Can’t Get No Bigger

My sister was already asleep– always the first to pass out. She curled in a corner of the futon, all snarled black hair and sharp elbows. Ever since our parents separated, she had become a feral ball of anger. She was born without any baby fat, and time and anger had sharpened her features. She was quick to hit, bite, punch. Even in sleep, she didn’t find repose, she slept with her eyebrows furrowed. Which, now, strikes me as odd for a six-year-old. Then, I didn’t know any different. I was only nine. I was also drunk. 

The year before I started drinking, my mother had left my father. The sunlight streamed through the billowing, sheer white curtains of our house and they told me that my mother was moving out to experience living by herself. She had never had the chance to do it before, they explained, she needed to try, to see if she could make it on her own. Maybe my parents watched too much Mary Tyler Moore. 

I had my doubts about the whole ‘separation’ thing. At eight years old, I thought my mother would be back. She did not make good choices. Even before she left, I could see the cracks in her psyche. Sometimes she was fine. She would make pancakes for breakfast and after we would walk down to the pet store and look at the birds and the fish. Sometimes she would stay in bed all day holding me in her warm brown arms. Her embrace was so tight that I was too scared to move, the sheets becoming acrid and yellow with our sweat. Or, she would take us for walks in the cemetery that would last for hours. We would rummage through the garbage cans, picking out colorful plastic flowers that we would clean up and place on our own grandmother’s grave.  

The grandmother whom my mother had found dead on the sofa from an overdose. My mother was only 18 and my grandmother was 38, and a pill-addicted prostitute married to an abusive alcoholic. The eldest of 6, my mother was left to raise her sisters alone or they would be sent to foster care. My grandfather made things worse, stopping by to throw bricks through the window when they wouldn’t let him in to sleep it off. This is my mother’s origin story. This is why you might forgive her for what happens next, even if I haven’t. 

The day she left, my sister and I bounced between the door and the living room watching the movers take away my mother’s things. She would be back, I thought. 

But she didn’t come back. 

A year after she left, my sister and I were traveling from our dad’s house to our mother’s apartment. On our evenings with her, she would fill a scratched plastic pitcher with a six-pack of beer. The pitcher reminded me of the ones that held soda during my friend’s birthday parties at the bowling alley. All screaming and streamers. That’s how our nights would start off, in a good mood. Giggling, we set up the empty squat Heineken bottles on the tiny windowsill in the kitchen. In the morning the light would turn the kitchen into a calming green sea, perfect hangover lighting.

The giggly anticipation of the evening was left in the kitchen. The futon was stuffed into a corner of the apartment, on the floor. The wooden frame long lost. My sister slept next to the wall, having already drunk whatever amount was necessary to induce a six-year-old into slumber. She always tried to get as close to the wall as possible, taking comfort in the coolness that radiated from the metal, thinly coated in white paint. My mother needed to sleep on the outside corner, so she could answer the phone, which would ring at random times during the night. The random calls occurred with an almost comforting regularity; now, 1:33, 4:17. Mercifully at times, not until 5 am; that’s when I could sleep. Sleep and forget the habits I was forming, which seemed ‘bad’ in a vague way. I was doing something wrong. I was being a bad kid. Health class had just started, just say no to drugs. Is beer a drug? Somehow, it was all linked to the bad kids in TV shows that received “groundings.” What was a grounding? Would Kelly Kapowski drink beer with her mother?   

We had been drinking together for a few months now. I noticed that my stomach was becoming round and as hard as a basketball. I poked at it, hard, with my finger a few times and wondered if anyone else noticed it. My dad? My teachers? I guess they thought I was just getting fat instead of developing the beer belly of a ruddy-faced, whiskered old man. It was part fat too. When we could wake up early enough, we would walk to McDonalds for breakfast. More often than not we woke up too late and ate ice cream with white chocolate Nestle bars crumbled on top. A mute Snow White staring at me from the package.