by Robin Palmer
I walked over and sat on the edge of her bed, reaching for the mug. “Can I have a sip?” So maybe I was still working on raising my trust level a little.
“You hate tea,” she said.
That was true. “Not all tea,” I said. “So can I?” If she said no, I was picking up the phone right away and calling Ben—
“Of course you can.”
I took a sip and tried not to gag. Why was tea so disgusting? After I swallowed, I relaxed. No alcohol. Unless there was a certain kind of alcohol that didn’t actually taste like alcohol, which you—
“Annabelle. There’s no alcohol in there. It’s tea. Just plain old Peach DeTox tea, okay?” Mom said, a little pissy.
“I didn’t think there was,” I said, just as pissy. So maybe we had a lot further to go with the trust stuff than either of us would have liked. “Anyway, I just wanted to say good night.”
She smiled. “Good night, Bug.” She leaned over and hugged me. “I’m so glad to be home.”
“And I’m glad you’re home,” I said.
For as long as we had one.
I don’t know if Mom believed me the next morning when I told her that I still wasn’t feeling well and should therefore respect my fellow students by staying home so as to not inflict them with germs, but she didn’t fight me on it.
Although I wished she had after everything hit the fan later that morning.
“That’s two weeks away!” she cried after she read the certified letter she had just received—the one addressed to Janet Eleanor Jackson, her real name. (“Janie just sounded so much cuter,” she had explained to me when I first discovered the discrepancy. “Plus I didn’t want anyone confusing me with Michael Jackson’s sister,” as if the difference in skin color wasn’t a big enough giveaway.) According to Mr. Dinshaw Patel from Wells Fargo, we needed to be packed and moved out of our house by the end of the month. Apparently this was not the first time that Mr. Patel had attempted to contact Mom to let her know there was a problem, but Barney had intercepted the letters.
Picking up a pen from the table and holding it to her mouth as if she were smoking it, Mom paced around the living room as the silver statue of Lakshmi, the Indian goddess of abundance, seemed to mock her. (Yet another very expensive yet obviously defective good-luck charm.) “Okay, okay. What am I supposed to do?” she asked herself. “I’m supposed to breathe, and I’m supposed to . . . call my sponsor!” In Twelve Step programs, a sponsor was a person who had been in the program longer than you, whom you called for advice. According to Mom, it was like a shrink mixed with a priest or a rabbi. “But I don’t have a sponsor yet! Because I’m supposed to be going to meetings so I can find one.” She turned to me. “I think I should go to a meeting.”
“Go,” I replied. It seemed like a much better solution than popping a pill.
CHAPTER SIX
CHANGES MY MOTHER, AS MY MOTHER, DECIDED WOULD BE OCCURRING NOW THAT SHE WAS MY MOTHER AGAIN (OR MAYBE WAS MY MOTHER FOR THE FIRST TIME)
Meals would be eaten together. Without the aid of magazines, books, TV, or iPhones. (That one went away after day two, when we resumed eating dinner the way we always did: on the couch making fun of the hosts on Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight).
Every day would include twenty minutes of non-meal-related together time, when we did things like “communicate, listen to, and appreciate” each other. (Thank you, Dr. Walter Bienstock, author of the bestseller We’re Family, But I Realize I Barely Know You, one of the many books she downloaded.)
Homework would be looked over to make sure it was completed before bed. (This one went away after day two, due to Mom’s ADHD and lack of math ability.)
Her Facebook friend request must be accep-ted so that she could monitor my online activity and make sure I was not interacting with people (i.e., men) who were age-inappropriate. (Not happening. I knew she’d just spam my wall with comments written in caps with exclamation points and inspirational videos about spirituality.)
“What would you like me to cook for dinner?” she asked a few nights later as we drove home from the two-bedroom condo on Darlington Avenue in Brentwood that I had found on Craigslist and that we had just signed a lease on. Mom thought that the fact that we’d be the only non-Iranians in the building other than the woman across the hall from us and her three cats would be great. (“What a wonderful way for us to expand our cultural horizons!” she exclaimed as Persian music wafted through the open windows as we stood in front of the smoked-glass mirrors in the living room. “And we don’t have to spend money on plane tickets!”)
“You mean, what do I want you to defrost?” I asked as I took the wheel while she reapplied her lipstick.
Satisfied that her lips were kissable—even though one of the things they said at rehab was that you shouldn’t get into a relationship for the first year of your sobriety or make any other big life changes—she took the wheel back. “No, I mean cook.”
“Pushing buttons on a microwave and opening takeout containers is not cooking.”
“I’ll have you know that during my meditation this morning I ended up visualizing myself cooking,” she said. “So I downloaded a bunch of cookbooks onto my ereader and—”
“Mom, you can’t be buying books right now!” I cried. “You need to be selling them!” I had started listing her stuff on eBay. I had gotten pretty good at writing up catchy postings about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to own clothing, shoes, and accessories belonging to an A-list Hollywood celebrity. (The word former really should have come before A-list, but I needed to move the stuff fast.)
“Annabelle, stop worrying about our finances,” she said firmly. “You’re not the mother, okay? I am.”
I snorted. “Since when?” Whoops. I hadn’t meant to say that. And from the hurt look on her face, it had come out pretty harsh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
She nodded. “No. It’s fine. I understand where you’re coming from,” she said softly, making me feel worse than I already did. She reached for my hand. “Annabelle, I want you to know I completely validate this hostility you’ve been feeling toward me since I’ve been back. I really do.”
“I don’t have any hostility,” I said.
She was the one who now snorted.
“I don’t,” I repeated.
“Honey, you’re allowed to have feelings around all of this,” Mom said. “In fact, you need to have them.”
“I don’t have any feelings,” I snapped.
“Yes, you do. You’re having feelings. End of story,” she snapped back.
I sighed. Mom not passing out every night was a positive change. But the fact that suddenly she was pulling rank and going so overboard trying to be the responsible mother was annoying.
Soon our conversations were limited to which box to pack what in. But even if I didn’t want to talk to her, I couldn’t stop myself from keeping tabs on her like I had before Oasis. As much as I wanted to believe that when she said she was going to an AA meeting, that’s where she was, or that the pill I had just seen her swallow was, in fact, a multivitamin, it was hard. Especially after we moved to the new apartment.
One of the most difficult things about Family Weekend at Oasis had been hearing just how much of a sneak Mom had been. The way she had poured vodka in the fresh-squeezed juices that Esme spent a half hour making her when she went on her health kicks. The way she’d play all her doctors against one another in order to get more pills. According to Dr. Warner, having everything out on the table was ultimately a good thing because now Mom and I could start with a new foundation, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like hell. If you couldn’t trust your mother, who could you trust?
Maybe snooping around in her bathroom drawers in our new apartment to see if she was hiding anything wasn’t a cool thing to do on my part. And not calling to find out her ETA after her AA meeting
, before I went to snoop through her bedroom—that was a stupid move. But I did snoop, and I did get busted, which resulted in her freaking out, which resulted in my freaking out, which resulted in her calling Ben to come over to “handle” me because she couldn’t. Which resulted in my asking her if she really thought it was fair that she was always asking Ben to do the kinds of things that you’d ask a boyfriend or husband to do—like, say, get a person into rehab or handle their kid—but she wouldn’t actually let Ben be her boyfriend or husband even though it was clear to everyone that nothing would make him happier. Which resulted in her telling me to mind my own business because I was not mature enough to understand how complicated these things were. Which resulted in my going into my room and slamming the door before firing off a text to Maya that said, God, I freaking hate her sometimes!!!!
The good news about Ben getting involved was that even though he was not-so-secretly-if-you-could-read-him-like-I-could in love with Mom, he also knew that, although she was sober, she was still nuts. I knew that when he got there, he’d totally agree that she was going way overboard with all this I’m-the-mother-end-of-story stuff. And that while maybe rummaging through her private stuff when she wasn’t home wasn’t very nice, it made sense.
I was in my new bedroom working on a list when Mom and Ben came in.
PLUSES TO HAVING A VERY LIMITED SOCIAL LIFE
Don’t have to worry about buying birthday gifts for friends, which means all that money can go toward new camera gear.
Don’t have to worry about clothes that you lend to friends getting stained/ruined.
Time that would have been spent texting with friends/shopping/getting mani-pedis can instead be spent making lists about the pluses of not having a social life.
Lunches can be spent alone under a tree pondering the meaning of the universe rather than talking about boys, movies, or gossip.
“Annabelle, there’s something . . . ow!” he said as he smacked one leg on a table that had been in the living room of our house. Like the rest of the apartment, my bedroom was stuffed to the gills, to the point that if the producers of the TV show Hoarders saw our place, they would’ve booked Mom in a minute, and probably for a double episode. We had downsized from five thousand square feet to a thousand, but instead of selling most of our furniture, Mom had insisted on keeping as much as she could. (“We’re going to need it when things turn around and we move again,” she kept saying.) But instead of putting it in storage like a normal person, she moved as much as she could into the apartment. I had a king-size bed in a room that was meant to fit a queen (snugly, at that) and bruises all over my shins from bumping into things whenever I tried to make my way out the door.
He turned to Mom. “Janie, you’ve got to get rid of some of this stuff.”
“And give in to small-minded thinking that is all about lack instead of abundance? No, thank you,” she replied as she maneuvered her way around the slipcovered love seat that had been in our cabana near the pool.
He sighed. “Fine.” He looked at me. “Annabelle, your mother and I have been talking and—”
“You’re going to Alateen,” Mom finished.
He gave her a look.
“What’s that?” I demanded.
“Remember when we were at Oasis and we went to that Al-Anon meeting?” Ben asked.
I nodded. Al-Anon was the Twelve Step program for family members and friends of alcoholics, whether they were still drinking or sober. They had meetings, just like AA, where speakers shared their stories about what it had been like living with the person who was drinking, and what happened that ultimately made them start coming to meetings and how their life was different now. Then, after they were done, other people got a chance to share for a few minutes. Because it was a Twelve Step program—which, according to Dr. Arnie, was not a religious program but a spiritual one—there was a lot of talk about a Higher Power, which seemed to be another word for God. I wasn’t sold on the whole God thing (see: the Holocaust, innocent people starving in Africa, the success of the Kardashians), but I do know that when Ben and I had been in that meeting I did feel like something had my back.
“Well, Alateen is a group for younger members of Al-Anon,” Ben explained. “Kids your age.”
What was going on here? This was the part of the movie where he was supposed to agree with me that Mom was overreacting. Telling me I had to go hang out with a bunch of strangers and share my innermost secrets and let them pat me on the shoulder or, even worse, hug me was not part of the script. Unless it was a horror movie. I shook my head. “No way. I already go to therapy.”
“This is different than therapy,” Ben said. “It’s a support group. With kids going through the same thing you are. You know, I’ve gone to some Al-Anon meetings in the last few weeks and—”
Had everyone gone nuts? “You guys can spend all the time you want going to meetings,” I said as I stood up, “but that’s not how I’m spending my time.”
Unless I was bribed.
“So I probably shouldn’t mention that the reason I’m here is because I was promised a Holga camera in return for giving up an hour of my life to listen to complete strangers share their innermost secrets,” I said to Ben as we sat in his car outside a church on Wilshire Boulevard that Saturday morning.
“Yeah, I’m thinking leave that part out. Might not go over well with the crowd,” Ben said as he ruffled my hair before pulling my door open. “I’ll be back at one to pick you up.”
Luckily, there was a decent coffee place that was about three blocks away, which meant that if I started walking back at quarter of, I’d have plenty of time to get inside and then walk out with the group at one.
“And just so you know, I’ll be waiting out here around twenty of,” he said with a wink. “In case, you know, you were planning on just ditching the meeting altogether.”
Or not. I sighed. It was both amazing and annoying to be known so well.
The meeting was held in a mildewy-smelling basement with a furnace banging away somewhere down the hall.
I walked in to find a fat kid with reddish-brown hair and freckles who looked to be a few years younger than me wearing a vintage Donkey Kong T-shirt with his hand in the Munchkins box that was sitting in the middle of the scuffed table.
He looked up, startled. “I’m only taking one,” he said defensively.
I glanced at his hand, nails bitten to the quick, clutching at what looked to be at least three, probably four, greasy-looking dough balls, before sliding into the folding metal chair closest to the door.
He pushed the box toward me. “You want one?” he asked with his mouth full.
“No thanks,” I said as I began to rummage in my bag. When I had turned twelve and started carrying a purse, I had discovered the usefulness of rummaging as a way to avoid having to talk to people when I was nervous.
“You’re new, huh?” the boy asked.
I looked up in time to see him go to grab another Munchkin. A mission that he reluctantly aborted when he saw he was busted. “I didn’t get a chance to have breakfast this morning,” he said, just as defensively.
I shrugged. “I don’t care how many Munchkins you eat.”
Which then made him grab two. “Am I right? You’re new? ‘Cause I’ve never seen you here, and I’ve been here every Saturday for the last eight months.” I wasn’t sure why he sounded proud of that fact, but he did.
“Well, yeah. Kind of,” I replied. “I mean, I’m new in that I’ve never been here before, but it’s not like I’ll be coming back. . . .”
“How do you know if you’ll come back if you haven’t even sat through a meeting before?”
I shrugged. “I just know.”
“But how? Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but that’s really judgmental of you.”
When someone told you you were being judgmental, how were yo
u supposed to take it?
“So who’s your qualifier?”
“My what?”
“Your qual-i-fier,” he said, as if dragging the syllables out was somehow going to explain it. “Jeez, you are new. The person in your family who drinks.”
I shook my head. “I never said anyone in my family drank.”
He snorted. “Denial’s not just a river in Egypt, you know.”
Who was this kid? “Okay. Fine. My mother . . . she used to drink . . . but she doesn’t anymore. She just got out of rehab,” I said proudly.
“I remember when my dad got out of rehab the first time. That was”—he counted on his fingers—“five times ago.”
If everyone was like him, I definitely wasn’t coming back. Before I could go to the bathroom for a Play-Doh break, some more kids started to file into the room. Most of them seemed to be around my age, a few younger, a few older. And—in the case of this one girl—a lot younger, like elevenish. In addition to the Munchkins lover and me, there were a few other white kids, some African Americans, a few Hispanic kids, and one Asian girl who took the seat on one side of me. Who—from the kimchi she was eating that smelled insanely delicious and was making my stomach rumble—was most likely Korean. It reminded me of my elementary school back in West Hollywood back before Mom got famous and put me in the L’École, where suddenly everyone around me was white and rich.
In addition to the kids, there was what I was later told was an Alateen meeting sponsor, someone older who was in Al-Anon who sat back and made sure that things ran properly. In this case, the sponsor was this girl Amanda, a woman in her late twenties with auburn hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a tattoo across her left wrist that said GRACE. She didn’t say much, and a few times I saw her checking her phone even though one of the announcements at the beginning was “Out of courtesy for the other members, please do not text during the meeting.” But I also saw her nod a bunch of times with a grateful smile on her face as people were talking, as if she totally identified and understood what they were saying and feeling, which made me jealous. It had been a long time since I had felt that way.
