Dear Carolina (3 page)

UNDERTOW

Whole grapes is one of the hardest things to put up. You got to seed 'em and stem 'em and, even when your fingers are worked to the quick, all stained and blistered and burning, the end result ain't worth a whole heck of a lot. But try telling that to a regular at the farmer's market who's so crazy about grapes he cain't see straight. He scrunched his nose and said, “Well, I know they won't be perfect, but, hell, can't I just skip all that and can 'em whole anyway?” If you ain't never canned you cain't understand.

It's the same way with drinkin': People who ain't never had a run-in with the bottle don't get what it's like. They squint their eyes, look at you like you've been spoutin' off some kinda calculus formula, and say, “Can't you just stop drinking?” They shake their heads to make you feel the Lord's shame and say, “Can't you see what you're doing is ruining your family?”

But you cain't.

One time when I was coming up, Daddy took me to Atlantic
Beach, and, while I was swimming in the ocean, wouldn't you know, that dag dern undertow got me. And it was gonna have its way with me too. I paddled left and kicked right, spewing and choking and coughing, that salt water clogging me all up. Then I figured that the waves is gonna win this fight. So I let go, gave in to that madder-than-hell devil ocean, and let it take me away. Finally, when it was done with me, it carried me to shore.

Same thing when I was drinking. I'd claw and kick and spit all day long not to have that first sip. But it was only just a matter a' time before that bottle'd be calling my name so hard I couldn't do nothing but feel my lips wrapped around its fat, dirty neck.

When Momma was sober one time she said, “Baby, I ain't just gonna stand around here and watch my girl go through this shit.”

But my raisin', it had been oil-slick with Momma passed out on the bathroom floor right after she'd gone to an AA meeting. And the other mommas would corral their youngens outta our house like dogs on sheep's heels when they met my word-slurring momma. I remembered all that one morning, while I was fixing to get my head in the toilet and rid of the poison I'd drunk the night before. And I made a promise: I would never put anyone through a raisin' like mine. I would never, ever, I promised my dragon-breathed, dark-circled reflection in the mirror, make a child go to wonderin' every time she walked through the door if she was gonna get the nice sober momma, the short-fused craving-crazed momma, or the angry drunk momma.

Even while my head was pounding like a hammer on a two-by-four, while that black sea of drink was doing the tango with me, I knew I was being like my momma. I could smell that same godforsaken venom on my breath and feel its grip on my body, like one of them pythons in the woods that got Bobby Daniels when I was a girl.

But I couldn't stop.

And so, I lost everything. I had already lost my daddy, which is how I got this whole drinkin' thing started anyhow. Now I was losing my momma. My friends. My job. But I would have rather lived on the street than give up the destroyer that felt like it was the only thing sacrificing itself for me.

I can see now that being with my boyfriend Ricky weren't a good idea no way you look at it. He was as stumbling and slurring and crazy-ass acting as I had ever been. My therapist in rehab—that's what they call it when they lock you up in a hospital with a stranger snoring in the hard twin bed beside you—said that women choose to be with men who belittle them because that was the example they saw during their raisin'. That might be right. 'Cause, the girls I know, we been through more bad men than the slaughterhouse has pigs.

I guess that, even though he could be the meanest son of a bitch you've ever seen, when Ricky was having a good day, he was the guy you wanted to be around. Like the afternoon he practically ran into the garage where I was working, lifted me up in the air, and said, “I got us a house!”

We'd only been courting a few months, and I ain't never heard hide nor hair of us moving in together. I almost told Ricky that. But then I thought about Momma. I mighta been clean and sober, but she was a dirty drunk. Me and Momma, we was like fishin'. One of us's that bobbin and one of us's that weight. One's floating by minding her own business and the other's trying her damnedest to sink 'em down to the bottom of the sea. While I was at my AA meetings, she was fixing to go to the bar.

“This is all your damn fault,” she'd slur when she got home. “Having you ruined my life. I coulda been somebody.”

I got to looking at her good, that shriveled woman alone in her nicotine-stained single-wide. “Momma,” I asked, “who in
the hell'd you think you was gonna be? You pushed away every person who ever even figured on helping or loving you.”

When I told her I didn't have time to get her more cigarettes before I left for work that afternoon, she took to yelling. “You're so damn worthless.” That vodka was talking for her right good. “Get the hell out and don't come back,” she had slurred at me from the couch, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, yelling over the TV.

I looked into Ricky's deep, hazel, bloodshot eyes and kissed him square on his clean shave. Ricky, when he got all clean-shaved it meant he had woke up with one hell of a hangover and decided his drinking, partying, womanizing days was over.

I wished that that cigarette would fall outta Momma's mouth and burn up her vodka-soaked couch with her on it. I got all happy about it for a half second. Then I felt right sorry. It'd been me on that vodka couch not too long ago. And couldn't nobody or nothing save me from drowning neither.

But my momma, she could make me take to drinking again like nothing you've ever seen. So I did what I reckoned I ought to. I said, “Yay! I cain't wait to see it!” I kissed Ricky, he lowered me to the ground, and I asked, “So, where's this house you're so tickled over?”

“Well, it's still on the lot 'til we find a place to put it, but then they're moving it to us free of charge.”

I wasn't trying to let Ricky see how disappointed I was. My entire life I'd been clawing my way outta that trailer park like a cat up a tree. “Just you make sure it ain't in the same park as my momma,” I said.

Ricky laughed, kissed me, and said, “Love you, babe. Cain't wait to show you when you get offa work.”

As he turned to leave, a voice behind me said, “He seems like a nice guy.”

I turned and stood right up on my tiptoes to put my arms around my cousin Graham's neck—my oil-stained coveralls and his mud-covered overalls meetin' up. We were people that made it through this life by workin' with our hands. I shrugged and said, “Sure.”

My big cousin, he always been watchin' out after me. He and his wife Khaki, they stuck by me even when everybody else turned their backs. I was all looped out and spinning around one afternoon, but I remember Graham scolding Khaki for giving me money when we all knew good and well what I was gonna do with it. Khaki, who was damn near as feisty as crazy old Miss Pat in the trailer down the lot, she looked at Graham and hissed, “I know what it is to lose the most important person in your life. She'll work it out when she's good and ready.”

Khaki's first husband died from drugs, keeled over right there on that fancy Wall St. trading floor, just about how I like to have died from drinking.

Graham said, all whispery like, “If she doesn't kill herself first.”

Khaki gasped. She hadn't realized yet that me and her husband, we was the same—and she was helping me do what he done. And I loved her for it that day like she was the fireman who rescued my cat from a tree.

Graham got me all outta my head, saying, “Sounds like you need somewhere to park your new home.”

I nodded and scrunched my nose. “One of my goals in rehab was to get out of a trailer park once and for all.” Tony, who'd been working at this garage practically since it opened, was looking up at me kinda mean. So I said, “No offense.”

He shrugged and slid underneath a white 1998 Oldsmobile just like my momma used to drive.

Graham nodded and said, “I've got this patch of land a few
acres over from the house that not a damn thing'll grow on. It's all yours if you want it.”

I gasped. Me and Ricky could be sitting in lawn chairs, holdin' hands and staring at the trees, grilling out, maybe even having a kid or two sometime. It don't matter that that picture assumed Ricky could act like his nice, human being self for long enough to make it through a meal. “Now don't get to thinkin' I'm being ungrateful. We'll pay you rent and whatnot,” I said.

Graham readjusted his cowboy hat and said, “Tell you what. You keep us in Grandmomma's blackberry preserves I love so much, and we'll call it even.”

I shook my head, thinking a' my daddy and how he wouldn't never take a handout. “Graham, you been getting into the whiskey again?” I said. “That ain't nowhere near even.”

Graham shot me that half smile with the dimple that made all the girls in high school swoon, that made all them hate Khaki for how he chased her like a retriever after a pintail. He said, “You don't know how much jam I eat.”

I thought about it and it didn't take too much more convincing to make me say yes. I wondered what it was gonna take for Momma to clean up again, how far that bottle would have to drop her off the balcony before she'd kick it to the curb.

For me, it took a lot. It weren't until I woke up in a trailer park with no shoes, no purse, facedown in a puddle of my own throw-up, not one dag dern clue what I'd got into the night before, that I finally hit rock bottom. Or, near like I was that little girl at the beach again, the undertow released me. And I was carried to shore.

RESCUE CREW

One of my favorite rooms I've ever designed was featured in my first coffee table book. It was an awkwardly configured bathroom in which, years before it was popular or I had ever seen it in
Veranda
, I placed a gorgeous, antique claw-foot tub in the middle of the room. It was something I'd never expected.

Adopting a child wasn't something I'd ever expected either. But you can't know how your life is going to turn out until you're living it.

I feel guilty sometimes about the way it all happened, about my participation in your birth mother giving you up. But then I push that thought away because if I hadn't been at the right place at the right time, if I hadn't done what I did, then I wouldn't get to wake up every morning to the sweet sound of cooing through the baby monitor or see you laugh with delight when I walk into the room. And so I know it all turned out like it was supposed to.

But I'll never forget the day that Jodi came to me, head hung
down, eyes red-rimmed and puffy, and asked, in the quietest, saddest voice I've ever heard, “Can I borrow some money?”

It sounds terrible now, but, in the moment, I was kind of annoyed. I had planned a call with the head of my design firm, Anna. And I was in the throes of three very demanding design projects, was working on a marketing plan for my new book, had to get a blog post finished, and needed to check in with Daniel, the manager of my antiques store in New York, to see what I needed to buy at the auctions that weekend. And Alex was with Mother and Daddy for only three hours. Needless to say, every moment had been carefully orchestrated.

But, all the same, I brought Jodi through the front door and sat beside her on the couch, holding her hand, looking deep into her watery eyes, my mind going to the first, natural place it would go. “Oh, Jodi, you're not drinking again, are you?”

She shook her head like that simple movement was taking all the strength in her bony body. I looked her over, her mousy hair stringy and greasy, hanging in her face, a tomato-sauce stained sweatshirt over a pair of faded jeans with holes that hadn't been put there ironically. My mind jumped to a vision of poor, sweet Jodi, down on her knees, wearing away at that fabric, praying every minute that God would give her a different life.

“I am happy to lend you money,” I began slowly. “And I'm not trying to treat you like a child. But I can't give you cash without knowing what it's for.” I thought back to the last time I had helped Jodi out, to the lecture from Graham I was certain would never end. He was usually fairly amused by my antics, my husband, and I craved that way he looked at me like I was the only thing on earth that mattered. He scolded me only when it was serious. And he was serious that I never, ever give money to an alcoholic.

One fat tear fell down Jodi's face, but she wiped it away
quickly and said, “I gotta get an abortion. I ain't got the money to do that and make the trailer payment.”

I leaned back on the couch and took a deep breath. My first thought was,
Why her and not me?
But I pulled myself together. I knew exactly where she was because I had been there a few years earlier, right after my first husband Alex had died. Of course, I wasn't contemplating an abortion for the same reasons as Jodi. I was just afraid. Afraid of being a widowed mother. Afraid of being alone. Afraid of dying and leaving an orphan. It was the kind of afraid that wakes you up at night and won't let you settle back down, the last wound-up, sugar-crazed girl at the slumber party. Part of me wanted to tell Jodi I was sorry, give her the money, and go on about my day. Part of me knew that, at nineteen and a recovering alcoholic with a minimum-wage job, the future was bleaker for her and that baby than a hospice patient.

But the other part of me knew how having my Alex had erased the gray rain cloud hovering above the black-and-white sketch of my life and replaced it with a full-color blue sky. The other part of me knew that one day, the little girl in front of me shaking like a guitar string in a blues solo might wish she had known all the information before she had made her decision. And so, I found myself wrapping my arm around her and saying, “Honey, I've got to tell you about when I found out I was pregnant with Alex.”

I told her about the abortion clinic that rainy day in New York and Jane, the counselor who had helped me realize that I should at least think about my other options. I told her about how I saw Alex jumping inside me for the first time on that ultrasound screen, and I realized that I wasn't just a widow and I wasn't all alone; I was a mother. I told this teenager, whom I didn't know much better than the teller at the bank, my deepest, darkest
secret, the horrifying truth that I had shared only with Graham and my best friends Stacey and Charlie.

I poured my soul out onto the living room rug like a can of Carpet Fresh. And I knew from her vacant, listless stare that she was so buried in the ash from the eruption of her life that she couldn't hear me.

So I said, “Jodi, I have to tell you: I was in the worst, deepest, darkest well of my life and that baby was the rescue crew that came to fish me out. I don't know how I would have made it without having him to live for.”

Her face shifted. “Ricky left me.”

I nodded solemnly, but I was thinking that was probably the best thing that could ever happen to her. But I didn't say that, of course. Instead, I asked quietly, “Did he know about the baby?”

She nodded like she was about to be unhooked from life support and take her final breath. I knew how she felt. I remembered that weariness that seeps through your organs and hides out in your bones, that sadness that takes over your mind and grips you in a way that you don't think you'll ever get back to a place where a smile can dance on your lips or a laugh tickle the back of your throat.

“He seemed like he was all right with the whole thing. But he didn't show up for my doctor appointment yesterday mornin'. And he didn't come home last night. And he ain't been here all day today.”

I wanted to say,
Good riddance
. But you can't make someone see how terrible their partner is when they're blinded by love, no matter how ill-advised that love is. “Doesn't he disappear like this from time to time?” I asked.

She finally leaned back on the silk faille-covered sofa, pausing for a second, staring down at her feet. Then she said, her voice cracking, “He's gone for good this time.”

I wanted to tell her that
gone for good
meant dead like my husband Alex. Gone for good didn't mean cruising around in the truck that your pregnant girlfriend was paying off with her hard-earned money. It didn't mean chugging beer with one hand on the wheel, throwing empty bottles out the window into the bed—and, if you were really, really lucky, a girl drunk enough that she didn't realize what a no-good bastard you were. But I remembered being nineteen. I remembered that shiny half dollar of love story hope that made you think the beast was going to turn into a prince if you just waited a little longer. Sure, he was an ass, but he was going to
change
for you.

I had bitten my tongue long enough and so, in a way that I hoped seemed encouraging, I said, “Sweetie, I think you're better off raising this baby by yourself than you would have been with him.”

She shook her head. “I cain't be trusted with a baby.”

I cocked my head and adjusted the books on the mirrored coffee table, catching a glint of my diamond in the reflection.

“I think you'll be an incredible mother. Why couldn't you be trusted with your own baby?” She shook her head again. I added, “I know you're young, but you're smart and ambitious.” I leaned back, smiled, and rubbed her arm supportively. “For heaven's sake, you can change a tire faster than a highway patrolman.”

I thought that would elicit a smile, but instead, I saw a shiver inch up her spine. “What if I get to drinking again?” she whispered like she was afraid the cloisonné lamps would hear her and tell.

And that was when I realized it: I could try to equate our two situations all I wanted to, but they'd never really be the same. Because addiction is a force that I can read about or listen about or think about, but that, praise Jesus, I'll never truly understand.