Like a lot of straight edge kids, Aaron came to the scene—and then left it, and then got into it again—after doing a lot of drugs. He’d done all the drugs, to be exact. Well, everything but heroin, he clarified. Nothing like that. There were some he liked more than others. But all of them were packaged in the distant cubby of the past. Straight edge was a narrative—a savior narrative, the story of saving oneself—that allowed him to see his life to that point, his twenty-something years, as containing a Before and After.
I found the weed in his desk drawer. I was looking for some papers. It was in a plastic baggie with a lighter in a hanging file folder. As soon as I saw it, I closed the drawer, walked to the bedroom, and forgot it.
Maybe part of my brain didn’t register what it was. I was the naïve girl, after all, who had once carried a large bong-shaped box into the Bob Marley music festival for my friends while they snickered behind my back. But most of my brain knew what my eyes had seen. It’s just that my brain didn’t want to see it. I was like a possum playing dead. We call this “denial,” or sometimes “survival.”
A few hours later I woke up from my possum death and a curtain rose in my head. I walked back to the desk drawer and opened it. There it was, hanging in the file folder. I hadn’t imagined it.
That evening, I heard him on the phone. I listened to him from across the house. My brain didn’t want to listen, so I made my ears do it. He was soft-spoken, pleading, matter of fact. He had run out of something, and he needed it.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked when he hung up.
“A friend,” he said.
“What were you talking about?”
He paused for just a beat. “VHS cases.”
“VHS cases? You’ve run out of VHS cases?”
He looked at me and knew I knew.
“I found your pot,” I said.
We didn’t fight that time. He didn’t deny it. He was defeated. He was sorry he’d lied to me. He had been smoking pot. He felt that he needed it. He was sad all the time. It made him feel better.
I thought of the Rimbaud poem I’d read after our first date. All the exclamation marks, all the O’s.
It had appealed to me, this sadness, when it had been merely figurative. I liked thinking of Aaron as a lost boat. I could steer him to shore.
But now I didn’t know what to do.
“I’m sleeping in the dorm tonight,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you kept something from me.”
“But I kept something from you because I’m sad.”
I rode my bike to the dorm and cried and slept in my lonely bed.
We had to break up, I reasoned. He’d lied to me and now we would break up.
FAMILY OF ORIGIN
I like to think I came by my denial honestly.
I liked growing up in my house, because we didn’t have to go to church and could swear. My mom was an artist and a secretary at the elementary school and later a teacher. My dad was an architect and a photographer. He built every piece of furniture in the house. In Gainesville, where we lived until I was eight, they had a studio in our garage, where my dad smoked a pipe and sketched buildings, and my mom smoked cigarettes and painted canvases of figures with no faces. “Can’t you put just a nose on one?” I wondered. Our bathroom was a darkroom where my father developed his photos. My friends were always scared to go in there. Many of them told me years later that they had watched their first R-rated movie at my house. We farted freely. That was enough openness to fool me into thinking we were a functional family. A little weird, but functional.
I mean, we functioned. We paid the bills, went to school, made art, shot hoops in the driveway. We decorated the Christmas tree. We ate macaroni and cheese and hot dogs, sometimes in the same dish. We rode bikes all over the neighborhood. We drove from Florida to Vermont in a Volkswagen Rabbit, our stinky dog, Wheezer, at our feet, our parents smoking the whole way. We loved each other and often said so. All of the things we said were well and good, but we were not saying all of the things.
When the things were hard, I think it was hard for my parents to talk to us. They tried. When I was eleven, my mom gave me the puberty talk as we floated in our swimming pool, our elbows resting on a raft between us. Around the same time, she took me on a walk and told me that her brother, Peter, was dying of AIDS. Around the same time, in the pool—what was it about that neutral, watery territory that would seem to protect us?—my father told me he was thinking about moving out. I was shocked. I’d had no idea, and no idea how to respond. I stepped out of the water in my leopard-print one piece and ran inside, sobbing, or pretending to. That night, I told him I didn’t want him to go, and he hugged me and told me that maybe he just needed to hear that. He didn’t move out, and I didn’t hear anything else about it.
My parents’ reticence was practiced and well-intentioned. My brother had been adopted at a week old, when my parents assumed they couldn’t have children. When it turned out my mother could get pregnant—only one of her fallopian tubes was blocked—my other brother was born, and then me. We were born into the universe of my parents’ making, and that included the fact that Pete was their child as much as Sam and I were. Of course he was. Somehow we all knew Pete was adopted, and somehow we all knew that to acknowledge it was to risk his belonging. It was a kind of radical acceptance.
Sometimes silence doesn’t feel like a gift, though. Sometimes it feels like shame.
When Uncle Peter died, I found out sideways. For weeks my mother was tied up on the phone, sitting at her desk and talking to him, talking to her other siblings. He was a country away in San Francisco, but all of their other siblings went to see him one last time. “You’ll hate yourself if you don’t come see me,” he told her. I rarely saw her cry, but she cried when she told me this. Why didn’t she go? I wondered. Then one day my friend was over and we were looking at the family photographs hanging over my mother’s desk. My mother pointed to the one of her brothers and said, “He just died this morning.”
I looked at her, startled. “He died, Mom?”
She nodded.
“How’d he die?” my friend wanted to know.
My mother told her, “AIDS.” She pointed to the picture of my uncle’s “lover,” as she called him.
“Gross,” my friend said.
For the life of me, I did not know what to say, to reprimand my friend, to comfort my mother, though I have thought of a few things since then.
When our dog died a few years later, it was the same. “Where’s Wheezer?” I asked, looking under beds and tables.
Sam told me, “They put him down two days ago.”
In this way, my mother taught me how to avoid conflict, and death, and difficulty. How to tolerate the differences of others, the sadness of others. You don’t question it. You don’t talk about it. You give it a very wide berth. Otherwise, you insult their legitimacy. You threaten the order.
* * *
Where did she learn that unquestioned loyalty? From her own mother? Her alcoholic father?
If you want to talk to your father, my grandmother told her children, do it before noon. After that, he was too far gone.
My grandmother, who suffered from psoriasis. Her hands were covered with it. Immediately after my grandfather died, my mother told me, it cleared.
She had stood by her man, her sick and brilliant man, as my mother did when it was her turn.
Four years before my father told me in my brother’s backyard that he’d once tried to kill himself, I sat with my mother on the same patio. She was smoking a cigarette at the table under the hood of an umbrella. It was dark, our voices were hushed, the baby was sleeping inside. Aaron was back home in Charlottesville. We were having a hard time. I was as desperate as I’d ever let myself be in front of my mother. I admitted to her that we’d just started seeing our first couples’ counselor. I saw her make a calculation as she breathed in a lungful of smoke.
“Your father and I were in the
rapy at one time.”
I sat up straight. “Really?”
“Well. Not really a therapist. We saw Simon Katz.”
“Simon?” He was my friend’s father. Their family had lived next door to us in Gainesville. “Wasn’t he just a regular doctor?”
“We wanted someone we knew. It was different then. This was after we’d both moved.” For months, she said, they had driven the hour from North Palm Beach to Ft. Lauderdale to meet with their trusted friend.
“When was this?”
“You were maybe eleven.”
“Was it when Daddy said he was leaving?”
My mom whipped her head toward me. “He told you that?”
I told her what he’d told me that day in the pool. “He didn’t tell me why,” I said. “What was that all about?”
She took a careful puff. “Your father had an episode.”
“What kind of episode?”
“A paranoid schizophrenic episode.”
I looked at her. With the hand that wasn’t smoking the cigarette, she ran her finger over her lips.
“Paranoid about what?”
She gave her head a shake toward the night sky. “Oh, I could never say.”
I tried to get my head around it. She couldn’t say because she didn’t know? Or she wouldn’t say? It was the first I’d heard of any mental imbalance on my father’s part.
I tried to remember what our house had been like when I was eleven. Where was I when my parents were in secret therapy? Did they go while I was in school? Did my brothers babysit?
“Your Uncle Peter was dying,” she said.
“Oh.” I saw the memories slide into place. My leopard-print bathing suit. My mother on the bone-colored telephone. “It was then.”
“It was why I couldn’t go see him.” She stubbed out her cigarette. It gave a little white fizz in the dark. “I had to choose. I chose to stay with you kids. And with your father.”
THE PINK CLOUD
I sat in the circle, looking at everyone’s shoes. It was summer in Ithaca: Keens, Tevas, Crocs. A fan churned in the corner. The slurp of iced coffee.
“Is there anyone here for their first Al-Anon meeting?”
I was there with Katie. We gave each other nervous smiles as we half-raised our hands. “Hi.” My voice sounded like a child’s. “I’m Eleanor.”
“Hi, Eleanor,” said the room. It was the singsong cadence of schoolchildren greeting their teacher. But they were like the schoolteachers, older women mostly, mothers and grandmothers with white-blond hair in practical bobs, books and purses and thermoses balanced in their ample laps. It had been four months since my mother had died, and two months since my husband had tried to overdose in the driveway. “Welcome,” they said, and already I was crying.
These women! They had been coming to Al-Anon meetings, some to this very room—the rooms, they said—for ten, twenty, thirty years. The rooms had saved their lives. They had grown children who were addicted to alcohol, meth, heroin, who were in rehab, or jail, or finally coming home. They had custody of their grandchildren. They had brothers and mothers and husbands and wives who were alcoholics. Some were active alcoholics. Some were in recovery. They had left spouses and stayed with them. It almost seemed irrelevant, whether they had stayed or left. The point was, you could stay, or leave. You still came to the rooms. The important thing was to detach with love.
If I’d had a notebook, I would have written it down. Detach with love. If I’d been able to raise my hand, I would have asked, “Um, how do you do that?”
The answer came about on its own, slowly, Saturday morning after Saturday morning.
You detached with love by hanging up the phone. By saying, “I love you, but…” By saying, “I can talk for five minutes.” By not sending money. These were called boundaries. When you didn’t set boundaries? That was when you were on the roller coaster. Or in the hurricane. With your qualifier. That was called codependency.
Codependency! So that was what that was. There were more C words, the three C’s. You didn’t Cause it, you can’t Control it, and you can’t Cure it. Alcoholism, that is. They were the fixers, solvers, nurses, sandwich-makers, doctor-callers. No more. They had stepped out of the chaos. Mind your own hula hoop. Take care of yourself. Self-care! Can you imagine a time when we didn’t have this handy phrase? Those women taught it to me. Oh. And something else? Maybe take a look at your own family of origin.
And of course: One day at a time.
And of course: the serenity prayer.
I had never, ever prayed in my life.
The first time I said it, it was like a little cairn of stones balanced on my tongue. Then, soon, there was the thrill of learning a foreign language, the words coming to my mouth before I’d prompted them:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I had memorized the words, but that didn’t mean I knew what to do with them. They were like a spell I had no wand for.
I kept coming back. Sometimes with Katie, sometimes alone. At the meetings, I shared a little of my story, then a little more. My husband had been in the psych ward, I said. A suicide attempt. Now he was in outpatient rehab. A ten-week program. He’d been an addict since I met him, I said, but it was the first time he was getting help. It was hard to see he’d been an addict. It was pot for a while. Then it was alcohol. And he was sober in between. I didn’t realize!
Oh, yes, the women said. Changing seats on the Titanic. They nodded. They made approving noises. Afterward, they hugged me to their bosoms.
“You’re still in the pink cloud,” more than one explained to me, smiling. “Early recovery.” The words were uttered with some discomfiture, by these mothers who had achieved the wisdom of a necessary but private milestone, like menstruation. Teasing, blushing. It was part congratulations, part warning.
Aaron had gone to a handful of NA meetings before I met him, but the first AA meeting he attended was in the psych ward. When he’d gotten out, he kept going. Every day, he went to meetings in the brick building downtown, the alcohol and drug council on one floor (he’d been assigned a drug counselor, Rich), and the mental health clinic on another. He was clear-headed, clear-skinned, remorseful, steady, thankful. “Thank you,” he said, when I went to my first Al-Anon meeting. “Thank you for going.” We’d bought a new house downtown, far from the miserable scenes of the last one. The house was an indeterminate color I loved—greenish bluish gray—and Aaron walked down the steep hill to the clinics early each morning, his backpack heavy on his back like a kid going off to school for the first time. The weight of the alcohol melted off of him. The weight melted off of us.
* * *
When the person you love tries and fails to end his life, you are glad that he is still living. That he failed.
There is a kind of embarrassment in that failure, though: embarrassment in the company of others who love people who successfully ended their lives. Embarrassment that the person you love is still living. Embarrassment that he did not succeed. He did not go about suicide seriously. His anguish was not deep enough.
You don’t have much time for embarrassment, though, because another thing that happens when someone you love tries and fails to end his life is that you spend the rest of your life trying to keep him from trying again. Trying to create a world in which he will not want to try again. When someone you love tries to end his life because you took your love away from him, you will spend the rest of your life trying to keep him alive with your love.
You keep thinking of what your father said about the time he swallowed those pills. “Being on crutches all your life … It does something to your sense of manhood.” What he didn’t say: when a woman leaves you, it does something to your sense of manhood.
What is it with men? you think. Are they all this way? Is it just straight white men? Little boys at their mothers’ knees, beggin
g to be loved? Or have you managed to find one just like your father?
The problem is: trying to keep someone alive with your love is the exact wrong thing to do. The rooms make this much clear. Still, you go to the meetings. You repeat the prayer. Detach with love, you remember. He has his own higher power. Your higher power is the room. The rooms. That’s fine, they say, the women. Your higher power can just be the rooms.
* * *
Maybe if I just found a sponsor. It was the next step, apparently. Everyone talked about having a sponsor: someone to guide you through the trying moments. Someone who would always take your call. It sounded a little like a benefactor to me, a godmother. Will you sponsor me? As though I were a hungry orphan on a commercial.
One week toward the end of the summer, I watched the women carefully. Will those who are willing to serve as sponsors please raise their hands? Up the hands went. I eyed the woman with the short salt-and-pepper hair, the wire-framed glasses, the sensible clogs. She always shared these effortless little stories of grace: a trial, a moment of doubt, a higher-power intervention, a miraculous metaphor—all without getting too God-y, and with a humble humor that sent an appreciative laugh through the room that you could feel under your feet. And all under three minutes! Her name was Kate. She was like a minister in a church I’d want to go to.
After the meeting, I approached her. I asked her if she’d be willing to sponsor me.
“Of course,” she said. She didn’t really have much of a bosom, but she had a bony shoulder the same height as my mother’s and a cozy quilted vest.
Every couple weeks, I met Kate in the Wegmans café for coffee. She drank a small black cup of decaf. I had a towering twenty-ounce, drowned with soymilk. I took mental notes: Don’t be afraid. The coffee will not run out.
Everything I Have Is Yours Page 6