I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (8 page)

A few nights later, at 6:30, when the nephew is on his way to pick me up at my parents’ house, Sophie calls. She said, “Bill’s moving away.” All I can think is
Get out, get out, get out.
I don’t want to count anything; I don’t want to be counted. This is a moment I know well, the one they talk about in meetings, when I have no defense against the first drink. By now, I’ve just been going through the motions of sobriety. I’m not calling anyone in recovery. My attendance at meetings is scattershot. I’m a regular again at the bar.

There isn’t much time. I’m afraid the nephew will arrive before I can run to my car, drive out of sight. Afraid someone will stop me. It’s still light out—too early to go anywhere. Methodically, I drive to the Big C liquor store. Buy two pints, familiar clink; careful of cops I keep my bottle low while I’m driving down the highway. It burns in stages, like an elevator. By seven o’clock, I’m drunk. Drive to the Night Train. It’s just one big room. This is where I’d cocktail-waitressed briefly in 1982, almost two years ago.

Three bars. Black vinyl booths with cigarette burns. On the tables, round red glass, beveled, each with a candle inside, a yellow living room. Calm. The band starts at ten. When I worked here, I had trouble counting money in the dark, keeping it wrapped around my fingers all night.

Bill’s not busy yet—he’s at the door. Kisses my cheek. “Don’t charge her,” he tells the bouncer. “She doesn’t even drink,” he says proudly. At first, it’s blindfold dark. I sit at the bar, back to the wall. Bill happy at first, friendly. Clatter, clink. It gets busy. I want a drink, but Bill won’t serve me. I’m not thinking that I’ve just lost almost six months sober, definitely not thinking of going to a meeting. I’m thinking of not being lonely. I’m waiting for the fun to start, for Bill to love me.

He laughs scared when I order from the other bartender, but his face is serious with concern. The short glass against my lips, lift my chin. Drink it in front of him. He tries to grab the glass. I giggle. People are calling his name—he’s too busy to stop me. I’ve won—he can only give me nervous glances. I am very drunk, writing on damp cocktail napkins when Susan arrives. She sits down, blond and compact, flirts with Bill.

The light in the empty ladies’ room glares like a hospital. No door on the toilet. I smash my glass on the enamel tank. Tiny red bubbles on my right hand. Back on the barstool, I flirt with the guy to my left, hiding the glass. A few nights before I’d dreamed that I saw the date of my death inscribed on a stone: August 6, 1944—age 63. Wondered who I was. The bottom of the glass intact, and I slid the edges into my wrist. Eight little bones in two perfect rows. The bone next to my thumb is a boat; the bone beside the boat is a moon. A bracelet that lets my fingers work. I don’t look down. The word for skin used to be grass covering an open place. I quietly set the broken glass on the bar, blood on it. Bill is funny, so predictable with wide eyes, mouth open. The open place is spilling out.

I blacked out. A few months later, Bill says, “You don’t even know what happened.”

“Tell me.” He’ll turn away. We’ll be back in the other train car bar—he’s got his old job back. I won’t be drinking, won’t drink again. But it’s crazy that I’m there, standing that close to him, all
the bottles shining. He won’t move away after all. He’s right there. He tells me I had sex in my car with someone I didn’t know. Got a condom from the bouncer. What kind of man has sex with a woman with blood on her hands?

I don’t know why I left my car in the parking lot, along with my keys, coat, my tights, panties, purse. I come out of the blackout walking down the highway. Black elfin boots, legs bare to my thighs, my skirt. No idea of time. The all-night Denny’s bright, and I go in to use the pay phone to call Bill. But I don’t have a dime. Stand in the light looking at the phone. Walk out. Back to the highway.
How do I find Bill?
It’s cold. Even in Florida, January is cold.

This is how girls disappear. Walking until they become darkness. A van stops. Someone vanishes.

A car does stop. Window down. The driver has dark hair. “You look like you could use some help,” he says. He’s older than me, but not old. Maybe thirty. Pale. His car is small, our bucket seats close together. I get in the car. He doesn’t ask what’s happened. He doesn’t ask how I am. “Where do you want to go?” he asks me. I tell him.

“Turn left at the apartment complex …Here.”

Bill’s apartment. The time in between seeing him at the Night Train and now is like a black Polaroid. I don’t get out of the car. Bricks in front of us, one on top of another. The people who live here are bricked in. The driver turns his face to mine. He’s not in a hurry.

“Are you sure this is where you want to go?” It’s so calm in his car. “I can take you somewhere else.” But I’m already racing ahead in my thoughts, wanting to see Bill, afraid of what I’ve done. I thought about asking the driver to take me home, my parents lived less than ten minutes away. But they’d be mad—I’d broken my curfew. How would I explain my car gone, my clothes, purse, the blood?

The dark-haired man in the car had all the time in the world. I could have told him that three years ago, my son had bruises on his legs, but hadn’t fallen. That sometimes the past appears right over the present. That I had a ribbon-thin dress like a flag, red with blue inside, and I slept in it after Tommy died. That I almost hadn’t given him away. And if I’d kept him, maybe he wouldn’t have died. Instead, I say, “Yes.” Open the car door.

Bill’s front door isn’t locked. There are men’s bodies sleeping on the carpet in the living room. I bump into them walking to Bill’s door, push it open. He’s not happy to see me. He runs his hand through his hair. I know it’s soft. He won’t look at me. “I can’t stand to be in the same room as you,” he says. I’m a little surprised that he’s not at all concerned about the cutting, the blood. But he’s not.

“I can’t go home now,” I said.

“If you’re staying, I’m leaving,” he said, bending over into his closet, grabbing a gym bag. He leaves. I can’t believe it. His room is nothing without him. Even my ribs are distressed at his leaving, rising and falling.

I wade through the bodies on the floor, go into the kitchen. Smash a juice glass in the sink, terrifying one of Bill’s sound-asleep roommates. He levitates from the couch like a cartoon. I can’t stop giggling at his fear. I giggle back to the bedroom, Bill’s room, shut the door. Take a piece of the glass to bed. Glass edge resting on my wrist. But I’m tired. I don’t have the energy to die.
I can die in the morning if I still want to.
Then the bedroom door is pushed open. The now-awake roommate comes in. The bed is in the center of the room. He’s touching me. “I just want to make you feel good,” he said.

“No,” I said. “No. No.” But for a moment, I wonder if it’s possible. Can he make me feel good? Can I feel good? By then, it’s too late. I don’t seem to be in charge of my body anymore.

Years later, I’ll tell something of this story to a woman in a small, windowless room. She’s a spiritual therapist who befriends me, who counsels me at no charge in her office. The telling will make me sick to my stomach, the feeling that I am trash—body crumpled, and a hard wall that I bump against. “What if it wasn’t you?” the woman will ask me. And sometime after that telling, I’ll be in a fancy grocery store that had expanded to include a liquor section, video rentals, a dry cleaner drop-off. At the dry cleaner counter, a girl will be standing in the yellow store light, and I’ll think, “What if it was her?” Instantly, the hard wall gives way.

When I imagine it’s her he rapes, I know she can’t stop the rasping, like sandpaper inside. She’s forgotten how to lift her hands. She doesn’t think about the broken glass, about using it as a weapon. How she could cut him to make it stop. It’s as if her arms are sky. She can see him through a window, and then he’s gone. I want to go to her, and say I’m sorry. It’s all I can do, even now, not to walk over to her in the store that no longer exists, and touch her face. I’ve never seen her face—she’s in profile, the counter far from the front door, the registers where I stand. She’s waiting on a ticket, or her clothes. But if I walked over, she’d turn, look up.

The Monday-morning light is shady. Skirt and angora an inside-out tangle on the floor. I swallow dry. One door away, the bathroom sink drips. I know not to move. If I move, my memory will click in, I’ll wake up. Staying very still, I curl up slowly under the quilt, in segments. I could be embroidery. Eyes closed. Sleep.

By noon, the sun brightens. My contacts are dry, sandy bubbles. I want to find my way back to sleep, but it’s too late. My hands start trembling first. The shaking won’t stop. My skin is stitching, unstitching, needles getting stuck. My ripped wrists burn. The piece of juice glass I broke is on Bill’s nightstand. It looks crazy by daylight. Meant for the wastebasket, not skin.

It takes almost an hour to punch seven numbers in a row on
the telephone. I have to take breaks, lie back down. I call my counselor at the Navy treatment center. I can’t drink anymore. I can’t not drink. I’m on a line between the two. “Help me.”

“Will you go to detox?” she asks. I don’t know what that is, but I don’t care either.

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t take you back in here, even if I wanted to. But I can get you into another rehab. Can you leave for detox right now?”

“I lost my car. I can call my mom. She’ll bring me.” I’m not feeling anything as strong as hope. I just want to live. Can’t think of anything more than two breaths ahead. But I do want to live—it’s as if my bones and blood, my body has taken over.

Mom’s teaching first grade, but she leaves work. Finds my car, my clothes, me. Takes me to my counselor on the Navy base, who arranges for me to get into the Gore Street detox. My mom asks, “But what if she doesn’t make it?” She looks small. Not even mad.

And my counselor puts her arm around me, the Queen of Going Back Out, says, “You’re going to make it, aren’t you?” She smiles at me. I feel the warmth of her arm, the astounding confidence in her voice. I nod.

Chain-link fence, metal door like on a submarine—something that would hold under pressure, underwater, fathoms down. There’s a kind of foyer—milling ground for the men. A corridor on the far right wall leads to showers, bathrooms, metal lockers that no one uses. Donated clothes spill out of a human-sized door—left open for those without clothes. A staff desk beside the corridor. Across from the desk, a large sleeping room for the men. Their beds seem to reach to the ceiling, bunk on top of bunk, like in the hold of a ship. The far wall opens to the women’s side. It’s taken days for a space to open up for me—I’m not drunk anymore. It’s early February now. For the month I’m here, there’s never a bed available for me in the treatment center section, no room with the recovering, sober women. I sleep in the one big room of women’s detox with the drunk women like mummies. White sheets bandaging their bodies. It panics me, living with all these people—so many of them, a city of broken people. All of us corralled into this one concrete block building. I have to keep pushing the anxiety down. There’s nothing to do but stand it.

The Gore Street detox is more centrally downtown than the recovery house on Broadway. The Navy base treatment center was fancy by comparison. At least on the Navy base, no one was drunk. Gore Street takes anyone. It’s so smoky in here. Every
one smokes. Mornings, Nurse hands out juice—fingerpaint purple and black swished in a Dixie cup. With a pill that she says could kill if I drink. I don’t tell her I tried it last summer. When I drank three days off Antabuse, the drug still in me. Drank until my skin burned underneath like soft pear flesh cooking in sugar, jam boiling.

We line up. Nurse takes our blood pressure. Therapy is in a yellow room. We cut pictures from magazines, look for messages on the opposite side. One counselor has hair like cold sand, clumped. On my last day, I’ll find a note from him on my bed, with his phone number. He’ll want me to call, he’ll want me even though he knows what’s happened. A grainy older man, someone who should know better. Another counselor has long curly hair to her waist—she sits so far away from me, behind her desk, she’s like a girl in a painting. I pick out all the colors—red that’s more like yellow. Gold from the wood of trees. Linden. We say things back and forth. My vowels are too close together, but I’m upright. The girl counselor and I talk of practicalities. I think I promise good behavior.

When there’s no therapy, we’re bused to a flea market. I stand in a phone booth breathing, steam up the cold glass. Drop quarters, but no one’s ever home. I’m pretty sure no one wants to talk to me. I get Bill on the phone once, but I can hear Susan in the background, asking him mockingly, “Is that your girlfriend?” Behind the booth, the market is a circus—diamond bright, a chaos I can’t face. Even behind glass, the phone booth is a kind of privacy, a clear coffin.

One night at dinner it’s gravy on meat. I don’t eat meat. We sit with the men, and the new woman I’d met was gone. The night before, this woman had held her palms up to me, black thread tucked tight in her wrists. She’d said that the nurse in the emergency room had been mad at her. “There are people out there who
are really sick,” the nurse had said, and yanked the needle. Sitting so close our knees almost touched, looking down at her wrists held out to me, I didn’t touch her arm. There was a TV on in the background. In another country a wounded angel is carried on the limbs of trees, like a ladder. Her eyes covered by a bandage. Head bowed, she can’t see that the sea and mountain and sky are all the same color. How close they are. The new woman spoke with a sense of accomplishment, as though the story was something that sewed her together. Maybe it did.

After dinner, the AA volunteers arrive with real coffee. We sit in a folding chair circle, Styrofoam in our hands. A guy sits next to me, looks at my outfit—yellow T-shirt, tight yellow pants with zippers up the sides. He says, “You look like a banana.” I like the circle, as if there is something in the center that we are all paying attention to, that lives inside it.