She drove to Vegas, and that’s where things got really bad. She formed new addictions and spent all her money on them. Gambling, yes, but mostly cocaine. Met a guy who thought she’d make a good dancer. “I told myself it was art.” She shrugged. “Which it was, in a way.”
It was a nice club. Very nice. Fancy. And the men liked her. She got popular quickly. A good group of regulars. The money started rolling in. Fast, really fast. She moved to a swanky apartment, got a swanky new car. Hired a tailor to make her striptease outfits. All custom-made to fit her body perfectly. And there were themes. Not the usual nurse and schoolteacher clichés, but interesting, artful themes. Her favorite was the peacock. It started off unassuming, in a cocoon of thick black velvet, and then, bit by bit—and this was to Tom Petty, by the way—she expanded into feathers. It was hard to work the pole with all those feathers, but it was fun. And, if she had to be honest, she liked the attention. Being onstage like that. Their hungry faces. It felt powerful. Because she could control them. She could control their emotions.
But then most of the money went up her nose, and she started unraveling. She tried to keep it together. She’d go to the gym. Well, at 5:00 a.m. after snorting a few lines, she’d go to the gym.
It all ended when she got pulled over one night. A hundred and two on the freeway and she was blazed. They sent her to NA. Which stood for Narcotics Anonymous, in case I didn’t know. She thought it was a waste of time. And she knew it wouldn’t work either.
And then something happened. Hard to explain. Suffice to say that this was when she decided on Mother Nature as her higher power and found Celia in the sky. Somehow—and she still couldn’t believe this, by the way—she never did a line of coke again.
After that, Ana’s life was better, obviously, because she wasn’t fucked up all the time, but it also became harder in new ways. Without drugs, she had all this extra time on her hands. All this extra time to ask, What am I doing with my life?
She used to drive deep into the desert and look up at the stars and ask, What do you want from me?
And then she met Berta. “Berta was a badass. She’d been sober for three hundred years.” Berta was also a Buddhist. They had long, long coffee dates, talking about Buddhism. The non-cruelty aspect appealed to Ana most. She wanted to tame her mean streak.
From Buddhism, Ana found yoga. Then astrology. Then she found a whole world waiting to be healed and decided to become a healer. In Hawaii, because being surrounded by water would offset her fiery nature. In Kona, because the volcano, full of fire, would remind her of who she was.
“And here we are now,” she said, motioning to the red sign. “At Longs.” She chuckled, and then she let out a big sigh. “I hope you don’t hate me now, Nancy. I know that was a lot of information.”
“No.” I was adamant. “I don’t hate you at all.” And then I sighed, just like her, and I was aware of our matching sighs, and why did that happen? Had I copied her? Or was it contagious, like hiccups?
“I think it’s hard not to feel a little judgment when one hears a story like that.”
“I feel no judgment,” I lied. Because of course I was judgmental. Robbing a bank? That was crazy. But, like she’d said, it only made sense, coming from where she came from. And she wasn’t a thief anymore. Or a stripper. She had changed. She was a healer now.
When I looked at her, suffering under the heat of that big orange wig, I thought that she deserved mercy. We all deserve mercy, don’t we? And so mercy was what I would give her.
“I don’t mean this in a victim, poor-me way,” Ana told me, “but sometimes I think if I had had better parents I would have been a better person.” She blew cool air up into her bangs. “But I guess they did their best. With what they had, they did their best.”
This was a familiar refrain, and one that all parents repeated to themselves frequently, I assumed. I did my best. We had to believe that to get through the day. But often, and usually at night, we questioned our definition of “best.” Had I done my best when Jed and Cam at five years old vanished in a supermarket and I continued to shop for ten more minutes before going to look for them? And what about those years I took care of my younger brother? Was it the best I could do to sew up the gash in his leg with fishing line instead of taking him to a doctor? Or what about when he was fifteen with no driver’s license and I handed him the keys to my boyfriend’s car so he could take himself to the SATs? Was that the best? In a way, I think it was. And maybe in every way it was. We had so little then. Just as we had had so little always. My mother’s version of “best” was bleak, hauntingly bleak, and even now, in certain moments, I still felt cast in its shadow.
“What about your parents?” Ana yawned. “What were they like?”
I don’t know why I hesitated. This was the part where I usually delivered my line in a smooth, uplifting voice: “My parents were just your average Jack and Jane.”
I looked at her tribal bracelet tattoo. It was a parade of triangles and elephants bordered by two rows of dots. The dots were imperfectly spaced and they were also imperfect themselves—some bigger, some smaller. I wondered if this was intentional—some kind of message about the imperfections of life.
And this, somehow—this perceived understanding about the meaning of her tattoo—was all I needed. If it hadn’t been the tattoo, it would have been something else. I was looking for a reason. I’d spent the last million years with people who didn’t understand me, and now here was someone who did. It felt right to tell her more. I felt like she could hold it. I knew she wouldn’t be shocked.
I started small. I told her some pieces. About how my stepdad used to beat me as a kid, and about how when I’d told Chuck, he had protectively said, “What an asshole,” but I knew he didn’t really get it. Which—he had no reason to get it. His parents really were just your average Jack and Jane.
I was already crying at this point. Ana had the ability to melt me like that. Or I was willing to melt myself in her presence, which still pointed back to her ability to make me feel like melting was okay. I wiped my eyes and said, “I don’t want to be crying. It’s such a beautiful sunny day!”
Ana said, “Oh, who gives a shit. Every day is sunny here.” I thought that was hilarious.
I went on. I told her my dad had left when I was young—I’d never met him, didn’t even know his name—and I told her how my mom—I swallowed hard—was gone now, too. “She ended up”—oh, how it still made me tremble to say the words out loud—“killing herself.”