Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  Faith stands back and admires the structure as Spence carefully places a triceratops in the middle of it.

  “So we were in this line of chairs and they brought out the babies one by one and handed them to the new parents. It was interesting to watch, because we had all gotten pictures. So it was kind of this guessing game too. Anyway, they brought out Faith and I said to Sarah, ‘That’s her.’ But they handed her to this other couple.”

  “Did you just think maybe you were wrong?” I’m thinking that a lot of babies look alike to me. Not just Chinese ones.

  “Actually, no. I had this thing in my chest. I was watching this couple coo over her and I felt—I just knew—she was mine. Meanwhile, they keep bringing out these girls and handing them to couples, and Sarah and I are just sitting there.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Then they said my name. And they handed us this cute little girl who looks nothing like the pictures we got.”

  “But pictures. Jeez, who can tell, right?”

  “I can tell.”

  “Sure. Of course you can tell. You’re that connected. I’m not so sure I would have been able to tell. When Spence was about a month old, this weird scenario used to repeat in my head. I’d think about what it would have been like if Spence turned up missing. What if I had to go to a lost and found to find him? What if there were all these diapered babies lined up on the shelves? Would I know which one was him?”

  “Of course you would,” she says.

  “Michelle, I’ve got to say, I’m not so sure. Not at that young an age.”

  “Well, I knew,” she says. “First of all, these babies were a little older. I knew it was her. Faith was sitting in that other couple’s lap. I knew that she was mine.”

  I feel the top of my skin get tingly at the surety in Michelle’s voice.

  “So what happened? How did you get her?”

  “After about twenty minutes the two people who were running the thing said that they’d made this terrible mistake, and they switched the babies. Took the one in my lap and gave it to the other couple. Then they handed us Faith.”

  “What did you think?”

  Michelle looks at Faith walking around the structure with a T. rex in her hand.

  “I thought she was home,” says Michelle.

  Friday

  I watch Michelle move her finger in a circular motion, describing the funnel that she envisions all souls going through before being born this time around.

  We started out talking about what to do with outgrown kids’ clothes, moved to where to donate the clothes, skipped to volunteering, spent a couple of minutes discussing time management, with Lana throwing in a comment about how Tony is always late, and ordered a second round—all of this has led, inevitably or not so inevitably, to a discussion about death and what, if anything, is “out there.”

  “And I saw all these souls who had just died, picking out qualities as they moved down the funnel. Like they could pick out their skin color and their interests,” Michelle says.

  “Before these souls funneled into new fetuses?” asks Katherine.

  If anyone’s going to find this notion the least bit freaky, it’ll be Katherine, since she was raised Catholic.

  “Something like that,” says Michelle, lifting her Amstel.

  Katherine considers. “Cool. Beats the shit out of going to hell and that’s it for the rest of eternity.”

  We all mumble and nod.

  Lana takes a sip of her drink. “I’ve got a guy who hangs around me.”

  “Tony?” I ask, wondering if this is the next bend in the conversation.

  “No. A guy who you can’t see.”

  “Really?” asks Katherine, leaning in.

  “Sure. I met him through this medium. This healer. A woman who does that kind of thing. I was depressed. I went to her and she said that this guy and this girl kind of hover around me, protecting me. Helping me out.”

  I want to ask what the pair says about Tony, but I don’t want to sound flip. Thing is, I really do want to know. I mean, it’s one thing to guard a person, but if an entity were hovering around me like that, I would want some solid advice. I wonder about the day-in, day-out work of an entity. Do they hang around when you’re having sex? Or do they float into the next room when you’re in the middle of something private or gross? Do entities hover around more than one person? And if so, how do they divvy up their time? Do entities nap?

  “But you only mentioned a guy hanging around you now. Where’s the girl?” asks Katherine.

  “I only talked to her once. That day. The day I went to the healer. She never showed up again.”

  “Maybe her work was done,” offers Katherine.

  I think about all the different ways we humans interpret our spiritual existence. Is it really a guy and a girl who hover around Lana, or is that the way she characterizes parts of her psyche? Do souls literally go through a funnel, or is that a way of describing preexistence in a way that we can all imagine? Jesus, this stuff makes my head hurt.

  “Sometimes it’s more interesting what people don’t believe than what they do,” I say. “I was talking to some friends recently about Mormonism, and the part they got hung up on was Mormon belief that Christ appeared in the United States.”

  “That is pretty hard to believe,” says Katherine.

  “Yeah, but you just had a reasonable conversation with Lana about a male entity that hovers around her.”

  “Sure. But you’re talking about Christ showing up in an American desert. How likely is that?”

  “How likely is it that Christ turned water into wine?” says Michelle.

  “Which reminds me,” I say, holding up my empty glass to Mack.

  I turn back to Katherine. “All I’m saying is that maybe your Catholic background allows all kinds of room for entities floating around, but has a hard time allowing for Christ showing up anywhere but in the Middle East.”

  “Why couldn’t Christ show up in the United States?” asks Michelle. “Why couldn’t he show up anywhere he wanted?”

  Michelle goes to a Lutheran church, is a minor expert in astrology, and, let us not forget, is the forger of our recent funnel theory. This kind of effortless eclecticism is very attractive to me. I think that religion should be all about mixing and matching. Hey, you only go around once. Or do you?

  “I think Brett has a point,” says Lana. “Given your background, different beliefs will grab you. And some won’t. Like, I can’t really get behind the whole blue elephant god with all those arms.”

  “Me neither!” I say a little too loudly. Mack looks at me from the other end of the bar. “But see, I bet if I were Hindu or grew up in that part of the world, the blue elephant would make total sense. As it is, I’ve just got to say, ‘Oh, come on—a blue elephant with all those arms. Do you take me for a total rube?’”

  “Let me pause,” says Katherine, pausing to drain her black and tan, “to appreciate the word ‘rube.’”

  Michelle raises her voice above ours. “You know the blue elephant god . . .”

  “What is his name?” mumbles Lana.

  “. . . doesn’t really look like that.”

  “See. You too,” I say, slapping the bar.

  “No. I’m saying that he’s a metaphor. And his name is Ganesh, I think. The Hindus aren’t saying that that’s what he actually looks like. The representation of him as this blue elephant with many arms is just a metaphor for something.”

  “For what?” asks Katherine.

  “I don’t know. Abundance? I don’t know.”

  “That’s disappointing,” I hear myself say.

  The others look at me.

  “Here I was thinking that a huge group of people believed that God looked like a blue elephant with tons of arms.”

  “So?” says Lana.

  “Well. It was kind of nice to me. Even though I couldn’t imagine it. That people believed it. Believed in the unbelievable.”

  “That’s what faith is,” s
ays Michelle.

  We get quiet for a bit.

  I wonder if men talk about things like this when they’re out with each other. Pat has a poker game every Tuesday night. When I ask him what the guys talk about for five hours over cards, he says, “Poker.”

  I think about the things women talk about. The things they think about. I think about the way women can believe several seemingly contradictory things at once. As long as one of them isn’t a blue elephant god with lots of arms.

  I watch Lana stir the ice cubes in her drink with her finger and I think about Michelle’s funnel. I imagine Spence sliding down it, picking up this trait and that, and falling out the bottom into me.

  Porn and Magic

  I sit on a folding chair across from a porn star. Her white sleeveless T-shirt stretches across two breasts that look like floating bowling balls. A tiny dog is curled up on her lap.

  I’m in the backstage holding area of a show called Colin and His Sleazy Friends. I’ve agreed to do the show because my former comedy partner, Shannon, said that all the really hip comedians are doing it. The host, Colin, used to do a cable access show of him sitting around with porn stars, touching their breasts. Some Hollywood types loved it and decided to put up a live version of the cable show, throw in some legit comics, and try to sell it to Comedy Central or Bravo.

  The porn star’s tits look like they hurt. She can’t possibly sleep on her stomach. How does she sleep? If she slept on her side, the weight of the top breast would surely stretch the tissue around the breast. Maybe she props up her breasts with pillows.

  I’m not exactly sure why I said I’d do the show. I haven’t performed with Shannon since before I had Spence. We were a duo for four years. Lately, I’ve wondered if I even care about acting anymore. But I’m afraid to say it. What would I do if I didn’t act? An actress is all I ever was.

  The porn star smiles at me. I smile back. She’s my first porn star. But I imagine she’s like anyone else. Doing a job. Making money. I wonder if she’s going to bring the dog onstage with her. Maybe the dog is part of her act.

  Shannon said there wasn’t any pay, but everyone was doing Colin’s show because it was a great opportunity to get seen by a bunch of network and studio guys who were coming to see this latest, hottest porn/comedy hybrid show. Who knew where this might lead? she said.

  “Ritualized shunning?” I said. “If a parent from the preschool sees me.”

  It felt like a bad idea, but Shannon was really fired up about how great it was going to be. So after extracting a promise from her that I wouldn’t have to take off my shirt, I said I’d do it. Mostly out of habit—the habit of moving my marginal career forward even though I’d rather be somewhere else, if I only knew where that was.

  The porn star says, “I like your purse.”

  She crosses her legs that squeak in brown leather.

  “Thanks,” I say, moving my purse-party purse onto my lap.

  “I need something like that, with compartments. I just have this.” She looks down at her dog. Which I now see is a purse, not a dog. “It’s not very practical.”

  I think that her breasts alone tell us that she is an impractical woman. And I feel sad that the dog is a purse. I liked the idea of a porn star with a dog. It was sweet.

  “Well,” I say, “this is a great purse. I can fit a book in here. And look . . .” I hold it up. “There’s a little pocket in here where you can keep your keys.”

  “I only have one key,” she says.

  I think that’s odd, and I consider asking how she gets through life with only one key. But I really want to talk about my purse. In fact, I’m surprised by how much I want to talk about it. Then it occurs to me that I have been ignored since the stage manager showed me to the backstage tent. I didn’t think I would want the attention of Colin’s sleazy friends, but here you are. I must, because I puff up with confidence as I show the girl my purse.

  “I can put my lipstick in here,” I say, slipping my hand into the front pocket.

  “Oh. I see,” she says, then tilts her head. “But I probably need something bigger.”

  “It’s deceptively roomy,” I say.

  “I need room for products,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. I’m not sure what products she’s talking about.

  I look at her hairy dog purse. “Looks like there’s plenty of room in there.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she says, putting her hand into her purse and fishing around. She brings out a doll that looks like Barbie with an even bigger rack.

  “It’s me,” she says. “You can order dolls of me from my Web site. I have a card.”

  The hand not holding the doll of herself slips into the purse, which has somehow morphed from looking like a poodle to looking like a big hairy vagina, out of which she pulls her wares.

  She hands me the card. “Tammi Silvers—I came, I saw, I swallowed.”

  If I were looking for a sign that I no longer belong in the comedy world, this might be it. I am about to go onstage with a woman who sells dolls of herself, owns only one key, carries a big hairy dog vagina purse, and misquotes Julius Caesar. No offense to her. In fact, I’m grateful. Maybe she’s a cosmic messenger.

  I consider asking her who buys these dolls. They’re too small to be sex toys. Unless . . . I stop my mind from going where it’s going.

  “Yeah,” she says, holding up the doll to admire. “I’m working on making the transition from porn star to icon.”

  An icon of what? But I think I know. So many people in Hollywood want to be icons. What they mean is, “I want to be remembered. I want people to think I’m important.” I feel for her, even without the dog.

  And I realize that I’m not in the same show as the porn star. I’m in the show where I get to go home to my son who will remember me. Who will always remember.

  Shannon’s face appears over my shoulder.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she says, slipping into the seat next to me.

  She’s dressed in a powder-blue suit, her long legs bare, ending in high strappy sandals. I realize that I have made a sartorial blunder. Standing next to her in my loose black T-shirt and jeans, I’m going to look like a stagehand.

  “I didn’t know we were supposed to dress up,” I say to her.

  “I just thought, when in Rome,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “But we’re ‘the funny,’ not ‘the porn.’”

  “There’s a law that you can’t be both?”

  I want to say yes. There does seem to be some unspoken cosmic law that says that you can’t be funny and sexy at the same time. I am proof—having fallen heavily on the “funny” side of the funny/sexy continuum all my life.

  “Nice suit,” the porn star says, still holding the doll of herself. I’m guessing that this porn icon has fallen heavily on the opposite side of the same continuum.

  “Thanks,” says Shannon. “Nice doll.”

  The girl smiles proudly and says, “It’s me.”

  Shannon throws me a “we’ll talk about this later” look and removes me from the conversation with a deft “Let’s get a beer.”

  I drink a beer even though I never drink beer, because it’s all they’ve got. Strolling through the look-alike porn stars and sleazy hangers-on, I think of all the places I’d rather be.

  Last week Spence and I went to Isabella’s birthday party. It was one of those lavish affairs that folks planning on only one child throw for their three-year-olds. There was even a magician.

  “And now,” said the magician, holding up a trembling rabbit, “I will put the bunny in this cage.”

  The magician, who was probably a neighbor’s fifteen-year-old kid, stuffed the bunny into a cage, sliding the gate closed.

  “Bunny!” a toddler shrieked, running toward the cage. Her mother scooped her up in an expert grab. The magician continued despite the distraction of the child’s fading howls as she was carried into the house.

  I took a sip of watery punch, watching Spence stare at the
bunny in the cage.

  The magician floated a silk handkerchief over the cage.

  “Where’s the bunny?” Isabella asked her mother.

  “We’ll see,” said her mom.

  I remember thinking that there were going to be some pretty pissed-off toddlers when the bunny disappeared. Who knew this was not a great trick for three-year-olds? The magician’s act hadn’t been going well up to this point. The toddlers were decidedly unimpressed when the flower changed color. They mostly looked around like, “So?” I guess you have to have a sense of the way things do work in order to be amazed when they turn out differently.

  “And now,” said the magician, “presto.”

  He pulled the handkerchief to reveal an empty cage.

  “Where’s the bunny?” cried Isabella.

  “It disappeared,” said her mom.

  Spence looked at me, teary. A younger kid rushed the cage and knocked it over, which somehow released the bunny manifest.

  “Bunny,” screamed Isabella.

  The bunny zigzagged wildly across the yard.

  “For God’s sake, someone get that bunny,” said a mother next to me.

  The children mobilized in one unit, charging after the bunny. It all happened so fast that I couldn’t respond in any way, other than to anxiously picture the rabbit torn to pieces in some gruesome toddler slaughter. A mother yelled to the children to be careful, the bunny might bite and give them rabies. Finally, the children cornered the bunny and threw themselves on it—a heap of screaming toddler. The magician and a couple of moms started picking the kids off, until the magician stood up, raising the bunny above his head.

  “Back off!” he yelled. “Everyone, back off and leave her alone.”

  The kids, hearing hysteria in his voice, withdrew.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” muttered the mother next to me.

  “You almost killed her,” the magician said to the retreating children, tears running down his face. He hugged the bunny to his chest and ran with it into the house.

  Shannon and I line up backstage with the porn stars. I think about the teenage magician and the frightened bunny. I think about all the disappointed children.