Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (4 page)

Three and a half hours later, Lala came home with the sweaty and parched baby. Needless to say, she was fired immediately; a neighbor later told me they had seen her at the park canoodling with a man while the stroller sat there under a tree. SHE LEFT MY STARVING BABY FOR THREE HOURS DURING A HEAT WAVE! I spit on her name.

After Lala’s one day of employment, we hired a baby nurse named Juju. My eldest is almost nine years old, and Juju still lives with us. I have no idea of her age, but she’s never abandoned my children out in a heatwave and she loves crabbing with raw chicken necks as much as me. As General Electric would say, “She brings good things to life.”

And Juju will live with us forever—even if she sells dope out of the house!

Chapter Four

Don’t Look Back

W
hen my older sister was seventeen, she underwent spinal fusion surgery. She had scoliosis from birth, and my parents had hoped a back brace would mend it. But she never wore her back brace. She would leave for school, sneak around the back of the house, stash the brace in the garage, and race onto the school bus. The surgical procedure fused her vertebrae together so her spine would be straight, and the brace could permanently live behind the pile of firewood and mice droppings.

I was twelve years old the summer Sissy had surgery at Mass. General Hospital. It was a sweltering and sticky July in Boston, and I remember living on chips from a vending machine and lying on the plastic-tiled hospital floor talking to my sister while she was suspended upside down in a medieval bed contraption. At the time I didn’t realize the extent of such major surgery. (The only other time I had been in a hospital was when I was born, on a gurney in the hallway during a blizzard, so my initial reaction to being there was to feel cold and lonely.) Both my divorced parents were there, trading seats, conferring with doctors, and fetching coffee. Sometimes my sister would scream so loudly I could hear it down the hallway in the waiting room, where I’d be working on my Mad Libs. It was usually a sign the morphine drip had run dry.

The hospital had a distinct smell, a combination of pudding, Lysol, and piss. (Do hospitals have a rule against potpourri?) My sister couldn’t move for weeks and had to poop in a bag, which was both fascinating and repulsive to me. For that reason alone I never wanted to have surgery. Although as a middle-aged woman, I might put up with pooping in a bag for a good face lift.

W
hen I wasn’t trying to amuse myself with popping rubber gloves and stacking pill cups at the nurses’ station, Fiona and I stayed in our house in Plymouth. The modest house, with a stunning view of the public beach, was just over an hour’s car ride from the hospital. Back then, Plymouth was a tiny village that survived off saltwater taffy sales and tours run by adults dressed up as pilgrims and Indians, who crushed corn and sharpened arrows with rocks. They weren’t allowed to break character, so if you asked a pilgrim where the gift shop was, she would answer, “Thou dost not know from what thou speakest.” (“Yes, but doesn’t thee drive a Pinto and babysitteth us sometimes?”) I still remember seeing an Indian Squanto complete with loincloth sharing a cigarette and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with Captain John Smith behind the Wampanoag barn.

Fiona and I would spend the days in Plymouth with a mélange of long-haired, long-legged teenage babysitters in bikinis and straw hats named Jody, Darcy, and Liz. Down the hill from our house was the Eel River Beach Club. It was named for the begrimed canal of backwash between the club and the ocean, which housed slimy eels that boys threw rocks at or tried to catch in the janitor’s bucket. The only prerequisite for being a member of the club was you had to live in the town. If you lived kinda near, that was okay too. The club consisted of a cracked saltwater pool, one tennis court with grass growing through the tar, and a snack shack with a cook who was always out of supplies. We would spend the whole day there, dozing on our Marimekko beach towels on the hot cement, perfecting our knee flips in the saltwater pool, and slurping melting Creamsicles. The highlight, when it was really hot, was when we would pop tar bubbles on the paved parking lot.

The nights were peaceful; with the window open you could hear the crashing of the ocean waves, which lulled me to sleep—until that summer when the movie
Jaws
came out. After that, my windows were permanently sealed shut; I was too young, and the film traumatized me for life. My brother and his long-haired stoner friends took me opening night. These are the sorts of mishaps that occur when your mother is away changing bedpans. After the movie we all went to the beach, where I was catatonic, held hostage to their fake shark attacks in the moonlit ocean. I didn’t take a bath for two years and still won’t swim in water above the waist, and that includes swimming pools and koi ponds. Sissy missed the
Jaws
phenomenon that summer, but considering she was ripped apart by the teeth of great white surgical instruments, it was a blessing.

I used to lie on my single bed during those summer days for hours. When you’re young, your mind isn’t bogged down by questions about discovering your true self, preventing cancer, and liquidating assets; you can obsess about when you’ll sprout breasts for weeks on end. My only fleeting concerns (aside from my sharkophobia) were for Sissy and for my mother, who slept in a hospital chair for weeks. There’s a scene in the movie
Terms of Endearment
that was pulled from that summer. In the scene Debra Winger is dying and in great pain, and her mother, played by Shirley MacLaine, runs to the nurses’ station, screaming, “Give my daughter the shot!” For me it’s like watching a home movie.

M
y mother decided that when my sister was released from the hospital, we would all stay in a rented house up in Marion, near Buzzard’s Bay. Sissy was going to be encased in a full body cast for six months, and Marion was breezy and temperate. My mother rented an ambulance to transport Sissy up there. At the time I assumed this was so that in the event of a postsurgical complication, the medical technician would be on hand. But in hindsight, I think my mother just didn’t want to have to stop at red lights.

The Marion rental was a small white clapboard house with windowpanes of original glass that distorted the landscape and faces that passed by. Sissy spent most of the day horizontal. The body cast extended from her chin to below her pelvis. Fiona and I would break up the monotony of her day by taking extra-long Q-tips, dipping them in rubbing alcohol, and digging under the plaster to relieve itches. Fiona was young enough that a piece of string could occupy her for hours. Sissy was despondent with boredom.

One afternoon Sissy was particularly agitated. She was crying and banging her cast against the wall molding and narrow doorways, much like a toddler trying to walk with a bucket on his head. Fiona was busy still playing with string, and I was on my twenty-sixth pastel drawing of a clamshell. Sissy stomped into the kitchen. “I can’t live like this anymore! I’m running away!”

My mother stopped snapping peas. “Okay, okay, simmer down . . . you want some ginger ale?” The comfort elixir in our house.

Sissy’s fist hit the side of the refrigerator. “NO! I’m leaving! I’m running away!” And like that, she threw open the screen door and started waddling down the front path. My mother walked into the living room, where I was spread out on the floor surrounded by paper, pastels, paint, and a bunch of clamshells. “Go with your sister.”

I looked up at her. “I don’t want to run away!”

My mother tapped her foot on the knotty pine floor. “Please run away with your sister! I don’t want her out there alone!”

“But I don’t want to run away!”

“I’m asking you nicely, now go!”

I was getting irritated. “I don’t want to run away, Mom! I want to stay home! I’m happy!”

At this point she snapped, “GET OUT!”

I stood up in a huff, grabbed a Channel Thirteen tote bag, and filled it with a can of tuna, a bottle of juice, two apricot fruit rolls, and a spoon. I slammed the screen door as I ventured out to find my sister lurching like Frankenstein through a cluster of pine trees. It’s hard enough to swallow your mother forcing you to run away, but when I finally caught up with Sissy, she screamed at me to go home. I considered running away on my own at this point, but knew my mother would invest all her efforts in finding Sissy first, and I’d be in Tijuana doing tricks with a donkey before anyone realized I wasn’t at breakfast. So I followed Sissy from twenty feet away like some nymph stalker. We were in a part of Massachusetts that was foreign to us, so I just followed her path and prayed it would lead to a Howard Johnson. Finally, as dusk began to fall, we collided with an actual paved road, an occasional car whizzing by. Sissy stormed along the side of the road and I scampered behind, giving passing cars the “don’t ask” look. I was seething. We were in danger of missing
The Partridge Family
, and I had forgotten a can opener for the tuna.

We walked for yards. Sissy finally stopped and rested her cast against a stone wall surrounding a cemetery. A small cemetery, probably one family’s worth of deceased. I was starving and ready to face the consequences of going home for food and shelter. “I’m never going home,” Sissy huffed, trying to catch her breath.

“You know it’s Friday night! We’re going to miss
The Brady Bunch
,
Partridge Family
, and
Love, American Style
!” I was on the verge of bursting into tears. I felt guilty; here was my sister, who had just had her back split open like a chicken breast, with a metal rod skewering her like a shish kebab, and my shallow universe was shattered by the idea of not hearing a family of bad shag haircuts belt out, “I think I love you.” Even though Sissy was tall, blond, and very beautiful, she didn’t deserve that horrific operation. Well, maybe her svelte legs merited a root canal, but not this.

“What do I have to do for us to go home?” I asked as Sissy looked away. Silence. And then: “If you can make me laugh, I’ll go home.”

I repeated the terms, so we were crystal clear: “If I make you laugh, you will go home?”

“Yes,” she snorted. For the record, Sissy hadn’t cracked a smile in eight months.

It’s difficult to be funny on demand. In the woods. Without pay. I’m sure if Richard Pryor had been in my position, he wouldn’t have jumped up on a mound of dirt and delivered a thirty-minute set, in Massachusetts, with no crack.

I zipped across the road to the cemetery, because where better to find yucks than a plot of dead people? I looked around for props and anything that would trigger some creative initiative. Sissy stared at me like she was watching the Nuremberg trials. I found an unused black garbage bag caught in a branch. I hid behind the largest tombstone (clearly the moneymaker of the family), out of view from Sissy and the road. I stripped down to my white undies with pink faded bows. I used my teeth to make holes in the top and sides of the bag and pulled it over my head. I gathered a bunch of twigs and meticulously wrapped them around small bunches of hair—instant forest hot rollers. The ground was moist enough to mix a muddy concoction, and I rubbed it on my face like Trish McEvoy cover-up. I put leaves between my toes, weeds around my neck, and a dandelion behind one ear. I was Bigfoot and Nell’s child.

I popped up from the grave like a stripper from a cake. At that precise moment two cars were driving by. The Volvo screeched to a halt, causing the VW bug to brake abruptly and careen to the side. Suddenly windows were down, and even a golden retriever was gawking. It was show time. I pranced around like a member of some esoteric Martha Graham dance troupe, occasionally berating a squirrel or pretending to seduce a birch tree. I was so committed to the role that I didn’t realize there was a traffic jam piling up on the road. As I broke character and absorbed the absurdity of my surroundings and the borderline psychotic lack of inhibition, I caught Sissy in my peripheral vision—she had fallen over. Laughing. I’d like to think it was my performance, which will never be seen by the Academy, but for her it was my complete abandonment of self-respect. The fact that I would sacrifice all dignity just to get home to the Friday TV lineup was unfathomable to her. Sissy laughed so hard she peed in her voluminous linen pants, which provided us with an even more compelling reason to go home.

When we finally hobbled through the door, my mother and Fiona were eating scrambled eggs. My mother took Sissy to her room and changed and comforted her. Afterward, we all convened in the living room just in time to catch Marcia Brady receiving her corsage. Fiona was tying string around her legless doll, my mother brushed Sissy’s flaxen hair, and I sat mesmerized by a TV family of six children who lived a perfect suburban life, complete with a well-groomed dog and a wisecracking housekeeper who probably worked for free (just being part of the bunch was enough). They lived an ideal childhood with inconsequential hardships that were without fail resolved in twenty-two minutes. They didn’t have divorce or episodes of madness in a cemetery, and unless I missed that episode, none of those kids ever spent time on a morphine drip.

Chapter Five

Girls, Interrupted

F
or generations in my family, when a child turned thirteen he or she was shipped off to boarding school. It wasn’t questioned, it wasn’t a choice, you just went. My parents went to boarding school, as did their parents and their parents’ parents—all the way back to the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims prepped by debating the Bible, freezing root vegetables, and bullying Indians.

My older brother and sister were dispatched before me, and it seemed innocuous enough. As they weren’t around during their teenage years, there were no rooms that smelled like pot (except for school breaks), band practice in the garage, or make-out parties in the basement to corrupt me. However, my sister did get suspended from school for having beer in her room. She was sentenced to a week back home. I remember it being a crisis on par with Watergate, which we had just lived through. There were endless hushed discussions: “What should we do?” “Oh, God! How could this have happened”? I mean, it was an Amstel Light, not a human skull. But it did make prep school seem devious and exciting. So, naturally, I wanted in.

I picked an all-girls school. First big mistake. The theory used as ultimate propaganda for single-sex schools is that boys won’t be around to distract the girls, and therefore they’ll perform better. Ever been on a diet? When you’re not near a bakery, you’ll crave chocolate-glazed doughnuts even more! You can’t take a few hundred teenage girls and lock them in a pretty white cashmere box for four years. They are hormonal, rebellious, and riddled with eating disorders.

I showed up at my chosen prep school, tucked away in the suburbs of New England, in colored patchwork corduroy pants and an electric pink sweater. I had my old camp trunk, a quilt, a pillow, and a Raggedy Ann doll with one eye. My dorm room was small, with two beds, two desks, and a bathroom down the hall for everyone to share. I tacked up my poster of a kitten clinging to a branch with the words “Hang in There!” in rainbow-shaped script above the kitten’s head. My mother helped me make my bed and set up a five-dollar metal desk lamp. And then we were done. I was waiting for her to say, “This is depressing, a huge mistake, let’s pack up and get the hell out of here.”

She cleared her throat. “Well, I should get moving. I’m going to have dinner with Pebbles in Cambridge.” I felt an ache in my chest, and my palms started sweating. (This was the first of a few panic attacks I would experience in my life.) I begged, pleaded, and cried for her to stay. As my mother pulled the Volvo out of the parking lot, I was hanging on to the front bumper, my sickly arms wrapped around the chrome appendage, my feet braced in the gravel. Either I would stay in that position while we traveled home, or my mother would have mercy somewhere on the Mass. Pike and let me in the passenger side.

It had been two hours since my mother peeled out of the school driveway when my roommate, Lucy, walked in with her father. She had a jolly smile, a plump face, and a nervous giggle. She and her father were from northern New Hampshire and had accents straight out of
Good Will Hunting
. Lucy’s dad put down her suitcases, shook my hand, gave her a pat on the back—“Ah-rite Lucy, I gutta git bick in the cah before it gits too dahk”—and disappeared.

We walked together across the soccer field to the dining hall. It was unspoken but clear that whether we ended up liking each other or not, we were an army of two when we walked into the commissary. We would sit together, walk together, and act closer than we actually were. Your first friend at boarding school, camp, or prison is your life raft, and you always have each other’s back. Luckily Lucy and I genuinely liked each other, which made the first few months tolerable. If I had ended up with one of the Asian girls in our class who always got awards and went to MIT early decision, I never would have been able to keep up, although I’d know how to rock a Hello Kitty minidress, and I’d probably own half of China!

I
realized quickly that in boarding school the only method of survival was to smoke. Like in prison, if you have cigarettes you’re exalted and safeguarded. There was one room designated for smokers, which was elegantly named the “butt room.” One had to walk through it to enter the end of the dorm closest to the main classroom building. So in bad weather, if you didn’t smoke, the walk from one end of the rancid basement strewn with filters and ash to the other was excruciating. You could almost hear, “Dead man walking!” So I learned how to smoke cigarettes. Like most urban gangstas, I chose Kool menthols as my brand, eventually switching to Virginia Slims Menthol Lights. I mean, I was a lady, for God’s sake. I remember endless frigid nights spent sitting in the butt room under the fluorescent lights in our Lanz nightgowns, puffing away as we debated virginity—who had it and who didn’t.

Around Thanksgiving was when the landscape changed. The trees were barren, every day was gray, and sports practices took place in the dark. It was this time of year that girls, no matter how much they smoked, started to succumb to the doldrums of winter and the environmental depression it brings. Everyone would order pizza nightly to ensure that each day would have a silver lining. The same way a recently married friend of mine told me, “The way I get through sex with my husband is I close my eyes and visualize the Oreo I’m going to treat myself to when it’s over.” In those days pizza and carbs were a teenage girl’s antidepressants. When the tattooed pizza guy finally showed up with the boxes, the girls would swarm him (testosterone and pepperoni? Be still my heart!), and the trust fund babies would shell out an enormous tip. After pizza I would fall asleep to the sounds of my neighbor forcing herself to throw up down the hall. She was from Tallahassee, where it’s imperative to be skinny and tan all year round. From what I understand, she runs the Orlando Hooters now.

I
t was around this time that Lucy started spending more and more time in the infirmary, a building with six rooms, painted a variety of repulsive pastel colors like crème de menthe and eggnog, with two iron beds in each. I don’t remember being sick there, just faking it to get some extra sleep. All I wanted to do was eat cheese out of a can and sleep sixteen hours a day. The nurse always gave us pills, lots of (sugar) pills. I would take them with ginger ale and slide into a coma. And that was as close to a break as I got for four years.

I never knew what exactly Lucy was sick with. Whenever she came back, she had no discernible symptoms; she was just a bit pallid and less animated. It was a Monday afternoon before Christmas vacation when the ambulance pulled up in front of the dorm. I was walking back from art class and saw two technicians get out and greet the headmistress. Then everyone walked somberly into the building. I was told to wait downstairs. I sat quietly on the mustard-colored sofa in the waiting area. Usually this space was used for storing lacrosse sticks or collecting mail. I had never actually been stationary in the room before. I looked up to see white shoes descending the stairs backward, then some Keds flailing, and then another pair of white sneakers. It was Lucy. She had a white canvas straitjacket tied around her middle, and she was thrashing like a marlin begging to be thrown back. She was placed in the ambulance, and then, in the blink of an eye, it drove away. I sat on the sofa and watched the sky turn a deep aubergine. Dusk seemed to close the curtains on the event. Nothing had to be explained to me; I knew everything was different.

I got permission to visit Lucy twice at McLean Hospital. She was always simultaneously crying and smiling while chain-smoking. I got the impression she didn’t know where she was or what had happened, so I kept our conversations to simple categories like field hockey scores and who had cheated on their midterms. I would sit on her roommate’s bed across from her and nod and smile and try not to run screaming though the glass security doors. She kept repeating, “We can smoke in here, so that’s good, no butt room!” and she’d stamp out another cigarette into a makeshift aluminum foil ashtray. After the second visit I never went back. The thing about mental hospitals is—they make you feel crazy!

I
never got a new roommate that year; I think the school felt I could use the mending period before assigning me another unstable adolescent. I did befriend two other girls who were on my floor. There was Bella, a former toddler pageant winner from Atlanta, and Lulu, a hippie from Marin County, California. Bella had plastered the whole wall with magazine cutouts of beautiful clothed and unclothed models. It looked like the creepy inner sanctum of a serial killer, minus the newspaper clippings circled in red lipstick. But a shrine to obsession nonetheless.

Every night Bella would lay out her outfit for the next day, down to the hair clip, belt, earrings, and lip gloss shade. I found this extraordinary, considering most girls wore their pajamas to class, or the nearest thing they could pull off the floor. She even had a skin regimen, a nighttime ritual that involved five different jars. This was my introduction to astringents and exfoliators. Sea Breeze and a cotton ball were no longer sufficient; apparently my skin was in desperate need of cleansers found only on the first floor of Neiman Marcus. If there was a feminine component missing in my education, I had found it in the shape of a petite Georgian who owned an elaborate manicure set and used a safety pin to separate each lash after applying mascara. She taught me to wear earth tones, big belts, and brow highlighter. She ate cottage cheese and lettuce every day for lunch, and whenever I had a bowl of Sugar Pops with whole milk, she would look at me with such disappointment that I felt like a puppy who had just disemboweled the couch. There were moments when I got tremendous pleasure out of torturing her with raw cookie dough during all-nighters. I may have been twenty pounds heavier, with overgrown brows, but I much preferred watching her do sit-ups from the sideline with a box of Entenmanns’s Brownie Chunks. It is my firm belief that if Bella had eaten Halloween candy and Rice Krispies Treats back then, she wouldn’t be spending Saturday nights on a StairMaster tagging articles about surrogates and anal bleach kits today.

Lulu did not possess Bella’s svelte figure or discipline; she was the opposite. Lulu was voluptuous, with heaving breasts and a thick mane of orange ringlets. She dressed and looked like a carrot-top, Shakespearean Janis Joplin dipped in freckles. My introduction to Lulu took place in the middle of the night. I was asleep. She snuck into my room, shook my shoulder, and asked if she could talk to me.

“Sure,” I whispered, wondering how I could possibly be of any help to her. She was groovy, drank blackberry wine, and wore a floppy felt hat.

“Well,” she whispered back, “Would you come with me to Boston this weekend to get an abortion?”

I had no idea what an abortion was. It was not something that came up at Girl Scouts. “Of course,” I answered. “I’ll get one too.” (Thank God hers was a false alarm. Otherwise I’d probably be missing my pancreas.)

Lulu was the first and only nymphomaniac I have ever known. If Oprah did a show on sex addiction, it would be Lulu, Charlie Sheen, and a whole bunch of football players on the couch. At night Lulu would sneak out of the second-floor window and, like a cat in heat, promenade into town, a sleepy New England village that shut down at 6:00 p.m. There were no bars or clubs, but she would trawl the streets like a vampire searching for fresh blood. She would meet a cop having his cup of joe or a townie listening to Black Sabbath in his Camaro—the details weren’t relevant. They’d have nameless, faceless sex, and afterward she would just crawl back through the window before dawn with pink cheeks and a wicked smile on her face. I can only imagine her Facebook page today (lots of people to befriend)! During a particular heavy patch or full moon, Lulu would have to go to the infirmary for a day to recover; she needed pills, sleep, and a bag of frozen peas. And then there were the nights she couldn’t escape, when the dorm mother was patrolling the halls like a prison warden or campus security was parked out front. Lulu would dance around the room completely naked like a psychedelic wood nymph. She would blare the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd until she worked herself up into such a state she would collapse, covered in sweat. I assumed that was how witches masturbated.

And there was the group of girls that were untouchable. You had to be either a junior or a senior even to be eligible to run with that pack. You also had to smoke, dress in ripped jeans that partially exposed your underwear (ghetto for debutantes), and have rope bracelets stacked up your arm. It was required you be obsessed with the Grateful Dead and have a summer home in either Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. Renters didn’t count unless you were from Bermuda. One night I found myself in the butt room with this social hive of queen bees. And on my third cigarette I was invited into the conversation. Did I know where they could score some pot? That was their opener. I had to be very careful framing my response; my answer could jeopardize the next three years of my life. I had never smoked pot, let alone knew where to score some. “I’m out,” I blurted, “just smoked the last batch.” I prayed they came in batches and not blocks.

One of the girls knew a guy at Deerfield Academy, the Krispy Kreme of boys’ schools, who was a dealer. She went to call him and figure out the logistics. “We should get some munchies.” I stayed silent; I assumed munchies were short drug lords. And then the recruitment began. After swearing their Sicilian code of silence, my ultimate trial was to go to IHOP and get snacks for “the family.” I would be accompanying a senior named Suzanne who looked like Joan Jett—same haircut, same scowl. I was still in my Lanz nightgown and moccasin slippers when we snuck out of the dorm and disappeared into the trees. I figured we would get to know each other on the walk, tell funny stories, and bond like we would at a sleepaway camp. But when we reached Route 128, Suzanne held out her thumb. All I could see in the flash of speeding headlights was my mother’s disappointed face. (“What the hell are you doing? Wearing your pajamas outside in the middle of the night?”) The evening had taken a dark turn.