“I am also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.”
“You do know, don’t you,” asked my counselor, “that you are not a joke?”
The counselor said my addiction was a trickster and that I was a secret keeper. I was told I should not go back to the city, that I would be unable to resist falling into the same patterns, but I had to keep my job. I left early on a Thursday morning. A man in a van was to take me to catch a train. On the way out, I took a last look at the line of people who were too anxious or depressed to function and who waited at this time of day for their rations of prescribed medicines. I wandered over to the place where I was to pick up the things they confiscated when I arrived. Bruce motioned me into his room and, in the dim light, blessed me, hugged me, and gave me his phone number.
“I want to stay in rehab forever,” I told Beth, who looked at me and said, “Well, it looks like I’m going to.”
. . .
On the first morning I was to return to the publishing house where I worked, I left my apartment at 7:30, but had to pause at three different Starbucks to collect myself before I could walk in the door. I arrived a little after nine. At the end of the day, a woman I liked came to my door, sat down with me, asked me if I was okay. She came in each day for a while. Her kindness made me feel okay.
Since then, I have not picked up again. I have attended hundreds and hundreds of all kinds of recovery meetings. I have chanted, meditated, stood up in front of people to tell my story. I have tried to reconnect. When I lost my job, I thought I was going to just fall down. “I feel ashamed and scared,” I said. I told the truth. It was the strangest thing to not try to cover it up.
You can spend your whole life revealing very little to anyone. You can stay smoke and mirrors and, if you give them a laugh or two, no one will say or ask much. I never really wanted anyone to know that much about me, but I didn’t even realize that. I didn’t know what I was doing.
I can never be a person who has not made mistakes. But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, “This is how it has been, and it is okay.” It has been a long, long struggle to hold my head up. I think I have survived because of Betty, more than anyone. I will never stop remembering my mother’s strength, her struggle to remember words, to hang on to the world. I will always hear her at the piano, an old woman practicing, still trying to get it right, to find the right notes. I will see her walking, haltingly, in the dark, doing her best to find her way. We have sometimes struggled with words, but I am Betty’s boy. There are so many things I will carry when I leave Bettyville with my old suitcase.
. . .
At home I just slip in quietly and go to my room to read. For weeks, I have been trying to start A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, but I cannot get beyond the review quotes in front. There are, like, ninety. I have been fixated on them. “Reverberates with quiet lingering power that leaves the reader pondering the randomness of life and death and the wisdom and futility of love,” says the Sacramento Book Review. This seems too much for a Tuesday afternoon.
“Where have you been?” Betty asks when she sees me.
I say I went to take some pictures.
“Of what?”
“The scenery.”
My mother is still in her gown. For her birthday, I got her three new ones and a robe, but she won’t wear them, says they were too expensive.
“I want to call that girl, you know,” Betty says. “You know her name.”
“Who?”
“The one from the dinner, the dinner at Jane’s. You know her name. Her husband . . . She had to find him.”
“I know.” Betty has been obsessed with Jamie for weeks. She wants so much to think of some way to help her.
“I don’t think a person can ever get over that,” Betty says. “I want to try to help some people before I die.”
There are things that everyone carries. I don’t really know the things inside my mother, but I know she feels so much more than she says.
I never wanted a child for myself, but I would have liked to have seen them all, all my family, once again in someone. I would like to have kept parts of them in the world. But that was not my life. I want my mother to know that I may not be what she expected, but I am someone who tries to be good. I cannot give my mother the kids we might have liked with Mammy’s eyes or Aunt Bess’s crazy, gentle ways. I cannot bring her the child who sings with my father’s voice. But I can wait with her through these strange days for whatever is going to happen. I can sit on a chair by her bed when she is too flustered to lay her head down on her pillow and stay with her until she can close her eyes.
.
21
Things My Mother Does Not Do
1. Complain.
2. Dispose of almost anything, including years-old margarine tubs possibly hoarded for the dispersal of emergency rations.
3. Ignore a coupon.