Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [42]
“Jeanne, go get some clothes on.”
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Sully,” I mumbled as I slunk off, toward Mom’s bedroom.
I came out after I heard the door closing. Mom was sitting in a chair, smoking.
“Well, that was quite a display,” Mom said, and she went into her bedroom without saying good night.
I had a hard time falling asleep; each turn in my garbage bag gaucho made a noisy, crinkly sound, reawakening me and reminding me of the clingy creatures that seemingly wouldn’t go away, creatures that may or may not still exist, I didn’t know anymore, bugs, things that passed from one person to another. Mom didn’t believe we still had them, if she ever believed we had them in the first place. Why couldn’t we get rid of them? I could hear Mom yelling and then laughing and then crying to somebody on the phone. I got up and opened the window. I was hot, though it was January 5. The bag made my legs feel clammy and sweaty. I wondered whether I was losing any of my freshman fifteen in all this, not that I really cared.
To get out of Mom’s hair, so to speak, Julia and I went to Bronxville the next day to see some high school friends. As the train pulled out of Grand Central, Julia gave me a few orders.
“Do not sleep at Maggie’s tonight,” she said, sipping a sugary Zabar’s coffee. “I like her and everything, but she’s a slut and she gave us crabs.”
“Maggie’s not a slut, Julia. She’s an alcoholic.”
“Well, she didn’t get crabs from a bottle of tequila. That’s a worm in the bottle, not a crab.”
“Okey-doke, Jules. Can we talk about something else? I’m trying to block out the garbage bag rash I now have all over my inner thighs.”
Julia leaned into me. “Could you please keep it down, Jeanne? God. Don’t you think these Bronxville businessmen would love to pass on a nice crab tale starring the Darst girls to their daughters at dinner tonight?”
The conductor came around and punched our tickets, sliding them in the backs of our seats, a practice I have never fully understood. It just seems like fake work. We agreed to meet on the NY side platform for the nine-o’clock train back Saturday.
When we got back to Mom’s on Saturday night we came in quietly. We had gone to Bronxville to see friends as much as to stave off a hissy fit from Mom. We had made it through Christmas break. We would be going back to school tomorrow and for once Mom hadn’t had her annual Christmas meltdown.
There was no sound coming from her bedroom, strange considering it wasn’t that late and the light was on. Julia looked at me and shrugged her shoulders, turning into the bathroom. I stood outside Mom’s bedroom. The worst thing one could do at this point in the night was to engage Mom, unless you wanted to hear about how she fell out of her bedroom window at eleven and was sidelined from the Lexington Junior League Horse Show, the most important twelve-andunder equestrian event in the country, but since I was leaving the next day for school and we had really pissed her off with the whole Phil Sully/garbage bag thing, I decided to go in and say good night.
I opened the door and Mom was lying facedown in the ivory-colored carpet. The rug around her head was red and black. I went to her and pulled her up by her shoulders as well as I could, her head drooping forward and gushing blood onto my T-shirt and jeans. I called out to Julia. She phoned 911. They told me to apply pressure to where her head was spurting blood until the ambulance got there, which was within about four minutes. They took her to Doctors Hospital around the corner. We walked the block and a half there ourselves, rather than get in the ambulance. I had a lot of blood on my shirt and hands. We spent most of the night talking to doctors, who said she would be okay but would have died if we had not gone in her room until the morning. There was also a social worker who took her alcohol history from us. (It was either eight or nine rehabs she had been to at this