The Good Life (18 page)

Seventeen years had passed since I'd lived in California, but I drove with perfect memory. Jon had some expression about how adolescent knowledge is the hardest to lose. I felt more adolescent now than I had ever felt as a teenager—teary, shaken, driving because movement was soothing.

I turned onto Pacific, the first four-lane street I'd ever driven on. Windows were starting to light up; coffee shop parking lots were half full, and a wobbly mechanical Santa on top of a computer store soundlessly waved and laughed. Four stoplights down was the rec center where I'd learned to swim. Lights were on throughout the building. It was already almost seven o'clock, when morning sessions started for people who needed quick uplift before they went to work. The center had a flashy new sign out in front, listing classes and meetings for the holidays—
WEIGHT WATCHING IN FRUITCAKE SEASON, QUIKSTITCH QUILTING, HOLIDAYS WITHOUT HO-HO-HO: SUPPORT GROUP
.

If I had been my mother, I would have called that sign the hand of God. I turned into the parking lot from the far lane. Even if the group wasn't a good one, there would be a coffeepot going in the back.

The meeting was practically finished when I crept in—the leader, a shockingly thin woman with hair cut above her ears, was already reading from the closing statements. “We come together without fears or requirements,” she read dully. “We allow each other our own needs. If you feel that you belong here, you belong.”

Twenty-two women listened in the circle around her. One, near the leader, was so frantic around the eyes and mouth, she looked as if she'd vibrate if you brushed her arm. “It is our faith that all pain is to be honored,” the leader read.

I knew this. I'd heard it hundreds of times, meeting after meeting, night after night. Sometimes two meetings a day, before I met Jon, when the loneliness was so sheer and bright, I burned my fingertips with matches as a distraction. Next came call and response.

“Our experience—” the leader read.

“—is the center of our being,” the group chanted back.

“Our responsibility—”

“—is our own healing.”

I thought of my mother, her pursed lips and fussy fingers. With some shock, I realized that she would look right at home here.

“Happiness—”

—is up to us.

“That's wrong,” I said to the woman beside me. She looked up with bloodshot eyes and shifted as if she might move, so I put my hand companionably on her arm. “I'm not criticizing. But if it was up to us, we'd all be singing.”

She stood up then, shaking off my hand like water, and scuttled to another chair in time for the next refrain.

“Honest,” I said, standing now and speaking clearly, to be heard over the others. “I've written a book. I know what I'm talking about. Don't you all deserve joy? I do. My mother does.”

“Growth comes in knowledge—” the leader began, but the response was splintered as women turned to look at me and frown.

“Sure,” I said, “but what does knowledge lead to? I know every bad habit I have. Now my bad habits are my best friends. Every day I tell myself I hold my own happiness, but I'm still coming to meetings like this.” The group had fallen silent, the tense woman looking at me with a slack mouth. I took off my jacket and moved into the center of the circle, where I liked to stand when I directed groups. “We all want a map because we can't see the road. But there aren't any maps. There isn't a road.”

“We find our own path,” said the leader, her voice quivering. “Only by working together can we find our individual paths. We've learned that this is the only answer.”

Heads were nodding, but women looked back at me, waiting for my response. I stood on a chair. “Aren't you listening? Individual paths are the same as no path. Every day is shapeless.” As I spoke, the tears broke free again. I couldn't wipe them away fast enough, so that looking at the group, I sensed we were all held in the same warm, salty water. “Listen! There's a new answer every day,” I said. “I'm trying to tell you.”

 

 

 

T
HE PHONE RANG AT
11:10, almost certainly Lucy. I was watching the local news report on a four-alarm tenement fire downtown, a harrowing, gorgeous sight. The tulip of flame, three stories high, lit the night for blocks. A cigarette had been left burning near a pile of bedding. Residents had been lucky to escape with their lives. The camera closed in on a shivering group of youngsters, three of them wailing but the fourth, maybe ten years old, standing stiffly apart, holding back his tears until the cameras went away. I felt a quick stir of sympathy for him. The phone rang one more time before I turned off the TV. “Took you a while,” Lucy said when I finally picked up. “My bad if you've got a guy over there.”

“Don't I wish. There's nobody here but us chickens.”

“Here either.” Lucy's voice was a husky whisper. “I could use a man. I could use a drink. I've been turning myself inside out trying to get ready for this stupid play. Want to hear one of my lines?”

She went silent for a four-count.

“You won't have to sit up nights memorizing,” I said.

“I'm onstage for sixteen and a half minutes and don't get one word. I deserve a drink. Don't even say it: I should go out and help somebody else instead of sitting in my self-pity.”

“Okay. I won't even say it.”

“If I went down to Central Parkway right now and found a junkie to talk to, why would watching him stick a needle in his thigh make me feel any better? Strike up the band! I found an addict!”

“You're not living down there with him. That's something to be glad about.”

“If that's all I've got to celebrate, then I really want a drink.”

For the next five minutes I focused on coaxing Lucy out of the kitchen and into her bedroom, where she was less apt to have stashed a bottle. On other nights, when her dry rage wasn't so far off the charts, I could get her to start thinking about her good fortune. Her rent for the month was paid. She had heat, hot water, a cupboard full of ramen noodles. But tonight Lucy was too drunk on her own misery to be grateful for salty noodles. “Everything takes so much effort, and then everything still goes straight down the shitter,” she said.

“Take a deep breath. Go easy on yourself. Put your slippers on,” I told her.

“I guess it would kill you to admit that sometimes life sucks.”

“Give it a rest. Life always sucks. That's life's job. But you should still put your slippers on.”

“Little Mary Sunshine,” she said. “You want to know what really makes me want to take a drink right now? That you are the only person in the world I can think of to call. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.”

“I'll live.”

I could hear Lucy shifting around, putting something in her mouth. “My life stinks,” she said, and I flicked the TV back on, sound off. We were out of the woods.

Although only ten years older than Lucy—thirty-five to her twenty-five—my role in her life made me feel ancient, part mother, part sage. A regular Sacajawea of sobriety, in the last five years I'd blazed the trail for a teacher, a lawyer, two women who had started a glassware business together, made a fat little fortune together, and decided to go off the bottle together. All of them called me when they felt lost or fearful, and I talked them back into the light: things were never as bad as they thought, remember the big picture. But Lucy, a temp worker who wanted to be an actor—how could anyone make a living in Cincinnati as an actor?—was more inventive than those others, better at remembering temptation, and very, very much better at talking about it. She didn't have a scrap of the beaten-down humility that usually signaled the newly sober. “Life is boring enough,” she liked to say. “Don't add to the general load.”

I couldn't help liking her spirit, an affection I was pretty sure she recognized without my telling her. Neither of us could stand the damp emotions. Instead, I phoned her twice a week, sent her greeting cards that I knew would give her a wry laugh, and tracked her sobriety. Since being cast as one of the wordless Citizens of Vienna in the civic theater's upcoming
Amadeus
, Lucy was 44 days sober. Before this she had been 13 days sober, 81 days sober, and 117 days sober.

“You're on the upswing,” I told her now. “Every day you can be a little more proud of what you're doing for yourself.”

“Actually, I'm doing it for my director. And my agent. My fans!” She produced a bitter laugh, and I heard the sizz of a match, then an inhalation. “Last night I walked around my apartment for three hours, holding marbles in my hand, just so I couldn't pick up anything else.”

“That's pretty good.”

“That's ridiculous. Nobody can live this way. I felt like Captain Queeg.”

“He didn't drink.”

“But his men mutinied,” Lucy said. “I went to bed at nine-thirty. At ten-thirty I took my bottle of Seagram's out to the trash. At eleven I went back out and broke the bottle.”

“That's good. That's what you want.”

“Jesus, Virginia, go easy on the uplift. I called to ask you a favor. You can say no. Maybe you'd better.”

“What do you want?”

If Lucy heard the guardedness, she didn't let it stop her. “There's going to be a cast party Friday night. A party-party, not just everybody piling into cars and winding up at someone's apartment. Invitations. Punch.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It sounds like booze. Every director in town will be there, and I won't get a part in anything next season if I don't go. If I drink, I'll blow myself out of the water. I want you to come with me.”

Now I took the four-count. Lucy had never asked me to do anything for her before. On the few occasions we'd gone out together, she had acted as if she hardly knew me. “This is up to you, not me,” I said shakily. “You know the routine: Go on a full stomach. Keep a glass of water in your hand. Even if I went, I couldn't keep you from drinking.”

“Oh yes you could.”

“Why not ask a friend in the cast to help you?”

“Nobody else cares if I take a snootful. If you're there—don't take this wrong, but if you're there, I won't drink. I couldn't take the lecture.”

Watching an ad for an RV dealership, I let another beat go by. “How could I take that wrong?”

 

I didn't flatter myself that Lucy was striking out at me in particular. Like a trapped cat, she was slashing at whatever she could hit. “It's easy for you. You don't remember what it's like,” she would snarl whenever she was freshly sober and her mood murderous.

In fact, I remembered my drinking with absolute clarity, which bothered me. By now the details of that boozy decade should have been softening in my memory, but the old days replayed in my brain as sharp as Hollywood movies.

Starting when I was twenty-one, ending when I was thirty, I spent most of my nights closing one or another of the bars downtown. During the daytime I wrote systems-evaluation reports. I wore sharp, trim suits, drove a snappy blue Prelude even though the insurance rates strangled my budget, and loved the orderliness of my life, which was two lives: eight to five at my desk with my files and my computer and my phone, and then five until two at The Maple Room or P.T.'s or The Mulligan, where the bartender made vodka sours—better than they sounded.

I remembered Mike, the one I lived with, and the others after him. They showed up in my dreams—handsome men, athletic, mostly kind. They laughed on the nights when I, fueled and furious, turned to some overloud customer at a nearby table in a bar and explained to him that his opinions, his vocabulary, his too-tight polo shirt, and the baseball cap over his bald spot exposed him to be the worst kind of poseur, a man who thought he was intellectual because he saw the movie version of
Hamlet
. Once I heard a bartender call me “Shali, the goddess of destruction.” I tucked five dollars into the tip jar along with a napkin on which I'd written
Kali
.

I didn't stop drinking after the first bout of D.T.'s, but after the second, in a saving moment of fear, I checked into a hospital. There a doctor with a flat mouth stood waiting for me to wake up. “An alcohol-damaged liver gets hard. It starts to look like a rusty engine,” he said. “Yours looks like it went down with the
Titanic
.”

“First class or steerage?”

“Do you think you're cute? Capillaries in your nose are broken. Your hands tremble. You're not fooling anybody.”

I closed my eyes and remembered the man I'd been drinking with. I remembered sitting with him at The Mulligan, and I remembered waking in my Prelude, shaking so hard the whole car shuddered.

“Do you want a list of AA meetings?” the doctor was saying.

“Thanks all the same.” My lungs, like my eyes and ears, seemed to be full of something hot and sticky. “I can handle this on my own.”

It's hard to stop drinking, but it isn't complicated. Don't go into the bar. Don't open the bottle. I didn't see any reason to have strangers tell me in public what I already knew, knew, knew. Once I was back at work, I made this point—loudly, with arm motions—to a colleague, not knowing he'd been sober for five years. Some days later, he mentioned a group he knew that met for weekly counseling. Smart, he didn't talk about support or one-day-at-a-time. Instead he said, “I go for the entertainment. You can't believe the things people say.”

He went with me the first few times, until I promised him I'd keep coming on my own. The promise didn't cost much; the meetings
were
entertainment, in a sitcom kind of way. I heard about other people's blundering and stupid weekends, the night one guy stole a golf cart that kept stalling out on the freeway on-ramp, the weekend a woman meant to fly to Vegas, found herself in Dubuque, and walked through town looking for a casino. “The policeman who booked me said I kept asking for The Sands. I don't even like The Sands.”