The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (11 page)

And then I cried some more.

In the movies, after someone falls apart like that, they wake up the next morning feeling better. As if a tsunami ripped through and although there’s all this destruction that’s been left behind, there’s also a feeling of peace and calm and the motivation to start over again and build something better. Not in my case. In my case I woke up pissed off that I was still alive and promptly pulled the covers over my head and stayed in bed. It turned out that, like Mom, I was really good at staring at the wall for hours on end. Maybe it was hereditary.

I didn’t even want to make lists, which, had I had the energy, would have been centered around things like Possible New Friends Now That I Only Had One and That One Was Totally Obsessed with Her Girlfriend. (I was thinking of zeroing in on foreign-exchange students from Middle Eastern countries who didn’t know who Mom was because they didn’t get
Plus Zero
there. Finally, around 4 o’clock, I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower, where, as I scrubbed away any physical evidence of my depression (lying in bed for almost twenty-four hours resulted in very oily skin), I also practiced various upbeat renditions of “Hey, Mom! Welcome home! Why are my eyes all swollen? Allergies, I think.” The last thing I wanted was for her to come home from rehab, get all stressed out about the fact that I was all stressed out, and end up drinking again.

Not that I needed to worry about that. She was too busy going through the Google Alerts about her that had accumulated while she had been gone the last twenty-eight days and reading me the comments that people had posted on the photos of her leaving rehab that had surfaced on some of the gossip sites that afternoon to notice. (“Listen to this one, Bug!” she yelled out from the bathtub. “Janie Jackson looks about ten years younger now that she’s sober. I’d totally do her.’ Isn’t that so nice?”)

There’s no guidebook that tells you how to act after your mom comes home from rehab. I wanted so badly to trust her; to believe that things were going to be different; but certain habits were hard to break. Like how, after we had spent some time going over some listings of condos to check out that weekend, I got ready for bed and walked over to her bedroom to say good night, carefully avoiding the creaky parts of the hardwood floors so that she wouldn’t have a chance to stop doing whatever it was that she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

I got there to find her door almost closed, but open just enough for me to be able to spy on her. What I saw totally freaked me out: my mother was reading quietly while drinking from a mug.

She looked up. “It’s okay, Bug, you can come in,” she said, all calm.

I pushed the door open. “How’d you know I was there?”

She smiled. “You’re a loud breather.”

“I was just checking . . . to see if you needed anything,” I said.
To see if you were drunk. Or zonked out on pills
.

“Nope, just reading,” she said, holding up a book called
Perfectly Imperfect
. Apparently, rehab hadn’t cured her addiction to self-help books.

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.”