The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

by Robin Palmer

  For months I had imagined how I’d feel if I discovered Mom drinking again—maybe because if I went over it in my head enough times, it wouldn’t hurt as much when it happened. Sometimes I was pissed. Sometimes I was scared. Sometimes I was sad. But no matter how many times you play something out in your head, the way you think it will feel, versus how it does feel, never seems to match up. Because at the moment, I just felt numb.

  I held it out toward her. “Just go ahead and drink it,” I said quietly. “Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Annabelle, I wasn’t going to open it. I was just—”

  “You were just what?” I demanded. “Using it as a hot-water bottle for cramps?” I asked, my voice rising.

  “No, I had it . . . It’s here because . . .”

  I shook my head. “You know what? I don’t care why you have it.” Now I wasn’t angry at her—I was angry at myself. For being stupid enough to have trusted her again. To have been dumb enough to have believed that things had actually changed. To have thought that my mother had finally grown up and gotten it together and decided to act like a parent, the kind who took care of her daughter and made her feel that no matter what was going on, no matter how sucky things were, things would work out.

  As I put the bottle on her night table, I knocked over the photo of us that had been taken at the Emmys.

  She leaned over to pick it up. “Bug, please—”

  “Like I said, it doesn’t matter.” And then I got my legs to move.

  Back in my room, I picked up my phone and dialed Maya. “Hi. Can you talk?” I said, sniffling when she picked up. Olivia and Sarah had given up with even pretending to be friendly to me anymore, but at least I still had Maya. When she wasn’t with Jade.

  “Hey,” she said over the din of what sounded like a restaurant. “I’m with Jade at Chin Chin. Can I call you later?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “I am. I have to go,” I said before clicking off. I scrolled down my contacts list. There were a lot of entries, but they were more the kind of people whom you called when you were feeling okay, or at least okay enough to know that you could get away with the lie that you were okay. I couldn’t call Ben because he and Alice were going to Mexico for a long weekend. From the number of times he’d cleared his throat, I could tell how hard it was for him to tell me, but I was happy for him. In fact, I was so happy for him I was tempted to see if they’d adopt me if they got married.

  “I can’t believe this is what it’s come to,” I said out loud as I came to an entry toward the end. I clicked on the name and reached for a can of Play-Doh.

  “Hello?” a voice said.

  I didn’t say anything. Mostly because I literally couldn’t, because my lungs were full of the smell of kiddie clay.

  “Hello?” it demanded.

  What was I doing? I was just going to hang up.

  “I know it’s you, Annabelle.”

  I cringed. Of course he did. He had me in his phone, too. “Hey, Walter,” I said as I exhaled.

  “What are you doing?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you sound weird. Why are you calling?”

  Someone was missing a small-talk chip. “I don’t know. No real reason,” I lied. “Just to say hi.”

  “Oh.”

  We sat on the phone in silence, save for the sound of faint wheezing coming from his end. “So, uh, how are you?” I finally asked.

  “Fine.”

  I waited for him to ask me how I was, but he didn’t. Those meetings may have taught kids how to deal with someone’s drinking, but apparently they didn’t throw out social skills tips.

  We went back to being quiet in what was possibly the most awkward conversation ever. “What about you?” he finally asked.

  “What about me what?” I asked warily.

  “Are you fine?”

  I was all set to say, Yeah, sure, things are great. Wasn’t that what most people wanted to hear anyway? I mean, most people, when they asked how you were, barely even listened to the answer because everyone just said “Great.” What would people do if you told the truth and said, Actually, things suck—life as you knew it has fallen apart and sometimes when you go to sleep you hope you won’t wake up in the morning? Not like you wanted to kill yourself or anything like that, but just that you wanted out of your life and into someone else’s.

  What was I doing? I didn’t know this kid. He was a fourteen-year-old gamer. Sure, when he talked at the Alateen meeting, I had related to a lot of the stuff he’d talked about, but what was going on with my mom now—that was different. It was private. No one other than Ben knew about Mom’s depressions. I hadn’t even told Maya how bad she actually got. I couldn’t tell this semi–complete stranger.

  “No. I’m not fine,” I finally said. I bit the inside of my lip so that I wouldn’t start to cry, but that plan failed as well.

  “Is your mom drinking again?” he asked quietly.

  I sniffled. “No,” I scoffed, as if that was the dumbest thing in the world.

  “Then what is it?”

  In that moment, I felt as if I was at one of those forks in the road that had all those signs to different cities all around the world. Except, instead of cities, these signs said things like LIES I’VE TOLD SO MANY TIMES THEY NOW SOUND BELIEVABLE, WISHFUL THINKING, JUST FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF, and IT’S NOBODY’S BUSINESS. But there was one more sign—it was near the bottom, and the paint was chipped and faded, but I could still make it out. What it said was, JUST TELL THE TRUTH ALREADY.

  Maybe it was living in L.A.—the capital of make-believe, where people got paid to make up stories and pretend to be other people. Maybe it was growing up with my mother. Or maybe it was because I had been down those other roads so many times and it had gotten me nowhere.

  I took a deep breath and, without meaning to, told Walter the whole story from the beginning. I told him about the good stuff—sitting in stools at fancy stores like Neimans and Saks when I was six, watching Mom get makeovers for free because she couldn’t afford to buy the makeup, and how when she was done, she’d put some lip gloss on me, which would make me feel just as grown-up and beautiful as her. And how, when I was seven, she had bailed on an audition for a Judd Apatow movie that Carrie had thought she was perfect for because it was at the same time as my ballet recital, even though she could barely see me because Madame Stravasky had put me as far in the back as possible because I couldn’t do a plié without almost tipping over. And how, when I was eight, she had come up with this idea that, although we didn’t have any money to travel, in order to teach me about different countries, we would eat at a restaurant that specialized in the food, watch a movie from there, and learn a bit of the language. (The fact that one of the phrases she always insisted on looking up was “What kind of wine do you have?” should have been the tip-off that she wasn’t like other mothers.)

  Those stories rolled off my tongue effortlessly, because they were all stories I had told reporters from E! and People over the years. It was the other stuff I had trouble with. The times she had been late to pick me up from somewhere because she had fallen asleep, or had just forgotten about me because she was too busy thinking about herself. The way she would ask me for advice about things that I had absolutely no idea about—when I was eight she asked me whether she should have declared bankruptcy because of all her debt.

  I don’t know why I felt I could tell Walter my secrets, but they just came out. And once I started telling them, I couldn’t stop. Walter just let me talk, and when I had to stop to blow my nose, he didn’t make fun of the way I honked into the tissue. I didn’t even hear any clicking in the background, as if he were typing on his laptop while I went on and on. He just li
stened.

  I talked until my throat was so dry I needed to stop for a minute.

  “Are you done feeling sorry for yourself?” Walter finally asked.

  Not the response I was expecting. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, are you done feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “I know what you said,” I replied. “I’m just trying to figure out why you’d ask that. Because I am not feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Well, you’re not in the solution.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I cringed as a huge crunching noise came through the speaker. “You’re either living in the problem, or you’re living in the solution,” he said with his mouth full. Another wave of crunching crashed against my ear. Walter may have been polite enough not to eat while I was spilling my guts, but he was sure making up for it now. “And you, my friend, are living in the problem.”

  I wanted to snap that friends didn’t tell friends they were feeling sorry for themselves, but I didn’t. “And how is that?” I demanded.

  “It’s the three C’s of alcoholism and addiction,” he replied. “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it. The only thing you can do is control your reaction to it.”

  This Twelve Step thing sure had a lot of slogans.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  I looked at the clock. “Five.”

  More crunching. “If you leave now to pick me up, we can make the six o’clock meeting over on Montana. In fact, if you hurry, we might even have a chance to stop at In-N-Out before.”

  More food? Really? “Yeah, thanks for listening, but I’m not going to be able to do that.”

  “How come? Because you need to stay there to make sure your mom doesn’t open that vodka bottle?”

  I thought about lying before realizing that telling the truth was a lot less exhausting. “Well . . . yeah.”

  He snorted. “Good luck with that. If she’s going to drink, she’ll find a way to do it. Believe me. My dad’s done it seven times since the first time he got sober. Well, seven times that my mom and I know of. It’s probably more.”

  As annoying as Walter could be, it must have really sucked to have a dad like his.

  “Meetings are a way for you to control your reaction to your mom,” he went on. “That’s the solution.”

  Whether it was because I was too tired to come up with excuses, or I was afraid I’d go deaf from the crunching, I sighed.

  “Fine. Give me your address.”

  “Took you long enough,” Walter said after he came out the front door of his house on Twenty-sixth Street—a house that looked just as normal and nicely landscaped as ours had—and got into the car. He looked at his watch. “Nope. Not enough time to go to In-N-Out,” he sighed. He pointed to the bashed-up front fender on a silver BMW. “See that? That’s what happens when my dad goes out to celebrate winning a case. One more DUI and he’s going to have to hire someone to represent him to keep him out of jail.”

  I didn’t know why it made me feel better that Walter’s dad seemed as screwed up as Mom, but it did. Maybe because I knew that when he said he understood how I felt, or that he had been there, I could believe him.

  Although it was a different church basement than the first meeting, it had the same musty smell, like old books and wet chalk. Some of the same kids who had been there that Saturday were there, and even though it had been a while ago, a few remembered me and asked how I was doing. As usual, I was tempted to lie, but instead what came out was “Yeah, not so great.” The way that they nodded—with sad smiles on their lips and eyes that said, I get it, but I’m not going to make you feel worse by throwing out some dumb cliché like “Don’t worry—things will get better”—allowed my shoulders to stop making out with my ears and move back to their regular position. Within a half hour into the meeting, my jaw started to relax, and I stopped grinding my teeth. And while at one point I reached into my bag to make sure my can of Play-Doh was there, I wasn’t tempted to go to the bathroom for a huff. I even found myself laughing a few times. And when the sharing got to me, instead of clamming up and passing or trying to spin things so that I sounded better than I was, I kept telling the truth. When I felt the tears coming, I took the crumpled-up tissue from the Filipino girl sitting next to me with a grateful smile and continued with my story, going on and on until I saw Walter pointing at his watch, mouthing, Wrap it up. After the meeting, when kids crowded around me and offered me scraps of paper with scribbled names and phone numbers (Call anytime!—Amy L.; Hang in there . . . it gets better.—Laila N.), I didn’t just shove them in a pocket of my jeans and forget about them so they ended up going through the wash; instead, I placed them carefully in my wallet. And when a few kids asked me for my number, I didn’t change the last digit so they wouldn’t be able to get in touch with me.

  I couldn’t say that I felt good when I got home after dropping Walter off. In fact, because of the number of French fries I had eaten at In-N-Out, I felt a little nauseous. However, I did feel that I was understood, which was something I hadn’t experienced for a while (see: loss of best friends). And that I wasn’t some freak, or the only one in the world who had a screwed-up family life. And because I believed them when they told their stories, there was the tiniest part of me that was willing to believe that things would get better over time.

  Whatever it was that ran the universe worked fast. Because after school the next day, a miracle was waiting for me in the form of a freshly showered, made-up mother sitting across from her AA sponsor in our living room, the two of them sipping chamomile tea.

  “Hey, Bu— Annabelle,” she said when I walked in after being held hostage in the lobby by our neighbor, Miss Kowalsky, while she told me how she had rushed her cat O’Neill to the vet because he had almost died from a urinary tract infection.

  “Hey,” I said, happy to see her out of bed but still mad. “Hey, Willow.”

  “Hey, Annabelle. You good?”

  I liked Willow. Mom told me that when she first got sober she had a purple Mohawk, so she had to buy a wig before she went on job interviews. Now her hair was long and black and shiny. “Sure,” I replied.

  She nodded. “Good.”

  “Do you want to sit with us and have some tea?” Mom asked hopefully.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” That was progress. The old me would’ve said yes just to keep the peace. But as someone had said in the meeting, “‘No’ is a complete sentence.”

  Her shoulders sagged a bit. “Okay.”

  They were still talking quietly when I turned out the light and went to bed. Part of me wanted to stand at the door with my ear against a glass eavesdropping, but I didn’t. If Mom suffered from Disclosure of Inappropriate Information disease, I was just as guilty in that I was willing to listen. While I was glad that she was once again part of the human race, I didn’t need to know why. It wasn’t my problem.

  Over the next few weeks something weird happened. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had started going to Alateen meetings regularly and Mom was going to her AA ones again, too, sometimes twice a day. Maybe the timing was all just a coincidence. But it was as if the umbilical cord between us—the one that the doctor had apparently forgotten to snip when I was born—started to dry up and crumble.

  For the first time, when I would glance up from my Lean Cuisine and see my mother, I thought of her as something separate from me. Now, when my mouth would open to finish her sentences, or I’d want to rush in to do something for her because it would’ve made things that much easier, I didn’t. To her credit, she let up on me as well. She stopped trying to tell me what I wanted or thought (or if she did, she’d quickly catch herself and say, “You know what? Forget I just said that.”).

  That Wednesday night as I worked on a paper for English class, Mom knocked on my door—she knocke
d on my door—and asked if she could come in.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “I was wondering if you could teach me how to use the printer,” she said, “so I can print out my résumé.”

  “Your résumé?” I asked, confused. “You mean your credits on IMDb?” IMDb stood for Internet Movie Database and gave you information on actors’ credits and mini bios of them, including birth dates that were a few years off.

  She shook her head. “No, I just put together a résumé for my interview tomorrow.”

  “What interview?”

  “At Promises,” she said.

  Promises had been the first of the fancy rehabs back in the day.

  “To work there?”

  She nodded.

  “Wow. Well, that’s . . . great,” I said, trying to be supportive. In trying not to butt into Mom’s business, I wasn’t going to tell her that she didn’t actually have any skills other than acting and accessorizing. “But Mom, if you have a regular job, you know you’re not going to be able to leave during the day to go to auditions and stuff.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. She shrugged. “I’ve decided I’m done with acting.” She flashed a camera-ready smile, but her eyes were sad. “I just think it’s time for me to do something different now.” She smiled bigger. “I can be a walking example that when you get sober, your life just gets better and better!”

  I looked around the room that was stuffed to the seams with furniture as the smell of cigarette smoke from the downstairs apartment came through the radiator. It did?

  A car alarm went off, and Mom cringed. “Or that at least you can stay sober through whatever life throws your way.”

  A second alarm joined the mix, which made a dog start to bark. Back when we lived in Santa Monica, the loudest thing you heard was the stone fountain from Japan that had been on our patio.

  “So you’re in a bit of a dry spell,” I said. In the middle of the Sahara Desert. “It’s not like it’s going to last forever.” It couldn’t, could it?