Bad Habits Read online

  My mother was furious. She threw my conduct sheet down on the table and said, “Can’t you just hold it together a few more years, Mac?”

  But in the end, she was the one who fell apart.

  * * *

  When I was eleven, my mother disappeared for a week.

  Since the car was gone, too, I assumed she had left for good. Strange that it had never occurred to me that she could leave, since my father had done it. But, three years later, that tragedy seemed unavoidable, even a little romantic. Besides, he had left us with her; she had left us with no one.

  I didn’t panic. Lily would be able to tell if I panicked, and then someone would find out we were alone in the house. I didn’t know what would happen next, but I knew it would be bad. That our mother might be hurt, even dead, was a thought I didn’t allow, because it would make no difference to our current situation. I dropped it down a well so deep, even I couldn’t see the bottom, and I turned off my feelings like turning off a tap. It was strangely easy to do, so easy I barely noticed I was doing it. Every morning, I got Lily up and took her to school and dropped her off at class, and every evening I threw a frozen pizza in the oven for dinner like nothing was wrong. I even learned how to run the dishwasher.

  On the fifth day, we ran out of frozen pizzas. I went into my mom’s room, which I’d been avoiding, to look for cash.

  I started with the curio boxes that crowded her dresser, a collection of crystal shells, porcelain hearts, and beveled, brass-seamed mirror boxes, all covered in dust and grime from neglect. I’d long ago exhausted my curiosity about them, but now I opened them all one by one, just in case, and peered inside. Next, I searched the dresser, from the top drawer with its stretched-out bras the color of graying skin to the bottom, where an emerald-green bathing suit I recognized from my mom’s old pageant pictures lay folded neatly under heaps of faded bikinis with rotting straps. I unfolded it, and out dropped a fuzzy black box with my mom’s diamond studs nestled inside. She’d stopped wearing them around the time my father left.

  I put the diamonds in my ears and watched them twinkle like little stars. Then I took them off and put them in my pocket. It wasn’t like she needed them now.

  * * *

  On the seventh day, Lily refused to take her bath. She allowed herself to be undressed while the water ran, but when I cut the faucet off, she stood shivering next to the tub, feet cemented to the mat.

  “Lily, it’s bath time,” I said, keeping my voice deliberately neutral. “Get in.”

  “No.”

  Things could always get worse. What would happen if kids started smelling her on the bus? Eventually a teacher would notice and tell someone in charge, and we’d be taken away.

  “Lily, you have to. Please.” Tears prickled in my eyes. I blinked angrily at them, knowing they’d only make things harder. I could almost feel Lily shudder as one escaped and raced toward my chin.

  Her jaw set. “I don’t want to.”

  I tried to make myself breathe deeply. Lily is my sister, I reminded myself, and then, Lily’s survival is my survival. “What’s wrong?”

  “Mom does bath.”

  Breathe. “I do bath now.”

  “Mom does bath.”

  “Mom isn’t here right now.” I said it as gently as I could.

  She stared obstinately at the door. “Mom does—”

  “When I was eight, I did my own bath,” I snapped, the compulsion to cry suddenly shoved aside by a feeling like a balloon swelling in my chest, about to burst. It was rage, the same rage I had vented on the playground in kicks and punches at the kids who made fun of Lily, now directed at Lily herself. Rage at her immovable flesh, her insurmountable will, her blamelessness. Rage at the dwindling pile of pennies in the change dish and the rubbery ground meat I’d microwaved for dinner in a frozen block, its cold center bleeding all over the plate, and finally, rage at the thought of what would happen if Lily refused to bathe tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Some part of me watched from a distance while inside me the balloon grew bigger and bigger, pushing against my rib cage until I thought it would crack.

  Powerless to stop myself, too exhausted to try, I took a step forward and put out my hand with no plan for what came next.

  Just then I heard the front door open and shut.

  “Mom does bath,” Lily said, smug.

  The woman who appeared at the bathroom door barely looked like our mother. Her week of absence had turned her the color of bruises, purple around the eyes and yellowish everywhere else. The skin sagged around her scrawny elbows and too-prominent collarbone as if she wore someone else’s cast-offs. She stared at us unseeing for a moment. Then she began to sob, and the bag of bones rattled to life. I drew back as she threw her arms around Lily, who politely ignored her tears.

  When Mom released her, Lily stepped into the bathtub without a word. I watched numbly as they began to perform the evening ritual of bath time, thinking only that it was over. There would be no more raw meat for dinner. Although it was only eight o’clock, I went to bed and fell asleep instantly.

  Sometime later that night, I awoke to the sound of my mom on the phone in the next room. I listened for as long as I could keep my eyes open.

  “I tried to stop on my own, I swear, but the pain was so bad. I thought, I’ll just take enough to get through work every day and I’ll get it somewhere else, anywhere but the clinic . . . I don’t even know what that guy gave me, Karen. I swear, I didn’t know how long I was gone.” Odd, dry sobs, like a record skipping. “I need help. I’m drowning, I’m drowning, I’m drowning . . .”

  The words went on and on, and then I was asleep again, no longer in bed, but back in the bathroom with Lily, trying to get her into the tub, stuck in the moment right before my mom came in. This time, I shoved Lily as hard as I could. Her eyes went wide and she fell backward, her head hitting the porcelain with a crack. Then she was underwater, not in the bathtub, but in the river, her hair waving all around. Beneath her, in the murky green depths, a forest of dead men planted in concrete reached up their arms.

  * * *

  The clinic didn’t press charges for the stolen opioids, but my mom’s job was gone for good, her license suspended. The court ordered outpatient rehab, a caseworker for home visits, physical therapy, pain management classes. Everything’s mandated but an income, she cracked sourly. How’re you supposed to get that.

  A girl on the bus whose mom worked at the same clinic said all nurses have aching backs, but they don’t all become drug addicts. Every day for weeks, she hung over the back of the seat in front of me and told me about the cancer patients who had died in pain because my mom shorted their IV bags. I just stared out the window.

  I could hardly bear to be in the same room with my mother now. She ate ferociously but gained no weight, and she’d picked up smoking again, which made the house smell and Lily cough. Her breath reeked so badly, I wondered if the drugs were still sitting in her stomach, sending poisonous gases up her throat. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.

  Her new plan was to homeschool Lily. A friend had told her she could apply for aid from the state if she was Lily’s full-time caregiver. “Public school isn’t serving her needs,” she recited. “Anyway, it’s only temporary. I’ll get a job in home health as soon as I get my license back.”

  The moment she said the word temporary, I knew it wasn’t. Lily was her project now, and my mom never did my hair again. Neither of us could forget that I had taken her place for a week. In fact, I had been too brave.

  * * *

  I had longed for independence from Lily, but the reality was awful. I missed her horribly. The thick shell I’d grown protecting her was not so easy to dismantle, and school was achingly lonely and purposeless. My classmates quickly forgot why they weren’t supposed to sit next to me on the bus, but the aura of disgrace hung around me like a fog, mingling with the stink of poverty. All my clothes came from church basements and garage sales now, and I outgrew them far too quickly
. My mom cast evil glances at my lengthening limbs, interpreting my lurch into puberty as an act of rebellion. She guarded my sister so jealously that I had to sneak into Lily’s room at night to sing her to sleep with the song from her favorite movie, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

  One night, Lily interrupted the opening bars. “When are you going away, Mac?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said gravely. I had just turned thirteen. My options were limited.

  “Dad went away. Mom went away.”

  I still had nightmares about that week, though it had happened over a year ago. I answered carefully. “Mom was only gone a couple of days.”

  “Dad went away. Mom went away,” she repeated matter-of-factly. “You’ll go away. And you won’t come back.”

  “I won’t go away, Lily.”

  I could feel her evaluating the truth of the statement, processing it the way she processed everything, by running it through her body. The napkin on the floor of the Bob Evans, the screaming at the school bus.

  “Okay, then,” I amended. “If I go away, I’ll come back for you.”

  This seemed to satisfy her.

  After a moment, she said, “Do you know the difference between horses and ponies? Ponies are less than fourteen hands tall. Fourteen-point-two for English. A hand is four inches.”

  “Oh.”

  “And ponies have different conformations.”

  “I promise I’ll come back, Lily.”

  She sighed under the blanket. “Conformation means they have different bones. They look like horses, but they are an entirely different breed.”

  “Lily—”

  “They can survive on a lot less grass.”

  We breathed quietly together in the darkened bedroom.

  “I know,” I whispered, choosing to hear, Don’t worry about me, I can wait.

  * * *

  The day I turned fifteen, I walked to the nearest strip center and got a job at the Frogurt Palace. We’d never replaced the Pontiac my father drove away, and if I ever hoped to escape after high school, I had to start saving for a used car now.

  I kept ten percent of my paycheck; the rest went to household expenses. This appeased my mother, who had less and less patience for my existence, and ensured we always had non-SNAP-eligible goods like toilet paper. My cash tips I rammed inside the smelliest shoe in the back of my closet—​a needless precaution, since I was the only one who ever cleaned.

  The Frogurt Palace was where I met Trace and the Kevins, a trio of red-eyed burnouts with sagging wallet chains who started coming in near the end of my shifts. I knew Trace vaguely from the bus, and Kevin Tran and Kevin Botti trailed behind him wherever he went. I let them have the frozen yogurt I cleaned out of the spigots every night, a grayish-pink slurry that tasted like strawberry toothpaste, and I wasn’t their only benefactor; Quimby, the owner of the Golden Crown Video next door, kept them high and supplied for the price of listening to his weird stories. After a while, they convinced me to come along.

  Quimby turned out to be a pale, puffy man in a sweaty T-shirt and eccentrically patterned chef pants who lived in the basement apartment under his store. With his baby face and unwashed hair slicked back from a balding pate, Quimby’s age was impossible to determine, but I had to think the owner of a video store—​even a shitty little video store that was mostly porn—​had to be a lot older than us. On the rare occasion when a customer rang the bell, he’d run upstairs, exchanging his ratty bathrobe for an equally ratty blazer on the steps.

  My first time smoking out at Quimby’s, Trace held the bowl for me and told me to suck in. Just when I thought my lungs would burst, he released the carb, and a giant hit of smoke hammered my chest. I coughed like crazy and my eyes streamed, first with pain and then with relief as all the girls I had been—​the brave girl, the tough girl, the winner, the wanter—​exited the building, and I became nothing.

  * * *

  “Hamlet was, on reflection, not a wise name for any pet, even a golden retriever of his particular splendor.”

  On a winter afternoon my sophomore year, I sat on the floor with Trace and the Kevins, mightily stoned, sneaking a look at Quimby’s wall of DVDs and videos. I couldn’t make out the hand-scribbled labels on the spines, but they looked unsavory.

  Quimby, as usual, pontificated from a beige recliner.

  “However, my mother believed a young boy should never be talked out of a budding romance with Shakespeare, and so the dog’s fate was sealed.” He paused for dramatic effect. “The bullet that separated gorgeous breath from golden body was chalked up to a hunting accident, but I always suspected my father of pulling the trigger.”

  Trace yawned. Kevin Tran rubbed his shaven head; Kevin Botti took a hit.

  Quimby’s voice jabbed me like a finger in the back. “Want to watch one, Jennifer?” It was the first time he’d ever addressed me directly.

  “Dude,” said Trace, looking up from his combat boots for the first time in an hour. “Her name’s Mackenzie. She’s been coming here for, like, months.”

  “Of course, she has,” Quimby said. “Darling Jennifer, please pick out something we’ll all enjoy.”

  Either because I was getting paranoid, or because the recliner gave Quimby an imperial height, it felt more like a command than an invitation. Determined not to flinch, I leaned over, tipped out a videotape at random, and handed it to Quimby. All I could make out of the title was “Madame de . . .”—​the ellipsis like a dirty wink. Kevin Botti passed me the bong, an obscure gesture of respect.

  But Quimby was regarding the video with an expression of mild astonishment. “The Earrings of Madame de . . .” He said solemnly, “Gentlemen, there’s more going on in Jennifer’s scraggly little noggin than anyone knows.” Then he swiveled the recliner and loaded the tape.

  If it was porn, it certainly wasn’t like what I had seen on the internet. It was black-and-white, with subtitles. In the beginning, a woman in an old-timey dress walked around her fancy bedroom trying to find something to sell. One by one, she touched her treasured possessions. The scene was shot from her point of view, so that in my stoned state, I could almost feel the cold slither of a diamond necklace over my palm, the tickle of fur under my fingers. A shudder of delight ran through me, pushing up on the roof of my mouth like a yawn, and suddenly I could see colors in the black-and-white. They were only the shy souls of colors, palest pink and pistachio green and robin’s-egg blue, like a faint residue of reality lingering in the image. I forgot the subtitles and relaxed into pure deliciousness. The woman pawned some diamond earrings, but somehow they made their way back to her husband, and then her husband’s lover, and then back to the woman again, around and around. She wrote a letter to her lover, ripped it to shreds, and threw it out of a train window, where it transformed into flurries of snow. Guns were drawn. The credits rolled. Tears streamed down my face.

  I looked around. Trace and the Kevins were gone.

  Quimby had been watching me for some time. “Oh, fools,” he said tenderly.

  Many years later, when I heard someone say the name of the film’s director out loud—​Ophüls—​I felt like an idiot. But in the moment, I thought he meant the others, and blushed.

  On my way out, he handed me a crumpled paper bag stuffed with videos.

  “These are for you, Jennifer,” he said. “When you need more, just let me know.”

  I dug up an old TV/VCR combo from the back of my father’s closet, where it had been banished when we bought a DVD player. I dragged it into my closet and watched movies late into the night. The colors never came back, but I knew they were there, and that they were as close as I’d ever get to perfection.

  * * *

  And then I met Gwen.

  December 29, 2021, 8:30 p.m.

  SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles

  It’s Claire now,” I remind her.

  Gwen winces. “I’m sorry. Old habits die hard.”

  We look down at our very different shoes for a mom
ent.

  “So, Claire. Will you have a drink on me and catch up?”

  “I shouldn’t.” Since the accident, I have been on certain medications that are strongly contraindicated for alcohol.

  “Just one?” She smiles conspiratorially.

  But I’ve already had one—​a rather large glass of wine at the reception. “I have work to do tonight,” I say, thinking of Harvard up in my hotel room.

  “You always did work too hard.” Her delicate allusion to our differences and how I so improbably overcame them seems to move her. She steps closer and touches my forearm. “Please?”

  There’s no word for losing a friend like Gwen. Breakup, separation, split—​all for romantic partnerships, and all suggesting a clear end, something you don’t get in a friendship unless you’re one of those drink-throwers or bitch!-screamers in the viral videos. Falling-out is too final to describe the particular uncertainty, the lengthening silence. The only phrase we have for the slow, specific entropy of a dying friendship is drifted apart. As if you fell asleep sunbathing on floats and woke up on opposite sides of the swimming pool.

  As if it didn’t hurt.

  Which is why, against my better judgment, against every instinct that tells me to go straight to bed and fuck my stranger and get a good night’s sleep for tomorrow’s interview, I nod and say, “Maybe just one.”

  Gwen points out a table in the corner, and we head in that direction.