The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (12 page)

“And give in to small-minded thinking that is all about lack instead of abundance? No, thank you,” she replied as she maneuvered her way around the slipcovered love seat that had been in our cabana near the pool.

He sighed. “Fine.” He looked at me. “Annabelle, your mother and I have been talking and—”

“You’re going to Alateen,” Mom finished.

He gave her a look.

“What’s
that
?” I demanded.

“Remember when we were at Oasis and we went to that Al-Anon meeting?” Ben asked.

I nodded. Al-Anon was the Twelve Step program for family members and friends of alcoholics, whether they were still drinking or sober. They had meetings, just like AA, where speakers shared their stories about what it had been like living with the person who was drinking, and what happened that ultimately made them start coming to meetings and how their life was different now. Then, after they were done, other people got a chance to share for a few minutes. Because it was a Twelve Step program—which, according to Dr. Arnie, was not a religious program but a spiritual one—there was a lot of talk about a Higher Power, which seemed to be another word for God. I wasn’t sold on the whole God thing (see: the Holocaust, innocent people starving in Africa, the success of the Kardashians), but I do know that when Ben and I had been in that meeting I did feel like something had my back.

“Well, Alateen is a group for younger members of Al-Anon,” Ben explained. “Kids your age.”

What was going on here? This was the part of the movie where he was supposed to agree with
me
that Mom was overreacting. Telling me I had to go hang out with a bunch of strangers and share my innermost secrets and let them pat me on the shoulder or, even worse,
hug me
was not part of the script. Unless it was a horror movie. I shook my head. “No way. I already go to therapy.”

“This is different than therapy,” Ben said. “It’s a support group. With kids going through the same thing you are. You know, I’ve gone to some Al-Anon meetings in the last few weeks and—”

Had everyone gone nuts? “You guys can spend all the time you want going to meetings,” I said as I stood up, “but that’s not how I’m spending
my
time.”

Unless I was bribed.

“So I probably shouldn’t mention that the reason I’m here is because I was promised a Holga camera in return for giving up an hour of my life to listen to complete strangers share their innermost secrets,” I said to Ben as we sat in his car outside a church on Wilshire Boulevard that Saturday morning.

“Yeah, I’m thinking leave that part out. Might not go over well with the crowd,” Ben said as he ruffled my hair before pulling my door open. “I’ll be back at one to pick you up.”

Luckily, there was a decent coffee place that was about three blocks away, which meant that if I started walking back at quarter of, I’d have plenty of time to get inside and then walk out with the group at one.

“And just so you know, I’ll be waiting out here around twenty of,” he said with a wink. “In case, you know, you were planning on just ditching the meeting altogether.”

Or not. I sighed. It was both amazing and annoying to be known so well.

The meeting was held in a mildewy-smelling basement with a furnace banging away somewhere down the hall.

I walked in to find a fat kid with reddish-brown hair and freckles who looked to be a few years younger than me wearing a vintage Donkey Kong T-shirt with his hand in the Munchkins box that was sitting in the middle of the scuffed table.

He looked up, startled. “I’m only taking one,” he said defensively.

I glanced at his hand, nails bitten to the quick, clutching at what looked to be at least three, probably four, greasy-looking dough balls, before sliding into the folding metal chair closest to the door.

He pushed the box toward me. “You want one?” he asked with his mouth full.

“No thanks,” I said as I began to rummage in my bag. When I had turned twelve and started carrying a purse, I had discovered the usefulness of rummaging as a way to avoid having to talk to people when I was nervous.

“You’re new, huh?” the boy asked.

I looked up in time to see him go to grab another Munchkin. A mission that he reluctantly aborted when he saw he was busted. “I didn’t get a chance to have breakfast this morning,” he said, just as defensively.

I shrugged. “I don’t care how many Munchkins you eat.”

Which then made him grab two. “Am I right? You’re new? ‘Cause I’ve never seen you here, and I’ve been here every Saturday for the last eight months.” I wasn’t sure why he sounded proud of that fact, but he did.

“Well, yeah. Kind of,” I replied. “I mean, I’m
new
in that I’ve never been here before, but it’s not like I’ll be coming back. . . .”

“How do you know if you’ll come back if you haven’t even sat through a meeting before?”

I shrugged. “I just know.”

“But how? Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but that’s really judgmental of you.”

When someone told you you were being judgmental, how
were
you supposed to take it?

“So who’s your qualifier?”

“My what?”

“Your
qual-i-fier
,” he said, as if dragging the syllables out was somehow going to explain it. “Jeez, you
are
new. The person in your family who drinks.”

I shook my head. “I never said anyone in my family
drank
.”

He snorted. “Denial’s not just a river in Egypt, you know.”

Who
was
this kid? “Okay. Fine. My mother . . . she used to drink . . . but she doesn’t anymore. She just got out of rehab,” I said proudly.

“I remember when my dad got out of rehab the first time. That was”—he counted on his fingers—“five times ago.”

If everyone was like him, I definitely wasn’t coming back. Before I could go to the bathroom for a Play-Doh break, some more kids started to file into the room. Most of them seemed to be around my age, a few younger, a few older. And—in the case of this one girl—a lot younger, like elevenish. In addition to the Munchkins lover and me, there were a few other white kids, some African Americans, a few Hispanic kids, and one Asian girl who took the seat on one side of me. Who—from the kimchi she was eating that smelled insanely delicious and was making my stomach rumble—was most likely Korean. It reminded me of my elementary school back in West Hollywood back before Mom got famous and put me in the L’École, where suddenly everyone around me was white and rich.

In addition to the kids, there was what I was later told was an Alateen meeting sponsor, someone older who was in Al-Anon who sat back and made sure that things ran properly. In this case, the sponsor was this girl Amanda, a woman in her late twenties with auburn hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a tattoo across her left wrist that said GRACE. She didn’t say much, and a few times I saw her checking her phone even though one of the announcements at the beginning was “Out of courtesy for the other members, please do not text during the meeting.” But I also saw her nod a bunch of times with a grateful smile on her face as people were talking, as if she totally identified and understood what they were saying and feeling, which made me jealous. It had been a long time since I had felt that way.

“Are there any newcomers who would like to introduce themselves at this time?” asked Laticia, who was running the meeting. The reason I knew her name was because when she began she said “I’m Laticia” and the group—well, everyone in the group but me—responded, “Hi, Laticia” in unison in this singsongy way.

I slunk down in my seat and started examining my cuticles, but even with my head down I could feel everyone staring at me.

“Introduce yourself,” whispered the Munchkin kid, who had somehow ended up sitting on the other side of me.

I gave him a look before I mumbled, “I’m, uh, Annabelle.”

“What’d she say her name was?” a Hispanic boy wearing a TUPAC 4EVA T-shirt across the table loudly asked the girl next to him, who was busy texting. “Angela?”

“She said Annette,” the girl replied.

“Annabelle,” I said louder.

“Hi, Annabelle,” they sang. I tried not to flinch. Even if I got something out of this thing, I didn’t think I could ever come back if only because I could not deal with the “Hi” thing. It just felt so . . . cult-y.

Luckily, no one began grilling me after that. (Annabelle what? Who’s your qualifier? Why are you picking at your fingers?) Instead, Laticia went back to reading a bunch of handouts that I didn’t listen to because I was too busy thinking. Where exactly did things go so wrong that I’m spending a beautiful Saturday afternoon not with my friends, or a boyfriend, but in a smelly church basement at some self-help group meeting? A few words stuck out—
understanding, hope, acceptance
. Like, say, the way I
hoped
that Mom and Ben would be
understanding
when I told them they needed to
accept
I wasn’t coming back here.

“Okay,” Laticia said when she was finally done reading through the
Twilight
-size notebook of announcements. “Well, Eddie was supposed to speak, but he texted me last night that his dad was getting out of jail today and he was going with his mom to pick him up, so—”

Okay, I’m sorry. But
jail
? Then I remembered: it was only a few weeks ago that my mother had been in jail as well. So much for thinking I was all that different than these guys.

She turned to Munchkin Guy. “Walter—would you do it?”

“Sure,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. As he stood up and walked to the head of the table, I saw that he had a bit of plumber’s butt going on. Once he settled himself in his seat, he cracked his knuckles. “Hi, I’m Walter—”

“Hi, Walter,” boomed the group.

I was just about to get up, slip out, and go hide in the bathroom when something clicked and the Charlie-Brown’s-teacher
wompwompwomp
noise coming out of Walter’s mouth morphed into regular English, and what I heard shocked me. Even though there was a lot that was different about us—he was a fourteen-year-old boy and mentioned Call of Duty, like, three times—I completely related to much of what he was saying. The way that he couldn’t stop himself from snooping in his dad’s briefcase and throwing out pills when he found them. The way that he hated to have friends over because he never knew if his dad was going to embarrass him by being drunk. The pressure to remember what lies he had told to other people in order to cover up the truth about what was going on inside their house.

When he talked about that stuff, I knew exactly how he felt. And because I knew how he felt, I felt understood—like Amanda did, when she nodded—and not so alone. And because I felt understood and not so alone, I felt. . . .
better
.

When Walter was done, and we went around the room and people started to share, I related to them, too. I even found myself nodding a few times. That being said, I had gone this long without help from anyone but Dr. Warner in dealing with Mom—I didn’t need to bring my problems to complete strangers. Finally, after the Korean girl shared about feeling if she could just try harder to be perfect, then maybe her mother would stop drinking (hi, been there, done that), it was my turn.

I cleared my throat. “Well, uh, this is really—”

“Who are you?” Walter demanded.

“Huh?”

“Your
name.
”

“I already said it,” I replied, feeling my cheeks getting red. “It’s Annabelle.”

“Yeah, but you have to say it each time you speak,” said the Hispanic boy.

I sighed. “Fine. I’m Annabelle, and—”

“Hi, Annabelle,” the room sang back.

I flinched. “Hi. And, uh, I think this is a really great thing you guys have here. So thanks for letting me sit in and listen today. . . .” I trailed off. They all looked at me, as if waiting for me to go on. “And . . . that’s it.”

Luckily, it was 12:59. When Amanda said it was time to close the meeting, I shot out of my seat.

“Where are you going?” asked Walter.

“She just said it’s over.”

“No, it’s not. We still have to close.”

As everyone got in a circle and grabbed hands, I half wondered if we were going to start skipping around and singing “Ring Around the Rosie.”

“Annabelle, would you like to take us out with the Serenity Prayer?” Amanda asked.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“She doesn’t know what that is. She’s new, remember?” Walter reminded her.

“I know what it is,” I insisted. Mom had put a copy of it up on the fridge.

He shrugged. “Fine. Go for it.”

Everyone looked at me, waiting for me to start. “Ah . . .”

“God . . .”—Walter began, before everyone joined in—”grant me the serenity . . . to accept the things I cannot change . . . the courage to change the things I can . . . and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Other than the God part, it wasn’t very religious, which was a relief.

At the end of the prayer, while still holding hands, everyone moved them up and down.

“Keep coming back,” they said in unison.

Even though I may have related to what they were saying. . . .
that
was not going to happen.

Awards shows are the L.A. version of religious holidays. The Golden Globes are Rosh Hashanah; the Grammys are Easter; and the Academy Awards are Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Kwanza all rolled into one. Each one is an opportunity for a party, including the MTV Movie Awards, which Mom decided would be a great opportunity to make into a house—or to be more accurate, apartment—warming party.

It was a good thing we had been poor before Mom became famous because it meant that we knew how to clean. And because our apartment was about one-sixteenth the size of the Santa Monica house, we had it party-ready pretty quickly. One of the worst things about going broke was having to let Esme go. She ended up taking a full-time job in Malibu working for a director and his wife because her mom was coming from Guatemala for good and she needed a steady gig, but she promised that she’d be back. (“Wait until I get on
The Price Is Right
and win,” she said. “After that, I’ll come back and take care of you for nothing.”) Her last day with us was so sad that I ended up eating the entire
dulce de leche
cake she had made me as a good-bye present while Mom was at back-to-back AA meetings.