I listened to the rest of them just drone on and on. "Grateful to be here—grateful to be sober. If I don't go to these meetings I'll drink, blah, blah, blah."
At least I had something to say. But looking around here, realistically, who was going to understand it?
When I talked about the horrors of my new job, and what a bitch my coworker was, I didn't get much sympathy on that score either, which made me mad and want to never return. What would they care, anyway, if I didn't come back? Not like I'd be punishing them or anything; they barely noticed me. I went to get a cup of coffee and their nasty cream. I decided to move to the end of the table, away from all of them.
I noticed a stack of newspapers. I slid one of them over and glanced at the picture. It was some sports team. God, who cares?
“And then when I looked around I noticed everyone was staring at me. I don't know what I was thinking, telling everyone I was an alcoholic like that. What did I expect them to do? But I don't care. I think it's important to admit what I am and if they don't like it they can—blah, blah, blah," said some redheaded newcomer. She had big green eyes and freckles and had the jitters all the time. She was constantly reaching for her cigarettes in the nonsmoking meeting and then pulling her hand back from the box, all the while speaking.
I turned the page of the newspaper. I knew it was kind of rude, but I was feeling defiant. Weather forecasts and a chart. A little picture of the sun. God, couldn't someone interesting please share? All this and then I was going to have to get up and go to work tomorrow.
At least I could sleep in. I didn't have to be at work till 3:00, so I could go home and turn on the TV and just lay there watching movies or old programs. I could also read, I suppose, but reading kind of scared me lately, not like when I was a kid. Now reading seemed purposeless, meaningless. I suppose it always had been and now I was just noticing it.
I was tempted to share again, partly because I did like to hear myself talk, but also genuinely because I wanted to hear something else, something interesting. Now a man was telling about how he worked the program and if you would just work the program too you would be so great.
Did the program do anything about nightmares?
I drank my coffee slowly and turned another page. I'd been coming to these meetings a long time now. I used to swear by them, and they did help. It was partly that the longer you were in here, the less bullshit you had to spew. A lot of them didn't stick around.
Strange as it seemed, I'd never run into a single person I knew in there. You'd think that with all the dysfunctional people I knew one of them besides me would end up here. None of them lived here anymore, so I suppose that was why.
I flipped to the next page. On page seven of the local news, there it was: a picture of my little blue Chevette being pulled out of the lake.
5
I peered at the picture. It couldn't be.
The headline read, "Car Pulled From Lake."
I shut the paper and several people turned and looked at me. I kept my head real still for a moment, and then I practically spilled the rest of my coffee as I jumped up from my seat. I didn't take the paper with me. Could barely touch it. Knocking over a chair on my way out of there, I made so much disturbance that the person sharing stopped talking and watched me leave.
"Are you okay?" asked someone by the door.
What did they care? They didn't give a damn if I was 'okay,' and what the hell did “okay” mean, anyway. I nearly knocked them over, trying to get out the door. If I didn't get out of there I knew I would scream right there in the meeting. Oh God, did I leave my keys in there? Where were they–where were they? Oh good, they were there at the bottom of my purse amidst the clutter. I didn’t have to go back in there.
No one followed me out. I was glad, because I didn't want to explain myself. They always had some sort of insipid answer like, ‘work through your issues.’ Did they think I hadn't done that a thousand times?
No this wasn't ‘issues,’ not an emotional trauma. The nightmares. The dreams of Krishna and the water. The freezing water. I needed to talk to … maybe not Krishna, but one of them, any one of them.
If I could just talk to one of them.
It was such a surreal drive home, as if I were in another town, not my hometown, not Oshkosh. The streets were strange, and I made a wrong turn. How could that happen in the town I'd been driving around and around in, complaining about the restrictive boundaries of, for—well—since I started driving at age sixteen. I was too tired to do the math, and besides I was never good at math.
I couldn't find the street. It was supposed to be only two or three blocks. A right on Bowen, three blocks and then a left on New York Avenue, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw, for just a moment, Gay riding her bike, headphones on, hands free, arms waving, dancing wildly in the air, jammin' and swinging to bubblegum pop.
Okay, I recognized this road, but there was no way I could be way out here, unless I'd driven at least twenty minutes longer than I thought I had, and in the completely wrong direction. I was out by the carp ponds where we used to get stoned and stare at the lake.
***
"This lake is named after an Indian tribe, you know. I think that calls for a peace pipe." Gay fills the bowl after deseeding the bag by throwing those seeds right onto the floor of my little blue Chevette. The fire lights her eyes and cheeks as she sucks in off of that peace pipe. It’s Krishna's pipe. We have been using that thing so long I don't think we would know how to smoke a different one. It is wooden, red like Krishna's room, all the red clothes that hang from her walls, and the red bedspread with silver and gold etchings, and glittery embroidery of elephants and palaces. Not like the embroidery in my house of darling hot pads and little farms with ducks.
"It's not a tribe. It's a chief," I say, blowing slowly and meditatively through my pursed lips. I hand it ceremoniously to Krishna. We had a whole bag of pot. We were okay for several days, but who thought about several days.
"No. You're both wrong." Gay and I look at her as if we had no idea what she was talking about. We didn't. "It's a chief and a tribe."
And then, after what seemed like an eternal pause, and from out of nowhere, I hear my own voice—sounding very far away—say, "Wouldn't that make us both right?"
We all three stare out at the dark lake.
Then, for no reason, all three of us burst out laughing at the same time.
***
I pulled up right to the old, white lighthouse and parked. I hadn't been out here in such a long time. There was no one else out here. Once, in the middle of winter, Gay and I went off the road into a ditch and were stuck at a 45-degree angle in a snow bank. I think only one car drove by in the time it took us to smoke an entire half-ounce. It wasn't until we were completely out of pot that we got out and walked the half-mile in the knee-deep, bright, afternoon snow to knock on some unwilling stranger's door.
The images were seeping into my brain. The rusted piece of old metal, the shell of my car. And what was that inside it? It was too dark to tell in the picture in the newspaper that I had stared at for that one transfixed second.
The car door slam echoed in the dark behind me as I wandered to the edge of the lake. The lighthouse glowed white and eerie from the grass-covered, rocky edge up the way. It loomed closer and closer until I climbed the weed-covered, stone steps that led to the dead, locked door.
"Why did you get out of your car and walk around?” Miriam took off her glasses when she said this. She only took those clear-plastic frames off when she was serious. I wondered if the glass in them was really prescription or just a prop for these occasions. They hung by a beautiful, silver chain around her neck, over a lovely, caramel-colored, silk blouse.
"What do you mean why?"
"I mean, you were frightened by the picture, seems like a more frightening thing to do to drive to a park in the middle of the night and walk around a lighthouse at midnight alone?"
"It's not a park. It was the carp ponds.
"
I stared at the serene pieces of art on the wall, the ones in all offices of pastel colors. Who could get upset looking at these?
There was one piece of art in there that I thought truly represented Miriam. It was a very small mask that must have come from someplace like Sumatra.
Krishna had a lot of things like that in her room. Small, jeweled elephants, dark masks, little decorated boxes and knickknacks that came from far-flung corners of the world. Indonesia. The Philippines. Japan.
On her coffee table she had lots of interesting pieces of art that she had made: a ceramic ashtray in the shape of lips, a white, ceramic mold she had made of her boyfriend Ames’s arm. It held a red candle, and when she burned it, it looked like the arm was dripping blood. She used to giggle about that. She had designed it that way. She had made a mold of his arm and put that red candle in it so she could light it and watch blood drip down his arm and giggle about it. When she broke up with him, she didn’t even bother telling him she had. She just said, when he showed up somewhere, “What are you still doing here? We’re not dating anymore.”
Boxes and boxes: tiny, jeweled ones, larger ones painted in bold, beautiful colors, ones laden with ivory carvings. Not cluttered looking even for the fact that they seemed to be everywhere I looked.
"Here," she would say, her eyes sparkling with mischievous glee, "you can have this one. It's perfect for containing weed."
And she would hand me an embroidered red and silver and gold silk case with gold snaps.
I'd ceased to question why I should be so enchanted with this idea. It was part of being with Krishna: receiving odd little gifts from around the world to contain my dope in.
They were the exotic counterpart to the cedar chest belonging to my grandmother, or the cigar box from the nineteen twenties from my grandfather. I accepted them with the delight she expected to see, then loaded up her little, red, wooden pipe and passed it around. Once I had brought a dragon-shaped bong, but we just sat and looked at it while passing the pipe. It was far too fancy for use. We'd yet to take a single toke off it.
One time we lost her red, wooden pipe. It was nowhere to be found. We were stuck using the dragon beast and out of matches. Fortunately Krishna was always lighting incense and candles everywhere, so even though we'd run out of matches, we still had fire.
"They once asked Keith Richards what's the worst thing imaginable; he said not having a match,” Krishna observed as she looked in every single drawer more than once.
"Shit,” she said finally. "I'm too stoned to go downstairs.” And she sat down, exhausted from the search. It was, after all, 2:00 a.m.
Meanwhile, Gay was holding that giant, white arm that drips candle-wax blood at an angle, trying to light the dragon bong, trying to get a toke off it, but the red wax keeps dripping into the bowl, causing the weed to smolder much longer than normal, and hurting her lungs. She coughs and complains. Krishna sits giggling at the sight of it.
After a while I notice the lighter sitting on Krishna's glitter- and candle-laden coffee table.
I grab the lighter and light a cigarette while watching Gay's struggle with my dragon bong, and toss it casually back on the table.
It takes Gay a few moments to recognize the humor in it. She looks over at my cigarette embers glowing in the dimness of the candle-lit room. She glances over at Krishna, who has closed her eyes and laid her head back against the pillowed chair. As if to say, I’ve wasted this much time, I might as well continue, Gay resumes her struggle with the arm, the dripping candle wax, and the dragon pipe.
***
“Snap out of it, Jane, come back to the present. Why were you out by the carp ponds?”
“What was the question?”
“Why were you out by the carp ponds?”
"Well," I began, still focusing on her small, dark mask set on the desk, "I, um … it didn't seem … it wasn't scary out there …"
"It sounds a bit like the start of your dream."
"No,” I said. "The dream always starts out at the party. For some reason it seems like the last party before everyone began to drift away."
"The Beatles versus the Stones face-off?"
"Yes.” I laughed.
"Things often have a deeper meaning than appears on the surface."
"True, and this sure seemed to. You see, we'd been arguing about this for years. Who was better? And sometimes I would get so confused because she seemed to really like the Beatles … oh this sounds so ridiculous."
"Not at all," Miriam reassured. "Go on. Before we run out of time today. Don't worry about how it sounds."
"Well they all did, you know: Ziggy, Krishna, Gay, everyone. They all loved the Beatles. But I guess it came down to whether they loved the Stones more. This really bothered me. I think it was because they loved something about jadedness and cynicism more than innocence."
"Good.”
"Well, we decided to have it out once and for all."
"And you lost count of your drinks,” Miriam said. “You were drinking very heavily that night. More than usual. Why were you drinking heavier than usual, Jane?"
"I'm very thirsty, I'm sorry, I can't go on with this till I get a drink of water."
"Well why don't you try. We are going to have to stop soon and you …"
"I … I can't; I'm sorry. I am so thirsty. I have to go. I have to go to work now. I don't want to get disoriented and end up missing work. I was late yesterday."
But I didn't have to be to work for a couple hours. I knew that Miriam knew this too, but she didn’t stop me when I got up to leave. I left without using my full hour, but I had to get water, and I had to get out of there.
Dad sat in a lawn chair on the freshly mown grass reading a book when I drove up. I went directly through the back porch though, so I didn’t speak to him.
"Well you're home early. Aren't you supposed to go to work?” Mom asked.
"Not till three."
"How did your session go?"
"Okay."
"How was the meeting last night?"
"Good, I guess."
"I was worried about you when you didn't get home till 2:00 a.m."
"You shouldn't worry about me—I'm an adult."
"That's true. It's time to grow up, Jane."
"Uh huh. Do we have any pop? Juice? Anything? I'm so thirsty. Lemonade?"
"I don't know—whatever's in there, I guess."
I opened the door and felt the cool air come out. It was refreshing, but there wasn't anything to drink. Just milk.
"Milk isn't thirst-quenching."
"Well if that's all we have, then that's all we have."
"I guess I'll have to go to the store, which is too bad; I barely have time." I thought maybe if I looked in there a little longer something might appear.
Nothing in the fridge. I decided to walk to Walker’s.
Walking to Walker's, I could still hear the echo of Krishna’s laughter. She thought Walker’s was the funniest thing ever, because there was a huge, 1950s-style, garish painting of a woman in a dress and pearls shopping, and underneath it said, “Walker’s, the largest grocery store on New York Avenue.”
Why wouldn’t she answer the phone? I needed to tell her about my dream.
I bought a big, cold jug of lemonade—so nice to buy it with my own money. To not feel a single twinge of guilt when I bought it. To not have to explain.
If this job worked out for me, maybe I could move into my own apartment. For all my talk, I had never done that. And you couldn't exactly call a room at the state hospital an apartment. I'd been away from there quite a while now. For a long time I thought I would never live away from that place for more than a year at a time. Part of being able to stay out of that place was staying drug-free.
Nothing could be worse than trying to get hold of weed when you are out of high school. For a few years, maybe ten at the most, you could still get it by hanging around the same crowds, going to the same parties. But then, as you got older, you had
to hang back. You couldn't be the screaming life of the party anymore.
I arrived at back my house, passing my dad again, reading in the chair. He had a big, thick “whodunit.”
"How's the book?"
"Oh, this is a good one.” He looked up from it and smiled. "Dorothy Lee Sayers. You really should read her."
"Oh, I will, Dad, I will."
I headed in through the front hall, the one that had last been remodeled when I was nine years old. It used to be an open front porch, but now it was an enclosed entryway. The red carpet in it matched nothing else in the house. In fact, none of the rooms matched any of the other rooms. Mom had done each with its own theme. The kitchen was done with New Orleans in mind.
The Danish dining room’s blue and white walls were still dotted with plates, painted with pictures of the sea, and sailboats, and mermaids. The gaudy, gold living room—a tribute to antiquity with paintings of Roman ruins on the walls—had once been lined with shelves stuffed with books, many of which were valuable, rare editions, published in the last century, the pride of my father, the history professor. My mom went on a rampage one day and cleared the bookshelves and sold them all for twenty-five cents at a garage sale, leaving those shelves barren and meaningless.
I went upstairs to my room after drinking a big glass of lemonade. Up in my room, I lay down to rest before getting ready for work. One nap. Would I wake up in time?
I did. I made it in, with a minute to spare, except I again forgot that I was supposed to be there at fifteen till. I must have a mental block against this.
As I did the rounds, caring for the patients—getting them drinks, fluffing their pillows, putting lotion on their dry skin as per the stats—I kept thinking, I should have called Krishna. I forgot again.
I wouldn't get out of there till 11 o'clock. It would be too late then. Or would it? That never used to be a late time for her. Was it now? I didn’t know anymore. I had no idea what her schedule was now. What she did.
Maybe I could just make a quick call from one of these rooms. Maybe if I could get the curtain closed. Mrs. Taylor's room was quiet. She couldn't talk. She'd been comatose since she'd arrived. She wouldn't say anything. I shut the curtain around her bed, then I shut the door, and quickly picked up the phone and dialed. I had dialed it enough times now that I remembered. Actually, the first time I dialed, I dialed her old number by accident. Every time I dialed that phone number, I thought about how her brother always said to remember the number by the year Hitler invaded Poland.
The Oshkosh Trilogy 01 - The Dark Lake Page 3