The Alcoholic's Daughter

by David Sherman

  “I never would’ve …” She was screaming but Evan left. There was no point. He knew that she was sealed away in the sanctuary of her delusions. The walls were up, her fists were cocked, there was no way for reality to invade.

  The escapes to the motels and the country homes were no longer enough. God, Evan wanted to love her, but the affection was as ephemeral as smoke. He began to dwell on how to get away, just for a while, maybe to heal, to get on his feet, to take a breath. Put some miles between them and then come back when the wounds had closed. He knew if he got away for a bit, she would soften. At least for a while.

  To sleep he conjured new fantasies. In the latest variation, he’d spend the summer driving between folk festivals, across the country in the little car, him, the guitar, his computer and cheap motels, play music, write songs, work on a play and breathe. Yes, and maybe meet a woman or two who liked him. He fell asleep to that one many nights.

  The best times were when her niece and nephew came over with the little ones and Annie got lost with the babies, playing with toys on the floor, being the grandmother she would never be with the grandchildren she would never have. He loved watching her at these times, the only moments she would gladly put work aside. He would shop and cook and serve so she could play. They loved Evan’s cooking. Annie was torn between her pleasure with the children and her jealousy of the affection they showed Evan and how much they liked his food.

  On a Sunday in autumn, the kids were her break from anxiety over work and money, and, well, life. But Annie seemed to need more control. So she busied herself between the kids spread out in the living room, her niece dozing on the sofa, her husband on the floor with his sons and keeping an eye on Evan lest he make too much food. He was standing at the counter slicing onions and peppers for the pasta sauce. Annie was stalking the kitchen, standing behind him.

  “Don’t make too much pasta,” she said.

  “I’ll count every strand,” he said, moving the box out of her reach. The last time he had cooked linguini she had removed what she thought was a sufficient portion and put the box back in the cupboard. After supper, he made himself a sandwich.

  “You always make too much,” she said. She pushed her hand across the counter and scooped up an onion peel and a rind of pepper.

  “I’ll clean up when I’m done,” he said. “Why don’t you go play with the kids?”

  “You never clean up, you never clean up, you always leave the counters full of peels and stuff.” She took a few garlic ends and then wiped the counter with a filthy cloth she dropped in the sludge fermenting at the bottom of the sink. She was speaking barely above a whisper, she didn’t want the kids to hear her. Evan took deep, long breaths. Annie knew what she was doing, Evan realized, and she could control it. She was afraid the kids would hear, afraid of what they would think. She had some control over the compulsions.

  She liked to wipe cutlery with the filthy rag stored at the bottom of the sink and then throw them in the drainboard and the cloth back in the sink. He had taken to rewashing everything that she touched with the toxic rag. Everything had to be clean except the utensils used to clean everything. The rag made him wretch.

  “Annie, go away.”

  “I’m just helping,” she said. “Are you finished with this? Finished with this?” She was dragging things off his workspace and dropping them into the dishwasher and the spice rack.

  “That’s the chopping knife. I’m not finished with that.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, retrieved it from the sink and wiped it with the fetid cloth. Evan washed it with hot water.

  “Go away, Annie.”

  She had become a dervish, manically bustling, her brain invaded by yet another uncontrollable compulsion. She adjusted the heat under the water — she didn’t like steam — so the water stopped boiling and she turned on the vent so it roared in Evan’s head and as he stepped back, she started scrubbing the counter where he had spilled tomato sauce. The kids weren’t giving her enough attention so she was in his face.

  He watched her, the large chopping knife in his hand. He saw Stan’s ex-wife and her hand flash down onto the cutting board, the big chopping knife almost taking off Stan’s hand. He watched Annie manically rubbing away at the counter. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t finished. It didn’t matter she was in his way. Evan tightened the grip on the knife.

  “It happened so fast, doctor, she always did that, reached in when I was cooking and I didn’t even see her hand, I was chopping up a chicken and I brought my hand down and … It was terrible. Can you sew the hand back on?”

  Did he even have a chicken to cut up?

  “Annie get the hell out of here and go play with the kids,” Evan said, whispering, gently placing the chopping knife on the counter. He turned off the fan, cranked up the heat under the water. “You can always work if the kids are resting. Don’t you have a lot of work to do?”

  “Okay, okay, I was just trying to help.” She grabbed the knife and put it in the sink, wiping it again with the filthy cloth and dropping it in the drainboard. “I’m just helping you.”

  Evan took the knife again and washed it again with soap and water and went back to the counter. He was tired. Do other people get this stressed cooking pasta?

  She had come down that morning, which is why he stopped work and started cooking. He had spread files on the dining room table, the desk he had inherited with the office from her was too small. But her work must’ve not be going well because she started frantically straightening his files.

  “Why can’t you work in your office? Why do these have to be there? The kids are coming.”

  She was grabbing files and stacking them.

  “You’re mixing them up, go away.”

  “You don’t need to work, here. The table’s all messy.”

  She was throwing his files together.

  Evan stared at the wall and said: “Don’t add accelerant.” If he lost his cool, she’d retaliate, and he could already hear the abuse.

  “You always lose papers, no wonder. You’re completely disorganized. These should all be filed away.” He took a breath, his voice light and cheery.

  “Go away now.”

  She didn’t.

  “Please go away now.” He was still singing it, keeping it light.

  “Okay, okay but you got to clean that all up before we eat,” she said. “I don’t want to eat with files on the table.”

  “You know if you didn’t go nuts every time I mentioned getting a desk large enough for me to …” But he stopped. There was no point.

  She opened the fridge and pushed all the jars and containers to the back so she wouldn’t have to see them.

  Okay, Evan got it. The kids were coming so she was into domestic propriety mode. The house had to look as if they didn’t live and work there. It had to look like a museum. It had pushed her into a manic phase.

  She liked the fridge best when it was empty, neat to the eye. But that meant he couldn’t see anything when he opened it, unless he bent down low enough, and then he might find, lined up against the back wall, forgotten jars and bottles of things long eaten by mould. Out of sight, out of mind and into the trash. It also meant when he went up to the country he’d return to find the fridge empty. Left alone, she didn’t buy food. Except cheese, wine and lettuce.

  Being avuncular host to her niece and partner was one of the few things he could offer to bring her pleasure, the other doors to happiness were closing one after another, with barely a click when they locked. The kids were primary in her life and, if he was working on a deadline, the deadline was sacrificed to assuage her need to be with the children. It was worth the rare sound of her laughter and the joy on her face. As soon as they left, she went about scouring the house again and then climbing up to her office.

  “It’s Sunday,” he’d say, until he gave up saying it.

  “I have a lot of work to do,” she’d say.

  As her anxiety climbed up the Richter scale and the kids
and his shows the only things that seemed to bring her happiness, she jacked up her working hours. She brought in no more money. She worked for the sake of work and when she did get a cheque it was one more reason to panic.

  “This has to last me until …” Life was to be a slog, joy dependent on the bank balance.

  “You really think you’re going to make money on your music?” she said one night over dinner. “That’s why you’re not looking harder for a job?”

  “No,” he said. Evan recalled a dinner party just a few months ago where a table full of media types had anguished over disappearing jobs. Radio, TV, newspapers were all cutting back. If you were over 50 and wanted a living wage, you could wipe down tables at Tim Horton’s from 8 to 4 and then do a shift at McDonald’s until midnight and maybe make $400. But Annie did not let reality intrude into her anxieties. It was Evan’s task to repair the vanishing media. Or she suggested, maybe he could become a speech writer for the Tories. They were advertising for a few to justify the country’s shift from peacekeepers to bomb droppers. Islamicism, as the always erudite prime minister had said, was the gravest threat to our way of life. Evan started filling out the forms and then stopped. “Am I fucking crazy?”

  He was practicing therapist-schooled non-escalation. Which meant exiting quickly and not descending into the foxhole from which they could lob grenades at each other.

  “Me and the record label and the manager, we’re doing this music thing for drugs and groupies. No one thinks I’ll make a cent, or sell a record, especially, it would seem, you.” He picked up his plate and dumped the dinner in the garbage, the dish in the dishwasher and went to watch the hockey game. She followed him into the living room, standing in front of the screen.

  “That’s why you’re not looking for a job, you think there’s going to be money in the music and that’s bullshit.”

  “I’m not talking to you about this now, you’re drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk, I only had two glasses of wine.”

  “You weigh 110 pounds. Two glasses of wine make you inebriated and slightly crazy and if you want to talk about my failures or your certainty of my future failure, we can do it when you’re sober. You pop the cork at 5 and you’re still sipping at 9. Two glasses? Really?”

  “I’m not drunk.” She bent the TV forward so he couldn’t watch it. But she didn’t see a glass on the TV table and the screen shattered. It was a new 37-inch that he had bought against her wishes.

  “You’ll just watch it,” she had warned.

  Now, she looked at the spider web of cracks in the screen and was instantly humiliated, tapes of her parents’ boozeplagued life playing in her head. He left her to her ghosts and despair and grabbed his jacket. He had clothes in the country.

  He looked at her before he left. She was watching him, her face a mix of dread and despair and helplessness. As it did most every night, she went from looking 50 to looking 70, the effort to maintain the appearance of sanity linked to the strength it took to maintain the sparkle of fading youth. Reality was the inevitable winner.

  There were more and more stories popping up like his, men and women in their 50s and 60s suddenly put out to pasture, media people in a quick-change media world that no longer had room for them. Annie was fascinated by these stories and sympathetic to the characters portrayed. She loved his story in the Citizen and sent it to all her friends.

  “Maybe you should write a book or a one-man play about it? Or make a film,” she said. “Did you see this piece in the Globe? It’s all about people like you.” That was one Annie. The other Annie held him responsible for being an unemployed professional in a dying profession. He wasn’t trying hard enough.

  “Women can’t have vaginal orgasms,” she said. “It’s all about the clitoris.”

  “I don’t know, Annie. I’ve known a few women who came pretty quickly through vaginal intercourse. Some came many times.”

  “How do you know they weren’t faking?”

  “I was married to a couple of them, lived with another, and they came pretty happily just from fucking.”

  “They were faking.”

  “You have videotape of my past relationships.”

  “Vaginal orgasms don’t exist,” she said. “They were faking.”

  The therapist had counselled at times like this it was best to keep quiet. So he did.

  Making conversation over the pasta, Annie had already dumped her salad into her dinner plate as she did every night. He watched the lettuce drowned in dressing sit on the pasta sauce and cringed but she did this nightly after three bites of dinner. But only at home.

  “I was reading the recession seems to have kneecapped only men,” Evan said. Annie liked to be talked to as she ate. “Employers are shedding men and their salaries and keeping older women.”

  “‘Cause they work cheap,” Annie said. “But at least they’re working.”

  “Yeah but the high-wage jobs are going and with it the economy.”

  “Men have been living high on the hog long enough,” she said, using her fingers to push the salad onto her fork. “Time for women to get to the trough.”

  “They’re not at the trough. They’re just cheap labour. And as they shed the high-priced men, their profits go up and the women work harder.”

  “At least they’re working. Men can suffer a bit. We’ve suffered long enough. Men have had it too easy too long. It’s our turn.”

  “You’re not getting it. It’s destroying the economy. It’s destroying families. Killing marriages.”

  “But it’s freeing women,” she said, smiling, pasta sauce staining the corner of her mouth. He reached over with his napkin and wiped her face. She smiled at him. She liked it when he cleaned up her messes.

  Something was happening to men. Some friends had begun signing e-mail with “love” or “big hug.” Sometimes in phone conversations they’d say “love you, man.” When they saw each other they hugged, they kissed each other’s cheeks.

  Franklin, the artistic director at the theatre, began to call him his brother and occasionally signed his e-mail with “love ya.” Maybe feminism had passed them by but he thought not. The men he knew all loved and respected women, had all been damaged by women and undoubtedly had inflicted a few wounds themselves.

  When he surfaced from his jail cell, his lawyer said: “Don’t worry, I love you and we’ll work this out.”

  Stan called from his big place in the country and said: “We love you and support you. Come and stay here as long as you like. We’re here for you.”

  Men were banding together as they aged, a fraternity of the bruised and weathered, looking for a constant they were not finding in their spouses. Yes, some couples have showcase marriages but the 60s and 70s have ripped apart the ideal of marriage, the sacrifice it was to be, the need it was to fulfil, the constant it could represent. And so, perhaps, men have turned to each other. They help and maybe even nurture each other, text and call and check in and pry loose the slings and arrows and help patch the wounds of vindictive lovers and spouses when necessary.

  Evan’s friends didn’t put him on trial. They realized they were all assholes, in one way or another, and that was life. He had some friends for 40 years, others were new. They give and take. They talk and they listen, and it’s most often not about who’s playing left wing on the Canadiens’ third line. It’s often about their relationship with the women in their lives. Or their kids and their struggles with them, their partners, their children, their work. Many men he knew were taking shots from employers, wives, kids. The ground was shifting and there was no phone app to help navigate it.

  He wrote a piece about what he called prostate lit. In today’s fiction, film or books, men were generally inept, suffering from prostate problems, addictions and diminished intelligence. They were a declining breed. He joked that if Dirty Harry was made today old Clint would have to make a pit stop at a urinal before he blew the bad guys away.

  Evan was sleepless, drinking too much, hav
ing panic attacks. The bail conditions meant he could not go home. In a flash he had lost his home, his office, the business and, of course, Annie. She was the least of it. He had gathered a phalanx of lawyers, criminal and civil. They all wanted money. Friends offered him a place to stay, bought him meals, offered money. Everyone offered love. Fritz the cat was really pissed. He screamed at him and Evan screamed back.

  “I’m sorry you don’t live at the house anymore,” he ranted at the bewildered cat. “Deal with it and shut the fuck up.” He hadn’t taken to drinking in the afternoon yet but the doctor had given him tranks and he swallowed two and curled up on the sofa of a condo his friend had loaned him. He hadn’t eaten in a few days. Chewing was tough, swallowing tougher.

  She loved him to sing her songs. But, on stage, singing, playing his songs, he was away from her. The music, the audiences, the validation, he sucked it up. Annie had no way to know it was taking Evan away from her. On stage he found his mojo. He could be funny and charming and heart rending. Sometimes women came to him after to tell him a song made them cry. A guy or two would say such and such a song gave them goose pimples. He feasted on their tears as he gorged on their laughter. The guitar and the songs salved the wounds of Annie. He kept getting gigs and getting asked back to play again. He spent more time in his office in the evenings or away in the country. Song writing and rehearsing, away from Annie, was sublime.

  Arranging the table for dinner one night, lighting the candles — there always had to be candles, just like there always had to be a cheese plate and salad and the habitual salad dressing with too much soya sauce, she said: “I love you so I can trust you to see the real me.”

  She trusted Evan enough to lacerate him regularly. He wasn’t convinced it was an honour but it explained at least that he was not, in fact, crazy, or too sensitive or sexist or overflowing with unjustified anger. One of the things that he loved about her was her ability to see herself. Her insights were rare and fleeting but took a bow once in a while. And gave him hope. Could she in fact moderate her behaviour? Did they not have a chance?