A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  “She’s always been like that,” she said dismissively. “Laying down her life for the cause. Of course, she would,” she hastened to assure me. “In all loyalty and fairness, she would. I used to be like that, too,” she added, as if her younger self were an old friend whose company she missed. “But it’s something else . . .” She was squinting past the ashes now. “The last time we talked,” she went on, feeling her way toward an explanation, “she was literally yelling at me. I called her in tears and she yelled at me.” We sat in lumpen silence for another shapeless length of time. It would have been the perfect moment to slip away. I didn’t.

  “I was upset about Gregory,” she said at last. She sounded like she was forcing herself to tell the story. “We were way out in Grass Valley, and his friends were being really snarky to me and that man did not have my back. He did not stand up for me once. So I’m tromping around in the woods, alone, at night, about to be eaten by a bear, for all she knows, and I call my best friend for a little support, and she yells at me.” She fumed for a few moments. “Danica Morgan’s opinion, is that Gregory is a bad idea. Do you know what she said to me?” And now she brightened angrily, with the joy of taking offense. “She told me to my face—we were on the phone, but you know what I mean—she completely dismissed his skill and his learning. His compassion as a healer! Knowing he’s brilliant. He’s fixed her effed-up neck so many times and she goes out and effs it up again and comes crying to him and does he ever lecture her? Does he ever say, now, Danica, you’re fifty-two years old, maybe you want to stop adopting insane children with oppositional defiance disorder and riding out into the wilderness on horseback with them? No! He does not. He lets her live her life the way she wants to. And she has the nerve to tell me to my face, and I quote, that man is a fucking idiot. This from a woman who calls herself a pastor. Judgmental Christian bullshit. I’m sick of it.”

  She subsided for a few moments. “And now, all of a sudden, it’s like it never happened. No I’m sorry, nothing. She was sweet as pie to him. Not that she didn’t have her chance.” And she gave a quiet, brutal laugh. “He was just trying to make a joke. So he’s a tiny bit socially inept. I know that. He’s not an idiot—but she could have ripped him to pieces. I’ve seen her do it for less, and laugh about it. It used to be a blood sport for her, back in the day.” When we really knew how to have fun, she did not need to add. When I knew she was on my side.

  IF ONLY SHE knew her own daughter was on her side. Reina loved her friends and family with an old chivalric fierceness, the kind that showers its recipients with banquets and finery. It’s an armor-clanking way to love, the kind that guards its bloodlines and requires periodic tests of loyalty.

  There is no better way to fail a daughterly test of loyalty than by deciding, in your second year of college, that now is a good time to have a child with a man your mother never met. You could make it a double, by telling your mother’s best friend before you tell the woman who gave birth to you. Then you and she could stand back and watch as your furious parent grasps how little you trust her; how certain you are to find your own way. Without your mother, who loves you so much the only thing missing from her life is the opportunity to die for you.

  “My nineteen-year-old daughter fucks some random asshole sex fiend,” Reina greeted me as I stumbled into the kitchen for a cup of coffee one morning. “Can’t even take a twenty-first-century precaution like a grown-up woman who knows where babies come from,” she seethed, fumbling around in the cupboard for the coffee beans.

  She was including me in her life. It was an invitation from a woman who had never judged me; who trusted me for no good reason; who shared her home and her appliances and her personal weaknesses with me. For all that, I owed her the simple courtesy of hearing her out. I took a seat at the bar.

  “And then, after she spreads her legs all over town, she asks her favorite Jesus freak: Can you think of any good reason I shouldn’t be somebody’s mother for the rest of my life?” She thrust her head into the cupboard, which only partly muffled her voice. “Maybe I should fuck up my entire life and raise a child on food stamps because, forget college, but hey, I’m a great waitress. Whatever we do, let’s not murder this clump of cells that’s growing inside my body because I let some guy fire one off at the wrong time of the month.” She plugged in the coffee grinder and flashed a few furious air quotes as she said the word “murder.”

  I began to wonder if my own mother invited people to share her life by reciting the details of my sexual illiteracy. Was Caitlin drinking coffee with a sympathetic listener right now, explaining her theories about why my marriage failed?

  “You know what I would have told her, if she’d had the decency to call her own mother?” Reina demanded. “Who happens to be a registered nurse, by the way: it is not a child. It is a cellular growth. That is science. She is supposed to be educated. She doesn’t even need to be vacuumed right now. She missed one period. She can take a pill and go home. Not that she knows how to take a pill or stay home. Obviously.” She seized a handful of coffee beans and slammed them into the grinder.

  I tried to remember how much I’d told Caitlin about my periods and fears. Had I ever talked about boys with her? Or had I just listened supportively as she reflected on the deeper meaning of her clients’ bizarre and horrible needs?

  “And does my oldest friend, the woman I trust more than anyone else—does she call me? Does she say, hey, you have a situation here? Does she let me handle my family the way I think we all agree I have the right?” Reina prowled the red-tiled kitchen with her fluffy bathrobe on, hunting for the coffee press. I took it out of the dishwasher and handed it to her.

  “Danica Morgan has been trying to get me to be a Christian since I don’t know when. “She probably thinks it is her God-given duty to advise an impressionable young woman to bring more unwanted children into the world so she can save them.” She picked up the pieces of the coffee press and glared at them accusingly, as if she were daring them to challenge her analysis. “It’s not like she’s stupid. She knows exactly what they did to us. With all her Native this and Tribal that. We’re in California, for crying out loud. Where does she think all those missions come from? It’s not enough my own daughter suddenly decides to be a Christian.” She shot another bad-tempered glare at the coffee press.

  I tried to remember if I’d ever read a book or seen a movie where the happy ending involved obedient adult offspring. Weren’t we all supposed to fall in love with people our parents wouldn’t have chosen for us; to disregard the way they raised us, and reject their spiritual teachings? Reina did not appear to know that. She was a mother, and I was a daughter. She was losing something I had never had.

  “I told her I could call in some favors at the hospital. Honey, I said.” Her voice when she said it was soft, like Danica’s when she declared herself a weakling for children. “I said, honey. You don’t need this right now. You have your whole life ahead of you . . .” She picked up the coffee things and surveyed them as if they had broken her heart.

  “And you think Danica knew?” I asked. I began to heat a pot of water, in case anybody ever decided to have a cup of coffee around here.

  “Oh! I know she knew. My Monya doesn’t lie to me. I raised her better than that. She let it slip when she was breaking the news to me. Her own mother! And I said, Monnie. Have you spoken to Dani about this? And she said, yes, I did, Mom.” She glared with triumphant anger, as if she had conducted herself honorably at a deposition and could now expect a favorable judgement. “And when I told her we need to get rid of this, she said, Mom, that’s horrible and offensive and I’m getting off the phone right now. And she hung up on me. I raised her better than that!” She whirled in her fuzzy pink slippers and seized the milk from the fridge, as if she would force this maternal fluid to pay for all the daughters who had been well raised and insisted on their right to misbehave.

  The Bear Plays with Fire,

  Expounds on Demon Love

  IT WAS
A season of rage, a monsoon of fury and hurt that battered the roses and pot. Alizarin used a palette knife to paint a towering piece. I wonder what the proper term is for a painting made with a knife. A knifing? She called it “The Patron Saint of Final Weddings”; rather ominously, I thought. The patron saint was leering from the bottom left-hand corner, with a bookie’s gleam in his eye.

  It was fall again, and by now I was such a fast trimmer, I could clean a pound in five or six hours. I spent every day inside, choking on wood smoke and resin. I think about that, every time I hear people talk about all those lazy pot farmers, sitting around watching their money grow on trees. I think about how many short fall days I turned my back on the final glories of the year and bent over my task like a data-entry clerk or a seamstress, working hard to make a living just like anybody else.

  Not that work at Serendipity Organics presented unnecessary hardships. We ate homegrown produce and mutton, fattened on poison oak and blackberry vines. We listened to public radio—except the first few days of rain, when every DJ felt compelled celebrate the harvest by playing nonstop Grateful Dead. Sometimes, Morpheus played songs he’d written, with two-part harmonies and lyrics of confounding subtlety. When that happened, Alizarin would raise her laryngitic voice and sing, with unexpected perfect pitch.

  There was something feverish about their singing that year. The more they fought, the more they sang. Their pitch took on the festive quality of an ER waiting room, where everyone is united in the glee of bleeding and endorphins.

  They had too practical a sense of ecstasy to crave the shabby facsimile of drugs. But I think they were addicted to warfare, the adrenaline roar of the rage and the hurt. The wine at Seder and the hippie outlaw acid trips were ritual forms of defying the oppressive dominant culture. They had the simultaneous advantages of being really fun, and kind of cerebral. But for all the time we spent cultivating, handling, and prettifying the gateway drug to heroin, no one at Serendipity was especially interested in using it.

  Warfare was the drug of choice. Alizarin and Morpheus fought with a single-mindedness that took precedence over everything else. It was needle and crack pipe and lines on a glass. Morpheus would roll in late to work, bleary-eyed and staggering, and weep in the teachers’ lounge after a ferocious battle. Alizarin would skip board meetings at the co-op gallery in town. She showed up distracted and edgy at functions that should have been ideal hunting grounds for hungry artists. They worked on their relationship with all the self-destructive fervor of an alcoholic mystic, honing his crystalline visions of The One while marinating in his own urine.

  And I saw Morpheus once, his eyes as crafty as an addict’s. I saw him contrive a scene that could only be dreamed of by someone whose ability to think symbolically has swollen like a vestigial organ that should be operated on immediately.

  In his own malleable realities, Morpheus created solar systems of intricate feeling, of thoughts informed by the highest principles of compassion. He was profoundly courteous to everyone he met in his mostly lucid dreams. Onstage, he was a tidal wave of nuanced tragedy, of joy with a shadow of pain. He was so captivating, no one else on stage existed as more than a moveable costume rack. I saw him play a dying man, rising to give voice to a last internal monologue. Narrative like that hardly ever works in live theater, not when everyone’s ear is tuned to the peals of cinematic voiceover. But Morpheus was so vital, so dying, so private in front of the crowd, that I don’t think a single breath was drawn until the lights went down.

  And yet, I saw him drag his undreaming carcass across the floor at Serendipity and place a gasoline-soaked rag in the cold dead ashes of the wood stove in the living room. I saw him tuck it in behind a blackened log and softly shut the door.

  As long as he’d lived on the homestead, Morpheus had never learned how to use a chainsaw. He was like some of the Americans I met in Germany, who bragged about how little German they knew, as if they’d proven their sturdiness of character by resisting some pernicious force. He was the only child of an unmarried schoolteacher, but Charnisse had a high-born horror of practical matters. He reminded me of one of Thackeray’s noblemen, whose fortunes have fallen so low, they can’t even keep a valet to help them dress. If Morpheus wore cravats and collars instead of velcro-fastened long-sleeved shirts, they would be greasy and askew. His wig would be utterly unkempt as he strummed his guitar, writing music madly by the stub of one last candle.

  “If he spent as much time cutting firewood as he does playing with that fucking guitar,” Alizarin complained, as if she were amazed he hadn’t thought of it himself. She left the conclusion dangling, like this might soften the statement into something indirect, like a question or a hint.

  She enlisted neighbors to offer him tutorials in manliness, but Morpheus would not be shamed. He would watch as some energetic competent man explained the workings of the chainsaw or the weed whacker or the diesel engine—and then he would take it in his hands and break it, or spill out all the gas, or leave the key in the ignition with the glow plug on until the battery died. Sometimes, he injured himself, and stood staring dumbly at the blood or the bruise or the blackening nail. The competent men would have known what to do if he had been playing gentleman farmer. They wanted to be gruff and good-natured, but he was semi-feral and didn’t like them. They were too kind, in their way, to accuse him of faking it. And besides, he wasn’t.

  He was embodying it, like a professional actor who immerses himself in a role, fully aware of what he is doing; who discovers, too late, that it has taken over his life. He was like a man whose cognizance of gravity doesn’t make him any less subject to its law when he throws himself off of a bridge.

  That was what happened, the day he tried to turn the wood stove into a giant Molotov cocktail. I was at the kitchen table with my little jar of grapeseed oil, committing misdemeanors. Alizarin liked each variety of pot to have a slightly different trim, so I was trying to give a tray of Chocolate Thai a feathery, whimsical look. The buds this year were light and airy, and she wanted to imply that she had grown them that way on purpose.

  Morpheus was interrupted as he sat on the floor, preparing to write a good song. His lips were moving. He was staring deep into the interior space where all the finest art resides before it takes its form. Every now and then, he stomped his foot or growled. It was a ritual for him, this demonstration of ferocity. He was showing the music that he was fierce enough to be worthy of it. And then Mike was there, with his big friendly ag-teacher glasses and his smiling sun-damaged face and his expertise in all things manly and mechanical. It was unconscionable.

  “Charnisse,” Alizarin said loudly. “Two o’ clock. Remember? Mike’s chainsaw lesson? You’ll have plenty of time to practice before it gets dark.”

  Mike smiled encouragingly. Morpheus rose and took a very long time to find his shoes. In a very short time, something happened to the chainsaw, and the men came back inside to reconnoiter. I considered moving my trimming operation somewhere else and decided against it. I could trim an ounce in the time it would take to gather up the buds and drag the table out of earshot and set up the lamp exactly right. I seemed to be chronically witnessing other people’s lives these days, as if, in failing to find a crisis of my own, I had a spare room in my life that I wasn’t using for anything else.

  As Mike conducted himself inappropriately—that is, taking stock of things with good cheer and rational thought—Morpheus began to move across the living room floor. He did this in a way that indicated impending disaster, by a number of cues too subtle to be identified. But if he were onstage, everyone in the audience would know that here was the guy who would get the message wrong, mix up the packages, leave the gate open, and accidentally set something on fire. The rest of us were moveable costume racks.

  As Mike and I watched—because what else do you do, when a brilliant actor takes the stage?—he opened the wood stove, placed the gasoline-soaked rag inside, arranged it as if it were a piece of useful kindling, and gently closed the
door. He was smiling.

  “What the fuck is that smell?” Alizarin asked, appearing like a Fury in a play about revenge. “You guys aren’t fucking with that chainsaw in the house, are you?”

  Mike looked guilty and distraught. The young farmers in his classroom, with their simple rustic courtesies and sunburned faces, had not prepared him for a city-born lady homesteader who used expletives like commas. Alizarin, who always seemed to be suffering from poison oak, had finger smears of burnt sienna on her face and neck where she had scratched herself savagely. They made her look like she’d been pawed by something made of red clay.

  “Well, we used some rags,” Mike began with reassuring civility, “to clean up a little mishap—”

  Alizarin zeroed in on the stove. “Charnisse. You didn’t put those rags in my stove, did you? I know you didn’t put those rags in my stove.” The repetition heightened the tension, like a phrase that turns into a curse if it’s said three times. “Because that would be a stupid fucking asshole thing to do, Charnisse.”

  When he answered, he spoke like he was unsurprised to find himself in a Socratic dialogue where no one else has ever had a single coherent thought. “We can’t just throw them away,” he stated, as reasonably as if he were positing a universal premise. His eyes were stubborn to the point of cruelty. “That’s toxic waste.”

  “You want them to blow up in my face when I start the fire?” Alizarin was never mocking in her fury. That was Caitlin’s weapon. Caitlin, who had even less sense of proportion than anyone else, would have created a scathing sarcastic fable, starring M.C. Harness as a bumbling Prometheus. But Caitlin regularly made herself ridiculous by turning Gatlin guns on mice.

  “They won’t blow up in your face.” He sounded affectionate and exasperated, as if she’d told him the leprechauns were withering the kale.