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Please Don’t Provoke My Mother
Growing up around my mother’s addiction meant navigating a sort of predictable chaos
In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Avram who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: “I love you” and “I need $500.” His body was covered in hair as thick as wool, but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left the house without Afrin nasal spray and toothpicks. Avi drove a station wagon with buckets of paint, turpentine, and brushes cluttering the backseat. On the way to school, he always warned, “Whatever you do in the dark comes out in the light,” as if he knew a secret of mine that he would ferret out. But I was 10 then; I read Judy Blume and wore mismatched socks. I’d already learned how to keep my secrets hidden away, safe.
Avram was a man who spoke little, so whenever he spoke, you listened. I wonder how it was that he introduced my mother to cocaine: whether there were words at all or if it was simply a pouch of white in his moist palm and a promise of omnipotence. They went from smoking joints while watching Dynasty and passing commentary on Sammy Jo or the silliness of shoulder pads — it was 1985, but Avi and my mother still donned bell-bottoms and paisley, trying to remain in the ’70s, that wild-child decade, for as long as they could — to cutting up lines of cocaine. Later, I’d hear my…
