|
: : : AFTER WORK, DENISE RIDES OVER to the church where the Al-Anon meetings are held. This will be her third.
I don't know if I'll keep going to these, she tells herself, as she's locking her bike to the fence. She thought the same thing last week. Two weeks ago she tricked herself into going in the first place by thinking you only have to go to one of these. Just check it out and if it's not your scene you can just forget the whole thing.
And it's not her scene, this whole church basement thing. The room they're in gets used for youth education on Sundays, and so there are all these like posters up—Jesus leading a group of fluffy sheep, Jesus standing beatifically in the center of a multicultural ring of children, etcetera etcetera. It makes her feel pretty weird, to be in a room surrounded by that sort of junk. Out of place. The only Christ she ever felt any sort of relationship to was the suffering one, the tormented one depicted over and over again in her German Art textbook. And even then she mostly felt drawn to him as just another body in pain—she can't say that she got any particular sense of divinity out of the paintings.
Sitting on the church's front steps is a woman, kind of overweight, ashing into a Styrofoam cup. When she sees Denise, she smiles.
—Denise, she calls. —Good to see you again!
—Hi, Muriel, Denise says, smiling back. She climbs the steps and sits down next to Muriel.
—Nice night, says Muriel.
—It's gorgeous, says Denise.
That's the thing that gets her; just how friendly everyone is. Denise wouldn't think, on the face of it, that she'd ever really be glad to see a woman in her mid-fifties, with a bad frost job—but she is.
Denise is the youngest person in the group and probably the person with the least fucked-up life. Some of these people can talk about what it's like to be in a relationship with an alcoholic for twenty years, what it's like to be married to someone who can't hold a job, what it's like to come home and find your husband drunk and having sex with a strange woman on the floor, what it's like to live with someone who will sell the furniture to get money for booze. And Denise knows that when she leaves she'll feel a little embarrassed about the whole thing—what are you doing, she'll ask herself, spending your evenings with all these old people and their problems?
But the real fact is that she likes it. When she's there she feels like it's the best thing that she's ever done for herself. It's like she's made a decision to let people know her. That's part of what's so hard about it; that's part of why she's cried every week. Because she's spent so long keeping herself closed off from other people—trying to keep other people from caring about her. And to reverse that, to take off the sunglasses and keep them in her bag, to talk to a room full of people, to be able to say I'm really hurting this week and have the room sort of absorb her—it feels terrifying, yet also enormously relieving; impossibly difficult, yet easy. Like trying to believe that you can fly when you're already hovering shakily in air. To know that all you need to do is let go.
She wonders if this is what it feels like to have a conversion experience. At the end of her first meeting Muriel squeezed her in a tight hug and into her ear murmured the words let go, let God. At the time Denise smirked, but she's been thinking over the phrase ever since. Wondering what it would be like to do just that.
: : :
:: Year entries
Index | << | 69 | >>
:: Denise entries
Index | << | 8 | >>
|
