Drunk Mom (26 page)

Very funny, I tell him.

I don’t know whom to believe, is all that he says.

I know that he doesn’t believe me. I know that.

On the day of Frankie’s birthday, I think about that first day in the hospital after he was born.

You were only a little baby, I say to his baby face. He looks at me with serious eyes.

He has no idea it’s his birthday. How could he know? Still, I’ve bought him ridiculous amounts of toys—bags of colourful building blocks, trains, trucks. I already know that he’ll be more interested in the packaging than whatever is inside, but I love the illusion of celebrating this milestone. I’m overcompensating.

My boyfriend is cold. I suspect he has reached his limits with me and his hate is slowly surfacing, getting harder and harder to hide. He gives me a murderous look when I joke about deserving some presents. I mean, it was mostly my doing that the little human is here with us and it was me who spent twenty-three hours in labour.

It is that look that upsets me and I decide that I’m not joking after all and we almost have a fight as I whine about not being appreciated. We make up because it is Frankie’s birthday and we shouldn’t be fighting. At least not in front of the baby, on his first birthday. Even if he has no idea it’s his birthday.

He’s looking at our faces—eyes still watchful, big—as they explode, implode and then quiet down.

Everything’s okay, sweetie.

Are you sure? his eyes ask. He’s in his high chair, eating cereal.

I’m totally sure, my eyes say back.

I have no idea what happens during the day. I guess I go to work. I pick up some vodka on the way home.

When I get home, my boyfriend’s mother is already waiting for us to get ready. We’re supposed to go to a fancy restaurant to celebrate the big event. The birthday.

My boyfriend’s mother is nice to me but I imagine I notice her
looking at me a little too closely. I wonder if I should bring up the vodka-smelling incident from the night before, but I decide to let it go. This is my method of convincing people that they’re wrong about me—to show them that I have no qualms about attacking the issue head-on. I figure that they can’t possibly think I’m guilty of something if I confront it myself. My delusional bravery is a substitute for honesty. But it’s too risky to bring it up now, especially since there’s not a lot of time left to get ready for our dinner and I still have to down my mickey.

I drink the mickey in the bathroom while I get ready. It goes down so easily lately, just drinking it straight from the bottle—no problem. I ignore the burning, just bear it, pretend I must do this. I must do this.

Maybe it’s the presence of my boyfriend’s mother downstairs, or just the general sense of urgency today, but I finish so quickly I’m suddenly panicked about not having had enough. This is always a problem. I never have enough. But I can usually just change places, move, pass out. Tonight is supposed to be many hours of being stuck at a restaurant table, pretending. I am no longer capable of just sitting. Just sitting is the most impossible thing. I can’t imagine it happening.

I never know what I’m going to do. But now I worry. I worry that I know what I’m going to do. Just sit there and sit there. And sit there.

I do my eyes. I do something with my hair. Twist it and tie it—one mickey, what was I thinking?—and pin it.

I open the bottom drawer in the vanity. This is where we keep all the pills and Band-Aids and medical things like that. I know there’s nothing illegal in there, no fun pills—I’ve eaten all the fun stuff already—but you never know and this is an emergency.

Noises from downstairs: baby giggling.

I open the door to the bathroom to announce I won’t be much longer. My boyfriend says, okay, no rush.

I start sorting through various bottles and containers and boxes of crap in the drawer. Nothing. Just your regular Tylenol and vitamins and such. Finally, I fish out a bottle of sleeping pills. They are my boyfriend’s prescription pills, so I guess they are better than nothing. I never take sleeping pills. I suppose they sort of make you high? They make you sleepy, too, I’m sure, but with my energy levels that’ll be impossible. So maybe they’ll just numb me out a bit more to get me to that perfect level. So that, for once, I’ll be able to just sit.

Now we are in the restaurant and my boyfriend’s mother is saying something. Everybody is saying something. I’m saying something. Or I think I’m saying something. But I can’t open my mouth; it requires too much energy.

Speaking of energy, the restaurant is screaming, dishes are being broken somewhere in the kitchen. There’s music playing over the noise, something with a steady beat. We’re in the middle of the room, people are eating pasta out of bowls all around us. Everyone is so annoying, talking and laughing. Shut up. I’m so tired. Deadly tired. Tiredly dead.

The baby is smashing things, bread, throwing it on the floor.

The waiters say it’s no big deal.

It’s his birthday, I explain.

One of the waiters says to me, Happy birthday.

Not mine, I meant the baby’s birthday. I’m not celebrating anything.

I am, but it’s
his
birthday. I’m celebrating the baby’s birthday, right?

My boyfriend’s mother looks at me.

I get up. I have to go to the bathroom, I announce.

I drag my feet up the carpeted stairs.

Why is there a carpet on the stairs? This is a restaurant, no? Carpet on the stairs, I say to some girl walking by, can you believe it?

In the bathroom, I lock myself in the stall and lay my head on my knees. Just a micro nap. No more than two minutes. How long could a person be in the bathroom to not be in there for too long? Ten minutes? How about a ten-minute nap, then.

People walk in. A bunch of women talking. There’s only one other stall. Too bad.

It’s nice and warm in here. I fall asleep for a moment.

There are more voices, closer, some at the door. Somebody says, I can see her feet.

Her feet. My feet.

I open my eyes. God. Please. Shut up.

Yeah, I can see a pair of heels. Hey, you okay in there?

Heels. I’m wearing a new pair of heels. I can hardly walk in them sober and in this condition it’s a miracle that I’ve made it all the way up here. Probably because of that carpet on the stairs.

Another girl voice: You okay in there?

Yeah, yeah, I mumble. I’m gonna be out in a sec, just give me a sec.

I want to go back to my nap but it’s probably a bad idea. I don’t know what to do. I need a shock, I decide. I’d put my head in the toilet but I can’t with all those stupid bitches outside.

I’ll slap myself in the face.

First, I flush the toilet. Then I slap myself in the face. As hard as I can. I do it again and again. Flush, slap. Flush, slap. Wake up.

I’m not much more awake at all when I leave the stall.

I walk out of the bathroom and walk-cum-slide down the carpeted stairs back to the room where my boyfriend’s mother is sitting by herself now.

They just went outside. Frankie’s having a bit of a tantrum.

Okay.

I sit down.

I get on well with her, when I’m sober. She’s a beautiful and stylish woman and I love her sense of humour. I admire her. I used to watch her play stupid when her husband was alive, watch her pretend to forget things, do Marilyn Monroe eyebrows, girly laughs. And then she would do something—make a comment, stifle a giggle—that would be exquisitely discreet but so telling of the big brain whirling in that girly head of hers. Her husband was officially the smart one, but I wasn’t fooled.

She was slippery, clever. Which is what I remember now and it paralyzes me.

I may be drunk and three-quarters asleep but I’m in no way relaxed. Just the opposite. I’m in the throes of the worst combination of panic and coma.

How are you? You seem a bit flushed, she says, and her eyes scan my face. They seem to stop on my mouth.

Okay. I’m okay. Just so tired. We didn’t sleep much last night. Frankie kept getting up, wanting to be fed. I used up all the formula. I’m very, very tired.

You look tired, she says and lets it hang there as if waiting for me to say something. It’s not safe to say anything else, so I’m quiet.

I think she knows anyway. I also wonder if my face is bearing red handprints.

My boyfriend comes back with the baby. I pull Frankie onto my lap so that the boyfriend can eat the dish that has just arrived. Frankie twists and tenses his little back and refuses to sit on my lap. My boyfriend’s mother starts cooing to him, trying to distract him, but there’s no distracting him.

I better get up and take him outside. To calm him down, I announce.

Are you okay?

Of course. And to prove my point I walk as steadily as I can with a squirming baby and four-inch heels and with sleep that keeps pulling me under, not letting me off for a moment, even as I walk.

I sit outside on the steps with the baby in my lap, now quiet because he’s distracted by what’s going on around us. The road is busy. On the sidewalk there are people walking by, women’s eyes smiling at him, and everyone’s waving to him the way they always do.

I bury my head in his shoulder, feel him lean into me. If he could only stay this way. Still and hot. I could sleep a little.

But no, he squirms. He’s squirming so much I consider putting him down on the ground to teach him a lesson. See what happens. Someone stomping on him. Cars.

My boyfriend comes out of the restaurant and takes Frankie and says that I should go inside and eat.

His mother excuses herself when I show up.

I try to give her a smile but my mouth won’t cooperate and I end up yawning instead.

Before I have a chance to fall face down in my plate, my boyfriend comes back with the baby. He says again that I should eat. He says this through clenched teeth.

I eat whatever’s on the plate in front of me. I’ve no idea what’s on the plate in front of me.

I order coffee. Another one.

I’m fine, just really, really tired, I insist. My boyfriend keeps asking what’s wrong. His mother says nothing. Her mouth is getting thinner and thinner as the evening progresses.

The baby is trying to wiggle out of our arms again.

Well, are we done? says my boyfriend.

My boyfriend’s mother snaps out of it and says chirpily, Let’s get a dessert.

All three of us start waving at the waiter, desperate to not pay attention to one another if only for a brief moment.

The waiter comes and I tell him that it’s the baby’s first birthday.

He smiles and says nothing.

Perhaps I already told him that. I can’t tell the waiters apart.

The dessert arrives and I dive in. Maybe the sugar will kick-start me. I try to give the baby a spoonful of crème brûlée, but he won’t have any, moves his face away and spits.

My boyfriend’s mother takes a picture.

The baby whacks the bowl of crème brûlée suddenly with his little fist and it shatters on the ground.

I shout.

The boyfriend shouts at me for shouting.

The waiters are here again, shouting that it’s no big deal.

Let’s just go, I say, and my boyfriend says something back and then I tell him to fuck off and his mother says loudly, Stop it you two, but I know she wants to say things loudly to me exclusively but won’t because she’s too polite for that.

They bring us our bill right away. My boyfriend’s mother pays.

Outside we get into separate cabs. As soon as we start moving, I fall asleep with my head on my boyfriend’s arm, the baby safely buckled up on his lap.

I
don’t know where I am. This place looks familiar but it also looks completely foreign, like a sketch of a place that I should know but the sketch is too wacky to make any sense of. This often happens when parts of my mind are still short-circuiting between a blackout and consciousness, trying to hang on to the latter.

I have my bicycle with me and I’m not wearing any shoes. I’m not in the middle of the road for a change, falling off my bicycle and breaking one of my shoes. That’s what I remember doing just a few minutes or few hours ago. My baby’s birthday was three nights ago and then I broke my shoes tonight, but that’s all I recall at first. I’m now somewhere where I don’t know where I am and it’s been three days since my baby’s birthday and I broke my shoes. That was tonight, the shoes.

Once I recall the shoes, there are suddenly more memory scraps of what unfolded this evening. First there was vodka at home, then I was
on the patio of a bar, with a friend, and I fell off a chair. Then I had to go. I was thirsty. I ordered pints in another bar, a shot of something. Then I was falling onto the road, twice, cars swishing by, blaring their horns, massive bright lights right in my eyes.

Now it’s not light at all. I’m more or less safe, I suppose, not lying in the middle of a speeding road with broken shoes, but I can’t tell for sure. I’m too drunk to focus long enough to know what the what.

I’m so lost.

I have no choice but to call for help. I dig my cellphone out of my pocket, my hand reaching there as if on autopilot, some kind of a physical memory that tells it that’s where the phone is. Me? I can’t remember shit like that. I can’t remember the number either so I try to punch it without looking, letting my fingers do the remembering.

Where are you? my boyfriend says.

I don’t know. I don’t have any shoes. I lost my shoes.

Are you okay?

I don’t know. I’m not. Can you come and get me?

I can’t. Everyone’s gone home, I’m alone with Frankie.

Just leave him, he’ll be fine.

Where are you?

I look around me again. I’m in another dimension, that’s where I am. It’s as if some force grabbed me when I was going into a blackout and then just threw me right in the middle of here, wherever here is. But I have to try to figure it out. I squint and look around. I move slowly with my cellphone, surveying the area. No clue. Sidewalk, glass, cars, vegetable stand. I don’t know.

What do you see?

Sidewalk, glass, cars, vegetables.

What’s the name of the street? What street?