The Alcoholic's Daughter

by David Sherman

  He squeezed her tighter.

  “I heard the door slam and the car screech away and I tried to get into their room but they had locked the connecting door. So I ran outside and it was raining and their door was locked and I pounded on it but my mother didn’t answer. So I ran through the rain to the front desk and I told the guy I had lost my key and he gave me another and I went into their room and my mother was nowhere. I called her but she wasn’t there. Their room was empty. But I heard water running and I knocked on the bathroom door but she didn’t answer. I kept calling her. Finally I just opened the door, it was all steamy inside, the shower was running and she was just standing naked in front of the mirror, sobbing. I was all wet and shaking and angry and scared. I remember I was really, really scared. I said: ‘Why do you let him do that to you? Why do you stay? He’ll never stay sober. He’s a drunk. He’ll always be a drunk.’ I was screaming at her and crying. But she wasn’t listening. Her face was bruised and she was writing in the condensation on the mirror with her finger.”

  Annie was crying softly now; he could feel the tears dampen his shirt and neck.

  “What did she write?”

  “Just one word. ‘Help.’ With an exclamation point. But I couldn’t. Couldn’t help her, couldn’t help him, couldn’t help my sister or my brothers. Couldn’t help anyone.”

  She went to take a bath, kissing him hard and he promised he’d be up soon. He sighed and went to pour a scotch to take up to bed. He had heard the story before, and it had brought tears to his eyes. Her childhood had been out of control. Now she exacted control over every variable. It was her father’s legacy.

  “I love you,” she said. “I trust you so I can let you see the craziness.” The therapist he had started seeing a few years in told him the same thing. “She trusts you enough to let you in and see her.” He was honoured. If that’s the price of love, he was willing to pay, he thought. He was going to try and figure this out.

  She was so good at hiding who she was. The first symptom was his electric toothbrush, the Braun, sitting on the toilet tank, its wire snaking up to the wall socket, 10 inches away. He’d plug it in each morning and each night he’d find it unplugged. She was going into the bathroom after him and dispatching the plug. The damn thing was never charged.

  “It’s not beautiful,” she said.

  “But it needs to charge.”

  “The wire’s ugly.” He moved the toothbrush to the dressing room — there was no closet in the bedroom, barely room enough for the bed — plugged it in behind the TV they didn’t use anymore and took it from there and returned it each time he brushed his teeth. Curiously her toothbrush was always plugged in the downstairs washroom. And the TV, well, they couldn’t really use it because it had rebelled. She had hung a plant over it and watered it excessively, the overflow dripping down into the back of the TV. Solid state circuitry didn’t do well drowned regularly. But, he realized, neither the toothbrush or the TV was hers. Therefore fair game.

  Do you leave someone because they unplug your toothbrush? he wondered one night, on the sofa in his beloved night-time reverie. Or because they have this weird habit of making the bed with you still in it? She didn’t like disarray and when she went for her run at 6 a.m. she would start straightening the bed as he slept, tucking and tightening the sheets, turning the bed into a straitjacket. Or because even the smallest thing can’t be done your way? Nah. True love meant learning to live with the eccentricities. “I mean,” Evan told the cat, “we’re all a little crazy, right?” Fritz closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  “Everything in the house you decide,” he griped one day. “Furniture, artwork, colours, curtains, blinds, what goes where. I don’t have a say in anything. You even decide where I can put my razor, which I usually find buried behind a bunch of stuff in my medicine chest while the sink and the shelves are full of your makeup and lotions and other shit.”

  He lit her fuse.

  “I opened my house to you,” she yelled. “I gave you everything. A beautiful house. I gave you drawers for your clothes and cleaned out half a closet. See what I’ve done for you. I’ve made room for your clothes. Do you have to have so many clothes? And shoes? And sweaters? You have a million sweaters, and a dozen pairs of jeans. Can’t we give some away?”

  Wasn’t that curious? he thought. She had turned his complaint around and made it a problem with him. He had too many clothes. That was the real problem.

  After the house had been renovated and a real kitchen installed instead of the kitchenette she had been using, along with a beautiful office for her that looked out over the garden, he came downstairs at 4 o’clock and began cooking dinner. He was stirring tomato sauce when she came running into the kitchen and started slamming cupboard doors and screaming.

  “This is an office! I can’t work smelling tomato sauce!” she yelled, her hysteria full blown. “I have a lot of work to do. I can’t work with the place stinking like a kitchen!”

  He stared at her open mouthed, stunned into silence. He wasn’t sure where Annie was but it couldn’t be the woman that was standing there screaming about tomato sauce. Could it?

  The disorders exposed themselves like a seductive stripper peeling, slowly, delicately, uncovering an inch of sacred flesh at a time, only the revelations here were neither sacred nor desirable.

  “I have anger issues,” she admitted a couple of years in. Really? But that was not the only issue, he figured one night, taking an inventory. She needed control, control over everything. The colour of the walls, the colour of the sheets, destinations, hour of departure, the plants in his office, the positioning of the artwork on the walls, the characters in his plays, the amount of food in the fridge and on the plates, the colour of the car, the films they would see and when they would see them and where they would sit. But love would conquer all. It had to. Here he was, getting older by the second. Tick, tick, tick. He had sold his home, ditched a woman he had once loved, to share a life with this celebrated intellect. Everyone seemed to love her. She just had bad days, like everyone else. Just bad days like everyone else.

  The therapist liked to wrap herself in large sweaters, conceal her figure. She sat in her armchair, propped up by a pillow. He sat on a little sofa, back to the windows, box of tissue at the ready, a large green plant to stoke with the cosy, talk-to-me feeling. He’d known her a while. Sometimes she said she was like the mother he never had, giving him some tough love, urging him to get his shit together and stop taking sleep aids or minor tranks.

  Seems since living with Annie he had developed quite the appetite for Ativan or Rivotril or Xanax or whatever he could get his hands on, smooth out the sharp edges of his domestic bliss. The therapist liked to lecture him on the hazards. Rebound anxiety. Check. Insomnia. Check. Limp dick. Not yet. Memory loss. Not sure. Addiction. Probably but it was like methadone for heroin addiction, tranks for dealing with Annie, the lesser of two evils.

  “She’s making room for you,” the therapist told him, “but she’s deciding how much and where. I’m worried, Evan, that you’re not you anymore. Your personality’s dissolving. You have to stop accommodating her.”

  “Not accommodating her means hysteria, abuse,” he said. “I can’t handle the constant fighting. It’s easier to let her do what she wants.”

  “You’ve done that your whole life, avoid confrontation, avoid conflict. Your childhood made you adverse to it. But it ends up festering. You’ll get angry; you’ll get depressed. You have to say no. She’ll have a bird but she’ll get over it.”

  He sat pondering that equation on his own green sofa, the sleeping cats his companions, the scotch his pacifier, the shroud of early morning peace, silence and solitude wrapped around the house.

  “That’s what they make Ativan and whiskey for,” he said to Fritz, whose tail twitched. “Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women, they’ll drive you crazy, they’ll drive you insane,” he sang softly. Fritz opened one eye. “Thing is Fritz, my friend, they don’t have to be
wild to drive you crazy.”

  Their wagons were welded together. Why? Mutual need, co-dependence, finances, fear, and of course, the worst one, love. He loved her. He couldn’t speak for her. She certainly told him she loved him, over and over and over again. She told him she would die without him. She told him if this didn’t work out there would never be another man. But who knows? One person’s love is another person’s obsessive compulsive disorder.

  His blood pressure was up almost 20 points. Just from living in her home, her home, her home, like a mantra. He lived there by royal assent. It began to gnaw at him. It was his home, but was it?

  He had brought women into his homes to live with him and felt honoured. Make yourself at home, was his credo. What would you like to do to be comfortable? The woman that became his second wife and life-long friend took a sledgehammer to one wall, open the living room up a bit, she said. Sure, he said, smiling at the sight of this slight beauty taking his wall apart. “If that’s what you want.” The plaster dust was a bitch but it made her happy and at home. A small price to pay.

  But here, he paid half the bills, half the mortgage, paid for the car, bought the groceries, did the cooking, but it was always her house, her house, her house. Later, she sometimes said “our house.” And sometimes he believed it.

  The few friends he confided in wondered what the hell was wrong with him. “I wouldn’t take the shit,” a single woman he knew said. “I’d be so gone.” Of course, she was single and had been “so gone” many times for one reason or another. Maybe not an oracle to bet a life on.

  “I love her,” he’d say. “She’s not so bad.”

  Not that bad. There were nights they would play like children, cuddle like teenagers, laugh at each other’s silliness, even made love on the sofa a couple of times. Exactly twice. There had been nothing better. They were kind of nuts for politics, Quebec, Canada and U.S. For him it was a hobby, a carryover from his days newspapering, for her it was an obsession.

  She read the papers as if they were the tablets from Moses, ear attached to the morning radio talk shows, the chattering class chattering at each other, jostling over the latest events in the capitals, jockeying for jobs as hosts or voices at Radio Canada. Evan found it curious that she could take all the jabberwocky so seriously. He had worked papers and radio for years, seen the news holes slashed, staff slashed, budgets crunched, ad ratios pumped up, good brains abandon ship.

  To him it read and sounded like babble, never-ending babble, radio talk, cable TV talk, newspaper columnists, everyone with an opinion trying to out-opinion everyone else. There was air time and news holes to fill and there was no end to the cheap-labour voices lining up to fill it.

  But to her it was a religion. Or was it a hideaway?

  Make Ottawa and Quebec and Washington and the attendant polls and never-ending issues the centre of your universe, you can ignore the ghosts sitting on your shoulder, the sinister voices screaming in your ear, the dark memories dancing in front of your eyes.

  But they could share their abomination over the rise of the Tories, the Republicans; they could discuss over dinner whose business was it if someone wanted to wear a hijab or a veil while the city still lit up a cross on top of the mountain, spar over whether western feminists had the right to decide what was right for every woman in the world. As far as Annie was concerned, of course they did.

  Annie saw an affront to women in just about everything. Sex workers were all exploited, Moslem women were all exploited, Hassidim women were all exploited, married women were all exploited — they just weren’t smart enough to realize it. Testimonials from sex workers and Moslem or Hassidim women who weren’t buying the western feminist rap were rejected. They were too ignorant to know better.

  Well, he learned, little would change her mind on anything. As the pages of the calendar flipped, her tolerance of opinions not her own disappeared. He told himself she was strong-willed, adamant. And the apple cart of their love rattled on. Sometimes after dinner, as she was polishing and scraping and scouring, he learned quickly that whatever he wiped, she would wipe again. Dishes he placed in the dishwasher she reflexively rearranged. He stopped bothering. Instead, he would sing a song or two. And if he sang Forever, she would come out of the kitchen, wet J-Cloth crushed in her hand, a cloud of Windex trailing, and sit down and look at him. Sometimes her eyes were wet. His music, rudimentary as it was, was the one place she didn’t intrude. She was capable of sitting and listening for several songs at a time, over and over. And not tell him what was wrong with every song. His music was safe ground and he sought refuge there with increasing frequency and necessity.

  Many times when the dinner table was quiet she’d say: “Talk to me.” She loved to listen to angst, characters who weren’t behaving on the page, or his fretting over rehearsals of a play or an upcoming show. If it was a story or a character problem, she always had an answer. If he didn’t agree, he was handed a dessert of scorn. He too was too ignorant to know better.

  How long did it take for the novelty of living with a man to wear off? A year? Two years? Somewhere in there, he realized one early morning when he had snuck downstairs to take a break from tossing and turning. It had been nearly 40 years since the last one and now there was a guy actually taking up space in her home. Eating, breathing, talking, farting, cooking, defecating, taking up closet space, having friends over. Sometimes Evan felt she wanted to fold him up and put him in a closet with the skirts and the shoes until she needed him to cook a meal or help give her an orgasm or escort her to a friend’s to prove, “See, I can keep a man. I’m normal.”

  Evenings or weekends when she worked — “I have a lot of work to do,” life had to stop. And she didn’t like that Evan was not working 24/7 along with her.

  “You take up a lot of space, you know,” she said climbing the stairs to her office as he tapped on the computer on the sofa by the living-room window. “Do you have to take up so much space? Couldn’t you stay in your office? Maybe put a TV in there too, you want to watch a game?”

  “You have broken veins in your nose, it’s not very attractive, you know,” she said after her second glass of wine during what had been a pleasant dinner. “You really should get laser surgery.”

  There was an old lumpy futon in the living room she had been using as a sofa and it hurt Evan’s back.

  “I’d really like to get a new sofa,” he said, as they sat watching a movie. The futon was so low, his knees were almost in front of his face.

  “I don’t want a new sofa.”

  “Why? This is an ugly, uncomfortable piece of shit.”

  “‘Cause you’ll be on it.”

  “You mean we should have a sofa but not use it. I thought that’s what they were designed for. Where’s the switch?”

  “What switch?”

  “The secret switch that turns you from a loving, compassionate, curious woman into a scornful, insulting, abusive one?”

  “I am not abusive,” she said, indignant.

  “Maybe you need to check the dictionary, see the definition.”

  “I know what abusive means.”

  “Of course, you do,” he said. “You know everything.” Evan left her in front of the TV and climbed up to the spare room and closed the door. He stood in the sparse room. Bed made, closets tidy, bureau top spotless, TV top spotless, his electric toothbrush hiding behind it. Everything ship shape. Without character. Her idea of beauty. He sat on the edge of the bed. Put his head in his hands. His mind flipped through the names of people whom he could visit in the country, get away for a bit. It came to him. He was living with two people. One he loved. One he could barely stand. Forever was going to be a hell of a long haul.

  She could sometimes joke about it. “I know I’m a control freak.” “I know I’m being obsessive.” “I know I panicked, I’m sorry.” Their little secret. There was a list of phobias, obsessions, compulsions, fears, that her readers, her viewers, her listeners, her friends, knew nothing about.

>   And one lonely night, the house to himself, Annie safely tucked away and snoring, Fritz purring by his side, he punched into Google “child of alcoholic.” And there it was, in a millisecond. It was a subgroup of society, he discovered. Adult Children of Alcoholics. There was even an organization or two. It was a damn cause, a collection of partially fermented psyches.

  Man, there were millions of them out there, millions of tortured Annies, dealing with their parents’ legacy. The president of a COA organization wrote a blog, describing their characteristics — alcoholic, workaholic, anxiety ridden, control freaks, obsessive, compulsive, abusive. And they lied. Frequently and with ease. They learned early to mask the truth about their life at home. Of the various characteristics, he wrote: “Some have all, all have some.”

  Evan bookmarked it.

  She has not been alone so long by choice. She had been dumped by the few men she had been serious about. In public she was charming and warm, witty and generous, practiced at hiding the snakes that coiled and snapped in her brain. Meeting new people, going out in public, exhausted her, she admitted. She had to don a mask, play a role and she did it well. At home the mask came off. She was at her most comfortable staring at the computer, hiding behind a newspaper, sitting in a dark theatre, transfixed ideally by some tragedy greater than what she had lived as a child. Sometimes, she said, before she met him she could stay home for days at a time and speak to no one. Live on pasta and salad and cheese and work, and every week or so, a laxative.

  She was constipated. Literally. It was one of her eccentricities that amused him. Her life could not begin until The Bowel Movement. And that could not happen until her coffee and a period of time in front of her computer. Hence, early morning dashes to the Jean Talon market, before the hordes descended, were off. Getting an early start on a road trip to beat the lineups at the border, or just to make the most of the day, were out of the question. The bags were packed but he would sit downstairs, picking at his guitar, waiting for the sound of the toilet flushing.