With or Without You: A Memoir (25 page)

These death dreams were as real to me as anything I had experienced before. They circled my head like a flock of crows. I didn’t especially enjoy them, nor did I feel that I had any power to make them fly away. The best I could do was distract myself. Nature is nothing if not proportional, and the more suicidal I became, the more I got laid. My life had turned into a soft-core porn full of soulless, at times hatefully carnal, fucking. After two months of this, I ended up pulling my groin, something I didn’t even know could happen to people outside of construction or professional sports. For five days in a row, I limped to all the various church basements, where
they
kept insisting that alcohol was my problem. I didn’t want them to be right, but there were certain facts I couldn’t ignore. My hangovers were getting violent. The shakes were no longer a once-in-a-while occurrence but something I planned for every morning. I was physically too small to drink the way I wanted to, and anything less than that was miserably frustrating. I couldn’t sustain this habit for long, it had to stop, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how.

Then one day I found the answer to all my problems. A calm washed over me. I was excited and relieved. Finally, it was going to be okay. I’d just get pregnant.
A baby will keep me sober for nine months at least
, I thought.

It wasn’t an original idea. I could hear her voice as though she were standing right next to me: “I quit using everything the moment I found out I was pregnant with you. I just walked away from it all. That’s how much I loved you, Nik, even before you were born.”

IT IS THE DECLARATION
of every thinking woman at some point in her life, a manifesto that crosses all boundaries of class or color or whatever arbitrary thing we try to pretend separates us. It starts out as a girlish whisper, grows louder with each passing year, until that faint promise we traced in the sand becomes a declarative, then an imperative:

I will not become my mother.

It’s an ambition born of fear. It’s the fear that attends our every ambition. It seems at once inevitable and yet the only thing that we can truly control. Even women who have good mothers, those pillars in the temple of dignity, intelligence, and grace, even
their
daughters find themselves screaming this one sentence out loud, at their girlfriends or sisters:

I will not become my mother.

I will not get fat like her. I will not starve myself. I will not call gin and a handful of peanuts “dinner.” I will not bury my libido with the tulip bulbs in the front yard. I will not become a humorless, abstemious prude. I will become neither a cheap nor an expensive whore. I will never cheat on my husband. I will never leave my kids alone with a man I hardly know. I will never get married. I will not deny myself an orgasm. I will never set foot in a church. I will celebrate a devout faith in capital
-G
God. I will never knit. I will learn to hem, darn, patch, and sew my own clothes. I will cook real food, have a healthy dinner on my kitchen table no matter what. I will never hit my children. I will never have children. I will make my own money. I will leave the first time he hits me. My ass will never resemble a large sack of potatoes. My house will be clean and my children will be proud to invite their friends over. I will not obsess over real estate, antiques, collectible dolls, reality television, tarot cards, crossword
puzzles, or what the neighbors think. I will never buy things I can’t afford. I will allow myself to wear nice clothes. I will dare to enjoy myself. I will not go to prison. I will not become a racist, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, a xenophobe. I will read widely and with an open mind. I will travel the world until no place is unfamiliar. I will never own cats. I will try and try and try even if it kills me. I will never give up. I will not become the woman she was.

I CRAWL BACK TO
the meetinghouse I’ve been visiting for months, with the same thought that everyone else in these rooms has had a million times before.

“This time it will be different.”

I cross my arms against my chest as tight as a straitjacket and rock back and forth in the brown metal seat. A woman appears out of nowhere and rubs my back. I’m too numb to thank her. I wasn’t even aware that I was shaking. But she seems to understand. And I just keep coming, as they tell me to, though I have no idea why.

I stay sober for a week, then two, then three. The snow retreats, leaving ugly gray islands of ice melting here and there along the roads. The sun lingers in the sky a little bit longer every day. One morning I wake up feeling deliriously happy. I prance around these Twelve-Step meetings telling exaggerated tales of my glory days when I drank in darkened bars and flicked my cigarette butts at joggers. (I only did that once.)

“Look at me now!” I say.

A man named Bert shoots me a knowing smile. He’s in his seventies, I’m guessing, an inveterate North Shore clam digger who brags that he never misses a tide. I admire his tan, and the way he can wear a pair of madras shorts without looking supercilious or elderly. At first I think Bert is what they call an old-timer, someone with decades of sobriety hard-forged in the early days of the recovery movement, before the infiltration of softer, gentler self-help rhetoric, back when drunks fresh out of detox were told, “Sit down, shut up, and don’t fuckin’ drink no matter what.” But Bert has been sober for only a
couple of years. Not too long ago, he tells me, he was blowing coke off his coffee table with the shades shut, like he was Keith Richards. My God, I think, in another life Bert and I would have fallen in love and probably killed each other.

“How you doing, honey?” he asks me that morning.

“I feel like a million bucks!”

“Don’t worry.” He laughs. “This, too, shall pass.”

“But I feel great.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Bert shakes his head. “You’re on the pink cloud.”

It’s a temporary euphoria that follows the initial detox. He emphasizes the temporary part.

“Well,” I stammer, “what happens after that?”

“You just keep coming, honey.”

On day twenty-nine of my sobriety, I wake up feeling wonderful again. The familiar objects in my home startle me with their radiance. Everything has a sharp edge, as though lit from within. A book laid on the table, a vase of dried roses, a vacant chair—it’s all a three-dimensional echo of my own potential.

I decide to celebrate by going on a long walk. The color green is making its first shy appearance in the New England landscape. The trees are budding with silky young leaves. Crocuses inch up through the mud. I notice everything as though for the first time. Walking past a cove near my apartment, I see a swan gliding silently across the water. A squirrel dashes into the middle of an empty street, pauses a moment, then scampers to the other side and up a tree. Life is all around me! It’s glorious. So glorious I start to cry.

The tears feel good at first—cathartic, the kind of cloudburst that leaves everything clean and new when it’s over. I treat this little outpouring of tears like a leg cramp. Just got to walk it off. But I don’t stop crying. I can’t. Ahead of me are two mothers jogging behind aerodynamic baby strollers. When they hear me gasping, they stop and stare. I blow right past them, tears pouring down my face.

It goes on like this for the next two months. I can see very clearly why so many people who make it to this point give up and start
drinking again. Like the rainy season in tropical climates, I am hit by daily torrents of grief, at around ten in the morning and then again at four. I cry and cry, and when I’m done I sleep. Sixteen hours a day, on average. I wear the same pair of sweatpants for weeks. It’s miserable. I wouldn’t wish this pain on my worst enemy.

That’s not true. I would.

I wake up one morning and learn that it’s Mother’s Day. There’s a liquor store forty steps up the street from my apartment. I’m not safe alone, so I call my stepmother and ask if she’ll come and get me. The two of us sit on her couch all day, with a bag of potato chips between us. We watch AMC, and what should come on but
Pocketful of Miracles
, starring Bette Davis and Ann-Margret. It’s a stupid movie about a stupid girl who is tricked by her selfless mother, a homeless fruit hawker named Apple Annie, into believing that she’s not the bastard daughter of a vagabond but a European princess. I stuff my face with potato chips and draft a feminist dissertation in my head. This sentimental comedy of errors is a sick charade. Behind Apple Annie’s good intentions is the desire to keep a young girl from crossing over into womanhood by denying her the truth of her past, and therefore of her present.

“Fuck this movie!” I say to Carla. “Pocketful of lies!”

In the climactic scene, Ann-Margret wears a dress that makes her look like a pink frosted cupcake. She is so sweet and gullible and pretty that I want to kick her in the head until she bleeds from the ears.

Bette Davis is looking at her with the incandescent glow of motherly pride. “How can I ever tell her I was never married to her father!” she cries.

A memory rises to the surface—one of those days a million years ago when my mother made me skip school so that I could watch this same movie with her in her big bed. At this very scene, my mother stubbed out her cigarette and said, laughing, “Oh, Apple Annie. You slut!”

I begin to sob. I look over at Carla, who has soaked through a box of tissues. This is pretty typical of her. I’ve never met anyone as
deeply affected by motion pictures as my stepmother. Whether it’s a comedy or a drama or even a ninety-second commercial for fabric softener, Carla lets it all come out. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about her.

I get a roll of toilet paper out of the bathroom and the two of us pass it back and forth until the credits roll. My father comes home and gawks at us.

“Are you two daft?”

“It’s a … it’s a really good movie,” I whimper.

I crawl up to my little sister’s room and take a nap on her bed. She’s away at college, at this moment in time living a life of dignity and maturity while I shuffle around our father’s house in pajamas like a teenager with mono. The walls of her bedroom are yellow and orange. Everything else—the curtains, the bedspread, the pretty-girl frills hung here and there—is bright pink. I decide to camp out here for the night, hoping some heliotropic transformation will happen to me in my sleep.

“You okay?” Carla asks me one afternoon. Mother’s Day was two weeks ago, and I haven’t left her house.

“I tried to wake up but I couldn’t,” I say with my eyes closed. I had actually unloaded the dishwasher and had ambitions to do some laundry and eventually return to my own apartment. But my legs felt so heavy, my eyes couldn’t stay open, and when I got to my sister’s bed I collapsed.

“I’m sorry. I just can’t wake myself up.”

“Don’t worry,” Carla says gently. “You must need the rest.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say again.

“You got nothing to apologize for. This is your house, too. It always has been. You can stay here as long as you want.”

I mumble a thank-you, then roll over and drift away. It’s a little like when I was drinking, and the opposite of it, too. Day and night become the same. My dreams are full of wild animals. They feel very close to the visions of ancient humans, the ones who first connected stars into bodies in the sky. I’m on the brink of something. I can feel it.

——

I
’VE BEEN SLEEPING IN
my little sister’s bedroom for about a month when my father finally notices me. “What are you doing?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you go out and rake the backyard. The lawn needs to aerate before I fertilize it. I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

While raking the lawn it occurs to me that I have not worked, as in done something to earn money, in months. Thanks to the invention of social-networking websites, I not only know what all my old friends do for a living; I know where they’re going for their lunch break on any given afternoon. The people I used to know are now in the middle of their careers. They get up in the morning and put on pants they call slacks. They commute and drink coffee, all without crying or envisioning a train hurtling toward them. They can drink a glass of Cabernet after work and not even finish it. They own houses with spouses, or soon-to-be-spouses. A lot of the people I once knew are having babies. I’m thirty years old, wearing my little sister’s sweatpants and a stained T-shirt, raking leaves in my childhood backyard because my dad offered me twenty bucks.

My God, do I want to drink.

That night I complain about this at a meeting. “I’m thirty years old, for Christ’s sake. I live in a crappy studio apartment with plastic milk crates stacked up for a bookshelf. I don’t own a car. I don’t own anything.”

A man raises his hand and speaks after me. He says that he is fifty years old and lives in a shelter. After his last relapse, his wife and kids wouldn’t have anything to do with him. “I’m looking forward to the day I have a crappy studio apartment with plastic milk crates to hold my books,” he said.

After the meeting, I go up to this man to apologize. I offer him my hand, and he pulls me into an enormous bear hug. “Just don’t drink, honey,” he says. “Just for today.”

So I don’t. I go back to my dad’s house, still afraid to be alone in the rent-free apartment I’ve just complained about. The next morning,
I sublimate my anxieties in a cleaning spree. My stepmother’s kitchen sparkles in the sunlight. I clean the downstairs bathroom and the living room and the hallway.

“What are you doing?” my father asks me again.

I’m holding a sponge in my hand, preparing to wash the walls.

“I don’t know.”

“Want to go for a run with me?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Agreeing to this is proof that I have officially lost my mind. My father is as muscular as he is competitive. In his basement you can find every fitness device ever advertised on a late-night infomercial, which he scavenged from the town dump or, as he refers to it, “the mall.” On more than one occasion he has used the word
blimp
as a verb when talking about his daughters. As in, “Don’t blimp out like all the other girls in college,” or, “Your sister really blimped out this year, didn’t she?” When it comes to disciplining one’s body, he has very little patience for the process. “So what if it’s hard? It’s supposed to be hard. Stop whining that it hurts. You’re lucky it doesn’t hurt more.”