Dry: A Memoir (18 page)

“Foster, this is crazy. What are we doing?”

“You said you liked crazy guys.”

“I know, but not, you know, crazy guys I’m in group therapy with.”

I make an effort to rise; Foster pushes me back down. “Stay,” he says.

I stay, lie back flat. I close my eyes. He rolls over on his side, puts his arm over my chest.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

Wendy’s face is in my head, along with the consent paper I signed at HealingHorizons, stating that I will not become romantically involved with any of the members of the group. “Nothing,” I lie.

Foster kisses my neck. “Know what I’m thinking?” he asks.

“I don’t know if I want to know.”

“Yes you do, I guarantee. So ask me.” He gives me a shake.

“Okay. Foster, what are you thinking?”

“Gee, Auggie, how sweet of you to ask. I was thinking that I can’t wait to see people’s reactions in Group when we walk in this afternoon, together, late.”

“Shit. C’mon, let’s go.”

Foster is laughing and I’m pulling him up from the bed by his arm, shoving the khakis at him.

“I’ll walk in after you,” I plot.

He slides his pants on, buttons them. “Aww. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

We take a cab downtown, Foster clutching my index finger in his hand the whole way. It’s a sweet gesture because he does it without thinking, while he looks out the window. Before we walk into Group, I check my watch, see that we’re fifteen minutes late.

We open the door, the talking pauses and all heads turn. Foster walks in first, whispering, “Sorry, sorry, go ahead.”

I take a seat on the opposite side of the room from him, despite the fact that the chair next to his is empty. Peter, one of the alcoholics in group, continues where he left off before we came in. I look at Peter, giving him my complete attention. Then, I briefly sneak a look at Foster. And Foster, the idiot, is smiling widely, staring not at Peter but directly at me.

This evening Hayden and I were walking on Perry Street heading home from dinner and I was wondering out loud which apartment Linda Hunt lived in because I read she lived on Perry Street; used to see her walk her dog. In fact, the first time I saw her I was squatting down scooping up Virgil’s shit into a Zip-Loc baggie and she was standing there, almost face-to-face to me, and she asked how old my dog was. The one time a celebrity, an Oscar winner no less, speaks to me, I am hunched over, collecting feces off the street.

As we were walking, a man in a wheelchair, parked on the sidewalk in front of his brownstone building, said something to us. I ignored him, assumed he wanted money. I walked on, then noticed Hayden had turned around, stopped. They were talking. I didn’t hear what they were saying because I was further ahead, frowning back at him. I was annoyed that he was talking to an older man in a wheelchair. Hayden waved me over and said, “This gentleman needs our help. He’s been waiting for somebody strong to come along.”

I’m strong, so Hayden volunteered me. The man focused his attention on me. I looked between them, impatient and annoyed.

Finally, the man in the wheelchair said, “Thank you for offering your help. If you could just get me up the stairs and unlock my apartment door.”

He produced his keys, fumbling with them with his semiparalyzed hands, looking for the correct key among the many. I was thinking,
You don’t need to show me the key now; you can show it to me at the door if I can’t immediately figure it out
. Since I was now going to help him, I wanted to do it as quickly as possible. I wanted it to be over. “Just wait one minute while I park my wheelchair over there by the stairs,” he said.

After his wheelchair was in position he hit a switch and turned the motor off. Then he asked me to pull the chain out of the pack on the back and fasten it to the railing of the stairs.

I forced a smile, although I felt conned. I reached into the bag and found the chain, then I secured the chair. All the while he sat, watching me. “Careful,” he said. And “Be gentle, please.” I wanted to say
Shut the fuck up
.

When I was done he asked me to carry him. “Just pick me up under my knees while I . . .”

I couldn’t hear another word he said because suddenly I knew I would be holding this man, carrying him up the stairs to his apartment. I heard “Like a baby. Just like a baby,” and I felt ill. I felt like I was visiting my mother.

My mother had a stroke ten years ago that left the right side of her body paralyzed, left her in a wheelchair. I thought about how I can never bring myself to visit her. And when I did, last time must have been over a year and a half ago, I could never bring myself to stay long. From the moment I walked in the door to her apartment, the need hit me in the face, thick like an odor. Would I change a lightbulb? Then roll her across the bridge. Then buy canned tuna. Then unscrew something, affix something or bring something to her and set it in her lap. Always turning something on or off, moving something from one side to another. As if she needed me to do these things, me specifically. As if she had been saving them up for me to do. Like they were gifts. Love. Dead birds she had caught and killed with claws, saved while I was away and dropped, all together in a mound on my doorstep for me to appreciate. Of course, they were such small things to do, but they each felt so impossibly large and uncomfortable to me.

I feel dirty when I visit my mother. I feel that her intimacy is exposed. Her nightgowns are so thin that her flesh shows through them. Her need is like a vagina. And I do not like to see it.

Her apartment isn’t as clean as our home was growing up. When I was a child, our house was immaculate; one dust mote on the teak dining table would be cause for a complete spring cleaning.

Like holding this man tonight, I’ve had to hold my mother, not carry her but hold her. I guess it’s called
hug
her. Or help her into a restaurant, hot-faced in shame. Looking around at the other people in the restaurant. Ashamed that my mother alone required two people to do the activities of one.

Furious, underneath of course, for giving me away to her lunatic psychiatrist when I was a little boy. And now paralyzed, needy, she has the nerve to crave?

I don’t go to see her because I don’t know her body. My mother in someone else’s body. A paralyzed woman’s body. Like she traded her own former lifeguard body in for one that was limp and frail and hungry. I resent her because I feel like she did this on purpose, made an impulse decision and now regrets it. Like it was a way of drawing attention, once again, back to her.

Of course this isn’t true. Hers simply broke, like a car, and she can never get a new one. A capillary burst in her brain one night while she was sleeping and when she woke up her life as she knew it was gone, like a dream. My mother lives inside a paralyzed woman’s body. When I hugged her, visited her, I was doing it to a stranger. I visited a body, like a medium that is a cripple and can fluently channel my dead mother. I feel particularly uncomfortable when I have to use her bathroom because it smells of something other than bleach or Soft Scrub. So does the kitchen. These rooms smell of paralysis. They smell of the handicapped.

My mother, who seemed to feel it was entirely okay to let a pedophile fuck me up the ass for three years when I was a teenager, this woman may not expect anything from me. She has not earned the right to expect me to change one lightbulb in her apartment. She gave me away when I was twelve, and she does not get to have me back.

But I did help the wheelchair man. I carried him all the way up to his apartment, four flights. He was light and silent like a bag of laundry. I delivered him right to the door. I had to reach into his pocket for the keys. It felt obscene, an invasion, my fingers against the heat of his dead leg. Yet he didn’t seem uncomfortable in the least. As if he were accustomed to invasions. Welcomed them maybe, or at least tolerated them. As I deftly slid each key through my fingers, hunting for what looked like an apartment key, he directed, “Not that one, not that one, the brass one, the round one,” until I had found the correct key. As I slid the key into the lock, I braced myself for what his apartment must be like. I expected a horrid, putrid, paralyzed smell to escape from the room like a big, bounding dog.

I opened the door and the apartment was stunning. It was large, artful and spotless. A Frank Gehry chair, beside a le Corbusier sofa. Bookshelves floor to ceiling, packed. Photographs on the wall, black frames and white mats. Photographs of him, before. Handsome, with friends, beachside. A computer and a fax and a glorious fireplace filled not with logs but with lilacs.

He asked me to take the change out of his pockets and put it on the counter. “No, not that counter, the other one, with the rest.” I set the change down, next to some other money. I thought,
I could take his money
. I could steal the small Picasso sketch that was framed and autographed. I could take his life. I could kick him and he would be defenseless. He lives on faith. Good faith. He thanked me and I smiled, told him it was nothing.

I was uncomfortable in my clothes all the way home, as if something of him wore off on me. I was afraid to touch my face, afraid of the transfer of molecules. I was thinking of a little girl I knew growing up, Annie, how she was playing in the yard and got dog shit in her left eye when she was four and caught a parasite that blinded her in that eye. I felt like some of his vulnerability, some of his need, some of his dependence, had attached itself to me.

He and my mother are like clams without shells. Clams and snails and lobsters without their shells. Vulnerable and exposed.

I e-mail my mother every day. She feels cut off if we don’t e-mail. Tonight, when there is no message, I feel oddly uncomfortable, disconnected. I wonder why she didn’t write. But I don’t wonder too deeply. I don’t consider that she might have fallen. Or had a seizure. Or another stroke like the one that took away her left side. I don’t think of her being hungry. Or depressed. I think of her as illuminated words on my computer screen, sometimes misspelled, but always there. Able to file away in her own little folder. And it’s sequential, our relationship. It’s never one on one. It’s one after the other. Time and date stamped. I’m removed from her not just by miles and cities, not just by computer, but also by time. I call fairly often, but I don’t send her any money even though a little of mine would be huge for her.

Is this punishment?

It just feels too difficult to find the stamp, make out the check and mail it off. Like when you have a dream where you’re trying to run underwater. I’m not committed to my mother. I treat her with the same regularity I feel she treated me.

Sometimes I fantasize about having a mother who wears a pleated navy skirt, crisp white shirt and a pale blue sweater draped casually across her shoulders. Her tan leather bag doesn’t rattle with prescription bottles when she tosses it on the seat of the car. And this version of my mother can be made happy with something from the Macy’s catalogue instead of the Physician’s Desk Reference. She would have a shoulder-length bob.

“Would you mind helping me with these bottles?” she would ask. My mother would have been to a farmer’s market in Hadley. She would take long baths in goat milk. “I just love what it does for my skin.”

When I hand her my report card, all A-’s, she would say, “You know, it might not seem like much, but that extra effort, that extra ten percent, could mean the difference between Princeton and Bennington.” Then she would smile at me in a way that suggested a private in-joke. “Bennington, darling. Think about it. Lesbians.”

Even in my fantasy, I would hate my mother sometimes. I would think she was petty and materialistic. I would complain. “You’ve already had your eyes done once.”

And she would reply, “No. That’s not accurate. They weren’t done correctly, so this counts as the first time.”

My mother would date men who own franchises.

“But you’ve always loved a Blimpie,” she would say, trying to convince me.

“He’s a pig, mom. He scratches his butt and then smells his fingers. I’ve seen him do it. Plus, his fingers are hairy.”

She would go on monthly pilgrimages to New York City where she would return loaded with bags from all the shops on Fifth Avenue. I would, from a distance, come to view Manhattan as a mall without a roof. I would not romanticize it. I would make a mental note to avoid it forever.

So when I turned eighteen, I would apply to USC. My mother would be aghast. “Good God, you can’t be serious. The University of Southern California? Have you been smoking pot? What can you be thinking? What are you going to major in, fast food preparation technologies? Surfing?”

I would say, “No, mother. Entomology.”

She would hate that I used this word because she wouldn’t know what it meant and would feel I was only using it to be showy (I would be a bookworm). “Well, if you want to be a doctor, I don’t know why you wouldn’t stay out East.”

“Entomology is bugs, mom. It’s the study of insects.”

She would freeze, nail polish brush midair. “What?”

I would look at her. Then I would shrug. “What?”

“Bugs?”

“Yeah. Entomology. Bugs.”

She would replace the brush into the bottle and screw it tightly. She would blow on her nails and her eyes would meet mine. “How can I phrase this so I don’t hurt your feelings, damage your youthful enthusiasm? Hmmm. Okay, I’ve got it. NO.”

I would tell her it wasn’t her choice, it was mine.

She would remind me it was her money.

I would say I’d get my own money.

She would ask how.

I’d say from getting a job and saving.

She’d say that I must be out of my mind and that she was going to take me to a therapist. She’d say, “If you don’t agree to see a therapist, I’ll cut you off without a dime.”

I would not agree. I would storm out of the house, furious.

We wouldn’t speak for a week.

And in the end, I would go to Princeton. Because in so many ways, my mother would have been right. And it would make her so much happier, could make life so much better if I just agreed. So I would agree. And because the future of bugs isn’t exactly promising, I would agree to at least try prelegal studies.