Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  Bethany turned briefly to lift the tea bag out of her tea. As she spoke, she squeezed it against the inside of her mug with her bare fingers. “So, you already know that the Joyner is the most prestigious and highly funded fellowship offered in the Program, or indeed the field—​a unicorn of a fellowship, a Sumatran rhinoceros of a fellowship, funded by an eccentric alumnus with an enthusiasm for the humanities? And you know that it allows one exceptionally ambitious student from DHU to conduct up to two years of dissertation research at any partner European university, while living on a stipend most find ample, even luxurious? And that it is as close to a guarantee of a tenure-track Research I job as you are likely to find in this fallen world?”

  Europe . . . ample funding . . . a tenure-track job. Escape. I forgot my white lie for the moment and let my eyes go wide at the prospect.

  She dropped the used tea bag into a little dish evidently kept on her desk for that purpose. It was an actual mesh pouch with drawstrings. I could not imagine how much a whole box of tea like that would cost. “And I suppose you know that it’s only given out every third year, and that this is a Joyner year?”

  I nodded quickly, wishing we could drop the fiction of my prior knowledge.

  “Then you surely also know that one of my students always gets the Joyner.”

  It seemed she wouldn’t go on until I nodded again. I got it over with.

  She shook her fingers lightly, and half a dozen tiny tea droplets flew into the air and evaporated instantly, as if they’d been dismissed.

  She leaned forward.

  “Well, let me tell you something I know. Every year, I know which of my students is going to get the Joyner. My students don’t know, but they know I know. I have never been wrong about who was the best fit. Not once.” She tented her fingers in front of her. “Some might say I have a knack for choosing the right horse.”

  The energy in the room seemed to hiss and pop, the air around Bethany growing wavy with heat, as if she were a radiator just turned on. Under her intense gaze, my chagrin melted into a shaky kind of excitement.

  “Would you like to go to Venice, Mac?” she said softly. “Would you like to study in Brussels? Oxford? Edinburgh, perhaps? The University of Lyon is one of our most sought-after partner programs, due to the city’s great beauty.” She touched her lips in a gesture I recognized from long years of watching my mother, and I knew Bethany had once been a smoker.

  I spoke slowly. “I wouldn’t be going there for the beauty. If I went there.”

  She looked at me from under half-lowered lids, her hazel eyes shifting subtly. “The fellowship application is due at the end of the semester. You’re going to have to work very, very hard.” Before I could respond, she said, “Starting now. Get out your notebook.”

  I hardly knew what happened for the rest of our meeting, though I took copious notes on the words that spilled from Bethany’s mouth and curled around me like smoke. Later I went back to look at my notes. I had accidentally taken them in red pen, and the page looked as if I had opened a vein over it. I recognized the word negation, underlined several times, and there was a series of bullet points that appeared, on closer inspection, to be a list of birds—​tern, wren, crow, finch. The rest I couldn’t make out.

  It was all very confusing, as everything Bethany said was confusing. But leaving her office, I felt the architecture of dreams taking shape around me and growing solid under my feet. I had been chosen. And she whom Bethany chose, I gathered, did not go unchosen by others for long.

  I pulled out my phone to text Connor, and my stomach dropped. I had missed seventeen calls from my mother over the past hour. My voice-mail box was full. My mom never texted, but there was one from Gwen: Your mom is calling me every ten minutes to ask if you’re home yet, PLEASE call her.

  I didn’t bother listening to the messages. My mom had a million reasons for calling, but they all added up to two little words with the power to stop my life’s forward motion as implacably as brakes stopping a high-speed train. I headed to the apartment to call her back in private. The damp air turned to a freezing drizzle, and I walked faster and faster, the two words pounding in my head to the rhythm of my steps:

  Come home. Come home. Come home.

  5

  Damp, miserable, I crouched on my bed with the phone in my hand.

  “Did you hear me, Mac? I said I need you to come home for a while.”

  “I heard you, Mom. I—” I tried to say, I can’t come home right now. I’m sorry. It’s not a good time. But, as always happened in my nightmares about this moment, my throat closed up. It was useless. “What’s wrong?”

  “ ‘What’s wrong?’ ” she mimicked. “Some people’s lives. What do you think is wrong? It’s Lily.”

  My heart leapt into my throat. “Is she okay?”

  “What a question.” Her voice went momentarily quiet, as if she had pulled away from the receiver. After a crackle of packaging in the background, she was back, working her words around a bite of something. “Well, she has me to look after her, that’s something.”

  “Mom.” I knew she was settling in, drawing this out on purpose to make me worry, but I couldn’t help it. Against my will, I started flipping through worst-case scenarios: Lily sick in the hospital. Lily hit by a car. Lily pregnant. “Mom, just tell me what happened.”

  “It’s her checks. They’ve stopped coming.”

  “Her disability checks?” I had filled out the paperwork when Lily turned eighteen, found the specialist to testify that she would never be able to support herself, while my mother had cried in the background, repeating, “She’s coming along. She’ll get her GED.” Lily, who had nothing invested in denial, had gone along with the process without complaint. “Have you tried calling?”

  “Yes, I’ve tried calling!” she snapped. “You think you’re easier to get hold of than the Social Security office? Their wait time is only an hour. Getting you takes all day.”

  “What did they say?”

  “She doesn’t qualify anymore.”

  “Of course, she qualifies.” Something occurred to me, and I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply through my nostrils. “Mom, you’ve been taking her to the doctor, right? For her regular appointments?”

  There was a pause just long enough for my mom to prepare her defense, and in that pause, I could see instantly what had happened: thanks to her sloppiness with doctor’s visits and paperwork, we’d missed a continuing disability review. Then came the onslaught.

  “You try getting her out of the house, Mackenzie Claire. I’d like to see you feed her breakfast and get her dressed and presentable, all while singing the song she likes and keeping her favorite T-shirt in sight and the Morning Show has to be on, Lily is my morning girl.”

  I felt something in me strain almost to the snapping point as I remembered the countless times I had done all that while my mom lay incapacitated in bed.

  But she wasn’t finished. “And then if you manage everything just right and you get her in the car with her headphones on and she sees something—​could be anything, a fire hydrant that’s the wrong color—​well, you know what happens. Last time she screamed herself sick. She actually vomited. And we missed that expensive appointment, which I still had to pay for, mind you, because I was cleaning her off in the ladies’ room.” She wheezed indignantly. “You think that’s where her checks should go every month? To some therapist who can’t even get off her lazy ass to help in the bathroom? Not to food and gas and electric, and the cable bill for all the TV channels she has to have, or she’ll go nuts? Is that what you think?”

  She had worked herself up into a righteous fury, the tremor in her voice gone, her eyes with their Percocet glow nearly burning me through the phone.

  “She has to keep up medical treatment,” I managed, but it came out less than a whisper, like something you’re trying to say in a dream.

  “She weighs thirty pounds more than me, Mackenzie. I can’t force her into the car.” Her voice was
quivering again, shaking itself free of its anger, diving back into self-pity. “She hurts me, Mac. It’s not her fault—​she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Last week she threw a tantrum and gave me two black eyes. I had to wear sunglasses to the bank.”

  I pulled the phone away from my face and covered the receiver, forcing the sobs out hard, like vomit. If I tried to hold them in, it would show in my voice, and she’d pounce on my weakness. Lily was never malicious, but the fact that she couldn’t be blamed for the damage she did made the house feel, at times, like a prison. I tried not to think about my mom having needs of her own, perhaps even aspirations—​those baton-twirling lessons, the home-sewn costumes . . . But no. When she had chosen pills over us, she’d forfeited her right to personhood in my eyes.

  That thought led horribly, inevitably, to the next. Had she missed the appointments because she was using again? Or, worse, was the eligibility problem some elaborate ruse to cover up the fact that she was stealing the checks herself?

  I shoved it down. Lily was her life. Even at her lowest, in the doldrums of addiction, Mom had never stolen from Lily. She’d sold everything there was to sell—​thank god, I thought for the millionth time, I had taken those earrings—​but she’d always broken down and confessed what was happening to me before it got that far.

  Still. I thought of the logic of her past relapses. I was the furthest from her I’d ever been, and the closest to escaping for good.

  “Mackenzie? Are you coming home, baby?”

  She only called me “baby” when it was working. I had to think. I had to clear my head. Vaguely, in the back of my mind, I could see Oxford—​Brussels—​Lyon. I had been chosen.

  “If it’s too hard to get Lily out, I’ll find someone to come to the house,” I managed. “We’ll resubmit the paperwork—​I’ll resubmit it. And they’ll see that her diagnosis is the same, and they’ll send the checks again.”

  There was a long silence. “That’s not what the lady said on the phone,” she said, suddenly sullen. “I didn’t write it down. I’ve been so tired lately. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re worried about the grocery money.”

  “I think if we get her examined, this will clear up.”

  “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? While you’re in school reading books and drinking with your snobby friends?” As always, her instinct for where to strike was jarringly accurate. In stabbing out blindly at the two things that seemed most luxurious to her, the most outrageously wasteful, she had boiled down what I thought of as a complicated and important lifestyle to the essentials. Reading and drinking.

  “I can transfer six hundred now, and more after the weekend.” So much for rent. I’d have to pick up extra shifts at the restaurant, somehow. “Will that get you through the next couple of weeks?”

  “You won’t come home?” She tried the wheedling voice one more time, halfheartedly, as if she already knew she’d lost the fish on the hook.

  “If I come home, I’ll lose my job,” I said flatly. “If I stay, I can send you money. Which do you want?”

  I held my breath.

  “If you send it fast enough, we can manage,” she sniffed. “Me and Lily do all right on our own. Don’t we, Lily?”

  I froze. She was in the room. In another minute Mom would put her on the phone. Lily hated the phone. “I’ve got to go, Mom, but I’ll call you really soon to let you know about a doctor. And I’ll send you that money today.”

  I hung up without giving her a chance to say I love you. For some reason that part always hurt the most.

  It was only when I’d sat down to empty my checking account into hers that I remembered her line about wearing sunglasses to the bank. I’d switched her to an online-only bank years ago to make transfers like this cheaper and easier. She didn’t go to the bank; didn’t even have a brick-and-mortar bank. I shrugged wearily.

  The front door opened and shut, and Gwen walked in, knocking softly on my open door.

  “Is everything okay?” I could tell from her too-perfectly enunciated consonants she was fighting a three-drink slur. “What was your mom calling about?”

  “Oh, it’s just some stuff about Lily. Not a big deal.”

  “Anything I can do?” The tender inquiries of someone who could rest easy in the knowledge that they could do nothing, and therefore would be asked for nothing. “If you want to talk, or something.”

  Or something. I briefly imagined myself asking Gwen to float me next month’s rent, then rejected it. She would say yes, and then where would we be? I had never officially borrowed money from Gwen. She had always covered me at restaurants and bars and pretended not to notice that I got her back much less often than I should. But these were luxuries, and it was understood that Gwen wanted to indulge in them herself without guilt, which meant helping me enjoy them as well. To pay for something real, something necessary, even urgent—​to keep me alive for a month—​that would change our relationship irrevocably, I knew. The way it had changed my mother’s and my relationship the first time I floated her for a month. Breaking out of normal hierarchies of care created a sense of outrage in both the giver and the receiver that, in my experience, could not be repaired. It was Gwen’s privilege to remain ignorant of the cost of such unnatural transactions, and I would do anything to keep her from finding out. Better to get a second job on top of Nona. Better to drop out of grad school altogether.

  “I’ve already taken care of it,” I said lightly.

  “Great,” she said, relaxing. “Because Connor’s having a party on Saturday and you are very much invited. He said if you bring a thermos of buttery nipples, he may just forgive you for quitting the trivia team.”

  I could feel the threat of imbalance between us evaporating as Gwen’s words made me into an ordinary student once more, not a charity case. “Thanks for the tip,” I said with a smile.

  * * *

  Saturday night, Gwen and I arrived at Connor’s at 10 p.m. on the dot, but the party was already well underway. Connor and his roommate, a first-year he referred to drily as Aggressively Bland Matt (the other Matt had a tattoo), had decorated for the party by clearing out the glass-front bookshelves and stuffing them with wads of dollar-store Christmas lights. Bowls of chips and trays of tequila shots, garnished with limes and little dishes of salt, dotted every available surface. TVs and laptops throughout the apartment played half a dozen different musicals just loudly enough to compete with the party music, creating an entertaining cacophony.

  Gwen pointed at Little Orphan Annie tap-dancing in the fireplace. “I’m assuming this whole thing was Connor’s idea.”

  As if summoned, Connor appeared in the hallway, a head taller than everybody around him. I raised the thermos for him to see.

  “Buttery nipples!” Connor shouted, stretching his arms over the heads of his classmates, his exuberance drowning out both TLC on the stereo and “It’s a Hard Knock Life” on the television. “At last!” He broke out of the crowded hallway and wrapped his arms around me, and I could tell he was already three sheets to the wind.

  “I can’t say no to you.”

  I pressed the thermos into his hands, and he pretended to cradle it in his arms like a baby.

  “Where have you been all week? They registered trivia teams for the playoffs, and you missed it. The pot is three hundred dollars. We’re all going to be rich!”

  I made a face. “I thought I was forgiven if I brought candy-flavored booze?”

  “I had to beg Aggressively Bland Matt to take your place. I’m too sad to forgive you.” He sighed, then brightened. “But luckily I’m also druuuunnnnk!” He shimmied away down the hall to the chorus of “Waterfalls,” holding the thermos-baby over his head and spanking it while he sang, “ ‘Please stick to the rivers and the streams that you’re used to . . .’ ”

  I wondered why he hadn’t said hi to Gwen, and then I turned around and saw that she was gone. Alone, unmoored, I looked around for someone to talk to. I noticed Tess stand
ing in a circle of people in the living room and approached tentatively, lingering on the outskirts while Aggressively Bland Matt held forth.

  “There’s not a single third-year here, man,” he was complaining to someone I didn’t recognize.

  “I guess they’re all studying for quals. I heard people get weird around quals.”

  “At least Bird came, didn’t you, Birdsy?”

  “You can always count on the Bird.”

  Even I knew who the Bird was. He was an eighth-year in the Program who had taken a year of medical leave halfway through his dissertation and hadn’t turned in a chapter since. People whispered that he had spent that year in a mental institution, but he looked much healthier than his dissertating peers. I saw them from time to time in the library, pale and slack-jawed. Bird’s dark olive skin, on the other hand, was ruddy from sitting in the sun on the quad, surrounded by first- and second-years, and he came to all the parties.

  Trying to catch Tess’s eye, I edged closer. But it was Bird, a little shorter than me, balding on top, with a ponytail and little round glasses, who acknowledged me first.

  “You’re Bethany’s new student, aren’t you?”

  The conversation circle instantly widened to include me, Matt and the others melting back deferentially at the magical name. In spite of my relief, I felt strangely exposed. I hadn’t told anyone about my independent study with Bethany yet and wasn’t sure I wanted them to know. “I’m Mac,” I said.

  “Prometheus Birdling III, renowned shipbuilder. Pleased to meet you.” I laughed uncertainly at the fake introduction, and he eyed me. “You’re very much her type.”