TWENTY-SIX
Three days after I came up with the concept of a talent show at our table, we had more skits and songs than we could use. The entire women’s campus had caught talent-show fever. Girls who hadn’t been interested in anything but reconnecting with their boyfriends or their dealers were busy writing lyrics or scraping together costumes or finding props for The Sound of Rehab.
As we walked to Share, two girls, Amanda and Samantha, were performing a version of a Run-D.M.C. rap called “My Addiction,” instead of “My Adidas.” “My addiction walked through high-school doors and danced all over coliseum floors . . . spent all my dough just blowing trees . . . we made a mean team, my addiction and me.” I was learning all kinds of new words and phrases. “Blowing trees,” I learned, was smoking marijuana. “On my grind” meant working. “So, when I’m at my desk, writing a blog post, that means I’m on my grind?” I asked, and both Amanda and Samantha started laughing and said, “Nah, it’s a little different than that,” but they wouldn’t tell me how.
We were almost at the art therapy room when Michelle popped her head out of her office. “Allison W., can I see you for a moment?”
I rolled my eyes, left the group, and took a seat on the opposite side of her desk. “Allison,” she began, “I understand there’s a talent show in the works.”
I shrugged, saying nothing.
“You know,” Michelle continued, “that any activities have to be approved by staff.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. Then I resumed my silence. Michelle stared at me for a moment. Then she reached into a folder and pulled out a script that, judging from the coffee stains, looked as if it had been retrieved from a cafeteria garbage can. “?‘How do you solve a problem like an RC,’?” she read, in a tuneless, cheerless voice. “?‘How do you make them understand your world? How do you make them stay . . . and listen to what you’d say . . . when they look at you like you’re a human—’?”
“You know,” I interrupted, “it really sounds much better when you sing it.” I sat up straight and demonstrated. “Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them. Many a thing you’d hope they’d understand . . . Low bottoms and low IQs . . . they’re low on empathy, too . . . with nary a prayer of ever getting canned.” I bent my head to hide my smile. “You see?”
“Allison, I admire your team spirit. But you are not permitted to perform skits and songs that make fun of the staff members.”
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, of course, assuming that there is a talent show.” I arranged my face into an approximation of confusion. “And why do you think I’m the one in charge?”
“Allison, I’m not going to get into that with you. What I need you to understand—”
I cut her off before she could finish. “What I need you to understand is that, to misquote Alexander Haig, I’m not in charge here. I’ve got nothing to do with anything. I’m just some poor, stupid pill-head who can’t figure out how many sessions with her therapist it takes to get a day pass.”
Michelle narrowed her eyes, causing them to practically vanish into her doughy face. “Let me ask you something, Allison. Do you want to get better?”
“Better than what?” I muttered. Better than you? I thought. I was pretty sure I’d achieved that particular goal already.
“Think about it,” she suggested in a sugary-sweet tone, and sent me off to Share, where I listened to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Dice describe her descent from high-school cheerleader to crackhead. She’d arrived at Meadowcrest after her parents told her they could no longer care for her boys (twelve and nine), and would be putting them in foster care unless she got her act together.
I would never, I thought, as Dice described leaving her boys home alone or, worse, with strangers while she wandered the streets to cop. Her hands, with the nails bitten short and bloody, trembled as she worked to extract pictures of her sons from underneath the plastic lining of her binder. “That’s Dominic Junior, my little Nicky, and that’s Christopher. He eats so much I can’t even believe it. Like, mixin’ bowls full of cereal, gallons of milk . . . I tell him we should just get a cow, let him suck on that, ’stead of using all our money on milk . . .”
Had she ever been like me and Janet, with a husband and a house, a car in the garage and money in the bank? Had she ever had a chance at that kind of life?
“Allison?”
I glanced up. Gabrielle, she of the pink lanyard and officious-bank-lady look, was staring at me. So, I noticed, were the rest of the eighteen girls and women in the circle. “Allison, are you ready to share?”