Boomerang

Outrunning the Truth

Home. It feels like I’ve been gone for a million years and like I never left. I emulate my parents’ routine, a balanced breakfast at eight in the morning, soft boiled egg, one piece of toast lightly buttered, or cereal, fruit, plain yogurt. The papers, The New York Times and local, my mother does the puzzle, my father supplies answers. I have been living amongst savages and have lost the practice, more than a practice for me, an obsession, and an addiction to reading. Reentry is challenging and my mother stares at me hard as if she can discern all the drugs, the alcohol, and the men.

I don’t really like breakfast, but it is important to conform. I murmur an answer, beating my father to a crossword question about Sylvia Plath. This inspires my mother to announce that Richard Murphy, my friend Emily’s father, had spent the weekend with Plath before she stuck her head in the oven.
“Evidently she didn’t have a good time,” my father says.
“Well, Richard’s gay,” my mother says.
“Maybe she was depressed,” I say.
“Of course, she was depressed,” my mother says. “Ted Hughes was a pill.”
“Did you meet him?” I ask.
They have met nearly everybody that matters.
“Yes,” my mother says. “At the Amises’. Are you depressed?”
I look up. They are both staring at me.
“Maybe,” I say. “I guess so.”
“You’re depressed? Why? Is it my fault?”
I looked at my father. This felt like a trap.
“We’ll pay for therapy.”
She returns to her puzzle. My father is still looking at me. He smiles. I smile back. My bedroom is unchanged, same flat pillow, wooden bed, slanted attic ceilings and old wood floor. The walls are painted white and except for a postcard, a Modigliani of a woman, they are bare. April is cold and cruel. Small ice crystals form in the corner of the windows. There is mail, letters from the Irish girls and one from the Shakespeare festival in New Jersey. I have been accepted as an acting intern for the summer and beyond. No pay but a place to live for the summer. The festival starts in June. I need only survive two months at home. My mother stands at the bottom of the stairs calling my name.
“Molly?”
“Yes?”
Silence.

It has always been so. I must descend to be told it is lunchtime. I no longer decide when or what or whether I eat. Lunch is a salad with additions from the previous evening’s meal, other bits of things that emerge from the refrigerator. I can’t remember the last time I sat down to eat a proper meal unless it was the drug dealer feeding me lobster or molten chocolate cake. Nothing normal. I had been lying to my mother about meals for so long I had invented entire menus to draw from: chicken, green beans, noodles; pork chops, roast potatoes, zucchini; broccoli, salmon, rice.

My childhood reversion is to become my mother's little helper, snapping green beans, setting the table, and feigning interest in how she manages to make such delicious carrots. At moments I am tempted to blurt out the truth, to articulate how awful life was in California, to confess about the drug dealer, the abortion, the drugs, the drinking, but I know she will crumble and moan and I will become the comforter and that is worse than anything else, watching her fight with my father when I was so little, terrified yet on deck to make her feel better, I remember thinking someone should take care of me. I was a child and had no power. My father looks at me hard across the table. “San Francisco wasn’t magical?” he asks.
I could tell him the truth, and I know he would help me, but then I would be breaking so many rules. “No, nobody read books.”

We discuss books and I reach back into the education I gained during my three years at Rutgers, one at Trinity College Dublin to comment on Hardy or Joyce or possibly we agree that Beloved is a masterpiece but then we stop talking.

“Are you all right?” my father asks.
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you need money?”

I don’t need money. I need to tell him I lost my way so badly in California there were times I wondered whether I could continue to live. I need to tell him my skin hurts, my heart hurts, I’m afraid I’ve failed and by failing I am no longer loved. I need to tell him I love him, and I need him. We are silent. I ask for a ride to the train.

On our way we pass the pig farm.
“Pigs are very intelligent,” he says.
“How can you tell?” I say. “Can they understand irony?”
“You can teach them things,” my father says.
I like this definition of intelligence. I feel unteachable; unlovable, unfuckable; untrustworthy, unintelligent, inarticulate.

I get a job at a diner, a diner on Route 1 with overweight waitresses and a lack of service that fits my level of skill. During one lunchtime rush, Gertha, the biggest, scariest waitress who is inexplicably popular with customers, actually snatches the food from my customer’s hand as the sandwich reaches his mouth. He is left like a cartoon holding air in the shape of a sandwich. I have mistakenly taken her order or maybe not, but no one argues with Gertha. I wear a hideous polyester waitress uniform, beige with a brown apron attached. My mother looks at me leaving the house, pencil behind one ear, hair scraped into a messy ponytail, the uniform stained with ketchup, white nurse’s shoes, support hose and her sigh could collapse a building.

I am thrilled. Downward mobility is the ultimate revenge. During my seven-hour shift not a single customer uses a word longer than two syllables. Gradually, I feel less motivated to change. I’m not drinking every day, but I still drink to blackout nearly every time I go out and pick up men to keep from going home. I have reunited with a friend from high school who projected a serene calm in high school that I found puzzling given the craziness of much of what occurred during those days. I manage to inspire her to heights of self-destructive behavior, getting extremely drunk and finding ways to scatter plastic dinosaurs into various potted plants that decorate the bars we patronize. I woke up to alien ceilings, a body previously craved but now the merest contact will make me sick. There is sliding and crawling and creeping involved during these mornings, wallets withdrawn from pants to check the name, the address. At times, I stick my head out a window to try and decipher a street sign. What town, what city, what fresh hell is this?

I found a phone and called her.
“I’m looking out the window,” I tell her. “I think I’m in Trenton.”
“Molly, you left with the drummer from the band.”
“What band?”
I am trying to locate a glimmer of a memory, a sense that the man I have slept with the previous night has a name. It is all dark. I locate his pants, pull out his wallet and find his driver’s license. All is darkness. I can’t imagine how I reached this state of prolonged chaos.

Both my older sisters are now married. This should not have been a worry; after all I was the youngest, the fairy tale favorite, father’s darling, the grabber of the gold ring. I tell myself I am waiting for something fabulous but darkness hovers. Driving, I imagine crashing, on a roof, jumping, in possession of drugs, overdosing, seducing a stranger, murder a la Mr. Goodbar. The future appears tiring, uninviting and unpleasant. The past, sad, laced with bad decisions, loss and regret.

At twenty-four, I was discouraged and defeated, aware that I was blessed with gifts that I had trashed and squandered. Serving bad coffee to long-haul truckers, I hold the pot aloft while they tell me about their routes from Florida to Maine, flat tires, bad drivers, slutty women, stories that lack even a glimpse of understanding that their lives were deadly dull. Deeply depressed, I draft several beginnings to my suicide note, “I’m sorry, I tried, it’s not your fault, I forgive you.” I wasn’t sorry, I hadn’t tried, it was their fault, I didn’t forgive them.

The Shakespeare festival was in residence at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. There were actors from New York who would be spending their summer there performing plays in repertory and then there were the apprentices like myself who could audition for roles, otherwise they were required to spend their time running errands and building sets. One set required a massive grid to fly above the stage and each square in the grid (hundreds) had to be covered in shiny Mylar. It was a task for stoned, bored and rebellious apprentices who banded together to form a secret society called FOST (Federation of Set Technicians). We had a secret handshake and signal, a set of ever-morphing rules and we spent hours, days and weeks, Mylar-ing the grid.

The head of the Shakespeare festival was Paul Barry, who ordered us to run laps every morning around the Drew playing field and when the laps were finished, push-ups, sit-ups and the 1980 version of a burpee. Those of us with hangovers were in pain. I made friends with a small, crazy girl who identified herself as an alcoholic the first time I met her. This seemed scandalous and tragic to me. Not that she was a drunk but that she was so comfortable with admitting that fact. I could whisper into the grass like King Midas but admitting I drank too much felt like jumping off a cliff into a bottomless pit. I soon recognized my acting talent was limited. I had learned through knowing actors that either you long to act beyond any other possible profession or you stop immediately. I am cast in two plays. Neither character has a name. One is “old woman,” the other is “maid.” Each has enough lines to require me to attend numerous rehearsals.

There are a few people at the festival I gravitate towards, one of whom is a set designer, Anne, a very talented, self-possessed woman with a handsome boyfriend who actually seems to like me and ignores the fact that I vaguely lust after her partner. I spend a certain amount of time in her presence, listening to her discuss the rationale behind her choice of colors and backdrops. I learn about scrims and why the grid must be Mylar-ed. This passion is familiar although I left the world of motivated, thoughtful people so far behind it feels like I’m in a foreign country. Anne has to make a trip to New York for supplies, and I lend her my car. She returns later that evening and corners me in the theater.

“You’re a writer,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I’m not,” I say.
“I read the notebooks,” she says. “I was waiting for the paint guy and I sat and read all those notebooks. You are so talented, Molly.”

She is terrifying me. I have been writing nonstop since grade school, poetry, prose, plays, and novels. I had a terrible poem about death published in the PDS literary magazine, last line: “Weaving her shroud, singing her song.” These days child psychologists would have probably diagnosed me as having suicidal ideation although my mom pronounced it silly. Writing was safe, writing was happiness, and writing was the waking dream. My father was the writer.

“What notebooks?”
“The ones in the back of your car. You started about six stories I wanted to keep reading. And something that reads like a novel.”

My father writes novels. My father had a terrible childhood. I’m a spoiled brat who writes mediocre bratty stories. I babysat for the fiction editor of The New Yorker; my parent’s friends are winners of Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and best-selling writers. Richard Poirier brought us to Martha’s Vineyard to stay with him at Lillian Hellman’s estate where he was executor of her will. My father went on a trip with Richard Ellman, Joyce’s biographer. Nabokov’s widow chose my father to write and read the elegy for Nabokov at his funeral. The list is endless. I am nothing. I am an alcoholic.

“You need to write, Molly. I’m telling you, you’re so good.”

Fear. I feel it moving up my spine and entering somewhere at the base of my neck. This is not the fear of people or of failure or of being abandoned. Instead, it is the fear of acceptance, the possibility of happiness and purpose. My mouth feels dry. I am not a writer; he is the writer.
“I submitted stuff before,” I say. “Maybe I’ll try again.”

This is a lie. My creative writing instructor at Rutgers, poet Alicia Ostriker, had urged me to submit my work to be published. When I mentioned her comments about my work to my parents, my father stayed silent while my mother said, “That woman is a bad poet.” Neither of them reacted to the praise. But this was the norm. From that point on I told myself a bad poet encouraged me. Why persist?

Anne is still waiting for an answer.
“Thank you.”
“Do you know how good you are?”
“No.”

I had written about losing Cynthia, my Midwestern best friend in seventh grade who healed my loneliness, loved me unconditionally, and just as she was about to marry, died in a flaming car crash. I had written about the taste of copper in my mouth, the empty ache in my chest, my memory of her beauty and her sweetness, my reckless squandering of her devotion. I had written about my parents, my mother’s tyranny, and my father’s silence. My drinking, my endless, terrible thirst.

“Well, I’ve never sat in anyone’s car before deciphering horrible handwriting, crying because of how that writer described grief.”
“Sorry. But I’m not a writer.”

I took my recently acquired credit card and hitchhiked to Newark Airport and flew to San Francisco, mainly in a blackout. Johann junior picked me up. We did mushrooms and went to Tiburon where his friend had a boat. We spent several days on the boat, in bars and on beaches. I was thrown out of one of the scuzziest bars in Tiburon after having a screaming fight with someone’s girlfriend. The morning after that fight I discovered a tiny piece of paper shoved into my denim skirt that said: “If you ever want to stop, call me. I’ll take you to a meeting.” I vaguely remembered a handsome guy outside a bar that I shimmied up to and when he showed no interest I started screaming, “faggot” at him. He handed me the piece of paper.

One evening – they all blurred together – I managed to fall backwards into an empty goldfish pond, preserving the bottle of wine I was carrying but apparently not my skull. We went into Johann junior’s house where his skeletal mom was drinking herself to death and started watching  television. Blood was slowly dripping down my face when Johann junior told me we needed to go to the hospital.

photo by Brandon Holmes

Emergency Room Doctor: “I can see your brain.”
Me: “Hurry and stitch me up. I don’t care.”
ERD: “Do you want help?”
Me: “I want you to stitch up my head and leave me alone.”
ERD: “How old are you?”
Me: “Twenty-four.”
ERD: “You could have died.”
Me: “Sad.”

The next morning, I had a headache that felt like someone was drilling into my skull but the worst of it was the horrors. Whether I had DTs or just alcoholic paranoia or just realized I had nearly killed myself, it was pure terror; fight or flight but the enemy was myself. I followed Johann junior from room to room, crying that I was afraid until he finally sat me down and said: “You have to stop drinking.”
“I can’t. It’s genetic and traditional.”
“Some people can drink until they die but you’re not like that. You’re going to write books and have a baby and have a life. You’re a terrible drunk.”
“I don’t want to write books or have a baby. I don’t want to have a life.”
“Call your father and tell him to meet you at the airport.”

I called my father. “I’m an alcoholic. If mommy comes with you, I won’t stay. I’ll get on another plane and disappear.”
“She won’t come. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m like your dad. Like Grandpa. But I can’t disappear.”
“Just come home.”
“I love you, Daddy. I’m sorry.”

The red eye left at midnight, so Johann junior took me to an AA meeting in Tiburon. Before we pulled into the church he stopped and bought himself a six-pack of beer.

“Come with me,” I pleaded. “We’ll both get sober.”
“No. This is what I do. You go.”

I walked inside with my bandaged head, wearing the t-shirt and denim miniskirt, flip-flops and face of fear, and was surrounded by kindness, acceptance and love. It was awful. Someone was celebrating an anniversary, so I was convinced that every AA meeting required singing Happy Birthday and cake eating. They gave me the blue AA bible, the Big Book, and sent me on my way.

On the flight, I held the Big Book on my lap and each time the drinks cart approached I held it out like a mighty shield. The person sitting next to me at the window was familiar. It took me a moment but then I realized he had been a theater graduate student at Rutgers that I attempted seducing at a cast party. At the time he was engaged to a woman I liked very much. I had taken my shirt off and stood in front of him until he had told me to put my shirt back on and left the room.

“I know you. I’m Molly Moynahan. We were at Rutgers together.”
“Of course, How are you?”
I flipped the book over. “I’m an alcoholic. I’m going home to get sober.”

And then he told me his sister had just jumped off a building in Washington, D.C., leaving behind a suicide note that stated she was finished with the pain of living. He was returning East to help his parents and bury her. We talked for a long time as they turned off the cabin lights and people slept. I could feel his sadness, like my fear, as palpable. He was angry with his little sister while I understood why she had flipped the switch. It was exhausting to stay alive. He made me promise to do exactly that. It seemed ridiculous that we had ended up together on that flight, forcing me to accept that a decision to end my life would cause a ripple that became a wave and finally have such an effect there would be a tidal wave of grief, rage and regret. Survival was apparently my only choice if I was to honor the hope of not causing pain.

As soon as I saw my mother I regretted not dying in that goldfish pond. Instead of displaying any interest in my situation the first thing she said when I walked through the front door was, “I didn’t make you an alcoholic.”  

While I had no idea whether this was true or not, I felt the immediate withdrawal of my father who had been quietly kind on the drive home from Newark Airport, not grilling me as a suspect but willing to listen. I told him a few things, and we laughed about some of it. I described how I had sat next to the grieving brother on the plane, and I saw him wince. “Did you ever want to kill yourself?” he asked.
“Yes. But I’m okay now.”

As my mother sighed and stared and asked me loaded questions about my “plans” it came back. After two days of trying to avoid fighting with her, refusing to answer her query as to “What made you an alcoholic?” ironic since there was my father, my Uncle Brendan, my grandfather, probably shadowy men and women stretching back for generations in Ireland. As she dumped the hated lima beans on my plate with a tortured sigh I said, “You did,” and this led to the scene and the apology and the understanding that I could only get sober away from her.

—Molly Moynahan