Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  “It’s his worship sticker,” says Sharon.

  Pat smiles like he’s trying.

  “So, Sharon,” I say above the heads of children milling, “I wanted to ask you about the curriculum.”

  “Isn’t it great?” she says. “We had a whole discussion today about how Jesus wants everyone to love each other.”

  I look at Pat, who seems to be controlling an eye roll.

  “I just wanted to . . . talk about what the curriculum says . . . about H-E-L-L,” I say, spelling in case a kid tunes in.

  “Oh,” she says. Did I say something bad?

  “Are you going to say anything about H-E-L-L?”

  “Oh, no,” she says. And it suddenly occurs to me that she may think that I’m in favor of starting the kids off early with some scary hell stories. Maybe she thinks I want more hell and less lovey-dovey in my Sunday School curriculum.

  “I mean, I’m not a big fan of H-E-L-L,” I say quickly.

  Relief relaxes her face. “Me neither,” she says.

  Pat is now unreadable.

  “Great,” I say. “And S-I-N? Do you talk about that?”

  “No. None of that either,” she says. “We just talk about love and sharing. “

  “Good,” I say. I feel a bit foolish. Like I came in here to have some big confrontation about hell and sin, and I can’t get anyone to take me on. I have to stop myself from patting her on the back and saying, “Keep up the good work.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” I say. “Because love and sharing, that’s really what it’s all about.”

  I throw a look to Pat, who is on his knees, picking up toys and tossing them in the appropriate bins.

  “That’s what I think,” says Sharon.

  “Great,” I say.

  We smile at each other.

  “Have you thought about joining the church?” she asks.

  Pat looks up at me.

  I pause, then choose to pretend that I simply didn’t hear her. This is a little trick I’ve learned from my mother. It’s remarkably effective.

  “Well,” I say, “keep up the good work,” and I pat her on the back.

  Friday

  Lana is already crying when I walk through the door. Michelle stands, her arm around Lana’s waist. Katherine looks on with concentrated concern. I stop, just inside, to give myself a stolen second of calm before approaching. I watch the bar as if it is some disconnected scene, which, of course, it is—a world that moves ahead, pitiless to the small dramas of the people who move within it.

  As I walk toward my group of friends, I know that Tony has either left or is leaving. The pose tells me everything.

  “I can’t believe he’s being such an asshole,” Lana says as I pull out a stool to sit on.

  Mack slides a prepoured glass of wine in front of me.

  “He’s young, “says Michelle.

  “He’s young and he’s an asshole,” says Lana, sniffing and reaching for her beer.

  Katherine leans over to me. “The affair’s been going on for three months. Some chick he met outside a grocery store.”

  “Jesus. What an asshole.”

  “Yup,” she says. “‘Asshole’ is as far as we’ve gotten.”

  “Then I’m up to speed.”

  “He met her outside a grocery store,” says Lana. “He was coming out of the store with potato chips, and he just started talking to her. She gave him her number.”

  “That’s a particular kind of woman, right there,” says Katherine.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Come on, have you ever handed your number to someone you just chatted up outside a grocery store?”

  “No,” I say. “But I might have. I don’t think the woman’s the problem here.”

  “That’s right,” says Michelle. “Let’s get back to Tony.”

  “He’s such an asshole,” says Lana, looking off.

  The rest of us share a look. How much further do we go? Here is the moment that we’ve been waiting for—we now have empirical proof of Tony’s assholeness. And now that Lana has pronounced him an asshole—now that she’s said it—we get to say it. It is the first step in a long process of prying Lana loose from her dream of her little family of three. There is no pleasure in the task. There is, however, a shared sense of relief in this moment. It is hard to watch your friend suffer for as long as Lana has with Tony.

  “So what are you going to do?” asks Michelle.

  I’m relieved that it’s Michelle and not me who has asked the question. This is tricky territory. If Michelle’s too eager to kick Tony out, Lana might leap to his defense. Michelle must also make sure that her indictment of him does not become an indictment of Lana’s bad judgment. It’s best to stick to generalities like “He’s an asshole” and “What was he thinking?” and “How could he do that?” This is not the time to say things like “That first month when you were dating and he came home drunk at four in the morning, wouldn’t tell you where he had been, and smashed the glass shelf in the living room—that was the moment when it became clear that this was a man who had no clue about what it would take to make a woman as complicated and magnificent as you happy and cared for.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” says Lana. “If I tell him to leave, he won’t have anywhere to live.”

  I glance at Michelle, wondering what she will say instead of “Who the fuck cares where this guy who can’t make money, drinks too much, ignores you for days at a time, and cheats on you lives!!!! Kick his ass out right now!!!”

  Michelle says, “What do you want? Do you want him to leave?”

  Good, that’s very good.

  Lana pauses for a moment, sniffling. “Sometimes he can be so sweet to me, you know?”

  Katherine says, “When he’s not busy being an asshole!”

  Whoops. Total miscalculation. I look sideways at Katherine, who looks back at me to indicate that she’s just realized she’s made a mistake and that the conversation has taken a new turn. We’ve moved on from “asshole” to making Lana feel cared for.

  “I mean,” says Katherine, “of course he’s sweet to you. You’re a beautiful, smart woman.”

  “You think so?” Lana asks, looking into the mirror behind the bar. She gives herself a slight smile.

  “Of course you are,” we all murmur—or something close to that.

  “This girl he’s seeing,” she says, “is a lot younger.”

  “Maybe your self-confidence frightens Tony,” I say at the same time Michelle says, “Tony is probably immature himself.”

  I look over to Katherine, who only wants to confirm and reconfirm that Tony is an asshole.

  What follows is a plodding dissection of Tony’s motives and intentions. It’s slow and painful, but it must be done. This is how women restore each other—they question and affirm, coax and tease. It is a delicate and brutal dance.

  Until the end of this happy hour, we will perform it.

  Lana and the Reverse

  A couple of weeks after Tony moves out for a trial separation, Lana says, “Brett, I’m sitting at some bar in the Valley, making out with some guy, then I turn around and start making out with a different guy on the other side of me.”

  She pulls a blue plastic thing out of the freezer. She wears a tight white T-shirt with a watery pink stain and is naked from the waist down.

  “Sounds like a big night,” I say.

  “You’re not kidding,” she says. “I’m making out with two guys at once and I’m thinking this is wild. I haven’t felt like this since I was twenty. I’m having a blast, knocking back tequila and talking dirty. One guy asks if I was an animal, what animal would I be? I tell him a lioness. So I’m growling all night. Like he’s my prey. Anyway, you can tell that I’m so far gone I forget that I have to give a little speech at my preschool fund-raiser meeting today.”

  Lana pulls the elastic strap of the blue plastic thing and adjusts it around her head. I see now that it’s an ice pack. Lana’s eyes peer o
ut of tiny holes in the cold mask. She looks like a rare bird.

  “I don’t know how I get myself into these things. I can’t give a speech at the preschool looking like I just came off a three-day bender,” she says.

  I look at Lana’s bare legs and wonder if mine are bigger or smaller than hers. I’ve lost all sense of myself physically since having Spencer. With almost everyone I think, Do I look like that? Is my skin tighter, looser? I look for clues in mirrors but find that I adjust almost immediately, pulling in my tummy, standing straighter, dropping my chin. I’ve learned to distrust mirrors. Since she broke up with Tony, Lana has lost twenty-five pounds. She is the junior version of herself.

  “Goddammit!” she yells, and starts to hop around the kitchen, her white bottom bouncing. She balances on one leg, leans down, picks up a marble, and clanks it into the sink.

  “Goddammit! Daisy, Mommy just found another marble!” she yells to her four-year-old, who, as far as I can tell, isn’t home. “That’s it. If I trip or fall over another marble, there will be NO MARBLES EVER AGAIN in this house!”

  “It’s amazing how much stepping on something that tiny can be so painful,” I say.

  “Brett, it’s the tiny things that get you. Marbles, needles, paper cuts, slivers. Personally, I’d rather somebody smash me in the face with a big board.”

  She sits at her computer, pops it on, and stares at the screen through the ice-blue mask.

  “So here’s what I’m talking about,” she says, clicking the mouse with one hand and grabbing a cigarette out of its pack with the other. “It’s called Our Place. It’s a site where you meet people.”

  “For dating?”

  “For anything. You know my friend Bobbi? The psychic? She’s the one who recommended it. She said it’s a great resource for single moms. She’s a single mom.”

  “Resource for what?”

  “For meeting people. Could be dating. Could be someone’s got a great babysitter they want to share. I’m thinking I might even get leads on a house.”

  “You’re looking for a house again?” Lana wants a house almost more than she wants a man. “What about a down payment?”

  “No,” says Lana, images popping up on the screen, “I don’t have the down payment. But if I get a no-money-down thing, in an up-and-coming area—a fixer-upper. All I’m saying is, it’s out there.”

  I think of Lana and Daisy living in the skeleton of a house littered with crack pipes and condoms. I imagine a cold wind blowing through a broken window as Lana and Daisy huddle for warmth in front of the oven.

  “Here’s the site,” says Lana.

  She clicks and sits back as a site appears, exhaling smoke in a short, purposeful puff. I get up and look over her shoulder.

  “Fantastic,” she says. “Look at this. I’ve gotten seven hundred and twenty-three hits since I put up my profile three days ago.”

  “You got seven hundred hits of guys wanting to know you?”

  “Isn’t it great?”

  “It’s incredible. Kind of scary.”

  “What’s scary? Maybe one of them is rich, foxy, and owns a house. Besides, they only know me as Chiclit. It’s anonymous, unless you want to meet someone. Here’s my picture,” she says, clicking.

  Up pops her picture. In it she is model-gorgeous.

  “Where’s your profile?”

  “Here,” she says.

  I lean closer to the screen. Lana’s ice mask scrapes lightly against my temple as I read the first line: “Badass single mom likes to kick it in bars.”

  I straighten up.

  “Well, there’s your answer,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Badass single mom?”

  “It’s me,” she says. “Besides, it’s not just guys. I’ve gotten some hits from other single moms who just want to hang.”

  I start to feel light-headed and a bit woozy. I often feel this way around Lana. She lives on the edge of such real chaos that it’s almost like knowing someone who does extreme sports. Whenever I see her, I am surprised and thrilled to find her still standing. It makes me want to giggle a lot.

  I adore her. She is everything at once—sloppy, ambitious, funny, distracted, smart, and willfully naive. As a mother, she is affectionate, silly, impatient. She is my talisman. She is witchy voodoo against the cloning of the American Mom.

  Invoking Lana’s voice in my head is the only thing that gets me through my yearbook meeting with Jerri Regan.

  I signed up for the Yearbook Committee at our cooperative preschool because you have to do a committee and because I figured Pat could do a lot of layout on the computer. I was looking for an easy job. Not because I was afraid of a little work, but because I was afraid of failing. Most of the committee work demanded skills I simply don’t possess: cooking, organizing, cleaning, asking for money, or talking to people.

  I signed up for the Yearbook Committee because I can take pictures. I signed up for Yearbook even though I can’t understand why four-year-olds need yearbooks.

  Jerri Regan is the committee chair and she frightens me with her zeal to make sure that every second of every child’s life at Carter School be documented with precious and accurate detail. She is a squirrel-like woman, jerking fast, this way and that, several things in her hands at one time. When I talk to Jerri, I can’t help thinking that she is the photo reverse of Lana: Pale, where Lana is dark; small, where Lana is tall; desperate, where Lana is confident; earnest, where Lana is ironic and philosophical.

  There are forty children in the school. Jerri took pictures of each one on Santa’s lap—later laying out all forty pictures over eight pages, with captions telling us what each child asked for (seventeen boys asked for Spider-Man). Jerri took pictures of each child’s Halloween costume (we had fourteen Spider-Men), laying them out over another eight pages. Jerri took pictures of each child on his or her birthday with the child’s favorite gift (twelve Spider-Men and thirteen Barbies), superimposing the pictures on a calendar.

  Jerri is so devoted to creating this work of mnemonic art that she rarely asks me to do a thing. But near the end of the year she’s in a crunch and I agree to an emergency yearbook meeting.

  Her house is rambling, festooned on every wall with paintings done by her children, the edges curling.

  “We can sit in the breakfast nook,” she says, stepping over and winding through abandoned toys.

  I try to get a feel for the size of the house, sans toys, for Lana, who will want to know all the details. Lana spends chunks of time decorating her imaginary house and deciding what color to paint the walls. She carries around fabric swatches and subscribes to a magazine called Kitchen. She keeps a box of tiles she bought from Mexico under her desk, where they will stay until she can line her sink with them.

  Jerri brings two glasses of Kool-Aid to the table. I take a legal pad and a pen out of my backpack.

  “Well, the yearbook is going to be late again this year,” she announces.

  Since I am the only other member of this committee and have done almost nothing, I feel wholly responsible. But Jerri makes this statement like we’re in this together. Like somehow our people let us down. I sigh.

  “Well, yes,” I say. “It’s a big job and there are so many kids.”

  “You’re telling me. I’m missing pictures of kids in every category. Now, with Daniel that’s fine. Because of his ADD, it’s hard to get a picture that’s not blurred. But I’ve got almost nothing on Frida. And I’m missing fourteen pictures of kids with their Easter baskets.”

  She unfolds a large chart and smooths it out onto the table.

  “Now, what I’ve done is, I’ve got each kid’s name here on the side,” she says, sliding her finger down forty names. “And I check off if I’ve got a picture of them in each category. Like, look, here’s Spence.”

  She points to his name and moves her finger horizontally over checks in squares. Then she stops at a blank square.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” she says, soundi
ng more like she’s talking to herself than me. “I don’t know why I don’t have Spence in the pumpkin patch.”

  I look at the massive chart of checks and names and try to imagine what Lana will say when I tell her the story. Probably something like “Screw crazy Jerri and her asinine chart. How did she get the house? Money from her parents? That’s a hot area.”

  “He was sick,” I say to Jerri.

  “Now, that’s something we deal with all the time. I’m thinking of making a list at the end of each field trip, of kids who couldn’t be there. That way their parents won’t think that you and I missed getting a picture of their kid on that day.”

  “Sounds good,” I say, looking around. “Great house. Have you had it long?”

  “It was David’s,” she says, referring to her husband, who looks like her twin. “The point is that we’re missing a lot of stuff. It’s not just the pictures but the interviews.”

  “Interviews?”

  If I tell Lana that the house was David’s first, she’ll drop into a glum monologue about how Tony hasn’t given her shit and even crazy Jerri has a man who can provide the basics. Maybe I won’t tell her.

  “The interviews are darling,” says Jerri. “I have a list of sixteen questions that I ask each kid. Like ‘What’s your favorite color?’ Didn’t you read last year’s yearbook? The question I really like is, ‘What do you smell like?’ Last year little June said that she smelled like throw-up because she had just thrown up that morning. It’s little gems like that you don’t want to forget.”

  “Great,” I say. “So are these floors original?”

  “We just had them done,” says Jerri, tapping the floor with her shoe.

  “Sweet. I love hardwood.”

  “So what I want from you,” she says, “well . . . what do you think? Should we use the same questions we used last year?”

  “Hey, if they were such a big hit last year. I mean, why fool with what’s golden?”

  Jerri blushes.

  “Good,” she says, “I was hoping you’d agree.”

  I’m not sure what I’ve agreed to. But Jerri looks happy. Lana says I have a gift for making people think I’m completely on their side, while hiding my contempt. If so, it’s not calculated. I never mean to mislead. It’s just my Swedish soul and my desperate need to be liked that won’t allow me to say what I really think. Lana is a different animal, and would not be sitting here, sipping Kool-Aid, flattering the yearbook supervisor.