Curled in the Bed of Love (6 page)

I say, “The way you go around singing all the time.”

“I think it's dorky. I've been trying to make myself stop.”

“I like it,” I say. “It's like living with happiness in the house.”

With her dainty hands, she bangs a plate into the dishwasher hard enough to make me wince. “Oh yeah!” she sings. “I rule!”

The one place you don't have to be furtive about sneaking out for a cigarette is an
AA
meeting. At every meeting in the church basement there has to be a vat of coffee, regularly scheduled breaks for the smokers—necessary tokens of nostalgia for our drinking days, the habit of wanting. Roberta and I huddle together on the church steps, the only die-hards willing to brave the cold for the sake of having a second cigarette.

Roberta shivers. “I wish I wasn't so goddamn compulsive.”

“Do you want my coat?” I offer. Like my children, I'm more apt to go out underdressed for the weather than not, determined to deny that it's cold, like any good, self-respecting San Franciscan.

“That's your compulsion,” Roberta says. “Have you ever wondered why you volunteer for everything? Why you're always the one who gives other people a ride home?”

I still have a driver's license, unlike a lot of the others. So it seems as if I have to say yes, even to Walter, when I don't like him.
He's been a recovering alcoholic for a while, but he's only been in our group for a month. He starts arguments at the meetings. In the car on the way home, he's loud, he fidgets, and if he's sitting in front, he reaches over and leans on the horn whenever he decides another driver deserves it. He yells “fuck you” out the window, which is always open to clear the smoke from everyone's cigarettes.

“Nobody else brings cookies to every meeting,” Roberta says. “Homemade, at that. You don't have to please your mother anymore, Maizie.”

Everyone here knows everyone else's secrets and taps into them at will to discover an ambiguous motive for the simplest gesture.

“That was never possible anyway,” I say. There's no need for explanation—Roberta's my sponsor, knows the whole pathetic story. Which isn't much anyway. My mother struggled to raise two kids on what she made packaging chocolates at the See's candy factory with a vengeful fervor aimed at the husband who'd died on her, the managers at the factory, and her only daughter, who could never do enough to make up for any of it.

Roberta complains softly about her own mother. Her mother didn't talk. Not in sentences, only in clipped commands, one-word judgments—slut, bitch, ingrate. “When I had my son, I was eighteen, completely on my own, and she came to see me. She looked into the crib at the baby sleeping there and all she said was, ‘bastard.'”

Tears well in Roberta's eyes. “This is silly. I don't know why I get like this.”

But she cries on, and I cry with her. Often when we are out here alone, we cry together. I always think to myself,
get it out, get it out,
cheering myself on in the sob fest. When I don't even know what
it
is. I've got no reason to be unhappy: I have a good husband, two beautiful children who seem remarkably undamaged by my addiction, a nice house. About the only thing I suffer from is excess volunteerism: at the high school where I teach English, I'm always
saying yes to the department chair when she needs someone to organize a conference, counsel problem students, join committees. I juggle my daily teaching schedule so I can race to pick up the kids from school at three, and I work nights after they're in bed.

The only unhappiness I can claim—my beaten-down mother who maybe had a right to her bitterness—is meager by
AA
standards and little more than a murky fog to me. I've been blessed by forgetfulness, can't remember much of my childhood at all. An inherited trait, maybe, like the alcoholism I share with my grandfather, the random accident of genetic predisposition. I barely qualify as a drunk—I was always careful, only drank after dark, never drove when I was high. I don't have a single story that might hold its own, even momentarily, in my fellow members' “can you top this?” exchange of past crimes, of childhood sorrows that are the firm, succulent roots of all their sinning and redemption.

Here is the thing about loving a man who stumbles when it comes to words. Jay has an astonishing facility at speaking through his body, through his eloquent hands. When I curl up against him after we make love, he strokes my back, and my nerves tingle under his fingers, emit pulses that chase his hand as he repeats a delicate trace-work on my skin, the echo of the satisfaction of our love-making. Jay's dyslexia might be what makes him so good at what he does for a living, just as it makes him so good with me. As a programmer he translates words and functions into binary operations, simple yes/no questions that branch out to the next, neat yes/no. As a lover he uses his careful hands to perform a similar feat, to elicit responses that trigger a chain reaction of yes.

Nothing's so nice as our sleepy postcoital talk about the kids, the thriving product of our love. We trade stories of their day the way that other lovers might trade bites of some delicacy to romance one another. I worry about Nathan being bored in school, and Jay
simplifies things for me by dancing his hand along my spine and saying that he was bored in school too, and it's only a normal part of childhood.

I slip reluctantly from beneath his touch. “I have to go finish grading papers.”

It's our usual routine for Jay to fall easily into sleep and for me to get up and squeeze in a few hours of work before coming back to bed. And it's Jay's usual response to wish that I wouldn't take on so much. I don't have to work full-time
and
be the mother who organizes phone trees and bakes for all the class parties. He needs so few words to tell me who I am.

“And then you top it off by making it to three
AA
meetings a week,” he says. “Can't you taper off now?”

Jay will never know how much I used to drink, still thinks I volunteered even for the daunting task of being an addict. Without exactly putting it into words, he's let me know that he thinks I drank when the kids were little because I needed an outlet. I was an ambitious person, with nothing to do but take the kids to the park and make spaceships out of paper plates. I shouldn't have stayed home with them full-time. But I wanted to stay home with them. I don't regret a minute of the seven years I was a full-time mommy. I can't offer a better reason than his for why I drank then, when I was so happy with the kids, when taking them to the pediatrician for a checkup was a big event, a thrilling chance to show them off like two perfect jewels.

“You know I have to go,” I say. “Besides, a lot of people count on me for a ride.”

Jay laughs. “You're always so ready to feel guilty.”

Guilty
is one box among many, clearly labeled, conceivably avoidable if only one can answer
no
on the previous step. Jay likes to tease me about my Catholic guilt, cull it from the bundle of emotions I call my own. But even my name is a contraction of the
Irish Mary Elizabeth that leaves nothing out, only collapses the catholicity of my being so that it is more dense.

Roberta and I are crying again when the door to the church bangs open and Walter steps out. “Can I bum a smoke?”

Everyone else more or less grants us the right to this snatched privacy, but not Walter. He steps up too close to Roberta, as if to intimidate her into giving him a cigarette, oblivious to the tears streaming down her face.

Roberta brushes her open hands across her cheeks to smear tears, and then she fishes in her purse for a cigarette and a lighter. “You always bum.”

Walter holds Roberta's wrist steady while he lights his cigarette from the lighter in her hand. When he straightens up, he exhales noisily. “How can you grudge me?”

He can't stand still. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, moves down a step, then back up. Walter looks like everything that made me afraid to sign up for
AA
. His dirty hair is pulled back from his face in a careless ponytail, his shirttail hangs out, his face has
wreckage
written all over it. Our
AA
group doesn't have exactly the same composition as the mother's play group I used to belong to, but it's close. Just about everyone but Walter seems to be trying to lead a nice middle-class life. And Walter won't let any of the rest of us forget it, makes a point of coming to meetings in his work clothes—the grease-spotted shirt with the Chevron logo on a patch sewn over the pocket. He thinks he's the only working-class slob who ever walked the planet and enjoys telling the rest of us how coddled we are.

“Listen, Maizie,” Walter says. “Can I have a ride home?”

“Sure,” I say. “The more the merrier.”

“ ‘Sure,'” he mimics in saccharine tones. “When are you going to drop this Girl Scout persona?”

“Tell him to take the bus,” Roberta says.

Walter looms toward me, and it's all I can do not to step back from the assault. But he thumbs a tear from my cheek with astonishing gentleness. “Look at her,” he says. “She's so precious, she cries little diamonds.”

To get Nathan to stop reading so we can turn out the lights, Jay has to pull the paperback from his hands, and then he must take the book out to the living room so Nathan won't get up to read on the sly after we leave him.

While I smooth the covers and toss extra pillows from the bed, Nathan talks to me. He always wants to talk when we are about to say good night. He tells me that he's already memorized five prayers for his bar mitzvah. Even the morning prayer.

“I bet Dad doesn't even know that prayer,” Nathan says.

Jay had a fairly secular Jewish childhood and probably knows very little more than I do about Jewish tradition. It was Hannah, with her religious little heart, who wanted to join a temple, and then I thought it wouldn't hurt Nathan, Mr. Fact and Reason, to nurture that side of himself. There's so much I love about Jewish tradition, starting with Jay and his family, their exuberant Passover dinners, and it's never crossed my mind to raise the kids Catholic, since my own religious upbringing has an aura of punishment to it, my mother pinching me in the pew for fidgeting, the audible hiss of someone's voice in the confessional, an insinuating, frightening sound.

“You know what the morning prayer is for?” Nathan says as I lean toward him to kiss him good night.

I straighten up. “No. What's it for?”

“They believed that when you went to sleep, your soul went away at night. So when you woke up in the morning, the first thing you had to do was thank God for your soul coming back.”

I smile at his “
they
believed.” The tiny mustard seed of faith is hardly sprouting in my son, but in me it finds tilled ground.
“That's beautiful,” I say. I lean down again, hoping to finish the conversation with a kiss and a hug.

“You stink,” he says when I release him. “You've been smoking.”

I can't deny it. Caught again. He's old enough to have been drilled at school in the horrors of smoking. I don't smoke in the house. I go out in the backyard to have a cigarette, just as I go out on the steps with Roberta at meetings, so I won't poison the kids, so I can hide it from them. Still my son can smell it on me.

After the meeting ends, Walter begs a ride from me again and starts in on my other passengers as soon as I pull away from the curb. Walter has elected himself to be the man who keeps us honest, just as he's assumed the job of dictating my route when I deliver passengers, always working it out so that I bring him home last. I can feel the three people in the backseat holding themselves stiffly as if that will defend them from the ricocheting torment of his voice.

“You're all such gluttons for punishment,” Walter says. “Can't get enough of it. Because you're hoping for the one punishment that will be enough, finally, to let you off the hook. Me too. I love it when my son throws the past at me. I deserve it.”

After I drop off my next-to-last passenger, I'm scared that Walter's
you
will condense to a vindictive singular. I'm waiting to hear him accuse me of all kinds of things for the rest of the ride, but he doesn't. Instead he asks if we can't go by my house on the way to his place. He's just curious, he says. It's on the way, isn't it?

Maybe I have to offer him this in exchange for his silence. I turn up my own street, feel the car's engine strain on the hill, then slow down before my house.

I point it out to him. An Edwardian in a row of Edwardians that face the street, packed tightly together with tiny, carefully plotted flower beds on their shallow front lawns, their steep second-story roofs vaulting each of the upstairs bedrooms.

He puts a hand on my arm. “Stop,” he says.

I stop. We look at the house, the pearly moonlike glow of light through the window shades that have been pulled down at all the windows.

“I should have known,” Walter says. “Of course you live on a postcard street.”

“Why do you have to make that sound like a crime?”

“Well, it's not a crime, is it?” he says.

We watch as a shadow drifts across the upstairs window. I'm proud of recognizing Nathan even in such vague outline. “That's my son,” I say.

“How old is he?” Walter says.

“Twelve.”

“My boy's only a little older than that. Fourteen. You wait. He'll turn on you then. They all do.”

To get to Walter's house in the Duboce Triangle, I will have to drive through the narrow streets of Victorians in Noe Valley, over one hill and then another, to arrive at streets of dark store-fronts locked behind iron grills and shabby-windowed apartment buildings. The city is so pretty, its softly folded hills offering such astonishing vistas, cupping miniature worlds in each valley, that it always comes as a shock to emerge into a pocket of poverty like Walter's neighborhood. It's mean of him to make me drop him off last; I have to lock all the doors as I drive back alone on streets where drunks collect like moths in the glow of corner liquor stores.