Authors: Catherine McKenzie
Spin (12 page)
“So, your name is E., like the letter, full
stop?”
“No . . . that’s just something
Amber calls me. You know, like Eric on
Entourage
?
Because of the red hair and . . .”
“Because you work for Connor?”
“I guess.”
“So, what’s your real name?”
“It’s Henry.”
I roll his name around my tongue. “Henry. I like
it. It suits you.”
“Thanks, Kate, Katie, whichever. Anyway, I should
get to my run . . . unless . . . did you want to
join me?”
“I already went this morning.”
“Maybe some other time?”
“Sure.”
He lays his hand on my shoulder and squeezes
gently, then leaves through a set of French doors that lead outside.
As I watch him jog easily over the lawn I can still
feel the heat of his hand on my shoulder. Is this a good thing, or a sign that I
should avoid any further contact?
I think the evidence to date (liking it when he
touches me, awkward silences,
grinning
at each
other) points toward avoid-any-further-contact, since I’m, you know, in rehab,
and spying on his boss’s girlfriend.
Yeah. Henry is definitely off limits.
Apple Peels and
Other Fairy Tales
T
he
scraping of a branch against my window wakes me from one of those vivid,
realistic dreams that starts to fade as soon as you wake up. Only the taste of
it remains, and this dream tastes like alcohol. Tequila shots, I believe.
Why, oh why, did I have to wake up?
I open my eyes. I can tell by the total blackness
that it’s late, late, late.
I peel back the covers and walk toward the window.
I peer at the manicured courtyard. The sky is a bowl of stars that falls right
to the horizon. Black clouds whip across the moon.
I feel hot and feverish. I reach through the bars
and pry open the window. The cold night air rushes in. The wind feels good
against my cheek.
I climb back into bed and search out my nighttime
friends, the cracks in the ceiling. I try to reach back into my dream, to rejoin
the party, but something about it feels off and wrong.
Oh God. I didn’t just have a user-dream, did I? No,
no, of course not. Yes, I dreamt I was drinking, getting drunk even, but my
dream was nice, right? Fun, even. Nothing like Amy’s drugmares.
God, I miss Amy. Without her, the room feels empty
and lonely. I hope she’s doing well, and that take-three sticks.
I shut my eyes firmly, willing myself to sleep.
It works eventually.
I
t’s
Day Eleven: Identifying Patterns of Behavior. I’m standing on the path, trying
to psych myself up for my run.
OK. Eight minutes today. No more of this wimpy five
or six minutes shit. Just find the longest song you have and run for its entire
length. I scroll through the songs on my iTouch. The winner seems to be “Hotel
California.”
OK, then. Although . . . do I really
want to listen to a song about a place you can never leave given where I am
right now?
I look for the next-longest song. It’s the Pogues’s
version of “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” clocking in at 8:11. No, no
that’s worse. Shane MacGowan’s whiskey-soaked voice is not going to take my mind
off the lingering taste of last night’s maybe-user-dream.
“Hotel California” it is.
I stretch my last stretch, place the earphones in
my ears, and put one foot in front of the other. It’s as painful as it is every
other day; running just doesn’t seem to get any easier. At least not for me.
I remember the last time I danced to this song. It
was with Zack at our high school graduation dance. I knew I was leaving for the
city right after I threw my mortarboard in the air. My university classes didn’t
start for several months, but I wanted some time to acclimatize and find a job
to help me finance the tuition my parents couldn’t afford. I’d told Zack I was
leaving but not that I didn’t want to try the long-distance thing. He’d been
bugging me and bugging me to let him come with me to the city for the summer,
and I kept putting him off. He brought it up again as we twirled in the gym. I’m
not sure what it was, but I snapped and told him no.
It happened right when the song speeds up. You
know, where the drums kick in and you can’t slow dance properly? He let his
hands drop from my waist and shrugged off my arms. A minute later, the song was
over and he wasn’t mine anymore.
The drums kick in, and I pick up the pace to match
it. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
The song ends as I come to the gravel road that
passes through the front gates. Amber’s standing in the middle of the road with
her arms crossed over her chest, staring at the gates again. Her hair is pulled
back in a ponytail. I pull the earphones from my ears and look at Amy’s
watch.
Eight minutes. I did it! And not a monkey in
sight.
“What’s up?” I ask.
She peels her eyes from the gate. “Not much. Thanks
for yesterday by the way.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She looks me up and down. “Your face is awfully
red . . .”
“A hazard of healthy living.”
“E. gets all red when he goes running too. Red
hair, red face, red all over.”
“Right. So, where did they take you yesterday?”
“Just to my room. You?”
“I got a lecture from Dr. Houston.”
She smirks. “About how you should stay away from
bad influences like yours truly?”
“He did say something like that, actually.”
“Figures.” She kicks at the ground with her foot.
“Don’t you think Connor looks like shit?”
Yes. The right answer to this question is yes.
“I guess. I’ve never met him, though, so I don’t
really have anything to compare to.”
She looks unhappy. “I wish I could say the
same.”
“What was that all about yesterday?”
“Just telling it like it is.”
“Well, at least you got over your stage
fright.”
“With a little help from my friends.” She flicks
her eyes toward the front gates again.
“You figure a way out of here yet?”
“Not yet.”
“I know one way.”
Her head snaps towards me. “What?”
“Just do your time. They’ll let you out of here
eventually.”
A trace of a smile crosses her lips. “You’re no
help at all.”
“I
’d
like to come back to something we touched on the other day, Katie,” Saundra says
during our session. “About your family.”
I lean back in my chair and stretch out my legs so
they touch the front of Saundra’s desk.
Isn’t therapy supposed to involve couches? I could
really use a lie-down right about now.
“What about my family?”
“Are you close to them?”
“Not particularly.”
She takes a sip of coffee from her white D
OG
L
OVER
! mug.
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know. We used to be, but something changed
along the way.”
“Because of your drinking?”
A wave of tiredness passes through me. “No, it
was . . . before that.”
“Can you situate it?”
I think back, past the Christmases and birthdays
when I stayed away. Before all of the phone calls from my mother I avoided or
half-listened to. Pre whatever it was that made my sister go from worshipping me
to blaming me for everything that’s gone wrong in her life.
“I guess it was when I went away to university, or
before that even. I just remember feeling like my parents were something I had
to run away from. And whenever I came back, I felt further away from them.”
She watches me over the rim of her mug. “But yet
you chose a facility that was close to them when you decided to get help.”
Right. But that was Amber’s mistake, not mine.
“I didn’t think about it like that.”
“Do you think that maybe, subconsciously, you knew
they were part of what you needed to get better?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible.”
“You should consider asking them to come to the
family therapy program. I think you would really benefit from it.”
My body tenses. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Do you want to be close to them again?”
“Everyone wants a happy ending, right? Complete
with loving parents, the perfect man, and a white picket fence.”
She smiles. “I’ll bet that feels a long way away
right now.”
“Sure. I mean, you can’t get a happy ending if
you’ve never been in love.”
Oh God, why did I say that? My lack of sleep is
making me punch-drunk. And everyone knows that drunks do and say stupid
things.
“Do you want to be close to someone?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So, what’s keeping you from getting there?”
“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t met anyone I want
to spend time with long term.”
“Well, where do you usually meet men?”
Somehow I knew it was going to come to
this . . . and yet I still brought the subject up. Clever,
clever.
I should give this conversation my full attention
before I let something worse loose.
I sit up straight. “Well . . . in
bars mostly . . .”
“And what kind of men do you meet in bars?”
“The kind you’d expect.”
“Meaning?”
I shrug. “They’re just immature and looking for a
good time, for the most part.”
“Have you ever had a serious boyfriend?”
“Yes, two.”
“Did the end of these relationships have anything
to do with your issues with alcohol, or was this before?”
“Not the first one . . .”
Nope. I was just running away from him and the
promise ring I’d heard through the small-town gossip mill that he’d bought
me.
“And the other?” she persists.
I wish I could deny it, but . . .
shit, alcohol was totally the reason Greg and I broke up. Greg was my boyfriend
in university, and he was smart, cute, funny, and into me. We dated for two
years, but I got drunk at a party one night and fooled around with this guy who
I didn’t even like. I thought we could work things out, but Greg couldn’t trust
me anymore.
“Yes, maybe.”
“Maybe how?”
I sink down in my chair. “I cheated on him when I
was drunk, and he broke up with me.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“I was sad for a while.”
“But you weren’t in love with him?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
For a million reasons that are way too depressing
to say out loud.
“Because I never noticed how he peeled an apple,” I
say instead.
“What does that mean, Katie?”
“It’s just how love gets described in the movies.
Like in
Sleepless in Seattle
. . .”
This is the movie they showed us last night. “Tom Hanks’s character is musing
about why he fell in love with his dead wife, and he says that it was because
she could peel an apple in one long strip, or something like that. And I was
reading something similar in a book recently, only that was about peeling an
orange . . . anyway . . . I’ve just never felt
like the way someone peels fruit would be a reason to spend the rest of your
life with them.”
Saundra’s eyes grow serious. “I don’t think your
idea of love should be based on what people say in the movies.”
“I know, but don’t you think the core of what
they’re saying is kind of true?”
“What’s that?”
“That love should be simple, I guess.”
“Love isn’t simple, Katie, and neither is life.
Things that are worth having are sometimes complicated, and they evoke
complicated emotions. You know, one of the reasons people often turn to alcohol
or drugs is that they can’t deal with complications.”
“But everyone here’s life
is
complicated. I mean, look at what Candice tried to do.”
“Yes, of course. Because alcohol and drugs don’t
actually make things less complicated. You have to make room in your life for a
little messiness, Katie, if you want to fall in love. And also if you want to
stay sober.”
We finish up our session, and I wander through the
fragrant courtyard, thinking about our conversation. Something Saundra said
isn’t sitting right with me. Is messiness really the answer? Hasn’t my life been
messy enough up till now? I mean, I’ve slept with twenty-seven men. Isn’t that a
little messy?
My first time was with Zack, of course. We did it
in his single boyhood bed on a Sunday afternoon while his parents were visiting
his grandmother. It was uncomfortable, he was sweet, we used a condom. By the
time I ran away, we’d had sex one hundred and forty-two times. Yes, I counted.
No, I didn’t write it down, I just have a good memory. Zack thought it was weird
that I counted too.
It got easier after that to bring sex into a
relationship. Sometimes, not a lot of times, but a few times, I went home with
someone I met that same night. Once, I didn’t even know the guy’s name. Of
course, alcohol was involved. But it wasn’t a big deal to me at the time. In
fact, I remember the twenty-two-year-old me being impressed that I did it. And
part of me still kind of is.
But with the exception of Zack and Greg, I didn’t
care about any of those guys. They were just a distraction, something to help me
pass the time until my real life began.
So, I know what messy is, and it isn’t love. No,
love is supposed to be simple. It’s supposed to be about brushing raindrops off
eyelashes, and looks across a crowded room. It’s supposed to be about watching a
shooting star, or the way a leaf falls off a tree and floats to the ground.
It’s supposed to be about apple peels.
Messages Sent and
Received
“I
’m a
method writer,” Mary says during group a few days later. “I take on the persona
of each of my characters so I can write them as real people.” She stops, looking
uncertain.
We’re sitting in our usual folding chairs in a
sloppy circle facing Saundra. The coffeepot is bubbling loudly on the sideboard.
The sun hasn’t been out in a couple of days, and there’s a persistent fog
seeping down from the mountains. Today it’s enveloped the lodge, and the view
out the picture window looks like we’re in a tree house in a rain forest.
“Go on, Mary,” Saundra encourages.
Mary tucks her hands into her oversized fisherman’s
sweater and takes a deep breath. “The book I was writing is about a runaway
who’s living on the streets. She keeps her innocence for a while, but then she
gives in to the temptations around her. She becomes a heroin addict.”
I glance around the room. The other patients look
bored, staring into their coffee mugs, slumped in their chairs with their eyes
on the ceiling, but The Producer perks up when Mary uses the word “heroin.”
“What did you want to tell us, Mary?” Saundra
encourages. Her salt-and-pepper hair has gone wild in the humidity. It’s barely
being contained by a wide, black headband that has a line of dogs chasing one
another across it.
Mary looks and sounds miserable. “I was so into
getting every detail exactly right that I . . . I started using
heroin.”
“And you became addicted?”
Mary nods.
“Say it, Mary. Admit it.”
Tears start to trickle down her lined face. “I’m
addicted to heroin.”
Mr. Fortune 500 gives an audible snort of disdain,
and The Banker snickers next to him.
Mary wipes her tears away and shoots them a dirty
look. “Oh, fuck off, Ted.”
“Did you want to say something, Ted?” Saundra
says.
He holds up the palm of his right hand and examines
his fingernails. “I would’ve thought her story would be more impressive, that’s
all.”
“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
Mary says, leaning forward angrily. “This isn’t story hour. This is group
fucking therapy.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t entertain us at the
same time.”
Mary wipes away her tears angrily. “What? Like
Rodney’s stories about bowls of cocaine and big movie stars? Like Amber? Should
I sing you a song?”
I look at Amber. She’s sitting quietly in her chair
next to me watching the exchange between Mary and Ted like it’s a tennis
match.
Saundra clucks her tongue in disapproval. “Mary,
let’s not personalize.”
“Just because I’m not a big movie star doesn’t mean
I don’t have anything worth talking about.”
Speaking of big movie stars . . .
YJB is sitting across the room wearing dark distressed jeans and a
cornflower-blue crewneck. His color is healthier than it was a couple of days
ago, and his face is clean-shaven. Except for his shaking hands, he looks only a
few minutes out of character. All that’s missing is a tux and a Walther PPK.
He hasn’t spoken much in group yet, so I haven’t
had any news to report to Bob since the singalong in the cafeteria. He loved
that shit.
“Ted, Mary, this kind of exchange is hardly
helpful.”
“It’s not fair. No one else gets mocked when
they’re talking.”
“I think we could all learn a lesson from this,”
Saundra says, looking around the room. “Group is supposed to be a safe haven. A
place where everyone can speak their mind and learn from one another’s
experiences. There are enough people in your lives who’ll stand in the way of
your recovery once you leave here. You should be listening to one another,
helping one another, accepting one another. This is not a place for judgment.
It’s a circle of truth. A circle of trust. Does everyone understand?”
“Yes, Saundra,” we say as one.
B
y the
end of the day, the wind has picked up and swirled the fog away. When I get to
the cafeteria at our retirement-home dinnertime, I can see the sun setting
behind the mountains for the first time in days. The sky is streaked with orange
and purple above the bright green trees. It’s breathtaking. Not that anyone here
would notice.
I get some baked chicken and vegetables from one of
the women behind the counter and join Mary’s table. She’s sitting, surprisingly,
with YJB, Henry, and The Banker.
“Bette Midler and Susan Sarandon,” The Banker says.
His fingers are laced across his large belly.
“Dude, why’d you pick two
old broads?” YJB drawls, his voice a mixture of the Midwest town he
comes from and a lingering British upper-crust accent.
“’Cuz I don’t want to fuck the old lady from
Titanic.
”
“Not even to get Scarlett Johansson?” Henry says,
winking at me as I sit down across from him. The white lettering across his
crimson sweatshirt speaks of an impressive/expensive university education.
“Well . . .”
“What are you guys talking about?”
“They’re playing Two Equals One Hundred,” Mary
explains. “You have to pick two famous people to sleep with whose cumulative age
is at least one hundred.”
“Isn’t that a drinking game?”
“So?” The Banker replies.
I catch Henry’s eye. He looks amused.
“Forget it.”
“What’s your pick?” Henry asks me.
I think about it. “Um . . . Sean
Connery, and . . .” I catch a look from YJB that seems to me like
a challenge. “Can we pick celebrities we know?”
The Banker shakes his head. “No, no, no.”
“Why not?”
“Nobody you know. That just causes fights.”
“All right . . . Sean Connery
and . . . Daniel Craig.”
YJB smiles at me seductively. “Too bad you can’t
pick someone you know. It might’ve been interesting.”
“I thought we could only pick
celebrities.
”
Henry and The Banker hoot with laughter.
YJB taps Henry’s shoulder. “She’s lively, Henry,
watch out.”
“S
omething Mary said yesterday is kind of bothering me,” I say to
Saundra during our next session. It’s Day Fourteen: Rebuilding Your Career. I’m
wearing a pair of pink board shorts and a dark blue T-shirt with palm trees on
it. My look says: I’d rather be surfing.
“What’s that?”
“What she said about how she became a heroin
addict.”
“You could relate?”
“No . . . not at all.”
“So, why did it bother you?”
“It’s just . . . think about the
level of commitment she has.”
“To using heroin?”
“No. For trying it in the first place. I mean, I
can’t even commit to writing every day, and she cares so much about her work,
about its . . . verisimilitude, that she actually tried heroin.
Just to get her story right.”
Saundra looks up from her notes. “It sounds like
you admire her.”
“I do.”
“Katie, I know you like to tease
me . . .”
“No, I
do
admire her. I
wish I had what she has.”
“A heroin addiction?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then what?”
I pull my feet up onto the chair, resting my chin
on my knees, searching for the right words. “I don’t know . . .
something . . . a drive that’s strong enough to overcome the easy
temptations around me, I guess.”
“Have those temptations affected your career,
Katie?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you like to tell me about it?”
I think back to that day at
The Line.
The way my brain wouldn’t work. The way I puked and puked
and still didn’t feel like myself.
“I had this opportunity to get the job of a
lifetime, and I went out the night before . . . it was my
birthday, or the day before my birthday . . . anyway, I was just
going to have one drink . . .”
Oh my God. I can’t believe I’m telling a “just one
drink” story, the staple of every group session. These stories make me want to
scream. Like in the movies, when the dumb girl goes into the basement to check
out the noise she’s heard
after
she’s received a
dozen creepy phone calls.
Don’t do it, dummy! There’s a
psycho down there!
But here I am . . .
“And?” Saundra prompts.
“Of course, it didn’t stop at
one . . .”
It never does in these stories.
“You missed the interview?”
“No, I made the interview. But I was still drunk,
and I lasted about five minutes before I puked my guts out in the bathroom. And
that was the end of that.”
“Is that what made you realize you should come
here?”
That’d be one way of putting it.
“Yes.”
“Was this the only time that alcohol has affected
your career?”
“I guess I’ve never been good at finishing what I
start, and alcohol doesn’t help.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I just seem to get distracted.”
“By alcohol?”
“By life.”
“So it’s not a drinking problem, per se, but a
Katie problem?”
Oh, I’m definitely the problem all right.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Saundra smiles. “Katie, I think you have to give
yourself a break.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have to accept the things you cannot
change.”
Ah, the Serenity Prayer.
“God
grant me the serenity / To accept the things I cannot change; / Courage to
change the things I can . . .”
For some reason,
reciting it never leaves me feeling very serene.
“Look, I know we say that every day, but what does
it really mean?”
“It means you have to accept yourself. All your
flaws, and your good points too. You only have to live with one person, Katie,
and that’s you. But once you’ve done that, once you’ve accepted your
limitations, you can’t use them as an excuse anymore. If you want to finish
something, do it. You control what you do. You decide.”
“That sounds too easy.”
“It is easy, Katie, in a way. If you take it one
day at a time.”
I think about the various half-finished drafts of
the novels I’ve started and abandoned, cluttering a bookshelf in my bedroom in
the city. It’s such a cliché, right, a journalist with half-finished novels
lying around. But doesn’t everyone have an idea for a novel, some
semi-autobiographical tale that’s just waiting to be the next
Catcher in the Rye
?
Only, none of my books have anything to do with me,
which is probably part of the problem. Like book number two, which was inspired
by Sheryl Crow’s song “Home.” That song kills me. Anyway, my book was going to
be about a woman struggling to stay faithful to her longtime love. I wrote
thirty pages, realized I knew nothing about faithful love, made myself all kinds
of promises about doing some research on the subject, and went to Rory’s
twenty-eighth birthday party. I ended up sleeping with partner number
twenty-four much later that night. His name was Chris. No, Steve. Chris. Steve.
Shit.
Anyway . . . Did I decide to never
finish what I start? Or was I just letting myself get easily distracted,
allowing myself to fail? And has that really been my problem all along? Not
making decisions? Letting life act on me instead of acting on it?
My head is spinning out questions, but I don’t have
any answers. I feel like they’re floating in front of me, but they haven’t taken
shape. And instead of making progress, I’m in suspended animation, waiting,
hoping, for something to happen, but unable to make it so.
G
iven
my turmoiling brain, it’s no surprise that I have trouble sleeping. Again.
None of the tips in the pamphlet Dr. Houston gave
me seem to be working. Go to sleep at the same time every night. Check. Exercise
regularly. Check. Try not to fixate on issues in your life that are troubling
you. Impossible.
So, as it happens, I’m wide awake sometime after
eleven, when there’s a soft rapping at my door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Henry,” a deep voice says in a loud whisper.
“Let me in. I think I hear someone coming.”
Damn. I’m wearing a stretched-out shirt and a pair
of men’s boxers, and my hair is bed-tousled. Oh well, it’ll have to do.
I jump out of bed and ease open the door. Henry
slips through.
“What’s going on?”
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“What is it?”
“Can you turn on the light?”
I flick on the small lamp by my bedside and light
floods the room. Henry’s wearing a broken-in pair of jeans and a white T-shirt.
His feet are bare. His red hair curls across his forehead, giving him a boyish
look.
“Shit. Someone might see the light.” I take the
towel I used to dry my hair earlier off my dresser and hand it to him. “Put this
along the bottom of the door.”
He looks impressed. “What are you, CIA?”
“Nope, I just have years of practice hiding the
fact that I was up from my parents.”
He bends down and fills in the gap with the towel.
“How disappointing.”
“You, on the other hand, obviously have experience
getting into places where you don’t belong.”
He stands up and faces me. “I’ll take that as a
compliment.”
We look at each other, and there’s an odd current
in the air. A whiff of danger I haven’t felt in a while. Not like something bad
is going to happen, but like I might do something bad.
“So . . . what are you doing in the
girls’ section?”
“Passing notes.”
“Seriously?”
“Unfortunately.” He reaches into the front pocket
of his jeans and takes out a folded piece of paper. He hands it to me.
“Is this for Amber?”
“Yup.”
“You want me to take it to her now?” I check the
clock. “At 11:37 at night?”
“Yup.”
“Why don’t you just deliver it to her yourself. In
the daytime?”
He pulls a face. “You don’t think I already tried
that? She wouldn’t take it.”