On the morning of the second day, I left bed, reluctantly, for a bowl of cereal; there were hundreds of boxes in the kitchen—brands I thought had been discontinued. Trust an addict to love a Fruit Loop.
Sitting at the table was a woman who had floated by during registration: Beth. In front of her was a bowl of Rice Krispies and, next to it, a small unopened container of milk. She stared into space, looked down at the cereal, then at me, and said, “I don’t want to be a fucked-up mother.”
“Me neither,” I said, spacey, but managing somehow to pour the milk into the Rice Crispies for her. “Snap, crackle, pop,” I said to her. “Am I going to have to clean the toilets?”
. . .
“Do you want to stop taking drugs?” they asked in rehab.
“I want to stop humiliating myself,” I answered. “Or just go away.”
. . .
Sitting at the meeting in the heat that will not break, I watch Mary guard Brittany. A man with a toothpick in his teeth tells his story without it ever falling out. His daddy was an alcoholic; his granddaddy was too. “And it goes like that,” he says. “I come to this natural and I give it up only because of no money. My kids had signed off on me. My wife signed off on me. I was living in my car. I got a house and a job now. My kids don’t call, but my wife brought over a cake for my birthday and we sat and ate it.”
At rehab, I talked, hour after hour, to Beth, who had a smoky voice. Her addiction began when she was in junior high. She started trying to get sober when she was nineteen, but it never clicked for long. Her kids had seen her strung out. Together, we sorted through our sloppy days.
It wasn’t the first time Beth was forced to leave her family—a husband and two little boys—to stay in treatment. One Sunday, I met her kids. Watching them climb up the hill to their mother’s waiting arms, the thing I noticed was their clothes. Both had on T-shirts and shorts of blazing white. They looked ready for the Laundry Olympics. Taking in those boys, Beth looked like she wanted to crawl off and die: Someone else had gotten her kids cleaner than she ever could.
. . .
“Beth is so ashamed,” I told a counselor.
“You spot it, you got it.”
“Did you make that up just now?” I asked.
I knew that before I left that place I was going to find myself talking to chairs.
“Why are you ashamed of yourself?” they kept on asking me. “You put yourself down every time you open your mouth, You have obfuscatory tendencies.”
“Do I need a vaccination?”
“Why do you do that, the joking?”
“Because if I say what you want, I sound so damn pathetic.”
I could not think at all, could not connect to what they said, stopped talking in group.
“You’re withholding,” said a nosy chatterbox who grew up amid the Pennsylvania Dutch. I will always picture her in wooden shoes.
“You’re withholding,” she kept saying. I found her intrusive.
“Bitch, do you think you work here?” I said to her. “What makes you think you’ve got everyone pegged so right?”
“You’re withholding.”
“You’re withholding.”
“You’re withholding.”
“Why do you feel ashamed?”
“Why do you feel ashamed?”
“Why do you feel ashamed?”
“Because I’m fucking bad,” I screamed out one day. “Because I’m wrong.”
They clapped. It was just like Ordinary People.
“Oh, screw you all,” I said. I didn’t think I had hit some sort of jackpot in terms of progress. I just gave up and said what they wanted. I just wanted to eat some Fruit Loops.
“When was it that you first felt your emotions shut down?”
“I’m not sure they were ever opened up.”
“Try to connect.”
“I can’t do this. Everything you say makes me want to be ironic.”
. . .
When I left New York to go to rehab, I told Betty that I had gone to Pennsylvania for work. She would have done her best with all this, tried to help, but I could not tell her what had happened, could not find the words. I am not sure I will ever develop the knack of letting her know just who I am, and had to put her on a shelf with all the things I could not think about then. I read recovery manuals, spiritual books, memoirs of addiction and alcoholism by rock stars and minor Kennedy wives.
I didn’t think I could trust my mother not to fall apart. I never trusted them to be able to take in anything about me that seemed even slightly out of sync.
“Maybe you misjudged them,” said Miss Withholding.
“Aren’t they ever going to fucking send you home?”
“Why couldn’t you talk to them about your sexuality?”
“Because I thought they didn’t want to know.”
“I think your mother would have liked for you to have opened up to her.”
“Did they give you a job here?”
“Your mother sounds pretty strong.”
“I thought I had to protect them.”
“From what?” a counselor asked.
“From me, I guess.”
“Who said you were bad?”
“Are you, like, new to this culture?”
“Do you wish your parents had said more, made you talk to them?”
“I wanted someone to help me . . . It was a long time back. It wasn’t like now. We didn’t know what we were doing.”