“Yeah, great.”
“That’s good,” she said.
My father and my brother walked in front of us discussing my brother’s latest case. I appreciated that no one asked me about what went on inside the hospital, and I was profoundly relieved that they didn’t ask about what had gone on to land me there. Were we all going to try to move forward without discussing it? Maybe the questions would come later. Certainly, I owed them some explanations, but for that moment, we were just a regular family walking down a city street. I tipped my head back, closed my eyes, and took deep breaths of the cool air. I wasn’t exactly Andy Dufresne just finished tunneling my way out of Shawshank, but in the sunshine of that New York morning, I felt free and full of hope.
My dad gave his ticket to the parking lot cashier and I watched the bustle along First Avenue. People carried Starbucks cups while walking little dogs on long leashes. Pairs of fluffed and manicured mothers around my age pushed baby strollers. I looked down at the Gracie Square hospital bracelet on my wrist and felt a little sick about the differences in our lives. According to my teenage master plan, I was supposed to have been one of them by now. My successful New York husband and I were going to have two deliriously happy children thriving in their exclusive, super-smart-kid academies. They would come home each day to healthful after-school snacks prepared with love in our kitchen with its granite counter tops and Viking stove. I couldn’t rip off the bracelet so I covered it with my sleeve.
One day at a time, Lisa. Don’t compare yourself to other people—some of those women probably have Starbucks cups full of cranberry and vodka.
“Let it go.” “Easy does it.” “Live and let live.” I was determined to try out these new slogans; maybe that would help quiet the racket that was already revving back up in my addled brain. My insides were calling for drinks, drinks. For me, morning in New York meant “time for drinks.” Oh to feel icy cold vodka oozing down my throat right now. Or warm red wine or even a light white pinot. Fuck. It was brutal. How was I going to make it? I reached under my sleeve and rubbed the hospital bracelet as if it had super powers.
On the ride into northern New Jersey, I sat behind the driver’s seat with my head tilted against the window. Mom sat next to me, holding my hand the whole way. Her skin was soft, mine felt scaly. Maybe this new start would bring new grooming habits, and I would moisturize every day as Mom had always preached.
As soon as we arrived at my parents’ townhouse, I dashed upstairs to the shower. I peeled off the clothes that I would never wear again and threw them into a heap on the carpeted floor of the guest bedroom. I walked naked past my Cabbage Patch doll and the stuffed panda I’d bought during an eighth-grade class trip to DC. They just sat there smiling at me like silly-faced old ladies offering encouragement behind frozen faces that masked their disgust. I gave them the finger.
The shower felt miraculous. I stood under the spray for a long time, letting the water run over me while I swayed back and forth with my eyes closed. This was what it was like to stand up straight in a shower. My God, how long had it been since I’d been able to stand, turn, or bend forward in a shower without the risk of falling over and cracking my head on porcelain? How many times had I vomited while showering? To think that most people go their entire lives without vomiting in a shower.
My thoughts began to whirl again. Why did I abuse myself with alcohol and drugs for so long? Why could other people shut themselves off after a few? What was it that made me decide to check into Gracie Square? What the hell did sober people do with their time?? Stop focusing on negative things—none of the answers are going to appear in the shower. Focus on the shower. “Let it go.”
After two shampoos and a thorough scrubbing, I emerged from the bathroom feeling clean for the first time in a week. I grabbed a pair of my mother’s soft cotton pajamas and a pair of my dad’s oversized, padded socks from their bedroom, combed out my hair and went downstairs. Lou had taken the day off of work, so he was planted in the den with my parents.
“Better?” my mom asked, looking up over her reading glasses.
“Much. Thanks,” I said. They were watching a Bogart movie on the big screen television that Lou and I had bought for our dad’s seventy-fifth birthday. I lay down next to my mom on the long couch and rested my head on her lap. I wanted a cigarette, but I was too tired to move. With a system still full of Librium, I feel asleep in minutes.
When I woke up, it was five o’clock, and my head was on a pillow instead of on my mother’s lap. “Hey, look who’s up,” Lou said from the couch across the room.
“Yessss! Sleeping Beauty rises,” my dad said from his recliner. He removed the giant headphones he wore over his ears. At seventy-five, Dad had pretty bad hearing, but the headphone system allowed the rest of us to watch television with him.
“You hungry?” Lou asked. “We were just talking about dinner.”
“Yeah, definitely,” I said, without raising my head from the pillow. “I think my stomach might be completely empty. But I’m not taking off these pajamas.”
“OK, we’ll order Chinese,” my mom said. “I’ll grab the menu.” She trotted up the stairs to the kitchen.
Given my recent release from the all-Asian-all-the-time floor at Gracie Square, I would have preferred pizza, but I was committed to no longer being a pain in everyone’s ass—starting right now—so I didn’t say anything.
Not five minutes later, I learned that the world was not about to start revolving around me. “Are we drinking?” my dad asked my mother and brother, slightly tentatively. After all, it was cocktail hour and everyone had had a rough day. “We know you’re not,” he said to me with laugh. Then all three of them looked at me for a response.
I looked back at them blankly. Of course, my first thought was that if I couldn’t drink, nobody else should. So much for not being a pain in everyone’s ass. No one at Gracie Square had told me what to do in this situation, but Dr. Landry had said that staying sober would be the hardest thing I’d ever do. This must have been what he meant.
Buck up, Lisa. Welcome to your new life. “You guys go ahead,” I said. “It’s OK. I’m going to have to get used to it,” I said. I dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand.
“Are you sure?” my mother asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure … I guess. I can’t tell everyone around me not to drink because I’m an alcoholic, right?”
For ten years I’d known that I was addicted, but right then I was amazed at how easily the words, “I’m an alcoholic,” breezed from my mouth in front of my family.
“OK, as long as you’re sure,” my dad said as he headed up the stairs toward the booze. Minutes later he came back down with two glasses of Dewar’s and a Heineken.
“I need a cigarette,” I announced loudly in a small act of revenge.
“Really??” my mom asked. Her forehead was scrunched in distress. “You smoke? Like a regular smoker?”
Time for me to launch another ugly truth about her little pink daughter. “Well, not like a regular smoker. I always just smoked when I drank,” I said. “But then I started drinking all the time, so …”
“Just do it outside,” she said.
“What? You’re going to make her go outside?” my father asked.
“She’s not smoking cigarettes in the house.”
“Dad, it’s fine. I’m happy to go outside. The fresh air will be good.”
“I’ll go with you,” Lou said. He popped up from the couch and slid on his leather loafers. I pulled on my crummy Nikes.
Cigarettes and lighter in hand, I opened the sliding glass door of the den and took a seat outside on one of the cement steps leading to the patio. I felt my parents’ eyes on me as I moved. Lou sat next to me.
“So unreal,” I said. “I can’t believe I did this.” I lit my cigarette and took a long drag. It tasted like home. I blew the smoke away from Lou and took another greedy drag then rocked my head back and exhaled, “Ahhh.”
“Hey, you did th
e right thing. The guy at Gracie Square told us that people don’t end up there unless they need to be there. He said you really have to try to stay sober now.”
Wow, if I did decide to go back to drinking, I was going to have to become an even better liar. “Well, my plan is to try it. I can’t make any promises, though. Everyone I hang out with drinks, and I’m not going to get rid of my friends. But I have to say, this is the first time in years that I haven’t felt close to barfing or passing out.”
“Well, that should tell you something. You know we’ll all do whatever we can for you. Seriously.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t mean not having a drink at cocktail hour,” I laughed a little and elbowed him in the ribs.
“Oh, no! Seriously, we don’t have to drink. Oh man, we should have known better.”
Then came more guilt. Was I ever going to get any of this right? “No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “Really! I have to get used to being around people who can drink. I mean, I’d love a drink, but they kept saying that for me alcohol is like poison, poison that kills over time. So I’m going to have to try the ‘one day at a time’ stuff.”
“One day at a time?” Lou laughed. “You’ve always mapped things out a week in advance.”
“I know!” I smiled. “Now time is going to move in slow motion. Anyway, how are Mom and Dad doing with this?” I asked.
“They’re OK. We all feel bad that we didn’t know.”
“There’s no way you could have known,” I said. “The things I was hiding, you wouldn’t believe. I became a great liar. Apparently it’s a thing alcoholics do. It’s how they, we, keep going.” I shrugged and stared at the sky, watching the trail of my exhaled smoke.
“If it was so bad, why didn’t you come to us? We wouldn’t have judged you. Why didn’t you let anybody help you?”
“I didn’t want to stop.” I gave him a moment to let that sink in. “Lou, if you’d had any idea of what I was putting into my body, you would have done everything you could to make me stop.”
“That’s true.” He thought about it for a moment. “So what changed?”
“Honestly, I don’t really know. I guess I realized that I couldn’t get it under control and that it was going to kill me.” I stubbed the cigarette out in one of my mother’s plants and said, “I don’t want to die.”
He reached over and held my hand, and I began to cry. “Thank God.” he said. “I can’t even imagine that.” I cried harder. Then I thought again about his baby’s birthday and the choice I made. I covered my face with my free hand and wept, wondering if that memory would ever stop hurting.
When we went back inside, it was clear that cocktail hour at my parents’ place had taken a big hit. The glasses were still filled, but there were no joyful clinks of glasses and no toasts to each other’s health, just quiet sips between hunks of Jarlsberg cheese on Carr’s Water Crackers. Stuffing my face with food comforted me in my strange new life. If I had to be the only person not drinking, I’d certainly let myself enjoy eating. But would I get fat? Oh God, please don’t let my addiction transfer to food.
What it would be like to have a rocks glass full of vodka with a splash of soda right now? It would taste strong but soothing going down. A shudder ran through my body. Shit.
I decided that rather than indulge booze fantasies, as fast as possible I’d change my mental channel. When I began to dream of wine in my bloodstream, I’d flip to the little Latin guy blasting us at my first group meeting: “You do not pick up a drink or a drug. One day at a time. Just for today, YOU DO NOT DRINK, NO MATTER WHAT.” So I decided to not drink that day, just for that day.
By the time I went to bed that night, the Librium had worn off. Lou had long since left for his normal home, normal baby, and normal wife. My parents and I had made our way upstairs at about nine o’clock. They weren’t going to leave me alone until they saw me all the way through to the end of this momentous day. I wondered, are they worried that I’ll sneak downstairs and bust into their liquor cabinet? They should be.
As I brushed my teeth, I looked at the toilet and remembered doing coke off its lid just a few weeks earlier as my parents watched TV. I felt a shudder of disgust, and I knew that a drink would nicely numb my guilt. But then the living hell timer would start again because I never had “a” drink. I’d finish the bottle. Remember that, remember that. You do not drink no matter what. You do not pick up no matter what.
Maybe it was the lighting, but in this mirror I looked less sickly than I had the week before. Bags still puffed under my eyes and my face was blotchy, but my skin no longer looked gray. Some of the bloat was gone and I could see my cheekbones.
With a fresh mouth and scrubbed skin, I climbed between the clean sheets of the guest room bed. Maybe I should grab a book from the bookcase, I thought, maybe reread my favorite: A Prayer for Owen Meany. But my eyelids were heavy. Turning off the light, I did theatrical stretch across the bed and settled into the soft mattress. Just go to sleep, I thought, just as people all around the world do every night. You don’t need drugs to make you sleep. You don’t need to pass out. One night at a time. Just fall asleep like a fucking normal person.
20
I spent the rest of the weekend lying around my parents’ house, overeating and subjecting them to my constant trips to the patio to smoke cigarettes. My mom even sat out there with me a few times.
“You know, I’ve never even tried a cigarette,” she said, watching me smoke on Saturday afternoon. It had been a constant refrain since the first time she discovered a pack of Merits in my underwear drawer when I was fifteen.
“You’re welcome to try one of mine anytime. They’re delicious,” I said, popping a few smoke rings out of my mouth.
“Yuck. How do you do that?” she asked.
“Practice.”
“That’s terrible, Lisa. I hope you don’t plan to smoke forever.”
“Who knows? I’m not making long-term plans. I’m just trying to not drink for this one day.” Wow, listen to me getting with the program. I hoped I wasn’t going to become one of those platitude preachers. “They said in the hospital that if you smoke now, you shouldn’t try to quit while you’re trying to quit drinking, not for the first year.”
“First year?” She looked at me with wide eyes. “OK,” she said, with a sigh and a shrug. “I guess whatever it takes to stop drinking is what you need to do.”
“Exactly.” I put my arm around her and gave her a squeeze. She returned the gesture with a full body embrace.
As full of questions as my parents must have been, all I heard all weekend was, “Are you OK?” and “Do you need anything?” At some point we’d have to talk about the lie I had been living for so long, but that weekend was all about making sure that I was okay and nowhere near the liquor cabinet.
On Sunday morning I came downstairs early. Mom was working on the New York Times crossword puzzle and Dad was unpacking fresh bagels and lox. “We’re up?” my dad asked.
“Yeah, we’re up.” I grabbed a giant mug from above the sink. “But we need coffee.”
“Good, good. We made a full pot,” he said. They watched me pour the coffee and their eyes followed me from the coffeemaker to the refrigerator for milk and then to the cabinet with the Splenda in it.
I sprinkled and stirred in the sweetener, and without looking up I asked, “What’s going on? You’re staring at me.”
“Nothing!” my mom said. “We were just wondering about today.”
“What about today?” I asked.
“Well, you’re supposed to go back to the city. But we were thinking maybe you could stay here tonight and then Daddy can drive you into the city before your appointment at that place.”
“Yeah,” my dad said. “We can do the early morning run, before traffic.” He used to do “the early morning run” for me when I was practicing law and would come home to New Jersey for the weekend. They loved when I stayed over on Sunday night, and he would get up at fiv
e-thirty on Monday to take me into Manhattan. Dad would be awake and chirpy, and I’d be brutally hungover from having sucked down another bottle of wine after they’d gone to sleep the night before.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m kind of anxious to get home. And I’m going to have to do it soon anyway.”
They looked at each other with resignation. My dad said, “OK. Then we’ll take you in today.”
“Will anyone be there with you?” my mom asked.
“No, but if I need anyone I have plenty of babysitters available. And you don’t have to drive me in! I’ll just call a car service. I’m sick of inconveniencing everyone.”
“You’re not inconveniencing us!” my mother said. “Just let us take you in, check out the apartment with you.”
When I opened my apartment door a couple of hours later my mother said, “Wow! You left the place in good shape!”
“Uh, no. I didn’t. Russell and Devon must have been here.” I knew they had planned to come over and remove any contraband, but I hadn’t expected a full cleaning. The shades were up, the curtains were open, and the sun blazed into the living room. The drug cave had been transformed.
I kicked off my shoes, dropped my bag, and expected a flood of memories of parties and laughing and drinking. But there was no flood. Strange, I thought. The good memories had long been blackened by the year of self-poisoning misery. But in that moment, none of those thoughts came back either. I just felt “here.”
“OK, you guys don’t need to stick around. I’m fine,” I said to my parents. They hadn’t been inside my apartment in years. I had always gone to New Jersey, or if they came into the city we met at a restaurant. All the truth in that made me feel guilty again.
“What about food?” my mother asked as she stood in front of the refrigerator. “There’s nothing but water and soy sauce in here.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll go up the street to the market and get some stuff. Maybe I’ll order in sushi for dinner.”
“You’re going to go out and walk around?” she asked.
Girl Walks Out of a Bar Page 20