Praise for Sugar
“Sugar by Deirdre Riordan Hall is one of those books that sneaks up and hits you in the gut with its powerful truth. Sugar is not easy to read. Between the nearly pornographic description of food and the cruel slanders of those who are supposed to love her, this novel will take you down the dark path Sugar is walking. But as she sees a light at the end of the tunnel, you will be reminded of hope and the importance of loving yourself first and foremost.”
—Hypable
“Sugar is about a teenage girl who seeks solace in the sugary, greasy foods she both craves and despises . . . Yet Sugar summons the strength to find her own inner beauty, and it’s not a size zero. Her triumph is heartbreaking and triumphant.”
—Denver Post Pages
“Sugar’s character has depth, and her unhappiness and determination to conquer it are realistically portrayed. Readers will sympathize with Sugar and understand her struggle to reach her full potential.”
—Publishers Weekly
Also by Deirdre Riordan Hall
Sugar
To the Sea
Surfaced
In the Desert
Mirrored
On the Mountain
Kindled
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Deirdre Riordan Hall.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York.
http://www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN 10: 1503948587 (paperback)
ISBN 13: 9781503948587 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503953092 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503953093 (hardcover)
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant
Dedicated to my sister, MDS, xo.
And to all my sisters everywhere, you are loved.
Contents
Start Reading
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
About the Author
“No, I do not weep at the world—I’m too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
Chapter 1
The sweltering days of late summer make me yearn for a great escape, but all I have to hang on to is this so-called life. With the start of school in a few weeks, at least there will be art class to distract me. For now, I’m standing outside Darren’s—my mother’s boyfriend—apartment door, dreading what’s on the other side, wishing to paint myself out of this picture.
The key I received last March, when we moved in, cuts into my palm. My legs are as useless as cooked noodles, and my stomach twists in its usual knot, telling me don’t go in. The nausea particular to this situation worsens as Janet, my mom, shouts, her voice carrying through the thin plaster. The timbre reveals that she’s been using. I resent my watch for keeping slow time—I don’t know why I wear it. It indicates it isn’t yet midday. She probably hasn’t even slept.
A door slams inside the apartment. I count to ten and then slip the key in the lock, hoping to sneak into my room.
The toxic smell of burning plastic bites my nose. Today on the menu, crack. With the utmost delicacy, I close the door behind me. As I turn around my mother stands opposite me, in the doorway to her room. Blue-gray smoke billows out from behind her.
It isn’t that I’m startled or scared or spooked. It’s something else, and it’s heavy, like dread.
“Where the hell have you been?” she barks.
“Just went out to get something to eat,” I reply cautiously. One wrong word will send her down a rabbit hole of paranoia and hysteria.
Darren appears behind her and places his hands on her bony waist and his nose in the crook of her neck—it looks like a mossy place to be. Unsteadily, she elbows him off as if he’s a needy stray unworthy of her attention.
He pushes by her to the kitchen and gets a beer out of the fridge. The only thing I can say for Darren is he pays his electricity bill. The power company turned off the service in the place we lived last winter with a group of burned AA dropouts. I’m lucky I still have my toes.
My mother stalks over to me. When I meet her eyes, they’re darker than they should be. Her once-long, perfectly straight hair tangles into a matted nest. A clip hangs in the back, suggesting she had it up earlier.
How much earlier?
When I’d slipped out, I didn’t dare check to see if they were home. Maybe they’d been partying somewhere else all night and just returned. She doesn’t get VIP treatment anymore, but the low-dwelling addicts she associates with consider it an honor to slum it with the formerly great Janet Jaeger, queen of the guitar, the melodic growl, and rock and roll. Or so she thought. Where there was once fame and fortune, now there remains the rough gravel of her undoing, causing friction and blisters to wear me thin in some places and leave calluses in others.
Experience promises that this will be a long day.
“I just came back to grab—”
I can’t think of what to say as she puts her clammy hands on each of my shoulders. I need to think of my exit strategy and quick. But my body, already riddled with nerves, bails out, shuts down, gonzo, just as it always does.
What’s it going to be this time?
My mouth is dry.
What kind of nonsense will she say?
My mind clouds.
Is this addiction or insanity? The line between the two seems narrow.
She brings me over to the tatty couch.
What new theft of my mother’s personality will she reveal?
When my mother is high, she has a series of tics or, like an unskilled poker player, tells, varying slightly from drug to drug, indicating to my knowing eyes and ears that she’s been using.
Her body tremors. But to my semi-relief, docile Janet presents herself;
it’s the ascension in the rickety cart on the roller coaster before the plunge. I want to let go, but all I know how to do is hold on tight.
“Let’s listen to Pearl.” She isn’t talking about listening to me but to the Janis Joplin album, my namesake. Joplin is a classic Janet Jaeger move. Her eyes shutter as “Move Over” comes out of the torn cloth covering the speakers. Her soundless lips move in time with the lyrics.
Darren grabs another beer and quietly nips back to their bedroom. Crap. She won’t be pleased if he takes a hit without her.
She opens her eyes. Her lips twitch. “I first heard Janis at a party in—it was—”
I recite the well-worn monologue in my head.
“I can’t—” She’s more spaced out than usual.
“At the party after the Shrapnels show at the Starlight, in Texas, Mom?”
This reminder puts her back in the worn groove of the story. I just want to get the ordeal over with.
“Someone passed me a hit, and when I inhaled Janis’s music was there, like her ghost had come back and she was singing just for me. I said, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ Some asshole told me all about Janis Joplin, like he had written her biography. Probably did. And I realized I’m Jan too, Janis, Janet, the Janet Jaeger, JJ. I wanted to marry that album.” Her voice trails off, and her breath slows.
I want to press my ear against her chest to make sure her heart is still warm, still beating, but I’m frozen.
“And what about the Shrapnels? How could we measure up to that fierce voice of hers? That sweet as honey-wine sound . . .” my mom says, drifting, reminiscing.
I wish I were anywhere but here. I’d take the Starlight back in the nineties, the humid streets; I’d even settle for nowhere, wherever that is.
She goes on. “Then that guy, with eyes like yours, said, ‘You were great. You rocked the joint. Wish I could play like that. You’re an animal.’ Those were the days, Pearl. Wish you could have met him. Nah, I don’t. But there was nothing like hearing those songs that first time. Janis was fuckin’ alive with rock and roll, but now you carry on her legacy. You carry the name, Pearl.” She tries to approximate a meaningful smile but looks deranged.
I have no interest in carrying on anyone’s legacy, not Janis’s, or Janet’s, for that matter. I sense she’s hinting about my father but know better than to ask.
She slumps back on the couch, her eyes halfway closed. I want to get away, away from the tired, old story and away from the stranger who is my mother.
Suddenly she sits up. “Darren,” she says. White spit showers the slivered glass coffee table. “Darren,” she calls louder. “Where the hell is he?” Moments before she’d looked like she might have passed out in reverie, but like a rabid coyote, she clambers to her feet. “Where did he go?” she shouts at me accusingly.
The apartment boasts six hundred square feet of valuable Manhattan real estate, and a quick scan reveals he isn’t in the closet that passes for my bedroom. The bathroom door hangs open and dark, narrowing the possibilities down to only one other room.
My mother jiggles the doorknob to their bedroom. “If you used the rest of our shit, I’m going to—” She doesn’t finish because the flimsy door bursts open, emitting another puff of menacing smoke.
“You’re goin’ to what?” Darren asks, shirtless and sinewy.
“Where is it, Darren?”
A fiendish smile peels back his lips. “Up in smoke, bitch.” He laughs.
With that, she lunges feebly at him. Glass smashes. I shudder. They disappear for a moment before my mother emerges from the room, still dressed in nothing more than a ratty T-shirt under a faux-fur vest, and underwear. The magnetic fascination she once wore so well vanishes like smoke.
She snatches his wallet from the counter and hustles to the front door. She trips over an empty case of beer, a blanket, and some guitar cables—items carelessly discarded in the littered apartment. I curse myself for not leaving when she went into the bedroom.
Darren trips over an extension cord but catches JJ’s ankle as she unlatches the chain lock. She falls to her knees. I cower on the couch. This is their fight. I’ve tried intervening in the past, but with a slap to the face, my mother made it clear that I should stay out of it.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he asks her, though it is less a question and more a warning.
“What do you think you’re doing, using all our shit?” she says.
“My shit,” he corrects.
“I went and got it.”
“I paid for it,” he counters.
She tries to wriggle out of his grasp, but unable to, she stands on one foot and with the other pushes down, hard, on his hand.
“Damn it, JJ. I need my fucking fingers.” He jerks her ankle, struggling to get to his feet. “Give me my wallet.”
“Give me the money to get more,” my mother pleads, the fire dying in her voice.
“No,” he says.
“Are you holding out on me?”
They scrabble against the dirty linoleum. A coatrack falls. I close my eyes. I hear a smack of skin on skin, probably my mother’s hand meeting Darren’s cheek, the former being the champion of the slap. I pull my knees into my chest. Janet squeals. A dull thud follows. I put my hands over my ears. Unable to leave because they still block the front door, I scurry to my room; snap up the latest issue of Vogue blocking the doorway, the glossy cover scorched by drug paraphernalia—no doubt JJ’s doing—and shut myself in.
Through the thin wall, the fighting continues to the sound track of Pearl. “A Woman Left Lonely” plays, underlining exactly how I feel. A door slams, telling me they’re back in their room.
I take out my journal and the cheap watercolors I got at a ninety-nine-cent store on Sixth Avenue. As I bring the brush to the paper, I let the liquid colors carry me away like a river of tears.
I consider running away from the madness. It wouldn’t be the first time. I live in a frenzied cycle where my mother hits rock bottom, then inevitably gets clean and promises sobriety, and I stick around if only to look after her and make sure nothing happens.
Where would I go?
I practically already live on the streets, so that’s not much of a leap. Becoming a ward of the state is as unappealing as licking an ashtray. My uncle Gary and his family live in a prestigious neighborhood just outside the city, and last I checked he wanted nothing to do with his sister and, by extension, me. Especially after he discovered she sold the car he’d bought her and received notice that we’d been evicted from the condo he’d rented for us, which messed up his credit. After my grandfather and then grandmother passed away years ago, he’d stepped in, but even then, JJ was beyond help. It’s as though she took the notorious destruction of hotel rooms and stages to an extreme and went ahead and bashed and smashed everything else in her life.
My uncle doesn’t know Janet hasn’t touched a guitar for years, practically since I was born. She had me around the time when her band left the charts, when junkies traded CDs for cash, and when the sonic landscape as she’d known it became a digital blur. I was like a punctuation mark, the end.
For a while, my uncle believed his sister was a successful musician who’d fallen on hard times, and excused her behavior with a tight-lipped shake of the head. After a long string of deceptions, he caught her in a weak, hole-filled lie in her already-deep trench of fabrications. The final straw was when she stole and sold my late grandmother’s rare and treasured print of Watermelons by the famed artist Frida Kahlo. It had been left to my uncle, but was always the centerpiece of my grandparents’ home—an oasis in the mire of dysfunction. The painting, not their household.
The quarterly royalty check my mom receives is the only thing, aside from boyfriends and handouts, that keeps us going. She’s reduced the small inheritance she received from her parents to ashes, but she doesn’t know that yet.
I opened the statement when it came in the mail recently, and the little zero under account balance made me fear we’ll disappear into a black hole, supernova out of this world into a void, into nothing, oblivion. There is nowhere for us to go.
Lying on my bed, I look up at the framed poster of the Shrapnels on my wall. The three women pose haughtily around a military tank. In tight pants and tall boots that reach her knees, Nell, the drummer, straddles the cannon. She hit drugs and alcohol hard and ended up dying almost a decade ago. Sandra, the bassist’s, long feathered hair falls past her bare shoulders. She wears a tube top that exposes her midriff. She did OK. After rehab, she became a real estate agent somewhere in the Southwest. Then there’s my mother, the singer, the guitarist, the performer, and the addict, standing atop the tank, wearing a fringed miniskirt and a torn-up T-shirt. She’s smirking at the camera.
Looking at this shot of her, taken when she was a handful of years older than me, is like looking in a mirror. We have the same stick-straight blond hair, only I have bangs and very thick eyebrows that somehow grow darker than my hair. We share defined cheekbones and full lips, along with a smirk. I only hope that this reflection is all that I’ve inherited from her.
Sometimes I wish I’d known her then. I’m not sure when her life as I know it, one of addiction and poverty, crystallized, but she hangs on to her glory days with a death grip.
The wall adjacent to my mother and Darren’s bedroom quakes, yet the earth, somehow, is still. She’s the earthquake, the wrecking ball, the walking disaster.
The signed and framed Shrapnels poster drops to the floor, balances for a moment on the edge of the baseboard, then falls forward, shattering the glass. My tacked-up poster of Frida Kahlo, wearing agony and beauty in the same subtle smile, remains affixed to the wall. I hear a crack followed by a cry of pain from beyond my small room. The front door slams, and moments later, my door opens.
Chapter 2
Sweat and tears intermingle on my mother’s face, and a cut bleeds slowly from the side of her eye.
“Pearl, we gotta get out of here.”
Pearl Page 1