No other option, except to keep trying, to try everything. Daily, she was sending this message outward, upward, a desperate, secular prayer. She held fast to that wild hope, my mother. That blind faith, that fortitude. It powered the purchasing of a pair of powder-pink fleece Gap pajamas that she sent with my sister to rehab. The fluffiness and the color—they looked like something you’d dress a new baby in. Did she realize it? Possibly. But the pajamas were a symbol, perhaps of new life, a new girl-baby who could be born, someone who could emerge from the fallout of this tragedy. They were a symbol also of my mother’s tirelessness. She would smuggle coziness even into locked wards. She’d had my father bring big Greek salads to the hospital after having babies herself, a detail I always held on to because there was a lesson inside it, part of our family ethos: personal comfort trumps institutional rules.
chapter eight
In desperation, I returned to Al-Anon in college. My sisters and I were all living in New York City then. Anya and I would meet in Washington Square, eat a lunch of sautéed shiitake mushrooms, marinated seaweed, and steamed kabocha squash at a tiny macrobiotic café on University, and walk to a nearby meeting. Lucia, by then a widow of sorts, was intermittently doing well—which, by our family’s standards, meant seeing a therapist and working some kind of part-time job. But then something would happen that made us question whether she was really okay. She would fail to return phone calls for many days, or say she would be somewhere and not show up. Once, she threw a party and Anya and I found a crackpipe in her bedroom. After that, we went to the Al-Anon meeting weekly at least four or five times in a row. Did we share at those meetings? I know we talked incessantly at the café beforehand, and afterward, standing on the street, unable to part. There was no texting, and we used email mostly for school. We weren’t in touch throughout every day, so when we saw each other we were brimming. We talked tersely, like detectives, divulging our theories about whether Lucia was clean, whether she was okay, who had seen her or spoken to her last. We grew animated sharing our terror, and laughing darkly about our parents, especially our mother, whose life seemed organized around my sister’s pain. We recited for each other Mommy’s efforts to involve herself, inform herself, insert herself, all of which appeared pointless and occasionally pathetic. The puzzle and the pain of addiction had changed our parents and, above all, distracted them for years. Anya understood as no one else could how hard it was to feel overlooked.
“Recovery” didn’t stick—the pursuit of it felt pointless, as I wasn’t the one who needed help. This is a refrain I’ve since heard many times: If only I could get these crazy alcoholics out of my life, everything would be fine. And my life felt too busy to take care of myself. I was too interesting! There was too much to do. I did not see any of my behaviors as related to codependency: not my own daily self-medicating with alcohol, nor my failure to sleep, eat, or otherwise take care of my body; not my tendency to keep a half-dozen relationships with men afloat at one time; not my decision to add to my hour-long commute uptown to Columbia a nanny job in the East Village, a shift at the tutoring center, a volunteer gig facilitating a book club for homeless women in Midtown, or any number of social or familial obligations. I collected people and I seemed to find everywhere people who wanted—who seemed to need—to be collected by me, to be swept up in my current, to worship me and be worshipped by me, to take in my breathless apologies for not giving them more, for not allowing them unfettered round-the-clock access to me—of course that wasn’t too much to ask, it’s not that at all, it’s just that everything’s been sooooo busy. The word “no” was not in my vocabulary. “I’m sorry” was, and I often meant it, but mostly I felt sorry for myself. My notebooks and datebooks were a catalogue of perfectionism. My tiny handwriting looked like it belonged to a high-strung academic mouse. I showed up places on time, and I was cheerful always. But my anxiety was high, my bedroom looked forever freshly ransacked, and I was full of fear, shame, guilt, and toxic secrets. I’d happily let a day be derailed if someone needed to talk. People in codependency recovery use the word “insane” all the time. I felt insane, I was insane, today the old insanity returned. “The things I was doing to make people ‘see the light’ were insane,” writes Melody Beattie in the Codependents’ Guide to the Twelve Steps. It can sometimes sound dramatic. Aren’t we all, after all, presenting one (false) face to the world and living as our real selves in private? But that is how it feels.
From the beginning I was intrigued by how it had come to be. What was this disease of misguided love, a disorder of knitting grandmothers that had felt like a tsunami in my family home? I was taking history and literature and philosophy courses and was starting to understand that nothing was static, monolithic. Every institution was made and remade by people, subject to the shifting forces of culture. Alcoholics Anonymous—like religion, like government, like college itself—was the product of human energies, forged as an idea and honed as a set of realities in particular times and places. I wanted to understand what forces had made it, and why they felt incongruent to our mess, to my life.
* * *
• • •
American women, as the gatekeepers of the so-called private sphere, have long been involved in crusades for moral reform. During the nineteenth century, in the period of large-scale Protestant religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, concerns about improving social conditions and the moral fiber of society came to the fore. Women were particularly passionate about temperance.
Drinking was considered socially unacceptable for women, who at the time relied more heavily on patent medicines and other remedies (precursors to “Mother’s little helper”) to alleviate the physical and emotional aches and pains often dismissively grouped together as “female complaints.” Men’s drinking, however, was out of control. Images from the first half of the nineteenth-century show men enthusiastically knocking back liquor in dark wooden saloons, bodies littering the streets as they slept it off. Women relied on men for their livelihood, which explains why, as drinking increased, women grew embittered—and exhausted. At the time, alcohol consumption was very high, peaking in 1830 with a stunning average of 7.1 gallons of alcohol consumed per person per year. Beholden to men for their very survival, women were profoundly affected by men’s drinking habits. They could not easily protect themselves from drunken or abusive husbands. Many expressed dissatisfaction with what they perceived as a morally lax and deviant culture around drinking, but they were specifically concerned with the law. The legal structure was designed to limit women’s participation in business and industry, in their families and their towns. The temperance fight was a moral crusade, but also a bid for greater equality under the law. Women learned to agitate for broader rights and protections by learning about the legal system, but speaking in terms that a wide swath of the population could understand.
As historian Carol Mattingly argues in her 1998 book Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric, these women carefully calibrated their message so as not to alienate audiences. The mention of the broader platform of women’s rights was often inserted casually, incidentally, nonthreateningly. By “carefully presenting their cause as an unselfish effort on behalf of suffering women and children,” and by scrupulously maintaining the status quo, they made their way rather strategically into the major newspapers and halls of male power. Temperance orators referred often to a “new woman,” but, Mattingly writes, this was not a radical new heroine. They “venerated women’s connection with motherhood and the home, and they cherished their religious associations; at the same time, they argued for dress reform, for women’s right to earn their own living and to be independent of men, and to women’s right to equality generally.” The “new woman” advanced by temperance women was seeking change within the framework of traditional femininity. Still, she was a precursor to the more progressive New Woman who would appear at the end of the century.
Temperance
women’s contributions are noted in women’s history but are dwarfed by the more radical work of suffragists. The suffrage movement is thought to be the gauntlet in which politically engaged women honed their oratorical, leadership, and protest skills. In fact, the overlap between the temperance and suffrage movements was significant and complex. Mattingly writes that because many temperance women were rural, religious, and poor, the movement has been painted broadly as conservative, especially as compared with the suffrage movement. But, Mattingly argues, just because temperance women “nearly always presented non-traditional ideas in a manner carefully crafted to appeal to a widely diverse audience,” that did not make the ideas conservative. Temperance orators may simply have been pragmatic about building the largest possible constituency.
In an 1852 speech to the New York State Women’s Temperance Conference, Clarina Howard Nichols spoke to women’s anguish, saying, “Woman is the greatest sufferer from intemperance…If intemperance did not invade our homes and tear them from over our heads; if it did not take from us our clothing, our bread, the means of our own self development, and for the training of our children in respectability and usefulness; if it did not take our babes from our bosoms, I would not stand here.” The statement was met with resounding applause.
Some speakers encouraged divorce. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “Let no woman remain in the relation of wife with the confirmed drunkard. Let no drunkard be the father of her children.” Stanton knew that alcoholics could be wily and good at giving apologies, but, she advised women, “Be not misled by any pledges, resolves, promises, prayers or tears. You can not rely on the word of a man who is, or has been, the victim of such an overwhelming appetite.” The tone of such encouragement for divorce lends some historical context to the notion of “tough love” as it’s been advised in substance abuse treatment. “Drunkenness is good ground for divorce,” said Amelia Bloomer, “and every woman who is tied to a confirmed drunkard should sunder the ties; and if she do it not otherwise, the law should compel it, especially if she have children.”
Bloomer, a suffragist, temperance activist, and editor for the first women’s newspaper, The Lily, framed the issue as one of autonomy, saying in 1853 that women’s “individuality must be recognized before the evils of intemperance can cease to exist. How absurd the idea—how degrading the idea that woman, before marriage, can enjoy freedom of thought, but afterward that she must endorse her husband’s sentiments, be they good or bad. Call you not this slavery?”
Temperance was not strictly a women’s concern. Men had started associations like the Washingtonian Total Temperance Society, which was founded by six alcoholics and became one of the first fellowships to focus on treating the individual alcoholic. The under-recognized model for groups like these were Native American mutual aid societies, which had been operating to treat alcoholism since at least a century earlier. Women started the Martha Washingtonians, in one of the first efforts to distinguish the plight of the wives, mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters of alcoholic men from the drinkers themselves. And into the early decades of the temperance movement, women began to forcefully articulate a distinctly female response to the scourge of alcohol.
In temperance rhetoric, women were often rendered as “angelic,” the helpless victims of alcoholic husbands. From the beginning, temperance crusaders’ speech “confirmed the worthy lineage” of all women and all mothers. This was in the context of a national discourse that feminized the nation, and saw women’s procreative power as a source of national strength—to grow and fortify the republic. Early temperance advocates knew better than to foreground their anger. But they were arguably already formulating some of the tactical resources women would later draw on as they sought to find ways to live with the disease of alcoholism.
Their concerns were expressed mostly in the register of sorrow and needless suffering, but there are also traces of hopeful desperation, a try-anything approach that will be familiar to all codependents. Some women tried to leverage their sexual power, Lysistrata-style: a well-known photo from the temperance era shows a group of fetching girls carrying a sign that says LIPS THAT TOUCH LIQUOR SHALL NOT TOUCH OURS. Temperance pledges were a common tactic at the time. Some were drawn up by individual women and signed among family members. Others were signed in public meetings—there were whole ledgers full of signatures. An 1887 “Family Temperance Pledge” in the Library of Congress reads, “We, the undersigned Family of ______ Agree with each other that we will not Buy, Sell, or Use intoxicating Liquors as a beverage and will use our Best Endeavors to Curtail and Prevent the Sale and use of the Same by others.”
Long before I learned of this phenomenon, I made K a temperance pledge, too. Not during a period when he was really strung out, but rather when he was newly sober and remorseful and I thought he’d be susceptible to the idea. I stood by the printer in my open-plan office, fiddling with a pen, completely visible, acting as if I was just waiting on a letter or other official document to be printed. No one needed to know I was really using company time to commit to paper this desperate prayer, a short paragraph followed by two blank spaces for our signatures. I, K——S——, solemnly swear that I will not consume substances of any kind. It went on, and included promises that he would not take money from me or “abuse my trust.”
Did I really believe that if I caught him in a devoted mood, I could capture his motivation as if in a jar? Did I believe it would last?
After dinner later that night, he signed it, though, and I smiled as I took it, signed it myself, and pretended to notarize it by pounding my fist on the page—thank you, sir, I believe it is customary to seal the agreement with a kiss—and willing it to become reality.
chapter nine
When I came home from San Francisco, I started college in New York a few months later. Rachel and Kat were there, too, and we spent much of our time together pining for California, for palm trees and Mission burritos and bars and boys. When one of my roommates moved out, Rachel moved in and we painted the living room crimson. Then love appeared again, at a softball game the summer after my freshman year. I wore shorts and knee socks and my hair in braids—I was looking for it. Love’s name was Randy, and he looked like a greaser with tattoos—a lot like K, in fact, except he loved me back. Rachel and I went to the softball game together. It was an informal beer-fueled gathering organized by Philadelphia punk rockers and followed by a house party. By the end of that night, I was in love with Randy, and Randy’s best friend was in love with Rachel. We didn’t go back to New York for a week. Instead, we became a foursome. We stayed in their hot, top-floor flat on Eleventh and Fitzwater, shopped for dinner while we waited for them to come home from their bike messenger jobs. We guzzled our weight in cheap beer and fucked within earshot of each other, stumbling out crease-faced and shameless in the morning for fried eggs and hair of the dog. When we finally made our way back to our New York apartment, it was with both boys in tow. They bummed around the city while we went to class. In the womb of our small, dark red living room, we passed around a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, ate punch-red chunks of bodega watermelon, and talked about what we would do after summer ended. Rachel thought we should drop out of college and move to Philadelphia to be with the boys. My parents did not.
I considered dropping out—anything for love—but then I had an even better idea. I could do both things, have it all, live on the third floor of the grand, crumbling West Philly house that felt like a mansion, and still go to college three hours away. We moved out of the crimson apartment and to Philadelphia—the boys came up and helped us. I organized my schedule so that I was only taking classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Without the crimson apartment, I had nowhere in New York to stay, but Lucia said I could crash with her. That year, my sophomore year in college, on Monday nights, I boarded a Greyhound bus to Port Authority, then traveled downtown on the A train to West Fourth Street, and hauled my duffel bag and a
backpack full of books to Lucia’s door. She lived on Thompson and Houston in a cozy, dark, ground-floor one bedroom.
Spending those three nights a week with my sister made me nervous. She had suggested the idea so easily and warmly, as though she couldn’t foresee a single problem, and as grateful as I was for the offer, I also knew I’d be caught between wanting to respect her privacy and wanting (or being expected) to serve as an informant. Moreover, my love for her had grown complex, laced with anxiety. Our big sister/little sister dynamic had flipped, and it was hard for me to take anything from her, to rely on her in even a basic way. But I took her up on it and tried to be a gracious guest.
It was a window into her intimate life—I found that she still intimidated me in her complexity, her opacity, her self-containment. She walked around the apartment in lace thong underwear, sometimes also an open kimono, with a kind of tragi-glamorous city-girl nonchalance. In the counter-height fridge in the apartment, she kept Gatorade, which she chugged standing up in the middle of the night, and occasionally cheese or pâté. We slept next to each other in her double bed, with the radiator, which sent forth a scorching, tropical heat, hissing and clanging. In the winter, we foisted the heavy window up and kept it open with a dictionary in order for the sizzling hot air to be tempered by frigid outside air. That combination, the mingling of those two temperatures, had the effect it used to have when, coming home from family holiday dinners at my grandmother’s house in Cranbury, New Jersey, we would pull back the sliding windows in the back seat of the Volkswagen van and snuggle under a blanket, to be carried by my father’s expert driving and the soothing dynamics of my mother’s voice back home to our beds.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 9