The Alcoholic's Daughter

by David Sherman

  “It is hard for her to give up the control that love entails,” she said. “Her childhood made it difficult. When you never know what is going to happen the next minute when you’re growing up, then you try to control whatever you can whenever you can. It’s a coping mechanism.”

  “Then how the hell can I trust her?”

  “Do you?”

  Evan took a second to think about it.

  “Yes … sometimes … no. Not really.”

  Evan couldn’t find his squash racket. He was about to leave and it wasn’t hanging on the front closet handle as it usually was. He was running late for his court time.

  “Annie, where’s my squash racket?” he yelled upstairs where she was ensconced in front of her screen. They began the hunt, and if she joined in it meant she had disappeared it in a tidying frenzy but couldn’t remember where. Every closet opened, every corner, every shelf, under every bed, searched.

  The real complaint, voiced often, was that he existed. “You take up a lot of room,” she said repeatedly, usually if he was reading or working on the new sofa by the living room window. Not being upright, at a desk, when the sun was shining, was one of the deadly sins — sloth — the only prohibition she abided.

  Evan knew she resented the spores he left throughout her showcase of a house. Books, magazines, shoes, mail, gloves, everything had to be put in a place, even if that place was immediately forgotten. Only newspapers, her morning pablum, were abided. The idea was for beauty to reign, reality to be hidden.

  Annie, embarrassed at having disappeared his racket, became frantic. As she was peeking under beds, looking in drawers — why the hell would she put a racket in a drawer? — he found it stashed in the one inch slot between a piece of furniture and the wall. She had dropped it there during a manic cleanup, so it wouldn’t sully the closet or the entrance and promptly forgot where she had put it. After all, it wasn’t hers and therefore immaterial. Each morning he found her jogging bra and shorts soaking in the downstairs sink until he rinsed them out so he could use the sink. That was permissible. Hanging his racket on a hook was not. Like the toothbrush wire. The tools of life had to be out of sight. If they were his.

  “Not her fault,” he said, as he got into the car, late for his court time. “Just another one of her idiosyncrasies. She doesn’t do it on purpose.”

  A few weeks before it had been: “Where are all my birthday cards?” They had been displayed on the side table in the kitchen.

  “I threw them out,” she said, emptying the dishwasher.

  “Why?”

  “You had them long enough,” she said. “You want to keep them till you die?”

  “It’s not for you to decide,” he said.

  “Sorry, they were just cluttering up the table and … you’ll get more next year.”

  She would sometimes apologize, but the frequent apologies weren’t soothing or a harbinger of change or realization. On a whim, shoes went from downstairs to upstairs, clothes moved from one closet to another. Evan was always looking for things. Then he stopped looking and found it easier to just ask her where she had put them, save him the trouble of tearing the house apart.

  “I don’t want you to say you’re sorry,” he said. “It’s not about apologies. It’s about stopping the weirdness.”

  But there were also times where no apologies were forthcoming. Instead there would be more abuse.

  “You can’t stand listening to a woman,” she railed. “Your precious male ego won’t stand for it. You’re so used to women who blindly adore you.” Or there was also: “You’re too sensitive. You can’t stand criticism.”

  After dinner and her habitual dose of wine, she said: “I think you should pay me extra for the antiques I have in the house.”

  “What?”

  “Most of the furniture is mine, why shouldn’t you pay extra?” she said. “All the linen are mine. You didn’t bring any sheets.”

  “I gave Danny whatever she wanted when I left her,” Evan said.

  Her eyes were glowing and rage was bubbling up. The volcano would soon erupt.

  “You need to get another job. You’re not making enough money.”

  He went upstairs to the spare room and closed the door. When he heard her come up and go into the washroom, he went downstairs. He opened the freezer and found a bottle of vodka that someone had given him for a birthday present. He opened it and drank it icy and straight. He was off to the races, joining that ancient fraternity that embraced alcohol as the panacea for all of life’s wounds, real or perceived. Alcohol became Evan’s mother’s breast.

  A few months later, as autumn moved in, he discovered scotch and the pleasures of drinking alone. It reassured him, told him he was a good person with good skills, good friends and good life. No, he wasn’t rich, but he had money in the bank, a new car, unlimited credit.

  There was nothing wrong with him, Evan told the cat. It was Annie. Yes, the booze did what Annie couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Make him feel good about himself. Fuck her.

  “I have a recording contract,” he told himself. “I’m performing. My plays have been produced. I’m writing newspaper stories on anything I want. I’m working on a big travel book, though it sometimes feels I’m in Dante’s Inferno. I’m always working on a new play or two. I have friends I love. They love me. Exactly what is wrong? What the fuck is wrong? And why am I sitting alone at 3 a.m. justifying my life to the cat?”

  A comic mused in the Times why would-be funny men were willing to stand behind a microphone and try to make people laugh. Comedians, the writer said, are “all messed up people. You have to have something missing to want to go up and be judged in front of people, seek their approval. We are all wounded losers.”

  “Are all of us with guitars and songs to sing and stories to write just another version of the comic?” Evan wondered.

  Was that what the writing, the singing, the plays, the teaching were about? A wounded loser seeking approval? Is that what he sought from Annie? Approval? The way he had sought it from his mother, who was a little too much like Annie — distant, hysterical, judgmental, prone to violent mood swings and abuse.

  Maybe he was spending too much time in therapy, he mused. Maybe he was thinking too damn much. If it was about being a wounded loser, then it was another defect they shared, Annie and he, though they seemed to forage for the applause with markedly different levels of ferocity.

  “I’m a loser, I’m taking the abuse because I deserve it, is that it? Is this where my parents’ and brother’s abuse has left me? Drinking scotch by myself in the middle of the night with a cat while a chronic abuser and control freak is snoring in my bed upstairs, a chronic abuser and control freak that I still love. Love maybe because she is, in fact, not well, and therefore needy like the women that came before her. And I need to be needed, be indispensable, need to know I’m of use. Maybe I’ve not had enough therapy.”

  The conversation annoyed Fritz. He jumped off his belly and skulked up the stairs to sleep in peace.

  “I want to be needed and to assuage my own needs I put up with being kicked around. Maybe I need more therapy. Or maybe I need another finger or two to take the edge off.”

  When the bottle’s full

  You’ve always been so kind

  Leave the lights on when you leave

  Puts steel in my spine

  When the bottle’s full

  With a glass in my hand

  I’m a happy single man

  So long, so long,

  I don’t love you anymore

  One half nourished him, one half slowly eviscerated him. One half he loved, one he hated. Was this what Mao meant when he wrote On Contradiction?

  She came into the bathroom without knocking, came into his office when he was working, ranted at him when he was on the phone. He was working, in his office, trying to book an interview for a story and there she was, standing next to him, lecturing him.

  “Mais est ce que tu est disponible mardi, M. Lemieux?”


  “You have to say vous, you can’t call him tu, he’s an older man, too.” She was speaking in a loud whisper into his other ear.

  “I’m on the phone.” Evan tried covering the receiver but it was a cell phone, there was nothing to cover. “Go away.”

  “You can’t tu him, it’s an insult.”

  “Annie, go away. Qu’est ce que tu as dit, M. Lemieux? Excuse moi, ma femme parle.” Evan wrapped the phone in his hand … “Annie get the hell out of here.”

  “You need to take French lessons, you can’t talk that way to him.”

  “Get out of here,” Evan said, pushing her out of the office. “Excuse moi, M. Lemieux. “Mardi à dix heures?”

  “You’re insulting him,” she kept on as he tried to understand the guy and push her out the door. It would’ve been funny had he not had to call the guy back and find out what he said while Annie was railing at him. The literature said children of alcoholics had difficulties with boundaries. Did that mean walking into the washroom when he was in it storming his office when he was working? It would seem.

  On the sofa, an hour before summer dawn, was the only place to escape one obsession or another. It was that or the motel room. Or the country. But under their roof, there was no place to go, no place to hide, except when she slept. When he tried to sleep without benefit of alcohol or pills, the darkness intruded. Was it reality or just his distorted view of it? Everyone else seemed to love her. She loved him. Maybe it was his fault.

  She turned to him and, as he tried to sleep on his side, imagining driving through the Keys to play at some clam shack, pressed her body against his, wrapped her arms around him, whispered in his ear.

  “You feel like you’re drifting away,” she said. “You’re distant.”

  “Just preoccupied,” he said, lying.

  “Promise you’ll never let me go.”

  “I’ll never let you go.” He was holding on for dear life.

  It was all about work, day and night, in and out of bed, at the dinner table, in the car. Work, seven days a week. And Evan became swallowed by it, too. It was a new strategy. He talked of the songs, the shows, the plays, the stories, the book proposals, trying to mollify her. Yes, yes, I’m working too, all the time. We will be free. Work will make us happy and drive your anxiety away, like the hum of the fan in the bedroom that keeps your mind from going places you don’t want it to. The fan at night; the radio during the day; the TV in between. Silence was not only golden but irretrievable.

  He didn’t want to accept it but the woman he fell in love with was not there anymore. Maybe she never was. She had been a carefully constructed illusion. And there was nothing he could do about it.

  When he met her he had been working the late night news desk and was on a leave of absence to teach the workshop and do a play and they had decided he shouldn’t go back to the newspaper. He’d have his nights again — movies, theatre, restaurants, friends, life — but he hadn’t yet learned to sleep again. He had got into the habit of coming home from the paper at midnight or 1 a.m. and popping a pill to sleep so he could get up early, down an espresso, hit the computer, edit a film magazine and work on whatever play or film he was writing. He worked 18 hours a day, it seemed, broken up with some guitar playing and an afternoon nap.

  The newspaper job had been killing him. The cutbacks had laid waste to the desk and the job of editing a newspaper had become assembly-line labour. When the staff was trimmed, so was the pleasure. Newspapers had been his first love. His earliest childhood memories included anticipating the arrival of the afternoon paper, The Star, thick and scented of fresh ink and a marvel of words and pictures, every day but Sunday, without fail. Every morning the first thing he did was go to the front door and grab the Gazette. How could they produce this thicket of words every day? It was extraordinary. For five cents or ten cents and then 25 cents and later a whole half a buck. What better way to spend your life could there be than to be part of the great bustling machine that was a daily newspaper? But once the corporations took over, salivating at the endless profits these once family-owned broadsheets churned out year after year, they were done. It was no longer about news, it was about profits. No matter how much they made it was never enough and slowly but surely, the product was sacrificed to the god of return on investment, profits skimmed off to pay for ill timed, ill thought out corporate ventures. The cuts kept coming until the job lost all its allure. He was happy to be rid of the place, though the loss of the additional paycheque stung. And now Evan battled insomnia, trying to get off the sleep aids.

  Annie was all for him quitting, he was in the theatre, after all, and he had the magazine. On good days he was an artist: “You’re not supposed to make money.” Other days she was demanding he needed another job.

  “You’re not making enough money,” she said. “You have to make more money.” The problem was, he knew, she wasn’t making much herself. Her income kept slipping year by year.

  But things were changing. Evan stopped listening to her. Even on the radio. She no longer entertained him. He had seen too much darkness, too much craziness. He had been punched and kicked too often, literally and figuratively. He stopped spending slices of each evening with her. He made dinner and left her to sandblast the kitchen while he repaired to his office to play guitar, write a song or work. Sometimes he slipped upstairs to read. It was cordial. But he found himself avoiding her. As often as he could he borrowed country houses and hid there. Cocaine interfered with the music and he stopped using it and stopped running to ugly motel rooms. Instead he ran to the Laurentians.

  The mountains, the music and the performances became his escape, except Annie never missed a show. He would sometimes watch her from the stage. Mostly she would be looking back but at times when the songs may have cut close to her slim bones, he could see her stare out the window. Evan was happy she came but she needed to go home as soon as possible. He couldn’t eat before a show and liked prolonging the night by grabbing a bite after, let his nerves hum for a bit. She’d grudgingly accompany him and often pick up the cheque but would rarely eat and always seemed anxious to get home.

  And so soon Evan would find himself still buzzing from the applause and the people and the mystery of it all, alone again on the sofa while Annie went to sleep for the next morning’s run, the next day’s work. Evan had to figure out what to do with the new direction his life was taking. Playing and singing in front of people who paid to listen to him. How the hell did that happen? He needed to talk about it, to explore it, but the only person he thought he could talk to about it was asleep. Instead he had the cat and the scotch.

  The music was making him a hundred or two a night, grocery money, but not anything that would assuage her fears. She wasn’t making a lot of money anymore. But she wanted him to. And had no patience to hear making money had never been his ambition.

  “We have a house worth a fortune, we have RRSPs, we have jobs, we run a car, why do we need to make more money?” he said. “We live better than 95 per cent of the world.”

  “We have to stop going to restaurants,” she said.

  “Maybe if you didn’t have to have two or three $11 glasses of wine with the meal, we could afford to go to a restaurant.”

  “I can’t eat without a couple of glasses of wine,” she’d say. “It’s my reward at the end of the day. Besides I’m an alcoholic and it keeps me from going totally insane.”

  “You’re not an alcoholic, you’re not a problem drinker.”

  “It’s a problem when you really need a glass of wine and don’t want to pay restaurant prices for it,” she said.

  “I sleep here, I work here, I eat most of my meals here, and I cook most of the meals and I need to get out sometime and get away, people watch.” he said. “I’m used to working in an office with people around.”

  “Before I met you I stayed home for three or four days at a time and didn’t see anyone. I’m used to it.”

  “Before you met me you lived on pasta and
salad every day.”

  “That’s true. You’ve widened my dinner horizons and increased the messes I clean up, too.”

  He nodded. Food for her was neither adventure or pleasure and certainly not worth the bother of cleaning away the detritus of its preparation. She’d rather eat pasta and salad than deal with pots and sauce pans and cutting boards. So he began washing the pots and pans from dinner rather than listen to her bitch.

  “Well, I can’t stay home every night,” he said. “I need a life outside the house, too.”

  “Why can’t you just do it without me?”

  “I guess that’s what I’ll do,” Evan said, a little something dying inside. “I’ll make a life without you.”

  He saw the hurt in her face. Another self-inflicted wound. She would do and say things that later she couldn’t account for or reconcile and then get that far away look in her eyes, seeing something he could not imagine but knew was far from heaven. Maybe her parents, the fuse to a long ago drunken quarrel lit with a few unkind or thoughtless words? Was she hearing the rage, the screams, the doors slamming, the dishes breaking? He never asked. He went into his office, slid the door closed and picked up his guitar. He could dream. He could put it in song. It was almost as good.

  Your heels come clicking down the hall

  You know you never need to call

  I open the door, caress your hip

  You gently touch my finger tips

  Let’s pop the cork and fill the glass

  You always add a touch of class

  Later, lying beside Annie, he developed a new tale to lull himself to sleep. In this fantasy, he hoarded a few thousand dollars, maxed out his credit cards with cash advances and stashed the money in the back of his sock drawer. “Do you have to have so many socks?” Then one night, after she fell asleep, he would take a pre-packed gym bag with jeans, t-shirts, sandals, a couple of fishing shirts, a handful of underwear and the roll of money and slip out of the house with his guitar.