Mommies Who Drink Page 4

  Is there something about motherhood that turns one’s mind to goo? I look at myself. Am I them? And what about the other things? Where’s the food? Are grapes all we’re going to get? Maybe this is my answer. These women are existing on water and grapes. And in this case they don’t even get the grapes.

  I turn on the cold faucet. The water feels good against my skin. Nice cold water.

  How am I going to make it through the afternoon? I’ll have to come up with some way not to fall asleep. And with no food I’m losing energy fast.

  I lean over and splash water into my face. That, too, feels very good. I look up to see myself dripping with water, my vision fuzzy.

  Yes, I think, it’s something about groups. Something that dulls the active mind and subdues the eager heart.

  I reach for a towel, press it to my face, and breathe in the clean.

  Looking in the mirror, I see myself, washed and makeup-free. Without eyeliner I look like a fetus—round brown corneas, a shock in the pale landscape of my featureless face. I look strange to myself. An alien.

  A knock at the door startles me. My alien eyes grow bigger.

  “Brett,” says Milly from behind the door, “are you okay?”

  “Sure,” I say, glancing down at Patti’s white towel, noticing a dark brown swath of makeup smeared across it. Christ, I think, I’ve ruined the perfect towel that lives in the perfect bathroom of the pristine house that Patti built.

  “Because Patti has to get in there with Sebastian,” Milly says. “There’s a cortisone cream in the cabinet that she needs for his scalp.”

  My hands tighten around the towel.

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Brett,” says Milly, “did you notice that I ate all the grapes?”

  “Yes. But I’m sure it doesn’t matter,” I say, laying the towel next to the sink.

  “Well, Patti just ordered pizza. She’s throwing a plastic tarp on the floor and letting the kids all sit on it and chew on crusts.”

  “Great,” I say, picking up the towel again.

  My stomach gurgles in anticipation of the pizza as I listen to her click into the living room on the glossy wood floor.

  What if one of the others finds the towel? Looking around the bathroom, I return to the stack of identical towels on the windowsill. Aha. I am—though alien—practiced at trickery. I refold the foul towel with the telltale dark stain now facing the inside, and slip it under all the rest.

  Then I slide open a drawer under the sink. My hand sorts through some loose tampons, lipsticks, and a brush. I take out a lipstick, dab color on my cheeks, and rub. Not bad, I think; the color makes me look more awake. I put the lipstick on the counter, fluff my hair, and smile my public smile.

  I reach for the door—then pause. Turning once again to look at Patti’s bathroom, I see the lipstick. And before I think of why, I slip it into my pocket.

  Friday

  Everything in me gets lighter when I see Lana walk in with her friend Michelle.

  Fifteen minutes ago I was waiting for Pat, pacing in front of Spencer while he plopped blocks into a pan I’d gotten out of the cupboard. Pat walked in the door and I fled, running to the bar—an escapee.

  I’ve seen Michelle before, over at Lana’s. But she looks different in the dim bar light. Her face is softer, her fine hair pretty around her face.

  “You remember Michelle,” Lana says, pulling a couple of stools away from the bar.

  “Sure,” I say.

  I feel a familiar constriction in my chest, the pounding of what feels like extra blood whooshing through my system. I am pathologically shy. Years of therapy, when I was younger, have made it possible for me to form words when I first meet someone, but I still experience a flight response. Inside my head, microscopic beings like the Whos down in Whoville run around screaming, “Holy Mary Mother of Fuck—run—fucking save yourself—hide!!!!!”

  I look down at my glass of wine while Lana and Michelle settle.

  “Michelle’s been going crazy with her two-year-old, and I thought she’d like to get together with us on Fridays. Cut loose a bit before facing the weekend,” Lana says.

  Mack walks over. “You ladies looking for a taste of heaven?”

  I am growing used to Mack’s playful flirting. He does it with everyone: men, women, children, older people, gay men.

  “What?” asks Michelle, clearly not responding in kind.

  Mack adjusts, affably dropping the flirtation. “What can I get you?”

  “I’ll have an Amstel,” she says. “No glass.”

  “Surprise me,” says Lana, winking at him.

  Mack winks back.

  “So, Michelle,” I say, “you have a two-year-old?” The first tool of the chronically shy: hide behind a question.

  “Faith,” she says.

  “Michelle and her girlfriend Sarah got her in China,” says Lana. “Michelle quit writing for talk shows to stay at home with her.”

  Mack puts a bottle of Amstel in front of Michelle. He slides a green shot over to Lana, who downs it and smiles.

  “Mmm,” she says to him. “You take such good care of me.”

  Mack salutes and turns as Lana says through clenched teeth, “What’s with his hair?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, holding my glass in front of my mouth.

  “There’s more of it,” says Lana.

  Michelle leans in. “Plugs,” she says.

  Lana and I look at her in our huddle.

  “You can tell because it comes out in a pattern. Like the way hair used to come out of those highlighting caps.”

  We stare at the back of Mack’s head.

  “Why do men do that?” says Michelle. “What’s wrong with bald?”

  “It’s a virility thing,” says Lana.

  “But, come on, do they think that this looks better?” I chime in.

  Michelle sits back in her barstool. Lana and I pull up.

  “At least they don’t do snaps anymore,” Michelle says.

  “Snaps?” asks Lana.

  “Yeah. I have a cousin whose toupee snaps onto a snap that’s surgically implanted in his scalp.”

  “Um. Okay,” I say. “What does snap-on toupee look like?”

  “Wrong,” says Michelle.

  “No, really, what does it look like actually? Describe it,” says Lana.

  Michelle smiles. She’s got us and she plays the moment. She sips her Amstel, looking off.

  “It looks,” she says, “like a smoker’s lung.”

  Lana cackles.

  “Only,” says Michelle, “there’s this indentation in the lung—where it snaps onto his head.”

  I feel my shyness seep away—the Whos slink off. I find myself on that peculiar planet women meet on, where being together in that moment is enough.

  “Now wait,” I say. “What about when he unsnaps his hair? Does he just have this exposed snap in the middle of his head?”

  Lana pulls up her knees, propping them against the bar. Michelle puts her beer down.

  “I’ve never seen him without the toupee or his cap. It’s this red plaid cap that snaps onto the snap when he’s not wearing the piece.”

  “His piece being his hair,” says Lana.

  “Right.”

  “I wonder if anyone’s ever seen the snap,” I say.

  “He’s single,” says Michelle.

  “Psst . . . ,” whispers Lana as she raises her hand at Mack to order another shot.

  We look at Mack, eyes on his plugs.

  “I bet,” I say, leaning over, “when you talk to your cousin, all you can think about is the snap.”

  “Haven’t seen him in years. Not after he threatened to shoot me for being gay.”

  Something drops out. We stop.

  Lana and I look at Michelle as she reaches for her beer.

  “Hey,” she says. “I’ve slept in bed with the same person for twelve years. He sleeps alone with a snap in the middle of his big bald head.”

&nb
sp; We drop back in. Motion and sound come together.

  Sounds about right, I think.

  Lost and Found

  I like the building right off the bat. The clanky gate of the elevator slides open even though it’s stopped two inches below the floor of the door leading to the hallway. The walls have old-building-smell and the wooden floor creaks with every step. I could be in New York or Chicago. This is definitely not a Los Angeles building.

  I figure the room I’m looking for is the one I see at the end. A woman sits there in a skirt, reading a magazine. As I enter, I try not to make eye contact. What do you say to someone else who’s waiting to see a therapist: “What are you in for?”

  A sign says to fill out one of the slips below if you’re new. I take a slip out of the basket and a short pencil from another basket. There are about twenty pencils in the basket and I wonder why there are so many. Are there ever more than a couple of people in here at a time? I can’t imagine a huge line of people winding out of this room demanding a session with Dr. Martha Ryan. Granted, I don’t know Dr. Ryan. But no one’s that good.

  I sit in the chair opposite the woman and stuff my backpack under my chair. She doesn’t look up from her magazine. She knows the drill.

  I pick up an O magazine from the low table, rest the slip on it, and fill out my name and all the vitals. I consider flipping through the magazine, but Oprah looks so happy and slim on the front that I’m not in the mood. Instead, I pick up Time from the table, with something about cloning on the cover.

  I flip through the magazine.

  I wonder if I got the time wrong. The woman in the skirt is waiting too. We can’t both have appointments at the same time. Maybe she’s here to see someone else. Some dentist down the hall who shares a waiting room with Dr. Ryan.

  I look up and see no evidence of any other doctor, only the slips for Dr. Ryan. The woman looks up from her magazine and smiles.

  “Dr. Ryan?” she asks.

  Contact. I look down at a picture of two sheep looking exactly alike.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I’m just here to pay my bill from last week,” she says.

  I look up. I wonder why she didn’t simply mail her check in. Is she using payment as an excuse for a therapy quickie?

  “I can go,” I offer, realizing that I’m looking for a reason not to go through with this. Right now my problems seem so petty, I feel ridiculous. “You see, Dr. Ryan, I have this husband who adores me and this darling baby who looks divine and friends who make me laugh.” What a load. What a goddamned burden. What the fuck? The woman in the skirt is probably here for real stuff; she probably has that condition that makes you pull one hair out of your head at a time. She’s sitting here in her wig, having scraped together a few bucks hooking so that she can pay off her therapy bill from last week. Therapy being the only thing that might give her an answer to why she wakes up screaming, scratching herself wildly, three times a night.

  “Of course not,” says the woman in the wig. “I’m only giving her a check. It won’t take any time.”

  The hooker has a bank account, I think. Things can’t be too bad.

  I haven’t been in a therapist’s office in years. Not that I have a problem with it. It took about ten therapists and a couple of self-help seminars to get me to the point where I had as much affection and forgiveness for myself as I might a good friend. In fact, I was my own best friend. Sometimes I annoyed myself. But there were times when I was so darned cute I wanted to hug me. This was up until Spence was born, when the best friend became a stranger.

  Having been through the therapy mill, I know that therapists are people with all sorts of strengths and prejudices of their own.

  When I was single and living in New York, I wasted a couple of good years on a Gestalt therapist who worked out of a basement office on Fourteenth Street. Dr. Flom looked a lot like a tall, skinny Freud, which probably did a lot to recommend him to me. He wore a beard and corduroy pants and had no discernible muscle mass.

  I don’t remember being particularly unhappy, though time does tricky things—maybe I was. Most likely, I went because I didn’t have a boyfriend or an acting job and I thought that going to a therapist might be just the kind of magic pill to make those things happen.

  So I entered Dr. Flom’s basement office a vaguely dissatisfied girl and left two years later, angry, bitter, and a couple of G’s poorer.

  The office was covered in dog hair that came from a white terrier that jumped all over me as soon as I walked through the door. The dog would start to settle as I took off my jacket to sit on the hair-laden couch. Dr. Flom would then lean back in his tilting desk chair, the smelly dog at his feet, and I would talk.

  Gestalt, he said, was a term that meant that he dealt with “the whole thing, the body and the mind.” So, occasionally, he would have me get up from the couch, kneel in the white dog hair on the carpet, and beat a pillow with a couple of padded bats. The dog would jump around wildly, yapping while I beat the pillow senseless.

  Somewhere in the middle of the second year, Dr. Flom hit on a theory. He decided that all of my problems stemmed from the fact that I was the least favored child. He should know, he said, because he was one of two brothers and his older brother was by far the favorite. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he described various toys his brother got, but not he. Trips his brother went on, but not he. Compliments his brother received, but not he.

  I encouraged him to talk to his brother. Work it out.

  He couldn’t, he said. His brother was dead.

  I suggested that he beat some pillows. He did once, but fell into a heap, crying, as the dog licked his head.

  Through it all, I thought, It’s true: my brother Erik was cuter than me. It’s true: he got more attention than I did.

  As Dr. Flom cried and struggled through the next couple of months, I seethed at my parents for having favored Erik over me.

  It ended badly. I stopped seeing Dr. Flom because he left town. God knows how long I would have paid for sessions that involved him weeping and raging about his brother. The last time we met in his hairy office, he told me about an incident twenty-nine years ago when he stole his brother’s fishing rod so that his brother couldn’t go on a special fishing trip with his father. Two weeks after that last session, he called me from Maine, where he had gone, he said, “to sort out some stuff with the dead.”

  I went home that Christmas to rail against my parents for ruining my life by favoring my brother. It was a Christmas that my mother refers to as “that time you came home mad at the world.”

  The bewigged hooker goes into Dr. Ryan’s office and leaves seconds later. I silently wish her well.

  I enter Dr. Ryan’s office with skepticism and desperation. It resembles a college professor’s study, with primitive African masks hanging on the wall and hundreds of books on the shelves.

  She motions for me to sit on the couch opposite her. I sink into it, noticing the box of tissues on the low table between us. She looks like a nun who only recently quit being a nun—no makeup, flat shoes, frizzy hair pulled back, a frilly blouse buttoned up to her chin.

  Maybe she was a nun.

  She does that therapist thing where she just looks at me for a bit. I find this passively hostile. But I know enough to know that that’s my own “projection.” So I sit and wait for something to happen while little specks of dust swirl in the sunlight that streams through the window like persistent hope.

  Dr. Ryan perches on the edge of her chair.

  “So what are you here for?” she asks.

  I have this feeling of hanging on, of being on the edge of something. I hold my breath tightly. At once I realize that it is not wise for me to open my mouth. If I open it, if breath comes in—I will . . .

  “I’m miserable!” I scream, grabbing the Kleenex box. Snot explodes out of my nose. I sputter, let out another scream, and double over, smashing the box between my knees and chest. I pull it out, crumpled, and try to mold it back i
nto shape as I continue my wall of sound and snot.

  “I’m so unhappy,” I cry. “I hate myself. I hate my life. I feel like it’s never going to change. I feel like I’m always going to be fat and unhappy and needy and a sniveling pile of nothing. This is it. I’ve got nothing. I’m nothing. I’m a terrible mother. I don’t like me. How can anyone else like me?”

  The words, phrases, come in short bursts, between phlegmy sobs. And as my volume and complaining build, so does my self-loathing.

  “And then I think, I’m so lucky, you know? I got this healthy kid. I have this husband who’s great. I’m worse than the most microscopic crumb because I’m so fucking ungrateful. All I want is to rewind my life and be the way I was before I had Spence. I’m never going to be happy, ever again. I’ve ruined my life. I’m miserable and I deserve to die. And it’s never going to change. I’m going to be this horrible, unhappy mother who makes my son feel like shit for being born and I’m going to torture Pat into having an affair and leaving me. And I’m going to be a fat, miserable old lady who screams at the neighbor kids for throwing balls in her yard. I hate myself.”

  More of the same self-pitying invective spews out of me in fits and starts for what feels like half an hour, as Dr. Ryan sits primly with her hands in her lap.

  My words get slowed down by longer stretches of soft crying and tissue grabbing, until I feel so tired I want to curl up on the couch and take a nap.

  That’s worth a sixty-dollar copay, I think, exhausted.

  Dr. Ryan looks at me, her expression unaltered.

  I put the mangled box of tissues back on the table and breathe.

  “Maybe we should think about antidepressants,” she says.

  What? It’s not that bad, I think.

  “I’m probably just having a bad day,” I say.

  “Do you think you might hurt your son?” she asks.

  “What?”

  I look down at the wet Kleenex in my hand.

  “No. I would never hurt Spence,” I say.