Lit : A Memoir (P.S. Book 3) Page 16

  Is everything okay at home? she asked. She had front teeth like fence pickets, and the reflection on her octagonal wire-rims was my puffy face.

  Of course everything was great. I was great and my husband was great. Happiness was the currency we paid to get our kid accepted here.

  So I failed to tell her that my husband and I had barely spoken that week, and sometimes, before I made dinner, I considered dousing the oven’s pilot light and sticking my head in. Or that—driving to my in-laws’ for Christmas dinner—I’d risen at four, ostensibly to bake pies but actually to drive around the local reservoir, finishing a six-pack of beer while listening to Argentine tangos.

  Wheeling in tight rings at about sixty around the local reservoir—night smearing across the windows as the tangos unrolled—I’d felt myself circling my marriage and being erased with each rotation. Around and around my head I went. My longed-for circle of family is choking me. The silk bow ties on my cheap business blouses—that middle-class disguise I’d wished for—are choking me. The good family name for my son is a strangle, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polite people who never, not in decades, stop being strangers. I’d never have let on when Warren and I married how it tickled me to see our names in the Social Registry, an attitude I now despise in myself, and my sole act of penance had been agreeing with Warren to take us out.

  During the war-zone months of early infancy when Warren slept, it was as if every hour of sleep I lost, he’d stolen. Now I’ve placed Warren at the radiant center of my misery, no longer comrade but capo. We’ve devolved into a cold war with a child-centered détente.

  Whap…thunk. The scanning light casts my face the color of ectoplasm in horror films.

  Plus, just thinking about the easeful, educated parents at daycare makes my throat sour. Walking up the tree-lined boulevard toward the center always brings out my inner Igor.

  I often run into Wincing Evan, so called because of the flinch—bordering on a Tourette’s-like seizure—he goes into whenever he spots Dev and me approaching. Head down, he’ll actually scamper across the street to avoid saying hello.

  In some ways, Evan is a figure of the type I aspire to cut. He translates (let’s say) Gogol. He publishes in The New York Review of Books and abroad. Unlike the blocky Boston bankers who abound in Harvard Square, he cruises in for Parents’ Day wearing a fluid flannel coat with French tailoring, for he and his professor wife (a comp-lit professor whose easy red-lipped smile could’ve sold lipstick) summer overseas often enough to use summer as a verb.

  Their immaculately turned-out son—Jonathan, age under four years—has shining hair and a good start on French and German. He’s a chess player with a princely manner. I swear if his voice were a little deeper, he could join the diplomatic corps.

  I once saw Dev, whose sandwich that day was, as most days, a peon’s peanut butter and jelly, try to urge Jonathan into swapping lunches. Young Jonathan peeled back one corner of his seven-grain bread carefully enough not to break the crust. Dev peered in. Jonathan said, Mine is brie and kiwi fruit.

  Dev reached for it, and Jonathan cupped one hand around it. It has less sugar than yours. His next sentence was so remarkable, I noted it down in my journal: I first had this sandwich in Vienna….

  Perhaps Evan’s flinch stemmed from the day Dev had elected to yank Jonathan’s mittens from his coat pocket, bolt up the stairs while Evan and Warren chased after him, and fling them into the toilet.

  Warren fished them out with a pencil and offered to launder them. When I got the ziploc bag from my husband, I tossed the mittens into the trash among the potato peelings. I just didn’t want to deal with them—or the whole starchy Cambridge milieu.

  So the mittens stop me dropping Dev off, or the puking. My head spends much of its day pumping out reasons for not doing what I should the way a magician draws long strings of scarves from a sleeve. Warren drops him now, an act that brings him endless praise. How great, the teachers say every day when I fetch Dev, that Warren drops him off!

  And isn’t it great that I pick him up? Then spend all day and night with him? I once asked.

  From their stunned expressions, I could guess that it wasn’t. Not so much.

  About once a week Warren asks for the laundered mittens, and I pretend to rummage around before wandering away, giving in to my failure as a laundress—read: mother.

  The other couples in the center look so blithe. They plead academic poverty but drive swanky foreign cars and live sweatered in cashmere. They take family vacations in beachy climes with grandparents who plunk seashells into buckets their toddler grandchildren tote while the couple slips off to the local bookstore or bakery to canoodle over steaming coffee.

  Our nearest grandparents are assiduously hands-off. Though Mrs. Whitbread had cranked out six kids like linked hot dogs, Warren’s upbringing was almost Victorian in its chill. By his testament, he’d been presented from time to time like a petit four, scrubbed up and bathrobed before bedtime for kisses. Otherwise, he’d been banished to a gulag nursery guarded by some icy servant.

  During our own requisite holidays at the great house, we spent hours chasing Dev through rooms big as skating rinks packed with costly breakables, which we weren’t allowed to move out of kid reach. A sofa lined with antique dolls stared at Dev with insouciant porcelain faces he squirmed in my arms to get at. Once, from exhausted spite, I let him smash one.

  As for Mr. Whitbread, he seemed to eye Dev’s festive ramblings as he might have a cockroach’s. He once made the boy cry by calling him—beyond my earshot, of course—an ignorant little crud. Dev’s teary response, which Warren reported—You’re a big fat man with a red nose—proved Dev had enough Texan in him to take the patriarch in a verbal tussle.

  Other couples in our orbit had such easeful abundance inside their families. One took a pensione in Rome owned by somebody’s aunt who’s married to Lord Suck-on-This of the foreign service. Another woman’s uncle gave her a house down payment.

  It’s the most amazing piece of luck…

  It’s not luck! I want to scream. You’re rich! You’re rich, and your parents are rich. Of course the Whitbreads were, too, and none of them ever had a cavity that ached in the mouth like a rotted cypress stump for weeks on end. Nor did they have to scrounge nursery furniture from a garage sale. The only clothes Dev gets are handed down from my sister’s kid.

  That Lecia sends her son’s outgrown slick leather jackets and that fancy loafers come free never strikes me as fortune. Nor does my subsidized rent. Nor the fancy Harvard doctors Dev has through Warren’s job. Nor the Minks’ ongoing calls and letters. I have a gaze that blanks out luck any time I face it, like a black box over the eyes of a porn star.

  Whap and thunk. I compose my Christmas list for my in-laws, who always give exactly what you ask for—nothing more, nothing less. This year I’ve asked for a crockpot, but I secretly long for a Smith & Wesson.

  The machine jams. I resist the urge to step back five yards and head-butt it repeatedly. By fumbling around on the side, I locate some kind of handle and pull. I stare at the machine’s innards. For one thousand years I could ponder here before any useful action came to me.

  There appears behind me another young poet with tortoiseshell glasses and a striped scarf. He’s a real professor with the right to get his copies done who therefore knows how to clear the machine jam with a few arcane moves. It hums to life again.

  Celery-green light starts sliding across my face, and I can feel how massive my pores must look—real moon craters.

  Exfoliate, I think. When did I last exfoliate? Buy a scrub or grind up some almonds—was it almonds?

  An autodidact from a poor Irish family, yards smarter than I am, this young prof sports the countenance of an choirboy.

  You can jump in, I say. But he says I should go ahead before the secretary gets in and runs me off.

  Then he asks when my poetry book will be out, and it’s like he’s bringi
ng up a wart or goiter I’ve secretly had taken off, since the book came out two years ago, with grossly underwhelming response. Even I barely noticed, being stuck in the muddy trench of Dev’s sleepless infancy when the box hit the porch. Tearing it open, I’d lifted a copy, thumbed it, and tried to tell myself it was some worthy stone added to poetry’s great mountain. But I hid it out of eyeshot in my study—the sight of it made me sick.

  First books rarely get the attention they deserve, the other poet says with a kind look.

  I explain that virtually all copies sold were, I’m guessing, bought by my sister, who gave twenty or thirty for Christmas that year.

  He tells me the story of a writer who—on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore—opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad….

  He gestures behind me, where the secretary is making her way up the hall, and I grab my armload of contraband copies before scuttling off like a burglar with the house silver.

  A few people are starting to trickle through the halls, and I seize up, overcome with a sense of inadequacy to teach anybody anything. I simply can’t be the only dumb person in this place one more instant. Before I can stop myself, I loudly say, Let’s start a contest for who hasn’t read the most important book. I raise my hand like a testifying evangelist to shout, I haven’t read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Who hasn’t read a greater book?

  A friend pokes his head from an office, yelling, I never read Moby-Dick.

  Somebody behind me says, I haven’t read Byron’s Don Juan.

  A passing scholar corrects the pronunciation to what I guess must be super-anglicized Oxfordese, saying, Don Jew-wan.

  Pompous effing fop, I think. You should be shot.

  Another voice hasn’t read a word by Virginia Woolf. Students are starting to gape.

  Later, in my shared cubicle along a line of hissing radiators, I spread dozens of copies and start assembly-line stapling Mr. Nabokov’s memoir, the sentences I once worshipped now streaming in a hieroglyphic blur off my eyeballs, flooding me with gall.

  19

  The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind

  …oh how oddly

  the drinker seems

  to withdraw

  from the act of drinking.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy” (trans. David Young)

  I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it. Only drunk does the volume crank down. Liquor no longer lets me bullshit myself that I’m taller, faster, funnier. Instead, it shrinks me to a plodding zombie state in which one day smudges into every other—it blurs time.

  Swaying on the back landing in the small hours, I stare at the boxy garage and ghostly replicas of it multiplying along either side, like playing cards spread against the slate sky. Though this plural perspective is standard, I’m surprised by my own shitfaced state. The walkman sends punk rock banging across the tiny bones of my ears. And with the phonebook-sized stack of papers on my lap still unmarked, I—once more, with feeling—take the pledge to quit drinking. Cross my heart. Pinky swear to myself. This is it, I say, the last night I sit here.

  Okay, I say in my head. I give. You’re right. (Who am I talking to? Fighting with?)

  By the next afternoon, while I’m lugging the third armload of groceries up the back stairs, Dev, who’s bolted ahead to the living room, shrieks like he’s been stabbed, and I drop the sack on the kitchen floor, hearing as it hits what must be a jar of tomato sauce detonating. In the living room, I find Dev has leaped—illicitly, for the nine hundredth time—off the sofa back, trying to land in the clothes basket like a circus diver into a bucket of water. He’s whapped his noggin on the coffee table corner. Now dead center on his pale, formerly smooth forehead, there’s a blue knot like a horn trying to break through. I gather him up and rush to the kitchen, aiming to grab a soothing bag of frozen peas.

  But I step on a shard of tomato sauce jar, gash my instep, slide as on a banana peel, barely hanging on to Dev till we skid to a stop. I tiptoe across the linoleum, dragging a snail of blood till I can plop him in a kitchen chair, instructing him to hold the peas to his head and not move an inch while I bunny-hop upstairs to bandage my foot.

  Coming back, I find he’s dragged the formerly white laundry into the kitchen to mop up the tomato sauce. I’m helping, he says, albeit surrounded by gleaming daggers of glass while on his forehead the blue Bambi horn seems to throb.

  Minutes later, my hand twists off a beer cap as I tell myself that a beer isn’t really a drink after all. So I have another after that to speed preparing the pot roast, and maybe even a third. Before we head to the park, I tuck two more beer bottles in my coat pocket, plus one in my purse alongside a juice box.

  Coming home at dusk, I find smoke billowing from the stove door’s edges, the alarm screaming. I yank out the forgotten roast, black and unidentifiable as any roadkill. Mary’s pot-roast recipe? Drink a six-pack then ring the fire department.

  And rather than call for pizza while congratulating myself that Dev was king of the monkey bars in an arctic gale, I pile a hungry boy into the car for a rush-hour lope through the store for another pot roast, since I’d idly mentioned to my husband a pot roast was forthcoming. Thus ignoring the fact that Warren would forgo roast to find a cheerful spouse and a slice or two of pepperoni.

  In the store, I trot through the aisles behind a veering cart, thinking, Isn’t Warren a demanding dick to insist on pot roast? My blood-alcohol level is waning, and as my near-starved toddler holds out his arms toward a sugary cereal, his whine revs up till he’s baying like a sick calf to be liberated from the cart. I look at his quite prominent—is that his pulse throbbing?—blue horn as the strangers fix me in their sights. (What a mean, awful mother!) Dev is hoisted out while he thrashes and arches his back like he’s being abducted. We abandon our sundries.

  Outside, I strap him into his car seat while he flails, and I shout at him—Goddammit, Dev, you’re gonna make me nuts—and tears fill his blue eyes. He covers his face with his hands. While grocery carts veer alongside us, I catch in the rearview Dev’s face all quiet and big eyed. So I heft him out of the car seat and smother his face in kisses, gushing regret.

  Back home, still there is no pot roast. I scramble eggs while uncorking a new wine, the sweet squeak of the cork releasing the aroma of ferment, and I tell myself, Who wouldn’t drink? This is the last bottle. I’ll finish it, then start fresh tomorrow.

  In a sneaky, insidious process, it’s all I really look forward to, and I’d bare my teeth at anybody approaching the glass in my hand with a mind toward taking it.

  That night Warren comes in at ten-thirty, failing to thank me for the noodley casserole glop I slap in a bowl. Ditzy with wine and holding a boulder of guilt, I confess to Warren about snapping at Dev in the store.

  He blinks. You can’t do that.

  Easy for you to say, you’re not here all day.

  But Warren faces me with the piety of a natural parent. Trained to rein in a thoroughbred or wrest a slipper from a teething pooch, he’s disinclined to lose his cool.

  As he’s gathering up household garbage for the dawn pickup, I brillo the blackened pot-roast pan, slamming it against the sink’s perimeter, blue suds foaming around nails chewed to the quick.

  At one point he holds up a garbage sack of empty cans, asking, Did you finish a whole case of beer?

  Of course not, I tell him.

  (How trippingly off the tongue that lie goes. It weighs less than a mustard seed.)

  I just bought that beer last weekend, he says.

  Well, maybe you’re drinking more than you know, I say.

  Which is laughable, as Warren is a fount of discipline, a completer of sit-ups, a runner of many miles. We have a rowing machine set up in his study, and at night he pulls against oars for an hour at a pop. He barely uses a whole pat of butter on a potato. He slices turkey thin enough to read through.

  If you lie to your husband�
�even about something so banal as how much you drink—each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it’s deflected away.

  On the porch again, I scan the snowy landscape with an irritation almost predatory. The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. Daddy…I say, staring off the dark porch into my snowy yard. Before he died, the wordlessness he floated inside during my teen years had become permanent. If he roused at all, his head craned around bewildered, and he handled his dead hand like a parcel he’d been asked to hold for a stranger.

  Yet through alcohol’s alchemy, I’d swear some nights his shadowy form stands in the yard behind an old push-type lawn mower. Why’d you keep drinking? And Daddy, who was a shrugger, a starer into distances, shrugs and stares. You know…Then he dissolves into the falling snow. I upend the smooth bourbon, trying to achieve the same blunt, anesthetized state that once snuffed him out.

  It can’t have been sleeting or snowing every second of those years, but that’s my memory of it—the hood was always up on my parka, with some weather going tick tick tick tick against the waterproofing.

  There’s snow in my head, too. Wide blizzards of bad news blowing sideways. My few hopes are desperate ones. One key fantasy on the porch—no kidding—is winning the magazine sweepstakes I’ve never entered. I habitually filch sweepstakes forms from doctor’s-office magazines or shopping circulars. Sitting outside by flashlight—have to change that overhead porch bulb—I meticulously fill them out, imagining the limo pulling up with balloons and champagne. Such a good story we’ll be: two poets win a jackpot….

  The night ends with a black smudge, and come dawn, I stand in a cloud of shower steam, the former night’s conviction to quit solid, though it’s daunting to face unmedicated whatever’s beyond the plastic curtain I’m scared to draw aside.

  By afternoon I can’t abide Mr. Rogers asking me to be my neighbor without a cocktail.