I just tried not to use drugs. I was scared to go home, to be alone, to pick up. At treatment centers, I listened to stories: the ghetto mother who gave up crack, got her children back, and rose every morning at 3 a.m. to pack lunches, iron clothes, and navigate a long bus journey to work; people who had lost people; stockbrokers who flamed out on coke, got divorced from their trophy wives, braved the wrath of their children as they kept on, trying to get clean. I heard old men and women who had weathered decades of cancer, financial hardship, loneliness, without drinking or drugging.
These stories helped me through. I wrapped these tales around me. When, unable to rise from bed or certain I would not make it through the day, I called for the help of these strangers who spoke, they came or called to talk until my crises passed. It was the stories that saved me; words rushed in to draw me back to life.
When I looked into the mirror, I did appear older; I looked more and more like my father. In the years that have followed, it has seemed to me that my dad has taken me over, seeped into me. Sometimes I think I have become my father. My body is more like his, a fact that Betty, who is already anticipating the blockage of one or more of my heart valves, is quick to point out.
In rain, my hair, a different consistency now, frizzes up like my dad’s did as he strolled on the beach in Florida. I remind myself of him so often; the expressions that pass over my face feel familiar even though I can’t see them.
In traffic, I lose patience, start yelling, “Damn boobs!” at drivers during rush hour. Here with Betty, I feel even more like Big George. Gradually I have slipped into his role and reactions. She seems most angry at me when I remind her of him. We relive all the old scenes.
If I have been working all night and Betty finds me taking a nap in the middle of the day, she is not amused. She hated to see my father idle. He was never allowed to relax. She hates to see me idle. I am not allowed to relax. I fall into my role. Throwing my hands into the air, I get the ladder from the garage and head out to clean what seem like decades of dry leaves out of the gutters. I get angry and manage to dislodge the drainpipe that runs from the gutter to the ground. I mutter swearwords to myself. Like he did. If Betty comes out, I say them louder. Like he did. If Betty comes out when the neighbors are around, I fling them about with abandon, as loud as I can go without actually yelling. Like he did.
But the thing is, if I am suddenly, in Betty’s head, my father, what happened to the person who was me? Am I lost to her? Where did I go?
. . .
For a long time now, it has been hard to get my mother excited about anything, even going to the city. A few years back, when I took Betty into St. Louis for the periodontist, we stopped at Saks where I wanted to buy her a new outfit. It was there I noticed the depression that had settled into her, her lethargy. She looked tired and was unable to summon the energy to shop for new clothes. Later, when I went to visit another store in the mall, she waited in a chair by the Saks fitting room, the color drained from her face.
When we drove past Granny’s old apartment, as she once liked to do, I told her how I always thought of Daddy when we were in St. Louis. “Well, I think this is where he would be,” she said. “He probably should have stayed here. He might have been happier.”
She glanced at me for a second. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what she was thinking, maybe of things she could never give him. Sometimes I think she mourns over her failings. But I think she was wrong about my father, where he would wind up if the choice was his. I still remember the picture he drew of her, our Betty, the one no one else saw, the girl on the streetcar, waiting for him to come sit down beside her, but moving away when he approached. For both of us, I think, she was always a little hard to get close to and neither one of us ever knew the reason why.
20
Sometimes I still dream I am a kid running through the rows of the fields behind our house in Madison, a little scared. Very often in the mornings, I wake up in fear of the future, of finding myself alone here on the planet. “I think,” said my counselor in rehab, “that every patient I’ve had is scared like that.”
“Don’t worry, it’s prescription butter,” I told Betty when she eyed what I was slathering on my toast.
She said nothing; she has been irritable, mad at me, but won’t explain. She just falls into it sometimes. The air-conditioning had chilled this house. Wearing my parka, I pulled the hood up over my head right there at the table. I didn’t know if she was fretting over something new or returning to some festering resentment. I think she still has a little chunk of anger logged into her account book under my name, but is either reconciled to it or ashamed of its presence. It’s a little island floating between us and she doesn’t want to live there, doesn’t want to acknowledge it exists at all, but occasionally, there she is, sitting on the sand, far off, with a look not hard to decipher.
I didn’t turn out like she planned. Maybe a lot of things didn’t quite, either, and almost all of the story has been revealed. We can’t go back.