Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  When no one else would have me, Kevin would. Since we broke up nearly a decade earlier, we’d stayed in touch—just enough for him to know about things like the trip to detox, but not enough for him to know how much worse things had gotten since then. People see what they want to see. Kevin saw the girl he knew back in Austin—a little messy, a few scars and scratches, but basically a smart, capable person who could overcome any obstacle. The kind of person who certainly wouldn’t let something as common as alcohol get the best of her.

  He was my island of sensibility—my one through line to the time before Seattle, when my biggest problems were insomnia, anxiety, and ennui. He was my connection to a time when things made sense. I asked him if he wanted to go out on a date. He said yes. And, just like that, we were back together—sleeping on the same old futon mattress he had hauled up from Austin, now tucked into an alcove in the finished attic of the house he moved into after the shag-carpet apartment.

  Kevin didn’t judge me the way my friends did—not at first. Or, if he did, he kept it to himself. Bringing up someone else’s drinking, the way Josh so often did with me, can feel like an accusation, the kind of confrontation people routinely avoid because the stakes are so high. How many people want to start a conversation with, “Hey, can we talk about how out of control you were last night?” It’s easier to let it go, pretend it never happened, hope the person will get help or that you’re just imagining things.

  Josh, of course, was the opposite—when everyone else was averting their eyes, he looked directly into mine, demanding to know whether I was drunk. I hated this directness, because it forced me to choose between honesty and unconvincing denial—between “Yes, you caught me” and “No, how dare you suggest such a thing.” Josh always knew, anyway; after all the years we’d known each other, he could sense as soon as I picked up the phone when something was off—and I knew he knew. I hated lying to him. But I did. What was the alternative? At best, a profoundly uncomfortable discussion. At worst, another trip to detox, or even rehab. Either way, I’d be a disappointment and a burden, and for what? Nothing was going to make a difference anyway. I was the one who had to make the decision to quit, and I would. Soon. But not just yet.

  Kevin never said I was acting weird, or questioned me when I was out of focus. Even when I slept through a full day during a trip to a nearby national park, telling him, “I’m just really exhausted,” he let it pass without comment. Even when I “tripped on the sidewalk” on the walk from his house to the grocery store—explaining breezily, “I’m just not used to wearing heels!”—he accepted my excuse. In fact, it wasn’t until I passed out in the upstairs bedroom after breakfast one morning at his friends’ house in Portland that he had to admit that I had a problem. “I think you need to apologize to Alysse and Bryan,” he said. “Also, you need a shower.”

  Shaky, disoriented, and disgusted with myself, I made a big show of remorse, admitting over brunch that I had a “drinking problem”—I still didn’t like the term alcoholic—and promising to seek help. As it turned out, Bryan was an AA guy, and he invited me to join him at a meeting that very afternoon. An hour later, I found myself sitting in the back of some church meeting room, flanked by the three of them, sweating like a farmhand. The group leader, a handsome blond guy with horn-rimmed glasses that were either very expensive or very cheap, exuded an air of perfect hipster insouciance. What makes them think they’re so much better than me? What have they figured out that I can’t?

  Twenty

  Cindy

  A gap in my own biography had started to bug me more and more, like an unraveling thread in a sweater that grows and grows until you have to cut the whole thing out. I decided it was time to contact my birth mom.

  I had been thinking about Cindy superficially for many years, but there was always a period at the end of the story. Cindy was my birth mom, but she left, and no one ever heard from her again. My mom is my mom, and I don’t need a new one. Cindy didn’t want to see me, and now she’s living her life somewhere, or not, and that’s all there is to say about that. Maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s dead. Either way, it’s none of my business.

  But then, sometime after I turned thirty, I thought: Am I being immature about this? I don’t know what really happened. Maybe my dad kicked her out. Maybe I have siblings. Maybe she was an alcoholic, too, and just couldn’t handle being a mom. So I decided to ask about her.

  As it turned out, Cindy had been right under my nose all along. After she left my dad, she had moved away for a while but eventually came back to Mississippi, taking a series of jobs not far from where my grandparents still lived—first selling cars, then running a forklift at a chain hardware store in Jackson—the same chain my granddad worked for in Meridian.

  I found all of this out from my grandmother, who seemed oddly nonchalant about this question it had taken me more than twenty-five years to ask.

  “Oh, yes, Jesse sees Cindy and her mother from time to time,” Mama Opal told me on the phone. “Her family still lives right up forty-nine in Quinton. Are you just wondering, or did you want him to give her a message?”

  I pictured my grandmother, standing to the side in my parents’ wedding photo, lips pursed in disapproval as the teenage couple smiled nervously at the camera. “I want to talk to her,” I heard myself saying. Did I? “Do you think he can make that happen?”

  Within a week, I had an email, phone number, and an answer: Of course Cindy would love to hear from me. Would she? I started cautiously, with an email. “I have so much to ask you,” I wrote. We made a date to talk on the phone, and then suddenly—as if there had never been any reason for this conversation not to happen—I was hearing her voice, gravelly as a chain-smoker’s, on the other end of the line.

  Armed with a list of questions, I settled on the floor in front of my couch and began my interrogation. Why did she leave? She was seventeen, and she wanted to be carefree. Where did she go? To Virginia Beach, to live with her mother. Did she ever try to get in touch with me? No, but she had looked me up online and knew a few basic facts about my life. Did I have any siblings? No. She felt too bad after leaving me to ever try again.

  And the unanswerable question: Did she regret leaving me?

  The answer was complicated. “I regret it every day,” she said, but I heard a hitch in her voice. So I pressed: Wasn’t she grateful for the life she was able to have without the burden of having a kid around? I know I would have been. For decades, I’d been putting myself in her shoes: If I had gotten pregnant at sixteen, in a state and an era in which abortion wasn’t an option, what would I have done? Dropped out of school, stayed married, prepared for a life of drudgery? Or would I, too, have run, engaged in magical thinking, believing that my actions would never catch up with me? At sixteen, I was in an abusive relationship, looking at college catalogues, and working a part-time job at a Hallmark store. Who was I to judge anyone for the decisions they made at that age? How was I to know that I wouldn’t have done the same?

  Those questions are, like I said, unanswerable, because the real answers are probably: yes and no. Yes, she regretted her impulsive decision. No, she didn’t regret the second chance at being a young person, doing young-person stuff like partying and hooking up and all the things motherhood strips away from girls unlucky enough to get pregnant at her age in the South. The things I got to do.

  As Cindy caught me up on the past three and a half decades, part of me understood, and almost respected, her decision. But another part of me wanted her to feel the weight of everything she’d forfeited when she decided to leave—all the milestones, the arguments over boys and clothes, everything I went through to get where I was today. What it was like for me, growing up and discovering that my family was different and feeling like I had something to prove. How I admired my grandparents for taking care of me, and my dad for staying. How he had brought me up to be self-reliant, believing I could do anything I put my mind to, never tr
eating me like I was different or frivolous or fragile because I was a girl. How do you communicate all that history in half an hour? How do you compress decades of life into a story that ends on a positive note?

  “So tell me about yourself. What’s your life like?” she asked.

  “It’s good. I live in a beautiful city. I have a boyfriend. I own my own business. I’m a journalist, just like I wanted to be when I was a kid.

  “Everything’s good.”

  When we finally met in person a few months after that first phone call, I was hungover and anxious after a night spent nursing a fifth of vodka in a New Orleans hotel. I had driven the two and a half hours from New Orleans to Jackson in a fog, washing ibuprofen down with sparkling water and swigs of warm vodka, trying not to feel as nervous as I felt. Would she see right through me? Would she be able to smell the vodka on my breath? Would we have anything in common?

  Cindy lived with her husband, Bill, in a nondescript house on a nondescript street not unlike the one where I had grown up, in the same kind of anonymous suburb where my parents still live. When I pulled up in my rental car, she was already waiting outside, standing on the cracked driveway, waving me in.

  “You look just like Opal!” she exclaimed as I stepped out of the car, and she was right—the older I get, the more I look like my grandmother, from my arched left eyebrow to my soft, slightly pointed chin. I scanned her face intently for signs of myself. Maybe around the eyes? Cindy was several inches shorter than me, a bit heavyset, with sun-browned skin, friendly eyes, and a warmth I found off-putting even with a solid base layer of vodka sloshing in my stomach. Her house was full of items she had collected at flea markets over the years—copper baking dishes above the doorway, antique duck decoys on the fireplace, and an ecumenical array of crosses spanning the full height of one twelve-foot wall. My whole apartment could have fit inside the master bedroom she shared with Bill and their little dog.

  We talked for hours, looking for similarities. You like shopping at flea markets? Oh my god, me too! We ate lasagna; watched a reality TV show about survivalists; drove across town to meet her mom—my grandmother—at another suburban home with another wall of crucifixes. It all felt unreal, like I was playing a part written for someone else. Part of the problem was that I felt like a stranger imposing on these people’s lives, asking them for time and attention I had never earned. And part of it was that I worried, at any minute, I would be exposed as a failure and a fraud. If they knew the truth, they’d kick me out. If they knew who they were welcoming into their house, they’d lock up the valuables and keep a close eye on their dog. Don’t you know I’m an alcoholic? I wanted to scream. Don’t you know what I’m capable of?

  I stuck to my talking points for two days, avoiding the minefield of my drinking history. Cindy didn’t drink anymore, but to ask her, “Why not?” was to risk having a real conversation, was to risk being honest about my drinking and all the times I had tried and failed to stop. That wasn’t a conversation I was eager to have with anyone, much less this stranger I was trying to impress with how well I’d done without her.

  After a night staring at the ceiling in Cindy’s guest room, I was as eager to leave as I had been to make the trip. I showered, packed up, and said an awkward good-bye, hugging her too tightly and saying I couldn’t wait to see her again. There was something so familiar about this rushed parting, and on the drive to Meridian, I realized that it felt like infidelity—like I was cheating on my real parents, the ones who had invested in me and stuck around even when I was writing “I HATE THEM SO MUCH” in my journal and stealing liquor from their bottles. Even speaking to her had felt like a massive betrayal. Worse, I hadn’t spoken to my real mom since I told her I was making this trip a few weeks ago, and the last time I’d heard Dad’s voice was when I’d called him on the landline before flying south—the hey’s and how you doing’s followed by awkward silences that I never quite learned to fill. Dad and I had never talked much—avoiding him was as easy as not picking up the phone—and I had been ignoring Mom’s calls. I knew she would ask some version of the question I hated most, “How’s it going with not drinking?” and because I knew she’d know right away that I was lying when I delivered a practiced, “Fine!” Now, after everything I had put them through—the awful scene at my aunt and uncle’s in San Francisco, the alarming, out-of-nowhere call from detox—I was reaching out to someone who had never been there for me. Of course I didn’t want to talk to my parents about that.

  Twenty-one

  A Disease of Isolation

  Adozen years after I moved to Seattle, I had become a master of compartmentalization. I avoided friends who would know I had been drinking (my girlfriends Lisa and Stephanie; a new friend named Renee, whom I’d met through my reporting about a transit project in her neighborhood; and, of course, Josh) and gravitated, on the rare occasions when I felt like company, to people who didn’t know my “tells”—like the way my eyes would go slightly glassy after a certain point in the evening, and some part of me would become inaccessible. Alcoholism is often described as a “disease of isolation,” and that works both ways—if you’re already isolated, you’re more likely to become an alcoholic, and if you keep isolating yourself, you’re more likely to stay one. You’re also isolated in another way—even among people, your chief concern is the drink, whether that means a trip to the bar or a duck into the bathroom with your purse. In my conversations with other alcoholics, I have yet to meet a single one who didn’t pull away from people or reject offers of help, sometimes explosively. Of the many ironic things about alcoholism, this is the most paradoxical: The very substance that allowed us to be sociable and uninhibited, often for the first time, eventually sends us cowering to our rooms. Alcohol started out as a shortcut to human connections and all the emotions I was afraid to express openly. But it ended up being a bypass, a short circuit that catapulted me past insight to total disinhibition.

  Josh stopped answering my text messages after 7:00 P.M. or so, so I would call and call and call, and eventually he’d get fed up and turn off his phone. The morning after nights like that, I could expect to wake up to an email, equal parts concerned and annoyed. “Here’s something I’ve noticed,” one began. “Whenever you call me late at night, you don’t sound like yourself. You say things that don’t make sense, and repeat yourself, and you don’t listen to anything I say. It makes me worried and sad for you. Frankly, you sound like you’ve been drinking. I say this out of concern for you as your friend. I don’t want to see you throw your life away. What can we do to turn this around?” Later, his emails would get right to the point. “Again super worried and u need to get into a program immediately. What is the status of getting you into a program?” My reaction would depend on how drunk I still was, how hard the hangover was hammering my forehead. What could we do? We could get off my back. We could take me more seriously when I said I was sad instead of accusing me of being drunk. We could let me drink in peace.

  At work, Josh would ask me questions in code—“You seem kind of blurry. What percentage are you at today?” I always lied, but here’s the thing: Even saying “Eighty-five percent” meant admitting I’d been drinking. So usually, my answer was “one hundred percent”; or, more often, “Why would you even ask me that?” It’s hard to sympathize with the drinker in this scenario—everything about the situation makes you want to scream, “Why didn’t you quit drinking and stop putting everyone around you through hell?” But from my own admittedly myopic perspective, quitting simply wasn’t an option—not now, not yet. I just needed everyone to leave me alone for a little longer, so I could figure a few things out. But Josh was always there, asking if I was drunk, asking how much of me he had today. So I drew inside myself, and I turned my rage inward, too. Maybe if I’m the only one who knows, that will mean it isn’t that bad. Maybe if I can keep Josh off my back, I can come up with a plan to pull myself out of this. Always pull myself out. Never ask someone else for he
lp.

  My parents, as far as I could tell, had mostly given up—Mom didn’t want to listen to my sobbing, incoherent calls, and Dad had run out of sympathy for my complaints about money, which seemed to flow right through my fingers. Later, I would understand that they were detaching—something support groups like Al-Anon recommend—but at the time, I just figured they were sick of hearing about it. Fine by me.

  A few people knew the score. The liquor-store clerks, who saw me at my bloated, sweating Saturday-morning worst. My doctors, because every time I ended up in the hospital, it went into my medical records: chest pain, acute alcohol withdrawal, alcohol poisoning, atrial flutter. My downstairs neighbors, probably—I could hear everything they said through the floor, so it stood to reason that they could hear me retching in the toilet every morning. The cashiers at the Safeway, where I showed up, without fail, before 8:00 A.M., waiting impatiently behind the young couples in athleisure, getting a jump on the morning with my bright-yellow box of Bandit Chardonnay clutched in a shaking hand. And the tellers behind bulletproof glass at the downtown Money Mart, where I’d show up once a month or so, a week before payday, to trade $795 of my next paycheck for $700 on the spot.

  Alcoholism is an expensive disease, even if you never see the inside of an emergency room, and I was pouring about $300 of every paycheck down my throat, not counting the times I’d buy a shot on the sly, or spring for a $20 bottle of wine at the convenience store by my house when I didn’t feel like taking the bus to the grocery store, where a box cost $8.99. I had started going to the food bank near my house every Saturday morning, and those trips became one of the few things I looked forward to—every week, no matter what, there would be the 7:30 A.M. bus ride to the little wooden building on Rainier Avenue South, the wait in line for a number, then three hours until the place actually opened. During that time, I’d get my usual first bottle at the Safeway, then wander to my neglected community garden patch a block away, gulping from the bottle, daring early-morning joggers to judge my choices. In the garden, there were sometimes other drinkers—brazen ones, chugging Steel Reserve and littering the carefully chipped paths with chicken wings—and sometimes I was alone, sitting at the ancient picnic table with a bottle in my backpack, drinking and reading The New Yorker and putting my head down now and then for a little nap.