Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis(36)

She learned the truth when Mom came to me one morning demanding a jar of clean urine. I had stayed at Mamaw’s the night before and was getting ready for school when Mom walked in, frantic and out of breath. She had to submit to random urinalyses from the nursing board in order to keep her license, and someone had called that morning demanding a sample by the end of the day. Mamaw’s piss was dirtied with a half dozen prescription drugs, so I was the only candidate.

Mom’s demand came with a strong air of entitlement. She had no remorse, no sense that she was asking me to do something wrong. Nor was there any guilt over the fact that she had broken yet another promise to never use drugs.

I refused. Sensing my resistance, Mom transitioned. She became apologetic and desperate. She cried and begged. “I promise I’ll do better. I promise.” I had heard it many times before, and I didn’t believe it even a little. Lindsay once told me that, above all, Mom was a survivor. She survived her childhood, she survived the men who came and went. She survived successive brushes with the law. And now she was doing everything she could to survive an encounter with the nursing board.

I exploded. I told Mom that if she wanted clean piss, she should stop fucking up her life and get it from her own bladder. I told Mamaw that enabling Mom made it worse and that if she had put her foot down thirty years earlier, then maybe Mom wouldn’t be begging her son for clean piss. I told Mom that she was a shitty mother and I told Mamaw that she was a shitty mother, too. The color drained from Mamaw’s face, and she refused to even look me in the eye. What I had said had clearly struck a nerve.

Though I meant these things, I also knew that my urine might not be clean. Mom collapsed onto the couch, crying quietly, but Mamaw wouldn’t give in so easily, even though I’d wounded her with my criticism. I pulled Mamaw into the bathroom and whispered a confession—that I had smoked Ken’s pot twice in the past few weeks. “I can’t give it to her. If Mom takes my pee, we could both be in trouble.”

First, Mamaw assuaged my fears. A couple of hits of pot over three weeks wouldn’t show up on the screen, she told me. “Besides, you probably didn’t know what the hell you were doing. You didn’t inhale, even if you tried.” Then she addressed the morality of it. “I know this isn’t right, honey. But she’s your mother and she’s my daughter. And maybe, if we help her this time, she’ll finally learn her lesson.”

It was the eternal hope, the thing to which I couldn’t say no. That hope drove me to voluntarily attend those many N.A. meetings, consume books on addiction, and participate in Mom’s treatment to the fullest extent that I could. It had driven me to get in the car with her when I was twelve, knowing that her emotional state could lead her to do something she’d regret later. Mamaw never lost that hope, after more heartache and more disappointment than I could possibly fathom. Her life was a clinic in how to lose faith in people, but Mamaw always found a way to believe in the people she loved. So I don’t regret relenting. Giving Mom that piss was wrong, but I’ll never regret following Mamaw’s lead. Her hope allowed her to forgive Papaw after the rough years of their marriage. And it convinced her to take me in when I needed her most.

Though I followed Mamaw’s lead, something inside me broke that morning. I went to school red-eyed from crying and regretful that I’d helped. A few weeks earlier, I had sat with Mom at a Chinese buffet as she tried in vain to shovel food in her mouth. It’s a memory that still makes my blood boil: Mom unable to open her eyes or close her mouth, spooning food in as it fell back on the plate. Other people stared at us, Ken was speechless, and Mom was oblivious. It was a prescription pain pill (or many of them) that had done this to her. I hated her for it and promised myself that if she ever did drugs again, I’d leave the house.

The urine episode was the last straw for Mamaw, too. When I came home from school, Mamaw told me that she wanted me to stay with her permanently, with no more moving in between. Mom seemed not to care: She needed a “break,” she said, I supposed from being a mother. She and Ken didn’t last much longer. By the end of sophomore year, she had moved out of his house and I had moved in with Mamaw, never to return to the homes of Mom and her men. At least she passed her piss test.

I didn’t even have to pack, because much of what I owned remained at Mamaw’s as I bounced from place to place. She didn’t approve of me taking too many of my belongings to Ken’s house, convinced that he and his kids might steal my socks and shirts. (Neither Ken nor his children ever stole from me.) Though I loved living with her, my new home tested my patience on many levels. I still harbored the insecurity that I was burdening her. More important, she was a hard woman to live with, quick-witted and sharp-tongued. If I didn’t take out the garbage, she told me to “stop being a lazy piece of shit.” When I forgot to do my homework, she called me “shit for brains” and reminded me that unless I studied, I’d amount to nothing. She demanded that I play card games with her—usually gin rummy—and she never lost. “You are the worst fucking cardplayer I’ve ever met,” she’d gloat. (That one didn’t make me feel bad: She said it to everyone she beat, and she beat everyone at gin rummy.)

Years later, every single one of my relatives—Aunt Wee, Uncle Jimmy, even Lindsay—repeated some version of “Mamaw was really hard on you. Too hard.” There were three rules in her house: Get good grades, get a job, and “get off your ass and help me.” There was no set chore list; I just had to help her with whatever she was doing. And she never told me what to do—she just yelled at me if she did anything and I wasn’t helping.