Mommies Who Drink Read online

  Katherine throws me a “help me out here” look.

  “Right,” I say as Lana lifts her face to me. “What Katherine is saying is that sometimes it takes a seer and sometimes you see things even when you’re not a seer because it’s easy to see them. Not that you’re right about what you see. Seeing is a matter of who’s doing the seeing . . .”

  Lana’s brow crinkles and I know I’m not making sense, but I can’t stop because I’m hoping to land on something helpful.

  “See? What Katherine is saying is that we all see things at certain times, which doesn’t necessarily make us right. Though Michelle sees, so I’d pay attention to that first. Unless you don’t agree. In which case, ignore it and stick to what you yourself see.”

  Jesus, I haven’t a clue what I just said and I can tell by the look on Lana’s face that I haven’t accidentally landed on something that sounds good. So shoot me, I want to say. I’ve just been told I’m having a baby girl and haven’t had five minutes to process it. No wonder I’m addled.

  Mack returns with my glass of wine. We all look at Lana, who is red-faced, tears caught in her bottom lashes. Mack shifts his weight from side to side for a second, then leaves, probably deciding that whatever he was going to offer (advice, another drink, a quip) is best held back.

  Katherine catches my eye, her gaze speaking forgiveness for my inability to say the right thing. Then she turns back to Lana.

  “Tony isn’t making you happy,” she says, her voice like a public service announcement for living wills.

  “I just don’t understand it,” says Lana. “How can he stop caring just like that? Remember when Daisy was born?”

  She turns to Michelle, her voice a plea. “Remember? We were so happy.”

  “I remember,” says Michelle.

  These words, or ones like them, are said by Lana every other Friday as we watch her struggle through the last gasp of her relationship, helpless to ease her pain. All we can do, all we ever do, is acknowledge it. As we do now, Michelle’s hand on hers, my eyes wet, Katherine’s smile weak.

  And then, because there is not going to be a solution this Friday, the moment passes.

  Lana sniffs and smiles. “So Brett’s going to have a girl?”

  Our movement and breathing immediately register relief that Lana has swung the conversation away from Tony. So quickly the air gets lighter.

  “That’s what I see,” says Michelle. “Her girl has come to her.”

  I wiggle on the barstool, excited at the thought of ponytails and diaries with locks on them.

  “You’re the only person who can say stuff like that and it doesn’t sound freaky,” says Lana to Michelle, her voice bearing only a slight trace of the moment that has just passed.

  “Hey, being able to see things hasn’t seemed to change my life substantially,” says Michelle. “It’s not like I see practical stuff like financial trends or where lost keys are.”

  “I wonder why that is,” I say, fully convinced that Michelle does see things.

  “Maybe I’m not supposed to profit from it.”

  “Can others profit?”

  “No. Wait. I do profit. Well, I benefit. I see parking spaces.”

  “Like how?”

  “I feel a space is around a particular corner or down a particular street.”

  Lana jumps in. “You could hire yourself out. You know, like mediums who solve crimes. Only, you find parking spaces.”

  “Yeah,” says Katherine, “but then she has to ride around in the car with a stranger who hired her.”

  “What if you could, like, find parking spots for people over the phone?” I say.

  “Can you see things over the phone?” asks Katherine.

  Michelle shrugs.

  “Let’s test it,” says Lana, sliding off her barstool, grabbing her phone off the bar.

  “How can we test it?” I ask.

  Lana stops and thinks. “I’ll stand at the end of the street and hold something. Then I’ll call Michelle and see if she can tell me what it is over the phone.”

  “No,” I say. “That’s mind reading, not seeing.”

  We turn to Michelle.

  “Can you read minds?” Lana asks her.

  “I barely know my own mind,” she says.

  Air goes out of the idea.

  Lana sits back on her stool. “Damn. That’s what we really need. A mind reader.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” says Michelle, smiling.

  I’m no mind reader myself, but Lana’s far-off look says she’s thinking about Tony. Katherine is staring intently at a dapper black guy halfway down the bar, probably thinking things that she could never tell Slim. Michelle looks at me as if she’s thinking about other things she sees but won’t tell.

  Me, I’m thinking about my baby girl no bigger than a comma.

  Red Hurt

  I lie on the couch, my thighs pressed together, hoping to keep blood and tissue from oozing out of me. It’s a ridiculous pose because I’ve already miscarried and what I really need to do, according to Dr. Sammy, is let my body heal itself—let it expel the baby that is not a baby. Also, he says, I should have a D&C to remove any leftover matter that lingers inside me. Matter that might get infected, slowing down my ability to get pregnant again.

  Matter.

  Seven weeks’ worth of matter is oozing out of me, I think. It’s the night before my D&C and I’m watching a Lifetime Movie of the Week.

  It’s been only a month since I found out I was pregnant. It’s only been a month of anticipation and dreaming and lists of baby names. It’s been only a month.

  The pregnancy isn’t viable,” Dr. Sammy said only this morning—after pulling his gloved hand, dripping with matter, out of me.

  I cried, of course. Pat held me. Dr. Sammy held me. Pat cried. Dr. Sammy held Pat.

  Then I stopped crying. Pat and I both stopped crying.

  Well, I thought, that’s that.

  We really should have Dr. Sammy over for dinner, I thought for the umpteenth time as Pat drove me home. I watched neighborhoods whiz by, clutching the plastic container of pills we had gotten at the hospital pharmacy.

  This is really very ordinary, I thought. Lots of women have miscarriages. I’m lucky, I thought. I miscarried in the seventh week. It could have been the fifteenth week, or the twentieth. It’s not like I knew this baby, I thought. It’s not like I lost a living person who I already knew. It’s not like I lost Spence. I just lost a possibility, I thought. I just lost the possibility of a person. I just lost a lot of matter.

  On the TV, Meredith Baxter-Birney binges on three chocolate cakes in bulimic fury. She sits in a car and stuffs cake into her mouth with her hands, smearing it all over her face, making growling noises. She looks up, her face chocolate, to see a man looking at her through the window. She wipes her mouth with her hand, then smooths her hair, streaks of icing spreading through her sprayed do. She smiles at the man as if to say, “What you just saw was an aberration. I’m actually completely self-possessed and a member of Mensa.”

  I feel another ooze and I shift—afraid to sit up and feel a rush of “what was” soak my Kotex. The Darvocet I’ve just taken is one of my favorite painkillers. It obliterates the pain of the contractions that came in and out the night before, like a malevolent tide. It also encourages me to feel foggy and soggy and sorry for myself. Somewhat like Meredith’s character, who turns to the passenger seat of her car and vomits.

  I am stoned, I think. I’m stoned on Darvocet. Who would have thought you could get stoned on Darvocet?

  A German phrase for menstrual period is Rot Weh. The “red hurt.” This is it, I think. This is red hurt. There is something luxurious about my growing misery. It is so complete, so monumental, that I can only live inside it.

  Spence is asleep behind a closed door. I hear Pat opening and closing cabinet doors in the kitchen. He is contained, efficient, loving—like a good nurse. And I barely see him. The phone rings and I hear his voice, low.

&n
bsp; Meredith is at a party and watches as her husband inclines his head toward a beautiful young woman. Her husband looks back at her across the room like, “I’d rather be with you, but all this purging is beginning to wear on me.” Meredith sighs, goes into the kitchen, pours a huge glass of water from the tap, and turns to survey the hors d’oeuvres on the counter. Her eyes move over the squares of cheddar—no, the celery boats—hell no, the lemon squares—hmm, maybe. Then her gaze stops at a huge wheel of Brie. She smiles a stoned smile as the screen fades to black.

  “It’s the anesthesiologist,” says Pat, handing me the phone. He floats in front of me as I reach for the receiver.

  “Yes,” I say into the phone.

  I hear, “Hello, Brett.”

  A clipped voice tells me that the D&C I will be having tomorrow is a quick and simple procedure. But since I’m going under, the voice needs to go over some things.

  Foggy, I answer the voice’s questions while watching a commercial. A dog spins plates.

  It must be the Puppy Chow.

  It must be the Darvocet, I think.

  “Do you smoke?” the voice asks.

  “No . . . well, yes. Since I miscarried . . . I wasn’t smoking while I was pregnant. But yesterday and today.”

  The voice pauses, then I hear “Hmmm.”

  I clutch. All fog gone.

  “What? I was only smoking for two days!”

  The voice says, “That’s fine. Just don’t smoke any more before the procedure.” Pause.“Hmmmm.”

  “I mean, if you think I shouldn’t go under,” I say. “I don’t need this operation. I’m just electing to . . .”

  Pat appears in front of me.

  “No. It’s fine,” says the voice. “Just don’t smoke and I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I click off the phone and hand it to Pat.

  Fog settles in again as Meredith is rushed through a hospital ward on a gurney. A team of people in hospital greens runs alongside her, shouting things at each other as she rolls her head back and forth saying, “No, no, no.”

  I clutch again.

  “Pat. The anesthesiologist doesn’t think I should do this operation!”

  “What?” I hear from the kitchen.

  “The guy on the phone,” I yell. “He thinks I could die on the operating table!”

  Pulse jumps in my neck and I put my hand against it to feel the pound, pound, pound. Pat returns and sits at the end of the couch. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose.

  “You’re not going to die,” he says. I press my feet against his back. “I can’t imagine he said that, Brett.”

  “He asked if I smoked and I told him yes. And he took this long pause and sounded like he wasn’t sure I should do this.”

  “What did he actually say?”

  “He said, ‘Hmmmm.’ Like that. He took a big long pause and said, ‘Hmmm.’ Like, ‘Hmmmm, do I want to risk a malpractice suit on a dead smoker?’”

  “What?” Pat says, turning to look at me. “Maybe he just said ‘Hmmm’ as he was writing down your information.”

  “It was not that kind of ‘hmmm,’ Pat. It was like, ‘Hmmm . . . how many dead smokers does that make this week?’”

  “Brett, look. If he thought there was even the slightest possibility that you would die having something like this . . . an elective surgery, he certainly wouldn’t let you do it. And he sure as hell wouldn’t want you to die on his watch.”

  “People die on someone’s watch.”

  Pat looks across the room and blows out air.I push up with my arms and reposition myself on the pillows. Swoosh—out comes more matter.

  Meredith lies in a hospital bed, metal bars on both sides, oxygen tube in her nose, monitors beeping. Her husband holds her skeletal hand, tears glisten in the corners of his eyes. Meredith looks at him, parts her papery lips into a weak smile, and says, “You’re my man.”

  Pat puts his hand on my knee.

  “What if I don’t wake up? Ever?” I say.

  “You’ll wake up. I know you’ll wake up,” he says. “Remember when you thought you had that flesh-eating disease?”

  “I’m not making this up, Pat.”

  “I’m just saying that you have a tendency—well, a driving need—to extend these things out to the worst-case scenario.”

  “See! You think there is a scenario in which I might die tomorrow.”

  Pat takes his hand from my knee and strides over to the phone.

  “That’s it!” he says, punching numbers into the receiver.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling Dr. Sammy.”

  “What?” I yell. “Don’t call him.”

  Pat hangs up and turns toward me.

  “Look, Brett. We can end this right now. We’ll just ask Dr. Sammy if a couple of days of smoking is going to kill you on the operating table tomorrow.” His voice is hard with fading patience.

  I swing my legs off the couch and sit on the edge. I know now that this is what I’ve been wanting since this morning when Dr. Sammy said my pregnancy wasn’t “viable.” I’ve been wanting true drama. Big stakes. I’ve been wanting some yelling, some screaming. And it would probably be supremely satisfying if Pat stormed out into the balmy Los Angeles night only to return drunk and contrite with a huge chocolate cake that I can smear all over my face. Maybe Meredith Baxter-Birney can play me in the movie: Big Red Hurt: The Brett Paesel Story.

  I double over and rest my chest on my knees. My head flops down and I make a high singing sound. I follow the sound to the end, pull in some air, and make it again.

  Long as a road—sure and loud. Then, bang, like a door opening, I start to shake and sob. Blood gushes past my Kotex and spreads out on the towel beneath me. I am all body and sound. I am flesh and tissue and bone.

  I hear on the TV, as if through a long tunnel, a perky woman’s voice praising the virtues of a miracle spot remover.

  And even as I let my body heave up my loss, I realize that I have surely stained the couch.

  Becoming the Woman of My Dreams

  I sit in an upscale Italian restaurant in Laguna Beach with my well-dressed parents and take in the scene, satisfied. No one would guess that I am a ragingly insecure actress so desperate for my parents’ approval that I would eat cut glass for a word of praise.

  Within seconds Spence slaps his hand into my pasta bowl and lets out a yell that could lead grown men into battle. Marinara splatters over the three adults and the white tablecloth, making it look like a crime scene. Spence grabs his crotch with his sauce-soaked hand and screams, “My penis is pointing, my penis is pointing.”

  I panic and stand holding Spence while my parents sit motionless. An audience of suntanned faces turns toward us.

  “My son,” I say to the group. “He’s just . . . he’ll be okay. He just . . . got an erection and I guess it frightened him.”

  My head pounds with pulsing shame—about what, I’m not sure. Certainly not about Spence; I’ve got no problem with pointing penises. It’s something about me—some primordial shame, born simply out of being watched. Born simply out of being me.

  My mother comes to life like someone turned on her switch. “Honey, you don’t have to explain. You can sit down.”

  The faces continue to wait for the next thing.

  “If you’re three years old,” I continue, “well, you can imagine, an erection could be a scary thing. It probably feels like it’s going to just take off.”

  The faces remain impassive like whittled wood.

  Spence cries as I whisper to him, “Think about something else. It’ll go away soon. Think about something boring like cleaning your room or eating green beans.” I pause, then play to the crowd, “Or something even more boring like listening to Dr. Phil over and over again.”

  I wait for a collective chuckle, but it doesn’t come. My parents dip their napkins in their water glasses and start to dab their clothing. Slowly, the faces return to their meals.

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nbsp; I want to get their attention again. I want to say, “This woman you see standing here, dripping red sauce, holding her son with a hard-on, incapable of handling this moment with any moxie—this woman—is not who I planned on being. I planned on being Dana.”

  In my parents’ house, on the floor in the extra bedroom, is a battered cardboard box labeled “Kristin’s Stuff.”

  That’s me. I was Kristin. Still am, to my parents, who refused to call me by the many names I used through grade school: Kirsty, Robyn, Kate, and the ill-advised Natasha. These were precursors to the name I landed on: Brett, with a small “b”—an affectation I picked up in eighth grade and never shook.

  I pull out the box every once in a while and sift through the contents. Here are grade school tests belonging to Robyn and Kate. Letters addressed to Natasha, later shortened to Nat. Flowers pressed by Kirsty. And a worn piece of notebook paper on top of which is written “The Dana Project.” It is a contract I made with myself in seventh grade, itemizing the changes I needed to make in order to transform myself into Dana:

  I knew a girl named Dana when I was four. She was a mature eight-year-old who ruled the playground with the sheer force of her personality. Tough and pretty, she was intimidating as hell. I was particularly impressed when one day she pulled out the waistband of her underpants and demanded that all the boys put rocks in them. As the boys lined up to throw their rocks into the expanding cotton, I was stunned not only by her confidence but by her ingenuity. Why hadn’t I ever thought of rocks in my underpants?

  It must have been the image of Dana—boldly standing on the playground, the bumpy terrain of her false belly silhouetted against the fading light—that inspired the Dana Project. Here are the steps my junior high self thought I would have to take in order to transform myself into the woman of my dreams:

  1.Stop caring what other people think.

  2.Change name to Dana.

  3.Carry a brush at all times and brush hair five times a day.

  4. Swear sometimes. Not in front of parents. Try using the words fart, fuck, you suck, pussy, pissed off, and dildo.