. . .
After the meeting, Mary takes Brittany for a bottle of water and I walk with them. Brittany is shy, and when she finds out I am from New York, she gets quieter. I figure she maybe finished high school. Her skin is pockmarked and clearly prone to sunburn. She does not have money for water. I have a car that doesn’t look about to fall apart and a shirt with a man on a horse playing some game she has never heard of. I had parents who cared, who were there or tried to be. I can’t imagine she has ever had anyone.
“Honey,” I say to her, “believe me, I know how it feels to screw up.”
She asks, “Do ya?”
I do. It takes so long to feel better.
. . .
“What can we do for you?” asked one of the counselors at rehab.
“Keep me here forever. Give me a condo where I can see a Pocono.”
One night, during the hour allotted for phone calls, I got Betty. She had been to her cornea specialist and, for once, admitted she was worried. She had lost some vision. Transplanted corneas have a shelf life. She was afraid hers were wearing out and confessed that she didn’t want to go through more operations. As I tried to count on my fingers how many surgeries she had gone through, I said that if she had to have another, I would come home, but before I could get through the offer, she was saying, “No, no, no. I’ll be fine.”
She never mentions not seeing well, but that night was not herself. I asked what she intended to do, whether she was willing to have more surgery. “I’ll do what I have to do,” she said. “I am not going to be blind. I’ll do what I have to do.”
I decided I would too. But it was hard. Every time I tried to joke, the rehab shut me up.
“You’re running from your feelings.”
“I know. I hope they’re fat and slow and can’t keep up.”
At night, I could not sleep. My mind would not click off and I thought and thought, just hung out in my head for hours and hours: I had made myself up and it had not worked. Someone else kept poking through my little act, tripping me up. One night, very late, a man from Connecticut trying to make the break from painkillers came to our room in the middle of the night to ask if anyone wanted to play golf. I said maybe later. The next night, I was awakened again—by one of the counselors who was there to search my things. Someone thought I seemed a little too energetic. “They always do that,” Beth told me. “These people are all ex-addicts. They need drama.”
. . .
“Babe, fuckup might as well be my middle name,” Mary tells the girl from the women’s shelter whose face looks even whiter in the sunlight. “I got two kids in Memphis and not even a Christmas card and they never gonna forget what a tramp I was and you just learn how to live with the shit.”
I tell her, “You just close your eyes and say over and over, ‘I’m okay.’”
What I don’t say is that this doesn’t exactly work. Shame takes forever to go away. Actually, it never does. You scrub a little every day. The thing, I think, is to know, to realize it is there, waiting to trip you up.
At rehab, there was a priest—Bruce, an alcoholic, a repeat offender, from New Jersey. One day, he was informed that his congregation had decided to take him back after his relapse. I wondered if the world would take me back. This is what Bruce said to me one night after a session where I was told, once more, that I had disconnected somehow from my feelings: “You must always, always tell the truth. If you are mad, say so. If someone asks you anything, try to find the exact words to describe what you have to say. If you try to tell the exact truth, always, you will ground yourself, become yourself. The truth connects you. It hooks you back up.”
I didn’t joke. I took it in. I believe the truth does hook you to yourself, but it takes so long to get in the habit of saying it out loud. I like a bit of camouflage to spruce things up a bit.
Words are my business, but I had only mastered them on paper. I will always struggle with the problem of avoiding uncomfortable words.
“Do you always tell the truth?” I asked Bruce.
“Not so much,” he said.
. . .
I stayed in rehab for a month. Near the end, they gave us our evaluations. They wanted Beth to stay for another long-term treatment and she cried all night. The next morning, the tears . . . She could not stop crying. Later, she said she could not leave her boys again, that they would never forgive her.
At mine, a counselor asked me if I blamed my parents for my addiction. “Of course not,” I said. “Of course not. We all got hurt in a way because we didn’t talk. They just went by the rules they were taught.”
“What about your mother?” asked the counselor.
“Maybe,” I replied, “she was a little overdemonstrative.”
The people in the interview knew I had tried hard. They laughed a little bit, let me have one.