Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  “You folks have a bunch of wrapping to do,” says Eleanor.

  I slide to the floor and crawl around to retrieve the M&M. Aha. The plastic seal slides off and—pop—I grab the candies and put a fistful into my mouth.

  “You sure like those M&M’s,” says Eleanor.

  “Looks like you’re going off your diet,” says Mom Towne, looking down at me as I kneel on the carpet, gobbling up chocolate. There is pleasure in my mother-in-law’s voice. An overeater herself, she encourages complicity.

  I have only a few M&M’s left and I look to the table to see what else I can pilfer from Murphy’s stocking. Pat leans his head back and pours Gummi bears from the bag meant for Spence straight into his mouth. I grab a bag of sugared Gummi worms from the table and rip it open.

  “I knew she wouldn’t be able to stay on that diet,” Mom Towne says to Eleanor. “You can’t cut out bread for too long. It’ll make you crazy.”

  I look at Pat slowly putting PEZ candies into a PEZ Spider-Man dispenser. Surely, he doesn’t think there’s some kind of rule that you have to load the PEZ candies before you can eat them? I watch him push each candy out of Spider-Man’s neck. His fingers grab each cube carefully.

  I love his fingers. I want them inside me.

  Mom Towne pushes herself out of her chair and heads for the kitchen.

  “I think I’ve got a Hershey bar out here somewhere,” she says. “If you kids keep eating the boys’ candy, they won’t have any from Santa.”

  Santa? Jesus Christ, I’m Santa and I’m eating up all my sons’ candy on Christmas Eve. What kind of monster of a mother am I?

  “Here it is,” says Mom Towne, bringing the chocolate bar into the living room.

  I am a hungry monster mother.

  I take the Hershey bar and tear it open. Pat crawls over to the wrapping paper, unrolls it, and places a big toy whale on top. As he cuts around the whale, I think of Spencer’s recent obsession with deep-sea animals. I think about the nights he and I have pored over ocean books checking out the freaky creatures that live so far down that they have not evolved for millions of years. These creatures create their own light and feed off of bacteria they create themselves. They are sci-fi crablike beings climbing over the boiling-hot surface of underwater volcanoes, burning themselves white as they cling on.

  I think about how hard I cling to my men. How painful it is to hold on and how impossible to let go. Someday it will be one of my boys outside in the van. I will be watching Law & Order, with Pat beside me. Will I be able to let that boy be? Will I know that I am now the grown-up inside the house?

  I swallow the last bite of the Hershey bar and look at the whale, contemplating my evolution from baby to child to woman to mother to . . . what? I feel small as a whisper in the tiny farmhouse, in the tiny town, in the great white expanse of snow that goes on forever, under the winking Christmas heavens.

  I tell myself that this is why I don’t smoke pot. One should not have to think that much while eating chocolate.

  Friday

  I talked to Katherine on the phone, but I haven’t seen her since her mother died. She is the first of our band to lose a mother. Now she’s an orphan—a forty-two-year-old orphan, having lost her father five years ago. Michelle, Lana, and I still have both parents. We can only guess at what it feels like to be a parentless child.

  “You know that joke,” she says, “about there are two kinds of people in the world, those who have children and those who don’t?”

  “Right,” says Lana, “and those who don’t, don’t know that there are two kinds of people in the world.”

  “Yeah, well, it applies to having a dead mother too. You don’t know what it’s like until it happens. You’re a different kind of person than you were before.”

  “I can’t imagine life without my mother,” I say. “Who will I blame?”

  Katherine smiles and puts down her beer. “Oh, that part doesn’t change. You can blame a dead mother. It’s just a one-way conversation.”

  “I am not looking forward to the blaming,” says Michelle.

  “What on earth would Faith blame you for?” I ask.

  Michelle cocks her head and says in a teenage voice, “Why am I the only kid in school with lezzie moms?”

  “Maybe the other kids will think that lezzie moms are the coolest thing,” says Lana. “What about me? Daisy’s going to blame me for kicking her father out of the house.”

  “Not as an adult,” I say. “When she’s older, she’ll know why you’re not with Tony.”

  “Hey, being an adult doesn’t mean you’re not a child. You’re always your mother’s child,” says Lana.

  “Jesus. I know that’s true,” says Katherine. “But does everything that’s true about being a mother have to sound like a line from a greeting card? Speaking of which, I’ve got a big complaint about sympathy cards.”

  “Which was your favorite?” I ask, then wonder if I’m being inappropriate.

  “None of them. I kept looking for a card that said something like ‘Even though your mom was a bitch, we know you miss her. It sucks being alone in the world.’”

  “I bet that card would sell like mad,” I say.

  Lana downs a shot. “Or how about a card that says ‘I know you’re blaming yourself for every rotten thing you said about your mother. Stop it, now. She loved you anyway.’”

  “That’s great,” says Michelle. “Or how about a card that says ‘Even though your mother never accepted you as a Sex-Positive Feminist Dyke, she still loved you, especially when she could forget about that part.’”

  I think about the card that would comfort me most after my mother’s death. But my mind won’t stay there long. I don’t want to think about it. And when I do, all I can think about is the word “bereft.” Which is an odd-sounding word when you say it over and over again.

  The sympathy card conversation gets silly as I flash on my mother standing in our living room after she heard that her mother had died. She had her hand on a chair and she was looking out the window to our balcony. I stood in the doorway, not knowing what to do. We stood like that for a long time. My father also, a little apart from her—standing, waiting. After a while she shifted. Then came her voice. A deep and long wail, “Mamaaaaa.”

  “. . . or a card that says ‘Now that your mother’s dead, you can stop lying to her,’” Katherine says, laughing, tears shining in her eyes.

  We laugh back a release of a laugh. A bigger laugh than is warranted. A laugh that subsides into giggles and eventually sighs.

  Then quiet—except for the noise of the bar.

  “When my grandmother died,” I say, “my mother told me that what she missed most was that she could no longer say to her mother, ‘Look, Mom, look what I did. Look at me. Mom . . . look at me.’”

  We think.

  I wonder if the others are seeing their own children yelling out on a playground, “Look, Mom. Look at me.”

  I look at Katherine, now soft and teary.

  “Yeah,” she says. “That’s it. I’ve got no mom to look at me.”

  Murphy’s Eye

  The first time I see green in the corner of Murph’s eye, I pick it out with a Kleenex. I don’t think about it much, even though it reappears a couple more times that day.

  At dinner Pat notices it and says it might be an infection.

  This hasn’t occurred to me.

  He says, “His hands get covered in sticky food and then he rubs his eyes and gets an infection. We really have to keep his hands clean.”

  Pat says “we,” but I hear “you,” and my back stiffens.

  Pat is the Felix Unger of parenting, wiping our children’s chins raw after every drip. I am the casual parent. The one who doesn’t mind if chocolate ice cream hardens in the creases of my child’s chin. Childhood, I think, is a time when we can be free of care about stains on our shirts and dirt in our hair. Too soon it turns. Too soon we become ashamed of our very humanness—the flaky, smelly fact of ourselves. Live
it up, I say. Be sticky.

  “I bet it doesn’t have anything to do with food on his hands,” I say, working to keep my voice even.

  Murphy slams his hand into a bowl of peas. Pat jumps up and runs to the kitchen, returning with a washcloth. Murph screams as Pat rubs his hands. Spence covers his ears and starts screaming too.

  Lately, scenes like this are frequent. The children screeching, Pat and I snipping at each other.

  I want to say, “No. This isn’t it. This isn’t what I wanted.”

  The second time I see the telltale green ooze, I’m sitting in a dorm room at Tulane University in New Orleans. Murph and Spence play with straws under the table when Murph looks up at me and there it is.

  Pat has taken a job as a guest lecturer, and the children and I have joined him—my having had some romantic notion about being a faculty wife and going to all those parties where professors drink a lot, talk about literature, and fuck each other’s wives.

  If this faculty does indeed have parties like this, they are keeping it to themselves. It appears that it’s not enough for me to feel isolated and purposeless at home; I must drag my children to New Orleans to experience it afresh—in a landscape inhabited by students so beautiful my loins ache with memory.

  Days pass as I push Murphy in the stroller through the campus, Spence dragging behind. It’s February, but damp heat is omnipresent. The children and I seek one air-conditioned building after another as we make our slow progress toward the Theater Building, where we hook up with Pat after class every day. Pat then takes the children, cranky from the pilgrimage, back to the cinder-block room we all share, while I go somewhere to read.

  On this particular day Spence, Murph, and I take the elevator up to the second floor of the Theater Building. The doors slide open, air-conditioning hitting us like a welcome arctic blast. I push the stroller past offices where people glance up from their desks giving polite nods. An older professor moves his elbow—probably to hide the invitation to some literary orgy. I imagine the memo attached to the invitation: “Don’t let the new couple know about the orgy. I’ve talked to the wife, who’s intellectually dull and physically soft in all the wrong places.”

  Pat’s office is at the end.

  “What’s that pus in his eye?” asks Pat, looking at Murph.

  “It looks like an eye infection again.”

  “Dammit. We have to keep his hands clean.”

  “Kids get eye infections.”

  “Brett, he’s getting food in his eye. We can’t keep letting this happen.”

  “We?”

  “I’m just saying we’re going to have to pay more attention.”

  “Fine. You take care of them,” I say, giving the stroller a shove into the office.

  I catch Pat’s look (anger? concern?) before striding past Spence toward the elevator. Even as the doors slide open and I step inside, I know I’m behaving badly.

  Moments later I sit in a student bar across the street, one that advertises “Blackout Shots,” sipping from a mini of white zinfandel. The bartender tells me that it’s the only wine available: “Students don’t drink wine.”

  So I sit drinking pink wine, watching young people lean into each other, firm not only in muscle tone but in their belief that they will never grow old.

  I could chalk it up to the swampy heat or to the fact that I’m living in one room with three other people or to the fact that I have no one to spend time with outside my tiny family, but the truth is that my blues stem from the most banal of human conditions: I feel unimportant. I feel infinitesimal. I have no sense of where I belong in the universe.

  I have to assume that this latest bout of sadness is connected to getting older. Because until recently, I’ve loved the shape of my life. Having two children feels right. I’ve been writing a lot. Pat’s made a bunch of money on commercials. Until recently, I’ve thought, is it possible that I might get everything I always wanted?

  But something has changed.

  Lately, I am frightened. I want to do my life over again. I want to be able to say, “No. I don’t want this. This isn’t the life I pick. You know that man I said I’d stay true to? You know those children I said I’d raise? I’ve changed my mind.”

  I want to say, “No. Thanks, but no. I’m going to do something else.”

  I sit on the floor of the student clinic. Murph crawls over my knees as Spence flips the pages of a book about reptiles. A few blue-jeaned students stand in front of the counter. A roadblock of a nurse checks them in. Two she sends away.

  When the students clear, I pick up Murphy and walk over, Spence following with his open book.

  “My son,” I say, “has something wrong with his eye.”

  “Are you a student?” she asks in a sugary Southern drawl.

  I start to smile at this possible compliment but quickly realize that it’s more condemnation than question. The tone being “Isn’t it obvious that you’re in the wrong place?”

  “My husband is a guest lecturer here and I don’t know where else to go.”

  I consider bursting into tears. I’m close enough to crying, to let loose. But I am dimly aware that as a faculty wife, I should be more together than the students who flop around the waiting room like it’s their parents’ living room.

  The nurse shuffles some papers. “Do you have a med card?”

  “A medical card? No. We’re only here for a month.”

  I’m annoyed by the pleading tone in my voice. I try to readjust. I shift Murphy to the other hip.

  “Obviously,” I say, “this is an emergency. I didn’t anticipate needing a med card.”

  “Mmm” she says, stapling. “We really can’t help anyone without a med card.”

  “I’m not just anyone. My husband works here.”

  “But how do I know that?” she asks. “You could be anyone.”

  “I guess that’s true,” I say, trying my best not to see her as some divine messenger sent to confirm my worst fears that I don’t matter. “You can call the Theater Department. I’m sure they’ll tell you that my husband’s on the faculty.”

  “Or you could go to the Theater Department yourself,” she says, opening a file, “and ask them to apply for a med card.”

  I feel my face get hot. I pull Murphy further up on my hip.

  “By then my son’s eye might rot right out of its socket,” I say in my meanest voice.

  And I’m not sorry.

  She lowers the file.

  “Have a seat,” she says like I’m someone to be managed.

  Two hours later I sit on the edge of an examination table, Murph in my lap, while Spencer jumps on and off a chair adding up numbers. “One plus two equals three. Four plus six equals ten.” The consideration Murph gets from the doctor has Spence shouting out his greatest talent in order to earn some attention for himself.

  I understand this. I want the doctor’s attention too. She’s a maternal type, wearing practical sandals, a single salt-and-pepper braid fraying down her back.

  “He’s so cute,” she says, leaning in to pull Murph’s cheek down from his eye.

  “Six plus five is eleven,” shouts Spencer.

  I wonder if she’d be impressed by the fact that I speak almost fluent German.

  She takes a tissue and swipes it under Murphy’s eye.

  “Little Murphy,” she coos.

  “Ten plus four is fourteen.”

  I can ski down an advanced slope.

  “It looks like there’s an obstruction there,” she says.

  “Four plus eleven is fifteen.”

  I can blow concentric smoke rings.

  She taps her finger on Murph’s nose. “He’s such a cooperative baby.”

  “Ten plus six plus two is eighteen.”

  I can roll a joint with one hand, keep a secret, and cum again.

  She pulls up and walks over to her desk, where she tosses the tissue in the garbage can.

  “I’m going to prescribe a topical antibiotic ointment,
” she says, reaching for a pen, and starting to write. “Also, I want you to put hot compresses on his eye for ten minutes at a time. Will he stand for that?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “Well, give it a try. We have to knock whatever’s in there out.”

  I slide off the examination table with Murph. “Do you think what’s in there is food?”

  “Ten plus four plus two plus one is . . .”

  “Could be,” says the doctor.

  Shame floods me. I haven’t washed his hands enough. Pat was right.

  Spence tugs my shirt. “How much is that?”

  “What?”

  “How much is that?”

  “I don’t know, Spence.”

  “Come back if you have any questions,” says the doctor, handing me the prescription.

  “Thanks,” I say, wanting something more. Anything. A look. Forgiveness.

  She gives her final “time’s up” smile.

  No, I think. I don’t want to leave yet. But I do. I leave the cool air of the Student Health Center, the prescription already soggy in my hand.

  I try a hot compress a couple of times that afternoon, while Pat is still teaching. Each time Murphy screams and shakes his head so that it’s impossible to hold it there for any length of time. I remember that the doctor said “give it a try”—like the compress is a helpful thing but not necessary. I figure the ointment’s the real solution.

  The next morning Murph’s eye is sealed shut with pus, the surrounding skin bruised. A bath softens the hardened pus and his eye opens, though he looks like he’s been in one hell of a bar brawl.

  Pat and I decide to return to the Student Health Center, past Bouncer Nurse to Mama Doctor’s office.

  “Did you do the hot compress?” she asks, pressing under Murph’s eye. Pearly green stuff seeps out of it.

  Spence looks on, concerned now.

  “What compress?” asks Pat.

  “Murph wouldn’t let me,” I say. “Every time I put a hot washcloth on his face he screamed like I was trying to kill him.”