And there she is, the very first hit. No one else like her in the world.
I had heard from people back home that my mother made the paper a couple of times. Front-page news, I soon learn. Oh, Mum, honestly, I’m a little proud. I read the articles online, about how she lost her house, her taxi business as well as the building it was in, a building described by the journalist as “habitually unkempt.” Was the C&A building that bad? Even with the yellow stained walls, I remember it was ten times cleaner and nicer than the house we actually lived in. She and my stepfather were arrested for class-A drug possession; my mother was also charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She and Michael got pulled over while driving home from a drug run. Mum jumped out of the car and booked it down the highway on foot. When she was apprehended by the police, she kicked and swore.
I hardly breathe as I read this part. I’m playing it like a movie in my mind. What was she wearing? What song was on the radio? Then a gift: in the middle of the article there is a quote from her. The journalist had called her asking for a statement. Kathi’s voice comes to life in print.
“Call someone who gives a f—, sweetheart.”
Reading this sentence, I miss her more than I ever imagined possible.
TWO WEEKS AFTER I arrive in Danvers, I’m reading the Boston Sunday Globe at my father’s house. “Look at this,” the old man says. He drops a section of the newspaper called Homes in front of me. There are two properties featured on the first page. Above the fold is a house built in 1668. It belonged to a family of Puritans who landed in Massachusetts fourteen years after the first colonists arrived at Plymouth Rock. This house, which has remained in the same family for more than three hundred years, is a beautiful New England saltbox with the original seventeenth-century hinges still creaking open the doors. The first owner, Isaac Goodale, saw his brother murdered by Giles Corey, one of the five men who was crushed to death by heavy stones during the Salem witch trials of 1692. The current owners, I read in the article, are descendants of these same Goodales, now elderly Vermonters too frail to make the trip to the family house on holidays and too prudent to justify the cost of a house that has no use.
It must be a hard sell or it wouldn’t be in the paper. The owners acknowledge this in the article and offer an explanation: there are ghosts lingering in the halls. They joke that one needs experience to live in a house like this and not be afraid.
“We’re heartbroken to see the house leave the family,” they say.
Below the fold is another article, another house, also large, beautiful, and difficult to sell. Or, more accurately, hard to keep inhabited. Unlike the Goodale house, this one has passed through several owners since the original family left. It’s a three-thousand-square-foot contemporary cape with a large wraparound porch, offering what the newspaper quaintly describes as “a front seat for the Porter River across the street.”
35 Eden Glen Avenue. My mother’s house.
“It’s cursed,” my father says. “That’s why no one’s buying.”
Staring at the paper, I wonder for a moment which house he means.
In the Shadows of a Puritan Graveyard
———
IF YOU GOT AN OLD PAINT CAN, FILLED IT WITH RUSTY NAILS, THREW in a couple of sweaty jockstraps, and soaked it all in acid rain, then brought this mixture to a boil, somehow burned it, topped it off with toilet water, then boiled it again, you would have a beverage ten times better than the stuff they call coffee around here. I should know, because I’m the one who made it. Having nothing better to do, I volunteered for this job. In a state of desperation, an emotional nadir that I would later come to think of as a gift, I wandered into this ramshackle white building and took a seat in one of the eighty metal folding chairs. A woman with thick black hair stood up on the dais. I couldn’t glean how old she was, only that her life had obviously been long.
“We need a coffee-maker for Thursday nights,” she said in a gruff voice, as though already annoyed. “It is a minimum-three-month commitment. Does anyone want to volunteer?”
I don’t know if it was an overachiever’s reflex or a deus ex machina, but to say I raised my hand implies an agency that simply wasn’t there at the time. Looking around, I guessed about a hundred people were gathered in the small A-frame building, what might, in a simpler time, have been a one-room schoolhouse. Everyone in the hall was either skin-and-bones scrawny or grotesquely obese, and not a single face was smiling. Nor was anyone raising his hand—no one except, I noticed with disembodied amazement, me.
The woman nodded at me and slammed a battered spiral notebook down on the counter next to an industrial samovar. “Write your name and number in there.” She walked me through the six-step process for making coffee, pointed out the supply closet, the Styrofoam cups, the cream and sugar. “Make sure the chairs look nice. Not sloppy. In rows of, like, five or six chairs each.” She handed me a key to the building. “It’s not rocket science, but you’d be smart to get here a little early. If the coffee’s not ready at four-thirty sharp, they start to riot.”
For no one really knows how long, this building had been dedicated to the single purpose of meetinghouse for addicts in various stages of recovery. Situated between a Presbyterian church and the town fire department, it has a graveyard that is close to four hundred years old. Square gray stones poke out of the grass like rows of crooked teeth. Here lyes ye Bodies of the Zachariahs and Abigails, the sea captains, British colonels, and their wives, the “relicts.” They were Puritans who looked at the world with shrewd, dry eyes and saw that you could work as hard as an ox all your life, never uttering a nasty word, not even in your dreams, but nothing can guarantee your escape from hell. God-given redemption was limited to a few, and its allotment was random and inscrutable. What’s truly amazing about these people was their belief that, given a choice, knowing as all sentient beings do, that you are going to die no matter what, you might as well die trying.
The gravestones are all carved with that curious Puritan hallmark, a skull gritting his enormous teeth and sprouting thick fronds of grass out of his ears, a bodiless skeleton flying on angel’s wings. Sometimes the truth is delivered with artistry. Think of Mahler or Caravaggio or Yeats. Sometimes it’s as sublime as stars strung up just so across the black night sky. Sometimes it’s something as embarrassing as a rainbow, or as gross as dog shit on your open-toed shoes. It’s a punch in the gut, whatever it is. It physically hurts. It has to, or we might intellectualize until we’re cross-eyed and blind to the thing we need to see. That’s the way it has always worked for me, at least—a gastrointestinal revelation of Truth.
That day, I wandered the graveyard behind the meetinghouse with a cold lump of fear sliding down my throat. I didn’t want to be here. I regretted raising my hand. I regretted every single moment of my life leading up to now. Way, way down deep, I still sort of wanted to die. But the morbid little seraph carved into the thin slabs of stone—he was jubilant, on the brink of laughter, ready to sing the eternal good news: Life springs from death, and death from life.
Whether I liked it or not, the person I used to be had to die.
I LIKED TO SAY that I would quit drinking when I got pregnant or when my mother died, whichever came second. As my twenties came to a close, it was becoming clear that I might not live long enough to see my mother go, let alone to take over the official role of being someone else’s mother. My friends in recovery tell me that you finally get sober the day before you were supposed to die. It’s a dramatic, hysterical, almost superstitious idea, which is precisely why I love it, and why I think it’s true.
At the end of my drinking—what I hope is the end—I began to hallucinate. Walking my dog in the early morning, I’d fix my gaze straight ahead, on the flat rectangles of concrete beneath my feet, as though actively trying to shut out the overwhelming nonsense of life in the periphery. I would pay very close attention to the ground, to the wads of gum dotting the sidewalk like malignant black moles, or the impert
inence of a tree root breaking through the cement. If I let my eyes scan any higher, I would start to see visions, and though I never thought they were real in any ontological sense, the possibilities they suggested scared me witless.
Beams of headlights on the highway sliced through the mist in two continuous bands of light. The gold light was coming toward me, the red light streaming away. Staring at them, I’d picture a car skidding off the road and pinning my body against a scraggly tree. I could see it all happening frame by frame, feel the air being pressed out of my lungs, feel my ribs being crushed, my heart stopping. Then I’d shake my head and walk home.
Sometimes, as I climbed the staircase to the third floor of my apartment building, I’d feel my foot slip. My body would lean back. Reflexively I always caught myself, but what if I didn’t? What if I just let go, fell backward down the stairs? I could hear the hideous thud of my head whacking the steps several times before my neck broke. Gripping the knob of my apartment door, I’d think, Not this time.
Then there was the train. A commuter rail ran from Boston to the suburbs of Cape Ann and cut through my neighborhood every hour. I lived close enough to hear the whistle. To listen for it, and then wonder. How drunk would I have to get first? Blackout drunk. Not hard at all, when auspiciously placed a few feet from the tracks is a decent bar called the Depot. There’d be no way to screw this one up, I thought. No rescue, no miracle surgery, no way to undo it. An action completed as soon as it began.
These death dreams were as real to me as anything I had experienced before. They circled my head like a flock of crows. I didn’t especially enjoy them, nor did I feel that I had any power to make them fly away. The best I could do was distract myself. Nature is nothing if not proportional, and the more suicidal I became, the more I got laid. My life had turned into a soft-core porn full of soulless, at times hatefully carnal, fucking. After two months of this, I ended up pulling my groin, something I didn’t even know could happen to people outside of construction or professional sports. For five days in a row, I limped to all the various church basements, where they kept insisting that alcohol was my problem. I didn’t want them to be right, but there were certain facts I couldn’t ignore. My hangovers were getting violent. The shakes were no longer a once-in-a-while occurrence but something I planned for every morning. I was physically too small to drink the way I wanted to, and anything less than that was miserably frustrating. I couldn’t sustain this habit for long, it had to stop, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how.
Then one day I found the answer to all my problems. A calm washed over me. I was excited and relieved. Finally, it was going to be okay. I’d just get pregnant. A baby will keep me sober for nine months at least, I thought.
It wasn’t an original idea. I could hear her voice as though she were standing right next to me: “I quit using everything the moment I found out I was pregnant with you. I just walked away from it all. That’s how much I loved you, Nik, even before you were born.”
IT IS THE DECLARATION of every thinking woman at some point in her life, a manifesto that crosses all boundaries of class or color or whatever arbitrary thing we try to pretend separates us. It starts out as a girlish whisper, grows louder with each passing year, until that faint promise we traced in the sand becomes a declarative, then an imperative:
I will not become my mother.
It’s an ambition born of fear. It’s the fear that attends our every ambition. It seems at once inevitable and yet the only thing that we can truly control. Even women who have good mothers, those pillars in the temple of dignity, intelligence, and grace, even their daughters find themselves screaming this one sentence out loud, at their girlfriends or sisters:
I will not become my mother.
I will not get fat like her. I will not starve myself. I will not call gin and a handful of peanuts “dinner.” I will not bury my libido with the tulip bulbs in the front yard. I will not become a humorless, abstemious prude. I will become neither a cheap nor an expensive whore. I will never cheat on my husband. I will never leave my kids alone with a man I hardly know. I will never get married. I will not deny myself an orgasm. I will never set foot in a church. I will celebrate a devout faith in capital-G God. I will never knit. I will learn to hem, darn, patch, and sew my own clothes. I will cook real food, have a healthy dinner on my kitchen table no matter what. I will never hit my children. I will never have children. I will make my own money. I will leave the first time he hits me. My ass will never resemble a large sack of potatoes. My house will be clean and my children will be proud to invite their friends over. I will not obsess over real estate, antiques, collectible dolls, reality television, tarot cards, crossword puzzles, or what the neighbors think. I will never buy things I can’t afford. I will allow myself to wear nice clothes. I will dare to enjoy myself. I will not go to prison. I will not become a racist, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, a xenophobe. I will read widely and with an open mind. I will travel the world until no place is unfamiliar. I will never own cats. I will try and try and try even if it kills me. I will never give up. I will not become the woman she was.
I CRAWL BACK TO the meetinghouse I’ve been visiting for months, with the same thought that everyone else in these rooms has had a million times before.
“This time it will be different.”
I cross my arms against my chest as tight as a straitjacket and rock back and forth in the brown metal seat. A woman appears out of nowhere and rubs my back. I’m too numb to thank her. I wasn’t even aware that I was shaking. But she seems to understand. And I just keep coming, as they tell me to, though I have no idea why.
I stay sober for a week, then two, then three. The snow retreats, leaving ugly gray islands of ice melting here and there along the roads. The sun lingers in the sky a little bit longer every day. One morning I wake up feeling deliriously happy. I prance around these Twelve-Step meetings telling exaggerated tales of my glory days when I drank in darkened bars and flicked my cigarette butts at joggers. (I only did that once.)
“Look at me now!” I say.
A man named Bert shoots me a knowing smile. He’s in his seventies, I’m guessing, an inveterate North Shore clam digger who brags that he never misses a tide. I admire his tan, and the way he can wear a pair of madras shorts without looking supercilious or elderly. At first I think Bert is what they call an old-timer, someone with decades of sobriety hard-forged in the early days of the recovery movement, before the infiltration of softer, gentler self-help rhetoric, back when drunks fresh out of detox were told, “Sit down, shut up, and don’t fuckin’ drink no matter what.” But Bert has been sober for only a couple of years. Not too long ago, he tells me, he was blowing coke off his coffee table with the shades shut, like he was Keith Richards. My God, I think, in another life Bert and I would have fallen in love and probably killed each other.
“How you doing, honey?” he asks me that morning.
“I feel like a million bucks!”
“Don’t worry.” He laughs. “This, too, shall pass.”
“But I feel great.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Bert shakes his head. “You’re on the pink cloud.”
It’s a temporary euphoria that follows the initial detox. He emphasizes the temporary part.
“Well,” I stammer, “what happens after that?”
“You just keep coming, honey.”
On day twenty-nine of my sobriety, I wake up feeling wonderful again. The familiar objects in my home startle me with their radiance. Everything has a sharp edge, as though lit from within. A book laid on the table, a vase of dried roses, a vacant chair—it’s all a three-dimensional echo of my own potential.
I decide to celebrate by going on a long walk. The color green is making its first shy appearance in the New England landscape. The trees are budding with silky young leaves. Crocuses inch up through the mud. I notice everything as though for the first time. Walking past a cove near my apartment, I see a swan gliding silently across the water. A sq
uirrel dashes into the middle of an empty street, pauses a moment, then scampers to the other side and up a tree. Life is all around me! It’s glorious. So glorious I start to cry.
The tears feel good at first—cathartic, the kind of cloudburst that leaves everything clean and new when it’s over. I treat this little outpouring of tears like a leg cramp. Just got to walk it off. But I don’t stop crying. I can’t. Ahead of me are two mothers jogging behind aerodynamic baby strollers. When they hear me gasping, they stop and stare. I blow right past them, tears pouring down my face.
It goes on like this for the next two months. I can see very clearly why so many people who make it to this point give up and start drinking again. Like the rainy season in tropical climates, I am hit by daily torrents of grief, at around ten in the morning and then again at four. I cry and cry, and when I’m done I sleep. Sixteen hours a day, on average. I wear the same pair of sweatpants for weeks. It’s miserable. I wouldn’t wish this pain on my worst enemy.
That’s not true. I would.
I wake up one morning and learn that it’s Mother’s Day. There’s a liquor store forty steps up the street from my apartment. I’m not safe alone, so I call my stepmother and ask if she’ll come and get me. The two of us sit on her couch all day, with a bag of potato chips between us. We watch AMC, and what should come on but Pocketful of Miracles, starring Bette Davis and Ann-Margret. It’s a stupid movie about a stupid girl who is tricked by her selfless mother, a homeless fruit hawker named Apple Annie, into believing that she’s not the bastard daughter of a vagabond but a European princess. I stuff my face with potato chips and draft a feminist dissertation in my head. This sentimental comedy of errors is a sick charade. Behind Apple Annie’s good intentions is the desire to keep a young girl from crossing over into womanhood by denying her the truth of her past, and therefore of her present.
With or Without You: A Memoir Page 19
