Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  In the waiting room, I return to my seat to wait for my name, like the woman told me to. K takes my hand and lays it in his, face up, like a dead bird. The awkwardness of the waiting area closes in—its maroon-and-grey-patterned carpeting, its modular ersatz walls and colorless lighting, a scattering of elderly Asian couples who cannot be here for the same thing I’m here for.

  Senior discount day at the abortion clinic? K mutters quietly just as I notice the demographics of the place, and I smile with half of my mouth.

  It’s a good thing, I say, my voice sounding jagged with anxiety. It means they’re treating this like any other medical procedure, which is exactly how it should be treated. I mean, that’s what it is. I assume these people are here for other— I meet his eyes and catch him sizing me up, hearing the escalating panic in my voice, his mouth softening in a minute gesture of sympathy that immediately knocks me off-kilter. He takes my other hand so he is holding them both and he clasps them between his two giant hands like Beauty and the Beast.

  I know I said this last night, he begins in a low, gentle voice.

  Don’t, I say, feeling a lump rising in my throat.

  If you want to have this baby, he goes on, even if you go back there and you decide you want to have this baby—

  No, don’t, I say again, shaking my head, beginning to cry.

  I’m there, that’s all I’m saying. If you can’t…do this. We’ve done the baby thing—we could do it no problem.

  Yeah, it wasn’t a big deal at all, that whole baby thing. I laugh, wiping snot on the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

  Well, we fucking pulled it off, he says.

  I eye him.

  You, he corrects. You pulled it off. Because you can do anything. You’re amazing.

  I know that it’s a real possibility that I could decide not to do it even right before I do it, that I could sit up in the hospital bed and declare that I’ve changed my mind. That may seem like a comfort to him. It doesn’t feel comforting to me—it only exacerbates my anxiety to think of this decision as active or incomplete. To think that I’ve taken the insurance-mandated, in-office pregnancy test, slept like shit for a week, made it all the way here, filled out the paperwork, and that still a crisis of conscience might loom in my immediate future. I just wanted the certainty of it being done, over. There would simply be a moment beyond which it would be final. The chance for that particular life could never be recovered. I just had to get to that moment.

  But I let myself imagine it again, as I had for days. One last time, I picture keeping it. The tiny hand wrapped around my finger. The heat of the BabyBjörn as I sway back and forth. I remember K holding my baby girl above his head, bringing her nose down to touch his nose in an Eskimo kiss, setting off her inimitable trill of a giggle, the same one she still has.

  No, I would not invite another life into this scene. Another baby, this one belonging to someone I scarcely knew, to be raised by me with my ever-deepening under-eye circles, the gusts of air that blow my nightgown out around my legs as I resentfully tear into the kitchen to rinse the bottles. It takes a lot of resentment to whoosh through my house: it’s a small space. K would be where, couch-bound in his dirty jeans? Watching television and drinking from an extra-large glass of iced tea? Maybe this would get him sober, I find myself thinking, and I actually have to shake the thought—the delusional, insane thought—out of my brain.

  I am going through with it, I say decisively, looking past him, over his shoulder to a panel of windows that lead to a courtyard of some sort that isn’t even outside. It’s still part of the medical facility, one of those echo-y terra-cotta-tiled inside/outside spaces where built-in potted plants and an information desk sit awkwardly side by side.

  Well then, we’ll tuck you into bed with a rom-com and I’ll go get wonton soup, he says. I have to run another errand quickly, too. I know I said—

  Hey—I interrupt him, holding my hands up to my chin as if in prayer. I don’t care if you get high, I say. I meant that. I don’t care anymore. Just come back and be with me.

  At the end of this is a bad movie and wonton soup, I think. I try to relax into that, but feel myself tighten remembering the contours of K’s care, thinking that he’ll need my car and my credit card in order to procure the Advil, the curative soup—no act of altruism is independent for him. No act of generosity pure. Still, he is here—sitting beside me assuring me that any decision I make will be okay, that he would raise a stranger’s baby with me. I appreciate him so much. I also know this is not enough. Not right. I think about Josh and wonder if he will go by himself on the trip we’d planned. I picture him crestfallen, contemplative, alone. I think about the fact that he probably thinks he has it pretty rough at the moment. He has no idea where I am and what I am about to have to do. The life of a healthy bachelor is so staggeringly easy it is stupefying.

  I feel a wash of deep gratitude as I’m led by a nurse out of the waiting room, away from the check-in lady, away from K, back into the linoleum ring of rooms where I’ll be granted the fog of a mild sedative and this impossible pregnancy will be ended. After the procedure, K comes back into the room where I’m lying lightly drugged and smiles when he sees me. He stands next to me and the nurse who has brought him draws the curtain to give us some privacy. You always look like a little girl when you’re in here, he says, and when I faintly smile I feel the largeness of my face, a puffy deliberateness to the movements of my cheeks. The look on his face is the one he gets when, during an argument, I start crying from some deep, unsettling place and he goes entirely soft. He looks at me sweetly. His scruffy face makes him look tired. Even his facial hair is beginning to go grey, and he looks like a man who has lived a hard life, who “has put a lot of mileage on the car,” as he would say.

  When have you ever seen me in here? I ask.

  I don’t know, you sent me a photo before your eye surgery, he says. Remember that one crazy dilated eye? I had that on my phone forever.

  I smile weakly, turning my head toward him more and he takes my hand. Yeah, but you weren’t actually there, I think. You were never there.

  I do feel like a little girl with my skinny limbs tucked into the soft printed cotton of the hospital gown. But as soon as I’m back in my clothes, I am a woman again, a grown woman who will glaze over while watching a week’s worth of television in one night, who will well with emotion for months longer, weighing the choice she’s just made, wondering what one more baby might have been like, might have looked like, might have felt like with its gummy mouth against her skin. I am, at least, a woman with a man to drive her home. I lean my weight into K a little and he guides me toward the door, the car, our bed. If you’re going to let yourself need him, just need him, I tell myself. He can show up this once.

  For the rest of that day and the following day he takes care of me. He gets the soup and tea and all the other snacks I like and three rolls of SweeTarts and makes a nest for me on the couch, cozier than anything he would make for himself. He used to sleep on that couch beneath a single sheet and I would want to manage and control even that. Aren’t you cold? I’d say. How can you sleep like that? He knows I’m cold, always, so he brings the duvet from my bed and another light blanket to go on top of it, like I like.

  Can’t even imagine how many dicks have touched this thing since we broke up, he says as he brings the comforter up and then down on my head like he used to for the kids, tucking in the corners around my body.

  Oh, shut up, I say. This isn’t really the time.

  Oops, right. Sorry, m’lady, he says, tucking me into the second blanket. I’ll be back with your seltzer.

  He gets up to go to the liquor store, to go shoot up, he borrows the car to go buy more, and for the first time in years, I feel nothing. No sense of panic or fear of abandonment. No rage. My body feels like an empty cavity. I imagine that I have been scooped clean, disinfected somehow. These years
of rot, of toxicity.

  I will never change him, I think. His greying beard, the slackening in his not-sober, never-sober, and still-beautiful face. He is only a person, like me, trying to survive. When he returns and settles back into the fort of fabric and snacks, I set my mug down on the coffee table, then reach for him and say, I love you.

  He moves closer and lays his head on my shoulder and I feel the minor exertions of his breathing against my collarbone.

  It’s you, Pimentoloaf, he says. It’s always been you.

  chapter thirty

  “Serenity is giving up the hope of a different past,” says someone in my Tuesday night Al-Anon meeting. I take out my pink notebook, a gift from Claire (how many notebooks and nice pens have we given each other over the years, how many do all girls give to other girls, so that we might facilitate one another’s truth-telling, might imagine we will one day write it all down and find catharsis there?), and I write it down, along with all the other corny slogans that have by now, in the corniest of all possible conclusions, accumulated to actually alter my thinking, to begin to change my life. “Happiness is an inside job,” I have written. My mother-in-law’s line, which I could only hear as smug until I really needed it. “In recovery, we let go of burdens that were not ours to carry.” And “You didn’t cause it; you can’t control it; you can’t cure it.” And I jot down my favorite, one I had never heard before until a fellow Al-Anon pointed it out in our group binder: “If you’re eating a shit sandwich, it’s probably because you ordered it.”

  When I was ready to go back, worn down and exhausted, it was all still there. The coffee, the placards, the unsettling warm welcomes, the cardigan-clad knitters, although now they are young, pierced, and tattooed. It can be harder for codependents to hit “rock bottom” than it is for addicts. Often, there are few material consequences for our actions. Our lives fall into a devastating psychic, emotional, and spiritual disrepair—the “epidemic of wasted life” the doctors wrote about—but it may not be obvious. As with a chronic pain disorder, the suffering is typically invisible. Our expertise, after all, is in enduring and managing hardship, not showing what we’re going through. Rock bottom for me did not feel like the end of the line, as I’d imagined it would, a moment when I’d run out of hope or options. I’d tried Al-Anon in those moments before, and it hadn’t quite worked enough or meant enough to me to stay. This time it was, rather, a droplet of curiosity, only possible to register once K and I had split, about who I might be without the albatross of others’ addictions. Into the hollowness where he had been, one small bead of wonder collected about what a day might feel like, how I might spend my time.

  I had by then come to understand that people-pleasing extended far beyond my most intimate relationships. It was evident in the way I took on too much at work, the way I came to someone’s rescue even in conversation, trying to fix and smooth, laughing a little too loudly or too long. The way I would always say, Yes, I would love to come to your poetry reading, baby shower, birthday party, even though I wasn’t sure it was true. I overpromised and under-delivered. I dodged responsibilities and issued breathless apologies that left no room for response or repair. Like alcoholism, codependency is, at its core, a form of insincerity, of bullshit. And it feels terrible to be insincere.

  I went back to meetings and began to read the Al-Anon literature again. It wasn’t perfect, and some of the program’s literature—specifically admonitions to behave mildly and with restraint—feel woefully outdated. For example, the informational brochure given to newcomers in Al-Anon has a handy bookmark inside it, a list of things the Al-Anon member vows to do “Just for Today,” like take things one day at a time, spend a half hour alone, focus on happiness. “Just for Today,” it still reads, “I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress becomingly, keep my voice low, be courteous, criticize not one bit. I won’t find fault with anything, nor try to improve or regulate anybody but myself.” I hated finding lines like these in the literature. But I believed in its heart, in a strength to be found underneath my skepticism.

  None of this crystallized, however, until I did the even harder thing, which was to get sober myself. That happened unexpectedly. I flew east for Claire’s wedding and made a toast in a long camel-colored dress and bright red lipstick. I spent five days among people I adore, drinking without ever managing to get properly drunk. Instead, I felt bleary, blurry, bloated, disconnected. I wondered at my own apartness. I wondered, too, whether the kind of happiness that my friend had found with an especially warm, wonderful, dependable person could ever be possible for me. Could love feel like that? Something solid that you know will be there? It was as though alcohol had stopped working, or my self-hatred was finally strong enough to counteract its effects. On that trip, I woke in the mornings vowing to myself that I wouldn’t drink, but each afternoon I was drinking again. I even drank on the plane ride home and, close to the heavens, said a prayer I thought someone might hear. Please help me feel better than this. When the plane landed in California, I decided to try sobriety again.

  Drying out felt just like what it is: becoming more crisp, attenuated, economical. The taut electrified string of my own attention felt at times like a high of its own. To be able to think, focus, notice emotion: I didn’t know how strong those sensations could be. I also got sad. I got bored. I began to clean out some of my closets and drawers. But I was newly alive in all the ways the addiction memoirs I’ve read over the years said I’d be. A little surly, newly tender, frequently brought up short by an uneasy sense of wonder.

  The shift that took place in my thinking was subtle at first, and it hurt. It felt uncomfortable, physically rough like sitting on a pile of rocks. In Al-Anon, people are often struggling not to act—not to immediately seize upon a situation and try to manipulate it or fix it or exert control over it. Not to hide, lie, or manipulate. Another slogan: “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

  We repeat these simple slogans incessantly, but it’s because they don’t always get through. They can’t when our brains are buzzing or when we’re still caught up in feeling sorry for ourselves. If you hear them enough times, they are bound to stick one day, to catch you off guard with their usefulness, their depth. They remind you, at least, how many others have been through it. In the silence and stillness we learn to be alone, we learn to listen to ourselves, and we learn humility. The surge of confidence we felt while thinking we knew what was right for everyone else was actually arrogance, the cheap high of self-righteousness. Also like a drug, it’s surprisingly hard to put down.

  Nothing about my struggle has been unique. I can see that so clearly now. The singularity I ascribed to my feelings for K was both real (in that I felt it) and a delusion. The thought is painful. Could any two souls, any alcoholic and codependent, have collided and produced this exact tragedy? Probably. Like the monkeys locked in a room who eventually write Shakespeare. The grief over the end of the relationship is nothing compared with the mourning I must do for the thing I long believed to be love. Breaking up with that love fantasy is what brings me to my knees. I still grieve for the dyad—that desperation, obsession, distraction. I grieve for the belief, nurtured against all odds, that I could save my sister or K. I really did believe I could save K. But a man is not a house. You may be able to carry out small renovations, but you can’t re-pour the foundation.

  As one of the women in Women Who Love Too Much says, “I kept hoping I could find someone who would make my life turn out the way I wanted it to.” I still pine for the perfect logic of that victimhood. I remember the torment of some of those years with K as a time so abjectly lonely and raw that I am nostalgic for it. I felt hummingly, almost dangerously alive. To believe that it was only a matter of finding the right person—I miss being that naïve. I miss the simplicity of that worldview, of being that poor put-upon girl. She had it so rough, and with no one to rescue her properly. So many tried, but none got it right. I mi
ss that victim but I had to let her go. I had to let even the idea of her go.

  I believe the way we tell stories about addiction matters deeply—it informs the way we act, from the level of public health discourse to the kitchen table. It informs the degree of empathy we can bring to those suffering with this disease, the extent to which we can protect ourselves from its destruction and embrace living in spite of it. And it shapes the way we understand love and care—what can be justly expected of us, and when it has gone too far.

  At first, though I hear myself in what other Al-Anon members say, and though I am vaguely comforted when I leave the church and head toward my car—a certain feeling of pleasant solitude that takes hold as I mull all the personal information they’ve just lobbed into the room—I still question how it can be applied to real life. My real life. Still, I go. Once during every meeting, some stranger is briefly graced with a kind of genius tuned perfectly to that day’s need in me. I still don’t, can’t believe in God, so I just believe in that—that when I show up, some lightning bolt of essential, tailored wisdom is delivered directly to me, piped right into my ears. It may as well have my name on it.

  I find I don’t know how to share in the open-ended way that certain others are able to, to take up space with a mumbling, meandering comment about what’s transpired in my week. The few times I do speak up in a meeting, I curate my thoughts carefully beforehand, making sure there’s a narrative arc to what I’m going to say, a few small self-deprecating comments for laughs, a point to make. Even the emotion I submit to a support group must demand little of others.