Hannah Alejandro

Unbecoming

Memoir extract

Paradoxical Undressing

The first dish comes in the blue bowl, balanced on the newel post at the top of the stairs. 

You said you loved duck a few days ago, and here it is – studded through a pile of rice, a sunrise of egg at its center. 

What else will be balanced here, strung along these steps, from riser to riser. 

Hot tea and bacon sandwiches. Footfall and laughter. Tears, and too much silence.

You will be there, too, one day. Your body the blue bowl, studded pile in the last light of afternoon, balanced against the edge of footfall. 

You will be the offering. 

And he will be too much silence at the center, against too much love.

*

He would ask me, “Chica, are you hungry?”

And every time I would say, “Am I alive?”

And every time he would let out a laugh, breaths close and sparkling like couplings of gold and every time it was my heart’s triumph to gather every link without letting on.

Years of treasure.

Are you hungry. 

Am I alive. 

Every time. 

*

People or space.

I’ve been looking for a room to rent for the last two months of my stay – maybe the last two months of all. London isn’t real life, and the fantasy is running out, fading from the edges in, as the credit cards climb and family gifts dissolve pound by pound across the city. It was money they hardly had to spare for a second trip but found somehow, mined in quiet, ambient desperation – she seems to like it there. 

We all know it can’t last. 

No one knows what else to do.  

The city is mine, but only because it’s not mine – home because it’s not home – and I have been weightless here, bounding leaps across its surface, no gravity. The flat with good light and old wood floors in Islington, then out to Aberystwyth for the room at the top of the stairs and small talk about politics, and perfect nights in Llanarthne across the lot from Wright’s restaurant. The friend-of-a-friend with the double as tight as a slipper in Chelsea, and cat-sitting in the expensive tacky flat in Kensington, and up to Wood Green for the “artist discount” at the hotel, spare and dark as a monastery but with none of the tranquility, as roadwork roars outside through the night. The whitewashed loft in Tottenham, through the hatch in the ceiling. The sorrowful beauty of the housesit in Camberwell, where everything was so full of other people’s love it hurt.

Six months back in Virginia, and back again to London, to cycle through again – the gloomy council estate in Essex Road, and the room in the Herne Hill house with the bathroom that was always wet and the smallest kitchen on earth. Green Lanes, Finsbury Park, Stoke Newington. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to spend these last few months in one place – be still for a while. Let one place sit long enough to sink in. 

What do I need? 

People or space?

*

I would have been lying in bed when the text came through.

The room is tiny, just at the edge of being overfull with the double mattress and the little wooden dresser with the framed mirror on top, propped against the wall. There’s a distressingly fragile shoe rack that I’ve pulled nearby for a night table, and my suitcase open on the floor, and nothing else because that’s all the space there is. 

The wall against the long side of the bed is taken up almost entirely by a high window facing the street. With my head on the pillow and the curtain pulled back, it holds one of those banal views that ends up being transcendent despite itself – the irregular roof edges of old brick buildings, sooted black and brown, against a frame of sky that reaches infinitely out, unimpeded from East London to the very end of the expanding universe. 

You can hear the street two stories below but not see it from here; car horns and snatches of passing conversation and the bass of bus engines and clatter of trucks being unloaded. The clank of metal stands trussed up and broken down each morning, each night, for racks of ankle-length dresses and folding tables of sensible shoes. I’ve been wiped out with another wave of supernatural exhaustion since getting here a few weeks ago and most of my time is spent lying in bed, listening to life unseen, lost in the sky over Bethnal Green. 

I would have been there when the text came through.

Left some food outside your door X

I would have heard him on the stairs just a few seconds before; my door is at the top of the landing and his step is unmistakable – light and purposeful and tense. Would have heard him rise, and pause, and leave (making the parabola all men do), not guessing why. 

I get up, open the door, and look out into the dark hallway. 

There’s a bowl on the post.

I bring it into the room, along with the wooden chopsticks and flat-bottomed spoon that were beside it, close the door behind me, and rest the ceramic in my lap. Inside is a great cumulus of fresh fried rice, sticky tufts of grain charred to a deep brown. A radiant, wobbly yolk nestled precisely at the center.

I’ve told my friends about the young guy here who’s a chef. 

He was away when I came to see the place for the first time. The second guy, from the same culinary school, was out that day, too. It was just the Italian girl who showed me around that afternoon. 

I’ve been looking at rooms all over the city and it’s come down to a huge space in a charmless, half-empty house set back in a courtyard in Wood Green, or the cupboard in a council flat on Bethnal Green Road, packed in with three strangers and market stalls and bus engines and the betting parlor and pound shops and the big Tesco. 

The Wood Green house is newly renovated, but the effect is more sterile than invitingly refreshed, and the fridge has been put in exactly the wrong spot in the new kitchen, and it’s so quiet back here away from the street that once you’re indoors you could really be anywhere. Which makes it nowhere. I look around at all the emptiness, trailing the warm-hearted landlady who I’m disappointed to hear lives somewhere else, wondering if peace is what I need.

Bethnal Green hums with life in every direction from the very start. The ad for the room is so engaging, so winning, that I’m curious to know which housemate is such a gifted writer. Two chefs and a graphic designer, it says, who are already friends; a fully equipped kitchen and shared love of food; as many plants and herbs as they can manage to keep alive. There’s a pulse off the place that they cannot hide and could not fake, and I wonder if life nearby is what I need.

People or space…

That’s how I hear it in my head, over thousands of steps in the lean winter light – across beautiful bleak London, that I love and do not belong to and will have to leave. 

People or space. 

*

They are all so young. And the Italian girl is very beautiful.

I hadn’t entirely taken it in the day she showed me around, but now I’m here to stay and she hugs me and I realize how tall she is, how shapely and slim, how black her hair is, how warm her black eyes, how pristine her smile, and she holds me close and says soft like a love song into my cheek, Welcome home, and I realize she’s properly beautiful. The kind of beauty that organizes the world outward. I feel myself melt into the negative space around it, around all three of them, and a wave of relief swells through me. 

I know who I am here.

For the first time in years, I’m with strangers and don’t have to guess, don’t have to wonder where I stand – the hurricane inside me stops churning and the sea settles and goes quiet. Everything that can break has broken, and here is a lovely place to watch the world go by in pieces, out of the way, untouched and invisible. 

They are so young and she is so beautiful, and I am not-young and not-beautiful.

I am not-.

I tell my friends at home, I’m the old American lady in the cupboard at the top of the stairs. Reverse upside-down Harry Potter, shrinking backwards away from magic.

You’re not old, they say.

Colorado 

Can you lead the meeting next week, they ask each other, and everyone at the beginning wonders what it means to secretly want to say no and secretly want to say yes at the same time. Am I a coward or a show-off, they wonder. A coward and a show-off. Can you be both?

Everyone down the road knows it doesn’t matter to sort out the difference in your head between the coward and the show-off.  Just start talking. 

Eventually you’ll hear yourself telling the truth. 

And that’s what will save your life.

Step One starts with the truth to yourself – my name is Ron, and I’m an alcoholic. Later on, there’s Step Four, when you write down the moral inventory, and Step Five when you admit all of your wrongs to your sponsor. 

Step Eight, when you make the list “of all the persons you harmed.”

You will have to say it all. 

Tell the truth about the hiding places, the lies, the misdirections. The thefts, the sabotage. Tell the truth about the envy, the loss, the grief, the resentments, the humiliation, the shame, the guilt. Tell the truth about how you starved – for attention, for love, for care; how you hunted for them in other people; gashed them through, fed and were never full, left them starving in turn. Tell the truth about what you knew – the memories you lied about losing, and the ones you lied about keeping. Tell the truth about what you wanted, what you felt like you deserved. 

Tell the truth about feeling worthless and also, somehow, like the only thing in the entire world that matters.

Admit who you are. What you’ve done.

Admit.

Start by telling strangers. 

In church basements and community centers, with bad coffee and cheap cookies out. 

At first, you’ll have a plan to sound humble or fearless or nonchalant. But once you start talking, the words you choose will pull up invisible chains behind them, other words you didn’t know were inside you at all. And you will hear things for the first time as they come out of your own mouth, in your own voice, and suddenly you will not be telling the story to the room; the story will be telling you who you are in the room. How you got there, to the church basement. That moment when you realized that if you kept running from the pain you couldn’t stand, running itself was going to kill you. 

His story. 

He tells us how he married the woman from Colombia after he cut us off – he doesn’t mention her daughter, who I vaguely remember was around my own age. How he helped her family to immigrate to the U.S. They all loved him, he says, and when the woman decides to leave him and tries to get as much money in the divorce as she can, they all shun her and take his side. 

The drinking starts to get bad in the years after, and he goes to therapy but there’s no real progress, no relief. He is dissolving into darkness, soaked, and nothing can stop it.

He tells us that his therapist told him, after years of sessions, “You’re just hopeless.” Beaming with pride at having been such a unique disaster that a bona fide professional couldn’t sort it out. “Can you imagine? He just said to me, ‘You’re hopeless!’” Shakes his head, pretending to be mortified.

He says doing the program has been about learning to listen, and I think of what it took for him to finally hear the truth. 

Remembering the message in science class from the principal’s office, when I was 11 or 12 – that I shouldn’t go to my dad’s house after school like I always did on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Go to your mom’s instead. That night she tells me and Paul that he’s in a hospital-that’s-not-really-a-hospital, and she takes us to see him that one time, and somewhere on the visit I see that the name of the place is the Psychiatric Institute of Washington. 

The two of them walk side-by-side, talking, as Paul and I wander about nearby. In my memories of our house before he moved out, they’re never touching, never even in the same scene in my mind. Once he was gone, they mostly just yelled at each other over the phone. If they happened to be outside at the same time when we were picked up or dropped off, it was hard glances over our heads as we trotted from car to doorway.

When I tell my mother decades later about the walk around the Institute, she’ll look puzzled for a second, and then shrug. Did I take you two to visit? 

She doesn’t remember taking Paul and me to see the children’s therapist while he was there either. The brochures about dealing with “alcoholism in families,” and the woman asking questions, and my arms folded across my chest in ferocious, silent protest at the whole dishonorable thing. This is wrong, is all I can think. It tolls like a bell over the sound of the woman’s voice, the words on the pamphlets; whatever he is, it’s wrong to talk about it like this, here, where he can’t defend himself. 

Keeping his silence, on principle. Not knowing what it holds.

When he gets back from the Institute, he tells us the facility determined that he “misuses” alcohol, but is not addicted or an alcoholic. Very important difference. Some of the people there were really a mess, he says. It’s supposed to sound like pity, but what comes out is contempt. 

What a bunch of fuck ups. Thank god that’s not me.  

It would take 30 more years, drinking himself to death alone, and coming to a place 1,600 miles away, for him to see himself in other people. To stop running, stop comparing. 

“I really found fellowship here.” 

Paul and I nod, smiling. 

He tells us about facing the truth, even when it’s hard – that’s what recovery is.

Admit.

He says he was with his father – our grandfather – when he was dying a few years back, and there was a moment when his mother was at the side of the bed. “He apologized to her, for being a bad husband and a bad father,” he tells us. “You know, the worst things that a man can be – a bad husband, a bad father. He admitted it.” 

The worst.

He was in the room when his dad said it, and he wondered if he should object, even though it was the truth; would it be cruel to agree by silence, when the man was dying. His mom wanted him to say something – Ron, tell him he wasn’t a bad father. And he refused. He says to us now, dying himself, that his father had chosen to tell the most painful truth at the end, and that choice deserved respect. 

Admit. 

Paul and I nod, again, and the room is wise, warm eyes all around. Yes, yes – the truth is Very Important, we all agree, a lush consensus here in the sunshine at the residential rehab.  

He keeps going, on addiction and families; catching the stride that repentance makes for itself, through four years of stories. His own (how many times has he told it now), and all the bad husbands and fathers making their confessions over bad coffee and cheap cookies; countless tales of broken children and wives and parents – say it, get it out, every fucked up thing you did and said and thought and felt; all the times you knew it was wrong and didn’t stop, when they were crying or pleading or frozen or numb – say it, because your silence is a lie, and the lies are what will kill you.

I always thought that’s what the Steps do better than anything else – make you practice telling the truth. To ever really heal, you have to get as good at telling the truth about who you are as you were at lying about it. 

Keep coming back; it works if you work it.

He tells us how grateful he is that we came – so many people never get the chance to connect again with their children. And he looks properly compassionate when he says he can understand why, of course – of course, sometimes some things just can’t be repaired, some amends can’t be made; what a shame (and we all nod together again, in sorrowful consensus – what a shame, what a shame). But there’s also the faintest thread of triumph somewhere beneath it. You’re here. You came back.

I wonder if he’s proud of us, or proud of himself.

I wonder if it was worth dying for. 

When it’s all over – when the coral sea of sunlight and the driftwood between us are disappearing behind me down the Colorado highway, across the expanse east to Virginia, and further on, to the other side of the ocean – I still won’t remember how we got to the part that mattered the most.

When I remember later, it’ll be like tuning a radio – an indistinct hum of static, then a sudden snap of perfect clarity.

Something, something, something, he’s saying, alcoholic fathers, something… Then there’s a beat of silence, just long enough for him to look over to me. 

His voice shifts, all of a sudden much stronger than seems possible from that broken body, his eyes locked on mine. 

“You hear people talk in meetings,” he says, “about how they ‘lost’ their kids.” 

“I didn’t ‘lose’ my kids.”

His eyes straight into mine.  

“I threw them away.”

The truth he needs to say out loud, to save his soul before his body dies.

No matter what it costs to hear it. 

No matter what dies inside me.