Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent Page B

nickels, and dimes fallen loose in the bag’s cotton lining, mixed with a handful of aspirin and rolls of sugar-free mints. There were pieces of torn notepaper, a paperback book, a hairbrush full of hair. Oh, and yeah—who could forget?—there were always those three or four tiny bottles of Jack Daniel’s, clanking.
    When you ask the question how she did it, how she pretended so hard for so long, there is the answer. She drank. She drank a lot. And she pretended about that, too, hiding just how drunk she was or how often.
    I guess now you know where I get that from.
    I wonder, actually, if she puked as much as I do, or if she drank like a woman, a sip here, a sip there, just enough to top you up but not enough to throw your stomach into your throat.
    She must have been hungover in the mornings, though, because after I was about ten years old she stopped getting up to make me breakfast on weekday mornings, and I had to fend for myself with peanut butter.
    When I was just about ready to leave the house, I had to wake her to drive me to school, and that was like raising Lazarus, I can tell you. It was as if the woman slept in a bog with one arm protruding, and you had to pull her out by that appendage. Dead weight like nobody’s business, and a spindly kid on the other end huffing and whining, “Come on, Mom. I’m gonna be late. Again.”
    I’m amazed she didn’t belt me in the face. If some chipper fucker tried to wake me before I was human, I’d smack him clear across the room without even coming to consciousness.
    But somehow, she always managed not to take the morning woozies out on me. It helped a lot that before I went to the bedroom to wake her, I’d brew her a cup of coffee that was as thick as the sludge she was sleeping in. I practically had to pour it down her throat from a kneeling position while plugging her nose, like some kind of EMT trainee.
    That was enough to get her into her ratty robe and slippers, which is what she always wore in the car. We got into a fender bender once in the school’s drop-off zone, and when she got out to give the other mother our number, her hair all wild and matted, her face still greasy with night cream, she looked like she’d escaped from the state asylum.
    But what did she (or I) care what the housewives of Pelsher County thought of her? As far as she was concerned, they were a bunch of bubbleheaded cookie-bakers whose only purpose in life was to fatten up the next generation for the slaughter or the factory floor, or whatever else she thought the children of morons were meant for.
    Actually, I know what she thought they were meant for, because now and again, at the right hour and after the right vintage, she’d say things like:
    â€œThis is a nation of idiots breeding more idiots, a rabble whose only useful function is to fight our foreign wars and donate organs.”
    Still, I’m thinking she must have been pretty well three sheets to the wind when she said those things, which wasn’t that often, because midday, most of the time, when she was probably just mildly buzzed and playful, she rarely had a rude word to say about anybody. She was basically a good person, if a bit caustic on the delivery when you touched a sore spot. And before the drinking got really out of hand, she was a good mom, too.
    A mom who even made breakfast.
    Weird breakfast. But breakfast nonetheless.
    Other kids got Cheerios and Count Chocula on weekday mornings, or at the very least oatmeal with milk and honey. I got frozen fish sticks and canned lentil soup.
    I wasn’t allowed to eat sugar during the week. Not even after school or after dinner. Only on the weekends and on vacation. So brekkie in the Walsh house was always a savory affair, and the only desserts I ever got, as Mom was so fond of saying, were just ones.
    If I’d known at the time that in a few more years I’d be getting no breakfast at all, except what I could