Drunk Mom (19 page)

It’s starting to rain as we pull into the parking lot, and the boyfriend and I smile to each other, sadly. We are probably thinking the same thing in our helplessly poetic brains: how appropriate, this rain.

He carries my small suitcase into the building while I go to the front desk and sign in. I immediately get cuffed in a plastic hospital bracelet with my name on it. I no longer belong to the world, just this place.

We hug, quickly, and I take a deep, deep breath to inhale his smell as we do. My boyfriend says he loves me. I see his hand going up to his eyes and I tell him to go, leave, get back to Frankie.

Wide leather shoulders. My last glimpse.

After filling out forms and disclosing yet more personal details (names of emergency contacts, names of the child, the spouse, middle names belonging to me, nicknames people should call me, last time I used,
what I used, am I on Nicorette, would I like to be) to strangers, I’m finally taken to my room.

The room is big and cold. There’s a linoleum floor, two narrow beds with plastic mattress covers and thin, chewed-up hospital blankets. A pillow clearly made out of plastic, rustling in its starched-white case. A rickety night table sits by each bed supporting a lamp with a fluorescent bulb. There’s a desk and a metal chair. Two windows with heavy curtains. The overhead lights are fluorescent too. The bathroom is awash in yellow.

My suitcase is placed on one of the beds and I am told to unpack it. There are two women with me. They are watching me unload the suitcase. A couple of shirts, a pair of jeans, nothing fancy; I haven’t brought any makeup. I brought some books. The stuffed guardian angel bear from my friend Angie. They flip through the books. What could I have hidden in between the pages of books? Sheets of acid? Powder? They fish out an album with the photos of my son and his father that I printed right before we left this morning. They say my son is cute.

Once the suitcase is empty, one of the women runs her hands against its bottom and opens the zippers on the side. Smart. I recall when I used to keep my mickey in the hidden second bottom of this suitcase last summer.

After they’re done, one of them says she’s sorry.

No, it’s your job, I smile at her.

I’m told to finish unpacking and settle in.

When the door opens half an hour later, it’s as if a force enters, not a girl.

She’s tall, in tight jeans, high-heeled boots. She’s got a head full of tight curls. She seems to be in the middle of some hilarious story about
a fireman. I quickly learn it’s someone she’s dating, someone who’s so dreamy, she says, I just wanna eat him up, oh my god. At this, she bursts out laughing and the two women who come in with her laugh along. They are setting down one giant suitcase each on her bed; the girl has a suitcase too. Three suitcases in total.

She bounces up to me with her hand extended, bracelets clinking madly as we shake, I’m Sade. Like Sad but with an e, she says. Like the singer.

Up close she smells of candy and cigarette smoke.

What about this? What’s this? one of the women calls.

Oh, that’s just my makeup. I have a whole suitcase of makeup, can you believe it? Oh my god, that’s my vanilla bodyspray, leave it. Leave it. I just love vanilla, don’t you?

The two women take turns sniffing the spray bottle.

There’s no alcohol in it, come on you guys, Sad-with-an
-e
laughs.

Sorry, it’s the procedure, one of the women explains.

I watch as they unpack loads and loads of clothes: shoes, sweaters, skirts, dresses, underwear in every colour imaginable. The third suitcase contains a large comforter and matching sheets. There’s a bag of fluffy towels. In the makeup suitcase, there are bags of hair products, which the women say they have to confiscate as it’s against the rules. Sade screams once when they shove the hair products in a basket they’ve brought with them, but stops protesting almost immediately and rolls her eyes at me, saying she should’ve known better, this is her third time here.

I got kicked out for smoking, right, Mary? she says, Too funny, my god. I got caught, she laughs.

She laughs all the time. Everything is funny.

After the women leave, Sade moves her bed so that it’s parallel to mine and she starts sticking photographs on the wall beside it. She takes her clothes and all her products to the closet in the hallway where my things hang sadly, sternly.

She talks non-stop.

Why are you here?

Alcohol. I drink too much. I—

I’m a crack ho. But I’m not really a crack ho, oh my god, I hate it. I do a couple of blasts, right, here and there? Right? But I’m not a crack ho. I’ve only walked the street a few times. This is my son, Jamal, look how cute he is. He’s with his babydaddy, John. Oh my god, he’s such a bird. He thinks he’s better than me. Because he doesn’t smoke crack but guess who introduced me to it? Yeah. But now he’s all like, he’s only doing lines and he thinks he’s all that. High-end or something. He’s got Jamal today but I’ve got full custody. So I was supposed to have him but I have to get an apartment with a bedroom for him and I have to be clean for at least a year. And they won’t let me see him. Like, you know, John will make plans to drop him off and then he’ll cancel last minute and what am I supposed to do? Call the cops? I don’t want my boy to hate on him so I say to him, ‘Honey, you know that Mommy loves you, right? What do you want to do?’ and he’ll cry and say, ‘I don’t know, Mommy, Daddy tells me—’ and I’m like, ‘What is Daddy telling you?’ and he’s all scared and he won’t answer me. He’s with John and his parents and John’s got a girlfriend who’s pregnant now and I’m like, you’ll see what you’re getting yourself into, you’ll see. Three babies with three different women and he’s better than me. He’s such a fucking bird. He’s going to some stupid cooking school and his parents are paying for it and he’s the shit? I was going to get my nursing degree—

Three hours into rehab, I’m hiding out in what is known as the Quiet Room. My head is pounding and I’m trying to read but I can’t quite see the words on the page, I don’t know what any of it means—the words—and I am afraid to go back to my room. At the same time I can’t wait to find out more—Sade is better than having a TV in my room. And I don’t think about drinking. The rehab is clearly working.

B
efore supper, the first night, in the women’s lounge, we unload our big and little burdens right away: our addictions, boyfriends, babies. I’m surprised at how quickly we reveal ourselves to each other. Then again, none of us are here because we mistook this place for a spa.

My roommate laughs all the time, and the girls huddle around her like a fire. The other crack addict, Donna, is skeletal and shaky and says things in bursts and spurts while playing with the strings of her hoodie. Her teeth are exquisite, white and even. When I compliment her on them, she says she ground her real teeth rotten, these are dentures. She has a thick dressing on her chest that she says—creepily, mysteriously—hides her “special friend.”

I bond with other alcoholics. We share stories of hidden bottles. When I mention the liquor-store maps in my head, Tina, one of the alcoholics, laughs so hard she almost falls off the couch. I know exactly what you’re talking about, she says.

I say to the women when they ask that I miss my sweet little baby like crazy, but the truth is I feel nothing.

The first night, our meal is chicken with vegetables and a cup of watery soup and sticky cake. It’s tasteless and two Italian guys are complaining loudly about it. One pushes the plastic tray across the table and yells, It’s free and I’ll throw a fork in it for you, whoever wants it.

My roommate eats fast, as if she didn’t have any time to waste. It’s the only time when she seems to be serious and quiet. She refuses the bread roll and doesn’t eat her cake. She points to a non-existent bulge in her stomach.

Even here, I think, I notice other women doing weird things with food on their plates. Pushing the greasy bits aside, skipping the cake. I do weird things too. I skip the cake. The one person I catch eating everything is a counsellor with a round, pretty face. She actually reaches for the abandoned chicken dinner when she thinks no one is looking.

The meal is over in minutes. I escape to the kitchen. I’m alone for a few moments so I orient myself as quickly as I can and finally figure out where the fresh fruit is—I’ve seen a few people hoarding it already—and I grab a banana. I peel it, break it and eat it fast, fast, possibly inspired by my roommate. I also don’t want to eat a banana in front of anyone.

Some of the guys in here are exactly what I’d like to avoid. They’re not at all like my boyfriend. The ones capable of banana jokes have arms and legs covered in bad tattoos, rows of even scars. They talk about doing time. They don’t talk to one of their ilk because he was a pee-see. I find out later that this is PC, protective custody, which means that he ratted people out or worse.

The other guys I’d like to avoid are the ones in khaki dad pants and
sweatshirts that say
My Daughter Goes to Western and All I Got Is This Sweatshirt
. The dad pants smile at you like they’re your high school teachers but the joke is on them, because, soon, everyone here will revert to their teenage self and there will be only us versus them, the counsellors, when we start getting kicked out for smoking cigarettes.

According to our schedules, the days are divided into blocks, with way too much time devoted to meals and meds. According to the schedule, the dinner we’ve just had should have taken an hour and a half. I spend the rest of the hour and a half listening to more roommate stories in our room. We lie on the beds like girls at summer camp, our sock-clad feet in the air, moving up and down.

She got to New Hope by cab. She says, A friend—not like a boyfriend or anything—drove me here. For free. He’s been sober for years. He’s a cabbie. He’s in AA.

She talks about being on welfare, people lend her money, well, men do, it’s no big deal. She says she picks her face, says that’s what she is, a picker. She only does it real bad when she’s high. She smokes crack and then she picks her face, she imagines there’s something underneath her skin, zits waiting to pop up.

And now you’ll know what a crackhead looks like, just look at their faces, their jaws, a lot of them are pickers, she says.

I think about my neighbourhood back home and all those shady, shuffling people I’ve always wondered about. We live in a developing area, still full of sadness, the underground above ground, and its people in sweatpants, eyes flicking away. Now I will look at their faces and I will know.

At night, I toss and turn on the terrible bed with the plastic sheets and pillow. I fall asleep, finally, but am woken up by the most horrible stench coming from my roommate’s corner of the room. I hide under the towel that serves as an extra blanket and inhale my own familiar sweat and sour heat mixed with deodorant. Better.

A couple of hours later, I wake up again. The stench is gone. So is my roommate. She comes back and gets into bed. I hear wrappers being opened and crunching—eating—and one small burp.