For you, James.
In graduate school, we’d drink the Spanish Rioja, then you’d put a red candle in the empty bottle as we drank the next. Hunched over the kitchen table in the basement apartment, we watched the red wax slide down the green curves, pool on the cloth and cool. We talked and talked, about Hemingway in Paris and Absurdist painters and ethnomusicology, what we’d read or wanted to read. I’d never had such conversations, never felt the world so full of meaning and possibility.
*
The first bottle I ever found was one my mother hid at the bottom of the laundry basket in the upstairs bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, princess pajamas around my ankles, I saw the sun glint off something hard and green through the pink plastic weave. I dug to the bottom and pulled out a square bottle. The gold and green label said Passport Scotch. No alarms went off in my ten-year-old mind, no panic, no premonition that this was the beginning of a long line of bottles that would bloom in the strangest places—the toilet tank, linen closet, drawers, bookshelves. No idea that in two years my sister, brothers and I would comb the house monthly to harvest them all. That in three years she’d be admitted to her first rehab. That five years after the rehab she’d be hospitalized for debilitating cirrhosis and alcohol-induced jaundice. That seven years after the hospital, the family would walk through a frozen graveyard just before Christmas and bury her next to her father.
*
It’s a Polaroid picture. The color blurs a little in the corner where someone pulled up the paper too soon. You sit in the green recliner in the apartment you shared with your wife and son before it all came undone. Celeste must have taken the picture. Thomas, your son, stands between you and the side table. He wears a little sweater vest; he’s two. That recliner will be the one piece of furniture you take with you.
It’s just a couple of months before your divorce. We’ve been seeing each other for months, but miraculously the foundations of our lives haven’t yet collapsed. That’s coming. Your marriage, my engagement, that’s ending. That’s the blur in the corner. That’s the Jameson bottle on the side table.
*
Thomas went to his first AA meeting with you when he was three years old. You’d been going to meetings for a year by then. You brought coloring books, matchbox cars, a juice box, set him up in the corner and told him to play quietly while you went and sat in the circle of folding chairs.
The meeting began. The leader asked, “Is there anyone who is here for the first time?” Thomas came to the edge of the circle and raised his hand.
*
Hemingway characters drink absinthe, of course. Fitzgerald’s drink everything.
Carrie Bradshaw starts the Cosmo craze. Sex in the City, the glass and the woman both shallow and daring, legs dangling from a bar stool.
Don Draper, Mad Men, orders the Old Fashioned. Bitters and Bourbon.
The Dude likes White Russians.
The most iconic. Bond. Vodka Martini, shaken, not stirred.
I drank ouzo in the back of a Greek restaurant in London once, after the place had closed. Maybe twenty people, English, Spanish, French, Greek, swirling through the room. A handsome man with a dark beard and a filter-less cigarette poured blue and green liquors whose names I didn’t understand, whose bottles I’d never seen and couldn’t read. Twenty years old, I felt like a character in a novel or movie—romantic, mysterious, urbane.
*
Forced sterilization, shock treatment, lobotomy. Before AA, before anyone knew it was a disease, that was the “treatment.” Even in the 1980s, doctors forced my mother to take Antabuse, a drug designed to keep her from drinking by making her so sick if she drank that she would never drink again. Poison.
The doctor warned her sternly and brought her the pills on a tray with a Dixie cup of tepid water. She swallowed it all down and got dressed, bought a bottle of Scotch on her way home. She was hospitalized that afternoon.
*
My first year in college, a party night, my best friend came in to find me injecting melon balls with grain alcohol from a syringe her premed boyfriend had scoured up. “Oh,” she said, “so it’s going to be that kind of night!”
My second year in college, on a road trip to visit someone’s cousin at the University of Florida, I went to a dive bar in Gainesville—all stained oak paneling, with a cloud of cigarette smoke around each light. The beer came in plastic pitchers and we drank it out of red cups. Almost drunk, just on the line between sharp and slurring, I ran the pool table for the first time in my life. The whole bar laughed and applauded. I felt perfect, beautiful.
My third year in college, I decided that if I limited myself to drinking only white wine, I would not become my mother.
*
You never asked me to stop drinking.
One month sober, you put a book in my hands: Under the Influence. I remember reading it in the library in Wilmington, watching the car lights move north on I-95 like blood in a vein. I remember understanding the word “genetic” in a way I never had before: a trap set to spring, a cocked rifle.
I stopped drinking.
*
Thomas gets out of the car and walks toward us across the cold parking lot. He has no coat and his jeans are torn.
“There’s daddy, Nana,” our grandson says from his car seat.
Thomas moves like his limbs are lead, like he’s moving through water. He looks older than thirty-one—skin fevered, eyes hard and cold, smile too wide, a neon advertisement with letters missing.
*
Things you say when strangers offer you a drink:
“I’m allergic to alcohol. I break out in handcuffs.”
“I drank my whole share already.”
“The world’s a safer place if I don’t drink.”
“I’m not going out on wine coolers. It’s going to be Jamison and a revolver.”
*
I grew up listening to the ceilings, always picturing where everyone in the house was and what they were doing. I thought that was normal. I thought it was normal to laugh about the worst things, to say mom was “smurfed” instead of drunk, to make fun of how she fell into the toilet. To use humor to encyst anything that could cause pain. I thought everyone woke up in the middle of the night already crying, woke from nightmares screaming.
It wasn’t until years after my mother died, a summer day on our back porch that I started to realize. You were reading Achilles in Vietnam out loud to me. Jonathan Shay talked about the startle reflex and how after trauma, soldiers would suddenly startle sitting in a room alone.
“I do that all the time,” I said. “Don’t you? Doesn’t everyone?”
You looked at me with such kindness. “No.”
*
At sixteen, Thomas cut school one Tuesday. His grades were plummeting. The principal suspended him. We drove the eight hours to Celeste’s house in Massachusetts and the three of us confronted him in the kitchen. Celeste’s second husband—also an alcoholic but one who hadn’t stopped drinking, a man Thomas hated—was noticeably missing.
“Where did you go?” you asked.
Thomas leaned his chair away from the table as far as he could. The back of his head pushing a framed “Bless This House” embroidery askew on the wall.
“Nowhere!” he said. “Nowhere! I was there. They just didn’t see me. I stayed in the music room all day and no one noticed me.”
“Thomas,” Celeste said. “You’re six foot four! No one noticed you?”
You said, “There are three reasons to cut school: sex, drugs, and booze. Which one was it? Or was it all three?”
*
When I first started teaching at the university, a colleague, someone I barely knew, told students I was a drunk. He said he’d seen me falling off barstools at Smitty McGees, said I had vodka in my water bottle when I taught.
What I felt: anger, of course, and righteous indignation. But underneath that? Shame, such shame. As though he was right, as though he saw something deep in me, knew somehow everything I believed I could have been, everything I believed I still could be if I ever drank again.
*
I hate the movie Leaving Las Vegas. Nicolas Cage, the terminal alcoholic falling for Elisabeth Shue, the beautiful prostitute with the heart of gold and all her own teeth, a woman who promises never to tell him to stop drinking. Who stays with him to the bittersweet end. His hands shake, but he can still get it up. His hair’s a mess, but he’s handsome still, still Nicolas Cage.
I watched my mother die from this godawful disease. The movie’s bullshit.
He’s not so bloated he can barely walk. His skin and the whites of his eyes haven’t turned orange because his liver and kidneys are shutting down. He’s not covered with bruises from vitamin deficiency. He’s got enough energy for the DTs, enough brain for articulate despair.
Jesus Christ, he’s got years and years of the bitterest hell left in him. But who wants to see that movie?
*
When Thomas was seventeen, he told us that he’d quit drinking. Straight Edge, he called it. He and his friends were all Straight Edge. A movement, he said, rebellion through self-control. No alcohol, drugs, promiscuous sex.
He played us the music, angry metalcore, screaming vocals, every instrument playing percussion. He listened like it was religion.
*
The worst times were when my mother ran out of booze while my brothers, sister and I were at school. By afternoon, she’d sober up enough to want more.
The bus dropped the four of us off at the corner and we’d straggle up the hill, book bags hanging off our shoulders, school uniforms crumpled, askew—to find her framed in the door, waiting.
Before we left that morning or maybe the night before, we’d found all the bottles we could, hidden all the car keys, pulled the wire to the distributer cap in the engine.
Furious, in her own terrible pain, she’d grab us, hurt us.
*
Sometimes I wish I could have wine with dinner. I picture myself in a hushed restaurant with crystal and silver, holding the stem of the delicate glass, turning the gold liquid inside to see the “legs” rise and fall back like slender waves. I wish I could be the kind of woman who wears silk sheaths and understands the citrus and the oaky notes in her glass. The woman who runs a corporation or sits on the boards of museums and operas.
*
In the glass-grey cold of a March morning, just before dawn, I run my loop through our beach town. The off-season and the early hour mean I’m almost alone. At the bakery, someone has propped open the door with a rock and I run through a cloud of cinnamon, picture the sweet rolls rising in the oven. A sign in the window of the T-shirt shop says “Closed for the Season”; someone must have stuck it up there with masking tape and then driven north. Now the corners curl and yellow. By the time I get to the liquor store on the corner, the sun has begun to glaze the horizon and the bottles in the window pick up the light and shine.
As I pass them by, I think of jewels—emeralds and amber—and a feeling opens in my chest, growing in strength like the light behind me. I realize that I’m grateful, deeply grateful that, today, no part of me wants or needs to go in there. How lucky I am. How different my life could have been.
*
When there was no more booze in the house, when my father had taken her keys and disabled her car, when my brother had hidden her purse and taken all the credit cards so she couldn’t call the package store to deliver, my mother would drink anything in the house with alcohol in it—perfume, mouthwash, vanilla extract. Anything.
Who could believe this could be a choice and not a compulsion?
How did I ever believe that?
*
Thirty-three years ago, I waited in the car in the cold parking lot in front of the Health Center while you had your first appointment. It was April and the forsythia had just finished blooming. On the campus mall, the sycamores brushed the sky, yellow-green with the first leaves. I had a book propped on the steering wheel that I kept trying to read.
The counselor gave you a test, the Michigan Alcohol Screening Test. She said that if you scored a five, you were definitely a problem drinker. You scored a 12.
We were teachers; we believed in tests. It didn’t take much to convince you that the results were accurate. You walked out of her office, got in the passenger side of the car, shut the door and looked at me for one long moment. Then you said the sentence to me for the first time. “I’m an alcoholic.”
*
Years after my mother died, when my father and stepmother were moving out of the house on Daventry Road, I went home to help them pack. Pulling the books from the shelves, I kept finding single spare keys between books or between pages of books. They clattered onto the granite hearth below the shelves like metallic rain, silver key after silver key made for that long-gone car, the olive green Ford with the black vinyl roof.
I called my father in to see it, the remains of our arms race, the ironic symbol of release, and he laughed sadly. My stepmother stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile beginning, shaking her head.
*
When I was in high school, I would fantasize about my mother dying. She seemed so close to death, never leaving her bed, not eating, barely breathing. I imagined that I’d be sitting in class when I’d see the blurry form of the principal through the frosted glass of the door. The principal was an Immaculate Heart of Mary nun; she wore a black veil and habit, and in my daydreams that shadowy figure through the glass would be the first indication I had that my world had changed.
I imagined her hesitation to come in, how she would call Sister Theresa out first, it was always Spanish class, late morning. Their faces would be full of sorrow and compassion. Sister Theresa would say my name, say, “Come here, child,” then Sister Mary would walk me back to her office and sit me in the leather chair by the window and hold my hand.
I imagined their grief at my tears, their soothing words.
My overwhelming and secret relief.
*
After work on an ordinary Thursday, we go to the Mexican restaurant where the mom bartends and the kids wait tables and the dad cooks and sings in the kitchen. Our favorite place. The tables are full already, so we sit at the bar, watch other patrons dash in out of the rain. We talk to the mom who pours our seltzers and tells us that business is good. My eye follows hers to the statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe nestled over the top shelf.
We sit close, you and I, talk about our day. Our legs touching, your hand on my knee. We order the Carne Adobada, the ceviche, the tuna poké. Next week, you and Thomas will hike together up a mountain in Virginia.
Tonight, the bottles line the shelves behind the bar—whiskey, scotch, bourbon—but they fade into the background. This is ours. The one day.
Anne Colwell writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Delaware and has published two books of poems, Believing Their Shadows (Word Poetry 2010) and Mother’s Maiden Name (Word Poetry 2013). She received both Emerging and Established Artist Awards in fiction, poetry and nonfiction from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in several journals, including: Bellevue Literary Review, California Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and The Madison Review. She has been a member of the staff at Bread Loaf Writer’s Workshop and a visiting professor at the University of Granada in Spain.