Mommies Who Drink Read online

  The fact that I can’t drive is a constant source of fascination for my friends. It’s almost as if I don’t know how to read or use a fork. I have multiple eye problems that cannot be corrected very well with the contacts and the glasses I wear, or with LASIK. I’m a freak of the eye world, with eyes that are simply a mystery to doctors. There are poly-polysyllabic words to describe my eye problems, my favorite of which is “idiopathic,” which means “for no reason.” All this means is that I move in a world that looks fine to me, but probably doesn’t resemble the world everyone else sees. And, of course, I’ve never been able to drive.

  “The assistant director comes up to me,” I say, “and tells me, ‘Here’s the shot . . . blah, blah, blah. You’re going to drive up into the driveway, park, get out, talk to Larry . . . then . . . blah, blah.’ And all I’m thinking is, This is it. My first job in three years and I’m going to kill Larry David.”

  “Might have been a blessing,” says Lana. “I don’t understand the appeal of that show. A whiny guy whines about stuff without ever learning a goddamned thing. He’s the most annoying, childish man on the planet. I want to smack him.”

  “Oh, I think he’s hilarious,” I say. “There’s something so satisfying about him being your worst self.”

  Lana shrugs. Our taste in TV shows and films differs greatly. She leans toward the kind of esoteric fare that puts me to sleep in about five minutes. She can’t wait for the director’s cut of My Dinner with Andre—a movie made about a dinner conversation that goes on for two hours.

  Katherine calls over her shoulder, “Hey, Mack, I’m looking to float out of here. Another black and tan, my friend.”

  Mack nods.

  “So I tell the assistant director that I don’t drive and he says he’ll figure something out, but don’t tell Larry. He goes off and I sit in the makeup chair imagining what it would be like to be on trial for negligent homicide.”

  “Murder one,” says Michelle.

  “What?”

  “I think it would be murder one,” she says. “Because you had time to think about it in the makeup chair.”

  “Yeah,” says Katherine, “if you have time to think about your actions, things get a whole lot worse. If the DA is out for blood, he could make a case for murder one.”

  “But they’re not my actions. They’re the actions of the assistant director,” I say.

  “Maybe manslaughter and conspiracy to commit murder,” says Lana, draining her glass and sliding it toward Mack.

  “No, no,” I say. “Those cancel each other out.”

  We ponder the charge for a bit while Mack puts Katherine’s beer down and picks up Lana’s glass.

  “Anyway,” I say, “what ended up happening was that this little guy, on a walkie-talkie, hid in the backseat of this huge SUV and told me everything to do. Like, ‘Okay, push the right pedal now.’”

  “Did it work out?” asks Michelle.

  “More or less. I didn’t kill anyone, so that’s good. It’s just that I’ve never used a brake before. So I’d drive into the shot and the little guy in the back would whisper, ‘Left foot down.’ And I’d slam my foot down, because I was afraid of running into Larry. Every time the car lunged to a halt, it probably looked like I thought I was in some kind of cop show. Like I was going to jump out and yell, ‘Freeze, motherfucker.’”

  “God, wouldn’t you want to play a part like that just once in your life?” says Lana. “The suspect freezes, and you’re the hot detective in high heels. And you keep your gun trained on him while you flip open your badge with one hand.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I used to have a list of characters I wanted to play. Like I wanted to be the tough teacher who managed to turn the class around by being cool and showing them kung fu moves.”

  “Right,” says Katherine. “Or I always wanted to play the blind-girl part in that sixties movie. She falls in love with Sidney Poitier.”

  “That’s a specific part,” says Lana. “We’re talking about iconic images here.”

  “So why can’t I want to be the blind girl?”

  “Because it’s not like there’s a slew of blind-girls-who-fall-in-love-with-Sidney-Poitier parts.”

  Michelle pipes in, “A Patch of Blue.”

  “What?” asks Lana.

  Katherine smiles at Michelle. “Yeah. That’s it. That’s the name of the movie I’m talking about.”

  The conversation veers off and I’m left thinking about the roles I used to dream of playing. The teacher who turns around the school. The sexy spy. The class-action lawyer. The strung-out rock icon. The woman with multiple personality disorder, and one of her personalities is a hooker.

  Not one of them was a mom.

  Slow to Warm

  It’s a dream. I know this because the moonlight hits the water like it’s in a cheap motel painting. Spence is two. He walks along the edge of a pier, naked, wobbling impossibly on the drop-off. I follow him, covered in layers and layers of clothing. I think, Wow, this is weird. It’s weird in the way that twice-baked potatoes or pretzel salad is weird. But I’m not too fazed. I know that this is a dream, for Christ sake, and it could get a whole lot weirder. In seconds I could be eating my contact lenses, which is a recurring thing in my dreams.

  Suddenly, Spence dives into the water. I stop. Every cell of my body electric. My heart thumps fast and my eyes lock onto his watery form. He kicks his legs, but doesn’t rise to the top.

  I have to jump in. I start removing the layers of clothing. I think, I’ve got to get these clothes off so I don’t drag him down. And at the same time I know that I shouldn’t bother with the goddamned clothes. I should just jump in, for God’s sake. But I can’t. I’ve got to get these clothes off, and I rip them—tearing them off me as I keep my eyes fixed on Spence, who sinks further down.

  Then I think, Wait! I can stop this. I can just stop the dream. And I force my mind through some thick cosmic goo till I get to the cheesecloth layer between sleep and not sleep. I push and push—and my eyes pop open.

  I land in my bed—damp, agitated, conscious—and roll over to find Pat breathing rhythmically. Looking at the slope of his shoulder moving up and down, I think, Why didn’t I think fast enough? Why didn’t I just jump in the water and save my son?

  Days after the dream, I sit on a bench next to four other mommies. I watch Spence pour sand from a dump truck into his pants. Shit, that means slinging him in the tub when we get home. Or I could let him run around naked until the sand on his ass dries and falls off onto the carpet.

  “I simply can’t get Sam to eat vegetables,” a mommy next to me says.

  “Cover them in cheese,” another mommy says. “They’ll eat anything covered in cheese.”

  I’m so bored I feel like crying.

  A mommy looks at me and says, “What about you? How do you get Spence to eat his vegetables?”

  What I want to say is, “I don’t know about you ladies, but what I could go for is a big, hairy cock.”

  Instead, I say, “I just do the reward thing. You know, if you eat four peas, you can have this can of Pringles.”

  The mommies look at me like I suggested my son eat his own feces.

  I’m not getting this mommy thing down.

  I’ve been bringing Spence to this toddler program at a local preschool for a couple of weeks now, thinking that it’s time to mingle with other babies and mothers. Suddenly, all that we were together—our little club of two—is out in the open. My mommy shortcomings are on parade. I can’t cook. I don’t do crafts with dried pasta and glue on rainy days. Talking to these mommies makes me want to bite them.

  Jesus. It took me two hours to make the twenty deviled eggs I promised to bring to the preschool Halloween party. The skin of the eggs wouldn’t separate from the white part, so I had to gouge each egg with my fingernail in order to peel it, leaving big dents. When I laid the egg-white ovals on the paper towel, each one looked like the surface of the moon. I sat in my kitchen and sobbed.

&nb
sp; Spencer came up to me, covered from head to toe in red marker, looking like he had Ebola.

  “Mommy’s a little bit of sad,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m a little bit of sad.”

  A mommy at the school says, “I hide the vegetables in a tuna sandwich.”

  Cock, I think.

  “All he tastes is the tuna fish.”

  Cocksucker.

  “Or you can hide a piece of spinach between a cracker and a hunk of cheese.”

  Lick my juicy pussy.

  “Peas are the easiest to get them to eat, because they’re sweet.”

  Fuck me up the ass, soldier. Then dick slap me till I cry for mercy.

  A teacher comes out and yells, “Circle time!!!!!”

  The kids all run around like lab rats screaming, “Circle time!!!!!”

  Spence runs up to me and grabs my hand. “It’s share time. What do I have to share?”

  Just that your mom’s a big loser, I think. Because I forgot the damn thing to share.

  As we walk into the classroom, I look at all the other kids bringing in shiny trucks, dolls with glossy hair, bags of marbles.

  I bend down to Spence.

  “What about your subway ticket?” I say, pointing to his pocket, where he keeps the tickets for the subway we ride to school every day.

  “Yeah,” he says, and beams, reaching into his pocket. I know he is remembering our routine of riding the escalators, talking about the trains, paying for the tickets.

  I lean against the wall of the classroom, watching child after child show their loot and gab about it.

  “It’s a truck,” says a boy with sandy hair.

  “And where did you get it?” asks the teacher.

  “It’s a truck,” he says again.

  I can see where this conversation is going, and it’s not far.

  The other day, as I dropped him off, the teacher told me that Spence is “slow to warm.” It sounded like she was saying he was unbaked bread.

  “Slow to warm,” I thought. “That means . . . what?”

  She continued, “So it will take him longer to become integrated.”

  Not wanting to lay my mommy ignorance bare, I nodded and said, “Yes, slow to warm, I’ll have to look into that.”

  At home I agonized over Spence being “slow to warm.” Was it a physical thing, like his circulation was bad? Was it an intellectual thing, like he couldn’t grasp simple concepts and had to warm up to them somehow by not taking them head-on? Was it an emotional thing, like he carried things inside him—a human pressure cooker, ready to explode one day in violent preschooler rage? What the fuck was “slow to warm”?! Were we in serious trouble here?

  By the time I picked Spence up, I was close to tears. I pulled the teacher into a corner, shaking with shame and dread. She looked frightened, so I loosened my clawlike grip on her shoulder. I took in a long breath and tried to steady my voice.

  “What does slow to warm mean?” I asked, preparing for the worst.

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly relaxing, “it means he’s shy.”

  Relief flooded me and I felt like a doctor just told me that the black spot on my lung X-ray that he thought was cancer was just a mark from someone’s coffee mug.

  The sandy-haired boy sits down and the teacher calls Spence up to share. He reaches deeply in his pocket and fishes around, building the suspense, and pulls out a dog-eared ticket.

  “It’s a subway ticket,” he says.

  “Wow,” says the teacher, looking confused.

  “What’s a subway?” asks a kid. This is, after all, Los Angeles.

  “It’s underground,” says Spence. “I go with Mommy.”

  After circle time we all go outside to do an art project. Spence sits next to a girl who licks the edge of the table.

  A mommy hands out pieces of construction paper cut to look like the facial features of a ghost: spooky, slanty eyes, button noses, smiley mouths. The kids begin to glue the pieces onto an outline of a Casper-shaped ghost. Spence glues down two eyes. He wants to make the nose another eye and begins to put an eye where the nose goes. A mommy reaches over and takes the eye out of his hand.

  “That’s not a nose,” she says. “It’s an eye. You can’t have three eyes.”

  I could take her down right here. What a supreme idiot. Of course, a ghost can have three eyes—it’s a ghost!!! Christ on a stick.

  But I just smile weakly at Spence and remember to tell him when we’re on the subway that it’s fine to have three eyes.

  So I revisit the dream. I lie in bed and conjure the pier, my naked son, and me in layers of clothing. I see the moonlight. And I will myself there. I follow my son. He dives into the water—and this time, without hesitation or panic, I dive in after him. I feel the weight of the clothes pull me down, but my arms are strong, making sure arcs through the water. I go under. I see him suspended in bouncing, shifting light. I reach out, grab him, and swim toward the surface. The heavy clothing falls off of me and I kick easily back to the pier, my son safe in the crook of one arm.

  I wake from the dream, my limbs light and floaty. Goddammit, I finally got something right. I lift myself from the bed—maybe I’m still dreaming—and walk into my son’s room, where I see him under the covers, curled up safe. I scoot in next to him. I look at the ceiling and feel the roundness of his back against my arm. And I know in one of those fleeting moments of clarity that I can do this. I will learn how to do this. Because I cannot lose him.

  Secret Society

  Finding the Childwatch program at the YMCA is a lot like dying, going to heaven, and finding out that it’s exactly like the heaven you were told about when you were young: fluffy clouds and lots of naked frolicking.

  For months friends have been telling me that there’s this place where you can drop your kid off for two hours while you work out (if that’s your thing), sit in a steam room, soak in a hot tub, and finally give yourself a long blow-dry. All this for a thirty-five-dollar-a-month “poverty membership.”

  I tell those friends to go sell their bullshit to a blind old woman who still believes in fairies. I’m not buying.

  But Lana confirms the stories. She says that she doesn’t go there because she prefers her Silverlake gym, where she has a much higher chance of hooking up with a guy if the Tony thing continues to go badly.

  All I’m looking to hook up with is two hours of me time and the loosey-goosey buzz that comes from having steamed oneself shy of a coma.

  Proving that we are impoverished is easy. I show up at the Y, my dirty hair pulled into a ponytail, my jeans ripped, Spence’s T-shirt stained. I actually rub some applesauce into it before we arrive. Later Lana says that she doesn’t think that we have to look impoverished so much as be impoverished. But I’m not taking any chances.

  The guy behind the desk nods as he goes through Pat’s check stubs. We currently live on Pat’s daily stand-in work and an occasional commercial.

  “Looks in order,” says the guy.

  “Yeah,” I say. “We’re pretty poor.”

  I glance down at Spence’s unwashed face to bring the point home. The guy doesn’t look up from the papers.

  “Well, I’ll give you a short tour of the place,” he says.

  I push Spence in a stroller behind the guy, who walks me through the plant.

  He shows me the weight room, which I won’t be using. Lifting weights seems too exhausting.

  We glance into the classroom where an aerobics instructor yells orders over pounding music. Aerobics has never really worked for me. After a few minutes I get short of breath and have to sit down.

  We look at something he calls the mat room. It’s full of cushy mats on which people are stretching out and doing sit-ups. I watch some people bending backward over balls that are bigger than beach balls. That’s got to be murder on the lower back.

  Eventually, we get to the steam room and the whirlpool.

  “After your workout,” he says, “you can relax here.” />
  I look at the bubbling water of the whirlpool and imagine myself, hair bound up in a towel, hot water pounding against the small of my back, sharing secrets with a couple of other impoverished women of leisure. I wonder if you can bring champagne flutes in here. The plastic kind, of course, so they won’t break when one of the women throws out an arm while telling a story about her young lover.

  “And Childwatch?” I ask, wanting to throw my arms around him and scream “I won!”

  He leads Spence and me into a room full of machines of some kind. Along one wall is a window, through which I see about twenty children playing while three women look on, one with an infant in her lap.

  The guy introduces me to Doris, the kind of large woman that children love to bounce off of. She tells me that this is a child watch, not child care.They will watch my child while I work out, but if he cries for more than ten minutes, they come and get me. If his diaper needs to be changed, they find me and I come back to do the changing.

  She shows me a notebook.

  “You write your child’s name here,” she says. “And here’s where you write down where you’re working out.”

  I nod.

  “And if I’m doing a steam?” I ask.

  “You can write down that you’ll be in the steam room after your workout. But put down the workout area first.”

  I nod again, thinking that I’m going to figure out some workout place to write down. I’m going to have to at least appear to be working out somewhere for a brief amount of time—before my steam, whirl, shower, and blow-dry. This is going to be more complicated than I thought.

  That night I consider the possibility of committing to a real, rather than ersatz, workout routine. But that seems awfully drastic.

  Last year, as Pat and I were waiting at the finish line for my brother to complete the LA Marathon, I asked Pat, “Why don’t we run marathons?”

  We looked at the runners who’d finished, shivering in their tinfoil capes.

  “Because it hurts,” he said.