Drunk Mom
Page 21
In the weeks that I’m staying at Cara’s, my boyfriend and I divide custody of Frankie. After I drop Frankie off at the daycare or on the days when his father takes care of him, I ride my bicycle. I ride up the hills and down, for miles, pedalling and breathing loudly as I go up, letting my body sweat it all out as I go down.
My bike is barely holding together, still bent and twisted in places from my accident, but even that makes my excursion somewhat more satisfying, its brokenness a testimony to where we’ve both been. The fact that I’m still riding it meaning we’re better now.
I like feeling my muscles again. Since going to the gym at rehab, I haven’t been this close with my own body’s working. It’s good to feel it again. I even like the pain in my lungs and the awful city dirt and dust that lands on me in the sweaty evenings and clings to me during hazy mornings. I don’t mind at all.
I ride to and from work, and to and from my meetings. I fill up every free hour with going to and being at meetings.
On my days with Frankie I bring him to meetings. I know I’m becoming one of those moms with a writhing toddler who stands in the back of the room and leaves before the tantrum is in full swing but not soon enough to save everybody from a loud sample of toddler rage. Long time ago before I was a mom and before I relapsed, I used to get annoyed by these women in meetings. I remember having to talk myself out of the desire to shush them. I had to sit there, frozen in annoyance, and I had to keep reminding myself that they had no choice, they had to bring babies with them. And now I will be one of them and I’ll have to put up with tut-tutting bitches like myself.
Three weeks after I last drank, I’m at a meeting and I go up with Frankie on my hip, to pick up a chip that stands for wanting to quit drinking. It’s called a desire chip. I have to march across a room full of people to get it and I know from before that they will all clap madly when I walk back to my spot. This is the part I used to hate, but this time when I walk back and everyone claps, I feel touched and even a little proud of myself. Frankie loves when people clap, so he joins in, clapping his chubby little hands, after we sit down and honour the following thirty-day, two-month, six-month and nine-month chips that honour periods of sobriety.
Outside the windows, the trees are thick with green leaves. Like most meetings, this one is held in a room in a church building. It smells of cheap coffee and it’s a familiar smell; I welcome it.
I don’t leave this meeting early and there are no tantrums. We stay inside for the duration. Cara and her friend Kate take Frankie out near the end, when he fusses, and play with him as I sit inside the room where the actual meeting is held. I listen to a famous film director talk about binge drinking and smoking crack with bikers.
After the speaker is done talking, I go to find Frankie and Cara and Kate. They are in a classroom in the back of the church. Montessori classes are held here during the week, and my friends are playing with Frankie by the shelf filled with wooden toys.
He squeals when he sees me and triumphantly raises one arm to show me a piece of wood he’s holding on to. Cara and Kate turn around and squeal too. They’re squealing over the fact that Frankie is walking; they say he has made a couple of steady steps completely on his own.
Looking at the three of them sitting on the floor with open faces and big smiles, looking at my son with his cloud of golden hair and his face, his ruby-red lips and happy cheeks, and all that green August outside the window, and everything that makes this moment this moment—the smell of coffee still lingering in the air—I finally feel that we’re safe and that things will be okay.
When I go home that night to drop off my son, my boyfriend is waiting for me and we talk. He speaks softly; his face doesn’t twitch in annoyance. I wonder if he, too, had noticed how green and promising everything looks outside, if the evening summer light had made him feel something other than despair about us. If it had caused him to snap out of it, even feel some hint of hope.
We don’t shout, don’t say mean things to one another, just talk. Our voices are treading carefully, back and forth on this fragile golden line of cautious connection. We must be gentle with each other. We’ve been gravely wounded in this war. One more battle and there will be no returning.
I want to move back in, I say as I’ve said, threatened, begged many times over the past three weeks. Except that now I just say it, as strongly and as calmly as I can.
I don’t want you to live here, he says the words that he has shouted and hissed before. Now he sounds resigned.
Just a trial. I will move back out if you want me to.
He says nothing.
Please, I say.
That’s all I say. I don’t talk about my drinking or how admirably sober I am. It hasn’t been that long at all. There’s no sobriety to talk about, really. But: Please.
A long silence. We used to be comfortable being silent with each other before silences became weapons in our war: Him not speaking to me the day after he’d catch me drinking. Me not speaking when I was too drunk to talk. But this silence is okay. I don’t know if he’s comfortable with it right now, but I am. I can sit in it. I’m not alarmed by it.
Okay, he finally says, just trial.
Like a probation.
Okay. A probation. You have till the end of the month.
I can feel my heart flutter a little harder in my chest. I want to put my arms around him. I want to kiss him, feel his hard body against my soft one. My desire is physical but it also feels enhanced, as if there was a spiritual element to it, a need for a communion. But I can’t break through his hate, have no right to expect anything from him yet, have zero proof that he, too, is feeling that hope, light, filtering through the trees outside that’s letting itself inside. So I stand where I am.
I love you, I say.
He says nothing.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
I don’t lose my respect for him finally relenting. I think that he’s brave and loving and that this, letting me move back in, has nothing to do with him being weak. He’s in fact stronger than if he were to kick me out because he’s willing to take the risk. He is kinder than he is angrier. And that makes him a superior human being, at least superior to me. Me? I’m ashamed of everything, again, for having to put him in this position, but I’m also grateful that I’ve been given another chance. I have no clue if I will pass the test—I want to pass the test but my want is not the most reliable, it is not a fact. No matter. In the end I’m going to give it my best shot.
The probation starts the next day.
WEDNESDAY
I’m an addict. There’s no way to know what I will do. Most of the time I don’t know what to expect from myself. I have lots of evidence that proves this.
While drinking, in the morning, on waking up, remorse already eating away at me like rot, I would beg. I would beg and plead for a good day. I would promise my god, your god, the gods of worlds, and all the godless world that I would not drink.
I would be drunk by the end of the day.
This is why I don’t know the end.
Before we get to the end, I need to tell you about how I stay stopped.
Wednesday.
I do the same thing every Wednesday after work. I pick up my son from his daycare, first. I usually ride my bike, unless it rains. Same bike. Except this time around I’ve added a baby seat onto its back. I adorned it with flashing lights and I bought helmets for the kid and myself. I took it to the bike shop to tune it up. It still squeaks and coughs as I pedal, but at least now it sounds less like a death rattle.
I love picking my son up from the daycare.
He runs up to the gate with his little arms extended, pushing through other children and shouting, Momma mama mommy mommy-mommy. It’s the best thing that happens to me every day, that shouting. It’s the best thing. Ever.
And the face that comes with it—the smile of joy so authentic and absolute that most humans can understand and recognize it for what it is: god.
I can handle it. I can handle it now.
I get him dressed and strap him into his seat and put a helmet on his head. I knock on his helmet and then on mine and make googly eyes when I do. This makes him laugh. He dislikes the helmet but the googly eyes, and the knocking distracts him sometimes and he forgets to get upset.
Then we bike home.
We bike on a golden street with a pink and purple sky ahead of us. In the summer the street smells of sun and leaves; I ride the bike through a curtain of green parting against fences on both sides. It’s a Hollywood PG-rated movie. (In the winter, there will be the raspy throat of cold and sharpness and shadows but also lamps turned on inside houses filled with families. Christmas magic in the air—the smell of pine everywhere.)
We pass a convenience store called Rosie’s Garden. It’s run by a Trinidadian woman, set up in old-school style with tables and chairs outside. She sells soursop ice cream, patties, sodas in bottles. You can sit and have your soda and ice cream outside when it’s warm. This is where my boyfriend and I would meet when we briefly lived separately. It’s where Frankie had his first ice cream ever. And my boyfriend showed up and joked about me trying the world-old trick of bribing my kid with sweets.
I laughed then but every time I bike by, I remember hating every second of our strange child handovers. On the Rosie’s Garden patio, I passed Frankie over to my boyfriend and then rode off on my bike crying. Were we going to have to live through the weirdness of split custody from now on? Would any of us ever get used to it? The idea of being used to it only made me cry harder.
But now with Frankie on the back of my bike, those thoughts of what happened here early in the summer are only that—thoughts. The reality is that we’re going home and that we’re going to have a meal as a whole family tonight. As we do almost every night.
And after the meal, and after I kiss my warm pink little boy goodbye and leave him with his dad, I will go to where I usually go every Wednesday evening. Even today. I’m under the weather today and there’s nothing I want more right now than to just hang out with my toddler, but I go. I go to my meeting. It’s important.
Sometimes I believe that my life does depend on it.
So that’s how I stay stopped.
SADE
It’s September now and Sade’s taller than I remember her. Thinner too. She bounces as she walks and laughs as soon as she sees me. Then she stops a woman walking, demands she take our picture. Sade hasn’t figured out her telephone’s camera settings—it’s a new phone—and I can tell that the woman is irritated by the request. They’re both looking all over the oblong pink rock trying to find the button that will snap a photo. The woman finally shakes her head and says she really has to go, she’ll be late for work, and that’s when Sade shouts, Got it! Yes!
She wraps her arms around me and says, Say cheese, and the woman takes the picture or pretends to. Either way, she starts running as soon as Sade’s got the phone back in her hands. Sade says something about people being unfriendly in big cities.
We look for a place to eat and decide on a small front patio of a French restaurant. As soon as we sit down, Sade says that her fucking ex, John, now has full custody of her boy but that she’s getting him back. First, she has to go to South America with her new boyfriend.
She lights a cigarette and says, But he’s not the guy I’m in town with. This trip is just business, and the bird wanted to act all boyfriend-girlfriend like and I was like watch yourself, keep your hands to yourself, you know?
The guy, not the boyfriend, has paid for three nights and a hotel. He is at least sixty, she thinks, and kinda disgusts her. But it’s good money. Not that good. Okay, it’s okay.
Her phone makes a sound. She looks at it. She says, And then my landlord, he’s helping me find some lawyers but I’m getting worried because he’s all talk and no action. The fireman totally blew me off, by the way. Fucking bird. Just went off and disappeared. Oh yeah, that reminds me. Remember Donicio?
Who?
The guy I was fooling around with? Him and I talked a coupla times.
She presses some buttons on the phone, shakes her head.
Of course. Donicio. Like everything and everyone from that time, Donicio seems nothing more than some kind of cartoon character from my past. Sade tells me they met shortly after rehab was over, and they slept together. It was great, she says. They stayed in touch. Called each other a lot. They were making more plans to meet.
She says he talked to her a lot about the program. The AA program. He said he was going to meetings. He even talked her out of using once or twice. He was all gung-ho about keeping clean. But then he stopped calling.
Sade kept leaving him messages.
Donicio is not stupid. He does well for himself, Sade says.
He told her in the past he owned a used crane. He would rent it out to builders. He had to sell this crane to pay back his debts and fuel his habit. Heroin.
Sade nods, ringlets bouncing all over her head. Yeah, a whole crane. How much is that? Quarter, half a million bucks?
When she called him the last time, the number was disconnected, she says.
A waiter approaches our table. He’s bitchy, with piercings in his nose and lip. He pretends to have a French accent. Sade laughs when he corrects her pronunciation of niçoise.
Hold the eggs, please, she says, and his face freezes and he tries to kill her with his stare, but she’s not looking up. She’s digging in her purse. Her phone is making squeaky noises again.
I ask for croque monsieur. It’s one of the five things I know how to say. But I guess I don’t say it properly because the bitchy waiter says something in French that sounds like a question. Sade looks up at him then and says, She wants the ham and cheese sandwich for fuck’s sake.
He’ll spit in my sandwich, you know that? I say after he stiffly walks away.
Well, he would anyway. She lights a cigarette and asks me how everything is. Am I staying sober.
Yes.
Good for you. Good for you, I’m so proud of you, she says, and she does sound sincere so I ask if she’s sober. Clean, I mean.
It’s so good to see you, Sade says.
You too. (So she’s not. Clean.) It is, I say. But it’s strange to see Sade here outside of rehab. We’re not far from where I work and I think about that. I think about one of my co-workers walking by and seeing me here with this beautiful girl and asking how we’ve met and how I could say, Rehab. She’s a crack whore, actually, I could add. Watch them slink away.
Our food arrives and Sade starts on her salad. She sets the lit cigarette in the ashtray. The smoke drifts, breaks into a curl that unties near her head. The waiter is silent, gives me a frosty smile when I look up as he sets down my plate.
I don’t eat bread, remember? Sade says when I offer her a bite of my sandwich. I imagine a dollop of phlegm inside my sandwich. I hope she’ll take the bite with the phlegm, in a lucky coincidence.
Not even a tiny bite?
She pushes my sandwich away.
But you’re so thin.
Yeah, thin. Tell that to my pot-belly. It’s all carbs. I look four months pregnant. And it’s not good for you anyways. She picks up and waves her cigarette and rolls her eyes. Yup, carbs will kill you. She bursts out laughing.
After a couple of bites, the imaginary phlegm is too much to ignore. I can’t finish eating. I grab one of Sade’s cigarettes and light it.
Bonne petite, she laughs.
She talks non-stop the way she always does and I get lost in the sea of men, custody battles and bar fights. There are a few small crack binges in there too, something about the South American boyfriend doing blasts and wanting to have a foursome. She says she smokes only o
ccasionally. Almost never. Like, once in a blue moon. She’s off the stuff practically.
I want to believe her. I want to ignore that she keeps on laughing and her eyes say something else to mine, as if some version of our other, real selves were the actual ones communicating and telling it like it is. But maybe I’m imagining things.
I’m an addict. She’s an addict. There’s everybody, and there’s us. We are reverse. Or upside down. Or who cares. Because maybe not. Maybe there’s nothing special about us, addicts. We’re tragic, but not special. Maybe we’re just weak. Maybe I’m weak. Maybe I should stop being such a cunt and just believe Sade. Because I really want to.
She goes on about buying a car, her sister doing well on methadone. And Donicio being such a bird. She says, We were talking all the time and then I find out he’s talking to what’s-her-face, the teacher who was driving drunk. And she was giving him a hard time about me. And now I can’t even get a hold of him? Hello? I don’t need that shit.
The only time Sade’s constant smile tightens a little is when she talks about John and her little boy. Fucking John.
I want to ask how he’s doing, her boy. I half remember some story about Jamal putting some toy together or something and I try to recall the details but I can’t. I want to ask her about it, to steer her away from all this pent-up grief she’s got going on about John. But it’s impossible. She goes on about how it’s weird he’s pretending to be all interested in the kid suddenly. He wants to be the perfect babydaddy. He’s all up in her shit over how long she wants to keep the kid or if she’s keeping him overnight. He’s her kid for fuck’s sake.
I steal a quick look at the clock inside the restaurant. I can’t make out the exact time but I just tell myself that I’ve only got ten minutes left. I have a lot of freedom at work and can make my own hours within reasonable limits. But Sade doesn’t know that. I mumble something about my lunch almost being over.