Mommies Who Drink Read online

  But I might run away, I think. And isn’t that just as bad?

  In the remaining five minutes of our session Dr. Ryan and I decide to hold off on medication and see where this goes. But I can already tell by the lightness of my limbs that this is what I’ve needed—balls-out sobbing and complaining.

  I leave the building, a little buzzy, and stop by a high-end children’s clothing store called Lost and Found. I rarely poke around stores like this, because I have opinions about people who buy expensive clothes, especially for children. But today I think that my opinions are hard to carry, especially when they’re about myself.

  So I walk around Lost and Found fingering the tiny merchandise. And I end up buying Spence a pair of shoes that look like bear claws. They cost only slightly less than the copay I just handed Dr. Ryan.

  Ass

  Since Spence was born, my body has become strange to me. Sliding my hands over its topography, I feel bumps and sags where once there were curves and planes. I was warned, of course. But like sex, death, and Vegas, you really don’t know anything until you get there.

  During one of Spence’s naps, I steal into my bedroom to take a look at myself, naked, in a full-length mirror. Turning around slowly to view the new me.

  Uh-huh, hmmm. Fleshy, doughy. In some places the damage is not that bad. My breasts have held up remarkably well. Turn, turn.

  Then there it is—my ass.

  I haven’t thought about my ass for years, for reasons that are probably clear to friends who’ve seen my ass on a regular basis. It used to be unremarkable. Rather square and flat. The best thing I could have said about my ass is that one usually saw it after an overall impression had already been made.

  But this post-Spence ass is something else. Still square and flat, it is now larger, discolored, and mottled.

  When my mother comes to visit, Lana and I stand behind her in line.

  “You have the same ass as your mother,” says Lana.

  I look at my mother’s ass and see my future.

  Asses don’t get better, I think. They get worse.

  For days after that, I look at my ass in the reflection of store windows, forcing Pat to judge it and buying magazines that promise to tell me what jeans would best disguise my ass deficiency.

  I look at other women’s asses, becoming somewhat of an ass expert. I decide that what sets a good ass apart from others is size and definition.

  I can’t stay away from the topic of ass for too long.

  At a party I watch a woman lean over to dip her chip. She’s probably never been pregnant.

  “You have a very firm ass,” I say.

  She looks at me blankly as Pat pulls me by the elbow over to the bar.

  “You’ve got to stop thinking about ass,” he hisses into my ear.

  “I know, I know,” I say. “I just can’t help it. My world is full of ass.”

  I spend the rest of the party trying to divert my thoughts by figuring out how much it cost to cater the affair. Determining how much things cost and how much money people make often occupies my mind nicely for long stretches. If I determine that someone makes a boatload of undeserved money, then I make a mental list of ways in which I am better off than they are. It was when I started doing this that I really “got” that you can’t put a price tag on integrity and a sense of irony.

  So I’m adding up the price of the hors d’oeuvres and what the wine would cost wholesale, when I catch a glimpse of my ass in a marbled mirror. I spend the rest of the party and weeks afterward with my back against a wall.

  Just don’t think about it,” Pat tells me about whatever “it” currently is.

  Pat, I think, has the perfect mind for a serial killer. He can just turn it off. Like Scarlett O’Hara, he can think about it tomorrow. Or not think about it at all.

  My mind, on the other hand, is drawn to the grotesque, the annoying, and the petty like a heat-seeking missile.

  I think about ass every few minutes for the next month.

  Weeks before this I was obsessed with plastic vaginas—or, more to the point, with who on earth would buy and use a plastic vagina.

  I had gone to a store called the Pleasure Chest, with Lana, who was looking for things that might jazz up an evening with Tony. I’d been to these stores before when they first became popular in the early nineties. I’d gone partly out of curiosity and partly because I thought I might pick up a few new tips. I think I bought a pair of handcuffs once. But, for the most part, it just seemed like the outfits, zippered masks, and two-pronged dildos could cause a nasty rash. And how does one clean and store these things?

  The Pleasure Chest was different from the stores I remembered from a decade ago. For one thing, this store had branched out and also sold bath salts, scented candles, and fresh flowers.

  The other remarkable thing was that huge families from the Midwest strolled through the aisles with shopping baskets over their arms, picking up nipple rings and butt plugs.

  The merchandise looked like the usual fare. As I absently fingered some stuff while watching a mother and daughter flip through the flavored condoms, my hand landed on a plastic vagina.

  At first I didn’t know what it was. In fact, the hairless, pink mound of plastic was so unrecognizable to me that I had to read the label to figure it out.

  It’s a label I regret having read. I just couldn’t understand why someone would buy a small, disembodied vagina. What did one attach this to? Did one simply place it in the middle of the bed? Where was its hair? There was simply a hole in the middle of the mound. There was no canal, no insides to it. I just couldn’t see anything to recommend it except that it was remarkably cheap (just $6.95) and small enough to carry in a fanny pack.

  In the days that followed, all I could think about was plastic vaginas and who used them. Did any of my men friends? Did the man behind the cash register at the wine store? I asked Pat if any of his friends used plastic vaginas. He hadn’t heard of any who had. Would he ever use one? He didn’t think so. After a while he refused to talk about them. As did my therapist, best friend, and the women in my book group.

  Michelle takes me to a Siddha Yoga center. She claims that the meditation technique she learned there can help me train my mind away from thoughts of ass. After all, it helped her control her hypochondria. This is a strong endorsement, as Lana says she’s taken Michelle to the emergency room more than once, panting into a paper bag in the back of a taxi because she’s convinced a slight blurring of vision means the onset of mad cow disease. Lana says that last summer Michelle’s fear of West Nile virus was so extreme that she had to wrestle a knife from her to stop her from amputating her own finger after a mosquito bit it.

  Michelle and I take off our shoes in a bright lobby. Over the shoe rack is a huge photograph of the current guru of Siddha Yoga, Guru Mai. The first thing I notice about her is that she is a major babe. The second thing I notice is my ass in the mirror as I bend down to stash my shoes. “Don’t think about ass,” I say to myself as I focus on Guru Mai’s beatific face beaming from the photo.

  My mind starts to veer to thoughts of Guru Mai’s ass and how nicely covered it is in that red robe she wears in the picture. I feel slightly dirty carrying thoughts of the guru’s ass with me as I pad, in my stocking feet, over to a spot where I can sit cross-legged and watch Guru Mai give her videotaped lesson. A TV is propped up in the chair where she would sit, were she here.

  Where is she? I wonder. I imagine her sitting behind a two-way mirror deciding which one of us to mind-control.

  Guru Mai’s face pops on the screen and starts to tell a story about a foolish man and a strawberry. She tells the story like it’s a total laugh riot, like it’s something hilarious that this man wants this strawberry before it’s ripe. Cross-legged devotees around me giggle like they’re in on the secret.

  Michelle looks over at me and gives me a stoned-on-yoga-and-green-tea smile.

  I can’t figure out how any of this is going to train my mind away from i
ts petty and lurid thoughts. If anything, I’m so bored by the strawberry-and-foolish-man story that I start to think about how much the guru makes on the gift shop alone. I also think that the drawstring yoga pants that are being sold would hide any kind of ass, and I wonder if I can get a second pair for half price if I buy two.

  The TV pops off, leaving the image of the guru’s face burning on the gray screen like a modern-day Shroud of Turin.

  I hear a voice say, “And now we will have twenty minutes of silent meditation.”

  Good, I think, this is it. This is what I came for.

  The voice continues with some instructions as a musical instrument twangs over and over again.

  Is that a zither? I wonder. It’s twangy, isn’t it? Kind of a stringed thing that doesn’t play real notes. Like a poor cousin of the harpsichord.

  “Empty your mind,” the voice says.

  The voice—who is it coming from? Is it from that guy in the mustard shirt that gave me a date-rapist smile in the lobby?

  “If a thought persists, gently let it go,” says the voice.

  The bones of my ass feel the hard floor through a flimsy pillow that I picked up from a stack by the door. Who knows who’s sat on this pillow before? Faces dance in my mind—faces of other possible users of the pillow. They fade in and out of each other, laughing, like an arty segment of an old black-and-white horror film. Not just any film. I’ve seen this film. What movie is it? The Picture of Dorian Gray? No. A Jack the Ripper thing? No. Wait a minute . . . it’s something I saw recently . . . a Vincent Price thing . . .

  The faces rise and fall in my mind and I review every old movie I’ve seen in the last few months.

  This is hopeless, I think. I will forever be tormented by my own thoughts.

  “Do not attach yourself to any one thought,” says the voice.

  I start to feel floaty. My mind drifts as if it’s not in me, then focuses on a fuzzy red circle.

  This is it, I think. I’m not attaching to any thought.

  “Don’t attach to the thought of not attaching to thought,” I say to myself.

  I go toward the fuzzy red circle. I am walking but not walking. I get close to the circle and it starts to change colors. I watch it vibrate. It pulses rhythmically.

  It is perfect, I think—then try not to think.

  It is a perfect circle. My mind settles and for a brief moment I contemplate the mathematical rightness of the curve.

  The voice returns.

  “And when you’re ready, open your eyes slowly,” it says.

  The circle gets smaller. I watch it float in front of me. And just before I open my eyes, it floats away from me. The neat half of the perfect ass.

  Friday

  Look, I get it. I get it. Things get . . . the sex gets routine,” says Katherine. She picks up her black and tan and slips the wet coaster out from underneath it.

  Katherine has been joining us on Fridays for about a month. She went to acting school with me eighteen years ago in New York, and we bumped into each other again a couple of months ago at a mutual acquaintance’s preschool fund-raiser. When I invited her for Friday drinks, she practically wept with gratitude. She’d been to a number of midday mommy groups that were so dull that she found herself hoping for an interruption the size of an earthquake or a mud slide. Katherine fits into our little group remarkably well, having quickly distinguished herself as the mommy who can do a beer bong standing on her hands while balancing a plate of fries with her feet.

  “Right,” I say. “If you don’t know that sex is going to be a little tamer after you’ve been with someone for a decade and had a kid, then you’re an idiot.”

  Michelle smiles. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. It dawns on me that I know nothing about her sex life. Hard to know if that’s because she’s the lone lesbian here or because she’s naturally conservative about personal sex talk. I’d understand that, since I don’t tend to say much about Pat and me. Certainly not in comparison to Katherine and Lana, who don’t seem to stay away from the subject of sex for too long.

  Lana leans over the bar and pulls on Mack’s shirt. “What’s that?” she asks him, pointing to a misty yellow drink in front of a guy in a business suit. “Never mind telling me. It looks good. I’ll have one of those.”

  I pause in my head to marvel, yet again, at Lana’s adventurousness when it comes to drinking—and everything else.

  “But, oh, I miss the mystery of sex with someone new. The ‘what’s going to happen?’ part,” says Katherine.

  Katherine has a voice that rasps like it’s three o’clock in the morning all the time. In fact, she makes her living from it, most famously for saying, “Bravo—watch what happens.” She’s arrestingly beautiful too, her Irish pale complexion paler still under black curls that flop over her forehead.

  “I wish I could get Slim to wear some kind of weird mask, not talk, and do something to me so freaky that I can’t even tell you guys about it,” she says, raising her now empty beer glass at Mack.

  “Can’t imagine what that would be,” mumbles Lana.

  Neither can I, but for different reasons. I can’t imagine the act. Lana can’t imagine not telling.

  Katherine’s boyfriend, Slim, is a gorgeous, chiseled black guy with a lady-killer smile—a drummer for a band he started with his friend Jim, called SLIM JIM. As long as I’ve known Katherine, she’s predominantly dated black men.

  Slim has a gig on Friday nights. Which means that every week Katherine has to walk out of the bar sharply at 5:45 to take over watching Jake, their two-year-old.

  “The other day,” Katherine says to me, “I was thinking about a time. God, it was one of those loft parties we used to go to in Manhattan. This was the one where Milly picked up the egg with her ass.”

  “I remember.”

  “This guy who I had been talking to. Some hot black guy. Sexy. An actor, for sure. Follows me to the bathroom.”

  “What is it with you and black guys?” asks Michelle.

  “Black guys will do anything,” says Lana, sipping the yellow drink Mack has just delivered.

  “So I’m getting ready to pee and he slips in the door.”

  “You left the door open?” asks Michelle.

  “I think the point here,” I say, “is that she knows he’s coming in.”

  “And you know the way you hover over the toilet if it’s not a bathroom you know,” Katherine continues. “Well, he puts his hand in my urine stream.”

  “Okay, icky,” I say, leaning back in my barstool. “That’s all I need to know.”

  “I want to know,” says Lana.

  “And then he licks it.”

  “His hand?” asks Michelle.

  “Of course, his hand.”

  “What happened after that?” asks Lana. “That’s a pretty strong opener.”

  “You know,” says Katherine, “nothing really. I watched him lick and then washed my hands and left him standing there. We eyed each other through the party after that. Sexy as hell. And, of course, I think about it all the time.”

  Lana raises her yellow drink and stops. We all look at the drink in her hand for a moment. Then she smiles and takes a sip. Michelle and I shudder. Katherine giggles.

  “I wonder what he did in that bathroom after you left,” says Michelle, her face screwed up like she knows but doesn’t want to know.

  Mack delivers Katherine’s black and tan and tops off my red wine. I wonder how much of this conversation he’s hearing.

  “So these are the things you miss?” I ask. I don’t have stories like this. Sure, I remember a few sweaty fumblings in stairwells with men I just met. But nothing like urine-licking or Lana’s guy who put rubber bands around everything on him and her—a visual I try to block out even today, seven years after hearing the story.

  “Yeah,” says Katherine like a sigh. She picks up her fresh black and tan. “I wonder what would have happened if I had actually met the guy. Like if I had walked over to him at the party, after
wards. I mean, maybe something else would have happened to me. No Slim. No baby.”

  “Men who lick your pee off their hands aren’t the kind who hook up for any length of time,” says Lana. “I’m just guessing.”

  “Yeah,” says Michelle. “You are way better off.”

  Michelle is fast becoming a fan of Slim’s, who told her he likes dykes because they don’t give a shit about what men think.

  “I know I’m better off,” says Katherine, sliding her finger down the fog of her glass.

  We three watch Katherine.

  We watch her dream of the urine-licker and what might have been, as the orange light from outside stretches long across the bar.

  Orange Alert

  Six months after 9/11, I sit in a car with Lana, Michelle, and Katherine. We’ve just been to see a dreadful all-woman sketch group called FemFatal, the main source of dubious hilarity having been jokes about PMS.

  The car is stopped in front of my house.

  “That show was just one long complaint about being a woman and getting older. Jesus,” says Lana from the backseat.

  “Almost made you yearn for a dick joke,” says Katherine.

  “Almost,” says Michelle.

  “I’m off,” I say, opening the door. “Sorry to miss next Friday. Someone take notes. Don’t have too much fun without me.”

  I’m talking about my upcoming trip to visit a high school friend in London. Ten glorious days on my own, in London of all places, while my mother-in-law watches Spence with Pat. The women in the car have been oozing envy ever since they heard.

  “Hey, Brett,” says Lana, stopping me. “I have a present for you.”

  She rummages around in her purse and passes me a Baggie.

  “It’s a Vicodin. I figured you’d want one for the plane. It’s from my post-C-section hoard. I’m not sure if it still packs a punch.”

  “Vicodin,” is the hushed chorus from my friends.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I don’t know if I’ll use it on the plane, though. Because I’d rather have wine.”