Girl Walks Out of a Bar (6 page)

Even at that age, I understood that my compulsion to eat wasn't shared by other people I knew. I licked spatulas covered in Duncan Hines Brownie mix and then licked the bowl. I sneaked from cookie jars and hid candy that I could eat later when no one else was around. It was never enough and it was never too sweet. Food, and desserts in particular, just plain made me feel
better. Other kids would eat a cookie at recess and run out onto the playground, excited to have the freedom to jump around. I would eat a cookie, sit in the grass, stare at the sky, and wish I had a dozen more cookies.

At my annual visit to the pediatrician that autumn, Dr. Birnbaum ran through all the checks he performed on me year after year: heart, lungs, teeth, height, weight, immunizations, and so forth, and then began scribbling on my chart. Sitting on the exam table, I amused myself by swinging my legs back and forth and twisting my ankles left and right, pointing and flexing my toes the way I saw gymnasts do it. Without looking up from his clipboard, Dr. Birnbaum said, “If you don't stop eating, you're going to be as big as a house.” My extended legs and pointed toes froze in place. His words sent a rush of acid shame into my stomach. I felt a flash of heat up my neck and into my face, and I remained silent with my head held down. The only sound was the crinkling of the paper on the exam table.

During the drive home was the first time I ever heard my mother use the word “asshole.” “You never have to go back to that asshole doctor again,” she said, as she sneaked glances at the tears streaming down my cheeks.

I couldn't look at her, but I nodded. “Can we have Burger King for dinner?”

“Sure,” she said.

Lou and I were hunched over our Whopper Jr.'s and large orders of fries at the kitchen table when my dad walked in that night. Fast food was thrilling to us, so much so that on that day we hadn't pulled ourselves away to attack him at the door. “What's the occasion?” he asked. “We're eating like Kings on a Tuesday night?” It was his code for Burger King. If we had Dairy Queen for dessert, we “ate like Kings and Queens,” which was a real treat.

“Yes,” my mom said. “Lisa had her physical today, and that Dr. Birnbaum is a nasty man.” As far as I know, that was her only comment to my dad about the incident. And if they discussed my weight when they were alone, neither of them ever let on. Mom tried to monitor my nutrition and sometimes talked to me about eating habits, but that was about it. Dad never said a word.

My comfort eating was developing into a big, bad habit, and I knew it. After school my brother would take off to play kickball or tag with the neighborhood kids, but for me after-school time meant free access to food. I knew that spending every afternoon sprawled in front of the ABC
4:30 Movie
with a tub of vanilla fudge ice cream and a spoon was only going to cement my status as the pudgy kid. But for those ninety minutes I felt relief as the sweetness melted on my tongue and slid down my throat. I was calm, and it was the closest I ever came to happy.

My parents were a social couple and social drinkers in the '70s, and it didn't take me long to notice that at the parties they threw, the adults became happier the more they drank. People sometimes talked about the fact that my mother's father had been an “alcoholic,” which sounded like a bad thing, but I never saw anything but smiling faces when booze was flowing.

Our house was regularly filled with family and friends on occasions like New Year's Eve, Super Bowl Sunday, and Kentucky Derby Saturday, but even the first day of summer, the anniversary of D-Day, or a full moon offered my parents good enough reason to host another bash. A four-bedroom, traditional center-staircase colonial, our house had the distinction of being the only private home in Bergen County with a regulation-size
bocce court. It covered an entire side of our massive front lawn.

The court was the brainchild of one my father's oldest friends, whom we knew only as “The Dalai Lama,” a nickname that I understood had nothing to do with Buddhism and everything to do with a piece of headgear he wore one stifling hot day on the golf course. If the sun was shining on a weekend, a party broke out around the bocce court. “Harv!” the Lama announced one fall Saturday when I was about ten. He had walked unannounced into the kitchen from the back patio. The Lama smelled of soap and cigarette smoke as he hugged me. “Lisa! Good day for a game!” He had a booming, gravelly voice thanks to decades of smoking, and when he walked he hunched like a much older man.

An air of mystery surrounded the Lama; we never went to his house, but he was a regular fixture at ours. Lou and I didn't know where he lived or how he and our dad became friends, and there was talk of a wife, but we never met her. We heard he did some kind of “accounting,” but he didn't seem to work for a company.

It didn't take long for my father's friends and their wives to start appearing, old buddies from Lodi, the working-class, largely Italian town where they all grew up. Dad's parents had owned a candy and newspaper store where he was put to work as a young boy starting at four o'clock in the morning, folding and then delivering the day's papers. My dad was the only Jew in that neighborhood, the youngest of five kids and the only boy in his family. His buddies from Lodi called him “Meyer Lansky,” and they always greeted each other with firm claps on the back. Our neighborhood had a mix of families with dads whose occupations ranged from banker to butcher, and they all called Dad “Judge,” though he bristled at the formality.

“What are we drinking?” my dad asked each new arrival. No one ever stood empty handed in our house or front yard.

Once the game was set up, I zipped into the kitchen to fetch beers for my dad's friends. But I'd linger in the kitchen because the inescapable smell from the pans of home-cooked lasagna and baked ziti and the fresh bread baked just that morning from “the best” bakery in Hoboken made me delirious. And the desserts!

“Can I have one now? I'm starving!” I asked my mom as I pawed at the boxes of cannoli and Italian pastries sitting on the kitchen table in irresistible pink bakery boxes.

“OK, one, just one for now. They're for dessert!” my mother said. After she put on her oven mitts and carried a tray of lasagna out to one of the folding metal card tables set up outside, I piled four pastries on a paper plate and scrambled into the upstairs bathroom where I ate them behind the safety of a locked door.

Italian pastries weren't my favorites because they weren't loaded with chocolate, but the cannoli and the zeppole gushed with so much sugary cream that they did the trick. I barely tasted them going down as I sat on the bathroom floor with my back propped against the tub, knees up. After I licked my fingers clean, I washed my sugar powdered face and hands, just in case I ran into anyone on my way back down to the party. At the time I didn't know about the chemical reaction, the dopamine surge that was occurring in my brain thanks to the giant hit of sugar. All I knew is that for a little while I felt relief.

While the bocce parties were mostly about the food and the games, the soirées my parents threw on occasional Saturday nights were mostly about the cocktails. On one such wintry afternoon I helped my father set up the folding metal card table in the den next to the brick fireplace. We threw a red-and-white
checkered plastic tablecloth over it to smooth a surface for the bar.

In a show of heartfelt hospitality, we laid out a full assortment of bottles and garnishes. I was in charge of arranging the booze and mixers, always excited to impress our guests with my bar table arrangements which usually consisted of alphabetized alcohol on one side and alphabetized mixers on the other. And of course I thoughtfully lined up cocktail napkins, toothpicks, sliced and twisted lemons and limes, olives, maraschino cherries, and “good” plastic cups, the clear kind that look frosted.

Lou and I would peek through the curtains that covered the glass pane on our big wooden front door so that when guests arrived we'd be ready to announce them with great pageantry. One by one and two by two they'd cross the threshold as we bellowed their names in voices and accents befitting a Renaissance festival. Schoolteachers, construction contractors, politicians, housewives, real estate developers, lawyers, and judges all paraded in as my brother and I took their coats with the dramatic flair of a maitre'd at a fine restaurant. There were screeches of recognition to other guests across the room, hair tousles for me, and fake boxing moves for my brother. The air was electric and I jumped up and down as if I were on a pogo stick.

The women wore hip-hugging, bell-bottom pants or maxi skirts that touched the floor, and as they strolled through the party crowd, they left scent trails of L'Air du Temps and Charlie perfume in their wakes. Several women piled their hair high and accented their flamboyant updos with faux flowers, headbands, or barrettes. Their hairstyles contrasted starkly with those of their husbands and boyfriends who sported “high and tight regular boys' haircuts” as my dad referred to the military style that he himself preferred. Always swirling over the entire
party was a cloud of smoke, courtesy of Virginia Slims and Winston.

My dad, the evening's bartender, stood behind the card table offering miniature pigs in a blanket with spicy mustard while his friends decided what to drink. He wore his bartender's uniform, a special crushed navy velvet vest. It was a custom-made piece with his nickname, “Smitty,” etched into the left side in gold piping. I loved how the nickname seemed to hover right over his heart. The gold piping detail continued around the armholes and outer seams of the vest and made it suitable for duty at even the swankiest hotel bar. Whether he was in pajamas eating a bowl of cereal, in a flowing robe while deciding the fates of law breakers, or in a gold-trimmed vest shaking cocktails, I thought my father was the most elegant man in the world.

Alcohol deserved ceremony. My dad took his role seriously and crafted each cocktail carefully, holding every drink up for inspection with the eye of a jeweler assessing the quality of a diamond. I mimicked him from my position next to the card table, not knowing what I was looking for, but thrilled by the happy ritual of it all.

I was always curious about how the drinks were made and why they were so important to the drinkers. Why were some of them garnished with a wedge of lime instead of a lemon rind or perhaps three olives speared on a toothpick? Maybe the drinks with the olives were more substantial and called for some actual food as a garnish to help them go down. I wondered if the brown liquors tasted like Coke or root beer and the clear ones like 7-Up. I guessed that the brown drinks, the ones that smelled strong and were sipped slowly, were more appropriate for those in a downcast mood. Even the brown-booze bottles seemed more serious, and the liquid was generally served
in smaller doses, either straight up or just over some ice. I preferred when someone ordered a more upbeat drink, like a sparkling, filled-to-the-brim gin and tonic with a floating wedge of lime in the shape of a smile. All of the adults I knew drank—at parties, at dinners, watching sports, during evenings while sitting on summer lawns—and there was nothing forbidden about it. The bottles at home weren't locked up or stored out of my reach, and there was always beer and wine in the refrigerator.

By the age of eight, I was sneaking sips from people's left-behind glasses at parties, mostly just getting my lips wet to see what the drinks tasted like. And they almost always tasted like bitter nastiness, but I still liked the covert feeling of getting away with it.

By ten, I was catching buzzes from the sips I stole. An unhappy ten-year-old's booze buzz looks like this: sincere smiles, carefree laughs with no concern about what others think, and cartwheels turned without fear of looking foolish. I equated alcohol with feeling happy, relaxed, and something I had never before been: uninhibited.

By twelve I knew exactly what I was doing when I drank—trying to silence the trash-talking mosquito in my head by gradually numbing my body and brain. I drank full cans of Budweiser and smoked cigarettes with my older cousins when I could, which wasn't often enough for me. The boy-girl parties started at school and booze was a regular feature, whether stolen from parents or procured through an older brother or sister. Drinking not only shut the mosquito up, it helped me survive not being one of the girls picked to pair off somewhere with a boy. If it wasn't “liquid courage,” at least it was “liquid indifference.”

By thirteen I hung around almost exclusively with drinking kids. At my Bat Mitzvah luncheon on a frigid Saturday in February 1979, a few of the boys in their Sunday best
suits heisted a bottle of Jack Daniels from behind the bar and drank it in the temple parking lot. Along with a few other girls, I joined them whenever I could sneak out for a few minutes. Then we tried to disguise our breath with spearmint Tic Tacs. Most Friday nights that year involved pilfering beers from our parents' refrigerators and drinking them in the woods behind the middle school.