I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (9 page)

Lights out at eleven. We’re quiet as stones. They let in an old man. I heard the nurse took his arm, and he went crazy, just getting a pulse. Two guards, old junkies in white, hauled him out the steel door. He screamed drunkenly, an animal outside. Threw himself like a sack against the cement walls of our room, an hour and a half until the police come. I pull the extra blanket up over my head, breathing the smell of skin in the threads. What object gave my son comfort? That’s a simple question—something easy to remember—an object he carried, held. Tell me what you saw in his arms. I gave him blue blankets when he was born, a sky.

The other women in detox are all older. Drunk, knocking into furniture. They don’t speak. In bed, they’re unmoving, plunged somewhere. None of them stays more than a couple of days. After a week, when someone young comes in, Shanna, she’s like a childhood friend. We’re the same age. She has the most beautiful handwriting. In meetings, we seem to sit on a white ledge, high up in the corner of the room, looking down on a yellow light. She’s
married, and there’s something in the flat way she talks about her husband, what she’s done to him to get a drink, that scares me. The calculation. As if nothing can stop her. But how am I any different? She has no children. Always abortions, she said. A girl I’d worked with in the health food store had had two abortions. She was my age, long blond hair, wand body. We worked behind the juice bar, making sandwiches. She told me that one night she got drunk and ran down the street screaming, “I killed my babies.” She told me about it as if it was a dream—it caught her by surprise. As if there was a stranger, a mother inside her who broke free. Danny had wanted me to have an abortion. Pressured me. I wouldn’t. Then he tried to take my son, and all I could think was how dare you, how dare you.

In detox, by Friday night, I’m alone again. The girl, Shanna, had said, “I can’t take it.” We’d both cried. She’d left the meeting early, and when I went back to our room, my blue Samsonite had been pulled from under the bed, opened. She’d taken some shirts from me. Once they’re gone, I can’t remember what clothes I’d had—cotton, long sleeves—I think they were warm. It’s still winter, maybe she knew she’d need something extra. In the empty room, with my suitcase flung open on the cot’s white sheet, it looks like I’m the one leaving. She’s left me her Fourth Step on yellow paper, blue ruled. Her Specific Losses and Insane Behavior, Unsuccessful Attempts to Control, her Preoccupation, Progression.

I hated that the psychiatrist did both the physical and the mental examinations. I wouldn’t talk to him until the end. Nicknamed him Igor—tall, lumpy, rectangle-face. A movie monster. He said, “You think that people are trying to feed off of you.” That’s how I feel about him, but I don’t say that. “Anyone who meets you halfway is going to be crushed,” he said. When I talk, it’s to ask him how to stop that. He says “self-respect.” As if I can sort that out on my own, no explanation, no instructions.

In group, we keep cutting out words and pictures from magazines. The counselor says, “Find ones that describe your feelings, desires that you don’t tell others.” One word I cut out is “reincarnation.” The counselor goes through my pictures and words, turns “reincarnation” over. It says “loving” on the other side of the magazine page. The counselor says I’ve chosen it subliminally. How can I see through paper? Or how can my subconscious see? I think he’s just looking for something positive, something to give me hope. I wonder who helped my son after he died. Who lifted him. Could he walk? Could you tell me that, could he walk? I can’t ask anyone. But I looked it up. Between a year and eighteen months old, babies become toddlers. At a year and a half, most can walk and some can start to run. Some can walk backward. Sometimes they can take your hand and walk upstairs, but you can’t let go. You can’t let go. You can’t let go. Tommy was fourteen months old when he died. Maybe he could walk from room to room. He could take your hand. At twelve to fifteen months a child can say mama and dada, and at least two more words. Two words. What two words did he say? Years later, a mother will tell me that when she brought her son home from day care, he made signs with his hands—the day care taught the babies sign language to help them say what they didn’t have words for. I do think of reincarnation, I do wonder if my son is here somewhere. Sometimes I look for him. He died on May 27, 1982. How long would it take to be reborn? Could any child a year old be him? Evelyn, the mystic who works with me at the store in the Orlando mall, had understood the Big Book, Little Book experience I’d had as a child. Evelyn also said that when someone dies very young, a baby, they came for a specific reason. To make something happen. I don’t want to reduce Tommy’s life to a reason, an event, not his life as catalyst. But maybe I don’t know what Evelyn means. According to her, his reason, what he made happen, is different
from yours and mine because it wasn’t contained in a long life, an adult life.

One night the fire alarm goes off while we’re sleeping. It sounds like the end of the world. My ears still hurt the next day. They make us go outside in the rain, but never find a fire.

When my parents come for private counseling, my mom says that when we lived in Hawaii, when my dad went out to sea for six months at a time, that I’d climb on the bed on the highest floor of the house and scream for thirty minutes or so. Periodically. Just go climb up and scream. “It was so loud, I was afraid the neighbors would think I was ax-murdering her. I could never get her to tell me why she was screaming.” My mom said, “I could never make her stop until she was ready.” The counselor who would later ask me out said, almost reflexively, “She has a lot of anger.” I remembered the climb, but the screaming was like water, something that had its own ending. And there was a war on then. A fucking war. It seems like an appropriate response for a child. I couldn’t stand to have someone I loved taken away—to have no choice. To be physically separated from my father. I was already separated by an ocean from my mother’s mom, Nana, who had been my primary source of physical affection. Nana who could barely contain herself when I walked toward her—her arms shaking, reaching out—it sounded like bells. But what about my son? Why didn’t we ever talk about him in those sessions? I remember when I’d told my mom I was pregnant. Five months. She’d been silent, her magazine in her lap. She’d told my dad when he got home from work. He’d knocked on my bedroom door, and when I opened it, terrified, he’d said, “I just want you to know you’re still my princess.” Kissed me on the forehead. The next morning, he’d said, “I just have one question, Kelle. What are we going to name the baby?” My parents who got upset if I ran the air conditioner too high or tried to wash a load of clothes or came home late, my parents were calm.

But then I’d started worrying that we’d have to live with them forever. That I’d have to put the baby in day care while I was at school and my parents were at work. Then, at night, while I worked, my parents would need to watch him. How would we get out of that? What if I resented it? What if I took it out on the baby? After the babysitting incident, I worried that I couldn’t be trusted with a child, that I might have brutality bred into me, in my genes. I started thinking about adoption. Then at seven months pregnant, near Christmas, I came home from cocktailing at the restaurant, and my mom said Julia and Mark had called. “They said to call no matter how late you get in.” I knew they’d been trying for twelve years to have a child. They’d never asked me to phone them before.

In 2008, I’ll be in the theater of the artists-in-residence center where I’ll be working. It’s near the beach, an hour east of Orlando. Victoria, a writer, a mother, who is at the center teaching teenage writers for a couple of weeks, will point to someone near the door, ask, “Is that your son?” I turn around to see who’s there.

It’s my colleague Nancy’s son—a tall young man with dark hair, freckles. He’s smiling, laughing. He’s in college, studying photography, and that night he’ll take pictures of the young writers reading from their work. And for a moment I won’t be able to talk. Victoria has two sons. I can tell she’s a good mother. She knows what a mother looks like. That she thinks he could be my son, that I could be capable of raising him, makes me wonder who I am. I imagine I look like a kind of old teenager. Undomesticated. She gives me another world where I stand in this same place, in this same body, but am capable of caring for another and keeping him alive. It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. I turn back to Victoria, shake my head no.

One morning, Sheila arrives at Gore Street. She’s at least fifty. Hungover. In the bathroom, she sits in a chair by the sinks in a row. Dips a washcloth in lukewarm water, reaches up slowly.
Washes under her arms, between her legs. It must be hard to get clean like that. She doesn’t want a shower. Lifts a can, sprays her hair into thick, sticky curls. One of her eyes is broken, fixed to her right. Her nightgown is thin, filmy. Drags on the dirty tile.

Breakfast is outdated orange juice and powdered eggs. I sit next to Sheila. She said the last time here she met a woman her age who still wanted a drink. “She had money on her. So, we took a cab to her house. Really nice place. Lots of booze. Television. Food.” They drank for three days, and then the woman started throwing bottles, and kicked Sheila out. Days later, Sheila said she was making her own way back to Gore Street, but was weak. I don’t know where she went the time in between. She walked past a bar, by the Dumpster out back, saw something on the ground. Some boys were circling it slow. She said it was the woman with money, not moving at all. Sheila said she would have gone over, but the woman looked dead. She was afraid the boys would turn on her, so she kept walking, came back here. Why didn’t we tell someone? Ask the staff to call the police? For some reason, it seemed like the woman on the ground happened a long time ago.

When I’d first started going to recovery meetings in 1982, almost two years before, there had been a man I liked. I don’t remember anything he said, just how he had stood to my left after meetings. His hair was Jesus-long and dark. Heroin and alcohol, I heard. Our greetings were silent—nods, inclination. Like a wall between us when there was no wall. In February 1984, at Gore Street, we were living in the same building: he was in the men’s detox, and I was in the women’s. Just separate sides of a large space divided by an open doorway. Every morning, I had to walk through the men’s area to get my Antabuse and my hair dryer from the attendant behind the main desk. The attendant would say, “Here’s your hair blower.” They kept it locked up like a weapon, as if I could blow my hair to death.

In 1982 and early 1983, I’d known the man on the other side in those first meetings, standing near the coffee urn before I drank coffee, smoke everywhere, near people who were like friends. It was before I’d found the Broadway meeting. The very first meeting I’d ever attended, in 1982, had been full of senior citizens. I was twenty. They told me I needed young people and suggested a big meeting called Rebose (“Sober” backwards). That’s where I met the man I admired. That meeting had been a long drive from my parents’ house—in traffic it was a good hour from downtown. But I liked the familiarity of going to the same place. Back then, in that room, it seemed there was a mirror behind the man, with gilt, and a fancy table. In 1982, I could only go a day or two without a drink, the Queen of Going Back Out every other day, but I still went to meetings. We’d gather together at the end, before going out the door. I’d stay with the others to be near him in a casual way, not spook him. His muscles relaxed, but it seemed like he could run at any time. I’d talk to the others, look at him in sips. It seemed as though he mostly saw me from the side. But here at Gore Street in 1984, we’re with strangers, both of us still in trouble. He wouldn’t be here, two years later, if he weren’t having his own problems staying sober.

I’d lived there a month, drawn a coat of arms by the time I saw him standing on the men’s side. My coat of arms was made of pictures I drew to describe myself. Four things. One is a shield, or they all are. There was a doorframe between the man and me, but no door. I stood on my side. He saw me. I don’t remember any words, but we both lit up. Men and women shuffled between us. Heads down. Even though we were inside, it was like a plaza in a foreign land. His smile long-distance, but it felt like arms around me. Here we both were, still struggling, still hoping, and for the day, not using. Seeing him felt like a connection from my past to my future—a bridge to the life I wasn’t living yet. I hope that I
meant something like that to him too. It was my last day when I spotted him, almost time for me to go. When I walked through the empty doorframe, headed for the steel doors out, he stood in front of me. If we said something then, it could have been another language. It could have been that friend meant refuge. Dear. And also love. It’s the personal connection between him and me, and everyone else just trying to keep it together, that helps to give me what I need to stay sober. There’s no pretending between us. I don’t have to turn him into a boyfriend or some random guy to sleep with. I don’t have to use him. Unlike most of the other men in my life, he means something, exchanges something pure with me. I want him to make it. I want everything good for him. There’s nothing in my experience to compare with this. And even though we’d never really spoken, just stood in the same circle night after night two years previous, he put his arms around me. I turned my face into his hair, a place to rest. He kissed me. “For luck,” he said, before he let me go.

Ochre, olive, iron, sand. Weed and thistle. Backyard blown about by wind. At fourteen years old, in my room in El Paso, I could hear the dark outside. There’s a desert in the backyard. El Paso is the opposite of every place I’ve ever lived. No ocean. I’d never lived so far inland before. Being so far away from the coast makes me feel as if I’m holding my breath, as if I’m suffocating. It helps me to look at a photograph of the ocean, to stare at it until I’m inside. Like a book.

My parents came west before we did, making a home for us while my brother and I spent the summer on Cape Cod with my maternal grandparents. Almost every summer, no matter where I live, I return to them. Stay at least a month, sometimes longer. At their house I know I’m loved no matter what. There are lots of barbecues with family members I see only in summer. Sometimes a relative will see me, standing in the yard, say a few words, make me laugh.