Under the Influence (5 page)

O
utside of AA, I tried not to speak of what had happened. But that afternoon in the Havillands' sunroom on Folger Lane, with Ava across from me in her chair and the smell of gardenias from the cut-glass bowl on the table, and the beautiful cheese, and one of the dogs licking my ankle, it all came out. I hadn't planned on saying any of this. But by the time I left that afternoon—the sun low on the horizon, Ava pressing into my hands a jar of homemade soup and a sweater she said she never wore that was just my color, and reminding me that we were on for dinner that Friday at a certain Italian restaurant she and Swift loved—I had told her everything. My childhood. My marriage. The loss of my son. My brief, uncomfortable visits to his father's house to see him, and the fact that more and more when I went there now, Ollie seemed aloof and distant.

“I can't even think about another relationship at the moment,” I told Ava. “All I care about right now is getting Ollie back with me. I know I need to hire a lawyer, but I haven't even paid off the one I had before.”

“Things are going to improve,” she told me. “When I get to work on a problem, nothing stops me.”

The floodgates opened that day. Ava was a great listener.

I described to her the day my son moved out of our apartment. I didn't want Ollie to see me crying when we packed up his room, but
when Dwight came to take him away—greeting our son in the manner of a game show host, as usual—I knew it was going to be impossible not to let him see how torn up I was.

“I'll see you before you know it,” I told Ollie, standing on the sidewalk next to my ex-husband's car. Like it was no big deal that my son's clothes, along with his Legos and his rock collection and his stuffed pig, were now boxed up in the trunk. Ollie himself sat stiffly in the backseat with his hamster cage on his lap (his father's one concession: he could bring Buddy to Walnut Creek) and his head turned aside in a way that made me know he was sucking his thumb.

The court had ruled that I could see Ollie for six hours every other Saturday, contingent on his father's approval and my commitment to stay sober—but even if I'd had a license there was no way I could bring Ollie over to my apartment for those few hours and still get him back to Walnut Creek by dinnertime, and I wasn't allowed to keep him with me overnight. Ollie—the boy who used to sleep pressed up against me all night long, with his legs draped over mine and a piece of my hair wrapped around his finger—had become a person I saw now and then, if his father allowed it.

In the early days after Dwight had taken him to live in Walnut Creek, Ollie had clung to me when I went there for visits and begged to come home with me when I left, but lately, when I arrived at his father's house, he barely spoke to me.

I barely remember those early days without Ollie. I moved to a smaller apartment in Redwood City—very dark, in a sketchy neighborhood, but it was cheaper and closer to public transportation. I went to AA meetings every night, getting rides from my sponsor. I knit sweaters for my son that he probably never wore. I took portraits of other people's children—riding the bus to jobs, or sometimes, when I was really strapped, taking a taxi. I watched stupid television shows:
American Idol, Survivor, The Osbournes
. I went to the movies a lot.

I had one friend. I'd met Alice at a private party where I'd been
hired to help out—work I'd taken on the side, in the early days after my divorce, back when Ollie still lived with me. Weekends when he was away with his father, I'd take on catering jobs to pick up extra money for the vacation I was planning for the two of us to see the dinosaur flats in Montana that we'd studied pictures of in
National Geographic
.

Alice was a few years older than me, also divorced (so long, she said, she'd forgotten what her husband looked like; so long, she said, there was probably moss growing inside her vagina, or barnacles. That was the way Alice talked).

Alice had a daughter in college, Becca, who hardly ever came home anymore. Becca's main presence in Alice's life seemed to take the form of large credit card bills that showed up in her mother's mailbox on a monthly basis for shoes and manicures and weekend trips with her friends, while Alice herself rented a room out in her house to a retired teacher (male, zero romantic prospect) and economized by cooking one stew in the Crock-Pot that lasted through most of the week, when stretched with rice.

In the old days, before I'd lost custody of my son, my friend used to come over for pizza nights, and the three of us—me, Ollie, and Alice—would play Monopoly or the Memory Game or pile up pillows on the couch and watch old movies or try to match Michael Jackson's dance moves in the “Thriller” video. After Ollie left, Alice and I used to go out to the movies together at least once a week, nights when we weren't catering some event, if I'd gotten my AA meeting in during the daytime hours. We'd buy a large tub of popcorn—buttered—and, for Alice, a box of Raisinets. Alice had pretty much given up on men some time back and no longer made any effort to stay in shape. She was always a big-boned person—tall, and never remotely interested in exercise or hiking—but over the six years I'd known her she'd probably gone from a size ten to a sixteen.

“I'm going to starve myself, just for the thrill of getting to have some idiot with a comb-over feel me up?” she said. “I'd rather have the butter.”

She was one of those friends with whom not all that much that's exciting ever happens. She had a tough, hard edge to her, but she was funny and I knew she had a kind heart. I could trust her. After our movie, we'd go out for a drink together at a bar close to the theater—wine for her, club soda for me—and make it last a couple of hours. One time, two men had stopped by our table and asked to join us. There had been nothing particularly memorable about them, but they didn't look like total losers either, and if it had been up to me I would have said okay, but Alice had shaken her head.

“So, girls,” one of them said, already sliding into our booth. “What do you say we buy you two a drink?”

I might have let it happen, but not Alice. “Why don't you save your money,” she said, “and go buy some Listerine?”

That was it for our suitors, naturally. They probably hadn't expected that a couple of women like Alice and me—who weren't such prizes ourselves—would be that picky. But I had loved this about Alice: the way, unlike so many single women I knew, she never dropped a friend because a more promising prospect might present itself. Not that any such prospects had shown up for either of us, but that would be her policy, and I knew it.

Back before Ava, Alice and I used to have our coffee together over the phone almost every morning, and we checked in most nights, too. There was seldom much news to report, given the fact that we spoke every day, but it felt less lonely, having that voice on the other end of the telephone.

“I'm thinking about getting new blinds,” she'd tell me. Did I think venetian blinds were horrible?

I talked a lot in those days about the custody mess—endlessly revisiting the scene in the courtroom that day, wishing I'd had a better lawyer, wishing I could get another chance. I had paid a visit to a women's social service group in San Mateo to look into legal aid lawyers, but they couldn't help me, and the one lawyer I'd consulted wanted a ten-thousand-dollar retainer up front.

Most often, now, when I went to see Ollie, he'd be in his room, on the computer. Dwight was usually off playing golf, or attending real estate open houses and handing out his card to potential clients. I knew the drill. When he came home, Ollie reported, he complained if there were toys on the floor. Dwight liked things tidy. I knew that part, too. And the anger that came if things didn't go his way.

“Bastard,” Alice would say, speaking of Dwight. It wasn't the kind of talk that got you anywhere, but it felt good having someone on my side.

I'd make an effort to talk with Alice about other things besides the loss of my son, but it was hard thinking what those might be. I'd mention that I had a dentist appointment; she'd tell me about Becca's plan to go to Mexico on her spring break.

It was the kind of thing a person said to her partner, if they were married. The day-to-day. (Though later, once I got to know the Havillands, I could never picture Ava talking this way to Swift, or Swift to Ava, and the fact that this was so made me newly conscious of how ordinary and vapid my own life was. Or had been.) But as unexceptional as our exchanges might have been, Alice was a reliable constant in those dark days. The only one, probably, and she was loyal as the day is long, as loyal as a dog, she used to say. Times when I'd get to thinking about Ollie—how it sometimes felt as if he didn't even know me anymore—the number I'd call would be Alice's.

A
fter Ollie moved to Walnut Creek, I'd put into a closet all the things that reminded me of what we used to do together: the step stool he'd used so he could work next to me at the kitchen counter, his chalkboard easel, the art supplies I'd kept spread out on our table, his Spider-Man cape. Without my son around there was no reason to keep the aquarium, or to put funny sayings up on the refrigerator spelled out in alphabet magnets, or to play the old-timey music he loved that we used to dance to in the kitchen. When the CD player broke, I didn't get a new one.

I had an old digital camera that I let him use. One day I made the mistake of looking through the pictures we'd taken together—pictures Ollie had taken of his hamster, and his old room, and a cake we'd made where I'd let him squirt every color of frosting on the top. I never picked up that camera again.

Knowing his father's position on pets—that they made a mess and cost a lot in vet bills—Ollie had given up lobbying for a puppy. He got to have his hamster, Buddy, but that wasn't the same. Neither was the robot dog his stepmother had presented him with, which she claimed to have all of the good qualities of a dog without the trouble. All you had to do was buy new batteries now and then.

My son's life was filled with technology now. Every time I called his father's house to talk with Ollie, he seemed to be immersed in some
video game. To the extent that he had a life beyond the computer, it was playing out in his new town now—school events, mostly. It was a worry to me that apart from those, and the occasional birthday party, I never got the sense that Ollie had friends.

“Cheri doesn't like having kids come over,” he told me once. “She says we make too much noise and wake the baby.” This was Jared, Ollie's half brother, born not long after Dwight gained custody of our son. Young as he was, Ollie had noted, early on, his stepmother's early preference for the baby. “She talks to me in this voice, like the good witch in
Wizard of Oz,
” Ollie had said. He made a sound that resembled laughter but wasn't.

And then there were the Sacramento relatives—the grandparents and all those uncles and his aunt and cousins, one of whom always seemed to be having a birthday or graduation or a baby shower that would invariably be celebrated on a Saturday. How was I supposed to tell my son he couldn't be part of that? What did I have to offer that could even compete?

I made the trip to Walnut Creek when I could. Every other Saturday morning, if Ollie was free, Alice would drive me over so I could take him out. We'd visit the park and go for Mexican food or pizza afterward. Sometimes she joined us, sometimes she'd sit in the car with a book, waiting for me.

The truth is, Ollie never wanted to stay long at the park. He was getting too old for the jungle gym. We went bowling sometimes, but he mostly rolled gutter balls and got frustrated about that. “I like PlayStation better,” he'd said. He'd just gotten this new NASCAR game.

What I longed for, more than anything, was time with my son that wasn't scheduled, meals that didn't take place in restaurants, times together that didn't have to be organized around some activity. I missed ordinary life: hanging out on the couch, sitting on the front step reading together, not even speaking sometimes, just driving to the supermarket with him, going on our photography shoots, buying him sneakers,
looking in the rearview mirror and catching sight of his face. I had become a bowling alley mother, a woman who had the TGI Fridays menu memorized. I didn't do my son's laundry anymore, or get to dry him off when he got out of the tub. One day, when I took him swimming (using a Holiday Inn pool pass clipped from the newspaper), and I started helping him into his trunks, it occurred to me that I hadn't seen his small naked body in more than a year. But Ollie pushed me away. “I like to be private,” he'd said.

I knew his father yelled at him a lot, but Ollie didn't talk about it. Or much else that was going on in his life. The absence of friends. The baby who seemed to occupy all his stepmother's attention. Back when he was five—after the divorce but before I lost him—we used to spend Sunday mornings taking pictures together, but after he moved to his father's house he never wanted to do that anymore. Or anything else. Over the months—and then a whole year, and then two—it was as if Ollie were in some little boat and I was standing on the shore, watching him drift out to sea. Farther and farther away from me.

One day, not long after I'd gotten my license back, I pulled up to the house and didn't even recognize my son until he got close to the car. His face had that uneasy hangdog expression he wore almost all the time now, and when he caught sight of me, it didn't change. His father and stepmother had bought him new clothes, of a style I never would have chosen for him—shirts with sayings on them like
LITTLE TROUBLEMAKER
and (from my ex-mother-in-law, evidently)
MY GRANDMOTHER WENT TO LAS VEGAS AND ALL SHE BROUGHT ME WAS THIS STUPID SHIRT
, and another one that suggested he must have been enrolled at some point in Vacation Bible School. They'd cut his hair—a bowl cut, with a wide margin of skin shaved clean around his ears. For some reason, it was that more than anything—the tender pink skin that left his ears looking even bigger and goofier than normal—that got to me. The haircut made Ollie look so small and vulnerable. Exposed.

“Do you like it?” he asked. By this point my son never confided in
me about anything anymore, but he spoke to me in a way that made me know he was miserable about how he looked, and he was right.

“It'll grow,” I said.

Even though I had my license back, Ollie never came over to my place—the new, dark apartment in Redwood City. My visitation time was too short, and even if we might have worked that out, Ollie didn't want to come over anymore. I knew he was mad at me for letting the whole mess happen in the first place and for my inability to fix it.

And he was different now, too. Sometimes, hearing Ollie talk, I would look across the table at him, at whatever chain restaurant we were eating at that night, and it occurred to me that the way he was speaking, the wary look in his eyes and his recently acquired habit of avoiding my gaze—looking at me sideways from under his long, feminine lashes—was not so different from how he'd looked on those awful visits to Florida to see my mother and her husband. I was that much of a stranger. Worse than that, even. An object of suspicion.

By this point I had gotten a job as a photographer for a company that took those school portraits of children that parents buy in packages for the relatives (one eight-by-ten glossy, two five-by-sevens, and a dozen wallet size). I had learned from working in this business for a while that parents tended to buy these photo packages out of some kind of weird guilt mixed with superstition, because their child might feel unloved if everybody else's parents had filled out the order form and sent in their money and theirs didn't, and because it almost seemed like bad luck if you didn't send in the check. My company deleted the files. And who wanted to picture the image of their child's smiling face—bangs recently cut, cowlick slicked down, front teeth missing, perhaps—ending up in their laptop trash?

Shooting three hundred children in a day for Happy Days Portraits, Inc.—times when I was lucky enough to get the work—had not been my original goal when I started studying photography. But I owed thirty-four thousand dollars to my divorce lawyer at this point, along
with a few thousand dollars in credit card debt, not to mention my crazily high car insurance premiums. I needed the money badly, though the reasons for working as much as I did at the time went deeper. There was nothing harder or sadder to me than being alone with my thoughts, with enough free time to take in what a mess my life had become, how far away I'd gotten from the dreams of my younger days. I took whatever work I found.

My neighbors in my apartment complex were a young couple with a three-year-old and infant twins on one side, and an old man named Gerry who kept the television on all day and most of the night on the other. Gerry favored Fox News and sometimes liked to talk back to the set, which meant I might be reading, or trying to have a conversation with my son on the phone, and I'd hear him call out, “Damned liberals! Shoot 'em all, that's what I say.” Then the twins might pipe up, or their mother, Carol, would start crying, and a minute later I'd hear the door slam, meaning her husband, Victor, had evidently had enough. Then more tears from Carol. Then Gerry again. “That's telling 'em!”

It never worked very well anyway, trying to carry on a conversation with Ollie on the phone. When I'd try to get him to talk about his day, what had happened at school, to tell me about a friend or his science project, there was a flatness to his voice. His responses, when I asked him a question, were monosyllabic, and I could feel his restlessness as he held the receiver. I'd hear Dwight and Cheri's baby in the background, or the television. Sometimes I could tell he was sitting at the computer while we spoke, the sound of zapping superheroes and monsters giving him away.
Beep beep beep. Crunch.

“What game are you playing?”

“Nothing.”

“What's Mr. Rettstadt been teaching you lately?”

“Poop.”

“I miss you so much, Ollie.”

Silence. Whatever he felt about this, there were no words for it in his vocabulary.

Then came the sound of my neighbors' twins again, or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh spouting off.

In the old days, before the custody mess, Ollie might have actually found all the hubbub funny. We would have curled up on the couch with our Laurel and Hardy, and when Gerry would yell something in response to some report he'd seen on the television, we would have just laughed. Then Ollie would have pretended he was Gerry, shaking his fist at the TV, calling out, “That's telling them, Rush!”

Now, on nights when I was home alone, when the neighbors' voices filled my small dark living room—the crying babies, the angry man, the smell of take-out fried chicken seeping through the drywall—I just sat there, taking it in. I went to a lot of meetings, but I never stayed around for coffee hour. Most evenings, I'd call Alice, not that there was much to report. I edited my photographs from that day and went to bed early.