Letting Loose. Joanne Skerrett

so far away. I thanked Kelly for her efforts, but I couldn’t entertain any African warrior fantasies. But he is fine. And the son of a former prime minister. Who has lofty ideals. But two thousand miles away? Was I really that desperate? Was he? And if he were some kind of royalty down there, how would he see me?

      “I’ll think about it,” I told Kelly, as I helped her clean up the kitchen.

      “Are you and Whitney heading out tonight?”

      “Nah, too snowy. Besides my back hurts. I think I’ll curl up with a book and some Häagen-Dazs.”

      She shot me a look that was kind yet reprimanding.

      “Okay. I’ll curl up with just a book.”

      “Sure you don’t want to watch a movie with us?”

      “Nah,” I said. I always felt like an intruder when the two of them got all cozy on the couch and I had to sit there with my eyes too embarrassed to do anything but stay glued to the screen.

      So later I lay on my bed reading and thinking while the wind howled outside. I wished I were somewhere warm. I wished I had a date. I wished I could have some Häagen-Dazs. Butter pecan. That was my only addiction. Besides shoes. And I couldn’t even indulge it just slightly because I have no self-control; I could inhale a pint of ice cream in five minutes flat. Yes, I’ve timed myself. It really isn’t my fault; it’s all genetic.

      I come from a family of drunks, and that is why I never touch alcohol. Never once did and never will. My father died of cirrhosis of the liver when I was thirteen. My brother, Gerard, has been through so many programs that I think he’s now well qualified to start his own drug and alcohol rehab business. My mother is a nondiagnosed alkie. She’s not dangerous, just pathetic. It may sound harsh, but you have to understand what I’ve been through with this woman. She was drunk at all my graduations, teacher conferences…I try to stay away from her as much as possible.

      When I think back on my childhood, I have to laugh sometimes. There was never a time in my childhood that there wasn’t a drunk adult in charge. First, my dad, who loved me and my mother, but hated Gerard because he didn’t believe that Gerard was his son. So he beat Gerard every chance he got but treated me like a little princess. The two of us went to the movies every Saturday afternoon, or if it snowed we would rent movies from Blockbuster and make popcorn and just spend the entire afternoon in front of the television. He dropped me off at the Boston Public Library when I told him I wanted to read more books. On Saturday nights, he gave me money and sent me to the liquor store on Seaver Street to get him his Tanqueray and Johnny Walker; the store owner always winked knowingly at me. Back then my mother would only have “a taste” on her way to prayer meeting or bible study. But then my father lost his job as a transportation supervisor at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and he began to drink his unemployment checks away. When those checks stopped coming, my mother found work as a secretary for a big law firm downtown. Then they started to fight. Loud and hard. And she started to have more than a taste.

      When my father got sick, it got worse. I was in private school on scholarship and I didn’t want to come home. I was too scared to see him wasting away. So I made excuses as to why I couldn’t come home from boarding school on weekends. I had extra studying to do. Or tennis practice. Or some other lie I could think up. Gerard called me an ungrateful bitch. But the sicker my dad got, the more time Gerard himself spent on the streets, getting into trouble. It was 1993, and there was a lot of trouble available at the time in Boston.

      I was forced to go home when the chaplain took me out of calculus, solemnly telling me that I needed to go home because of a family emergency. I knew what the emergency was, yet on the way home in the backseat of my English teacher’s Subaru I still prayed that it was anything but my father being dead.

      My mom and I were the only ones who were crying at the funeral. Gerard was sullen. My aunts, uncles, and cousins seemed more glum than anything else. My dad owed them money. And in my family that sometimes was more important than life itself. Even now, my mother would sooner ask me for money than she would ask me how I was doing.

      Once my father was in the ground, I put him out of my mind. I lost myself in books. I talked to no one for about a year, and everyone at my boarding school understood what I was going through because it was a touchy-feely kind of place. Then I came home to go to high school at Boston Latin. I felt as lonely there as I’d felt out in woodsy Concord. Everyone studied so hard and cared so much about what college they would go to. I only knew that I wanted to be far away from my mother. But when that time came I didn’t have much of a choice. I had picked UC Berkeley, but my mother had other plans. She said she couldn’t have me “all the way out there where she couldn’t keep an eye on me.” So I went to Simmons instead, three miles away from where I grew up.

      Had I been angry then? Yes. But now that I’m an adult, or at least now that I think I’m an adult, I’ve mellowed out some. I’m not as intense anymore. I certainly don’t spend most of my time listening to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, fancying myself some type of street-smart bohemian black nerd. I’m over all that. I don’t hate my mother, Grace Wilson, anymore. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. We’ve had our fights, our blowouts, even a few shoving matches. But I’m staying on the sidelines as she crashes and burns. My new motto is like a doctor’s: Do no harm. I will not give her any money to drink herself into oblivion. But I will continue to buy her groceries every week because she is my mother and that’s just the way it is. And I will let her call me and berate me every week because that’s just the way it is, too. But I don’t internalize that stuff anymore. I’m so over it. I just wish I could have ice cream.

      Chapter 4

      On Saturday, the snow had mostly melted. The temperature struck up to forty-five degrees during the day, leaving gray slushy puddles everywhere. I spent the day doing what I love to do most on Saturdays: spin class, despite my aching back. Then an almond decaf latte at Starbucks with a croissant. Then I ran errands and made sure that I got myself something nice for going to spin class. This week it was a pair of chandelier earrings from Macy’s. I walked by the MAC counter, keeping my eyes straight ahead. Oh, the longing for more makeup. There was no bad mood that a Viva Glam lipstick could not cure. No fat day that a Blunt Matte blush couldn’t lighten. With MAC all things were possible.

      Later, Kelly and James had gone out to meet some of their other hemp-loving friends in Cambridge, and I was glad to have the apartment all to myself. I planned to cook a healthy dinner, maybe spinach with chicken and marinara sauce. No pasta. God, I missed pasta. And bread. And pizza. And Snickers bars. But as my former Weight Watchers leader once asked me: “Do you love chocolate as much as you would love being thin?” That was a terribly cruel question to ask someone who had never been thin, I thought. But each time I was tempted, I rephrased the question: “Amelia, would you love a Snickers bar as much as you would love to be thin?” It wasn’t always an effective deterrent because depending on my mood the answer could be a toss-up.

      But it was only four o’clock, at least two more hours till dinner. I needed a diversion. I went online.

      My little virus-infested Dell laptop is so slow sometimes I think it’s intentionally giving me enough time to really consider whether I want to spend my minutes in that vast and empty time waster called the Internet. The only upside to going online was that if I could somehow lose myself in fantasy on the Neiman Marcus Web site, then that would be one less hour I would spend obsessing about whether I was truly hungry or whether I was seeking emotional comfort in food. I almost fell asleep as the computer crawled its way over to my Yahoo mail.

      As I waited for my in-box to load, my cell phone rang. “Hi, Ma.”

      “Amelia, where you been?” She sounded exasperated.

      “I was out running errands all morning, Ma.” What was her problem!

      “I tried to catch you…I need some…I’m broke…”

      She’s not broke. Her disability check (I forget which disability it’s for) came this week. My guess is she wants attention or she just wants to hassle me. Find out what I’m doing tonight.