The Boys are Watching

Smile! You're Pretty.

The City.  I am in seventh grade, Mr. Z's age now.  I am flat as a board, wear an unpadded bra and big oversized tee-shirts from The Limited that says Forenza in cursive writing where the breast pocket would be if there was one.  As I walk into the heart of the city from my dad's ratty duplex, the one with the telephone wires scrambled in a cage behind the driveway, my movement is nervous, I would hide my hands in my sleeves if it were cold enough to be wearing them.  I am worried about my too pale skin.  Look at me: on my face is Clinique foundation a shade darker than my real skin thinking, incorrectly, that it makes me look tan or at least healthy.  I wear pink Clinique blush over this foundation and then--over this!--I wear red as apples gel rouge.  Three layers of crap because I am scared of myself and of you and because I feel the need to hide.  I think I ripped the rouge off of drugstore in the small downtown which doubles as the university's campus.  I also wear light blue eyeshadow, purchased with babysitting monies and medium blue mascara that cakes.  Though in my mind I have long, wavy blonde hair, it is dishwater colored with yellow highlights, it is cut in layers and hangs just above my shoulders.  The curls are hardly sexy and say only: middle school eighties perm.  I  might weight ninety pounds at this point, but I am thinking it might've been closer to eighty.  I remember feeling impressed with people who hit 100 on their weight in gym lass earlier in the month.

Over the summer, several months before I am walking to Rock Bottom Records to peruse the used 45 section and lust over the Duran Duran posters, I was at a musical with my grandmother in her boring little village at the Cape.  She is my height, with a froggy face that is on the cusp of attractive cute.  She has no ass, shapely legs from golfing, a permanent tan, and breasts larger than anyone I've met since,; my grandmother might not have mush, but she's got those double D's. She also has my eyes, or I should say, I have her's, turquoise blue and o matter what kind of bad hair day I am having or how concave my bony chest looks in comparison to other girls my age, they are remarked on, aften. People describe m by noting my blue eyes before anything else.

I am used to blending in.  I am next to my gram and we a re in line for Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.  My flowered Benetton Sweatshirt goes to my knees but it is tucked into my skinny white jeans in the front and is left hanging low in the back.  I do not understand that I should be showing my butt off yet.  All I know about are boobs, mostly because I do not have any to speak of. I am humming Jacob and Sons to myself, thinking fondly about the church we all went to before my parents separated and suddenly I realize that I am the center of the line.  People from the front are looking, as are the people in back of us.  I was humming so quietly; how cold they have heard me?  I want to ask my grandmother, but she is staring, too.  I must be so ugly to have them this entranced, right?

What I did not know is this: teenage girls are more beautiful than anything on the planet: brilliant, glistening stars punctuating an early blue sky, moss carpeting the labyrinth of trees in all each and every forest; the lonely, perfect sand dollar on a New England beach during the winter.  Teenage girls, even if the are weird, acne coated, flat chested, and the large legged, are creatures unlike any other.  And sadly, nobody whispered this truth in my ear.  My grandmother was so clueless thinking only of acting herself out of her welfare background, worried more about my pronunciation of words than what was in my heart.  My mother, tall and "handsome" had no experience with being tiny and adorable.  She was playing mirror mirror every morning.  She did not want to soften the blow of the world kicking me out of childhood, but wanted to steal any joy that could have been my own; it was my time.  I deserved to feel pretty because I was.  Teenage girls have always been, and will always be the most illuminated creatures on this earth.

Why I Left

It is a difficult to express why I left AA without going into why I entered AA.  The two are intensely intertwined, impossible to separate.   I got to AA when I was 21.  I was insanely depressed, dreaming every night about going completely and wildly insane, dreaming of being stuck in basements, or the “playroom” of my childhood.  And the worst dream, the one that still plagues me, is the one where I was in the car with my mother, happily in the front sit chatting, and then there is nobody driving.  I am stuck in the back, and it is clear she’s left the car without as much as a thought.  This dream represents my mother unlike any other description of her, literal or metaphoric.  And with my vulnerable personality type, having this type of mother, who never had the decency to just leave if she was going to leave, has nearly ruined me.  She has left me in the back seat of the 70’s Grenada, appearing often not to help drive, or to get me out of this fucked up, deranged car, but to use my son as a prop.  It is something I struggle with still, but it now is better, I am older, and so is she.  It seems like such a digression to my story about AA, entering and leaving, but it is not; it is the most central piece of this story.

When I was 21, just about to enter AA, I was living in a basement apt. by myself.  I’d dropped outta college, not b/c I was a poor student, but due to depression, anxiety, and decided social awkwardness.  I still have this social awkwardness, which has always been such a mystery to me, as I was so popular as a middle schooler (the age of my son, now).  Ppl . do not think I am that socially awkward though, when I meet them, but I digress (and I will do so often).

I was in my basement apt., depressed, few friends, and without many options.  Though I was a “drop out, ” I was taking a few classes and could hardly speak to ppl. in my classes.  I realize now I needed good therapy.  Or, I needed a supportive family member to urge me out of my own way.  But I did not have this.  After a series of tremendous nightmares, I called my mother, crying.

My abandoning mother had frequented Alanon (due to her Daddy’s drinking) like a feathered hair slut frequents bars, sent me to the Caron Foundation.  The Caron Foundation, briefly, is a sort of retreat Center that is steeped in 12 step ideology and rhetoric.  If you’re normal going in, you’ll be a victim of alcoholism or an actual alkie on your way out.  An aside to put mymother's 12 step obsession in perspective: I also had a tooth that was rotten @ this time.  I really needed help.  My mother (who has an obscene amount of money) decided she would send me to Caron, but at age 21, the rotten tooth was my problem. 

After partying a bit too hard in both high school and college, I sat in AA, knowing on at least some level, that it was bullshit.  I knew I was nuts and amazingly unhappy, but I also knew that I was not an alcoholic and that it was even more nuts that I was rotting in “the halls.”  Yet I was paralyzed, unable to make any sort of move.  I openly discussed this issue about the authenticity of my “disease” to people, old timers, mostly.  It was decided, collectively, that I was an “alcoholic of sorts” and that nobody, but nobody winds up in AA by accident.  I now realize that there are many, many ppl who are sitting in the halls with imaginary diseases, some who have scarely picked up a drink ever their lives. 

The energy and social way of AA was poison for me from the beginning.  Though I have a needy, over dependent side to me, I mostly like to be alone.  I like to read, and I like to watch television while crocheting.  I like taking long, solitary walks in the woods.  I loathe crowds.  Bars made and still make me feel ill, not so much b/c of the alcohol, but b/c ppl. compete for conversation that is completely ridiculous and boring.  I hate being on teams.  The only team I’ve been on that did not leave me feeling suicidal was cross country running.  I am at least kind of a misanthrope.  And there I was, trying to stay off the edges of AA.  And I knew I was was mentally ill, at least a little, but not really an addict.  But get this: I became one in AA.  I entered AA with a sort of fake alcoholism, constructed by my mother and the Caron foundation.  And the school of thought that is the 12 step religion.  And I left AA an addict, not of alcohol, but as a narcotic addict.  But I am getting ahead of myself as I often due with expressive writing. 

In AA, before I was addict, with my fake fucking disease: I was 13 stepped countless times.  I think on some level, I might’ve enjoyed the perverse attention, having always had a lame-as-fuck daddy complex.  But I was not getting better in AA and with this creepy attention.  Almost immediately, I started living with a street musician (this totally gives me away if anyone ever reads this from my old meetings) who was about 20 years my senior.  My parents expressed some concern, but not much.  People sort of looked at me weirdly, but he was so in AA, as he was obsessively writing his fourth step in a big book step study. The sponsor I had felt that I wold learn about relationships from this man.   I really loved this guy. There is a tiny part of my heart that misses him today; it is like a distant lullaby from my childhood still echoes in a way I can hear, but hardly.  A distant music box in a far away room.  A tiny dancer that was once in the palm of my hand.

But, as you'd prolly expect, he was horribly abusive.  I was so fucking adorable back then, but he had me believing I was hideous and stupid. He wold read my papers for school and tell me it was like reading scrambled eggs.  There was a concretely crazy chick, Bethany,  in the rooms who would talk at length about S and M and ritualistic abuse via her parents who then stole her child.  She had wild eyes and zero protocol for personal space. She would come upon you and another person after meetings saying huskily and desperately, "Am I interrupting a private convoe? Is this a private convoe!"  You'd want to rescue her form her crazy, twisted mess of a brain, but you had to get away from her even faster.  He would often tell me, "You're acting like Bethany, Violet, you're just like Bethany."  I started seeing her eyes in the mirror.  And I was too ashamed to ask anyone what they thought. I hid the Bethany secret in a sick, rusted part of me.  I think that part of me was so tiny back then, but then it oxidized quickly.  And the longer I stayed in AA it finally becoming the biggest part of me.  I worry sometimes about this, as once a car is rusted through it is only destined for the junkyard, no matter how perfectly and accurately the engine is fixed.

When graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and he said, “Jesus, so what?”  Fucker.  I cannot not blame AA completely for this relationship, but I can say this with certainty: I never would have thought this man was normal on any level w/o AA.  AA normalized the most insane ppl. on the planet.  We’ve talked on the S.T. blog about pedophiles in AA.  I think there was a time when I would have opened up my heart to a person of this ilk, as this was/is the AA “way.”   For years, I believed that the most sociopathic, mean fuckers could get sober and become good humans b/c of “the grace” they’d receive a la the blessed transmission line.  Once, my stepmother (who hated me, btw) expressed some concern, telling me that I was losing perspective, saying, “Violet, seriously, yer meeting the lowest common denominator of people in that place.  And how much did you really drink anyway?”  It is difficult to look back on this time and see how vulnerable I truly was.  AA teaches us we can restart out lives at any time, but I know better now.  what ever harm we do to ourselves, and whatever harm other inflict on us, causes injury that is, at least in some way, permanent.  Treat yourself, and others,  well today.  There are no do-overs.  There are second chances, but they are always more expensive and more difficult that first chances.  I learned this. 

I continued in AA, and after somehow ditching the street musician, I met a former heroin addict.  He was abusive ,too, but in a different way.  Without digressing to the point of ridiculousness, I am still with him (we've had our on and off times), and I will give him this decided credit:  I have always been at least in part a borderline anorexic.  He is the first man I've felt that I could eat around.  This man gave me permission to eat.  We had a child together. Astoundingly, this child born from insane, misguided fucked-up-edness, is PERFECT.    I learned about pills from my husband and doctor shopping.  And after a horrendous labor and c-section, I was released with a baby and a bottle of percs.  I relapsed.  But really, I think now that I am no longer in AA, what I did was not a big deal.  Taking a pill or two over what was directed.  It is insane and puritanical to feel otherwise.   I eventually drank  b/c I wanted to make it certain that I was, indeed, on a relapse.  One only thinks in this way, this land of black and white “relapse” and “sober” thinking, while in AA.  It is a world where minds are permanently shut.  The idea of thinking openly is not accepted; it is feared and shunned. 

My marriage to this former heroin addict was crazy, my parenting was less than stellar.  My relationship with AA was nuts.  I went, and I wanted my life to be all about AA, but it made zero sense.  I’d moved out of the middle class, intellectual area where I’d “gotten sober” and into a rural town with lotsa rednecks.  I prolly do not need to go into too much detail about what these meetings looked and sounded like. Fitting into that AA scene wrecked me.  For years, I drove an hour sometimes to get to a “real meeting,” toddler in tow.  It sickens me that I put my son through this.  I have just asked him about this, punctuating this writing and he has agreed, saying, "Mom, it was EVERYDAY of my life."  Often, I’d get to a meeting only to play with him and other children out in the hall, as other parents seemed less interested in their kids, and more interested in what their disease was doing to them on that day.  Yes, I am making myself sound better than them, but I was and am.  I relapsed a lot.  Before I’d initially relapsed w/ my c-section, I’d had about four years.  But really, four years of what?  Being “sober” from a “disease” that I did not initially have?  

I could get into the minutia of the relapses, the lame meetings, the pit my life became.  But I will not.  Things got worse, and I believe that my membership to AA exacerbated my addiction (I never could shake the desire to be half out of reality on pain pills after the c-section) and my mental health issues.  AA made me feel like complete shit about myself.  I never believed like I should have and I never felt like "they" said they were feeling.  And mostly, ppl really grossed me out.  Nobody had what I wanted.  Nobody. The loneliness that I eventually felt was noting like I’d experienced out of AA.  But in my mind, I believed that there was a perfect life for me, just beyond the horizon, where I’d be “happy, joyous, and free.” In part, I believed that AA was going to be my ticket to this happy world, but at the same time I knew it was bullshit.  And then, knowing it was bullshit, I’d want to leave, yet, I feared I would be fucked completely via “jails, institutions, and/or death" as the AA the rhetoric promises you, if you dare think of leaving "the rooms."

Years later (now in my early to mid thirties),  I was  overly extended.  The economy, as we all know, was falling apart.  The heroin addict husband kept getting laid off.  I was in a master’s program I hated and was commuting a million miles away to a job where a boss wanted me GONE.  I was out of my mind.  I wanted to die.  I fantasized about driving off this bridge on my way home from work.  I’d try thinking in that trite AA way to assuage my desperation. I was asking that nebulous hp to deliver me from my own thinking, that wretched neighborhood of shit.  I realize now that characterizing myself and my thinking as a bad neighborhood is a form of self hatred.  You cannot save yourself if you hate yourself.  

This is confession is even more trite, but I think listening to NPR’s “This I Believe” essays in the car during this commute, might’ve been what saved me.   My memory delivers: Violet is zooming over those dark, seacoast waters, the idea of veering her little beige car, shiny in its newness (her first new car and could she even afford the payments?)  over the edge of the bridge.  And from her car’s tinny stereo she hears words from Kay Redfield Jamison: “I believe that curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do.”  She thinks, just maybe, she can keep going a teensy bit longer.  And she loves that boy of hers, the one who looks just like her, except for his wide, Polish face, moony cheeks.  She loves him with every iota of her body, his cells still inside of her, as they will be for as long as she will breathe air.  She cannot end her life, as his cells inside her; she cannot do this to him.  And then she remembers something, her mother explaining depression to her, what it feels like.  It was an idea so foreign to her, at six, seven or eight, that she feels as though it was invented by a famous  storyteller, an idea from Grim. She listens to her mother explain that some people would drive their cars off a bridge.  And they would do sick things, too, like rip up a picture in their daughter’s backpack.  And Violet wonders about her mind then, what is memory, what was her mother’s voice, and what might have actually happened. 

Around this time, the time of dark waters in my mind, I got a call from an old sponsor. It is still unclear if she saved me, or pushed me deep underneath the waves.  (Without equivocation though, she suggested rehab, not AA meetings, but rehab. ) -- Do I need to say this? Dunno?

In rehab, they put me on Subutex.  This is a drug designed, sort of like Naltrexone, but it is specifically for narcotic addicts.  It is kinder, more gentle Methadone.  It is a drug that allows addicts to live their lives like normal ppl., as they deserve to do.  One can take this prescription@ home, and not in some urine infested, creep zone, littered with con men and hookers and low lifes.  A prescription for Subutex  is the beginning of a promise that ppl. believe in when they’re young; it is the light at the end of the tunnel.  It is the beginning of the ever after.  

I’d heard of this drug from a fellow AA, interestingly and ironically a 13 stepper who I actually slept with in his home while his wife was at work. Another memory delivers:  Violet is puking out orange juice into this guy's wife's tacky trash can with painted gel flowers while she is naked in his bed, their bed. On the wall above this bed, a thickly made, wooden crucifix.  It is not ironic art, but evidence of the way these ppl think or at least pretend to.  Weirdly, Violet thinks, they are not Catholics, but misguided born agains, clinging onto a drug store sold idea of Jesus like teen girls would worship Justin Timberlake.  This man, who is, in a word, old, is kissing her.  Waiting for her to puke, and then kissing her.  He empties her trash can and then gives it back to her so she can puke again.  She knows he is wondering about how she'll blow him with the puking, and then he no longer has to wonder.  

They say the thing that saves you can also kill you.  And I imagine this works the other way around, too.  I stayed on this drug while I divorced my husband, lost my house, and lived, with my son, in a fellow AA’s house.  We were controlled in a way that I could never articulate in this tiny space.  I add this experience to my many, AA experiences that loose their shape in my shitty memory, but remain, rusty and chafing, creating the person who I am and who I will become. 

It is hard for me to have a lucid handle on AA and how it has truly affected my life.  I wish I’d never heard of AA, but w/o it I would not have my son.  And I never would have heard of Subutex.  But of course, I feel like AA might’ve edged me into the narcotic addiction I did actually develop, the one that made the Subutex necessary.  But perhaps, I developed this addiction in the realm of safety, which I would not have had w/o AA.  Though my marriage and relationship with my son's father has been a nightmare, it has also saved me, as I feel this man has kept my addiction manageable.  He has done much worse things than I have in terms of using;  thus, I can and have experienced these things vicariously through him.  But then I wonder, did I become an addict to become closer to him? As Rilke suggests to us, I continue to live these questions.  Unlike people in AA, I am growing comfortable with a life that does not demand immediate answers.

And then there is this: I  feel like this Subutex has saved me, as it not only works as a deterrent for using, but as an anti depressant.  No other anti depressant has ever worked like this before for me.  Subutex made it possible for me to say hello to people, where before I would have looked at my toes.  It has allowed me to walk through the woods and notice the treble sound of leaves and the color of moss against soil.  I can look at sunlight with out feeling angry. 

I would not characterize myself as a low bottom addict, though I went through the most terrifying times in my twenties and thirties, after entering AA, not before.  I blame AA in some ways, but I also blame PTSD from my abandonment issues , and of course, I also blame bad luck.  I know that staying in AA would have wrecked me.  It made me feel like utter shit about myself.  That voice, sing-songy and evil in a way that mirrors an eighties slasher film, I would have heard in my mind, forever, “But where were YOU wrong?”  I've made mistakes, and I try to hold myself accountable when I can.  But mostly, I forgive myself.  And try to love that small, still anxious creature that is within me.  She deserves comfort.    

I left AA, and thus the 12 step religion, finally, as I ended up having a full-fledged affair with the married 13 stepper who’d introduced me to Subutex.  The one with the fucking crucifix bolted to the drywall in his bedroom.  I’d known this guy forever.  And I was so naïve and stupid and trusting.  I actually believed that this guy, older than my mother, loved me.  He was @ every meeting that I was.  I am not sure if he’s sober today, but he was one of those chronic relapsers.  I used to feel disdain for these releasers, as an early twenty-something, a not truly addicted young girl fitting awkwardly into AA b/c she had nowhere else to go.  Now, I get it.  AA fucks you and it turns you into this relapsing person; the cure is worse than the disease and it is designed to make you fail and it is designed to keep you there, hostage to its bullshit.   Mostly, these chronic relapsers are junkies who seriously need medical attention.  And AA deters you from this, offering you a free “spiritual” solution.  The idea that a junkie who is fully, and physically addicted can get squeaky clean through either the steps or life coaching is the fucking lames idea ever.  It sickens me to hear about it.

About this guy, as the “situation” with him is what finally pushed me out the door, or, got me to get up and get the fuck out… This dude was in AA to get his wife to let him stay at home.  She said that if he were “trying,” he was ok.  He was “trying' @ AA by hitting on new and vulnerable women.  This wife of his, a probation officer, btw, is essentially sicking her creepy old man husband on the women in AA.  This funny little Christian, 12 step couple is keeping AA sick.  But this is just one little, tiny, sick story out of a ga-zillion.  This AA life, especially here in the sticks, has been stranger than fiction. 

I was pretty shaken up by the affair, and about being on a drug as severe as Subutex.  I wondered how much being on Subutex defined me; was a different now?  I desperately wanted to get my life together.  I was from a nice town.  My parents were shits, but they were shits who raised me to be a reader and to go to college, and to not say "anyways" as a plural.  And getting my shit together while sitting across from a lecherous, old man with a shit eating grin that said, “I FUCKED YOU,”  while every woman in the room was not supportive of me, but pist that they did not sleep with him (he was pretty hot) was too, too much.  Ppl. seriously spent HOURS trying to help this guy who was and is, I know now, a con artist of epic proportions.  There is a part of me that empathizes with him, one addict to another.  But there is a decided difference between us; I am not a predator.  And I really was trying to get sober.

This dood kept following me to my car after meetings, trying to “make an amends” in a loud voice for all to hear.  I tried to protect myself, but nobody would listen to me.  They all insisted, especially the unattractive, over weight women, insisting, and “He is TRYING.”  Have you, if yer a chick, heard in AA that the women you meet there are FINALLY yer friends and that when you were drinking, you could never find a chick friend?  I heard this millions of times. Yet, I felt like sisterhood was a lot more powerful OUTSIDE Of AA; my female friends in AA being the phoniest, most manipulative bunch of chicks I’d ever met…

It was not until I spoke with a worker from a domestic violence type place (about a completely separate issue) that told me, “Listen, do not go to those meetings.”  I felt like it was my right to go and that he should go to a different meeting; he was the predator.  But the woman who spoke with me made an analogy, “Well, if you were being stalked, you prolly would not find it fair to get an unlisted number, but you would for your own safety, right?”  And her reasonable voice struck something in me.  It awakened the sleeping, smart, little badass in me.  I needed to fucking protect myself; I need not worry about my relationship with AA. 

And it became clear to me then in a wild, deep way: it was no fucking wonder that there were not more middle aged, smart women in AA.  THEY HAD LEFT TO BE SAFE.  THEY DECIDED TO HELP AND SAVE THEMSELVES.  They had looked ahead, at the happy life waiting for them just beyond  that horizon, the life AA promises you.  The looked around and looked towards their future and got up out of AA to find it.  It was not fair, but it was how it was.  And it sucked for me (and still sorta sucks) that this is not spelled out.  Ppl. do not break this down for you.  They want you there, in AA.  They need to feed off of yer normie blood.  And I think they know the truth; they are too sick to leave though, and they do not wanna be stuck there alone. 

And it was then that I left.  I have gone back a few times, punctuating sanity with creepiness, but I never wanted to be there again.  I’ve missed it sometimes, as I love feeling like I am not the only fucked up person around.  But “normies” man, they are fucked up too.  However, they aren’t articulating their mental illness that in scripted bullshit.  I used to cry when I’d read that part about trudging the road.  And I would feel a decided kinship to those “AAIOU” mobiles on the highway.  Not anymore.  I am a “normie” now.  I am still taking Subutex, which sometimes makes me feel weird and vulnerable, but other days I accept it.  I have, to be totally honest, drank.  I have had like two beers on maybe three occasions.  I felt maybe three percent weird about it.  I did have a slip of sorts with pills, but it is a nonissue.  I am bringing up the drinking and the pills only b/c of the way I was raised in AA to be utterly and unapologetically overly confessional.  And b/c I am looking at life in a more open way, and seeing these slips  for what they are, not emergencies, but small things to be parenthetically noted, and b/c of this, I feel like I am more glued to this world.  That horrible, horrible loneliness I felt predating AA, and felt esp. during AA, I recognize is from being abandoned as a kid.  And if I live the truth and accept myself for who I am without equivocation, I am mostly OK. 

Like Kay Redfield Jamison explains about her own life, I “have come to see how important a certain restlessness and discontent can be in one’s life; how important the jagged edges and pain can be in determining the course and force of one’s life.”  I keep going, and I keep going for myself and for my little guy.  I no longer rely on any dogma, but on my own  inner voice.  I am trudging, but I am trudging on a different path than I had initially thought.  We are all trudging our own road to whatever destiny has either been predetermined or created by our own hard work.  I am beginning to hear my own voice after years of speaking in 12 step script.  If you are reading this and want to leave AA, you can do it.  You are not powerless.  I wish you all of the best in this world.  You will not meet me in a meeting and I not there, on some level, to help you.  I am now walking in the footsteps of that blessed transmission line that you will not see in AA.  This is not the line that you met in AA, the one that told you to wonder about your own thinking.   I am one of the women who knew we were unsafe in meetings, believing in in 12 step dogma.  I got up and got out.  You can, too. 

I am Helping you Because You are My Mother

I am Helping You Because You are my Mother and You Asked Me to Help You....

(a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY ROUGH DRAFT)

(Below is a classic example of when a wannabe writer tells, and um, does not show; but the germ of my idea out there in this piece of writing, for the most part.) 

I heard this once:  

"I am helping you because you are my mother and because you are telling me to help you."  

And for some reason I always remembered it.  I kept on thinking about it as I was reviewing the rules of parallel construction when I had to take the teaching test.  I thought it was the most perfect "almost exemplification" of this rule.  It is not actually parallel construction.

However, the sentence's rhythm, especially within its context--a loving, loyal daughter speaking to her mother--creates a lulling like a lullaby sound and feel. When parallel construction is used, often the reader feels a sort of lulling, at least into understand a text or speaker's meaning.   This sentence--and so it also is for many sentences employing parallel construction-- ushers in a definition of meaning, an offering of an explanation in such a pretty, lyrical way that you simply cannot forget it.  These words from her daughter are like a stanza from a hidden poem that might have discovered. It’s a song, loved by many, but perhaps not yet covered in any great way. Her daughter's words are tattooed in my brain.  They were etched into the rhythm of my memory.  They have become part of my song, or at least, they have become part of my own voice.  

As she relayed the story to me, my eyes widened with anticipation.  But I wanted to stop her, too, to distract her at least a bit.  For the rest of the story, especially its ending, was going to be rich in a way that I wanted to prolong.  But mostly, my impatience and excitement overtook my desire for prolonging the pleasure from a story, this story in particular, and so I needed the details, and needed them rapidly.  I breathed in and willed myself to remain as silent possible.

But I needed to ask her and so I did.  "Did Lacy think you were crazy, Nancy?  Did she ask you why you were dong what you were doing?"

Nancy cackled in a girly way that lit up her fifty-something-year-old face.  "Lacy told me, she yelled it to me, she screamed in my face, her face was so red, she was like rage itself, she said,  'I am helping you because you are my mother and because you are telling me to help you.'"

She launched further into the story, full forced, her voice intense.  Her body leaned this way and that, clenching and relaxing feeling every feeling it had felt all those years back.  Her hands and fingers molded the air, illustrating the scene and setting up the stage of her memory.  Her engagement right and wedding band jingled as she gestured, her finger thin to the bone.  I knew it was wrong to be jealous of her sickness induced skinniness. As she spoke I saw.  Her daughter, in a state almost as crazed as her own, flung the arm of the futon out the window.  Fake teak, splintered and graphic hit the ground without apology.  And then the futon's cushions, and then the TV, and then a single piece of the kitchen table, a lone leaf.  Among true, autumn  leafmeal, lay (look up--problem for Violet!) the remains of Dice's furniture.    They were hurried in this endeavor.  It needed to be finished before Dice returned from his mid shift factory job.  They held their breath hoping that his son would not somehow come home early.  It was imperative that the mom and daughter evict this father and son timely, quick quick!, before any sort of interruption could arrest their cathartic, cleansing solution.  They looked around their small, tired apartment, dull in its practical construction.  Their own TV, table, and beds remained.  School pictures and artwork created by Lacey and her sister, Megan hung neatly, zealously almost usurping the loneliness that invited Dice and his son into their lives in the first place.  In a hard scramble pile, looking very much like an earthquake victim's former life, was their new beginning.  Gingerly and then plainly, the teenage girl and young woman stuck their heads out of the apartment's window.  If they blurred their eyes and pretended just a little bit: below them were bodies without arms and arms without bodies.  

I picture her rage attack, their rage attack, on a day very similar to today.  I look at the window and see an evening similar to the one they saw that same day.  And then I look outside of her window, over fifteen years back.  And I see: all Dice's belongings, as well as his son's.  Everything broken, scatters, but also clumped in a sense, all dead, ruined, embarrassed and demeaned.  The young woman, the teenager, and now I saw this all.  And Nancy, today, she looked at the debris again as she had all those years back.  We looked as they had beneath them, and they began to sense a quiet so profound it was nearly heartbreaking.  Their apartment was now their own.  It was filled now only with their own things, cast offs not contemporary to the setting of that decade, the 90's.  Their present, a mother and her two daughters who became so quickly enmeshed with this leaching monster and his sad son was now their past.  It was a matter of the furniture.  

"Everything they owned, their whole entire lives was now..." Nancy inhaled here, pausing, and looked at me.  I looked at her.   This particular pause in the story was like an epic rock and roll pause, "It was out of the window and on the ground outside."  She exhaled, looking out the window of the restaurant, but I knew she was really looking outside the window of that long ago apartment she shared with Lacey and her other daughter, Megan. 

She giggled now, a noise or motion that seemed forced in order to shake a kid of permanent sadness.  Shaking her head at the younger, unbalanced woman she was once.  She explained,  "It was going nowhere, we weren't safe.  Dice had stolen jewelry, cheap stuff from the girls several times.  And their allowances had gone missing.  At first, Nancy had thought it was Dice's boy.  His sad eyes, never changing, not even at dinner, not even when they were laughing together.  She had believed with her whole entire heart that the meetings were supposed to get you better; they were supposed to help everybody, right?  Her sponsor told her to pray about it.  her sponsor told her to read a page out of the AA book, a page that ushered the ex user into a mindset of complete acceptance, as acceptance, it was believed in the meetings, was the solution to all of their problems. 

Dice, she had realized soon after he moved in, had never really gotten clean.  Sure, he was done with booze, it was a sloppy high that little to take the edge off.  But Dice was a heroin addict.  And he would never change, ever.  

Nancy's voice got higher and faster the deeper she went into the story.  "Violet," she told me, speaking my name to engage me in a way that I could hardly not bring myself to it was  the meditating that did it.  It was the meditating that led me to this."  She shook her had again, "I knew we had to cut up the furniture with the electric knife and the ax.  I told you, I swear to you right here in this restaurant, it came to me while I was in one of my many trances at the Buddhist Center.  I would go there sometimes three times daily.  I let Lacey and Megan make their own supper all the time, for god sakes.  I do not know what Dice and his son ever ate; I do not think they did.  I knew Megan would cook for Lacey; that much I did know...” She looked down at her plate of half eaten salad then.  It was a look that portrayed a shame, the kind of shame that only certain people live to articulate. The look struck me on a visceral level and it felt like seeing a  familiar, but long forgotten enemy at a party--a mean, mean bully from middle school who rushes momentarily back into your life, if only for that night. .  I shook for a moment, and then shook the shaking off.  I took a sip of chowder.  And I waited.

 "But I know that my girls were there alone... With them!  God knows what could have happened.  I did not know.  I did not care.  I was meditating.  Anything can become addictive, anything."  She looked at me and waited.  She wanted me back at meetings.  She said, really without saying, that I should drop a class, work less hours, stop spinning.  She wanted me to be a follower of hers at the local AA meeting.  

I took a breath.  I put a spoon filled with chowder into my mouth and considered my furniture without her.  I looked into the road ahead of me and I felt the sort of loneliness that kicks you from the inside.  It kicks and then seems to, almost at the same time, hollow you out like a kid's jack o lantern.  But you've got no scary face.  You've got no face.  You're hollow and you're forgotten.  You were going to ornament a festivity, but then you became flawed, and you were tossed.  The air outside was brilliant, clear, sparkling, fall sunshine, eclipsed only by the occasional deep evening clouds.  I wondered if she was part of my forever.  Was she going to be the mother I never really had, or was she going to be a soft memory usurped by sadness, sadness over losing yet another person.

"You cut up all of all of Dice's furniture and threw it out the window with your daughter's help?"  I asked.  There was no point of clarification; it was not really a question.  It was a silly stall tactic. And Lacy helped you, being the dutiful daughter that she is?"  I imagined Lacy just then.  And though I knew my days of friendship with Nancy were numbered (she was not a proper mommy sub, nor was she interested in the job, she was dying after all) I felt the familiar pang of jealousy I always did when Nancy talked about either one of her daughters. Lacy looked like me a bit.  Were wee a similar height, build, and coloring.  She had a broader, more ethnic looking nose.  I thought, "Jewish?”  when I first saw her.  But then her crucifix style cross looked more like a rosary in it gaudiness, cheap carrot gold with fake ruby gems dotting its slender chain.  Lacy was certainly more endowed than me, but I will not e that this is not saying too much about her bust size.  I could see her cross skimming her cleavage in a way that suggested nice girl, bad girl, simultaneously.  

"How many meetings are you going to?" Nancy furrowed her brow and continued with, "And when was the last time you went to a meeting?"  Did you go here, in town?  Or did you go south to the city.  I know you're lonely and I do not blame you."  

At least she empathized somewhat.  I was stuck in this tourist town that became nearly deadly in its dullness over the autumn, winter, and early spring.  I had tried forgiving the men at the meetings in my town, but I could not bring myself to.  I loved myself more; I had to.  And the meetings out of town took time.  It was too much time away from Sammy, and Sammy needed me.  His dad was in a fucking shelter after all.

How could I tell her that I was finished with all of it.  The idea of sobriety bored me to tears, and then there was “my using” and how it was not the true issue anyhow.  I had PTSD from abandonment issues.  My boarding school days--I know, poor little rich girl--among other abandonment examples had essentially fucked me for good.  And soon, she would be leaving, too. "I'm trying, "I smiled in a pleading way.  "Love me," is what I meant. "Invite me to your family's Halloween party. Anything,"  I wanted to shout. 

I looked out into the autumn evening and then I looked at her old, tired face.  How long would she be here?  Even if she did not choose to leave me, she was being pulled away from this planet faster than I could control.  My throat tightened as I saw a hospital bed in my mind. Cancer.  And then the worse thought, "Does she really even have cancer."  I had been around in, or avoiding AA for so long that I had become pretty apt at picking out all sorts of cons.  It was true that I was most certainly still ridiculously naive; however, I got hunches that others missed, too.  And I had to wonder at the authenticity of her sickness.  She'd been stage four forever.  

I saw her check her watch then.  And I saw where she was going in her mind.  Lacey. The prettier version of me.  Me, with an ethnic nose and bigger boobs.  Me, with a mom.  And I saw them crouched by that garden style window, ugly in its function.  I see the ceiling pop corned.  I see the carpet, that depressing, apartment, beige carpet.  It is the kind of carpet that echoes, "Lower middle class, lower middle class." Mom and Lacy together.  They have gotten rid of the monster.  And they will always rid themselves of any monster, together, the two of them.  Today, Lacy's cross, Nancy's sensible Aerosole shoes.  In those days, Nancy is more sluttified.  Plunging V-Neck, tight, camel toe jeans and her daughter, probably fifteen the day of the furniture, in an equally sluttied up outfit.  Like mother like daughter, slut like slut. 

When I was fifteen I was at my father's mostly.  I did not have the sophistication to wear a bra that helped.  I wore make up to hide, not invite.  And I wore my clothes at least two sizes too big.  Nobody bothered to tell me I was a petite, especially not my mother who was five foot seven inches tall.   My petite grandmother, whose height I had inherited, was so ugly and had double d breasts to boot.  She was not me; she was nothing like me in her frumpy, matronly overbearing almost sickness.  I tried to borrow my friend’s femininity back then.  I remember friends literally being about twice the size of me.  So I then took to learning how to look female from Seventeen and from the ratty college students who lived in my town.  And I tried to cover some seamy episodes with my conservative preppiness.  I did not blow my boyfriend, thank you, do you notice my Keds?  No, I did not puke when he came in my mouth, do you see my impeccable Champion sweatshirt tucked into my Gap Jeans?  Note how my bob hairstyle is undercut professionally. Look, my mom does not speak to me, but she picked me up from school in our Peugot.  Instead of saving me from the monster, she pushed me out the window.  She looks out with relief, as she sees me broken, a bird who permanently is unable to fly.  I am stuck in the clump of furniture debris tossed, ended lives; I am outside of the window.  It is autumn again and I am alone; it is growing cold.  I’m scared because I am with Dice and his son.  My artwork has long since been forgotten.  I close my eyes to remember a puffy sheep water- colored with an intensity I no longer remember.  I am scared out here without my artwork, without my childhood belongings, and I am hiding with and from thee kicked away men.  Do you hear me?  I am calling you name? 

My mother will survive as will Lacey, Megan, and their mother.  They are crafty and can cut up furniture just short of an hour; it is a quick autumn, evening’s work.  I am calling to her, I am screaming her name, “Nancy, please, it is not too late for me, I can see out the window.  I can see myself below.  I need you to come out here, now.  I need you to help me get back inside!”

Later--about a week later--October 2, 2011

I was reading an interview with E. Schappell's man, Rob Spillman.  He writes about started where the story starts, not starting before this.  For example, if a man shoots a gun in a car, not writing about the man putting his socks on, finding his keys, and then getting into the car, but shooting the gun off in a car!  This was not his example, prolly obviously.  Fuck! I cannot write anymore.  But I am trying.  I am like the dilettante craftsman, building sloppy birdhouses, punctuating my already shitty yard was something sad.  Spillman also speaks to the notion of writing with confidence.  Um, yeah.  I will try to get to this.  

Good Night Nobody

I cannot decide which loss is more difficult to bear: the loss of my immediate family or missing my youth. I cannot believe my son is now the same age as I was when my parents split apart.  I was  forced to spend my weekends out of town with my unstable father.  Fantasizing about suicide, but then regaining my my more even demeanor by looking at all of my Espirit shirts hanging in my closet.  Even today, over twenty years later, I remember sitting on the carpeting of my father's rented house.  And I remember one Espirit shirt in particular, it's coolness large in my thirteen year old's mind--its ragged white and maize colored, college lined strips, soothing me.  Sometimes I consider writing about them, my family.  I would rewrite some of it, to fit them into my mind in a more loving way.

If any of you, my family,  were to ever read this, I am talking to you as I was back then:

I love you.  I am mean because I hate myself, and the little one is not as sweet as she seems.  I need your help, please help me.  I cannot ask you because I did not realize I would need to, and because I do not trust you.

But I miss:

The hill in our back yard

Mom's melon baller

The tupperware contained mom makes chocolate milk in

I miss the university the shirts you two both had, the grey ones with maroon lettering.  You two made me think that silly, low brow, overly average college was a kingdom of coolness, an epic academic environment.

I miss dad throwing the pasta outta the strainer so it'd bounce offa the cabinet and on to the counter, just to make me laugh.

If I had known it was all so fleeting, that once we left that place, that'd be it, I would have held onto you with everything I had.

I canot believe it ended, all of us. I thought it was a forever thing.  I never stopped loving you.

Books that Have Saved My Life

I have never had a ton of friends, other than that time in middle school when I was popular for a tiny spell. Oh, and there was that time in fourth grade when the mean girls demanded everyone vote for class president and I won. I was one of the only authentically nice kids. I get bored and lonely in my isolation at times. Sometimes I think that if I hated reading I may not be alive.

Here is another list.

1. Lullabies for Little Criminals, Heather O’Neil

This is a book about “Baby” and her junky (junkie) father, Jules. Reading this book was like reading Seventeen magazine and instead of seeing cheesy girls buying lame prom dresses, you see these smart, street girls learning how to score heroin, become prostitutes and then, transcend this bad scene and escape into an almost fairy tale ending. This book created my obsession with the idea of an alphabet book for street kids. And it gave me a literary father.

2. Flowers in the Attic, VC Andrews

This is not a joke. If it weren’t for Catherine, Christopher, and the creepy savior of a doctor who wants to “have his way” w/ Catherine while she’s still in high school, I’m not sure I would have developed a reading addiction. These books, and others of their ilk, were all I read during middle school.

2. The Color Purple, Alice Walker

This was the first book I ever read (at age seventeen) that made/helped me believe in a God of my own understanding. Later, I realized that "believing in a God of my own undrstanding" was a term created by the 12 step cult, AA. I will say now that this is the first book that truly modeled for me how one can beleive in God, but that it does not have to be the creepy Jesus type God that never appealed to me.

3. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman

I read this while I was doped out on painkillers after having my son. I still gain great comfort from the notion of a sisterhood/coven of mothers giving babies bottles filled with Dr. Pepper.

4. Squandering the Blue, Kate Braverman

These short stories taught me that the best fiction writers are also poets. One story about a single mother struggling with alcoholism gave me these lines (about her addiction) which I have remembered for almost twenty years: “It is the blue that knows you. It knows where you live. And it is never going to forget.” Interestingly, though I still love these lines, I know now that this characer was stuck in the AA cult and did not know it, nor did the author who created her. Later, the auther described in anther book, Small Craft Warnings, the inauthenticity of people the AA.

5. The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton

“Stay gold, Ponyboy.” I think I used to say this in middle school. I should start saying it again.

6. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger

I believe that this world is divided into two parts: those who have read and loved this book with their whole hearts, and then the other people. The idea of that poem-covered baseball glove still astounds me.

7. Let Evening Come, Jane Kenyon

This book made me realize that poetry is often the same thing as prayer.

8. The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute

This was the first book I remembering my parents talking about in an in depth way. I snuck parts of it. Reading it later inspired a summer long research project funded by UNH on rural poverty and its depictions in literature. I heart Ruben Bean.

9. Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison

A book that helped me understand that not all mothers are willing to take a bullet for their daughter; Allison helped me out of this scary emotional isolation.

10. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle

This whole story—and the very notion of “tesseracting”--is astronomically cool. However, here is why I love this book: whenever I feel grouchy about having small boobs, or being kinda mousy, blah blah blah, I remember that Meg Murphy was not popular or pretty. Yet, she totally rocked and she rocked hard.

11. A-Z Picture Book, Gyo Fujikawa

There are so many alphabet books; this is the best one. And I am almost certain that this was the book that ushered me into the world of reading.

12. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

…Because every time I reread why it is a sin to kill a mocking bird, I still cry.

13. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

I love that all Oskar wanted to do was take a sad song and make it better, even though he just did not know how.

14. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

This book blew my mind. “Caddy held me…she smelled like trees.”

15. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

This book made me think that my freak-showish-ness was somehow cool which is always a super great feeling.

16. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume

As a young girl, I escaped from an afternoon filled with mean girls, went home, sat on my bed, and read this book cover to cover. I still feel like Margaret is my literary twin, as her birthday, like mine, is March 8th.