“What’s wrong with you?” one asked. “Acute intoxication,” I responded, surprised at my own lucidity. Even when I couldn’t force my body to stand, I still wanted people to know that I knew what I was talking about.
The aborted flight was an attempt to trace a familiar path—back home to Meridian, Mississippi, the small town where my family lived until I was seven. I had just been fired from my job at the online news site I cofounded with my best friend, Josh, and I thought that if I could retrace my steps—dry out for a few weeks in a place where I had always been welcomed without judgment, then figure out how to rebuild my life—I would be okay.
Instead, I was en route to the Highline Medical Center in Burien, Washington, twelve miles south of my apartment in Seattle. And if a hospital in the suburbs seems like a weird detour to take at this moment, you don’t know what the past five years had been like. You don’t know how bad I needed a rest.
* * *
—
Thirty years earlier, I had taken a trip in the opposite direction—the first of many efforts to get away from my Deep South roots. Of course, I was only seven at the time—too young to know that the world wasn’t bounded by Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee—and I didn’t have much say in the matter. Did I take my first trip to Texas by myself, or with Dad and my new stepmother, Jonee, who hadn’t yet asked me to call her Mom? Did the Southwest Airlines flight attendant whisk me to my seat, harried but smiling in her orange-and-blue uniform, or did I sit between the two of them, staring out the window in awe as we rose up above the tops of the clouds? I don’t remember. But from then on, I would always love the feeling of being between one place and another.
Before I moved away from Mississippi, my family was simple. My dad lived an hour away, in Hattiesburg, where he was finishing school at the University of Southern Mississippi and living in a run-down single-wide trailer with a ratty couch and sloshy brown king-size waterbed. I lived with my grandparents in Meridian—Mama Opal (short for Opaldean), a surgery nurse at Riley Hospital, and Papa Jesse, who managed a Goodyear tire store downtown. On the weekends, we’d drive sixty miles down a two-lane highway to visit my great-grandparents, Grandmother and Granddaddy, in a dot-on-the-map town called Macon (Mississippi, not Georgia), where they lived in a little white house with a backyard and a metal porch swing that always squeaked after it rained. Occasionally, a younger family member would bring their grandkids around (younger being relative—the average age in Macon was probably sixty-five), but the people I remember most vividly were all at least seventy years my senior—“aints” with old-fashioned names like Vernice and Jewel and uncles who could fix a bee sting with spit and a wad of chewing tobacco. In Macon, where Grandmother’s backyard garden seemed to stretch for acres, Mama Opal and Papa Jesse let me run around more freely than they did at home, picking beans and shelling them on the screened-in porch, collecting pecans from under the huge tree that shaded the cluttered back patio, and pawing through the boxes of letters and piles of scarves and purses in the guest-room closet, where everything was suffused with the old-lady smell of roses, peppermint, and moldy cardboard.
What my family lacked, I eventually realized, was a mom—mine had taken off to pursue other interests when I was too young to form memories. Growing up, I never thought of being motherless as a deficiency, although I knew it made me a little different. Some kids had two parents and lived in fancy houses with fenced-in yards, some kids were raised by single moms and lived in the trailer park where we visited my uncle Mike and aunt Marilyn, and some kids had long-haired dads who studied biology and were really into MAD Magazine, Alice Cooper, and Tron.
Years later, I would develop questions about this woman, Cindy, whom I had glimpsed in photos that my dad kept hidden in a box in our spare bedroom, underneath the ancient copies of Playboy and Oui. Still later, therapists and boyfriends would inform me that I had been traumatized by this loss, which had led me to seek approval from everyone and fear abandonment like love was something I could earn by memorizing the right combination of words. Later still, I would meet her and look for myself in her eyes, her facial structure, her way of looking at the world.
But back then, I learned that there was no point in asking about Cindy. (Early on, I didn’t even know her last name, or whether she was still alive.) Ask, I discovered, and the adults would clam up as fast as if I’d inquired how babies were made, or what happened after you died; so, after a while, I didn’t. When I found a clue—my birth certificate, which showed her married and maiden names, or a photo of me as a baby, being cradled on my dad’s patchwork quilt by a thin, olive-skinned woman with feathered hair—I filed it away for Later, when I would be a reporter, or maybe a private detective, and have the skills to find out anything I wanted to know without asking anyone for help.
Much as I loved the company of my elderly relatives, I did have one friend my own age—Mizba, whose parents owned the Valley Motel off Interstate 20. Outcasts at Jeff Davis Elementary School, we spent recess setting up booby traps around the dusty schoolyard for the school bully, Chip Carney, and terrorizing the boy we both had crushes on.
Mostly, though, I spent my time alone, reading my way through the World Book Encyclopedia on the maroon shag carpet in my grandparents’ formal living room, playing farmer with my toy barn and plastic cows and sheep, and making brownies in my Easy-Bake oven on stormy weekends, while the rain sizzled on the concrete driveway.
On Sundays, we went to services at the Baptist church in town, where Papa Jesse was a deacon and where the very pews seemed like a kind of penance—cherrywood, hard and slick with varnish, too tall for my feet to touch the floor. In between the rapid-fire up-down-up-down of prayer, song, and May-Christ-Be-with-You-and-Also-with-Yous, I sat quietly, swinging my bare, bobby-socked legs and reading picture books from the church library. Afterward, there were ham or pimento-cheese sandwiches, chocolate milkshakes, and Grandmother’s vegetable soup, which came out of square white paper boxes in the back of the deep freeze. Afternoons were for MTV, singing along with Michael Jackson on my portable plastic record player, and trips to the mall, where I’d happily spend an afternoon paging through grubby copies of Dynamite and Hot dog! magazines and trying on ten-cent plastic clip-on earrings at Woolworth’s.
If my great-grandparents’ house was a museum full of treasure, my grandparents’ sprawling brick ranch house in Meridian was an oversized playground: double closets to hide my favorite toys from my cousins (and, decades later, my vodka); hallways where I would build intricate Lincoln Log cities linked by vast, regional train systems; a wood enclosure in the backyard that we filled with pine needles every year until it was deep enough for Papa Jesse to toss me in. Jesse was a karate black belt and weapons enthusiast who taught me, by the time I was seven, how to shoot cans off a fence, why it was important to always look under a car before you approached it (woe betide any wannabe carjacker who tried to slice my Achilles tendon), and how to kill a man with a pen (jab it upward through his chin, straight through the Adam’s apple to the brain). I thought my grandparents were already ancient, but looking back, I realize that they were only in their early fifties, still spry enough to toss a baseball or stand at attention through a complicated surgery or outrun a mugger if it came to that—which, of course, it never did.
Maybe it was all the talk about kidnapping, or maybe I watched too many Twilight Zone episodes at an impressionable age, but even at six or seven, I remember being gripped sometimes by a feeling that things were on the verge of falling apart, and that it was my job, somehow, to hold them together. Sometimes, lying in my big queen bed with the cross-stitched Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep prayer above my head, I would dream that my family had been replaced by shape-shifting demons who meant to do me harm, or that Grandmother’s old car was sliding slowly into the lake near her house, the windows closed, going under. On those nights, I would wake up shivering under the quilt Grandmother had sewn from heavy cotton and fabric scraps an
d wonder if I, or anything, was real. Other times, when I was staying with Dad at his trailer in Hattiesburg, I would imagine that an invisible wall had descended between his room, where I was lying on the waterbed, trying to fall asleep, and the living room, where I could see Dad watching TV on the tattered couch. I stayed as still as I could, praying that whatever was in the room with me wouldn’t notice I was there. All I had to do was be quiet and still.
That feeling of anxiety, that nervous energy that marked me as a lifelong insomniac by the time I was six years old, would stay with me. It hung around long after my dad remarried, all the way through Houston and high school and drinking and scholarships and internships and boyfriends and jobs. At that age, it was just a low-level hum—the kind of thing that put me in constant motion, talking, arguing, demanding that everyone pay attention. “Watch me play piano!” I would squeal, plinking out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the keys of my grandparents’ out-of-tune piano. Or: “Look at this!” followed by an attempt to pole-vault across the room, followed by a visit to the hospital where Mama Opal worked.
Jonee, the woman Dad started dating when I was five or six, was the first of his girlfriends who seemed willing to put up with my constant chatter, and she didn’t make me tense the way his previous girlfriend, a swirl of shiny black hair named Jane, always had. Jonee talked to me like I was a person, not a baby, and she listened to what I had to say—about the “Thriller” video, a short story I was writing about elephants, the newspaper Mizba and I were going to publish about our school. (When adults asked six-year-old me what I was going to be when I grew up, that was an easy one: a journalist, like John Stossel on 20/20 and the people who wrote The Meridian Star.) Jonee was Jewish, but that wasn’t the only thing that made her exotic—her parents, Susan and Barry, drank and sometimes even swore, and had been to faraway places like Dallas and New York City, and maybe even farther away than that. They belonged to the local country club, hung abstract art on their walls instead of needlepoint, and leased a new Cadillac every year.
Fast-forward through the wedding—held at that very country club—and my departure from Mississippi, an event that I experienced as a total surprise. (Quick pause to see Papa Jesse wiping away tears as he told me to “be careful,” his favorite benediction.) Fast-forward all the way to my arrival in Houston, a noisy, unfamiliar place that smelled like exhaust and felt as humid as a wrung-out rag, and to our new home, a two-story apartment in a gated complex that epitomized late-1970s suburban sprawl. Fast-forward, for that matter, past the city of Houston itself—we lived in an apartment in the city for the first half of my third-grade year, long enough for my parents to decide that the city was no place to raise a child. This was the mid-eighties, long before white flight reversed into gentrification, and we fled to Sugar Land, an area a few miles outside the city limits, where planned communities still bumped up against farmland and wildlife preserves. I had never been at the same school for more than a year, and now I was starting over again in the middle of the year—a gawky, gap-toothed beanpole in a school full of strangers.
Two
Sugar Land
Despite its prefab-sounding name, Sugar Land had a story—before it became a “desirable” suburb with a median income of well over a hundred thousand dollars, it was a self-contained company town for the Imperial Sugar factory, which still loomed over a grid of quaint, candy-colored bungalows. But by 1986, when we moved there, Sugar Land had burst past its original boundaries, sprawling across the former prairie in a web of cul-de-sacs, ring roads, and four-lane boulevards separated by big grassy medians that turned brown and crackly in the summer. Our neighborhood, Colony Bend, was the picture of mid-eighties Sun Belt suburbia: crabgrass lawns, crape myrtles, and endless iterations of the same five model homes, all painted the same HOA-approved shades of olive, brown, khaki, and greige.
My parents, still in their mid-twenties, seemed to take their parenting cues from an earlier time and place—Victorian England, maybe, with a bit of post-Depression abstemiousness thrown in for good measure. I exaggerate, a little—I was an only child who had never been acquainted with the concept of “no”—but there were a lot of rules, and I was constantly violating at least one of them. No chewing with your mouth open. Don’t put your napkin on the table—fold it nicely in your lap. Dinner is for talking, not for reading. (I shudder, sometimes, to think about how they would have dealt with smartphones.) No boys in your room. Smile pleasantly when your face is idle—no wonder everybody thinks you’re unfriendly. Lights out by nine. No reading in bed. Write thank-you notes, legibly, on nice stationery. Finish everything on your plate. No TV until your homework’s done. No cussing. That includes calling your friends “buttheads,” saying “what the hell,” and complaining that something “sucks.” No taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Oh my gosh” is acceptable, but don’t push it.
And the cardinal rule: Don’t argue.
Violating the rules meant exile—to my room, where I was supposed to sit quietly (no reading!) and “think about what I did,” or the guest room, where there was nothing to read but a musty unabridged dictionary from the 1960s. If my parents thought I needed to articulate my remorse, I would have to write an essay—explaining, say, why I shouldn’t have crossed the street on my bike without looking both ways, or why it was wrong to talk back in class. If I’d been really bad, or tried to whine my way out of being grounded, I’d have to write “sentences”—“I will not cross the street without looking both ways”; “I will not argue”—over and over until the words started looking like random patterns on the page.
* * *
—
I was becoming a jumpy, nervous kid—convinced that there were certain thoughts and feelings I needed to keep secret, and that the worst thing in the world was to be noticed for the wrong reason. We were the kind of family that kept our blinds shut—not because we had anything to hide, but because nobody needed to know our business. “Close those blinds!” one of my parents would holler. “Why? It’s dark in here!” “Because anyone can see right in!” As if anyone was interested in watching a ten-year-old playing with Legos or reading the dictionary.
I started to feel clenched—as if, without even knowing it, I might do the wrong thing and cause my parents’ car to drive off the road, or bring so much shame on the family that we’d have to move. I knew that superstitions were silly, but I still thought that if I shut my door too hard when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it might wake up my parents, which might cause them to not get enough sleep, which might make them lose their jobs, which might force us into the poorhouse. So I tried to hold it.
It was around fourth grade—the year I grew six inches, started wearing a bra, and acquired thick, plastic-rimmed glasses that I was sure would doom me to a life of solitude—that my body started refusing to stay asleep at night. No matter how tired I was when I went to bed, my eyes would pop open around 3:00 A.M. and fix on the red digital numbers of my alarm clock. 3:07. 3:45. 4:17. Deep space has nothing on the silence of a house in the Houston suburbs at three in the morning. I became obsessed with getting enough sleep to function—a strange preoccupation for a ten-year-old. Several times a week, I’d ask my dad: “Do you think I have dark circles under my eyes?” And several times a week, he’d say the same thing. “It’s genetic.” I wasn’t convinced. I definitely wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, but I started “borrowing” my mom’s under-eye concealer.
Thirty years later, during my intake interview at a residential addiction treatment center, the nurse on duty would observe: “[Erica’s] trouble sleeping is likely interfering with her life and probably has for so long that she takes it for granted.”
On the weekends, Dad was usually busy managing the Goodyear store where he worked, which meant that Jonee, who worked at Texaco, was in charge of keeping me occupied. In elementary school, this was easy enough: I was happy to watch Goose and Mav do victory rolls in Top Gun for the hundredt
h time, or wander around the Galleria looking at Liz Claiborne twinsets and the latest age-reversing miracle cream from Clinique. But as I morphed into an overgrown, cranky preteen with a bad perm and a permanent scowl, it got harder for us to be in the same zip code. Most of what we fought about was trivial mother-daughter stuff—whether I was old enough to wear lip gloss, or if I had scrubbed the plates properly before putting them in the dishwasher—but that was part of the problem. She wasn’t my mom.
And then, one day, she was. We had been having one of our screaming, door-slamming fights—the kind where I would have shouted “I hate you!” if I didn’t know that would only get me in deeper shit. (Instead, I scrawled it in my diary: I hate her I hate her I hate her.) I came out of my room to grab a wad of tissues out of the hallway bathroom—my private sanctuary, because unlike my bedroom, it had a lock—just as she was leaving her bedroom down the hall. Out of nowhere, she asked, “Would you think about calling me Mom? You don’t have to decide right away. Just think about—”
“Whatever. Sure.”
From then on, “Jonee” would be the name I reserved for the times when I really wanted to piss her off.
Dad didn’t like to step into a conflict unless he had to, and when he did, it was to play the role of hard-nosed disciplinarian. “You need to grow up and stop crying,” he would tell me, or, “You’re never going to get anywhere if you just get upset about everything like that.” It’s funny how parents slip into those roles. I had seen my parents yell at each other—a car-shaking fight outside our temple stands out in my memory—but my dad never yelled at me. To this day, I prefer yelling—any kind of yelling—to the silent treatment.
Quitter Page 2
