by Mary Karr
20
My Concept of Commitment
My concept of commitment was
to take all you could give.
—Chris Smither, No Love Today
In the sunlit study of a couples’ counselor, huge potted plants are thriving—ficus and mother-in-law tongue and wandering Jew with shoots sending out small explosions of streaky green. Across from us, the therapist smiles from a moon-shaped face. In the next room, one of her bespectacled kids saws through violin scales. This doctor—in her loose muslin dress and Birkenstock sandals, her long wavy hair dragged into a bun with a pen stuck through it—appears to have cobbled together what I want: a happy family. I tell her about snapping at Dev and making him cry—the reason we’re here.
She tries to reassure me that Dev’s childhood, however shadowed by our scratching at each other, doesn’t mirror my own. You’re both very worried about Dev’s feelings, she says, but he’s in no way neglected. (In some ways, true enough. But having your parents circle each other—I still contend—splits a child in two.)
Warren’s just a better parent, I say.
Is that true? she asks him.
His long legs in khakis bend and unbend, mantislike. He says, Mary’s very loving, very good about seeing he plays with other kids all the time…
He trails off, and she says, But?
She gets very overwhelmed and snappish, he finishes.
He’s perfectly patient with Dev, I say.
Well, probably, she tells me with that smile, if Warren was up all night like you, he might be less perfect.
I doubt that, I say. She asks me to say more, and I outline Warren’s steadiness. How his devotion to poetry has inspired me to strive for a higher bar in my work. I praise his integrity and self-discipline, saying, I wanted a solid family. That’s part of why I married him, for the stability he offered.
She leads me on, but now the stabilization feels…
Stultifying, I say.
She eventually turns to Warren. Why’d you marry Mary?
It seemed like time, he says. We’d been together three years. We loved each other—health insurance and so forth. She very much wanted a family.
I stare at him, awaiting some of his former warmth for me to squeeze through the stone, but he ticks off what might be qualities in a personals ad—attractive, athletic, smart. She’s much more social than I, he adds, very loyal, a very devoted mother…
Whoever you married would have those qualities, she says.
I think he married me—I interrupt—to rebuke his upbringing. Now he resents my absorption with the baby or that his father chips in my rent! (These pet theories conveniently skim over my own—at this point—innately repellent disposition.)
That’s so damned unfair, he says.
It’s Warren’s turn, the therapist says levelly. Toward the end, when she asks how much I’m drinking, I halve it. Still she suggests I try out an evening support group for people trying to give up booze.
She turns to Warren, Do you think she’s an alcoholic?
How insulting, I think, and brace myself for Warren’s assessment, already dredging up a defense: I’ve never been five minutes late to pick up Dev. I’m a room parent, for God’s sake. I lead toddlers around the aquarium on a rope.
No, he says.
(How my love for him doth bloom, the drinking mind thinks.) She likes a drink. (Or nine, the scolding, sober part of me thinks.) But who doesn’t? he concludes. (Those WASPs down so much sauce—the sober mind observes—that Warren wouldn’t know a dipsomaniac if one hit him with a polo mallet.) That’s the kind of courtroom convened in my skull, prosecution and defense.
Back home the next morning, while Dev blanks out at the TV, I sneak around, reaching under beds and into the hamper, gathering ratholed beer cans and wine bottles. Once Warren’s home, I drive around to unload them from the hatchback like body parts into dumpsters all over town. I also rotate liquor stores, telling each indifferent proprietor that I’m having a spectacular party—myself the honored guest.
One morning before New Year’s, I’m trying to jam Dev into his coat, and he’s slipping around in my hands like a greased pig. I get one arm in, and he collapses laughing on the floor.
I’ve been pondering the doctor’s suggestion as I say to Warren, Let’s quit drinking.
Sure, Warren says, why not. He crimps the top of his lunch sack. He, by the way, doesn’t need to quit drinking, and being full-time at both work and grad school—and being I’m a sneaky bitch—he’s missing the gallons I drink.
From my hands, Dev breaks free and dashes into the living room while I say, It’s not like we’re going to a party.
Going after Dev, Warren tells me not to start, for I gripe nonstop about our lack of social life. He returns with our maniacally snickering son tucked under one arm like a baguette. Warren asks me to toss Dev’s coat upside down on the floor.
Okay, dip and flip, sweetie, Warren says, setting Dev so he stands with his feet at his coat’s hood. Dev bends over, dips his hands in his coat sleeves, then upends the coat over his head.
Good man, I say as Warren starts to clip a mitten to a sleeve.
I ask him where—with his own patriarch’s testy disposition—he mastered parenting.
He’s hitching the second mitten on as Dev lurches to smooch, my cheek. Hoisting him up, Warren says, I imagine what my father would’ve done with me, then do the opposite.
I tug at Warren’s sleeve so he curves his tall form down, seeming to tolerate my peck on his lips. (Is this true or only my faulty interpretation?) The familiar masculine odor of him sends down my spine a surge of ardor as if stirred from a muddy aquarium bottom. I step back till my knees hit the chair edge and I just fold myself shut as he disappears out the door.
By this time one of us is perennially on the way out the door, pausing to hand our boy off like a football. More and more often, he’s our sole point of contact. Otherwise, we exist as a pair of profiles gliding past each other. If a laser had sliced each of us cartoonlike down the middle—half of each falling away—we may not have noticed the missing half for days. While I tell myself this is the normal way of careworn parents with handfuls of jobs between them, the distance feels like powerful magnets, once kissing, now turned to their opposing poles. It’s not just that we don’t eat out, don’t take vacations at all—together or apart, expense being cited—we barely speak beyond necessity. Only in bed do we sometimes fall on each other like starved beasts.
Quitting drinking will reunite us. On New Year’s, we down our last champagne, and two days later, a wicked flu fells me like a chain-sawed oak. The sole cure for which ailment—it strikes me—is whiskey toddies with lemon and honey. Purely medicinal, of course. Don’t you want a drink? I say to Warren as I itchily shift around in bed. I can’t concentrate on grading.
Not really, he says. The literary magazine he’d cofounded before keeps him editing manuscripts even nights he’s home.
My limbs ache like I’ve run ten miles, and I’m clammy. In the past, quitting drinking was a breeze. I’d done it a thousand times—binge as a reward, say, or down it all one weekend then swear off on Monday. I whine to him that sleep’ll elude me.
He yawns, hefting his folder to the floor with a thunk, saying (as a joke), I wish I couldn’t sleep.
I sullenly kick back the covers on my side of the bed, pissed at how he’ll twist off the light, and block out my insomniac pouting.
Downstairs, I stand before the brass thermostat swathed in layers of sweatclothes and woolens, for this is how I bundle to sleep at the igloo temperature Warren insists on—again, expense being cited. I scrub my chafed red hands together like a fly then I twist the wheel right. Before it reaches eighty, I hear—from the bowels of the house—the furnace go whomp. I even rise early to dial it back low before Warren—soaked in sweat—comes down in the morning, wondering why the thermometer’s red line holds at eighty, as I look mystified.
Since there’s no liquor in the house,
I concoct for myself a backache, filching a few of the blue valiums Warren rarely takes for his—truly bad—back. They’re for sleep, I tell myself. (My creative skill reaches its zenith at prescription interpretation, i.e., the codeine cough syrup bottle seems to read: Take one or two swigs when you feel like it. I take three.)
In February I decide I’m under too much stress to quit booze cold turkey. Full sobriety as a concept recedes with the holidays. I’ll cut down, I think. But all the control schemes that reined me in during past years are now unfathomably failing. Only drink beer. Only drink wine. Only drink weekends. Only drink after five. At home. With others.
When I only drink with meals, I cobble together increasingly baroque dinners, always uncorking some medium-shitty vintage at about three in the afternoon while Dev plays on the kitchen floor. The occasional swig is culinary duty, right? Some nights I’m into my second bottle before Warren comes in with frost on his glasses and a book bag a mule should’ve toted. Maybe he doesn’t notice, since I’m a champion at holding my liquor. Nonetheless, by the end of March, I have to unbutton my waistbands.
Only drinking socially leads to a flurry of long afternoon lunches we can’t afford with people I barely know, so—for thrift’s sake—I often just split a bottle of wine while my lunch partner eats. In academia, meticulously split checks are the norm.
At the poetry readings Warren hosts for his job every few weeks, I swill plastic cups of vinegary white wine and yammer like somebody pulled a string on my neck till the library lights get turned off.
After one such event, Warren drives home with his jawline flexing.
What? What’s the matter? I ask.
Do you have to stay till the last drop is drunk? he says. His sole mention of my drinking, as I recall.
Which pierces me. How hard I’ve tried not to drink. I call him the fun police and unleash the litany of chores that tip me out of bed every day at five A.M. That this was a dead echo of Mother’s speechifying on Warren’s not being enough of a party boy eludes me. The more I drink, the more weekends I split off, leaving Warren to care for Dev solo while I take naps. Also, evenings Warren comes home early enough, I hide in my study drinking as he and Dev play at making the bed, which involves Dev bouncing as Warren floats the sheet over his head, occasionally wrestling the little ghost form down.
Through the wall, I can’t make out words, only Dev’s staccato whoops and giggles, followed by Warren’s deep-throated purr, which sounds like hubbidee hubadub hubbadee…hum sally bum bum. The timbre’s barely tolerable, for when Warren speaks to me, the airspace is sandpapered and abraded, spiked as a bondage collar. I can’t look at him without hearing some muffled verdict pounded out by my own heartbeat—guilty guilty guilty.
Across the months, I start to find myself first one place, then another, arriving in situations as if tipped out of a bucket.
I find myself in a restaurant before noon ordering a pricey Bloody Mary, telling myself the tomato juice makes it a vegetable serving.
I find myself cornered by a drunk writer of substantial reputation at a party. His expectant leer scares me out the door. At the car, I have keys in my hand but no purse. Where’s my purse?
I find myself squatting in the bedroom closet with two incongruent bottles, whiskey and Listerine—the latter with accompanying spit bowl. Despite the dark, it feels safe in here, leaning against the back wall with clothes before my face.
On one of Warren’s school nights, friends I once taught with ring my doorbell holding a twelve-pack, the ambush making me giddy as a prom queen. They pore over my shoe box of Dev’s baby pictures while regaling me with their new projects—a play at Yale, a book of short stories. But even as I giggle and suck down beers, I know Warren’s headlights are gonna swipe the house silent again. Sure enough, he comes in the back door and stops in the living room to shake hands before excusing himself. About eleven, he calls from upstairs, and I find him on the landing, shirtless in boxers.
He whispers, I can’t sleep from the noise. If you don’t ask them to leave, I’ll have to.
I hiss at him, You’re such a control freak.
He says, You knew I was like this when you married me.
The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it’s a cliché that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while every husband signs up believing his wife won’t: both dead wrong.
So I send them home, then stay up nearly all night drinking and staring past the edges of the yard like a rabbit through chicken wire. What happened to those great poems I was going to set the world weeping with? Tomorrow!
How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible. Tomorrow, I will rise at three A.M. and log two hours writing before Dev stumps out. I’ll take a five-mile jog, start a cheap but nutritious stew, submit a query letter to The American Scholar for an essay. If only I could be left alone for a few days to drink like I want to, I could get my papers graded.
Every mom trails undone chores—dishes in the sink, laundry going wrinkly in the dryer. I lug from room to office to playground reams of ungraded essays. With one hand, I use a fork to fiddle with chicken in a skillet. With the other, my red pen marks comma blunders on the counter. The papers I hand back sport grease stains and grass stains and smudges of homemade applesauce.
One night I get gussied up for a book party Warren would rather have been shot than attend, and sunk in the cavern of a leather armchair, I hold my liquor enough to hear—from the mouths of poets—work I’m itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.
Driving home in the spring rain, I imagine straddling my muscular husband in his desk chair and planting a soft kiss on his mouth.
But coming through the back door, I enter the household’s tentative air, drawing back from the idea like a starfish to an underside touch. I find him typing a paper with the baby monitor on his desk. He glances over. How was it?
Great, I say, and I burble out a summary. When Warren announces Dev’s been up feverish twice, the news stops me. However I long for a night off, taking one scalds me in guilt. Did you give him the antibiotic in his lunch box? I say. If he’d forgot I’d be up a point.
You left his lunch box at school, I think—
Shit, I say. It’s another black mark for me.
—but it’s pretty much run out. His fever was over a hundred after Tylenol.
We stare at each other to stave off the inevitable spat over who misses work. Warren’s down to his last few vacation days; I’d have to reschedule forty student conferences. But enough of the night sparkles through me that I say I’ll handle it, then I add, It’s good for me to get out every now and then.
I hope so, he says.
A few heartbeats keep me there in silence till I say, Was that sarcastic?
He meets my eyes again, saying, Of course not.
I start up the stairs and stop. I feel another urge to slide my arms around his strong middle and have him hold me, but if he withdrew, peeled my arms off—the refusal would’ve scorched me like a nuclear blast. I lean tentatively on the door jamb.
Don’t you think I need to go out?
You believe so, he says.
Some rage burbles up, and from nowhere, I say—calmly but with force—That’s a shit thing to say.
He shakes his head and says, You’ve had your night. Why jump on me now?
Excuse me for having a life, I say. That’s the most fun I’ve had in months.
It’s not all about fun, Mare.
Just fuck you, I say, and bolt up the stairs. Storming into my study, I flip the side switch on the massive IBM computer, which starts to growl and grind. The monitor begins to blink awake.
Inching through Warren’s edits on the book review I owe his journal, I seize up like the screen’s stalled cursor. I sit there
ping-ponging back and forth between righteous fury and guilty shame.
There had been a time when the wide world was sunlit, every grass blade shining, but the sun’s spotlight has shrunk smaller and smaller. Now Warren is squeezed out. He’s a shade, an outline. I can’t see him anymore.
(You could say I needed God then, which notion would’ve gagged me like a maggot. But if you’re a nonbeliever, replace the word God with truth or mercy. To kill truth to defend my fear was—in one way—to kill God. Oedipus wound up murdering his father because he ignored the divine warning that he would. When he learned the truth, his guilt so ruined him, he stabbed out his own eyes. Without truth, I was blind, worshipping my own fear-driven thoughts, and the ground beneath me never stopped heaving.)
The next morning I find myself riding in circles around my dining room astride a truck, wanting to shriek with boredom, for that’s what I think mothering is—doing whatever my son does, himself not yet literate.
That afternoon I bring Dev in solo to the warm-eyed psychologist, who tells me I don’t have to play with him nonstop. She has on a bulky green sweater and heavy boots that ground her to the floorboards as she points to him happily moving cars around on the rug.
In tribal cultures, she says, mothers work in the fields, and kids—once they’ve learned not to fall in the cooking fires—run around in a gaggle like geese. Only in the 1950s did the bloated economy permit women to stay home concocting the current parenting fantasy.
Till then, I’d believed my job was to impersonate a preschooler every second I was with Dev. In some ill-considered way, I hadn’t wanted him to feel so bad about being so short, so ill spoken and incontinent.
Dr. G. looks at me, her forehead bending into a little tilde of concern as she says, You can cook or fold clothes or relax.
But if I fold clothes, I say, he starts throwing them over his head.
Tell him to stop, she says.
I don’t want to yell at him.
Dev looks up and—holding up his arms with open palms bent back to demonstrate the obviousness of her argument—says, then don’t yell at me.