In 1951, Lois Wilson cofounded Al-Anon, formalizing the existing network of support groups of families and friends of alcoholics. The joy she felt about her husband’s sobriety had worn off. “I found myself losing my temper over trifles,” she said, sitting beside Bill in an interview. “I then began to think of my own relation—to you, to myself, my inner self, and I saw that I was resentful that someone else had done something that I had wanted to do all my married life. My one purpose had been to sober you up. And then somebody came along and in two minutes did the job.” She was resentful that they didn’t have as much time together anymore now that Bill was busy with AA and inviting fellows to their house. “I love having a house full of drunks,” she said, “…but I didn’t feel I was needed any longer….Then I realized that I too had to live by the Twelve Steps. It was just as important for me as it was for you. Not so obvious, perhaps, but just as important.” Soon after its founding, Al-Anon developed its own literature and its own tools, all based on the Twelve Steps. Later, definitions of addiction and codependency broadened to become more inclusive and less obviously heteronormative and gender-specific, but importantly, the understanding of this role, which is co-constitutive of alcoholism, has its origins in romantic love. This could be among the reasons that Al-Anon did not initially draw me in. Though its materials are intended to be generalizable to all alcoholic situations, it was built with marriage in mind.
When Lucia was clean, I didn’t resent her. I felt worry and suspicion—could I really trust it this time?—but mostly, I experienced an overwhelming sense of relief, a sense that I, too, would now survive. Lucia had often felt like an extension of me. We were close in age and had grown up entwined. In snapshots of our childhood, I was often lit up by laughter with her sitting slyly by my side, having just made a joke. Or I was relaxed into her—in one image, leaning my whole toddler body back against her as she sat in a rocking chair, her arms wrapped around me. While embracing, we were sharing a box of raisins. There were differences between my sisters and me, but they felt insignificant, especially in youth. We were but variations on a theme. There was Lucia, wild and unpredictable; and Anya, fierce and intense; and me, the median. So when she was sober it felt like we were sober, like we were going to make it after all. The resentment I felt was directed toward my parents for caring too much or too little, trying too hard or not enough, doing everything wrong.
But there was no such triangulated resentment with K—it was all directed straight at him. I was angry with him for obvious reasons when he was drinking or using, but, as with Lois Wilson, my rage barely moved during his sober periods. For a time, it lifted and I was elated to have him back, but before long, I found that the things I couldn’t stand about him had merely shifted. Now he was distracted not by the rhythms of his own addiction, but by his phone lighting up every forty seconds with new messages from his sponsor. He left often for meetings and for coffee, endless cups of coffee, which gathered in clusters around the house and which he didn’t like to throw out. He would reuse them, making himself a cup—strong, made with heaping scoops of the fancy brand I’d bought—as he left the house. Can I take the car? It’s for a meeting, he’d say, keys already in hand. I couldn’t exactly say no to a meeting. And I couldn’t ask for more from him, could I? It was taking all he had to stay on the righteous path.
In relation to Lucia, my codependency was shot through with fear. But with K it seethed, a quiet fury that I strained to square with domesticity. I came to understand what has been called the “dilemma of the alcoholic marriage.”
chapter eleven
I like discovering the ways my grandmother and I are alike. We both keep our Q-tips in a jam jar and eat smoked fish on crackers while standing in the kitchen. She makes a cucumber and tomato salad and I commend her for salting it liberally, as I would. When I pad around her small apartment, a little peckish, she asks if I want some sour cream as a snack. I do. I stand like a pelican while eating a few tablespoonfuls, on one leg with a foot balanced on the inside of my knee, and wonder if she did too, in nimbler years. We both own more tubes of lipstick than is reasonable, mostly corals and bright pinks that we enjoy trying on for each other, one after another, even though the matte ones leave a stain, thereby adulterating the subsequent color somewhat. We acknowledge even this to each other—Here’s this pink, but this isn’t really what it looks like, there’s still some of the other one underneath. Still! she exclaims. Gorgeous! She likes mine so much I leave all but two behind for her, replacing her Revlon with Chanel, Cover Girl with Givenchy.
On the second morning of my visit, she lingers in the doorway of her geriatric bathroom, with its bright red EMERGENCY switch beside the toilet, and watches me apply winged liquid eyeliner. She can’t wear it anymore because of Graves’ disease, which has made her eyes more bulbous and sensitive, but around me, she enjoys remembering a more chic iteration of herself. I never left the house without eye makeup, she says. Not one day in my life. I would die before I’d do that.
Me too, I laugh. There is such comfort in these odd inheritances. The pleasure of continuity, maybe, or a connection to an era it’s easy to think was much cooler than this one.
Now it is 2013, a number that sounds both futuristic and deeply uncool, and, running from gnawing confusion about whether to stay with K, I have come to visit and to continue the project of recording my grandmother’s life. I set my iPhone on the kitchen table, from which she’s cleared our breakfast bowls—hot oat bran cereal with salt—and tell her I’m beginning the recording. She knows that one motivation for this trip is that I want to capture her story in her own words, her own voice. I don’t know if it’s so interesting, she says, but once we start going, it’s hard to stop her. This is for posterity, yes, for record-keeping, guarding the family narrative after she’s gone. But she also rightfully intuits that a great deal of what I seek to understand is love.
One of the first questions I ask is how she kept her love, her marriage to my grandfather, intact. It’s not complicated, she says. I was crazy about him. Crazy! Of course, we fought, I used to threaten to move to California about once a week. Oh, how we used to fight. But he was the man for me.
When they met, he was a bassist playing live on the radio nightly for WNEW in New York City. He lived with his brothers and one young cousin in an apartment on Brighton Fifth Street in Brooklyn. He was thirty-five and she was twenty-two, working with her sisters in a paint factory in Linden, New Jersey. She was ravishing. The family beauty.
The night they met, he told her she was going to be his wife. She thought he was nuts. They were married after just two weeks, by which point he’d already brought her six pairs of black-market silk stockings (their second date) and put a down payment on a Flatbush row house with new appliances (their third). They call that stalking now, Nanny, I say to her. But back then, it was romance. They had four children and were married for twenty-nine years, until he died.
Nanny’s New York sounded impossibly grand. Was it really all brassy big band music, I wondered, giant pots of hot food cooked by blocky, bawdy, ugly women who didn’t even care they were ugly? Boisterous parties and hushed street-corner gossip among glamorous young mothers zipping up fur coats against the chill, saying things like Well, Henny, you know what I heard…
Do you think he was faithful? I asked, taking a risk.
Oh, I don’t know, she said. He used to speak Yiddish with Tante Lottie and I could understand everything they said. She asked him once if he was fooling around—he came home at four and five o’clock every morning from playing music—and he said to her, “Are you kidding me? After Sylvia, I don’t have the strength.” That’s a good thing, Ninaleh, if you’re crazy like that. If you make them a little crazy, they don’t have the strength. We laughed and sipped our tea.
Nanny talked about her life a bit like it was a fairy tale, which in a sense, it was. Her own mother’s life had been short and brutal. My great-
grandmother came from Russia through Ellis Island to New York City as a teenager with her sister and young husband, but they both died shortly after in the flu pandemic of 1918, leaving my great-grandmother with a six-month-old baby boy. Alone with the baby, she went north to Canada, where she knew some family friends had settled, and there she met her next husband, my great-grandfather, a stern Orthodox Jew. They returned to New York. He raised the baby boy like his own, and they had three girls together and lived austerely in a cramped apartment in a tenement on the Lower East Side. While raising her son, my grandmother, and her two sisters, she worked in a sweatshop. On Sundays, she cooked and did the family washing by hand. By contrast, my grandmother’s life, which came to include a car, a television, and a move out of the city to the suburbs of New Jersey, was charmed. And it wasn’t only creature comforts, it also contained the sparkle of romance.
I grew up with the legacy of this love—loud, long holiday dinners, uncles barking jokes at one another, children being snatched as they ran howling past the table and smothered with kisses. Get over here with that punim! my grandmother would say from her seat as I bolted through the room, if she’d even managed to sit down for five minutes. That’s a variant of the crazylove, too: get over here. It’s like the words K so often texted in the early, urgent days of our affair, at the mere suggestion that I might be available for a few hours: Get. Here.
In other families, the answer to the question of how an elder kept a three-decades-long love alive might be “he was a good man” or “he always provided for us,” maybe “he made me laugh.” In my family, the answer is a sort of insanity. A man holds your interest because he’s completely nuts: capricious, unpredictable, unsparing with affection and with everything else. Love is a party that lasts into the small hours of the night, a party you should probably leave but it’s so fun you can’t. Love is navigating together various forms of precariousness and prevailing not by establishing stability, but by evading debt and death, surviving to eat and drink and fuck at the end of it all.
Not all of the relationships in my family were like this. But these were the stories that stuck. The ones, I suppose, that I wanted. Safe love may be enough for some, but it seemed lesser in both quantity and quality. Obsessive, unhinged love was simply more love. A thrilling, if inconvenient, excess. Like a leak you try to contain by catching the water in a tin, but soon the tin overflows, soon the whole room is filled with tins, and still more pours down from the ceiling.
* * *
• • •
Anya liked to collect my grandmother’s stories, too. On another visit a few years later, we meet there and stay two nights in the complex of apartments where my grandmother enjoys a form of dignified semi-independence. After the loud greeting, the frantic hugging and the kissing that leaves her lipstick traces on our hands and cheeks, we tell her we’re going food shopping and walk from the complex through a massive parking lot to the supermarket in the strip mall next door, for something to cook for dinner so we don’t have to eat in the common dining room on the ground floor, and for provisions for ourselves. Pretzels and flavored seltzers and the kosher chocolate bars filled with raspberry jelly that I love and Anya hates. Being around Nanny makes me want to eat very Jewishly.
Let’s cook her something good, Anya says as we walk through the automated sliding doors and into the plastic-y chill of the massive supermarket. Every time I talk to her, she’s eating oat bran or, like, one fried egg, and the food downstairs in that place is awful.
Let’s make something easy but that she can’t make anymore, like a roast chicken.
Yes, perfect! says Anya, clapping her hands together. A big salad, too. Oh, I just want to feed her, you know what I mean? Let’s watch her pick the chicken off the bones. She raises her shoulders and eyebrows adorably in excitement and sets off into the islands of produce.
On the walk back to the apartment, I tell Anya that our grandmother seems to have let her guard down more in recent years.
Being on the other side of ninety has that effect on people, Anya says.
I’m still recording her stories, I say. They’re getting more real every time I visit. Anya starts to do Nanny’s voice, the thick Brooklyn accent, parroting her description of her wedding night. I was a virgin, we were all virgins back then, but your grandfather—she lowers her voice—he was very gentle, repeats Anya.
That’s the tip of the iceberg, I say. I think all the secrets are coming out.
When we get back to the apartment with the groceries, I prepare the chicken while Anya pours wine and begins to roughly chop tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and parsley for a salad. My grandmother sits in a chair at the kitchen table, facing us, enthralled by our energy. She says she wants to call her friend Arlene to stop by and say hello.
She should see this beautiful meal you girls are cooking! she says.
You were going to tell us about your wedding, I remind her. We’ve heard the story so many times, but we ask for it anyway. The older she gets, the more we want to hear the stories because each telling has its own small differences. It’s like tracing the same shape over and over, forcing here and there by repetition the slip of the pen, an errant line.
February fourteenth is Valentine’s Day, she begins. February fifteenth we were born.
What? I say.
What! she repeats.
You said you were born.
No, not born, married! We were married February fifteenth. It wasn’t very fancy, but it was full of love. Oh, I felt so sorry for the whole world, that’s how I loved him.
Nanny didn’t want a wedding—she had lost her mother recently and couldn’t imagine having a party. And anyway, her Orthodox father did not approve. When she returned to his apartment to gather a few things for a honeymoon night away—specifically to borrow a nice new outfit from her also-newly-married sister—her father told her to pack all of her things and not to come back.
He doesn’t understand what a nice Jewish man you married! said her mother-in-law, who hand-delivered an invitation to a meal at her place in Brighton Beach to celebrate the newlyweds. Her mother-in-law’s apartment was full of music and booming voices and laughter that day, and the spread she’d prepared, well, you couldn’t see an inch of the tablecloth underneath all those platters. Nanny’s father reluctantly joined and took in the spectacle somberly, but because he kept kosher, he didn’t eat a single bite.
Maybe because I had said out loud that all the secrets are coming out, or maybe because we are energized—by the smell of roasting chicken, the red wine Anya’s opened that even Nanny is nursing out of a cheap-looking frosted wineglass (I hate these glasses, she says, after every other sip), Tony Bennett’s smooth crooning coasting into the kitchen from the portable CD player—Nanny begins to talk in long uninterrupted memories, a monologue. This time, it isn’t the well-worn tale of the nice serviceman she jilted when she met the bassist from Brighton Beach who swept her off her feet. Instead, she begins talking about the end of their marriage, the day, decades in, when my grandfather died.
You know, after the kids had grown up, you know how things slow down, it’s not the same passion as in the beginning. But that day, I took a shower and was about to get dressed to go to the neighbor’s house for a dinner party. Your grandfather was lying down to rest before getting dressed for the dinner. I sat down on the bed in my bathrobe and my hair was up in a towel. He was looking very tired, but handsome, he was going to get up and get dressed. Anyway, we made love that evening before going to the party, unexpectedly.
Anya is looking at me, her eyes wide. At that party, my grandfather felt a tightness in his chest and a wave of nausea. He collapsed there, on the neighbor’s kitchen floor, and they called an ambulance. He died in the hospital later that night. My grandmother called my mother, who came from the city and tried to blow through the nurse’s stand but was stopped because her father’s body had already been t
aken to the morgue.
We never met our grandfather, but we grew up with the legendary tales about him. He was the son of symphony musicians and came from Alexandria, Egypt, to America when he was thirteen with his brothers and his mother, the one who always laid such a nice table. They lived together in Brighton Beach. All three of the boys were musicians, boisterous and funny. He’d led a lively life, an unusual life. (He wasn’t like other dads, my mom once told me. When other dads were getting home from the office, he was putting on a tuxedo to play a debutante ball in Larchmont.)
I feel a serene awe, the feeling that comes over me when I hear a good love story, and I rest my hand on Nanny’s and say, After all those years, you had sex—made love, sorry—the day he died?
That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, Anya says, her eyes filling with tears.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 11