1
Puffs of smoke happen to be my specialty.
I didnāt mean to become someone who smokes pot every day. Sometimes these kinds of things just happenāwhen you canāt stand the taste of alcohol and everyone around you is wasted every Saturday night. When the stoner kids at the party are much calmer than the drunk people youāre with. When you start buying from the most notorious stoner in school, first just enough to get you through Saturday nights, then entire weekends, and finally the whole week. When somehow everything thatās wrong feels just less wrong enough to become bearable when you blow a hazy layer of smoke over your own existence.
I look at the Magician card just before I leave the store for the day. Heās wearing white and red robes with flowers growing above and below him. Is that a magic wand in his hand?
Alakazam! Your life is no longer terrible!
That seems like too big a magic trick to ask for, so how about something neutral, like a calm day? Wave a joint over me and turn me into someone who can successfully walk the ten blocks home without having a panic attack. Who can calmly climb the stairs up to our third-floor attic apartment. Who can be a kind and agreeable daughter. Transform me, oh Magician, not into a rabbit or a bouquet of flowers, but into a human who can make it through another day.
āSanderson, youāre late!ā
Simon is waiting on our usual corner, ready to walk me part of the way home, as he does every Thursday. Heās replaced the āwhite stoner boyā beanie that is the uniform of his friend group with a Red Sox baseball cap that he thinks helps him look more like a respectable preppy jock for when he is making his ādeliveries.ā But because everyone knows everyone in this town, I have a feeling that all it accomplishes is alerting people that heās open for business.
My last name is actually Anderson, not Sanderson. This is Simon invoking the witch sisters from the movie Hocus Pocus, which was filmed all over this town. This is what passes for humor in Salem.
āGive me a break. Itās only two minutes after five,ā I say, walking past him. Let him catch up.
He jogs after me. āWhatās wrong with you, grumpy?ā
āDonāt ask questions you donāt want the answer to,ā I say. āEspecially when youāre talking to the town pariah.ā
He grabs my hand and makes me slow down. āI wish you would learn to look on the bright side of things,ā he says.
He likes to hold hands while we walk, which makes it easier to slip the bag of pot to me. He thinks itās funny that someone might think weāre holding hands because we actually want to. At one point maybe I thought it was funny too, but I donāt now. Now that no one in this town would think that Simon would have any reason to talk to me other than to sell me pot.
āOh, please remind me exactly what the bright side of things is,ā I say.
āYouāre missing the hell of senior year, for one.ā
āLucky me. Little Miss GED. Hope I get voted prom queen of Nowhere High.ā
Suddenly a loud clap of a backfiring engine breaks the relative peace of the afternoon and I jump about three feet, pulling my hand away from Simon and nearly throwing myself around the corner. Simon stares at me as the offending motorcycle speeds off past us.
āA little on edge there?ā
I can feel my heart thumping in my chest.
Deep breaths, Eleanor. Youāre okay.
āIām fine,ā I say.
Simon grabs my hand again and swings my arm like weāre about to start skipping down the sidewalk together. We keep walking.
āFor real, though, the workload is already killing me and weāre only two weeks in,ā he says. āAnd Iām supposed to know where I want to apply to college already. And Iām supposed to have already been working on my college essay for, like, five years. And Iām supposed to know what Iām going to do with the rest of my life.ā
āBut youāre already a successful businessman,ā I say, not even attempting to hide my sarcasm. āWhat else is there to figure out?ā
āIt is true that I will clean up at college. Thatās really the main reason to go.ā
āThey wonāt need you there. Over twenty-one, they can buy their own at the corner store. Welcome to Massachusetts.ā
āI better apply out of state, then. Follow the demand to the less enlightened territories.ā
He lets go of my hand and moves to my other side. When he grabs my right hand, the bag of pot is in it. I put it in my pocket. It is my favorite magic trick of all. Soon itāll disappear into a puff of smoke. Magic!
āWhat about you?ā Simon asks.
āWhat about me, what?ā
āWhere are you applying? UMass?ā
Simon has let go of my hand for good now. He will leave me at the end of this block.
I shake my head. Of the many topics I am not interested in discussing, this is in my top five.
āNowhere,ā I say. āMy mom needs me. And a high school dropout is not getting into UMass.ā
He shakes his head. āYouāre way too negative, you know that, Sanderson?ā He steps off the sidewalk to cross the street away from me. āYouāve got to have a little faith,ā he calls back.
This comment would annoy me if I wasnāt so happy that I am now three minutes away from being stoned enough to forget how much everything annoys me. All I have to do is duck into the alley behind the convenience store on the corner of our block. If the owner comes out and sees me, I just share my joint with him. There are not many bonuses to small-town life, but knowing who the other stoners are is one of them.
I sit down next to the dumpster and take out my rolling papers, roll a small joint, and light it. I feel my heart rate finally returning to normal even just from the prospect of this relief. Iāll smoke half now and half later. I am regulating. Only what is needed.
Our apartment is in the attic of an old Victorian house at the end of this block. An elderly woman named Enid lives alone downstairs and gives us cheap rent in exchange for taking out her trash and making sure sheās still alive. Susan arranged it for us when we moved to town two years ago, when we left Mystic because Mom couldnāt really work anymore.
How my mom ended up with Lyme and not me, I will never be able to understand. We only lived half an hour from Lyme, Connecticut, the namesake of the disease caused by the tiny parasitic deer ticks that are nearly impossible to spot and can screw up your entire life within a matter of minutes. But I was the one who spent my childhood running through the reeds on the beaches, sitting in the grass of any yard I could find, climbing up trees and refusing to come down. I never checked myself once for the raised black mole of a bloodsucker or the telltale bullās-eye that lets you know you have been targeted for slow disintegration. Natureās revenge on humans. Take us down one by one.
We donāt know when Mom got the tick bite that started it, which means that she probably had it for a long time before we figured out that there was something wrong. She just started getting very tired. First she was falling asleep on the couch as soon as she got home from work. Then she started falling asleep at her desk during the day, and when she woke up she would seem confused and disoriented.
For a while she thought it might be stress, but her job as a teacher at the Mystic Aquarium was not exactly high stakes. Her biggest concern was usually making sure a kid didnāt fall in the eel tank.
Once the joint pain started, from the autoimmune arthritis that can kick in when Lyme goes untreated for too long, we knew it was a bigger problem. When she finally got a diagnosis, it was mostly too late. She tried rounds of megadoses of antibiotics, which just made her feel sicker. She went to every doctor she could find. Nothing helped.
The only thing I could think to do was throw myself completely into my schoolwork and the various academic clubs I had joined. If I kept busy, she wouldnāt have to worry about me on top of everything else. I was already an overachieving honor roll student with the nerdiest roster of extracurriculars availableāmock trial, math team, Model UN. I just went into overdrive on achievement.
I realize now that doing well in school felt like something I could accomplish, that I could actually do right, when I knew there wasnāt much that I could do to help my mom. It was the only thing I could control.
Meanwhile our extended family in Mystic all felt the need to constantly weigh in on Momās illness. My grandparents, aunts, and uncles offered endless opinions and comments and no real help.
āBonnieās grandnephew saw a specialist who said that Lyme is a myth and itās all psychological.ā
In general our family seemed mystified by my momās life choices. She had raised me alone, calling me her miracle baby, when really I was her āunexpected babyā from an old boyfriend who possibly lives in Iceland now. Or is it Norway? We had always been a self-sufficient, independent team, me and my mom.
Susan was calling every night at that point to check on Mom. I donāt know when they made the decision that we would follow Susan to her hometown of Salem, but one night I heard them video chatting when Mom thought I was in my room.
āI know that they think because I couldnāt keep a guy that Iām going to lose my kid,ā she said, followed by a long silence.
I would miss the aquarium, where I spent the majority of my childhood tagging along with Momās classes and helping to feed the fish when they would let me, but there was something exciting to me about the idea of moving to Salem. Even though I didnāt care about witchy stuff, Salem had a mythic vibe to it that I could appreciate. It felt like a place where I could reinvent myself as someone cooler, more self-assured. Someone who did things besides homework and Model UN.
It is not lost on me that we traded one place with magical connotations for anotherāMystic to Salem. The Northeast loves magic. Rip Van Winkle, the Headless Horseman, the witch trials. It all makes for excellent tourist attractions.
Once we got to Salem, it made all the difference that we had Susan around to help us. She arranged for our apartment, hired a cleaning service, ordered groceries to be delivered, and hired us both to work at her store. Most nights she brought over a home-cooked meal. I was relieved to no longer be the only source of support for Mom. Susan would be the grown-up for all of us. And I was free to go live that new reinvented life for myself.
Walking down the block now to the house where we have lived in the apartment above Enid for the past two years, I am trying to maintain the floaty high that I know will keep me agreeable and calm at least for a few hours, until Susan closes up the store and comes over with soup and I can turn Mom over to her best friend for...
