Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife (8 page)

“Sounds good,” I’d yell as he practiced. I didn’t know what the piece was supposed to sound like, and it was better that way.

My expectations were pretty low for the band concert tonight. We dropped Max and his trumpet off in the band room and Charlie, Van, and I found chairs in the already-packed gymnasium. Soon after, the band filed in. They began playing. They were good. They were tight. There was no disjointed noise. I looked down at the floor to check on Van, who’d been playing with Play-Doh on the seat next to me. He’d been rifling through my purse and my bright orange Twelve Step directory was lying on the floor in front of the woman sitting on Van’s right. I felt the blood drain from my face. I bent down and swiped the directory off the floor. As I straightened up, I locked eyes with the woman. She gave me a pinch-lipped smile and turned her attention to the band.

[Thursday, February 6]

I had dinner with Kelly, Kelly’s friend Lexi, and my sister-in-law Bonnie at Café Francesca’s. Bonnie went to high school with Kelly and Lexi, and Lexi and I have become friends after repeatedly seeing each other at Kelly’s shindigs. I picked up Kelly and we drove to the restaurant, put our names on the waiting list, and sat at the bar. Kelly ordered a glass of wine and I ordered a club soda with lime. The bartender looked at Kelly, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Club soda? We’re gonna have to do something about that.” Kelly laughed and nodded. I thought about saying, “Hey asshole, I’m an alcoholic.”

Lexi and Bonnie arrived a little while later and the hostess seated us. Lexi, a light drinker, was pregnant and she and I split a bottle of San Pellegrino. Bonnie ordered a glass of wine. “Good,” Kelly sighed. “I have one person to drink with.”

Kelly was one of the few people who could match me drink for drink. Every time we went out for dinner, we’d plow through a bottle of wine, order a few more glasses, and as we waited for the check I’d ask, “Should we go somewhere else for a drink?”

Kelly would smile impishly. “Should we?”

We always did.

Three months earlier, Kelly and I would have been half in the bag by now, but tonight Kelly was pacing her drinking with Bonnie’s, and Bonnie is an extremely light drinker who nursed one glass of wine all night. It reminded me of my dinners with Emily and Aunt Alina, and I felt sorry for Kelly.

On the way home, our drive was not filled with the usual laugh-filled banter. We were pretty subdued. I miss getting messed up with Kelly.

[Saturday, February 8]

Today is my thirty-ninth birthday. Charlie and I went out for seafood with Sean and Marcy, and Tim and Clio, two high school friends of Charlie’s and their wives. I ordered a San Pellegrino with lime and got miffed when the waiter brought me a tumbler instead of a wineglass with the big green bottle. I handed the waiter the tumbler and told him I wanted a wineglass. Sean looked at me. “Are you not drinking again?” he asked.

Sean is the friend of Charlie’s who went to rehab and met a rock star there years ago. I’d called him when I decided to get sober the first time. Sean has been on and off the wagon since. The last time I saw Sean, he’d been sober six months, ran every day, and looked great. However, he was drinking tonight.

“Yeah,” I said and told Sean about the Mary and Pat bacchanal weekend that “pushed me over the edge.”

Marcy, who’d been listening, said, “I’ve heard lots of stories about Mary and Pat showing up for dinner parties with their baby and drinking into the wee hours. I hope nothing bad happens to them.”

“Keeping up with them got me to quit,” I said, feeling guilty for blaming them.

“There was more leading up to it than that, right?” Sean asked.

My face felt hot. “Yeah,” I said, completely ashamed.

“Well I’m proud of you,” Sean said. “I need to get back in a recovery program. I’m gonna do it soon.”

[Friday, February 14]

Charlie and I went to Café Pyrenees for dinner with Liv and Reed. There is an extensive wine list there, and I was trying hard to ignore it and be the best company ever. I’m sick of all this effort.

Charlie and I went home and had sex afterward. I told Charlie it was the last time he was getting sex when he was drunk. It sucks having some drunk ass pounding away on top of you.

[Saturday, February 15]

I took Van to see
Blue’s Clues Live
at the Rosemont Theater with my sister and her two boys, Zach and Riley.
Blue’s Clues
is Van’s favorite show. I expected Van to jump and dance excitedly with his cousins, but when the curtain opened, he sat like a statue, mesmerized, never taking his eyes off the show. It was the cutest thing. We all went to lunch afterward and Van talked about the show incessantly. It was the best eighty dollars I’d spent in a long time.

[Monday, February 17]

I play scenes over and over in my head of things I’d like to say to my mother but know I never will. I have these fantasy conversations while I’m in the shower, driving, working around the house. No matter how they start out, I inevitably get on my high horse and deflate her rigid religious beliefs. I point out how her ignorant piety damaged me and prove myself to be more enlightened spiritually than she is. What a head case I am.

This morning, however, I was having a fantasy conversation in my head with my friend Fay. Fay recently made a crack about a cokehead mom who lives in a dilapidated two-flat at the end of her street—a building everyone in our neighborhood wants razed. The woman has a little boy who runs around the neighborhood, and the principal of our elementary school often picks him up and takes him to school.

“Just look where she lives,” Fay commented. “If you can’t get it together and have a house by the time you’re our age … blah, blah, blah.”

What the hell does having a house have to do with anything? What would Fay have if she were on her own supporting her kids? What if she had a deadbeat husband? What if her parents were poor? What if she grew up without a good education and positive role models?

Fay rambled on and on about this poor sad sack of a woman at book club. Then the conversation segued into everyone’s home improvements.

Kelly was turning her basement into a plush rec room, just like her neighbor’s. She’d recently ripped out her deck to install a different shaped one. She’d also just remodeled her kitchen.

“I just couldn’t live with that dark cabinetry,” she lamented.

Tina mentioned that another book club friend of ours was moving back to town. Shelly’s husband’s temporary transfer was up and Tina had been talking to her about buying a new McMansion.

“Ted and I have been looking for a new house,” Tina said. “Wouldn’t it be fun if Shelly and I were neighbors?”

I thought back to a conversation I recently had with Max about buying a new car. Our Jeep has been having transmission trouble and I told Max we’d probably be trading it in.

“Make sure you buy a nice car because I don’t want my friends thinking we have a crappy one,” Max said.

This town is sickening.

[Saturday, February 22]

I’ve got to dump my sponsor, Lida. Lida is the last person I would have picked for a sponsor (which is probably why I haven’t mentioned her until now). Lida was at the first meeting I went to on December 8, and she attached herself to me. During that meeting I was feeling sorry for myself, sniffling, and half listening to the people speaking. But Lida’s comments knocked me out of my self-absorption.

“Feelings, yeah,” Lida said. “Yeah, they’re important, yeah. You know? Um, I’ve got to talk about my feelings. That’s what you’re supposed to do at meetings. Yeah, talk about your feelings. Yeah, uh, a lot of meetings you can’t do that. Um, so I go to meetings where I can, uh, talk about my feelings.”

This went on for five stupefying minutes. When the meeting ended, Lida cornered me.

“Do you have a sponsor?” she asked.

“No. This is my first meeting.”

“You need a sponsor. I’ll be your sponsor. Here,” she said, handing me a piece of paper with her phone number on it. “What’s your number?”

Lida called me a couple days later. I was her only sponsee—go figure. I learned that she is a suicidal head case, spends a lot of time on her therapist’s couch, doesn’t believe in meds, and in her mind is qualified to psychoanalyze me.

A couple of days after that, Lida called me again. I happened to be angry with Charlie and started bitching about him. “He takes his boots off and leaves them in the middle of the stairs for the kids and me to trip over. I whip his shoes down the basement stairs and you’d think he’d get the hint, but he keeps doing it. I just threw his boots into the basement again. This morning he shoveled the sidewalk because I asked him to. He’d never have done it otherwise. He barely shoveled a shovel’s-width snaking path full of clumps. Now the shovel is lying in a mound of snow in the backyard. I’m looking at it from the window right now.”

“Why do you think you’re so angry?” Lida asked.

“Why?” I asked, totally irritated. “Because I expect Charlie to be a partner, not behave like one of the kids. I expect to nag my ten-year-old into a crap job, not my husband.”

“I think there’s more to it than that,” Lida said. “We need to look at this and examine it more closely.”

Another time Lida told me I was in denial about my alcoholism.

“Alcohol wasn’t my favorite drug in high school or college,” I had told her. “But it was my downfall because it’s legal. It became my drug of choice after I became a parent. I think anyone can become addicted to drugs or alcohol if they keep doing them, regardless of genetics.”

“No,” Lida said. “Your alcoholism kicked in the day you took your first drink. That first drink affects alcoholics differently than nonalcoholics. It’s a disease we’re born with.”

“I didn’t like my first drink,” I told Lida. “I drank non-alcoholically for a long time before I developed a problem.”

“You’re intellectualizing this,” Lida said testily. “And you’re in danger of drinking again. You could die!”

I don’t believe I’ll die if I drink again. I suppose anything could happen, but I don’t see myself picking up a drink, guzzling the bottle, and killing myself in the process. I didn’t share this with Lida, however, for obvious reasons.

A couple of weeks ago, Lida called me at dinnertime. While I was talking to her, Van showed me some of his drawings in his
Blue’s Clues Handy Dandy Notebook,
Max asked me a homework question, and Charlie motioned me toward the dining room for dinner.

“Hey, I need to sit down with my family and eat,” I told her.

“Yeah, I think that’s a good idea,” Lida snapped. “I’m tired of being interrupted!”

“Look,” I said. “I have two children who need my attention. You called during the most hectic part of my day. It upsets my ten-year-old that I’ve been disappearing in the evenings to go to meetings, and I’m not about to push my kids off when I’m around. You don’t have children. You go to work, to meetings, and you’re in bed by nine. Our lives are very different.”

Two days later, Lida called again. “I just want to say that if I’m going to continue to be your sponsor, you’re going to have to call me every other day and we’re going to have to meet at a meeting at least once a week,” she said.

Lida had been bugging me to attend a meeting with her once a week that was an hour away from my house. I’d suggested meeting her halfway, but she said, “I only go to meetings where people talk about their feelings. We need to go to this one because people really talk about their feelings there.” There was no way I was going to that meeting, and there was no way I was going to call her.

“Thanks for being my sponsor, I really appreciate it, but I need to find a sponsor who lives closer,” I told Lida.

“Oh,” said Lida. “Well, uh, I’ll continue to be your sponsor until you find a new one.”

“Uh, okay,” I said, irritated with myself for not saying, “No.”

So today Lida called and said, “I still want to be your sponsor.”

“I asked someone else to be my sponsor today,” I told her. “She lives close by, I see her at meetings, and I think she’ll be a good sponsor.”

I’d thought about replacing Lida with Sara weeks ago. Sara’s smart, says insightful things, and has been sober for ten years, but I changed my mind during a meeting when Sara mentioned her son had been taken away from her when she was drinking and she’d spent time in a loony bin. Sara got her kid back years ago and works as a psychotherapist now, so hopefully I made a good choice.

“You know, a lot of people have two sponsors,” Lida said.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, so I’ll continue to be your sponsor,” she said.

“Uh, okay,” I said, hating myself for being gutless.

[Monday, February 24]

I called Lida at home when I knew she’d be at work. It’s cowardly, but I didn’t want to deal with her. I left a message on her answering machine thanking her for her help and telling her, “I only want one sponsor.” I hope Lida doesn’t call back. I don’t want to hear anymore about how I should get rid of my mouthwash and Grey Poupon because they contain alcohol.

“They could trigger you,” Lida insisted. “Did you get rid of them like I told you to? If you drink again you’ll die!”

[Saturday, March 1]

I went downtown for a makeover at Nordstrom. Sue Devitt, the Aussie cosmetics diva herself, selected colors for me out of her new cosmetics line and a makeup artist did my face. I dropped a bundle and went to the Art Institute. It felt great!

[Sunday, March 9]

Audrey is moving to Detroit and Hope threw a good-bye brunch for her today. I made a blintz soufflé, and Hope bought lox and bagels. I don’t know what Audrey sees in Nehemiah. He’s fat, sixteen years older than she is, and doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. I’m really going to miss her, but I have a feeling she’ll be back.

[Tuesday, March 11]

I want to drink again. Maybe I can do it. It’s hard to relate to the homeless stories, whoring stories, my-children-were-taken-away-from-me stories. I’ve been trying to work the Steps, but I’ve been having a hard time.

Step One: “We admitted we were powerless over (enter substance or behavior)—that our lives had become unmanageable.” I go back and forth with this one but, yeah, I know I’m powerless over alcohol, especially when I remind myself that part of the reason I had Van was to sober up.