hand on the big bronze door handle, I notice that I’m trembling. I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday. “We cannot watch you kill yourself any longer,” my parents said. I’m not killing myself, I think as I open the door. I’m just not doing what’s required to live. There has to be a difference.
I step inside the
church lobby and the heavy doors close behind me. It’s cold and dark. I stand still for a second, waiting. Nothing happens, and no one comes to receive me. So I look farther ahead and see another room. I walk through the glass door and step inside. In here it is red and velvety and still and warm. The incense in the air fills me and makes the space inside me and the space outside of me less empty, less lonely, less vast, more solid, more safe. I feel enveloped, as if I have stepped out of my life and into somewhere better. It’s not too bright or too dark in here. The ceiling is just the right height and it makes me feel just the right size. There is enough room to feel free, but not enough to feel insignificant. I see a tray of candles flickering in front of the altar and I walk toward them, slowly, down the aisle like a bride, wobbly in my heels. When I’m halfway there, my heel catches on the rug and my ankle turns. I sit down on the floor and unbuckle all the little straps on my shoes. When I stand, holding my heels in one hand, the soles of my feet touch the red velvet carpet and the softness sends a comforting ripple all the way to the top of my head. This carpet must have been made to soothe the soles of bare feet. I keep walking and then I stop in front of the tray of lit candles. Are these wishes? Are these other people’s prayers?
I look up higher and see that I am standing beneath a huge painting of Mary holding her baby. I look at Mary and she looks at me. My heart does not leap, it does not thud—it swells and beats steadily, insistently. My heart fills my whole chest but does not hurt, so I do not break eye contact with Mary. Mary is lit up bright but I am in soft, forgiving light. She is wearing a gown and her face is clear. I am wearing a tube top and my face is dirty, but she is not mad at me so I do not bother to cover myself. Mary is not what people think she is. She and I are the same. She loves me, I know it. She has been waiting for me. She is my mother. She is my mother without any fear for me. I sit in front of her and I want to stay here forever, in my bare feet, with Mary and her baby around this campfire of candle prayers. I do not know if I believe in Mary, but I believe in her right now. She is real. She is what I needed. She is the hiding place I’ve been looking for. My parents sent me to the right place.
Love Warrior Page 4