Drunk Mom (25 page)

When we go around and give reports on our well-being since the last time, I lie to the counsellor, tell her I’ve been staying sober. I haven’t been staying sober and have already abandoned my short-lived twice-thrice-a-week agenda.

I still have one rule right now, it’s the only rule I still have and don’t break: don’t get drunk on the nights of these meetings. Which means that I’m plastered six nights out of seven. I don’t even bother making excuses anymore, not to myself that is. I just go into the liquor store every day, walk in there like a wind-up toy, and pick up what I need.

Around the same time I join the aftercare, somebody from the New Hope centre calls and asks me how I’m doing.

I tell her I relapsed. Again.

I’m sorry to hear that. But relapse—

Is a part of recovery. Yes, I know. I’m on my way to getting better, I suppose. I’ve really perfected that particular part of recovery.

Is there anything that we can do? Do you want to talk to your counsellor?

Yes, because I really need another counsellor in my life, I say.

Who did you work with here?

I can’t remember who my official counsellor was. Maybe the woman who looked like a bird, the one who had wood plaques with words like
Believe
and
Faith
all over her office walls? Or maybe the idiot that made us tap our foreheads to get rid of cravings?

I don’t know, I say.

Let me check. It was Brenda. According to our files your counsellor was Brenda.

Never heard that name before. But, no, yeah, I don’t think I need to talk to a counsellor.

Do you have any comments for us?

Naturally. I always have comments. I say something vulgar and unnecessary about people—and I suppose I’m thinking of my former roommate—having sex all over the place and being distracting.

We were aware of that. The reality is that it’s hard to control.

So you were kicking people out for smoking but humping was okay?

No, not at all. But there’s only so much we can do. You can make an official complaint, of course.

Of course. That’s okay. I tell the woman on the phone I’m attending the post-treatment group. I say I’m trying to stay sober.

That’s excellent news.

I think how excellent news would be winning a free trip to Europe, but whatever, sure.

Anything we can do to help, she says. You can even come back for another term.

At this I laugh because that’s the most absurd thing I’ve heard so far. But I thank her for her concern and promise to stay in touch.

I
can’t remember how, but early that summer I finally negotiate hiring a babysitter in the evening. In the past, we’d hired a lovely Jamaican lady to look after Frankie sometimes, but since we moved to our new house we haven’t had much luck finding someone to help us out. My boyfriend feels overwhelmed having to take care of the baby, and I’m getting more and more sick of being trapped in the house night after night. My sister helps here and there but she’s still in school and it’s hard for her to make the commitment.

After we finally find a regular sitter, we book her for a few nights a week. On those nights my boyfriend and I always leave the house. We almost always go out separately. I go out with the pretext of wanting to work on my writing and he goes out to get away from me, I’m sure.

When I go out, I don’t talk to people. I go to bars. Just order drink after drink and when I decide that I’m starting to look suspicious I change bars. As usual, I’m paranoid about being arrested. I look at people and try
to figure out if they’re off-duty cops. I don’t do anything to warrant arrest. I fall off the stool once and I break a glass a couple of times, but nothing to even get kicked out for.

I think back to rehab and Tina and other alcoholics. I assure myself I am nowhere near as bad as some of them. I remember Tina’s stories: drinking on the plane while working, then being arrested on landing; being put on probation, taking stress leaves, not being allowed to fly anymore; drinking in the park while walking her Jack Russell in the morning, talking to street people, the dog earning the nickname Jack Daniels from the street people; passing out on a bench in the same park; Jack Daniels almost getting run over.

I also think about Charlotte, or whatever her name was, the teacher who was in love with Donicio. I recall her horror stories of driving drunk all the time and crashing.

Sade and her crack binges and her arm jerking and flinging itself forward.

Please.

I’m just having fun.

In moments of whatever leftover defiance I still harbour, I have a few ideas about what alcohol is supposedly aiding me with. With its help a tiny part of me is still convinced that I can again be the cosmopolitan woman I tried to be in Montreal. Louboutin-red, ambient techno, martinis.

Once I get to that perfect place where I’m sufficiently buzzed yet not too drunk, I will even be able to revert to my old charming self from many years ago. I will again be the girl with loose hands and lips searching for new kisses everywhere.

Back in my fantasies, I’m again the girl walking the streets swaying
sexily, with sun in her luscious hair, getting stopped by men. I am the girl who is taken to Paris by a man who just wants to be around her, who will settle for just looking at her. Like him, in Paris, the men will look. Some will say
ma chérie, ma chérie
as I walk—swaying, again, always—through markets full of tomatoes straight from vines, and peaches.

With the right amount of alcohol I am a superwoman. I will jump from tall buildings, run like the wind, charm whomever I choose and perform all kinds of magic tricks: get ahead of any lineup, walk through glass, fight anyone, kill a car with my fists.

My seductive powers are so intense that not just men in Paris—entire rooms of the world will fall in love with me.

I get phone numbers, give out phone numbers.

Money flies. Not my money, yours.

I am invited to parties. Not just any parties.
The
parties.

I meet the coolest person: an owner of a boutique hotel; a writer with a fatwa over his head; a hip-hop star. We will become instant best friends and will get on the plane and fly to St. Barts for the New Year’s Eve countdown on the yacht.

I’m just going to have one more pint. I’m almost there, just need one more tune-up and I’ll be ready to go. While I wait for this thing to kick-start inside me, I go outside for a smoke. I do my best to ignore the soreness in my breasts swelling with milk, and the slightly bloated, familiar face that almost brushes against me as I pass the smudged mirror on my way out of this place called something like Dodo & Fiddle.

One night, early in the summer, I go to see a movie on my own, bring my own wine and drink it in a dark corner. The movie is about a woman who discovers that her child is not her own. I think. I’m not sure.

There’s an actress in it who usually plays neurotic wives of mean men or fallen mistresses. In every movie, she’s got kids or is about to lose kids. Or has lost kids. In this one we’re not sure if there were kids, or rather, a kid, to begin with.

The actress has red hair and porcelain skin speckled with green freckles. She cries a lot and her tiny nose turns red at the tip when she does. She often takes long baths in movies, or it seems that way whenever I think of her past work.

I’m paranoid that the staff will be wearing night goggles looking for people videotaping the movie, finding me instead, guzzling wine from a box. Which is why I start drinking fast, gulping huge, sweet, sour and dank swigs to get rid of it for good. On the screen, the red-haired, red-nosed actress is drinking almost as fast out of a fancy glass of wine. I toast her in my mind as I finish up on this side of the screen.

Afterwards, the wine stays lodged somewhere in my throat. It wants to come out and spill all over my lap and the seats in front of me, even the screen. I talk to myself, calm myself down. Shh, it’s just wine, you’ll be okay. Shh, baby, I say, and think of my own baby and for some reason that makes me sort of cry—but not really cry, just pretend-cry. And I say—this time out loud, I can hear myself but pretend I can’t, pretend this is completely involuntary—Be quiet, baby, shh.

From behind me someone says, Yeah, baby, shush the fuck up already.

I think about getting up and telling him to go fuck himself. But I’m too barfy.

So I try to make myself comfortable. On the screen the actress is sleeping in a bathtub. She looks dead and even more porcelain-like with water shining, accentuating the sharp cheekbones and, at the same time, softening her alabaster brow. It makes me tired just to look at her, so heavy-lidded and weak with fatigue.

I come to when someone starts shaking me.

Ma’am. Ma’am, please wake up.

She’s a pudgy teenage girl with kind eyes. I look around to see who she’s talking to but I’m the only one here.

Ma’am. She called me ma’am.

She looks at something on my shirt, her eyes stuck there a beat too long. I look down.

It’s a little splash of purple. A little spit-up, which is what you call the not-quite vomit from baby’s burp, as I have learned in my short career as a mother.

I’m sorry, I say to her, and she shrugs and says, That’s okay. There’s a washroom just outside if you need it.

Okay.

When I get up—slowly, even though the room is spinning, the now black movie screen tilting to the right—she reaches for my arm and then the empty box falls out of my lap.

She says, I’m so sorry, and squats to get it. But I’m faster than her, or I think I am, because I dive for the box with the grace of what in my mind is a bird of prey, but I move more like a fat turkey. I lose my balance and fall right on the girl. She tilts back and now she’s falling too. This is a farce, a scene from an old black-and-white movie.

Now it’s time for me to say sorry, again, and I will say it, I just have to get that stupid wine box out of her reach or out of her sight, so I kick it behind me. Then I try to help her up but she’s too heavy or I’m too drunk or both. We go back and forth a few more seconds like this before we’re both finally back on our feet. She’s breathing loudly and her face is the same colour as the stain on my shirt.

I leave the movie theatre eventually, the empty box of wine squashed and shoved inside my pants. This makes me feel even dirtier than I already feel.

I
nside me, everything stalls. I begin to wish I was gone. For good. I’m not being dramatic, just pragmatic. I feel that I’m wasting everyone’s time, my own time especially. It’s not that I’ve been destined to do greater things with my life—other than drink greatly—but now that I have this kid, I feel that I’m wasting my time pretending to be his mother.

I’m ruining my child.

I don’t really want to commit suicide, but I start doing things like crossing the busy street two steps later than would be perfectly safe—my shadow getting struck and killed after I land on the sidewalk.

I stand too close to the yellow line on subway platforms, watching the trains approach, moving one step closer before they pull into the stations. I feel elated, nostalgic about my near-death when I get on. Elated because I didn’t do it or because the option is always there next time, I can’t tell.

At home, I casually google “painless suicide,” “ways to kill yourself,” I’m just a
researcher
of ways of death, I tell myself, but I store the information. I find that there’s even a book called
The Complete Manual of Suicide
in which various methods are analyzed in detail. The book has graphs discussing every method (freezing, hanging, overdose, etc.) and it explores such important topics as the levels of pain, the preparation, and “the disturbance it may cause for others and its deadliness.”

I also pray. I start praying one evening while in a liquor store, face to face with rows of bottles. It just comes over me, the prayer, like some kind of invisible blanket. It’s desperate and quiet. It gets louder as I wrap my fingers around the box or the bottle and then there’s nothing, just the hollow sounds of my trance as I pay for whatever I picked up. Outside, I come to again.

Sometimes, it’s as if I was on a train going round and round, finally becoming aware of the fact that we haven’t stopped at any stations in ages, and I start to wish for this, for the stop to happen. This is what I pray for. I need to stop. I need a stop, I need a stop, I need a stop, I chant in my head as I pick up bottles, and then drink them, later, after everyone goes to bed.

I have to stop.

Please give me a moment.

I can almost see it, this moment, like a ray of light from the sky, like some kind of cheesy religious image, a god’s finger piercing glowingly through a cloud. I don’t know. Whatever it is, I’m waiting for it because I need a break. Or I should just get on with it and die already.

I don’t die but I finally finish my mat leave and in late May I go back to work. I’m back at my old job, the one I got while sober, long before I got pregnant. I think of all the jobs from my past—me sitting at various desks,
in front of various computer screens, inhaling my own vapours from the night before. This was never the case in this job, but now it will be. Now I’ll be sitting at my desk feeling as if my eyeballs were trying to fall out of my face. The alcohol will still be chasing itself through my veins and I’ll be sitting at my desk, keeping my mouth, and every other hole, shut, to hold in everything that tries to escape the alcohol chasing inside my body.

I pretend to exist at work and make small talk and tell people stories about the baby. Everyone wants to hear about the baby.

I start smoking with the smoking crew and everyone seems a little shocked that I smoke.

I picked it up after I had the baby.

Really?

Yes, he made me smoke.

I try to make it sound like a joke. I succeed. I get laughs.

Mid-June, my boyfriend’s mother comes to town to celebrate Frankie’s first birthday. Her presence jerks me out of my overall numbness. I know she is watching me, I can tell. I try to tell myself I am being paranoid again, but what do you know—the second day of her visit she takes my boyfriend aside and tells him that she could smell vodka on my breath. I pretend to be indignant when he confronts me about it later, after dropping her off at her hotel.