by Fiona Maazel
“Well piss on him,” said Dee one.
Penelope: wheezing.
Cecilia, in drawl: “You said it.”
“But mostly, I felt alone. I’ve always felt alone. I mean when you think about it, what kind of woman wants to be a trucker? I never really had a community, friends I felt comfortable around. And I think my husband just got off on the whole thing. Probably thought this heifer redhead would boss him around and cuff his nuts to the bedpost. I wasn’t always this thin, you know. Anyway, I started producing my own stuff because I was too shy to go to the clubs, and when I was high and feeling like I could do anything, I forgot I was out to cop. I burned my fingers down to the bone and had to get them amputated. After that, it got too hard to work the lab. And the guys at the bars and stuff, they didn’t really want to fuck a woman with this horrible stump. So I started covering it up with gauze, but I guess it doesn’t make much difference. I have the virus now. And I’m on so many drugs for that plus antidepressants to help withdrawal, I feel like I’m in some horrible creature’s mouth.”
Susan nodded, said thanks, and immediately passed us on to Cecilia, the logic being that the accrual of miserable anecdotes beats a slow pondering of each, for the one results in overflow and horror while the other is a term paper.
Cecilia wore a straw hat pulled low, which served no discernible purpose except to shield her eyes from view so that she might be looking at you or out the window, who could say. I was surprised Susan let her wear it in group, but then the woman was eighty-five and how much clout can a yoga teacher-cum-clipboard muster on a day’s notice? Cecilia was saying she’d gotten the hat yesterday and that it was her first happiness since coming to this pit, selected by majority rule among her grandchildren, 75 percent of whom said Bluebonnet was the shit, in contrast to the 15 percent who wanted an old folks’ home in Key West and the remaining 10 who were too bound up in addictions of their own to vote, but whose proxy (illegally appointed, FYI) thought Bluebonnet was actually a kind of butter and that if they could do butter and recovery in the same place—wait, did the patients make the butter, like prisoner widgets?—the world was a marvel and the proxy just a kid, so, sure, whatever, majority rules.
“My husband and I have been retired for ten years,” she said. “And we did it right. We sold our house in Maine and bought a motor home. Not one of those low-class campers, mind you, but a luxury motor coach. There’s an entire community out there of retirees who travel the States like this. It’s quite civilized. Seven-foot ceilings, marble-tiled floors, Ralph Lauren bedding, custom-built cabinets, a quad slide-out for more galley space when we parked—we had it all. Dennis taught me to drive the coach and with practice, I did it well. Oh, it was so much fun. The places we went. But then, after a while, I still don’t know what happened. We were visiting a campsite up in Amarillo. Dennis had been talking about it for months, this restaurant where they gave you a free seventy-two-ounce steak if you could eat it within one hour. Dennis said the world record was a little over nine minutes. Can you imagine? Nine minutes to eat a steak the size of a puppy? I told Dennis it’d be like eating a puppy. I had gone to Radcliffe as an undergraduate; I had studied nutrition. He was a land developer from Kansas. We were not exactly bred from the same stock.”
I caught Dee two looking at her watch. It was impossible to run out of time in group because we’d always pick up where we left off, but this was of no consolation to Dee, who needed to talk very badly. Meantime, Cecilia had grown quiet. I thought she was reflecting on the acid flare-up Dennis had mistaken for a heart attack, during which flare-up he had panicked and veered off the road, losing two of the three ounces of hide he’d put down, and pitching Cecilia’s beloved feline, Tina, against the windshield with such force that she stuck there, in the radial crack, like a hunter’s kill mounted for show. But it was not that. Rather, Cecilia had lost her train of thought, not to mention cognizance of her whereabouts, time of year, and the happenstance of her outfit—this straw hat, Nike trainers, and knee-high sheers.
I looked at the others, trying to gauge the degree to which I should be alarmed. But then a bunch of drug addicts are not the best measure of cool under fire, so I looked to Susan, whose expression ciphered marvelously whatever ran through her head, whether Cecilia couldn’t remember her name or began to zig heil.
We moved on to Dee one, which seemed to provide Dee two with some relief. Her turn was only a single Dee away.
Susan said, “Don’t be shy, Dee. You’ve done this before. They won’t seem like newcomers once you’ve shared. That is the beauty of sharing, it makes you fast friends. You may not want new friends, but this is beside the point.”
Dee had actually said nothing, which meant Susan was conducting this conversation on her own. She was starting to puddle in those sweat pants and hoodie. Sinking low in her chair, losing shape. I bet this job killed her before the year was out.
“Go on,” she said. “We’re listening.”
I thought Dee two might pop a gland for how she was squirming in her seat. Dee one, at last, took a breath and started. “My story’s boring,” she said. “That’s the problem. I went and broke my arm, got set up with a rod they put in there, took some painkillers, and I liked them. But I never did crank or nothing.”
“Do not compare,” Susan said. “Identify.”
I smiled. In every recovery group there’s always at least one person who does not think she’s addict enough to belong there. This is either a source of pride or self-disgust, though in both cases it is by way of rejecting help.
“Well, all right, but I’m not sure what to say. I been here a week and I still don’t know what to say. Painkillers just made me feel less miserable. My daddy abused me all his life until the Lord saw it right to take him away. My stepmother’s part hobo, so she took to wandering from place to place and I didn’t see her after I was nine. I moved in with a cousin who must have been raised with Daddy because he touched me, too. I never did tell anyone when the time mattered. I never did get pregnant either, which was a blessing until I got married because if you can’t bear children with the man who’s agreed to take care of you, you aren’t worth much.”
She leaned back and began to tug on her earlobe. I noticed it was ripped from pierce to rim, like someone had yanked on her earring until it gave. She had brown tinsel hair streaked with gray that parted in the middle and gathered in a ball atop her head. Her face was chiseled and gaunt, but it didn’t look natural, as if masculinity was just a defensive measure she had worn so long, it took.
“My husband put me down, said he was gonna leave me for a woman with life between her legs. I said I understood, I wouldn’t stop him. Only he didn’t leave. He just impregnated someone else and when the baby was born he brought her to our house and said we was going to raise her. From then on, I hardly existed. It was Martha this and Martha that. I could tell from looking at her she belonged to the hairdresser in town, no one else had those blue eyes, and the hairdresser, she just upped and left one day, which was fine with me. We were a family and it was good. I even told John as much, when we were lying in bed, because it had been so long since we were intimate and I figured now that we had Martha it wouldn’t disturb him, my infertility, so I got to messing around with him but it was no use. I decided a barren woman cannot rouse a man no more than a wart, so I gave it up. We were a family, like I said. Anyway, next night I had gone to bed early, which might account for why I woke up round midnight because there was no other sound in the house, not even John breathing next to me, which made sense since he wasn’t even in bed. I didn’t think to call after him, I just tiptoed down the hall and as I did, all the memories from when I was a girl came back at me so violent that when I found John with Martha, and his hand was cupped over her mouth, and her little nightgown was drawn up her chest, I took the first thing I could find and next I know we were tussling and I was biting and clawing and then we struck through the banister and fell off the landing. I heard a terrible crack and didn’t mu
ch care if it was me or him, except for Martha was screaming from her bed and I had to do something about it.
“By the time John was in the earth and I got my arm fixed, the courts had taken Martha, saying she wasn’t mine to begin with, and, I don’t know, I guess she’s with her mother or in foster care, they wouldn’t tell me. Back at home, there was nothing to do, so I took my painkillers and slept and I found I liked the sleep and that I could save money on food if I slept through meals, and if I hadn’t been busted by my aunt stealing from the pouch under her mattress, I’d probably still be on that floor, with the shanks that was our banister, sleeping peacefully.”
Susan said, “Does that mean you miss the drugs?”
Dee said, “Does the Pope shit?”
In the two seconds that followed, I realized I’d begun to feel very bad. These were not nice stories. These people were on their last legs. If they did not get clean here, probably they would die. Meantime, I had to pee. All of a sudden. I was even starting to feel incontinent. Overflow and horror is right. I glanced at Susan, whose carriage was like wet socks on the line. I nodded, glad for this moment of camaraderie because it’s stupid to vilify the counselor just because you feel bad. She stood and said, “I think now is a good time to break for lunch. Be back here in forty-five.”
Dee two was ready to blow. And her impatience was catching. There wasn’t enough time to get back to my hole for replenishing, which meant I would have to deal on my own. Mother, of course, was worse. She had her nasty face on, which meant she not only thought everyone was on the verge of doing her harm, she also imagined they had done so already. I took her arm and made for the cafeteria.
We ate mac and cheese. We sat at our private table and this time we were not disturbed. People recognized that look on Mother’s face because they’d had it, too.
I said, “Pretty hard-core, those women.”
Grunt.
“Warnings, I guess.”
She stabbed at her macaroni with a fork, trying to load each tine full.
“Not that our experiences can’t claim the same heartache and degradation.”
Grunt.
“Or that every drug addict’s story doesn’t reduce to the principle of take for the ache. I mean, here we are in the middle of nowhere though we might as well be in the city for how different it is. Maybe it’s like how you hear the same music played all over the world. Even in Uzbekistan, you can probably catch Madonna or Bono. Possibly this has everything to do with the hegemony of the West but I think it’s more like what that gay guy said in those Harvard lectures, how when you call out to your mom, no matter what language, you always cry out the same two notes, likewise when one kid teases another—nyeah, nyeah—it’s always the same music, so that even as diversity abounds in our universe, we continue to abuse the same refrain. Take for the ache, you know?”
She looked up from her bowl. “We are the world, we are the children.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Grunt.
It was time to go back.
During lunch, Susan had raked all her hair into the clip and gelled the migrant pieces around her ears. She was drawn up so tight, you could strop knives where once was her face. She looked like a performer at the start of Act II, where the lead seems restored to fire after the exertions of Act I, though the effects are cosmetic. Any second, she was gonna look ten times the wasted rehab Samaritan she had been before.
Cecilia raised her hand. She’d traded the hat for a headscarf, which tied under her chin. I wondered if her room was in the main building and not out in the barracks. The scarf complemented her overall frailty so that when she began to address us as her students, as if she were our teacher, you just wanted to indulge her any way you could. Unless you were Susan, for whom hallucination came at the expense of the group, or Dee two, who’d had just about enough. She turned on Cecilia like she might slap her and said, “You’ve had your turn, kindly be quiet.”
Cecilia brought her hand to her mouth as if perhaps she’d let out a little belch and said, “Oh, dear.” Her eyes darted across the room. “Oh, dear.”
Gale squatted at Cecilia’s knee and said, “Don’t mind her, Ms. Broome. She’s having a bad day and you are still the best teacher we ever had.”
At this, Cecilia relaxed and patted her shoulder. Gale returned to her seat but not before shooting Dee two a look of such hatred, I thought I’d wither just from being in the vicinity.
Dee one, who sat next to me, leaned over. I guess I looked bewildered. She said, “It’s not Alzheimer’s. She’s gone batty because of the tranqs and sleeping pills. I guess if you’re old and take too much of that stuff, you go demented. Sad, right? She’s got insomnia.”
I nodded, though sad hardly covered it.
Susan said, “Okay, Deirdre, you’ve got the floor.”
Deirdre?
Dee one picked up on my thoughts there, too. “She’s Deirdre, I’m Dee-Ann.”
This was the most confusing rehab ever.
“Thank you,” said Dee two. “I’m glad the why of drug use is today’s topic because I struggle with this a lot. My therapist says I need to get to know myself, that I should go about it the same way as if I were making a new friend. So I’m supposed to put to myself lots of basic questions. ‘Why did you use drugs?’ is usually at the top of my list.”
She was wearing makeup. Pink lipstick that did nothing for the teak-and-olive color scheme of her face. She wore novelty earrings—miniature mugs—and a gold fish around her neck because she was a Pisces. I could not imagine what she and Dee one had in common aside from a diminishing sobriquet, but it seemed they were for each other what left is to right. She crossed her legs at the ankle and sat erect with hands folded in her lap. I was thinking a Sears photographer would have had a field day with her.
She blew the bangs out of her eyes. The sheen of her forehead was near reflective. I imagined her skin felt like putty, sorta wet and cool. She was taking deep breaths by way of preparation for her share, which was so long coming, we were primed for it.
“Oh, I can’t,” said Dee two.
Cecilia got to her feet and said, “You had better start talking right now, you can’t just leave us hanging out to dry, how many consolations do you think we get in this horrible place?”
Gale attempted to coax her back to her chair, but as she only had success with Cecilia gone mad, she was told to buzz off by Cecilia sober.
Susan appeared to have turned the group over to self-rule. As if from self-rule comes esprit de corps and not anarchy. She put her hand up for quiet. Everyone looked at Dee two, who was, she swore, ready.
“Okay, okay. Let’s see. I want to preface all this by saying I grew up in a loving family, that I had no complaints as a child, and wanted for nothing. So my, my habit, it’s absolutely my fault. Nothing triggered it. It’s maybe even inexplicable, which is what I was saying before. I don’t know. My husband and I have two sons, they are both grown now, one’s at Ohio State and the other’s at Tufts. Our house was always full of their friends. There was always lots of noise and activity and I was proud, you know, that my house was where people came to be social, that people felt comfortable there. My husband and I were like second parents to a lot of these kids. And when there was trouble, they came to us. Don’t think I didn’t hold a hand or two at the abortion clinic.”
She paused to search Dee one’s face for approval because you could never know whom the word abortion was going to set off. But it was fine, she got the nod.
“Dick and I, we thought after the kids left we’d sell our house and move to Seattle, where my mother lived. She was getting on in years. And we didn’t really see the point in keeping such a big house for just the two of us. Dick would go to the office and suddenly the house would get so quiet. It had always been quiet during the day, but this was different. Maybe because the quiet wasn’t an interlude. Anyway, we kept talking about Seattle and looking at houses online and talking to brokers about selling our own house, but
somehow, I don’t know, the months went by. Dick was busier than ever at work—he had a class action suit against Ford—and I hardly saw him. Most nights I ate alone in front of the TV. But then it was Christmas vacation and Jack and Michael were home. They’d come with a few friends each. And it was like old times. You should have seen these boys. Full of life. With them in the house, I started pulling my hair back again. And wearing more color because Jack said I looked too Romanian in my gray flannels. Dick was so tired from work, he didn’t much enjoy the visit. He couldn’t take time off, so he was more like a guest than the guests were. He’d come home at one in the morning and find us sitting around the kitchen table, playing poker. The boys would be going through six-packs of beer faster than I could finish a single White Russian. I must have lost three thousand dollars.”
She took a sip of water. I noticed her hands shaking in her lap. You got the feeling this story was about to go south.
“On their last night home, I got a little frantic. I had not realized how lonely I was until I had company. I didn’t want them to leave. It was irrational, but I was afraid. The house was so big, you heard things. Anyway, that last night we sat around a fire in the living room and roasted marshmallows. I was always trying to take my cues from the boys so as not to overstay my welcome. I was just the mom, after all. But they seemed content to have me there, especially when they were high. Just pot, I thought it was fine. That night my sons were both super tired, and they turned in. Their friends did the same, except Todd, who helped me clean up. I was wearing a robe cinched at the waist. I remember this because it kept opening when I walked. I cleared the ashtrays and tossed the beer bottles, and started to dust. I couldn’t stop moving. If I kept moving, the night would not end and I would not be alone. Todd said I looked a little anxious and did I want some grass. My heart was pounding so fast, I thought it would split. He sat me down. He took my wrist and just, I guess he just took over. We smoked joint after joint because it wasn’t working for me. Then it did. I remember laughing a lot. And him saying I had a beautiful smile. And me feeling all warm inside, and the next thing he’s cupping his hand around my breast. Mind you, I had seen The Graduate. I knew this was Mrs. Robinson. But I didn’t stop him. I just slid really low on the couch and let him part my legs. He was kissing my stomach and moving down my body and I knew what he was about to do, but I didn’t stop him. Dick wasn’t keen on that sort of thing and neither was I. But I had smoked some pot for the first time and I was afraid to be alone and Todd had his mouth on me and there was nothing that was going to stop it. And I swear, I had never felt anything better, it was a sensation I could not explain, but which was, I guess, that thing you heard about. I nearly pulled out his hair. I was like some animal. After, I hardly knew what to do. I heard him finish himself off in the bathroom. I wrapped my robe tight, but my legs were jelly and I could not get up.