I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (12 page)

I was offered a raise and a promotion, assistant manager, fulltime doughnut work, which seemed surprising since I’d had trouble just getting dressed. Around the corner, almost within sight of the doughnut shop, my boyfriend had sung “Sugar Mountain” in his room, an airless hallway in a tiny house on the side of the road. But the doughnuts at the shop didn’t even seem like sugar, dry cake the baked equivalent of a headache—I didn’t like coffee either, the heated bad breath, mouths like bitter ovens. Only frosting was appealing, sprinkles and jelly, and the boxes, the way a dozen fit, a large family of doughnuts on their way. So I turned down the entire two hundred and eventually quit.

I’d met Sophie that year too, my drinking friend, when we both worked at the juice bar in the Altamonte mall. In the fall of 1981, we started going out drinking together. Almost every night. By the spring of 1982, when Tommy was dying, she said I didn’t care about myself anymore. I wasn’t even trying to control my drinking. Stayed at her house a lot, or slept in my car.

Now it’s March 1984. I just got out of the Gore Street detox. My parents had come to pick me up. My dad told me that my mom had pounded her fists on the wallpaper in the kitchen, on the little orange teapots, crying, saying, “I can’t take her back.” But she did. After work, I go to the one bright place on the road that isn’t a bar and drink five cups of coffee in the doughnut shop where I’d worked the summer of 1981. The new night baker holds up
his index finger to the waitress, telling her to only charge me for one. It’s almost Tommy’s third birthday. I remember going to a meeting right after he died. Sitting at the folding fake wood table where I never stayed sober more than a day or two, a meeting I once attended fully drunk. I told them I’d been out drinking in the woods, in what looked like another country—a field, trees, no people. I said, “When I came home, they told me my son died.” I realized it sounded as though he’d died when I was drinking, but he’d actually died before I went out the door. I wasn’t drunk when he died, but the people in the room looked at me as if I had been—a kind of transfixed pity you’d have for a person on fire, not wanting to touch them, grateful it isn’t you. An object lesson. Everyone seemed very far away, as if I were talking to them from inside a TV.

I learned to drink coffee in meetings. So nervous, I wanted to sit on my hands, and the white Styrofoam cup gave me something to hold onto. The urn coffee chemically bitter, as though it were brewed from volcanic ash. And I’d read that hot liquids in Styrofoam could turn carcinogenic. But I sipped the coffee like a cocktail, in a way I never drank alcohol. Sipping made the taste manageable, the predominant taste just heat.

The lights in the doughnut shop get brighter and brighter as the waitress keeps filling up my cup. Being back at the shop is kind of like visiting a house I used to live in. I know how the cement felt beneath my feet, the corner in the back room where I’d sit on my break to eat a corn muffin. My feet dangle under the counter. I could spin on the plush round seat. Lately, I’ve been trying to remember how to walk. I’ve forgotten what to do with my arms, my facial expressions, my voice. I’m sober almost six weeks. Two weeks out of treatment. I can’t just stare at other people walking, so I go to the movies alone, try to see how to behave. I watch
The Hotel New Hampshire,
Frannie getting shoved into a dryer and raped. Her brother carries her home afterward and says, “If
someone touches you, and you don’t want to be touched, then they haven’t touched the you in you.” I still can’t open a dryer door without thinking about her.

At the health food store, Mrs. Collins had given me a month’s leave from work to go into treatment. She’d held my job for me. Now I’m back, working in the Orlando mall location. One of the other clerks, Carey, convinces me to go out with her ex-boyfriend’s cousin. Gryf. “He’s a little rough around the edges,” she says. It’s a blind date. We go to a bar. I’m not drinking, but I was still counting days sober.

I don’t drink. Gryf and I talk about the beach. He says, “I go to Playalinda. Even though it’s a nude beach, and you’d expect to see a lot of fucking, you don’t.” He doesn’t actually say “fucking,” instead, he makes a circle with two fingers and puts another finger through it. I don’t tell him that I don’t expect to see any fucking on the beach. He says, “I work hard, I play hard, and that’s a fact.” He says it twice, slowly. When he drives me home, and I jump out of the car, he looks surprised. It’s disappointing that Carey thinks this is an appropriate guy for me. It makes me wonder how she sees me—how anyone sees me—as though to other people I’m nowhere near who I think I am.

The next night, I’m back at the doughnut shop. The Night Baker says, “I wait every night for you to come in.” He says, “You smell like apricots.” It’s from work—the little vials of scented oils that you apply with a wand. I turn my hand over, lift my wrist up for him. “Skip work tomorrow,” he says. “Spend the day, all day, swimming at my house.” I can’t. I need the money. And I’m not sure about the Night Baker—he’s beautiful, but he could be the kind of guy who likes all women. I could just be one of the women he likes. I’m fixating on him anyway. As the compulsion to drink lifts, I’ll fixate on anything. It makes me feel dizzy. High on multiple cups of coffee, I go home to write in my bedroom.

After work, the next night, I go to the doughnut shop. “Your next weekday off, you’re going to spend swimming with me,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I said. It does seem as though this is just about sex, I mean even the barbaric blind date guy took me somewhere. The Night Baker touches both my arms, casually, but it seems like he has to touch me somewhere. He fastens on my upper arm as if he is going to keep me there. As though he can make me do what he wants.

My name is carved with a heart and some other writing and an arrow into a red vinyl seat at the doughnut shop, the second one over from the cash register. “Kelly” is misspelled, I think. I don’t want anyone to catch me trying to read it, so can’t get a real good look. The Night Baker goes to court tomorrow to get divorced. He’s twenty-eight.

My car breaks down. I don’t have the $200 to fix it, so take the bus to work. In Orlando, the buses only work if you live downtown. Here on the outskirts, they run every hour or so. Miss it, and you’re stuck for another hour’s wait. Without my car, there are no meetings, no doughnut shop. It was easy to think I’d been progressing—almost three months without a drink, until something screws up, and I feel trapped. I head to the end table in my bedroom, grab my keys, and rip the insides of my arms with them. I just want to open a window. Go into the cold air and let it blow this anger out of me. Walk into someplace new. I sit at my desk and start writing. My arm red, with darker red spots. Swollen, bumpy with long ridges. I’m afraid to stop typing. I’m afraid I’ll start to die if I do.

Car gets fixed. My parents loan me the money. I go to the doughnut shop and almost cry when there’s a pretty girl in the back with the Night Baker. She has a baby. He seems to not want to talk to me around her. She happens to leave just a moment
before I do, and the Night Baker follows me out and flirts like crazy. I’ve kind of had it with him. He says, “I saw you looking at that baby.” He doesn’t know anything about me really. Doesn’t know my baby died. Doesn’t know that all I feel when I look at her baby is the emptiness along the inside of my arms where I held my son. The emptiness in the center of my chest where he rested. I did everything I could not to feel that emptiness—still would—short of killing myself.

After that night, I feel nervous in the doughnut shop. Scared of the Night Baker. It feels like panic. He’s friendly, but he stops flirting, no comments, no leers. Once, after he’d just been to the beach, he comes up close to me, but one of us veers off. “Come back and see how my sunburn turns to tan.” He laughs.

Jeannette at work said, “If you haven’t gone out with him yet, then he doesn’t want to. He must not like you that much.” Inviting me to his pool to swim doesn’t count. She’s very straightforward. Once when a customer was stealing a piece of frozen liver under her coat, Jeannette just rang up her other items, and said, “These onions will go nicely with that liver.” So the customer handed the liver to Jeanette. My other coworkers, Chris and Pat and Stephanie, don’t agree with Jeannette’s reasoning about the Night Baker. They think he likes me.

It was my three-month sobriety anniversary last night, but they were out of 90-day chips at my home group, so I didn’t get one. The poker chips mark the crucial anniversaries of sobriety. The white chip for new people, and for those coming back after drinking—it’s a desire chip. For those who want a new way of life. I have a collection of white chips. I surrendered over and over, took it back. But now I’m here again, 90 days sober. The first chip is always white, but meetings use various colors for the other anniversaries. At the meeting on Broadway, the 90-day chip was yellow. I’m calmer in this meeting, safe in the little house where it’s held.

Even though they’re out of chips, everyone claps for me anyway. I feel pathetic, wanting the poker chip, not getting one. But then, as I’m leaving the meeting, J. gives me his own yellow three-month chip. It’s a special one with a message in the center. J. had been sober twelve years, and he has his three-month chip on him. In his pocket. I mean, he’s had this chip for almost twelve years, and he still carries it with him. And he gives it to me. I put it in the pocket of my jeans. I like the feel of the ridges around the chip’s edge on my fingertips.

At the doughnut shop, the Night Baker walks me outside and tries to kiss me between my car and the Dumpster out back. I’m scared. I’d heard him talking to a friend in the shop about buying a diamond, so he must have had someone he’s buying it for. Something inside me had dropped, a weight down to the floor of me. A diamond. In the two months since I’ve left treatment, I’ve gotten okay with walking, and have figured out what to do with my arms. I can make a little conversation. But this is an unexpected humiliation. I am too lonely to see straight. And then when this guy kisses me, he’d been meaning it as a little kiss. Some introductory thing. Which I had very little sober experience with—the opposite of drunken kissing. I try too hard, blotting out the diamond. The Night Baker said, “Slow down, I’m not going to hurt you.” He seems to recognize my aggressiveness as anxiety. I have the feeling of falling back into the open window of a car. The feeling I had as a child when someone else would speak for me. Falling into darkness. I don’t know how to get back out. The Night Baker said, “I won’t be working Monday—come in Tuesday.”

The final night I go to the doughnut shop, the Night Baker said, “I had a bad day. But it’s all right now because you’re here.” He hugs me, kisses me a little. “I must have just missed calling you today,” he said, “I didn’t set my clock back right.” He wants me to come to his house to fool around. His words exactly. “I see you
don’t trust me,” he said. Shit, what’s there to trust in something as blunt as that? The pretty girl comes in. Maybe the diamond is for her. She gathers the waitresses around her, laughs, walks the shop end to end, marking her ground.

I miss the long gone Sugar Mountain Man, his way of seeing me. His beautiful songs. But the Night Baker, Bill, drinking—they seem like ways of falling back. I remember when I’d looked at a pencil on a table and felt powerless. As though I couldn’t pick it up. That passivity. I’d need someone else to hand it to me. That summer, after work and meetings, I go home and read, write. It’s so hot in my bedroom, I have to write in just my underwear. To use the typewriter, I have to unplug the fan because there are only two sockets, and one is for my lamp. Without the lamp, I can’t see to type. So I sit there night after night, slick with sweat—humming from drinking instant coffee, urn coffee, high as I can get without drugs. I stay up until morning to write, to plead to the paper as if it is a telephone, a telegraph, a telegram, as if all I have to do is write, and I’ll be heard.

Since I got out of treatment in February 1984, my transfer to the less busy health food store has been made semipermanent. I think Mrs. Collins is trying to give me a break with the slower pace. So every night, I can just drive down the highway to the recovery meeting house on Broadway. Around back, the stairs lead to a door, a counter where I can buy a cup of coffee for a quarter. Clouds of smoke in the hallway lead to three rooms with chairs. If the main room’s packed, someone will volunteer to lead another meeting in one of the other rooms. I have asthma—the best I can do is not sit next to a smoker. But it’s hard to tell, you have to take one of the few empty seats. And then your neighbor lights up. Black ashtrays like clawed hands on the table, carpet.

Before it’s my turn to speak, I always panic. Maybe seven people before me, my heart’s racing. If I’m lucky, I can just say, “My name’s Kelle. I’m an alcoholic, and I pass.” Once I try to talk, but can’t. Wind up crying, and the chair lets me cry for a couple of minutes, as if those were words. Moves on to the next person.

Mike smokes. He never seems nervous when he speaks in meetings. Tall, bony, red-haired, sitting against the wall or at the table. I could swear a light opens up over his head, pours down. I could hear him. Other people saw it too. After meetings, people crowd him. But I stick it out. I don’t have anywhere to go. Eventually
the coffee counter guy will turn the lights out, say, “It’s time to go.” Mike and I will be on the porch or the sidewalk, and we’ll talk. Or we’ll go to the International House of Pancakes for hours and talk. Mostly I talk. Tell him everything I can’t say. Night after night. I know it’s selfish, but I want to live. I need him.

One night, the last thing he says to me is “Don’t work too hard tomorrow. Do what you have to. But don’t work hard.”

The next night he’s not in the house on Broadway.

T. says, “Have you heard what happened to Mike?”

“To Mike?” I have to tug his name out, as if I can keep his name safe inside me. The night before he’d told me he was worried. He had some work lined up, but had never done this kind of thing before. Cutting limbs off trees. I didn’t know that would mean climbing high, that one of the limbs would fall on him. The chain saw fell on his neck, and he fell. Broke both arms, smashed his face. That night he was in a critical care unit, waiting for space in intensive care. Then surgery, pins in his elbows and wrists, his temples, mouth wired back together, a month in the hospital. It was as if his face slipped off, down. As if a face is a mask that can come loose. Mouth a mess. Mouth that T. kissed on her way out of the meeting last night. I watched their lips meet perfectly, and T. saying she liked to kiss a lot, that she liked to kiss more than anyone she knew, that she called people up just to kiss them across the phone.