Evelyn never sold another piece of tail again. Instead, she opened a no-frills packaging store off Main Street on City Island. It was a forerunner to Mail Boxes Etc. She liked it because the inventory required a minimum of upkeep. I also heard she never left City Island if she could help it.
Meanwhile, I joined an outpatient clinic downtown.
“I wouldn’t have given a plug nickel for your sobriety,” Laura, my alcoholism counselor, told me. “In swaggers this punk in rags with matted hair—manic and unreachable is what I thought.”
Nevertheless, Laura must have suspected something, because, to keep me occupied, she composed for me a long reading list. That got my attention. I discovered later that my counselor had herself written several well-received plays, one of which made it to Broadway in the late fifties. Laura was a writer and an intellectual. But more important, she was a sober drunk.
No matter which acute crisis I brought to her—and there was nothing else but in the weeks that followed—Laura would circle a name and address in the meeting book and say, “Go to this meeting.”
“The landlord’s trying to evict me” or “I just lost another waitressing gig!” I’d say.
Real life or death stuff.
“Go to a meeting,” Laura would always reply with stony composure.
At first, I hated those church-basement meetings. I hated those creepy, smiling faces so painfully visible under the harsh fluorescent lights. I sat cringing and hiding in the back of the room. But then one day, WE CAME TO BELIEVE A POWER GREATER THAN OURSELVES COULD RESTORE US TO SANITY” leapt out at me from the scroll on the wall where it hung. ‘That’s a remarkable claim,’ I thought, ‘sanity.’ I was reminded of those times during my psychotic episodes when the handwriting on the wall had read get well. Sanity. Imagine the possibility even of such a state. Sanity beckoned like a grail, and I began to attend those meetings every day. But a part of me still believed for months that in doing so I was caving in. Surrender is never easy precisely because it feels like defeat. Laura suggested I go on welfare. “You’re unemployable right now” is how she put it.
The welfare office on West Fourteenth Street is a curious place for someone brought up on Park Avenue. I sat hour after vacant hour on one of the numberless hard chairs that stretched row on row like bleachers against the wall of the main room. I did some thinking. On all sides, other women sat packed in with screaming babies, their arms outstretched in the usually vain attempt to retrieve restless, wandering toddlers. Here and there solitary men waited quietly. A few of these men might have been classified as fit enough to work, but for the most part they were a forlorn, sickly bunch in obvious need. I realized sitting there I would never know what it is like to be born poor. If I spent the rest of my life depriving myself, I would not be able to entirely stifle hope or even opportunity.
After I finally succeeded in making the welfare roll, Laura suggested I move back in with my mother, with Maggie, one last time. “You can’t take care of yourself yet” was how she put it.
Maggie and I made amends. She became a model mother, and I, an exemplary daughter. Every evening I would return from my AA meeting, and there would be a hot meal waiting. She did my laundry. She bought me a down pillow and a new pink comforter for the chaste single bed in my old pink-and-cherry-red bedroom.
Then I went back to school. When I found out I could get a lot of loans and grants, I decided to go uptown after all and “hustle the intellectuals,” as the madam Corinne had suggested in another lifetime. I sat up front, hung on every word, and took copious notes. So it was, still too damaged and afraid to love the living, I wholly embraced the distant and the long dead. I began to understand that a relentless series of tests of survival in the street is not the only education worth having. The hot blast of the life I was running from did serve me well in one respect—it propelled me to study.
Since then, I’ve stopped running. The past is here with me. I respect it, even fear it a little. Otherwise I tell myself I no longer need be afraid—either of me or the rest of this mystery.