I know how this sounds; I mean, now I know how it sounds. Then I thought Excuse me this is a very interesting story I’m telling you about me, a very interesting person, I thought If you think I need therapy because of it the word for that is pathologizing, I thought And also I never liked you that much anyway. “Right,” I said, shouting now, “thanks again.” I had almost reached my car. “See you tomorrow!”
* * *
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My son didn’t wake up on the way home. Didn’t wake up when I stopped at Vons to get a bottle, a couple bottles, of white wine, didn’t wake up when I lifted him from the car and carried him into the house, back then he slept well, slept soundly. I settled him into his crib, uncorked one of the bottles, poured myself a glass. As a child I’d watched a television show in which a girl, half-human, half-alien, was able to stop time by pointing her index fingers toward each other and joining them. Her father, the alien, was a cube of some kind? A trapezoidal quartz crystal? I poured myself another glass of wine and tried the thing with the index fingers, knowing nothing would happen, treating the trick as a sobriety test, passing it, congratulating myself. If it were possible to stop time, I thought, I’d take a week, maybe two. Read some books. Develop a meditation practice. See a therapist, fine, sure. Journal. Get my story straight. The problem wasn’t thinking of myself as the protagonist of a narrative it was that I hadn’t figured out the right narrative yet. I just needed one that looked less like a bell curve, and me on the downward slope, and more like a tangent, a tangent to a vertical. A vertical line meant x equaled a constant, I remembered that. Yes, me and the kid, my son, zooming up the y, bigger and better things in the future for both of us. I poured myself another glass of wine. Truth didn’t help. Everything that had ever happened could never be integrated into something coherent. The trick was picking the right moments. The trick was knowing when to lie. I’d drained my third glass, part of a fourth wouldn’t hurt, two-thirds of a glass, three-quarters. I’d stashed bourbon somewhere, the trick was finding it. Drinking now, white wine or maybe bourbon, maybe two glasses in front of me, drinking first from one and then from the other, thinking, What’s the story, thinking, What’s the story, Morning Glory, was that an album, maybe British, thinking, You are the master of your destiny, thinking I missed the weight of a body on mine, how the weight tamed and taught my body, how easy it was for my body, under a weight, to do nothing but be. Thinking one more drink couldn’t hurt. Thinking I wasn’t so old now, was I, thinking in the morning I’d get another shot, another shot at getting it right, getting it all right, making it all right, and this was the last thought I had, the last I remember, before falling asleep, my hand on a glass, the baby monitor waking me three hours later, my son’s sharp, wordless cries, my head resting on my shoulder, my neck sore from the awkwardness of the position, his cries impossible to interpret, no time to think. All I had to do was respond.
Santa Barbara, 2016
“I tell people—” She paused. “When I tell people. If I tell people. I tell them I gave the baby up.” We were, she and I, swimming. “People assume I mean adoption. If I don’t bother to correct them.” Her shoulders rose and then fell. “It’s not a lie, not exactly.” We’d met earlier that day, our carts colliding at a supermarket. “After all,” she said, “I did.” Another pause. “I did give the baby up.” This woman, I don’t remember her name. What I do remember: it was dark. The body of water in which we swam was the Pacific and though the water was cold I was not uncomfortable. The water pressing against my body and my body pressing back, pressing through: the experience was one of minor but continual triumph. Of resistance, again and again, overcome. Yes, my primary feeling was one of pleasure. Sustained pleasure, that is, luxury. I rolled the word luxury from the back to the front of my mouth, the underside of my tongue, smooth and slick, sliding against the roof of my mouth. Also we were both naked, both drunk. If this does not explain the situation perhaps it may explain something about the kind of woman who would find herself in it. Often, when I tell this story, as I have been encouraged to in therapy and in group and by my mother, I say that I picked her, this nameless woman, up. Not because it makes more sense, though it does. Because that phrase, I picked her up, my listeners find it provocative. Provocative as in to provoke, as in to provoke interest. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: conversation is flirtation. Tease out enough rope and the listener, she’ll hang on your every word. Though it’s true: usually I am the one left hanging. This woman, for example, she certainly had me on the line. Why is it that people tell me things? I think it is because I like, liked, to drink and I am good at keeping my face quiet. Also because I ask questions. What I had asked her: “Do you have any kids?” This is female socialization, that is, the desire to be everywhere approved of, carried to its logical extreme.
* * *
—
It was a Saturday. Earlier that day I’d left my son with a babysitter, gotten in my car. It was summer. Ten in the morning and the air in the Central Valley was already dry as sandpaper, never mind hot. In the cup holder nearest my ever-outstretched hand, a thermos of coffee. A thermos of coffee and bourbon. Maybe one-third bourbon, two-thirds coffee. Maybe one-third coffee, two-thirds bourbon. These details are hard to remember. Also I may be exaggerating them. Also I may be minimizing them. The difference between the two—for when a memory is retold, its particulars, inevitably, are brightened or muted depending on the arc of the story of which it is a part—a question of, determined by, desire. Am I, just now, more interested in appearing openly louche (look at me lapping at luxury) or secretly wounded? How close to the surface is my pain? Or, rather, how close to the surface do I want my pain to appear to be? How enamored am I of the clichés of female pain? Or, rather, of which of these clichés am I enamored? Do I wish to make my distress visible and, therefore, hysterical? Or do I wish to suffer in silence? How often do I clean my home? How many loaves of bread do I bake, on average, every week? Careful: do not blame these hard-to-remember details on my child, as cliché might urge. Many women fear losing, in childbirth, in the daily act of mothering, autonomy, independence, selfhood. But I had never had a self I was much interested in keeping and a child will give direction as well as, better than, a married professor. Though the satisfaction in taking direction from a child is mixed with fear. The fear of who will this child become, of what if he turns out to be, of will it be my fault. The fear of am I doing this right. The married professor, on the other hand, he tells you if you’re doing it right. Yes, he’s quite direct. And if the satisfaction he offers is mixed with shame, well, shame is not without its pleasures, not least the pleasure of knowing you deserve to feel it. Anyway, you’re not supposed to take direction from a child. Or you’re supposed to know when to take it and when not to, and I was, no surprise, bad at telling cases of the former from cases of the later.
And so: my skin itched after too many hours with him. My son. The son I bounced in my arms as I walked the halls of my house. No, not my arms, plural. My arm, singular. The other arm was needed to lift the glass of bourbon to my mouth. I only felt him slip, I only left him in his crib, howling, while I ran to refill the glass, I only let him cry while I held my head, throbbing, these things, really they only happened once or twice. And so, from time to time it became necessary to schedule a reprieve. Driving: this was the reprieve. A way to keep my mind occupied. To distract it from the topic in which it was most interested and which I—here we imagine the I as a whole and the mind as a part, as apart—most wished to avoid. That part being the self and how it was doing. Whether it was doing it right. The self being my self. The avoidance stemming from a fear of self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge—no, you are not doing it right—that provokes not merely guilt but the desire for, the necessity of, reformation. Perhaps this is becoming confusing. Sometimes when I drank from the thermos that was either one-third or two-thirds coffee it became confusing, and sometimes it became clear.