by Laura June
Increasingly, I felt more isolated than even before. I’d been isolated my whole life, often by choice. But now, I felt true division away from everyone and everything. I didn’t really feel as though I could trust anyone at all: my parents, my brothers, my grandparents, my friends. I had a few teachers I confided in piecemeal, but largely my adult world was very sparsely populated and quiet.
I remember from that period the sound my school locker door made when I slammed it shut, and there was nobody—not a soul—in the hallway besides me. I smoked in the bathroom outside the school library, the same library that I loved and hid in, warm paneled with windows backing onto a courtyard. I still have dreams that I am cutting class, walking through the empty, tired afternoon halls, or falling asleep in the back of the darkened auditorium, where I had theater classes and often watched movies once a week to end the day.
I remember these hiding places, where I went with friends but just as often alone. I remember getting caught smoking in that library bathroom, the last time I ever smoked in it, with Ellen. All that time we’d smoked in there, never knowing that the handicapped stall, which we had commandeered for our very own, shared a common wall with the librarian’s office. The vent in the bathroom blew air into her office, and so she wandered over to us in that bathroom to let us know that the smoke had billowed into her office. She told us to go straight to the principal’s office but never followed up on our progress there, so we simply left school for the day.
I wandered around on my own a lot, thinking but coming up with no answers. I usually ended up with my friends or a boy I was interested in, but much of the time it took me hours to get there. I formed habits that I still struggle to support, so antithetical are they to being a social animal. I require hours of prep time before social events, and I want so much time to myself. “I can’t think,” I say, when I don’t get it. I need a completely empty house sometimes to write a piece, often avoiding the work for days, then vomiting it out in the space of an hour or two when I suddenly find myself alone.
It was then, when I was sixteen, seventeen years old, that I became who I have remained. A person who saw herself motherless, even though I was not. I grew upward and outward, expanding and sloughing off the extra pieces. I felt unsure of most things and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I’m convinced anyway that no teenager should know what they want to do when they’re in high school, but maybe that’s simply convenient for me to think, since I didn’t know anything about that yet. I didn’t even properly think that I wanted to escape my parents. I guess I simply would have been happy to go on attending high school. I wasn’t ready to be finished with it all yet. But the end of my official childhood was fast approaching, and I did not have any choice in the matter.
In hindsight, I’m tempted to say that I didn’t really have much of a childhood beyond the age of seven or eight, mostly because of my mother’s alcoholism. I felt so conflicted about her. I loved her so much, but she also was my greatest—really my only—source of pain. I have always wondered what I would have turned out like in the absence of her problems, and though I am wary of making direct connections, pulled tight like a string, from one parent to another, Zelda has provided me with some indication that often children are simply born very serious. Though she has a great capacity for humor, she too, like both of her parents, seems born for work. She’s never really played with toys, and when we buy her a toy version of some real-life object—a phone, a computer, a watering can—she often rejects it for the real, adult one. If my personality, anxious and serious and exacting, is not wholly the product of my mother’s alcoholism, well, that makes sense to me. But it’s surprising to me to see the way that traits transfer to a new person.
A true love of music works in both directions: rather than my simply passing on my love of certain records or artists to Zelda, almost immediately she also passed some on to me. In the earliest months of her life, Josh and I began looking for a new house outside the city, a little up in the suburbs of New York City. As I’d aged and now as I’d become a mother, suddenly the prospect of such a move, despite my lifelong despair at the prospect of suburbs, became increasingly attractive to me. But when Zelda was just born, house hunting became a casual fun activity for a Saturday or Sunday morning. Every other weekend or so we’d go out and look at one house. Zelda was a city baby and unaccustomed to riding in cars, and so we made a habit early on of playing her the same quiet and calming album every time we got in the car, Lorde’s Pure Heroine. Josh was a huge fan of the record, but I was more suspicious of it. I didn’t like something about it; it hadn’t grabbed me on first listen. Some records, even brilliant ones, take some warming up to.
But Zelda seemed to like it, and so every time we got in the car, we’d throw on Pure Heroine until eventually it was the only album we played if we wanted her to take a nap. I’ve listened to Pure Heroine probably more than any other record of my adult life and, over the months, it grew on me until I came to consider it one of the best albums I’ve ever heard. Thanks to Josh and Zelda, I have Lorde. Sometimes, your best discoveries come from other people, and there’s almost nothing more satisfying than when it’s music. Like discovering Lush in a field twenty-five years ago, sometimes you accidentally light upon something that you love and it stays with you.
CHAPTER 10
◆ ◆ ◆
I should tell you about the fire.
But first, I want to tell you about when my mother stopped drinking, because that’s what happened right before the fire, the first time I’d ever known her to actively try to be sober. It’s important that she tried for lots of reasons, one of them being that it also led her to make her best decision for me with clarity, the decision to get me the abortion. If she hadn’t quit drinking, and if our lives hadn’t been such an insane, rocky mess at the time that I got pregnant, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have called her or, if I had, it would have been a mess. But it wasn’t a mess. I’ve already told you. The abortion was the best thing that ever happened to me, because my mother walked me into it with clarity and a full heart. A sober mother making a sober decision.
And I have to believe now, thinking about it, that the abortion happened only because of the way everything directly before it collapsed. I could have gotten pregnant under many circumstances. But for the abortion to happen, everything had to have fallen apart.
My mother had veered increasingly out of control in the months since her and my father had separated, though she managed to hold down her job. She drank almost daily, now that my father wasn’t there to watch over her, and we, her kids, were no deterrent despite our constant arguments with her about it. She drove drunk a lot, something which pained all of us. Sometimes, if she didn’t appear for dinner (meaning there was no dinner), we would just call down the street to the bar and ask for her. But more often than not, we didn’t bother.
I don’t remember much of what it was she was doing at that point, beyond working in an office somewhere. Since I’d been in about fifth grade or so, my mother had usually worked, mostly part time but sometimes full time. There was a sense, though I never confirmed it, that she would get a job, almost always in an office, as a secretary (what we would definitely now call an “assistant”), become well loved and highly valued, and then, one day, the job would sort of dissipate.
“I quit. They didn’t pay me enough for the shit I put up with,” she would say, and inevitably, I’m sure, that was true. Now, however, I suspect that my mother would make a work friend and after a short amount of time she’d reveal her addiction. Or at least the fact that she was often a very sloppy drunk. Because that always happened: my mother’s new jobs usually brought about some new friendship with a single or divorced woman, they went out to “dinner” a bunch of times and then sometimes came to our house to drink and talk. Sometimes these other women friends were just as drunk as she was—drunkenness is normal enough on occasion, and at first I think it probably seemed
to the friends to be nothing out of the ordinary. But my mother had a way of eventually letting her guard down, and it never worked out for her.
I think there was always a sense of endings on the way. The story of my mother’s adult life, I see now, outside her family, was one of fast friendships that ended as soon as she drank with them enough times. I get it: it’s hard to be around a drunk.
Anyway, my mother, my two brothers, and I became ships passing in the night, nobody looking anybody else too closely in the eyes, which I suppose was for the best. I wanted no scrutiny on myself, as I rolled joints in bathrooms and rolled my eyes at teachers who told me I could do better.
When I did go to school, I mostly skipped classes and hung out with Emily and Ellen and Vanessa, and I tried not to think too much. But the outside world barged in a lot in those days. In April of 1994, Kurt Cobain died (in addition to Richard Nixon); and on June 12 of that year, just three days before my birthday, Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. June 17 was the O. J. Simpson Bronco chase. All of this, somehow, made sense to me, if I don’t sound too ridiculous saying so. I felt myself surging toward adulthood: I would graduate from high school the following year, my parents were getting divorced, and the rest of the world was falling apart around me. In September of that year, just after I’d returned to school to begin what I hoped would be my final year of high school, USAir Flight 427 crashed just outside the airport in Pittsburgh as it was landing. Everyone on board died. Four of the people who died were from my hometown, and some of my fellow students lost their fathers.
I didn’t make any of this about me; I didn’t need to. My own life was sort of a mess too, and so I simply took it all in and moved forward. But the pall cast over the town where I lived and the people I was surrounded by was huge and black.
These are the only world events I remember from that year. What else was going on I cannot say, and I’ve never liked tying things together in neat little packages, relating unrelated events to one another in order to create symmetry, even if that symmetry is misery. But this feeling, that everything around me was suffocation, was palpable. Did my depression and anxiety go unnoticed? No: it was simply that everyone else was depressed and anxious too, in that time and in that place.
At some point that fall, my relationship with my first real boyfriend, Nick, began to end. Like most things, it was gradual until it was bluntly over. I had my gripes with him: he wouldn’t go to my junior prom with me; he was “over” high school. I went with someone else, who I secretly also wanted to date. My feelings about relationships were fairly fluid. I wanted more boyfriends than one sometimes, and that seemed fine with me.
My mother and I began to argue about that, too. She could see clearly when I was fucking around, and even though she didn’t really know much about it, one or two times she overstepped her boundaries—something she excelled at, especially drunk—and called Nick herself. Listening to her slur her words on the phone with my teenage boyfriend was more than I could bear but nothing I could stop. He humored her; he listened. I wanted to scratch out my own eyes as she complained bitterly about me to him.
Nick and I fought but remained close as the fall fell into winter: he was the only person I’d really been honest with about my mother, and that tie was hard to break. Once the floodgate of my honesty had opened, it couldn’t be closed again. I started, quietly and slowly, to hand out bits of information to other people. And I became friends with Nick’s friends, some of whom could relate to my home life.
I want to say exactly how all this unfolded, but I’m not sure. In January of 1995, just after Christmas, something terrible happened, which I ignored. I came home one afternoon to my mother locked in the bathroom. I couldn’t tell what was going on, but I feared it was something awful. I did not investigate, because I was selfish and I guess I didn’t care exactly what happened to my mother just then. We’d barely spoken to each other in recent months, and she drank nearly every day.
The light person she could be disappeared and was replaced almost completely by the dark one. The depressed mother I avoided at all costs. I left the house not knowing what my mother was doing locked in the bathroom, and I didn’t come back until the next day.
By then, it was obvious: my mother had, drunk or sober, cut her wrists in the bathtub. Her friend from up the street who had been a nurse in a previous iteration but was now mostly a drinking buddy to my mom had been summoned. There were conversations I had with her, whispered. Should my father be called? Of course. My grandparents? Yes.
I don’t remember those few days very well. I know that my mother did thankfully end up in a hospital, and I wasn’t able to visit her for well over a week. I’m not sure how much time passed. I know that when I did visit her, my friend Patrick, who I’d met through Nick, took me there. He was kinder and quieter and more caring than Nick. He understood without me telling him much of what was happening. I didn’t need to explain: he was bent toward sadness too, like me.
In that hospital, I found a small and changed woman. The anger flowed out and was replaced by a need, a desperate need, to save. I was, as I’d been in third grade, the adult once again. My own problems ceased to exist; the teenage cares died away. I was sober, and so was she.
I worried, as I talked to her, to hear that her doctors would not really discuss what was going on with me directly. I worried, as I heard her say, “I’m depressed about your father,” when I knew at a cellular level that she was an alcoholic. She said the depression caused the drinking.
“Of course I have to stop drinking, but that’s not my real problem,” she said. She looked so small as she lied to me. My mother was much shorter than me. I was five foot five; she barely grazed past five feet. She weighed one hundred pounds at most. Her wrists were wrapped up; she’d have those scars for the rest of her life.
“I didn’t mean it,” she told me there.
“I know,” I said.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I said.
At home, in the meantime, my grandparents Peg and Stanley presided over their three grandchildren. My grandfather’s advancing Alzheimer’s meant that he was increasingly irritated by being away from home and paced back and forth constantly.
“She’s smoking in the bathtub,” I heard my grandma Peg say of me once, as I lay in the bathtub smoking.
My father, to the extent that I remember him then (I suppose I have a way of forgetting the men, with time), was panicked and constantly asking my brothers and me to live with him. We all, to our eternal detriment, declined. My father was a straight arrow: he was strict, not always easy to talk to, all business. He was simple and didn’t drink much. I can recall seeing him drunk on only a number—a very small number—of occasions in my entire life, and even then he hadn’t been wasted.
Why do children of alcoholics cling to the worse parent, the alcoholic? Well, I see even now in my relationship with Zelda that I am the “less fun” parent and that, in a standoff she would, certainly as a teen, choose her father over me. I am the rule keeper, the boss. That was my father. So maybe it was me staying to protect my alcoholic mother, or maybe I simply wanted to stay with her because she was easier.
Why did my mother do what she did? I suspect that she wanted to start fresh but didn’t know how. I have suspected that maybe she realized too late that my father leaving wouldn’t actually solve all her problems, as she had predicted many times. In this one case, however, I do not have any real theories or answers: I only know that this happened, and that it was gutting to everyone.
But it did reset us, sort of.
I began to take up childish pursuits that as a teenager I had abandoned. I started coloring and carrying an Elmo doll around with me. I clung to my friends, waiting for my mother to come back. I don’t know how long she was gone, I guess close to a month, because it was nearly February by then. My grandparents were going out of their minds and had pack
ed up and gone home. My brothers had somewhat grudgingly stayed with my dad for a bit, and I went not far up the street to Emily’s house.
And that was how Wacky Wednesday started in earnest. Because suddenly, I was staying with Emily. We’d spent most of our childhoods alternating homes but now, really, I was there every minute of every day. Her mother packed me lunches and made sure I went to school. It lasted only a week or two before my mother came home.
I was happy to have her back, though I don’t remember it very well. Everything seemed sort of tenuous. My grandparents reappeared and stayed again. My brothers returned, and we re-formed, silent, awkward glances and knowing stares.
My mother seemed better, but nothing felt permanent anymore. Would it hold?
And she had stopped drinking. She was on antidepressants and sleeping pills to counteract the antidepressants. I tried to go to school more, to pay attention and apply myself. I thought about taking the SAT, which I had never done before and was late on.
I think now that my mother’s breakdown and attempt to harm herself physically was easily glossed over in some respect because it was followed so quickly by a long (relatively speaking) period where she reset and recharged. She seemed fragile, yes, but not weak. She seemed reinvigorated and more like the person we had known early in childhood. She was in therapy and AA. I want to believe that that was why I didn’t focus for too long on what had come before: because she seemed so much better, truly, and because I desperately wanted her to be.
My grandparents shuffled back home at some point; my mother did seem stable and quite content, happier, to me, maybe than she had seemed in years.
But still, it was not much of a surprise to me when I came home from school one snowy afternoon, the first Friday of February, packed into a Jeep with a bunch of friends to drop me off, to fire trucks parked in my giant front yard.