“My husband . . .”
She listened, but tried to not remember the person’s name. She didn’t want friends; she couldn’t handle the responsibility right now. Should she raise her hand and share?
Telling the story of what had happened the night before would take longer than the allotted three minutes. Was that always going to be the case? Keep It Simple. It seemed that most shares had to do with going to work, looking for work, the ever-increasing stress of Trump destroying the nation, and, always, relationships. Most shares did not involve strangled actresses and jumping on trains to avoid the police, but some did. Overall, it was banality that was the bond, and having a story that was too big would break that bond. She needed to not stand out. It would be good for her. Stay sober! Whatever she had to do to not pick up, that was what she should do.
She raised her hand. Someone else was called on. Ronald.
Maggie was kind of relieved, kind of pissed off. As Ronald started describing his obstacle, trying to lay out his choices, Maggie practiced what she was going to share. She ran it through in her mind to get the share down to three minutes. So, I went to see my daughter to negotiate with her mother to create a humane . . .
“I just ask my Higher Power,” Ronald was saying, “to help me, help me understand. Because I can’t figure it out on my own.”
Everyone clapped.
Maggie was thinking so hard, she forgot to raise her hand again. Ramón got called on. Higher Power meant that they all needed some mercy, some exterior kindness, someone else wanting to make things right. Right? But Frances wasn’t sitting in a meeting trying to deal with her actions. She was watching TV with her arm around her new wife, thinking that meant she had won. It was so strange. Maggie seemed to be the only person in this cast of characters who was actually trying to deal with everything. And for there to be a solution, they both had to be doing it, Maggie and Frances. Technically, Frances qualified for Al-Anon, and frankly also for AA. How could Maggie get Frances to recognize this and go to meetings too so that they could start talking about what really mattered? Getting visitation with Alina.
Ramón was describing the experience of trying to save up for a car, and how it was a symbol, concrete evidence of making something out of his life. Did Maggie need a car? No, she remembered. She needed curtains and a tea bag.
“First Things First,” said Ramón.
First Things First.
She raised her hand.
“Hi, thanks for calling on me. My name is Maggie and I am an alcoholic and a drug addict.”
“Hi, Maggie.”
Omar walked in.
“I feel like . . . like . . . I’m supposed to . . . acknowledge all the ‘destruction’ . . . I’ve . . . ‘caused.’ But I don’t want to. I don’t feel like it’s all my fault. I feel like . . . it just happened. And I want to know . . . why is this my life? Thank you.”
That wasn’t what she had meant to share. She had meant to share the pain of Frances making the wrong decision. The decision that served no one but Frances’s need to feel superior. Maggie was so frustrated that she hadn’t said what she needed to say that she forgot again to call on the next person. Then the pressure of all the staring, hungry eyes finally bore through her thick skull.
“Sorry.”
She pointed to Omar.
“Thanks for calling on me. My name is Omar; I am a drug addict.”
She did not want to hear what Omar had to say. She did not want to get to know him. She did not want to get involved with all these people who were dangerous to themselves, whom she could hurt. And then, some terrible pain exploded inside. Missing Frances. Regret. Where was her beautiful child? Why didn’t anyone love Maggie Terry?
“Thank you.” Omar was done. He smiled at her and called on Charles.
Maggie felt terrible that she hadn’t listened. What had this man done to her besides being welcoming and kind? She had n-o-t-h-i-n-g but her sobriety. Who was she to be a snob? Was that what she was? A bitch? Really? Let’s get honest.
They all stood for the Serenity Prayer.
Maggie again left out the word God. But this time she did stay for the entire closing. Changing the things I can. Honestly, that was almost anything, but not everything. She couldn’t change a court order, but she could get it reversed. Anything a human being created, a human being could change.
And the wisdom to know the difference.
The meeting was over and Maggie beelined for Omar.
“Omar, I apologize for my behavior at the dance.”
“Thank you so much, Maggie. It’s your right to decide whether or not you want to be at a dance.”
“True.”
“At least you checked it out.”
The Next Best Thing.
“But it’s not my right to be rude to you.”
He smiled a huge, truly happy smile of reward, surprise, and contentment. “That is a wonderful gift. Thank you so much.” Then he handed over his card. “Here is my phone number. If you ever want to get together over coffee . . .”
That was the problem with taking responsibility, Maggie remembered. Everything becomes deeper. It is not a way out of life, it is only a way in.
“After what I just shared? Omar, what in the world would make you want to get together with me?”
“You are honest about how defensive you are. But still think you are a special case. Maggie, you are not the most fucked-up person in the room. No one is. You are competing for a position that doesn’t exist. Everyone needs support.”
He smiled, but in a gentler way. She was suspicious. What did he want?
“I have to get to work.”
Maggie picked up her uneaten apple and her cold cup of mint tea and walked to the office, placing the apple in her shoulder bag with today’s newspaper, where it knocked against the apple left over from the day before. Maybe she didn’t like apples. How could that be? Maybe she should stop buying them at Nick’s until she found something she actually wanted? What would she eat? A bagel? The thought seemed repulsive.
“Good morning, Maggie,” Sandy warmly greeted her at reception. “How are you today?”
“Okay,” Maggie mumbled, distracted. She started stumbling toward her personal version of an empty refrigerator, i.e., her office, when suddenly she turned around. “Sandy?”
“Yes?”
“How are you?”
“I’m excited, actually.”
“Why?”
There it was again. Other people.
“Because,” and Sandy actually jumped up and down and clapped her hands like a TV nursery school teacher in 1964, “I have some great news for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, Maggie, your office is finally ready!” And Sandy grabbed her hand and led her down the hallway. “Look!”
On the gray door was stenciled: MS. MAGGIE TERRY, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
“Isn’t that cool?”
“Yeah,” Maggie said, realizing that someone was telling her that she was going to be there for a while. That she was welcomed. “Mike is such a doll.”
“Actually, I did it,” Sandy reported calmly, and burst into giggles. “But Mike approved it, of course.”
Maggie opened the door, hoping that someone else had taken care of everything; maybe Sandy was the new daddy, the new good daddy, and Maggie would no longer have to do the hard work of decorating when she didn’t know what she liked. But, of course, the room was still empty. Shit! She had forgotten to pick up curtains and tea bags for her apartment again. She had to do it. Maybe during lunch? Then, she had a better idea. The right idea. Maggie stood in the doorway, reached into her bag, pulled out the green orb and the mealy red one, and finally bit into each apple. Then she drank the cold tea. First Things First. Then she took out her cell phone and dialed one of the two numbers in her contacts.
“Hi, it’s Maggie. Can we meet for lunch?”
“Sure, did you watch Rachel Maddow last night? The Trump people are sending forged NSA documents
to the media, trying to trick them into printing fake stories, so they can accuse the media of being fake.”
“No, I don’t have a TV.” Everyone she met was talking about the world. Maggie could never remember a society so united by threats regularly announced on television.
“You can watch it online. Okay, come by the office. See you soon. First Things First.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1:00 PM
The droning of the drill made Maggie’s teeth hurt. That was the one thing about Rachel she had never understood: not her tales of incessant and insane cocaine use that were, today, invisible and unimaginable. Not her difficult journey toward transsexuality, as Maggie had always known her as the woman she is. Not her fanatically left-wing politics that made her sponsoring a former police detective a state of contradiction, not Rachel’s constant embrace of contradiction, but how in the hell could Rachel spend most of her life with her hands in other people’s mouths?
The waiting room was like any dentist’s office: pastel, demure on the edge of boring, but the magazine rack held the Nation, the Guardian, and printouts of each morning’s edition of the Electronic Intifada. Democracy Now! played on the sound system. The reporter, Amy Goodman, had the most no-nonsense voice Maggie had ever heard. She was saying something about Raqqa being “slaughtered silently.” What, Maggie wondered, was Raqqa?
A thin, macraméd curtain separated the waiting patients from those in the dentist’s chair, and Maggie could hear all of the banter.
“Now, rinse.”
Or,
“Every day there is a new impeachable offense. When are the Republicans going to stop using him to get richer, and help the Democrats kick him out on his ass?”
Or,
“I can’t do anything if you won’t floss your teeth. We have to work together to keep you chewing.”
Even dentists were fluctuating between panicking about the government and the coercions of daily existence.
Soon Rachel emerged in her sleeveless red linen tunic from Eileen Fisher, plaid cotton skirt from Ann Taylor, and black Birkenstocks. “I’m on my feet all day, you know.” And they headed down the block for lunch.
Veselka had been on the corner of Ninth Street and Second Avenue since before Rachel was born, and she had been eating there all of her life. In homage to that life, she usually ordered the cold borscht with homemade challah bread and a cherry lime rickey. Since Maggie only ever came to this place with her sponsor, Rachel usually encouraged her to dip into the depths of Ukrainian delights. But to Maggie, it all looked unappetizing. Sour cream might be too sour. Kasha varnishkes, butterfly pasta covered in thick mushroom gravy, seemed like wallpaper paste; and the stuffed cabbage being devoured at the next table appeared to be some kind of stringy substance wrapped around an advanced Eastern European meatball. So while Rachel gobbled her side of potato pancakes, a half order of fried pierogi, and a side of kielbasa with gusto and glee, Maggie ordered a BLT on whole-wheat toast that she could have had anywhere in the United States. She just could not assimilate one new thing. Today.
If Rachel was disappointed in Maggie’s rejection of new experiences, she kept it to herself. This relationship, after all, was not about her. It was about keeping Maggie sober, and in order to stay sober Maggie had to address her anxieties. To do that, she had to work the steps, go to meetings, and talk to her sponsor. The fact that Maggie had called meant that she had asked for help, and that was a move in the right direction. For this reason, Rachel was there to listen and advise, just as Rachel’s original sponsor, Matias, may he rest in peace, had listened so closely so many years before.
Maggie slowly recounted her maladjustment at work, the pressure of Craig’s disapproval, Brinkley’s pass and subsequent tailing, the command of drugs and alcohol from every corner. The loneliness. The paltry service at meetings. Her dismissal of Omar, her ambivalences about her own actions. Enid’s active hatred of her. Sandy’s kindness. And her ongoing inability to get her apartment organized. She entirely omitted any information about having taken the train to Frances’s house and Frances calling (or perhaps pretending to call) the police, since no one had contacted her with any warnings, legal or otherwise. Every time it came to a place in the conversation where she could have brought that up, it seemed less grave. She focused her story down to the struggle to stay away from substances.
“I bring you check,” said the Ukrainian waitress, wearing a small blue-and-yellow flag pinned to her apron.
“Dziękuję,” Rachel responded with enthusiasm, as it was her habit to try to speak to people in their own languages to whatever degree possible. “I think that might be Polish,” she confided as the waitress picked up their cash.
“And how are you?” Maggie finally asked as they walked out past the Rice Krispies treats and black-and-white cookies at the front counter by the door.
“Danny and I are having a big party for our nineteenth anniversary. I want you to be there.”
“Thank you so much.”
“And then we’re going to Hawaii.”
“Nineteen years of happiness.” Maggie felt hopeless. “I admire you so much.”
“Well, it came after ten years of sobriety.”
“I’m forty-two.” She had eighteen months and three days. She would be fifty-one when she had ten years. If she met someone then, if they could last nineteen years, she would be seventy.
“Fifty-two is not too old to meet the love of your life,” Rachel said with gravitas. She meant it. “Also sixty-two.”
“That does give me some time to decorate my apartment.”
They walked up Second Avenue to Rachel’s office. “Maggie, listen to me. I have many sober years, but each one starts with One Day at a Time. Tonight, on your way home from work, buy a bunch of flowers for your apartment and a vase to put them in. That will start you creating a foundation for building a home where you will love to be. A safe haven. The first step of many steps.”
“Okay.” Maggie looked at her watch. “I want to.”
“Good. What is next for you, today?”
“I have to get back to the sexually abusive father of a murdered mentally ill young actress.”
Rachel seemed, well, concerned. “Why?”
“It’s my job.”
She laughed. “Put that on your list of things to think about.”
“Okay, Doctor Rachel. Wish me luck.”
“Where is he living?”
“In a slum apartment.”
“Is it owned by Jared Kushner? He owns that one.” She pointed across the street. “And that one.”
“I don’t know.”
“Maggie,” Rachel wrapped her arms around her, “I believe in you. Buy flowers!”
Walking east and south to Stefan Wagner’s building, it was hard to believe how much this area of the city had changed. There was a Starbucks on Saint Mark’s Place and Avenue A. There were new luxury constructions everywhere, with placards advertising “One bedrooms starting at 1.6 million.” There were buildings with pools on the roof, and movie stars buying entire buildings and adding floors they didn’t need just to show off their wealth to the squeezed, rent-stabilized tenants next door. Every so often there was still some eccentric low-cost variety: a Vietnamese sandwich stand, a walk-in that only sold pork sandwiches to go, a little shed with a guy shaving ice off a large slab and adding plum juice. Some old bars. This went on and on: bad expensive restaurants, bars selling food that only belonged in the suburbs, with undesirable themes like German sausage haus. On corners where Maggie had once bought dope in peace, there were ubiquitous $5 doughnut shops. Everything that should cost a dollar now cost five. And boring people, looking the same, same, same, until suddenly, it was a strip that hadn’t yet been seized. There were still some auto parts stores. There was a Chinese bridal shop. Some storefront churches stayed strong between the last of the bodegas with plantains and yucca in the window. There were unrenovated businesses, some old men sitting on a stoop, and garbage. Where did th
ey go to buy food? How did they get secondhand refrigerators? Where did they get their shoes repaired? Oh, there was a shoe repair! Lots of garbage. The garbage cans were chained, but not sealed, so the place had rats.
But when she got to Stefan’s building, one of the few dirty tenements still on the block, it was clear from who came running down the stairs and out the front door that these new tenants were paying $4,000 a month, and their apartments were probably newly constructed palaces, hiding behind the crumbling facade. They didn’t look her in the eye, and she was white. But those $4,000-types would rather have rats than meet their neighbors. It would never occur to them that if they called a meeting, they could get the landlord to deal with the garbage, because these kinds of people identified with the landlord. So, they never complained. It was the passive mentality of the over-privileged. Someone else should take care of it. Maggie knew from her days driving to crime scenes with Julio, that—even with gentrification—there were still people in these buildings who had been there forever. Some of them wished they still had a neighborhood. But some of them just wanted to be left alone.
She pressed buzzer 5F, no name. No answer. So she waited.
Finally, a white guy with a thick neck and a coordinated running outfit came out the door, earbuds already in place. He didn’t look her in the eye, so he didn’t notice her foot in the closing door as she let herself into his hallway. These kids had zero street smarts. It would be so easy to rip them off.
The hallways had been renovated and the gentrified apartments had new doors. She could see that there were only a few of the original tenants left, waiting to drop like flies. But the rickety stairs still had burn marks sealed into the slate. A lot of junkies died in this building, she thought, as there was no sign of them beyond the cigarette scars they’d left behind on the steps. The oral history passed down by drug addicts told of days before Maggie’s time. The ghosts of young men yelling Ba Hondo! when the cops were coming, and gasoline envelopes with hand rubber stamps advertising Toilet-brand heroin, or Watergate. There were no monuments to the thin Puerto Rican women whose lives were lost waiting on line to buy dope out of buckets lowered from abandoned buildings, where blue glass towers now stood guarded by doormen, and featuring four-star restaurants. No plaques saying “A person in this building died of AIDS.” No sign. No sign. It never happened at all. Pretend, pretend, pretend. Like Frances, refuse history.
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