Lying

by Lauren Slater

  Suffice it to say, I was not helped by the Brandeis Counseling Center. I thought about calling Dr. Neu and asking him for a referral. I didn’t do it, though.

  Instead, I tried to put the whole visit behind me. I tried to put it right out of my mind. I went for walks. I visited churches, because they were soothing to me and could possibly take the place of professional counseling. I liked churches where there was holy water in pools, churches where tiny toy fires burned beneath copper samovars, or where the priest walked in a hush of black cassock.

  Usually, when I visited churches, they were more or less empty. One day, though, I walked into a church right by my studio apartment, a church called Saint Perpetua’s of the Precious Blood, a small, unassuming-looking building on the outside, but on the inside garlands of fresh flowers, pews worn and almost soft to the touch.

  I touched the pews. I slid in and sat. I thought I had stumbled in on a service of some sort. The pews were filled with people who one by one stood and said things. They walked to the front of the room and spoke into a microphone. To the side, I saw a cloth-covered table, pamphlets and books. I saw a coffeepot, and platters of delicious-looking treats.

  I saw the food first, and then a man next to me leaned over and whispered, “Welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  It was such a simple word, welcome, but it had within it the delightful sounds of door chimes announcing your arrival at a hospitable house.

  I watched. A woman with frizzy hair and lipstick so bright it made her mouth stand separate from her face got up to talk. I figured this was a Christian thing; what did I know? The woman took the microphone and lowered her lips to it. She said nothing. Her mouth began to tremble and tears came out, silvering her sad, sad face. No one said a word, and the woman just stood there weeping, and then I got scared. A small cry escaped her bunched, bright mouth, and for a second I thought of my mother; I thought it was her up there. I knew it wasn’t, but the shadows angling the woman’s face, the palpable air of sadness and something far too tight, her hair, high and sprayed; my mother. And then I, too, wanted to cry, because the idea of her unhappiness—whose unhappiness?—brings me always to a dark and difficult place.

  “It’s okay, Elaine,” a voice from the pews said. I tried to see who spoke, but the church was darkish.

  “Remember, let go and let God, Elaine,” another voice, from another pew, said.

  Elaine nodded. She touched a strand of pearls at her throat. “It’s been a week now,” she said.

  Everyone clapped.

  I clapped too.

  I have clapped many times in my life, but this time was different. I clapped for Elaine, sad, strung-out Elaine, and I heard precisely how my singular claps joined the larger universe of claps, and we made a single sound, for Elaine.

  I felt, suddenly, inexplicably, joyful. “Welcome,” the man next to me had said. And I was here, with my hands beating back someone’s sadness, and I forgot all about the sadistic Brandeis psychologist, and just then Elaine smiled; her mouth broke open and her huge teeth glistened, and she laughed and said, “Oh, God, I love you people so much!” Her voice echoed through the microphone, and the clapping got louder, and I got louder, and soon we were standing, and everyone was hugging, and someone hugged me, and the next thing I knew, I had a cookie in my mouth, warm, buttery, jam-filled, welcome.

  • • •

  I went back the next day. I wasn’t planning to, but since the counseling center had failed me, I felt I had nowhere to go. So I just went out walking, and when I came to the church, I slipped in. Three o’clock, just like yesterday. And I saw the strangest thing. It was as though no time had passed. The garlands of flowers were just as bright. The people seemed to be sitting in the exact same places in the pews, and the cookies were fresh.

  “Welcome,” the man said to me when I entered the pew. He had good breath, like a lawn. I heard the door chimes in his voice, the hospitable house, and then Elaine got up, stood by the microphone, and she cried as she had before, and then she said, “It’s been eight days now,” and everyone clapped. Here, time stood still but never stagnant. Here, the room was filled with high, baroque emotion, and yet tempered with plain kindness and camaraderie.

  I stuck around when the meeting ended. Yesterday, I’d pretty much rushed out, but today I felt a little less shy. People gathered around the refreshments. That’s when I saw the pamphlets, “Alcoholics Anonymous,” “Clean and Sober,” “Twelve Steps to Spirituality,” “You and Your Higher Power.”

  I had heard of AA and even seen a TV movie about it once, a movie where a boy named Bobby got up and confessed to an entire auditorium that he was a drunk. The movie had pictured old grizzled men smoking cigarettes, coffee in mashed paper cups. This crew, however, looked different. The church was in Weston. The men carried briefcases and wore leather shoes. The women had fine jewelry.

  The man with the nice breath came up to me again. He held a mug of coffee. “So,” he said, blowing on it. I smelled hazelnut. “So, we saw you here yesterday. You’re a newcomer, are you?”

  “Yes,” I answered, not sure what I was supposed to say.

  “And how many days sober do you have?” he asked.

  The question threw me. I should have been anticipating it—what else would you ask in AA?—but I was caught completely off guard. I didn’t know how to explain what I was doing here, and I thought if he found out I wasn’t an alcoholic, he’d get mad, and so I said, “Well … seven months.”

  This was right in several ways. Seven months ago, I’d broken up with Christopher, and Christopher had been pretty much of an addiction for me, so there. Also, seven months ago, right before breaking up, we’d had a drink together in the hotel room, and I hadn’t had an alcoholic beverage since then. And it had been, most important, seven months since my last grand mal seizure, up there in Vermont, in the snow, in the sex.

  “Seven months,” the man said. He held out his hand and we shook. “That’s quite impressive,” he said. “Did you do that with the help of AA, or on your own?”

  “On my own,” I said.

  “That’s dangerous,” he said. “You can get sober without AA, sure, but the program’s not just about getting sober. It’s about change and growth. It’s about serenity.”

  I have always loved the word serenity. The word is imagistic. It’s a blue lake of a word. It is pitch pine and horses.

  “I guess,” I said, “that’s why I’m here. I can’t do it on my own anymore. I’m looking for serenity.”

  “Elaine,” he said, beckoning her over. “Elaine, Joy, Mike, come here, we’ve got a newcomer.”

  “Do you need a sponsor?” someone asked.

  “We have a telephone tree,” someone else said.

  “931-0434,” I said, spitting out my numbers, it happening so fast, my life branching with theirs, they older and elegant, I a child by comparison, they put their arms around me.

  “Seven months,” Elaine said. “You are an inspiration to me. If I had found AA at your age, instead of when I was fifty-three, who knows. God bless,” Elaine said, “God bless you and your time,” and then she hugged me, and I smelled her perfume. I smelled the minerals in her jewelry and the hazelnut in her hair, and I remembered a long time ago, dreaming of women touching me, many mothers gathered around me, here we were: Joy and Elaine, Mike and Elaine, Joy and Amy and Brad, they saw me. They said I was special. And in the following weeks I learned their names, and I stepped over their thresholds, into their house, this house, it became my house, saints walking in every window.

  • • •

  It happened slowly. AAers will tell you that miracles are rarely claps of thunder; they are the small steps we take every day. I took small steps into AA, one day saying I was seven months sober, the next day getting hugged, my phone number mixing with theirs, a sponsor, some pamphlets, it happened as rhythmically and naturally as breathing.

  They called me the silent member because I didn’t want to talk into the
microphone or explain my past drinking behavior. They thought I was shy, but really I had lied, and then gotten tangled in the lie, and I didn’t want to do it more into the microphone. Most of the time my lie didn’t bother me, because AA, like any disease, is about so much more than its symptoms. AA is about life, and honesty, God and desperation and desire, and these things are relevant to anyone.

  I went to that meeting every day. I got a sponsor, Amy. I had wanted Elaine for my sponsor, but you were supposed to have a person with a lot of sobriety, which wasn’t Elaine but was Amy, a second-grade schoolteacher, her husband also in the program, her two kids in Alateen.

  A sponsor is someone to rely on, someone to get you through the hard times when you don’t have a meeting. A sponsor is like a best friend and a wiser person, explaining the program concepts, helping you reach your higher power.

  At first, Amy and I talked after the meeting. I didn’t yet have the guts to call her at home. We would sit on the church’s stone steps, and she would tell me my higher power could be anything I wanted, so long as it was larger than me, it could even be a bus. I said, “My higher power is God,” and she said, “So is mine, it’s Jesus.”

  When she said the word Jesus, I felt uncomfortable, because I’m a Jew, but at the same time, I felt a natural affinity for the man. It’s not an affinity I can intellectually explain. In my mind Jesus had a smell; he was not entirely clean; he cried out loud, and he seemed very loving. He had hair as blond as a Breck commercial.

  Amy suggested I get down on my knees and pray every day. “It’s the AA way,” she said. “Just fall on your knees, just let go and fall on your knees.” When she said these words I thought of learning to fall a long time ago, at Saint Christopher’s Convent, how that had been the one place, the one time, when I had felt confident in my life.

  So I did it, even though being on your knees is very un-Jewish. I started to pray on my knees. I said, “God, please fill me up.”

  God, however, seemed to have different plans. He didn’t fill me up. I felt good at the meetings, but as soon as they were over, they were over. The campus newspaper had not published my interview. No one called. I felt an essential piece of me was missing, a piece perhaps burned out by my illness, or a piece that never developed because I had spent so much time playing a part.

  It was depression, but I wouldn’t have called it that. I would have said numbness. My head felt cold.

  I had a bad night one night. Rain lashed against my windows, and a huge centipede crawled out of the shower drain. I called Amy on the telephone, the first time. “Hi,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” Amy said. “Do you feel like picking up?”

  “Well,” I said. “I don’t know, I’m just, I’m feeling,” and then I started to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is so embarrassing.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Amy said, “it’s okay to cry. You have to feel your feelings.”

  “I can’t stand my feelings,” I blurted out. “I feel so bad all the time. I feel empty.”

  My words surprised me. They were so simple and direct, and right then things lifted a little, because what I had said was true.

  “You have to remember,” Amy said, speaking slowly, “you have to remember that your feelings are not facts. You feel terrible but that doesn’t mean you are terrible. You feel empty, but that doesn’t mean you are empty. Feel your feelings and then let them go. Don’t act on your feelings by picking up a drink or a drug or anything else for that matter.”

  “If I don’t act on my feelings,” I said, “then what do I act on?”

  “Act as if,” she said. “Act as if you are feeling good, and productive, and, eventually, it will become that way. In the program we call it ‘Acting As If,’ ” Amy said, and part of me knew she was right, part of me knew she was wrong. You couldn’t act as if you weren’t having a seizure; sometimes your body just took over, your body told the truth, unalterable, essential, clenched. Other times, though, you might make your whole world, make a maxim, make an adage, dress for the position you want, not for the one you have, smile and the sun smiles back, flex and miraculous muscles arise. How odd that we are at once tethered to the truth of our bodies and yet, at the same time, utterly free to sculpt ourselves.

  It goes both ways. How odd.

  Act as if. As if.

  In this way, fictions become facts.

  • • •

  There were so many vector points, that was the real miracle. Everyone in AA was battling against the disease of alcoholism, as I, too, had battled against the disease of epilepsy. And, like alcoholism, epilepsy never really goes away, even once you stop having seizures. A seizure could come back anytime, the same way an alcoholic, even with years of sobriety, can just slip out of the blue, and pick up a whiskey sour. AAers, like epileptics, are always alert, always waiting for the demon force that can crumble a life. “Cunning and baffling,” is the way they talk about their addiction, and that’s certainly the way I would talk about my seizures, the sudden storm bringing me down.

  I, like them, was always on the alert. Seven months without a seizure, eight months, nine months, but no matter what I was doing, in the back of my head, I always knew the world could slip away, my bladder come loose, crash. Falling asleep, I would twitch, and startle awake, wondering if that was a normal twitch, or the beginning of a nighttime fit. I would stare at the ceiling and wait.

  Alcoholism and epilepsy, so many vector points. Both can come back anytime. Even more important, both are more than just physical diseases. Both are personality problems as well. AAers describe addiction as an allergy of the body coupled with an obsession of the mind and an impoverishment of the spirit. For me, epilepsy, along with what doctors called my temporal lobe epileptic personality disorder, was also a psychological, spiritual, and physical thing. AAers say that alcoholics don’t just drink; they are also manipulative, need to be the center of attention; they lie, cheat, and steal from God and man; it’s all part of the disease, theirs and mine.

  Let me tell you, I fit right in. “We drink,” the AAers said, “because there is a hole in our souls,” a hole they had tried to fill with many marvelous liquors, as I had tried to fill with the intoxicant of illness, the intoxicant of tall tales, the intoxicant of attention lavished on the patient and the poet, me.

  Sometimes, I know this is corny, but sometimes in meetings, hearing people talk about all the desperate things they’d done just to feel good about themselves, tears came to my eyes. Tears also came to my eyes when they talked about living day in and day out with drunkenness, with hangovers, waking up with something pounding in their heads, as something had pounded in mine after a seizure, terrible tastes in our mouths; us.

  I started to call Amy more and more, not in the addictive way I had called Christopher, but in a regular, reaching out kind of way. One day, she invited me over to her house for tea. Another day, Elaine invited me to her house for dinner. I really liked Elaine a lot. She made me fried chicken and green beans. She was divorced, with her three kids grown and gone. Her house was nice, with fluffy couches and fluffy rugs and a poodle named Maggie O’Brien. Elaine fed me, and we watched TV, and she said, “You are becoming just like a daughter to me.”

  As far as my own mother, my own home, well, I didn’t go there very much. Brandeis was only one mile away, but we weren’t close, my parents and I. I had a feeling always of missing my mother, a kind of perpetual pang in me, and yet, at the same time, I had lost hope a long time ago. The pang, actually, didn’t have so much to do with missing my specific mother, but of missing a mother in general, a warmth or a certain kind of touch. My dreams were always of women; I think they always will be, women lifting me, women touching me, women treading toward me across a pink satin sheet.

  • • •

  I did go home occasionally, a few times a year. My father had done pretty well in the bakery business. He had long ago stopped teaching Hebrew School, and he had enough money to afford a fairly price
y country club, where he and my mother spent summers playing golf. My mother, well, my mother never got a single maxim published, and for a while that depressed her, but then she got a new interest; she became a matrimonial consultant. I am happy to report that in this she found fulfillment. She planned girls’ weddings, from the dress to the music to the flowers on the table. One month or so after I’d joined AA, I visited my mother and father, and she was so excited. She had just become a representative for Adela’s Wedding Designs, which meant that Adela sent her sample dresses she could show to potential clients. I walked in and the house was filled with white. White veils draped from hangers on the doors, petticoats flounced, skirts of tulle and satin, the whole house, like being inside a baked Alaska.

  “Wow,” I said.

  She was on the phone. “I’m telling you,” I heard her say, “I’m telling you that lilies will take this over the edge.”

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “And,” she said, “I don’t recommend a long veil for Francine. It will overwhelm her. I recommend an off-white mantilla.”

  I sat at the kitchen table. I watched her talking to her client over the phone. She had a high flush in her cheeks. She had a desk piled with white cloth cutouts, which she fingered lovingly as she talked. I watched her touch the fabric samples, and I felt a rush in my throat, I, suddenly, so happy for her. My mother had found her place in the world, a white white world, an aisle of perpetual promise.

  She hung up. “Hello, Lauren,” she said. Her tone changed. She was more comfortable with her clients than she was with me. Between us, a certain formality. “How have you been?” she said.

  Usually her stiffness hurt me, but not tonight. Maybe because of AA, or Elaine, or Amy, or my higher power, or maybe just because I was happy she was happy, a burden off my back, I didn’t mind.