The Bitch Posse (19 page)

That e-mail to Puck still sits in her drafts folder. It’s the first time she’s considered saying no to sex. It’s just too strange; that Pepper Perryman thing freaks her out, not to mention the cocaine. Sometimes she’s grateful for these hours when she can be Ms. Taylor, Teacher. Slutty or not, at least she’s not someone who’s supposed to have a second book out by now, Wren Taylor the has-been, someone so desperate for literary attention she’d sleep with Puck MacGregor for access to his agent.

“Sit down for a minute, Paul. I want to hear all about it.”

He sits and spills out the story, how they’re paying half his tuition, how they might want him to play basketball too and that’d pay for the rest. She watches his brown eyes, his pale lips, studies the swell of his cheekbones under his skin, the tendons in his throat working as he talks. Before she knows quite what she’s doing, she reaches out, runs her fingers up the trembling hairs of his arm. “Paul.”

He stops talking.

She slides her fingers back down to his wrist. “Paul.” And he gives a nervous little smile. She’s standing at the edge of the cliff again, looking down into the dizzying canyon.

And now she’s going to jump.

May 1988
Holland, Illinois

Before I threw a pizza in the oven, Marian rolled a joint for the two of us, and now we’re sitting around the kitchen table blabbing it up like old friends. While it wouldn’t be accurate to say I’ve forgiven her for burning up my poetry book (when the flames licked the sides of the pages, curled around from blue to red to yellow, and consumed my words, my thoughts, myself, she watched me as I cried, rubbed my back, thought she was helping me I guess), we’ve reached a sort of understanding, and so we’re chatting about friendships, giggling. The dope’s gone to our heads, and sometimes, during these good moments with her, I feel like her sister, not her daughter. I don’t bring up what I found in the bathroom this afternoon because she’s being nice and I don’t want to spoil it. She’s already opened up a little about her mom and dad, who we never, never see, and she told me how they kicked her out of their house when she got pregnant with me, how she worked
two jobs until she delivered to save money so she’d have a few months with the baby—me—before she went back to waitressing.

“Tell me about my dad.” I pick up our fattest cat, Bradbury, who’s been crawling over the table, and drop him on the floor. “What was he like?”

She shakes her head, holding smoke in her lungs and passing me the joint. This has always been forbidden territory.

I take a toke and pass it back to her across the table. “Please tell me, I’m half him. I want to know.”

“There’s not much to tell. We didn’t really know each other.”

“Well, what was he? A doctor? A truck driver? A waiter?” I’ll never have the man in my life, never even a photo of him, but if she’s opening up she may give me a little piece of him.

“You’re going to laugh.”

“I won’t.” Bradbury jumps back on the table, and I pull him off again, drop him in the living room, and close the door.

“He was a cop.” She giggles and takes another hit. “Imagine, me in bed with a cop.”

“What was his name?” I wonder if I could look him up, not to edge my way into his life but just to figure myself out, who I am, who he was.

“I never knew his name.” She shrugs. “It was a casual thing. We were just doing each other a favor.”

Which means I’ll never track him down, he probably doesn’t even know he got her pregnant.

“I will say this, Cherry, you look more like him than me, your eyes, the shape of your nose.” She reaches across the table and strokes her finger over the bridge of my nose, and my heart swells with love for her. This is the same moment at the barbecue pushed forward eleven years, a carbon copy of the best moment I’ve ever had with my mother. Not Marian. My mother. “This is him,” she says, her fingers brushing the cartilage near the tip of my nose. “This part of you is him.”

We both smell the pizza burning, and I yell, “Shit!” and rescue it. I
pull a slice onto a napkin, but now Marian’s getting itchy for her coke. She shakes off the pizza, makes a bunch of excuses, and takes off for the bathroom. That’s when my worries burst into reality, worries so huge and intense they’re monsters pressing their arms around me, choking, suffocating, sinking their teeth into my relaxed contentment, tearing off pieces and spitting them onto the ground next to me. My heart pumps the worries through my system until they’ve poisoned every part of me. No, no. It can never be simple with Marian, can it?

See, when I was touching up my makeup this afternoon I found the needle next to the sink. She didn’t even rinse it out, just left it on the counter with yellowish droplets clinging to the inside. Her little coke habit started about two years ago, and I always hoped it wouldn’t turn into this. I don’t know how long she’s been shooting up, but I’m not going to let her get away with it. Because the next step’s going to be heroin, and we aren’t going there, we just aren’t, we can’t.

After the clock spins out ten minutes that feel like twenty hours, I press my fingers to my green glass necklace for strength. Then I walk to the bathroom and knock on the door. “Marian?”

“Just a minute.” Her voice is strained, thick.

I rattle the knob. “Marian, don’t give me that crap. What are you up to?” I hate that I have to be the rational one, that I have to click my mind away from my pot buzz so I can take care of her. But I do it, it’s easy to do if you know how to shut off one part of your brain.

“Don’t you dare talk to me that way.” Her voice flings through the door, slices into me like a knife. “I said just a minute.” There’s a little gasp, like the sounds that escape my lips during sex with Sam. So of course she’s mainlining right now. The needle’s sticking into the fleshy part of her inner arm, and she’s pressing the plunger in, letting the coke hit her veins. God, I never thought Marian would sink this low. I mean, snorting coke is one thing, that’s even glamorous in a sick,
Less Than Zero
sort of way. But shooting up? That’s what junkies do.

I bang on the door. “Marian?” Fear stabs me in the stomach. I hate
her fucking guts most of the time, but at the exact same moment and from the exact same part of me, I love her, and I’m worried. She’s already fucked up anyway since we smoked that dope together before dinner. What if there’s an air bubble in the syringe and it goes to her heart? “Marian!”

She doesn’t answer me, maybe didn’t hear me.

“Marian!” I’m sure I’ve sent her into one of her rages, and on coke it’ll be even worse. But I need to know. With all my strength, I pull back my combat boot and kick in the door.

Sure enough she’s sitting next to the toilet, knees drawn to her chest. One of her belts and a glass of water and a spoon and her plastic bag half full of coke and her little mirror and of course her goddamn needle all lie next to her on the floor.
(On the bathroom floor, Marian? It hasn’t been scrubbed in weeks, I know I haven’t done it and I’m sure you haven’t.)
She’s shaking a little, rocking back and forth, starting to cry. “I didn’t want you to see this, I didn’t want you to know, it’s the first time I’ve done it this way. I won’t do it again, just leave me by myself for a while, go out with your friends. . . . ”

We’ve been in denial all along about her little habit. Hell, I don’t talk about it to anyone, not even my best friends, certainly not to Marian herself. So basically what she’s done is given a confession, and the reason she wants me to leave is so she can chase her cocaine high, keep doing it till it’s gone, only this time she’s injecting it. I’m not going to let her.

I grab her wrist and pull her to her feet. Needle marks trace all up and down her arm, and my stomach turns. How long has she been doing it like this? Who showed her how to do this? “Marian, don’t lie. It’s not the first time. Look, who made these?” I hear my own voice, but it’s like I’m disconnected from myself and I almost don’t know who’s talking. I sound sure of myself, but I have no idea what the hell to do. She should be in treatment or something, but what do I, how can I . . .?

Just then her knees crumple under her and she falls to the floor. “Marian!” Her eyes roll back in her head, fall closed.

Jesus, she’s not dead, is she?
I slip my fingers next to her neck, and her pulse is pounding like machine-gun fire so no, she’s not dead, but she’s gone all stiff and wired up. “Marian, wake up!” Her knees move back and forth and her arms flail about like a newborn baby’s. What do I do?
Jesus, what do I do? I
press her wrists to the floor to stop her from hitting herself. Her knee lands in my stomach. Is my mother dying right in front of me? Tears blur my vision, but I sniff them back where they came from. “Marian!” I should call 911, but can I leave her? The seizure stops as quickly as it began, and I pull her to a sitting position and lean her against the wall. Her head dips down, like she’s a kid who’s fallen asleep in the car, and the knot in my stomach tightens. I need to get her to the hospital.

I stand, holding her hands, and lift her to her feet. But she’s still not awake, and her skin is burning. I run cold water in the sink, soak a washcloth and press it to her face, her neck, her chest, and thank God (thank
God
), her eyes blink open. Her glance flitters from left to right, and fuck, I’m still taking her to the hospital. “Marian . . . ”

“ ’Sfine,” she slurs and narrows her eyes to slits. “Th’ wall . . . ” She leans against it like she’s too dizzy to stand.

I push myself into some other universe so I can be Just the Facts Ma’am. “You had a seizure. Maybe you hit an artery. Are you okay? Do you know where you are?”

She’s sweating now, her red hair tangled at her neck. An image flashes into my mind, my best memory, a barbecue on a hot summer day when I was little, six maybe, and Marian (back then, I called her Mama) laughing, flipping some hot dogs on the grill, music swelling in the air, I was singing along too the best I could. And she knew every word; it was “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by Bob Dylan.

I loved the song then, but let’s be honest, it’s a bunch of bullshit. I’d really like someone to explain to me what was so great about the sixties,
because kids like me got fucked over and half those flower children are now wearing suits and thinking up ways to make money by ruining the environment and screwing over children in third world countries.

Or else drinking up the world, fucking teenagers, rigging coke in their bathrooms.

Mama’s hair was clumped in just that way, the way it is now, in the hundred-degree weather, when she pressed me to her hip (so long ago!) and said, “My sweetums, my Cherry Pie.” The air was thick and sweet with marijuana and love and hugs and kisses, but where did it all go? When did all those hippies turn into cokeheads, drunks, child molesters? How can we believe in their dream of peace and freedom when it’s turned into shit right before our eyes?

I reach out and smooth her tangled hair. I’ll never believe in anything. All those big houses in the subdivisions are filled with former hippies who said Make Love Not War and Never Trust Anyone over Thirty. My anger at an entire generation could consume me, swallow me whole. But I have to focus on the here and now and not fly into a philosophical rage. So, I bite my lip hard, anchoring my thoughts in reality. “You’re here at home. Do you know who I am?”

I concentrate on Marian’s eyes, and she makes eye contact, a glimmer of recognition glints in them, and she says, “Course, Cherry. Don’t worry. ’Sfine.”

She’s talking like she’s drunk, and I have to wonder if she lost oxygen. What if there was brain damage with the seizure? “We should take you to the ER. I’ll drive the truck. Can you walk?” I take her by the hand and start to lead her to the bathroom door, but she freezes.

“No.”

I tug her arm. “Yes.”

“No. No one can know.” The words are coming out better now, and she knows it and pulls a smile over her lips. “See? I’m fine.”

I feel sorry for her, for Marian and her whole spoiled generation,
who can’t think of anyone but themselves and can’t even keep their own shit together. Like a bunch of babies. No wonder kids like us fall for the spun-sugar dreams of Princess Diana (once in a while her smile drops from her face and I’m certain she’s hiding something) or dumb sitcoms that solve problems in half an hour. Because there’s nothing else to believe in.

Nothing real.

“Let me look at your wrist.” The little pop of fresh blood marks what looks like an artery, and a big purplish bruise spreads in a teardrop shape around the needle hole, and I’m pretty sure my mother almost died just now. “You’re not fine, Marian. Let me take you to the hospital.”

Her eyes harden, and she’s starting to get paranoid and weird because she says, “You’re ruining the whole thing for me, Cherry. Run some more water, it sounds so beautiful.”

I ignore her. “Come on. We’ll take the truck, I’ll drive.”

“You’re not taking me to the hospital. Not if you want to be alive in the morning.”

I whistle out a deep breath. “You need help. Don’t you see that? Look at yourself.” I pick up the needle from the floor, clatter it onto the counter. “Look at your arms, they’re a mess! You criticize Amy for slicing her arm, well, this is self-mutilation if I’ve ever seen it! You’re killing yourself. You. Are. Killing yourself!”