Mommies Who Drink Read online

  She balances a coaster on top of her drink and hops off her stool, heading out the door like she’s the coolest bad girl in high school.

  I slide off my stool and follow.

  Standing on the street smoking with Lana feels like an illegal thrill. Can mothers of newborns get away with this? Leaving a drink on the bar to grab a smoke outside? Am I being watched? Are my poufy belly and bilious breasts unmistakable evidence that I should be at home in my bed with my infant, like Rananda says?

  Lana and I both take a drag and blow out.

  “Feels funny, doesn’t it?” Lana asks.

  “What?”

  “Being without the baby. Feels great and horrible at the same time.”

  “I’d say yes, but I really don’t want to be that much of a cliché.”

  “Hey, can’t avoid the clichés,” she says, flicking ash into the street.

  “All I know is, this feels great,” I say, holding up my cigarette.

  “Yeah, like a huge fuck-you to the whole mama label.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Well. Tell Pat we talked.”

  “Sure.”

  We take another drag and look around. All I want right now is to talk about something/anything that has nothing to do with babies. But I can’t think of what that would be.

  “Book any good?” asks Lana.

  “What book?”

  “The Tyler book.”

  “Oh. I haven’t really gotten into it yet.”

  “Mmm. I’m reading this book called Sex with Kings. It’s about courtesans. Now, there’s a job.”

  “Yeah, but you have to fuck the king.”

  “Probably better than fucking your syphilitic pockmarked husband.”

  “Whose husband?”

  “Yours. If you’re one of these courtesans I’m reading about.”

  Now, this already feels better, I think.

  “The kings couldn’t have been much better than the husbands,” I say.

  “Sure they’re better,” says Lana. “They’re goddamned kings.”

  I stub out my half-smoked cigarette. It’s enough.

  Lana takes another drag and does the same. “Another drink?”

  I nod.

  And we turn to walk back through the swinging doors of the bar.

  Ordinary Madness

  It’s on all the talk shows and the news. Women who’ve recently given birth experience a special kind of insanity. Now, we know about the murderous kind. But your average garden-variety kind of insanity varies in degree according to your predilection for that sort of thing in the first place.

  I am one of those women who have a strong predilection for ordinary kinds of madness. So my postpartum funk is characterized by very understandable, even banal, fears and obsessions. Like the belief that the birthing process had turned me into the most boring woman alive, or the fear that my son will develop that disease that would make him look like a tiny old person, or my need to put everything that’s loose into a Tupperware container. But probably nothing characterizes my ordinary madness more than my certainty that all of these symptoms will disappear if I can only find the right haircut.

  It’s four o’clock in the morning when I clamp Spence onto my breast and tune in to an infomercial about a miracle stain remover. I find myself considering buying a case, along with the miracle mop, when I notice the nice casual shag cut on the model who’s making a bloodstain disappear. What a great cut. It does that thing I always look for. It just falls into place like it doesn’t mean it. Like it hasn’t even been planned. In that “I just got out of bed and my hair just did this” kind of way.

  As the baby tugs at my nipple, I start to dream. What if I had this cut? What if I had this cut and a cute cottony pair of pajamas with a drawstring waist? If I had this cut that looks like I didn’t mean it, and the cute pajamas, I could be surprised at the door anytime and still look put together. I’d look like one of those mothers in that magazine called Real Simple. I’d been getting this magazine, overlooking the dreadful title, hoping to get “real simple” myself. Its pages are full of images of people making their lives “real simple.” With tips on how to organize spare buttons and how to grow bamboo shoots next to your bed to encourage dreams of prosperity.

  I drift to sleep, the baby heavy and warm on my belly, knowing that the haircut—the shag flip—will make everything all right.

  So I go back to Cathy, who used to cut my hair three years ago.

  I go back to Cathy because I have no money. Cathy likes to do trades for haircuts. I will help organize her salon area and she will cut and dye my hair.

  If I were thinking clearly, I would remember why I stopped going to Cathy in the first place. But I’m in a walking coma and not up to deductive reasoning. So Cathy seems like a great idea.

  Here’s what I’ve forgotten about Cathy:

  #1. Cathy doesn’t know when to stop. She does the cut. She does the dye job, which is or isn’t good, relative to how stoned she is. But then she’s got to do something more. My makeup. Or maybe she needs to weave a piece of wire through my hair. Once, I left her place with two cones glued onto the sides of my head like Mickey Mouse ears. She wanted to show me a club look that was “sort of sci-fi.”

  #2. Cathy involves me in her crazy life. Cathy has twin sisters who joined a cult when they were sixteen. The cult was an old guy who lived out in the desert. The twins were the only members of this cult. The old guy was sleeping with the twins at the same time. Cathy hired a private detective and some cult deprogrammer to get them out. At one point she had me call the old man, pretending to be a bank lady threatening to put a lien on his account.

  #3. Cathy is a healer. So along with the do, I walked away with various elixirs—good for mood swings, that funny yellow cast to my skin, and toe fungus. Cathy has made me aware of maladies I never knew I had. Two years ago she convinced me that my fatigue came from an allergy to my own dandruff. The cure for this was a foul-smelling paste. I had to put the paste on my hair and tie a plastic bag around my head twice a week. After weeks of this I was still tired, I developed tiny scabs on my forehead, and Pat threatened to stab himself on our balcony if I didn’t stop.

  #4. Cathy is bald on one side of her head.

  #5. Cathy’s brother works in her salon. He is a filmmaker who makes sci-fi videos about wars that take place in another dimension. In exchange for a haircut, Cathy once asked if I could do some free acting work for him. This involved me standing in front of a green screen, wearing a breastplate and a Medusa-type wig. When he yelled, “Action,” I had to stare into the camera and say, “Fardoch will punish you for your travel from Sector 4. For this, your gender will be changed.” Then I had to laugh for a really long time—until he yelled, “Cut.”

  These are the things I’ve forgotten about Cathy.

  I lie on my back on Cathy’s kitchen counter with my head in her sink listening to Jethro Tull blast from the stereo. Through the cacophony of flute and guitar, I can hear my five-month-old son gurgle as he lies on the hair-covered floor.

  Cathy whooshes warm water over my forehead and into my hair. Her fingers massage my scalp, making my body feel loose like jelly. I stare up at the peeling ceiling, tiny points of light bouncing on my retinas.

  She says, “So I said to my sister, ‘You take those kids and just fucking leave him.’ I mean, right? When she married him, he was this groovy guy who rode a motorcycle and had a couple of teeth missing. Which I can see is fuck-all sexy.”

  “Yeah, sexy,” I say.

  Meanwhile, I’m thinking that if the shag falls just right at my shoulders, I’ll try fitting into the velvet V-necked thing again. I wore it the Christmas before I was pregnant, and I love those pictures. The velvet drapes in a way that makes me look thin but curvy.

  She says, “But he’s not that guy anymore. I mean, this is definitely the kind of soulless prick you should leave. Am I right?”

  “Right,” I say. “A prick.”

  I’m thinking that if t
his cut manages to give me a little height, my face will look considerably younger. That’s going to be great for this reading of a pilot I’m doing next week. The HBO people are going to be there, and they haven’t seen me for a while. If I get a new bra and throw a little clip into the shag, I can even wear a casual T-shirt and look messy but still serious.

  “Sit up,” Cathy says, pulling me to sitting. She reaches over, drags on her joint, and waves the smoke around. I guess so it won’t get to my son.

  She says, “So that’s it. If that loser doesn’t come after her, then he’s even more of a major fuck than I first thought.”

  “Sure, sure,” I say. “What I need is for the shag to look casual when it’s towel-dried and elegant when I blow it out.”

  Cathy presses her hand into my back and I hop off the counter, stepping over my son to get to the chair.

  I’m thinking that if my hair lies flat when it’s blown out, my mother will be really happy when she comes to visit next month. We can go out to lunch together and I can wear my blue linen shirt. I’ll pick up the check. And she will look over at me in my flat smooth hair and blue linen, and it will give her peace.

  Cathy starts snipping away with the scissors as I look into a long antique mirror propped against the wall. I see the neat ends of my just-cut hair grazing the black plastic cape that covers my shoulders. I smell the sweet remains of marijuana smoke. And I dream of how perfect life is going to be when I have the shag. Yes, I think. The shag will give me more energy, ease my loneliness, and give me back what I’ve lost.

  Spence babbles on the floor. Looking at him, I get a sense of time not being a straight line. I see him a boy. I see him a teenager. I see him without me. And I realize that it’s not the shag that will do all those things for me. It’s him.

  Mommy Groups and Me

  Spence is eight months old when I start to see how this is going to go. I’m going to be home with him, from the moment he wakes until Pat walks in the door in the evening, returning from whatever midlevel actor job he’s managed to score that day. I have given up the notion that Pat and I would trade off stay-at-home child-care duties—not because Pat’s unwilling to do so, but because he’s simply more likely to earn chunks of money faster than I would.

  Alone together, Spence and I live like bears. By the time Spence wakes, Pat is already gone. So I bring Spence into bed with me and we roll around till he tires of that. Spence has become an easy, cheerful baby since he stopped nonstop screaming around his fifth month. Now we pad through our days, eating and napping, eating and napping. Sometimes we see a friend. Which gives us a reason to change out of our pajamas.

  One friend is Milly. She says I should come to her mommy group. It would get Spence and me out of the house.

  Now, I’ve never been much of a joiner. As a whole, people in groups make me nervous. People in groups do things that they would never do on their own. On the upside, groups of people can feed the hungry, free political prisoners, and get medical marijuana legislation passed. On the downside, groups of people burn books, lynch people, and drive through the streets in limousines, grabbing their crotches and screaming, “Do you want a piece of this?”

  I almost always consider the downside, so a mommy group doesn’t immediately appeal. But when Milly says I should go, I go. I go because much as I adore Spence, I can’t bear another week of afternoons twisting ahead of me like a figure eight: pick up baby, feed baby, change baby, pick up baby, feed baby, change baby.

  So I go because I think that maybe there are more mothers like me, bewildered by their discontent. I go because I think that surely these new mothers ache for what I ache for: adult conversation, a safe place to let the baby roam, and booze. I go even though I’m pretty sure that my shyness with strangers will make me appear mute and simple. And I go because Milly says not to judge mommy groups before I’ve been to one. Milly is the least judgmental person I know—a quality both charming and maddening.

  Before she had her daughter, Emma, Milly was a pretty actress who liked books, vintage cars, and gossip. We met in acting school and our friendship was cemented at a party one night when, on a dare, she moved an egg from one chair to another with just her ass.

  Lately, Milly’s voice has acquired a hysterical edge and she admitted to me that on her daughter’s birthday she ate the whole birthday cake after removing it from the oven, and had to make another. The mommy group, she says, is the brightest spot in her week.

  This mommy group meets at Patti’s. The house is immaculate, the wooden floors glistening like they’ve been computer-enhanced. Patti is as immaculate as her floors, her shiny blond hair pulled into a perfect ponytail that I think might be fake. She wears a pressed white men’s shirt and a pair of shorts that shows her flawlessly tanned legs. A friend of mine recently told me about spray-on tans and I wonder if Patti has sprayed hers on. As I index everything about Patti and her home, I realize that I’m generally assuming that nothing here is real.

  Eight mothers sit around a long glass table that has a cushy gray childproofing strip around the edge of it. In the middle of the table rests a bowl of grapes. The women sip from glasses of what I hope is vodka. Milly sinks into a pillow on the floor and pushes Emma toward a gaggle of children who are pounding on things and ignoring each other nicely. I perch on the edge of the sofa and slide Spence down to the floor next to me so that he can suck on my knee.

  Patti stands in hostess mode. “Brett,” she says, “can I get you anything? Water, iced tea, or a Diet Snapple? We have strawberry-kiwi Snapple and iced tea Snapple. The real iced tea has sugar, the iced tea Snapple is diet.”

  It’s not vodka, I think.

  “I’ll have some water.”

  “What’s his name?” she asks, nodding at Spence.

  “Spence.”

  “Nice,” she says. “You know there’s two girl Spencers at my son’s day care.”

  I mentally grope for an appropriate response.

  “Wow,” I say, as if both shocked and impressed.

  Patti cocks her head and says, “Yeah,” like maybe I’d better consider changing Spencer’s name.

  We both look at each other and nod for a very long time.

  “Which one is your son?” I ask.

  She points to a bald baby who sits staring at a wall.

  “Sebastian,” she says. “He scratched his own eye yesterday.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  “You’d think so,” she says. “But he seems fine.”

  I look at Sebastian staring at the wall and wonder what he’s seeing.

  “Patti,” says a woman who’s crystal-meth skinny, “I went to that ‘Music and Mommy’ class at Kids Place last Tuesday. It was great. But I thought you’d be there with Sebastian.”

  “You know,” says Patti, “I thought the class was really great too. But the week before, Sebastian put a drumstick up his nose and really hurt himself.”

  I watch Sebastian lean his cheek against the wall.

  Milly pulls off a branch of grapes. “I like Kids Place,” she says, “but I think it’s weird that they don’t have some kind of padding on the steps. I mean, it’s all about kids, and those concrete steps are just an accident waiting to happen.”

  “You’re telling me,” says Patti. “The first day we were there, Sebastian fell and slammed his chin on the top step. If he had any teeth, I’m sure he would have lost them. As it was, the fall made his face swell up and he had to take an anti-inflammatory that he ended up being allergic to. It took a month to get his face to go down and to get rid of the rash and the scabs.”

  “The rash and the scabs?” asks Milly.

  “He got the rash from the anti-inflammatory. Then he scratched the rash and got these scabs all over his face.”

  It looks like Sebastian has fallen asleep leaning his face against the wall. I think of all those self-inflicted wounds. Sebastian must be sending out a crude kiddie cry for help. Without words he can only bang himself up badly enough to require remo
val. I am impressed by the simplicity of his plan.

  I want to join Sebastian against the wall. I’m not a general kid-lover. I like some kids and not others. But I’m drawn to Sebastian—poor guy. He’s living in a fake home. Right now he’s perfecting his ability to nod off in any situation, a skill my husband has honed, having grown up in not a fake home, but a terminally dull one. Pat can actually nap while playing cards, which his family does for hours on end while talking about which are the fastest routes for getting to towns no one else wants to go to.

  The mommy group winds on through the early afternoon like a figure eight: discuss latest accomplishment of babies, pick up and reposition babies, remark on how hard it is to get anything done with babies, discuss latest accomplishment of babies, pick up and reposition babies, remark on how hard it is to get anything done with babies.

  One woman says that she’s afraid her daughter’s teeth are coming in crooked. Another says that she’s pretty sure her daughter’s going to be left-handed and “Isn’t that a sign of creativity?” Another says that a real sign of creativity is when a kid smears his feces on things “like it’s paint.” I wonder if Milly realizes that she’s eaten all of the grapes and that no one else has had a chance at one.

  Spence’s rhythmic gumming of my knee makes me feel heavy and groggy.

  I hear a woman say, “Well, of course, you need to cut juice with water. It’s too much sugar otherwise.”

  I doze off somewhere in here, then come to with a jerk, quickly reaching up to wipe my mouth.

  A woman says, “Daphne throws a fit if you put anything green on her plate.”

  I lean over to Milly. “Can you watch Spence for a minute? I need to run to the bathroom. Just let him suck on your arm, he’ll be fine.”

  Patti’s bathroom sparkles like a television-commercial bathroom in which germs are cute and animated and toilets talk. I look in the mirror. I can’t imagine that all these women, by themselves, are this dull. I mean, Milly told me that one was a journalist and another owned a gallery. It must be something about putting them all together in a group. And what about Milly? She seems to blend right in. The Milly-I-know can pick up an egg with her ass, for God’s sake.