I confront my face in the bathroom mirror. I don’t like what I see. My face is full of pain, rings under my eyes, mouth pouty and sad, cheeks puffy and white. My face is the mirror of my life; more even than most faces, it conceals nothing. This is the face of a woman in deep trouble.
Always, I have looked ten years younger than my chronological age—but now I wonder. I seem to look ten years older. Whatever this man is doing to me, it is not making me more beautiful.
My face is like my palette. I know every inch of it—every enlarged pore, every birthmark, every sag of skin, every discoloration. My once hazel-green eyes have dulled to mud. My titian curls are nondescript wisps on my once rosy cheeks. I open my bathrobe and check my body. Even my breasts are defeated and seem to sag. The big pink nipples loved and praised by all men, from Snack to Dart, appear to have shrunk in defeat. And my caesarean scar, now faded to a pale zipper of flesh above my reddish bush, is angry and inflamed again. I turn around to see red welts on my buttocks. My heart lurches in my chest. How did I get these? I have no recollection.
A burning smell reaches my nostrils. I run to the kitchen and find the oatmeal pot smoking and burning on the stove. An acrid odor of burnt cereal fills my nose. I turn off the stove and clatter the oatmeal pot into the sink. It hisses evilly. I run cold water into the pot and a cloud of oatmeal smoke assaults my nose. Who wanted oatmeal anyway?
The phone rings.
“Hey, what’s up?” It’s Emmie (who, for the moment, is as close as I can come to the voice of my sane mind).
“I burned the fucking oatmeal,” I say.
“What happened with Dart last night?”
“He left. First he got me all relaxed and gooey and warm and open to him, and then he left—the bastard. I’d like to cut his cock off and stuff it in his mouth. I’d like to kill him—kill all of them. They’re Martians. They can’t just fuck us. They have to open us up, make us love them, fuck us, and
then
they leave. I’m ready to join the Lesbian Commune. C’mon, Emmie—want to be my girl?” (The Lesbian Commune is an old joke with us. It’s where we’re heading when we finally give up on men. Soon, in short.)
“Wait a minute. Back up. Tell me what really happened.”
And I try, I patiently try to explain all that happened with me and Dart between his arrival and his departure. I tell her everything, leaving out only the red welts on the buttocks and the parade of empty bottles. Leaving out everything, in short.
“So how did you feel when you got up this morning?” she asks.
“Why?”
“Just tell me.”
“I woke up in a panic, after having these terrible dreams. The first thing I felt was despair—my whole life seemed mad, crazed, out of control. I felt suicidal. Then I began to pull myself together, and I had visions of myself floating through the cosmos in my bed. . . .” I start to cry. “Emmie, I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t stand it. Everything is
pain, pain, pain.
”
“Why, do you suppose?”
“Because life is pain, pain, pain.”
“And wonderful. A gift. A blessing.”
“Don’t feed me that simple Pollyanna shit—”
“It’s simple, but it isn’t shit. You can
choose
how you see your life. Whether you live in Eeyore’s gloomy place or in sunshine. Whose choice is it if not yours? What other reason for this passage than joy?”
“Crap.”
“Do you know why people love your work? Because of the joy, the life force that comes through—”
“What work? I can’t work, I don’t work. All I do is sit here and think about Dart. And drink.”
“Leila, do you want to stop? Is that what this is about? Do you really want to stop and get your life back?”
“Yes.”
“Think about it. There’s no law that says you have to get your life back. You can go on the way you’re going. You can kill yourself if you want to. I’d miss you—but you have that right. You can leave your twins the legacy of another suicidal woman artist, or you can do something different.”
“How?”
“Will you let me show you how? Will you trust me?”
“What choice do I have? I can’t stay
here.
”
“Then wait for me. I’m driving right up.”
Waiting for Emmie, I drink a whole bottle of Pinot Grigio. At first it relaxes me and makes me feel calm and spacey while I listen to Bessie Smith, but then, when the blurry feeling gives way to a pounding headache, I begin to think of ways to do myself in. I could open my veins in the bathtub—all that red blood marbleizing the clear water. I could do a film-still self-portrait as my life ebbs away. Set the camera on time exposure, get in the tub, and . . . When they came for me, they’d find not only my dead body but a photographic record of the very act that had killed me. Talk about postmodernist images! Or I could puncture my veins and smear the fresh blood all over a canvas.
Dart Gone,
I’d call it. Or I could open the oven, turn on the gas, and do a Sylvia Plath. (But I have an electric oven!) Or wrap myself in Theda’s old mink coat (the one I’ve kept in the coat closet since my mother died), climb into the oxblood Mercedes called DART, and inhale the carbon monoxide fumes à la Anne Sexton (but the Mercedes is a convertible, so the carbon monoxide might escape!).
As the wine wears off, I dose myself with Valium and aspirin. Then I scrounge around under the bed for the bag of dope I saw Dart rolling cigarettes from last night before he left. Goddamn it—he’s even taken the dope.
“The bastard even took the dope!” I scream.
Sighting a barely smokable roach under the bed, I flatten myself on the oaken floorboards to reach it, but it just eludes the tips of my raggedy fingernails. Finally I skewer it with my index finger and pull myself up. I begin searching for a match, ransacking the house from living room fireplace to kitchen wood stove. There’s no incendiary gear but me! I stomp about the house, cursing, unable to find a match, a lighter, anything—and the phone rings.
Dart! Dart wants to come back. He loves me. He’s sorry. He’s been with some little bimbo, and he misses me terribly. He realizes my true worth. I race to the phone. Perhaps it’s the voice of my sane mind.
“Ms. Sand?” An unfamiliar voice.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Sand, my name is Wesley Hunnicutt, and I represent the Paugussett Memorial Gardens of Paugussett, Connecticut—”
“The
what?
”
“The Paugussett Memorial Gardens. We are contacting all the home owners in this county because we have a unique opportunity for the purchase of burial plots we’d like to make you aware of—”
“The purchase of
what?
”
“Of burial plots for you and your nearest and dearest.”
“Where did you get my name?”
“As a home owner in the town of Roxbury, your name is available at the town hall. If you’ll give me a moment of your—”
“A burial plot!”
“Well, we like to think of it as an investment in your peace of mind, a slice of serenity.”
I slam down the phone.
And fall on the floor sobbing, my cheek to the warm wood of the floorboards where Dart and I have so often made love. Boner comes up and licks my face. I think of the hooded man in
Amadeus
who came to Mozart to commission his Requiem, predicting his death. That is what has just happened to
me.
Death has made an appointment. (And he didn’t say when he’d be back.)
I bang my forehead on the floor like an autistic child. I bang until it’s bloody, feeling no pain. Finally the pain begins and with it some new twinge of consciousness. “God,” I say aloud, “I don’t want to die. I want my life back. Please, God, give me my life back.”
I am still kneeling on the foyer floor, with my forehead caked with blood and the dog lying beside me, when, two hours later, Emmie opens the front door and walks in.
Isadora: You certainly have made Leila a hopeless case. Everyone will think she’s
me.
Everyone will say
I
beat my head on the floor and did S&M and abased myself for some twerp. I was never that bad. Why are you making her so pathetic?
Leila: Every woman has that potential.
Isadora: Not me. Not you.
Leila: Your memory is very selective. Haven’t you beat your head on the floor?
Isadora: Never.
Leila: And drunk yourself into oblivion?
Isadora: Well—once or twice.
Leila: And succumbed to drink, drugs, cock?
Isadora: That word again. I never want you to use that word again.
Leila: Prick? Shall I go on with my pricksongs?
Isadora: Does what I say really matter? You are my creature, but like my child, you seem to have taken on a life of your own.
Leila: And wasn’t that what you wanted?
Isadora (sighing): We little know the things for which we pray.
6
Experience, Strength, Hope
Gimme a reefer and a gang o’ gin.
Slay me, ’cause I’m in my sin.
Slay me, ’cause I’m full of gin.
A
nd that was how I got to my first AA meeting.
Imagine a little white Greek Revival church in rural Connecticut with no one going in the front door and all these people going in the back. (Ah, the return to church through the back door!) My plumber, Mr. Raffella, is one of them; a wizened, gray-bearded artist from New Milford whom I met once at a dinner party (and whose name I don’t remember); the local lady librarian; some raggedy teenagers and some scrubbed and shining ones; an old black man with five or six teeth; a number of solid-looking burghers, housewives, and other Connecticut swamp Yankees in their Top-Siders, corduroys, and madras shirts.
Why am I shaking?
Emmie leads me into the church-basement rec room as if I were a two-year-old being taken to my first day at play group. The room is intensely smoky and intensely friendly. People sit on folding chairs or stand near the lone table, drinking coffee, chain-smoking, eating cookies, hugging each other, talking among themselves. My first impulse is to bolt.
What the hell am I doing here?
My plumber nods his head and says, “Welcome.” I’m too flustered to respond. Neither Miss Manners nor her opposite, my mother, taught me what to say when your plumber greets you at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Emmie takes me to the coffee urn, makes me coffee with lots of milk and sugar, leads me to a chair near the front of the room.
“How did you know this meeting was here? You’re not even
from
Connecticut.”
“There’s a meeting book.”
“You’re so fucking efficient,” I say.
She looks at me and smiles. Gently. “I was absolutely terrified the first time I came. We all are.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Nothing.”
“You know that’s the hardest thing in the world for me to do.”
“That’s why I brought you here. If you hate it, you don’t have to come back.”
“Ever?”
Emmie laughs.
On the walls of the rec room are signs lettered on little oak-tag panels. “EGO = Easing God Out.” “First Things First.” “Think.” (That one is upside down.) “Easy Does It.” Platitudes. Don’t these people speak English? There are also two enormous scrolls. One is headed “The Twelve Steps.” The other is headed “The Twelve Traditions.” The first line of the twelve steps reads: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” I read no further.
“What are the steps
to?
” I ask Emmie.
“Your own mountain,” she says. “Whatever you call it.”
“Mount Leila,” I say.
“Is that a noun or a verb?”
“A verb,” I say flippantly, to cover my terror.
I hate the jargon. I want desperately to leave.
“I don’t belong here,” I say to Emmie.
“Try editing the first step: ‘I discovered that I was powerless over Dart, that my life had become unmanageable. ’ Then listen and see if you like what you hear.”
I look up at the first step, substituting “Dart” for “alcohol.” My life is nothing if not unmanageable. My life is . . . I begin to cry. Nobody seems to notice, except for one woman who comes over and hugs me. “You’re in the right place,” she says, and gives me her phone number on a little slip of yellow paper. Having entered a world in which kindness seems the rule, not the exception, I want to leave.
The meeting begins.
After someone makes announcements and reads a preamble full of words like “strength,” “hope,” “fellowship,” and “sobriety,” a woman introduced as Fleur from Boston, gets up and begins to speak.
I decide that Fleur-from-Boston, a small, frightened-looking soul in her mid-forties, would be perfectly cast as Blanche DuBois in an amateur production of
Streetcar.
She has wispy brownish hair, a faraway gaze in her greenish eyes, and a birdlike scrawniness that seems almost brittle. Her wrists are so frail, you feel that a mere touch could snap them.
“It is said,” she begins, in a strong Back Bay accent, “that alcoholics deform the lives of the people around them. I never fell in love with a man who wasn’t an alcoholic, and I seldom drank except in connection with the men in my life. They drank, so I drank. I drank not to drink, you see, but for love.”
The last thing I want to hear is the story of a woman who gets free from love. I am terrified—not that the program will fail me but that it might possibly succeed. I hate all the mellowness and security in this room. I want the roaring back: the roaring inside.
“I woke up in a lot of beds without knowing how I got there, and I looked over at a lot of snoring men whose names I didn’t know,” says Fleur. “At first they were men I went to school with, men whose families I knew, men whose parents went to my church, but eventually they were men who hadn’t gone to school at all, who no longer had families or mothers, and had never even
been
to church.”