Mac returned to live with his parents at the ranch.
We split the week with Ava so each of us only had to endure a few days without her. When she was with me, I dressed her in colorful tiered skirts and leather shoes, took her to the bakery down the road for a croissant, and to the park, where I would lie to the other mothers about my marriage. We’d go home and eat lunch, and then I would snuggle into my bed with her, her head on my arm. I’d kiss her over and over again. She’d drift off for a nap, and I would too.
Sleep was harder at night, though, because I had never lived alone. The neighborhood was largely retired folks who enjoyed trimming roses and talking to each other, but my house had windows and doors right near the ground, where people could walk up and climb in if they felt so inclined. And I was sure they were so inclined.
So, before bed, particularly if it was just those wood floors and television and me, I protected myself using a complex inspection routine. First, I of course checked every door and window lock. Then I had to look under my bed and Ava’s twin bed, but because I couldn’t see to the back of my queen bed I would sometimes do a quick sweep with a broom to make sure nobody was curled up in the corner, where no human could ever fit. I also sometimes had to do that under Ava’s twin bed. I then looked in the closets, in the corners, behind the coats I hadn’t worn in five years. I could have just looked for feet on the ground, beneath the coats, but that didn’t occur to me. I looked behind bedroom, closet, and bathroom doors. I looked in the shower. For people. Intruders. Lurkers. Rapists.
I was not on meth. I was not suffering from schizophrenia. I was scared, and I thought if I knew every corner of the house was clear, I would lie down in my bed and turn off the light and feel safe. I thought I would feel comfortable knowing I had secured the perimeter.
But it never worked. It didn’t matter how thoroughly or often I checked, or how many days passed without incident. I could examine every millimeter of that house, but somehow at the end of the process, I was just as terrified as before I started. I left a light on in the living room and glanced out my bedroom door too many times as I fell asleep in twitchy half-sleep inspection.
I knew it was crazy. I would tell myself when I looked behind a door, “Janelle, nobody can fit there,” but I was compelled to look anyway. I had to do something to become unafraid.
It wasn’t my mother on the chopping block as I had imagined when I was younger. It was me. Something was coming for me. Somebody in the closet. Somebody under the bed. Maybe the same man who threatened to chop my hair off when I was a little girl also lurked in the closet of that 1940s house, a monster I never quite saw, for whose existence I had no evidence, but whose power over me was undying and uniform.
• • •
On the evenings when Ava was gone, I would lie on the couch and watch Sex and the City reruns and sip white wine until I was good and loaded. Then I would make phone calls.
“Hey, you want to go to SoCal’s?” I’d usually call my friend who’d walked into the law firm with a porn star name.
“Janelle, it’s nine p.m. on a Tuesday.” she’d say, fake exasperated.
“So? I know. Come on. I’m bored. One game of pool and a shot.” I’d soften the urgency in my voice. I’d play it cool.
“Well, okay.”
Oh, thank you, sweet baby Jesus.
I’d be at the bar within fifteen minutes, and I would have a grand time right up until the moment my friend would realize it was eleven p.m. and she needed to get to bed for work the next day. Then I would find myself alone, again, as the world moved on and I looked for more. More.
Hours later I would wake up in my nice bright house and whack my alarm, squint beneath the throbbing in my head, the chilly sweat, the strange panic. Advil. Water. Shuffling to the shower. Coffee. Cigarette. There I was, with my promotion and house full of character and freedom, and not a goddamn thing was different.
Drink more water. Take another pill.
But there was no pill to fix the regret, the abhorrence of myself each morning. I never woke up hungover thinking, You know, Janelle, you’re really winning at life. I never thought about the “fun” I had, or decided the hangover was “worth it.” I never looked back with a flippancy like other people might, the way they do in the movies: “Wow, we really went on one last night, huh?”
I woke up with mind-bending shame and deep confusion. Why can’t I stop drinking? Why can’t I drink like my friend?
What got me through those mornings was that I knew with every drop of blood in my body that I would not drink that day. I would dunk my head in a sink of ice water and hold it there for as long as I could stand it, in a miracle hangover cure my father had inadvertently taught me. He always laughed and told me it was for his complexion, but as I grew older, I realized it was for the headache. After “icehead,” our loving name for our loving cure, I would focus only on getting through the morning, one second at a time: eat food, drink coffee, get to cubicle. Let some hours pass.
But when I started to feel human again, when my thoughts became crisp, the furious remorse would fade to a whisper in the back of my mind, and every day, as soon as I was well again, I would suspect I was overreacting about the whole “not going to drink today” verdict.
That seems a little extreme, I’d think. Maybe tonight I’ll just stop by the store to buy one quality bottle of white wine because I need to relax. Make myself a nice dinner.
Life was officially not getting better without Mac. The only new feature of single life was worrying about Mac falling in love with some broad who would tell Ava what a loser her mother was. Well, that and I didn’t have magical nights in buses anymore, or my best person to call to hit the dives and play pool.
But mostly, when my drinking didn’t improve without Mac, I invited him to live with me again because if I was going to be a fucking drunk, I thought I might as well do it with my best friend, and at least some ability to pretend my life was working.
• • •
I made it six months without him, and we made it one week without drunken domestic violence. One night in the parking lot of a Thai restaurant, I sat in Mac’s truck and scanned his text messages, engaging in a process of snooping I had only seen in sitcoms. Before I left to pick up our takeout he was quite obviously trying to shield me from his phone, which he had left on the seat of his truck. What a fucking horrid liar he is, I thought. I found messages from a woman who “really missed him.” They were sent at eight a.m. on a Saturday. She appeared to have seen him the evening before. He assured me it was “nothing.” I assured him I knew all the various ways he’d slept with her.
I was the abuser. He could have killed me if he wanted to, flattened me with one hit, but he didn’t touch me. I shoved him while he stood in the entryway. He stumbled backward to the ground against the front door, and I remember him looking up at me in shock and wild confusion. He got up, grabbed his car keys, and tried to leave, but I snatched them away and continued screaming while our daughter slept in her bedroom.
At this, he walked to our bedroom and I threw his keys at him, but missed. The sight of his back, of his silent retreat, reminded me that I was nothing more than a current that came Mac’s way—something that pushed him along through a few years, and when I was gone, there would be another.
He was not loyal. He was just another man. He could leave me. Those daggers sat in me like metal in a fire—poised and red hot.
• • •
Mac never joined the rodeo. Instead, he signed up for calculus and geology courses at the community college down the road.
A few months after I learned of his non-girlfriend girlfriend, he was supposed to go on a weekend field trip with his geology class to Lake Tahoe. On the evening before he left, he scanned the checklist of items he needed, packing and repacking his backpack. He was eager and anxious like a kid before the first day of school. When he was all ready, I wanted to go to a bar, so I commenced begging.
“Let’s go out for a coupl
e games of pool!”
“What? No. I have to leave at six a.m.” He shook his head and looked at me from beneath his hat like I was insane. I was standing above him, hopping around like a puppy.
“We won’t stay out late. Come on!” I smiled and yanked his hand.
“We always stay out late, Janelle.”
“We won’t this time. I promise, I swear, I promise! Please, baby. Just a couple of games. Come on. We never get to hang out, and Ava’s with my mom.” I pulled his arm and flirted with him until he agreed.
We played our games of pool, but in the back of the bar I ran into some men with cocaine and did a few lines on the back of a toilet seat, without telling Mac. Then I bought a baggie from them in the dark parking lot, alone, and by the time I got back to Mac it was too late. He was now the husband of a wife on coke, and if he didn’t join me, he would be the man who “didn’t party.” It was already done. Already purchased. To me, his words of “no thanks” were a mere inconvenience, an obstacle to be overcome. I was a boulder smashing down a mountain.
“Have another drink,” I said, knowing if I got him drunk enough he would get high with me. Sure enough, we went back to somebody’s place and did more, and more, and more—until five-thirty a.m. arrived and I drove a sleepless, trembling Mac to meet his class at the school. He pulled his carefully packed backpack along on his drooping shoulder, red-faced and wild-eyed and never supposed to be like this. I watched him get on the bus alongside a bunch of bright-eyed students cradling cups of coffee and smiles, and I thought I had never seen a man look sadder in all my life.
Through the window of the bus, he mustered a little smile. It broke me.
Through all that, he smiled at me still. He forgave me already. He already loved me again. I drove out of the parking lot seeing his face and the way he looked at me, and I thought about how he must feel coming down off alcohol and blow among strangers, already shy and reserved, miserable and frantic with nothing but static in the brain, without sleep or a place to rest and get well. But more than that it was the way he refused to not go. He wanted to be better. He wanted to try. He wanted to be with the regular humans, and I ruined it. He wanted to sleep, and wake rested, and join the students on the bus to learn and be good and right and clean.
I sent him off sick and twisted and lonely.
He could have not gone with me. He could have left his wife with a bunch of men doing cocaine—because he knew I wouldn’t leave. I would stay where the drugs were. But he wasn’t that kind of man. Or maybe, he wasn’t healthy enough to let me go.
As I turned the corner onto our street to get home and sleep off the disaster, I realized I was wrong about all that “potential.” I was not capable. I was not destined for anything. How do you keep making these decisions, Janelle? How do you keep knowing what’s decent and true and then doing the opposite? How do you do it over and over again?
My next thought was, I must have been born without a moral compass. This wasn’t pity. It wasn’t groveling, or vapid self-deprecation. It was an observation of the facts, and I accepted them as such. I was born without morality. I must not care. I am not capable of caring. I thought about the way I used to chase my brother with the knife, the way I raged at my mother. It had been a long haul of depravity.
I could see my home crumbling. I could see any hope we once had for a decent family fading into an old memory. I could see myself turning into a person not even I recognized.
I begged him to forgive me when he got home, but he already had.
“We need a new life,” I said, clinging to him. “We need a new start.” And I had been thinking, Nothing says “new start” like a new baby.
In my mind, if I had two children, I would join the fucking PTA. I would carve carrots into little owls and place them lovingly into bento boxes with sober, manicured hands. I would wear yoga pants and actually do yoga. I would decorate cupcakes. I would have a special birthday breakfast plate and a Waldorf candle ring. I would clean up my act and get right with heaven and hell, but mostly, I would stop drinking, and if I stopped drinking I would also stop snorting cocaine, and Mac and I would be in love again. I wouldn’t leave him shivering in the cold on a curb, in line to board a bus, waiting to inspect shimmering pines with pupils aching for darkness.
• • •
The two lines popped up again without hesitation, no longer a “fuck you” pink. Mac and I hugged and hugged.
“Mom, I’m having another baby!” I told her ten minutes after I took the test.
“You are? Oh my goodness! I’m moving there.”
Of course you are, I thought, because this is our refreshing new life.
My mother, Mac, Ava, and I moved into a giant house we rented on a big fake lake in Natomas, a slightly fancier suburb than Elk Grove, but still soulless. I was now living in the house I used to admire from afar. I knew which one was ours without looking at the number because the houses were at least large enough to appear different from the others. It had five bedrooms and three bathrooms, an office and a laundry room, and a backyard that opened onto the cement lake. We put a pool table in the formal living room.
At the four-month ultrasound, the doctor jellied up my belly while Mac and I held hands in the dimly lit room. Ava sat near us on a stool, her blonde ringlets frizzy and wild around big blue eyes. “You’re having a boy,” the doctor said. He pointed to something on the ultrasound screen that was supposed to indicate this, but all I saw were squirming yellow lines. Still, I gasped and cried, and Mac’s eyes filled with tears as Ava hopped off the stool and marched up to the doctor with her hands on her hips, announcing, “No! We are having a girl! I am having a sister!”
The doctor laughed and confirmed that indeed she was having a brother, and then Ava’s sobbing ensued.
To cheer her up, we sat in the parking lot for a moment with Ava in her car seat and asked, “What should we name him, Ava? Can you help us?”
Within seconds, as if it were obvious, as if it were the only name possible in such a situation, she proclaimed: “Rocketship Rock-On. We need to name him Rocketship Rock-On!”
We roared and said that was an excellent name. I looked at Mac and said, “And because we are Frank Zappa, that name is perfect!”
He laughed. She beamed.
She told everyone we knew, “I’m having a little brother, and I named him Rocketship.” She was so proud nobody had the heart to tell her we weren’t Frank Zappa.
With Rocketship, I had a whole room to decorate. I bought an oak crib and changing table. We installed a chair rail and painted it white. We painted the bottom of the room a pastel green and the top blue. Because I wanted him to use it for years, like an heirloom, we spent real money on a matching honey-colored oak dresser from the fancy baby store.
A boy. A son. My son!
My job was rising. Our home was huge. I was sober as hell and decorating a nursery. I bought playful maternity skirts and ruched blouses and strappy sandals. He was due in September, the most beautiful month, and every appointment was happy news. I sat in the rocking chair of his color-coordinated nursery, a room straight out of a catalogue. I hung his tiny clothes on fuzzy little hangers, organized by size. I washed it all in baby-friendly detergent and folded the washcloths into tiny squares. All the cloth diapers were ready, folded, cleaned, and placed in gingham-lined baskets. There was even a patchwork quilt draped over the back of the rocking chair.
Labor began two days before his due date, four days into my maternity leave—because he was a gentleman who would never imagine arriving late. His birth was the kind they show in hippie movies trying to convince women birth is like dancing among lilies in morning dew. It lasted seven hours, beginning at home. When a contraction came, I leaned against the wall and swayed, moaning, resting on my bed in between. I took showers. I swayed some more. Around seven p.m., Mac told me we had to leave for the hospital. I told him I was okay where I was. I had never been so okay.
While in the shower, I felt the familiar agon
y and delirious pain of hard contractions, and I thought, No! I cannot do this again. I began panicking, resisting the pain, but I had read somewhere in those hippie books that you should think of all the women who were birthing with you in that exact moment, and that you had to let go and ride the pain through, because fighting made it unbearable.
So I surrendered, consciously. I let go. I visualized myself among a few thousand women all over the world—in rivers and huts and hospitals. By the time Mac told me again we had to leave I was in another world with those women, peacefully birthing my baby like those bitches in the movies nobody believes are real.
In the car that September day, the sun pounded through the glass and it was, of course, Friday evening, when the traffic is terrible. I even screamed at Mac about how much I hated him. I tell you it was a perfect birth. When I got to the hospital, the nurses didn’t believe I was in active labor because I was “so quiet and calm,” but they booked me into a room and demanded I get on the bed for twenty minutes of continuous fetal monitoring. I told them to go to hell. I was standing and swaying. That’s how I was riding the pain. I ultimately agreed to stand against the machine so they could do their monitoring, and then they left. I was delighted to see them go. I wanted to be alone, alone with this boy, alone to have my baby.
I almost immediately felt an urge to push. My mother yelled down the hall, “Somebody better get down here! She wants to push!”
I wanted to deliver in the water, so the midwife helped me into the birthing tub. I had three more contractions and pushed twice, and then turned over onto all fours. In one contraction he was born. I heard the midwife say, “Turn around and pick up your son.”
I flipped my leg up and over the umbilical cord and looked into the water and saw him there, pushing the water, eyes wide open, with his palms out and his arms and legs reaching. I brought him to the surface and pressed my face against his as close as I could without crushing him. I felt his velvet cheeks and inhaled the sweet newness at his neck. I cradled him against me on my arm, and I watched him pull his first breath of the air we shared, and his body flood pink with my blood. He looked me right in the eyes and sputtered. They rubbed his palm to make him cry, though I thought that was unnecessary. I didn’t understand why they needed to hurt him, even a little. Mac was pressed against me, his head on my shoulder, and my mother and Mac and the midwives were hushed and whispering in the gray room. When they asked how I felt, I said, “Elated.”
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