Those of you who’ve never prayed before will cackle like crows and scoff at the change I claim has overtaken me. But the focus of my attention has been yanked from the pinballing in my head to south of my neck, where some solidity holds me together. I feel like a calmer human than the one who’d knelt a few minutes before. The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away.
I walk back to the table with a pearl balanced in my middle. And Lord am I hungry.
Lux is in place, and my wineglass has been swept away, replaced by ice water. I ask for the bread basket and tear off a piece of the rough Tuscan bread and dunk it in the peppery green olive oil—never has bread tasted so good. I gobble up three pieces before the salad comes.
For most of the meal, I sit dumb as a stump, honestly listening to other people’s tales with little thought for where I can wedge in a comment to justify all the chow I’m wolfing down.
As the dessert plates are being cleared away, Toby nudges me to ask after Mother, whose travails I regaled him with as a student. Since I’ve just been in Texas to clear out her ex-boyfriend’s belongings that summer, her latest romantic misadventure is fresh in my head.
Toby says, This was your mother’s new boyfriend? What happened to the nurse?
She got sober. He didn’t, the nurse. That’s the hell of it. She picked this subsequent guy sober.
At first Mother described the new guy as a boarder. Ben Barker, his name was. I expected some homely local Joe, but in the picture she sent, Ben towered over Mother with the lean frame of a basketballer. He had steely razor-cut hair and deep blue eyes. A health nut, Ben occupied a room in a house whose curtains were saturated with menthol smoke. He introduced to Mother’s kitchen the Cadillac of vegetable juicers along with a flat of wheatgrass for squeezing all the chlorophyll out of.
It’s supposed to clean your liver, Mother told me. It’s filthy stuff to drink.
How can you tell your liver’s dirty? I said.
That’s what I wanted to know, Mother said.
Tell me he’s got a job at least, I said.
He’s retired, she said.
I thought he was, like, fifty.
(Which, by the way, was way younger than Mother.)
She told me Ben had done well farming all over the Midwest, but the crop prices kept dropping and he’d sold out.
He kept his truck parked in the garage but mostly tooled around the county on a racing bike worthy of the Tour de France. He also had a fancy fiberglass kayak he took out in the bayous at dawn among the alligators and morning glories.
He got Mother taking pricey vitamins by the fistful. He wanted her to flush out her nose with salt water snorted from the spout of a porcelain Indian neti pot, but she eschewed that and kept burning cigarillos, though she did sip infusions of Chinese herbs he bought at the Buddhist temple run by Vietnamese monks.
One morning Mother called me to ask a question I found strange.
Did you ever meet somebody you thought wasn’t who they said they were?
I hadn’t. I’d met all manner of strange individuals. But other than a tripped-out guitar player who’d told everybody he was Moses, I’d never met anybody whose stated identity I questioned. How, I asked Mother, had she come to this?
Well, she said, he’ll be telling a story, and he’ll say, “The guy said to me, ‘Bill…’” And I’ll say, “But your name’s not Bill; it’s Ben.”
At that time the sheriff in our town was a guy I used to steal watermelons with named Stooge. On the phone, Stooge didn’t sound overexercised. Ben Barker’s truck was registered legal in the name he’d given Mother. Stooge doubted the guy was some lost gangster.
Lecia told me the guy seemed too well spoken, too well read, to be outright dangerous. (Which, I now think, fails to take Ted Bundy into account.)
Another morning the phone rang early, and Mother whispered that Bill was in the shower, but she’d gotten his license out and his name wasn’t, in fact, Ben Barker. It was Wilbur Fred Bailey, she said. And his ID was from—let’s say—Kentucky.
At this point Toby interrupts to comment on the poetic perfection of the guy’s actual name. Wilbur Fred Bailey, Toby repeats. It has a Faulkneresque ring.
I notice the rest of the table has gone quiet. The agent has her hand on a glass of water. Toby’s editor is leaning forward.
Fred’s the ideal middle name for the guy, Lux says, who’s heard the story before. Fred has that foreshortened, temporary feel to it. A real trailer-park name.
So what’d your mother do? Toby asks.
I briefly stall like an arid engine, for it’s different telling the story sober—and to these people. But Lux gives my elbow the slightest tap, and, since the current of the story has me in its grip, I start right up.
The morning Mother found the license, I told her to run to the library and xerox it, then drop it by Stooge’s office. She did copy it but changed her mind about the sheriff, because—it turned out—Wilbur Fred was paying all her bills.
Which pissed me off, since I was paying her gas bill and grocery bill. As was, it turned out, my sister. I made Lecia go down there and call me with Mother on the line, so we could confront this bookkeeping inconsistency.
Mother elided it by saying, Oh, Ben doesn’t pay those. He helps me out all kinds of ways.
Helps you out how? I wanted to know.
How? Lecia said.
Well, he cuts the grass, Mother said.
I pay Sweet to cut the grass, I said, referring to an old pal of my dead daddy’s.
I pay Sweet to cut the grass! Lecia said.
The agent said, Hilarious. Triple-dipping. What a woman.
Lecia said, Let’s you and me talk after this.
Mother said, If Sweet lets the grass get too long, Ben cuts it. Plus he edges the walk real straight. He takes the tops off jars. He hooked up my VCR. He takes me out for Mexican food….
You could be in danger here, Mother, Lecia said.
He’s good company, Mother said. Besides, I’d hate to be a dime-dropper.
A what? Lecia said.
A snitch, Mother said. A tattletale.
But drop the dime Mother did, after Ben, aka Wilbur Fred, took out the trash one day, failing—as she’d told him to do a zillion times—to reline the can with a plastic bag afterward. She later said it had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. The very morning of the unlined garbage can, she called Stooge, who called the feds, who descended on my childhood home with dope-sniffing dogs.
What’re you looking for? Mother asked the agent who checked her in to the Holiday Inn, courtesy of the government.
Guns, drugs, and money, he said.
They found none.
Four days after Wilbur Fred vanished back into the penal system from which he’d escaped, Mother got a call from a young woman from Detroit. She was mother to Wilbur Fred’s kids and alleged that he’d left her—hidden in Mother’s house—some much-needed cash.
Sure enough, in Mother’s old magazine rack under a batch of New Yorkers, Mother found a paper sack containing ten thousand dollars cash—money Mother decided was hers.
The woman threatened to come down there armed with some of Wilbur Fred’s posse, and Mother told her, Come on, I’m locked and loaded for bear down here.
Where, Toby finally asks, did she meet this guy?
Church, I say. At which everybody laughs.
You should write a memoir, the agent says, and across the table, she hands me her creamy card, which I resist pinning to my dress like a merit badge. No way is the card a ticket to ride. It is a chance, though. For years I’ve circled Boston agents like a horsefly on the off chance they might drop a card.
On the way back to the hotel, Toby says, Don’t be disappointed if my agent doesn’t sign you. She’s never taken anybody I’ve recommended.
That worries me not at all, since I’m so unable to get a pen to traverse a white sheet, I doubt I’ll ever have a single page of anything to send he
r.
But a small part of me wonders if prayer wrought that whole series of wonders. Joan tells me without it that I’d never have gotten (a) sober, (b) the grant, and (c) the invitation to the table where the agent solicited me and not the other way round. Nor would I have d) dared tell Mother’s goofball story without Toby drawing it out of me, for I’d have been too busy trying to pass for an East Coast swell with an Ivy League hookup instead of the cracker I was.
That may be so, I tell Joan. But I’ve also prayed to write as well as Wallace Stevens, prayed to be five-ten, and not had those prayers answered. As Emile Zola once noted: The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.
30
Hour of Lead
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
—Emily Dickinson, “After great pain”
Only an alcoholic can so discombobulate her insides that she might weigh in her hands two choices—(a) get drunk and drive into stuff with more molecular density than she has, and (b) be a present and loving mother to her son—and, on picking the latter, plunge into despair.
Which explains why I don’t deplane in Boston, saying, Lucky me, freed from paycheck work. Let’s settle down and raise a book. Instead, I come back feeling alternately mite-sized and unworthy, panicked as a felon facing the electric chair thanks to that fat grant. The time I’d bitched for years about not having now falls in abundance. But each day becomes a gray tundra I wade across.
Notebooks from that time contain increasingly ornate doodles, designs and lines like (I kid you not) I am sad, the end, by Mary Karr. In the past, I’ve been able to learn poems or whole paragraphs by heart. Now lines pour through me like water.
Guilt shadows every underemployed breath. Maybe I steer clear of Warren so much because while I do less, he slaves like a field hand—a forty-hour work week, classes three nights a week, with massive course work and a book-length master’s thesis on Robert Lowell to finish, plus Dev in the evenings and the magazine. Any night he’s home by six, I saunter out to a meeting. Our couples therapy has trailed off. The trips to his parents’ big house, I virtually stop going along on—Christmas being an exception—arguing that the abundant booze makes me nuts.
The more Warren does, the more lardassed I get, wallowing in my dusty psychic moonscape. I complete not one sit-up, squat-press no weight, trot not a block. Thrown into a pool, I’d have sunk to the bottom and drowned before flapping a stroke. My daddy’s phrases for the lazy sometimes flurry through me—Wouldn’t say sooey if the hogs were eating her…Wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake reared back…Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
One day I might splay across the sofa staring at infomercials with the sound off, wondering whether the Abdominizer is the answer, or the Pocket Fisherman, or that glittering altar of knives.
My mental function drags. I walk out leaving the refrigerator open, lock keys in the car more than once. Warren and I sleep together on separate sides, and while for years my revved-up libido has amused me in private, now even that has puttered to a halt. At the halfway house, I develop an aficionado’s taste for Thai kickboxing. Or I languish on their porch among the disabled, pondering the design on a pack of smokes. Or I sit alone in a donut shop drinking coffee with shaking hands till it’s time to get Dev from daycare.
Still depressed, my shrink tells me, and she gives me pills that send color flushing back into the tips of leaves at least for a week or two, but I don’t know how to write about color. My only vocabulary belongs to feeling dark and dead. I go days without obsessing about a drink, then—pushing Dev’s stroller past the sour fumes of a beer joint’s door—have to restrain myself from running in and downing the first Bud I can get my mitts on. These powerful urges are close to complete madness, the old drunk self so fully occupying my body, it’s like being possessed.
Joan praises my prayer regimen—however minimalist—the one or two sentences morning and night. But she wonders why don’t I apply prayer to my other woes: floundering marriage, the work, insomnia?
Oh, please, I say on the phone. For me, god is a lowercase noun. God with skin on, as you said. You women keep me sober.
You haven’t let go yet.
People keep saying that. What’s it mean?
It’s like there’s some hook in your head. You’re still fueling your fears by intellectualizing them, thinking this way and that.
Everybody needs a hobby.
Unless it’s gonna lead them back to the bottle. You’re not even kneeling yet.
Sometimes I am.
Yeah, like twice, she says.
Why don’t I feel better? I say. I’ve doubled my Prozac.
You do feel better, she says.
The fuck you say, I shoot back.
You were sobbing uncontrollably the first day we talked. You had to check in to the infirmary. Now look at you.
The more I stall, the more Dev cranks up. In the park one day, he takes his best friend’s front tooth out with a stick. Another afternoon I’m collapsed on the sofa, and he pulls on my hands, trying to drag me upright. Get up, he says. The most cutting memory isn’t his fury as I recede from him, but his playing quietly, studying me with squiggles of worry around his mouth. I think our therapist has gone to France, or have we stopped seeing her after over a year of spinning our wheels? My focus is sobriety, not therapy.
Maybe that time is so blurry to me—more even than my drinking time—because we remember through a filter of self, and of self I had little, having been flattened like a cartoon coyote by an inner anvil. With no self, experience streams past. Time lags until it’s sponged up. What I’ve forgotten from those sober months astonishes me.
I can’t even dredge up how Warren and I decide to separate for the summer. I pushed for it, I think, or did I only find the sublet? The marriage is an airless box. Outside it, I’ll spring into being—or so I believe.
I do recall confessing the decision to Joan. I’ve dreaded telling her because I think she might stop taking my calls. On the phone, I blurt out, Warren and I got the separate apartment. We’re gonna try it for a few months this summer. Dev will stay at home. We’ll go back and forth.
I don’t recommend—
—I know, that I make any changes before I’ve been sober awhile.
At least a year, Joan says. Before you make any major decision, take a year for a cold look at all you’ve done wrong in it. Just chronicle the resentments that are really chewing you up. Get it down on paper.
I’ve been looking at myself in therapy off and on since age nineteen, I say.
A lot of therapy is looking through a child’s eyes, she says. This is looking through an adult’s. You have some nutty ongoing resentments about loads of people.
Like about my writing group? I say, for I’d told her at some point I feared my writing group looked at me like I was stupid.
Any chance that’s from your head alone? Joan asks.
Maybe, I say, but it’s terrifying to think I might not be able to trust my instincts.
Joan sighs over the receiver. I can relieve your mind right now: You can’t trust your instincts. What makes you think they think you’re dumb?
Just how they look at me.
Aren’t these, like, the smartest people—in literary terms—on the planet?
They are. Doctors of this and that, translators from many languages.
Joan says, Let’s just assume, then, that you’re the dumbest person in the room—
Ouch, I inwardly say, for her sentence sang with truth, reverberating like the bronze of a bell.
—all things considered, that’s not so dumb. I mean, in terms of the general population.
Which is true. I actually feel relief at that.
If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cro
ss into it whistling. There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then—for me, anyway—a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren’t yet operational. There’s been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible. You don’t have to be Christian for the metaphor to make sense, psychologically speaking.
My weight drops back to the double digits. I’ll be walking down a street, and I suddenly feel panicked, as if the earth beneath me has caved in and I’m free-falling. My head buzzes constantly, as if an electric shaver’s running over it, some tugging metal teeth traveling over my scalp. I can hardly sit still.
Crazy. What I’ve always feared the most—that I’d go cuckoo, like my mother—seems to be happening. I don’t hallucinate. I lack any grandiose Napoleonic fantasy. But every aspect of my existence has canted me deeper in a dark space. The mind I thought would save me from the trailer-park existence I was born to is not—as I’ve been led to believe—my central advantage.
When does the idea of suicide become a secret relief, a pocketed worry stone I can rub a slight dip into?
It’s an old specter. As a kid, I watched Mother disappear into the occasional locked bathroom with a gun, and I’d alternately banged my fists on the door, begging her to come out, then stood back and hollered she should go ahead, I was sick of her shit. My best friend from high school, Meredith of the leonine hair, tried after law school to cut her own plump throat and nearly bled to death—the first of ten or twelve attempts over ten years. I’d flown her to stay with me a few times, checked her in to the hospital a few times, more than once gone to a shrink with her. (She’d die of liver cancer fifteen years later after a brief but brilliant legal career, medicated into a stupor, weighing near—no exaggeration—four hundred pounds, which size kept her off the transplant list.)
Before I was twenty-two, I knew a spate of successful (is that the parlance?) suicides. On my childhood block, three fathers took the wrong end of a gun into their mouths. Of my six California roommates, I buried two as drug casualties. Quinn the Eskimo shot himself with the gun he’d brought to California to defend his old man’s honor.