Drunk Mom (14 page)

Forward to a random side street.

Now I’m pushing through the snow, which is falling harder and harder. The day is completely gone, and with it all its light. Everything is cooler, quiet, dimmer. But despite the cold, I’m hot in my big drunken Sorel boots.

I open my sweater under my coat. Even better. There’s that open tall can of Heineken in my hand too. The streets are empty. I’m singing again. Or maybe the whole time.

I’m singing because I’m really happy. We are walking toward our new house. I’ve never owned a house before. I don’t really own one now but it’s the closest I’ve got to it. My boyfriend owns it and I’m going to be living with him.

This is why I’m happy.

I have a few more cans in the diaper bag, enough to last me until we get to the new house. This is also why I’m happy.

The snow is getting bigger, thicker, there’s more and more of it, coming down from the sky and blowing at me from the sides. I hear my phone ringing somewhere on the bottom of my purse.

I have to stop singing because it’s hard to in this wind, but I remain happy. I’m pushing the stroller through all this windy whiteness, and in my head I count the cans in the diaper bag: There should be four left. With this open one it’s four and a half, although more like four and one-third.

Then we are a little bit lost or maybe a little bit closer to our goal. Who can tell? The goal, the new house, is somewhere to our left; we should be turning at some point. The phone rings and I almost answer and consider asking my boyfriend if he could tell me where we are.

It is snowing even more now, so I stop and secure the plastic stroller cover over the stroller. I close it tight to make sure the baby is okay in there, dry and warm.

I have some trouble moving my right hand. It seems to be frozen around the can. I have no way to unbend all the fingers. I’ll unbend them later. For now, I stick the hand with the empty can in my coat pocket to warm it up.

The good thing about all this snow is that you can hide things in it so easily. My warmed-up hand lets go, I drop the empty can, kick some white over it; it’s gone. Nobody sees it. Nobody is out in this weather. Except for me—the happy woman with the stroller.

Eventually, we stop at a laundromat. There’s a man inside and he grunts in response to my request to let us sit down and rest. Through the plastic I see that the baby is asleep inside his cozy fish tank on wheels.

It’s so thick with snow outside, the street lights look like ghosts.

I buy a ginger ale from a vending machine to appease the laundry man and also to mask the smell. I don’t know if it will mask the whole day, but it’ll have to do.

I have one more can left in the diaper bag. Only one can? The liquor-store map pops up in my head. We are a good twenty minutes away from the liquor store at the nearby plaza. It’s way past eight now. In this snowstorm I won’t make it before nine, when the store closes. I’d make it by myself but not with the stroller. Maybe this is a good thing.

I open the Heineken in the diaper bag and the ginger beer simultaneously, to combine the sound. I take a small gulp from the ginger ale can, a huge gulp from the other can. I take my big furry hat off and swoosh my hair around. Next, I loudly bring down the can of pop onto the table so that the laundry man can see that I’ve no bad intentions and am just taking a little breather here, drinking my pop before I continue on through the snow.

My boyfriend calls again and I answer and in the straightest voice I can manage, give him updates like a correspondent: We’ve already turned the corner at the main intersection, yes. We are a few blocks away. I believe. We’re almost home.

Where are you right now?

Right now? Right now I’m in the laundromat.

He says something, not sure what because the connection is weak, so I hang up. I get up and stick my head out and squint to see the name of the street. It’s the name of my street. Our new street.

The phone rings again. It’s my boyfriend and he’s saying something again, who knows what.

I say I’ll see you in five and hang up.

I leave the laundromat.

I take a long, filling gulp from the last can and drop it and kick it into a snowbank. Drunk, I’m a disgusting litterbug.

Then we’re home.

We’re home.

Home is a forest of boxes. Our entire lives are packed up inside. It’s random: picture frames with pillows and a coat in one box, a set of
champagne flutes in a cardboard divider, a squeaky soft toy and my bathing suits in a plastic bag in another.

Did you have a little drinkie tonight? my boyfriend says.

So he can smell it on me after all.

This is our game: He can tell and I can tell that he can tell but I’ll say no, and he’ll say, No? Are you sure? And I’ll say, No, I am sure, even though I know that he knows that I know that he knows.

Are you sure?

I’m sure.

He’ll ask one more time, probably. This time, I will bare my teeth.

He will back away, Okay, okay. Sorry. Just checking.

Checking what?

Nothing. Forget it. I’m sorry, I’m just high-strung because of the move.

The baby is home and safe, but I don’t recall when we took him out of the stroller and where we’ve left him. He could be in one of the boxes, for all I know.

I want to move furniture.

It’s too late, my boyfriend says.

This house needs more space, I declare.

My boyfriend—I have no idea where he is at this point. He doesn’t register. Maybe he’s in one of the boxes too, with the baby. No matter, I’m driven by the need for space but mostly by the need for destruction. The need comes on sometimes when I’ve been drinking too much. I’m usually a quiet drunk—always pretending not to be drunk—but tonight I feel fired-up from all the walking and singing and all that snow.

I discover my dresser buried underneath a pile of boxes. I try to pull it out but it’s stuck. Fucking thing.

I’m filled with energy and anger, thawing in the warmth of the house. It’s a physical reaction, this rage, but it’s also caused by knowing I’m this drunk. Right now I’m extra-disappointed in myself. The disappointment is constant and I get drunk because of the constant disappointment, but usually I am quiet about it. Not tonight. Tonight I am so disappointed I can barely see.

I kick the dresser and something gives, a leg buckles down or something. The whole thing is suddenly sitting legless, on the floor, and it’s puking up drawers.

Fucking ridiculous thing.

My boyfriend’s voice says to leave it alone, we’ll deal with it tomorrow. The baby must be upstairs because I hear his thin wail somewhere above me and I scream, My baby, as if someone was murdering him—and someone is, possibly—and I plough through the boxes to rescue him. My boyfriend follows me up the stairs because he probably knows what I know: that he knows.

The baby is fine, sleeping, quiet.

Just a nightmare, I tell my boyfriend, and he nods, knowingly.

Let’s just go to sleep, he says, and I almost agree but then I remember: the dresser.

The disappointment comes up again.

I explain that if I don’t deal with this fucking dresser right now I will explode.

I don’t know if my boyfriend hates me right now but just in case he doesn’t, I’ve got enough disappointment to make up for it.

He lets me deal with the dresser. Or do whatever. He goes to sleep or something. He disappears, again, along with the dresser and the boxes and the baby, in the vortex of my blackout.

There’s one flashback of me dragging the dresser on the sidewalk, away from our new house. The drawers are in it, I think; in this flashback I see myself pushing them back inside the dresser’s mouth once, twice, again. The dresser is a bomb about to detonate. I drag it far, in the snowstorm, drag it to the end of the street—white falling, then it’s dark again.

In the morning, on my way to the convenience store, I see the dresser. It’s sitting right on the corner of our street. Its top is covered in a thin layer of new snow. The drawers are gone. I wonder if I took them out or if someone else did.

I say nothing about the dresser or the missing drawers as my boyfriend and I walk by it later on that evening. He says nothing about it. I have no way of guessing the level of his own disappointment.

S
hortly after our move, my doctor’s office calls to remind me about an appointment with a counsellor. I don’t remember making this appointment, but every time I pile up clean underwear on the carpet in the corner of my bedroom I remember the dresser. The lack of the dresser suggests in its symbolic way that I probably could use another person to talk to.

The counsellor, Bobby, has patterned green socks. Everything about him suggests gentleness, but the subtle flamboyance of his socks makes me a little suspicious. I know it’s crazy, but his socks make me distrust him.

I have Frankie with me. He’s stirring in the stroller. Bobby mentions a grown daughter. He asks me the standard questions.

I give him the standard lie: divide amounts and days by two, then divide it by two again.

Bobby’s voice is so soft it almost lulls me to sleep. It at least puts me
into some kind of a semi-coma because later I can’t remember anything that we talked about, only those damned socks and how close his office is to point C on my mental map.

In our second session, a week or so later, Bobby suggests that I may be depressed or suffering from anxiety and maybe this is why I drink and why I suffered from an eating disorder in my twenties: an old demon I had mentioned to my doctor a long time ago that is documented in my chart.

I dislike the words
suffering, suffered
. As if I had done something heroic like my grandma, getting captured by the Nazis and sent to a work camp and surviving. I never heard her use those words. But okay,
suffered
. Suffering.

I nod.

Bobby waits with a tranquil smile.

Well, I am very, very anxious, I say. All the time. I used to take Ativan. It really works for me. Can you talk to my doctor about it? My hands tingle and freeze and half of my face spasms from anxiety. Feels like I’m always sitting on the edge of my seat, figuratively and literally, you see, because anxious people like me, they can never sit still so they sit on edges. I’m definitely. Suffering from anxiety.

Bobby nods a lot at this and stops to write things down.

Today his socks are pink, purple, orange.

There’s a drawing of a sailing ship on the wall. Light pastel colours; even the blue looks more like yellow, that’s how mellow it is. Bobby’s socks are the brightest objects in the room.

I would love to know what he’s writing down. Grocery list like all shrinks, probably.

I wait for him to finish.

Frankie makes a noise in his sleep. He’s with me again.

Bobby blinks friendlily, Do you always take care of the baby?

I’m the baby manager, I say.

A “baby manager”—that’s funny, Bobby says softly in his singsong voice and scribbles again.

(Tomatoes. 2 lb brown sugar.
Bok choy.
Rapini?)

He says, So. Not enough time for Jowita. What does Jowita like to do?’

This throws me off. Jowita. Who the hell knows what she likes to do. I don’t know. I like to write and watch TV. And take photographs. And, before, I liked sex. I liked dressing up for parties. And flirting. I guess. Ask me what I love, that’s easier. I’m certain about what I love. I love, love, love drinking. Being drunk.

To Bobby I only say the part about photography, and this seems to satisfy him because he writes things down again. He must have at least a month of grocery shopping planned by now.

I say, So. What should I do? Since photography doesn’t seem to be working.

We exchange a couple of polite blinks. As we do, I hope and pray and beg every god that I can think of that he will say he’s going to talk to my doctor about prescribing me something, some Ativan, some other miracle magical medicine like that. Instead Bobby says, There are special programs for artists to deal with issues like anxiety. We have a great program here at Western, it’s through our artist clinic. Let me look it up quickly.

He half turns to his computer to look it up quickly.

I took a program like that some years ago. It was called Mindful Meditation and it was full of misfits like me: a woman who was socially anxious; somebody who stopped talking after a serious car accident,
out of fear of losing her voice; a bunch of chronic dieters; a shitload of actors and actresses. We sat in the circle and discussed feeling feelings. One time we spent most of the session learning to meditate while eating, and we chewed on a piece of raisin for minutes, talking about it and feeling feelings afterwards. Near the end of each session we lay on mats and meditated. I always fell asleep, which was an okay thing to do. Eventually, I chose to stay at home and sleep there instead.

I wonder what Bobby looks like naked. I don’t want to see him naked but I wonder what he looks like naked. Or what he looks like when he’s having sex.

He probably leaves his socks on.