by Sarah Gorham
Q: My husband has a sweet body odor after even one drink. I have a good nose and can always tell. Mornings, the bedroom smells syrupy, like peaches soaked in brandy. The odor has soaked into the pillows, sheets, even my own nightgown if he holds me at night. I can hardly sleep. I used to shower every other day. Now, it’s every single morning. He’s a teacher and I’m worried one of his students will notice too and he’ll lose his job.
A: The smell comes from ketones. In alcoholic ketoacidosis, alcohol causes dehydration and blocks the first step of gluconeogenesis. The body is unable to synthesize enough glucose to meet its needs, thus creating an energy crisis resulting in fatty-acid metabolism and ketone body formation. It happens in diabetes too. Is your husband Asian, by any chance? They often lack a certain enzyme, causing booze to be metabolized differently (and making them feel as if they are taking Antabuse).
In any case, I suggest your husband visit a doctor.
The cat is back, bearing on his back an enormous box like a redwood Jacuzzi. He flips the hook and two blue-haired spawn rush out dressed in miniature full-body sleeper suits. But no, they aren’t sleeping; they are flying, followed by contrails and rapid ink-slashes. They pause briefly to shake hands with poor Sally and her brother, then like gunshot dash off again. Thing One and Thing Two like to fly kites! High, higher, highest! In the house! No matter the spillage and untidiness! In comes mother’s polka-dotted dress on a string. Down goes momma’s vanity, perfume, and brush. Sally is blown off her feet. Brother grips a doorjamb for dear life, as two Things careen around corners, tear up the stairs. This is worse than any argument or fender bender. Says the fish, “No! No! / Those things should not be / In this house! Make them go!”
The kids knew he liked his ice chipped from the fridge door and a French jelly glass set to the right of his special chair. He had them well trained by age five; snack of Smokehouse almonds before dinner, or Goldfish in a salad bowl. He was their hero as he sat and sat and sat with his laptop, building mountains of cool stuff from eBay—antique fountain pens, Bakelite, letterpress furniture, or custom-made knives. Two dozen Catalin poker chips, spilling over the coffee table and onto the floor! Packages of fonts so heavy the postman wondered out loud if they weren’t bars of gold. The knives were impressive, made of rippled steel, inlaid pearl on the grip, and blue-black blades. He called the girls to his chair, snapped his wrist forward to show them the cutting edge etched with curlicues. Again and again, he flipped the knife open. With each click he growled like a wolf and the startled children jumped back.
I stood before them, straining like the fish from its fishbowl: “Stop, please. Put that away. What are you, Crocodile Dundee or something?”
Who loves the fish? Prickly finned, frowning with wrinkled pink fishy skin. Each word overpronounced, clipped. No-fun fish, too strict, and always worrying about homework or junk food. Too easy to mock, lots of fun to run from with a snicker and hoot.
Shaving one morning, my husband lingered outside the girls’ bedroom. Their noses were pressed to the back window, which was large and framed their small bodies with room to spare. In each hand they held a pastel-colored My Little Pony, and there were more on the floor behind them, piled in a heap. They paused in their play to stare down into the alley, a stone’s throw from the house. On the asphalt, a drunk lay face down, his jacket oily, pants crumpled, and one of his shoes missing. He resembled a filled-in version of a police outline at a murder scene, right hand and knee raised, cheek turned to the left. Drivers backed up, honking, then inched forward, negotiating their vehicles around him, but no one stopped or called. The man had a head of thick, black, only slightly disheveled hair, which unsettled Laura. “That looks like Dad,” she said, turning to her sister. “Make that cat go away!” said the fish. “Tell that Cat in the Hat / You do NOT want to play.”
Once I took a walk with my father, in town for just a few days. Showing obvious restraint, weaving the question around and about, he finally asked me if I thought my husband had a drinking problem. “Well no,” I said, “he can handle a lot. Hardly ever gets drunk. He’s a big guy.” This I reported with only an ounce of concern, “Right, honey?”
Later, a famous poet came to visit, widow of a fiction writer well known for his addictions. She had thick hennaed hair and a maternal touch, waiting all day till they were alone before she took him out to the back porch: “Maybe you ought to shorten up on the booze, friend.”
Spirit signals, like buoys blinking in high sun. In the moment they seemed irrelevant, unconvincing. But, peering out from the dark descended, their swaying lights formed a neat line straight to the shore. I should have paid attention. But he did pay attention in a backdoor way. Their warnings slipped in and smoldered along with his own low-register fear.
The mind grows languid that has no excesses.
—FRANCIS BACON
The sun spreads in the west like Courvoisier with a lick of blue flame. Excess, ecstasy. A going out, beyond, loss of possessions, self-possession, excedere, excessum.
Temperance is like wholesome cold, it collects
and braces the powers of the mind.
—FRANCIS BACON
Patient, calm, sedate. Abstinere. I abstain, keep, hold. Where does your mind work best?
Like so many other writers, he suspected drinking was fuel for creativity. There was the evidence: books published, plays produced, grants won. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, James Wright. Still, he noticed the lapses, skin blotchy and cold; nerves when he gave a poetry reading or presented the same old material to his class as if he didn’t know how. Once, a Target clerk called the only number she could locate in a stack of poetry portfolios left by the register. The student drove by to pick them up that afternoon and brought them to class. “Hey, absent-minded professor. Look what I found.” They all had a good laugh. Ha! Ha!
Sally’s bow droops like rain-heavy pansy petals. Mother’s dress has been dragged across the carpet, spotted with lint, cat hair, cake crumbs. Brother holds an upside-down kite, and the fish issues commands from its teapot. What to do with a mess this wide and deep and tall? Every object has fallen cockeyed: frame on a wire, telephone off its cradle, crooked plates in a crooked pile, vase toppled, pink chair on its side kicking its fat little legs. This is some kind of hairbrushbowlsoapdishteacupbook soup! Where to start, where to start, if that is at all possible? “This mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we cannot pick it up. There is no way at all!” The children’s arms hang like loose rubber bands; they’re up to their middles in crap.
Lindsey B. Zachary points out in “Formalist and Archetypal Interpretations of The Cat in the Hat” that nearly half of the book’s sentences end in exclamation points. There are several ways to voice this form of punctuation: One, with an excited lift like the cat’s “Look at me! / Look at me now!” Two, with a scolding, insistent tone, as the fish declares, “He has gone away. Yes. / But your mother will come. / She will find this big mess!” To add heft Seuss uses caps: “Now what SHOULD we do?”
Zachary continues, examining the book through Northrop Frye’s mythos of satire: “Throughout The Cat in the Hat there is … a comic struggle between two domains, one emphasizing traditional morals while the other is a fantastical explosion of chaos and entertainment.” No wonder teachers and parents were worried the book would displace the staid and incredibly boring primer Dick and Jane. Imagine a classroom turned upside-down by the suggestion of FUN, not to mention AUTHORITY teetering on the slippery handle of a crooked umbrella!
Children love to be brought to the edge but rely on adults to be pulled back to safety. As Zachary notes, Sally and her brother “are watching the comic struggle between the worlds of order and fantasy, and they maintain their balance in the midst of the chaos simply by staying silent, eyes open.” The fish does the talking, and like the fish, I tried to arrest the cascade of events set into motion by someone else’s out-of-bounds behavior. Planted my body before him, pointed with my index finger, declared what he should or
should not do. Control (or the attempt to control) was my disease, and it encompassed things large (drinking) and small (pillowcase folded just so).
But the cat had stolen the scene with his spit-takes, shaving-cream cakes, and over-the-top pranks. I was knocked aside, stiff and irrelevant. This is the lesson for Sally and her brother: no fish rules forever and a fish can look like a fool strung up on a kite string pulled through the house by Thing One and Thing Two. My sputtering speech, command, or inflexible view made no impression whatsoever.
When an alcoholic takes a drink, the alcohol affects his brain as a depressant, decreasing the activity of the nervous system. In order to keep the brain functioning normally, the brain attempts to chemically counteract and disrupt alcohol’s action. In simple terms, it ramps things up. Over time, more drinking is necessary to produce that confident, soothing effect.
One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor. When the alcoholic abruptly stops drinking, his nervous system suffers from uncontrolled synapse firing. Symptoms include anxiety, seizures, hallucinations, the “shakes,” and even heart failure. The otherwise healthy individual has a significant risk of dying from withdrawal, if not properly managed. Hospitals and treatment centers use various pharmaceutical medications including barbiturates, clonidine, and vitamins like folic acid and thiamine to get the drunk through this early stage, which lasts roughly a few days. Then they work on his emotional, social, and spiritual recovery.
The staff at Hazelden knew he was a professor. So the first night they handed him a big stack of recovery books and asked him to prepare for a meeting the next day. Twelve, thirteen different titles, none of them difficult. He read the first one all the way through, took notes. The second, third, fourth. After that he skimmed: same message, well written or not. He had substantial recall. Even doped up with Librium, he was ready to quote, criticize the simplistic sentence structure, extol the points he agreed with. He could pass the test, no sweat. Next morning, seating himself in the counselor’s office, he crossed his legs and leaned back, confident.
“Oh, we don’t want a report. We thought we’d just get that out of the way. Now you can go on in there and join the group.”
What followed was a militaristic routine endured because it helped get him through the day. The bed tight-sheeted, early breakfast in the stainless-steel cafeteria, AA meetings, steps, slogans, the psychologist half his age forcing a role-play opposite another drunk on his knees making amends. An arrogant PhD, his closest peer in the group (he thought), stormed off, “I’ve got this, thanks, I’m good.” No one tried to stop him. Though my husband chose this facility because it was close to the beach, the beach was not on the agenda. For a month he couldn’t phone his wife, kids, even his father, who had been sober two years. Everything timed, scheduled, ten minutes for a shower, fifteen for dessert in the spotlight of the mess hall. Dessert! If he couldn’t have a drink, he could still have his sugar straight like a cloud on the tongue. Oh, angel-food cake with cream-cheese frosting! Oh, chocolate meringue pie!
Chastened, the cat returns in his cat-driven, cat-manufactured, quickerpickerupper jalopy. It’s a Rube Goldberg contraption with cockeyed springs and telescoping arms, none of them entirely solid or securely attached. But they do the job Voom! with a flourish and a pat. Even the hat is a little perkier on the cat’s head as he maneuvers the controls and picks up the cake, rake, gown, milk, strings, books, dish, fan, cup, ship, and of course the fish, who sails into his fishbowl with a springy tail flip. Look at the children’s faces! For once they are smiling, brows high, eyes bright. On his way out, the cat salutes and the fish relaxes just as Mother places the toe of a neat high-heeled shoe on the doormat. She looks composed too, the gentle drape of her coat, the S-curve of her calf, her slender hand lifted, “Hello.”
There are diseases that die with a flourish and a fffttt. The course of medication is complete, the offending organ surgically removed—the story’s over. Chronic disease, from the Greek khronikos, “of time,” is a never-ending tale no one wants to hear about. Arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure.
In the case of alcoholism, the end is “recovery,” but more accurately, it’s “disease control.” The alcoholic must live in real time, stick to the program, keep up his meetings, slogans, steps, and not drink. Ever. Various studies show that anywhere from 54 to 90 percent of alcoholics are likely to experience at least one relapse, and two-thirds of these are within the first ninety days.
Social adjustment is a key factor in relapse prevention. Alcohol dependence froze this drinker’s emotional and social skills at the age it began, around twenty-eight. Now he faced ordinary unpleasant experiences like colds, car accidents, kids who refused to do their homework, claustrophobic plane travel, a pissed-off wife, all without a buffer. I was recovering too, trying to extricate myself from, as the cliché goes, a family disease. This meant giving up control over a multitude of things (especially the alcoholic), disappearing on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for my own meetings with their focus on detachment and healing, phrases like “I’m sorry you feel that way” and “Let it begin with me.” Both AA and Al-Anon have been called “selfish” programs, implying not the pejorative—self-centeredness to the detriment of others—but the idea that recovery must come first or we are of no value to anyone, even ourselves.
He was not a happy camper. Consider the cat without his hat, sack of tricks, Thing One and Thing Two, all his partners in crime. He did not bound through the door, feeling great, up-ending this and that with his bedraggled, swishy tail. His temper was short. He sat in his chair like a stone, afraid to move. And the girls steered clear. Even our Friday steak dinner at Jack Fry’s was dangerous because less than a month ago, it was preceded by a Seagram’s and followed by a Courvoisier. Perrier on ice just didn’t DO. Cranberry juice mixed with soda and lemon was NOT a perfect substitute.
It was more than a year before his nerves healed and he began to feel human again. A new wave of students joined the ranks of his admirers and the ones who had noticed his drinking moved on and never looked back. Another year at least till his humor returned and he was easier with all of us. The games continued, within reason. I noticed how deftly they were tailored to the girls’ advancing ages, colored with a streak of sadness. “Listen to your mom,” he said more than once. “Let’s talk it over with Mom.” But the dreams: a river floating hundreds of beer bottles, a bartender with his hand stretched out, “Double Aspen with a twist?” They kept on.
Open the sequel.
Page one shows a big room with sloping pink walls and a wide red floor. Happy home, everything neat. In the corner is a single white-curtained window, the glass lightly streaked. Peace and qui—… but wait, could it be? Outside, surrounded by sky, is the cat, peering in. Oh, say it’s not so. Oh, stay away at least for today. His hat tilted like a road-construction barrel. His bowtie at attention. He twiddles his thumbs with a self-satisfied grin. He doesn’t care what you’re planning for lunch, or this promise or that. He’s high as a kite, that cat. Raring to go and ready for FUN.
PERFECT
Tea
Highly suitable for someone
or something; exactly right.
Last night was a good time. Now stumble to the kitchen. Fish the spotted mug from the dishwasher, the one from Italy, favored for its height, white crackle glaze, and slender lip. Its footprint is small, mouth wide. No need to pinch the handle or fling out a naughty pinky; all four fingers fit.
Honey squeezed from the bear before milk, water, even tea. Then two inches of milk, usually skim, though whole milk is hardly a crime on Sunday. Cold water up to the rim and a scuffle for the right tea in a drawer with too many herbal numbers. Twinings Irish Breakfast. In Ireland, “tea” simply, enjoyed throughout the day and evening.
The microwave is fine. Two minutes forty-five seconds on high and the perfect mottled scrim rises to the top, the bag floating in a paisley of light milk-chocolate brown. No puffing, gasping cappuccino din. No inch-high foam all e
mpty promise and mustache making. This cup is for immediate, wholesome, essential tea drinking. The buzz begins within four or five sips. Lucky day! I’ve got the New York Times and the font’s not so tiny after all. I’m up for more than Arts and Leisure. A story on deep-space imaging, the cacao’s genetic map, or why we’re smashing protons together in the Large Hadron Collider….
Monday morning: two bags.
Sentimental à la Carte
Today’s Specials:
Matzo brei fried in schmaltz
Wonton soup
Bea’s Ho-made cherry pie
Kentucky bison filet
Steak tartare
Before their dough could rise, exiled Israelites fled Egypt, and thus we have matzo, poor man’s bread, a reminder to be humble and not to forget what life was like in servitude. Eating it provokes a bitter sweetness. Chewing (with thought and dignity) offers both a lesson in humility and an appreciation of one’s sense of freedom.
Salt, fat, and the bread of affliction. A tradition lost on four braided girls in their Monkees pajamas, sitting restlessly at the dining room table. Sunday morning Father rose early and pattered down to the kitchen dressed in his maroon-and-navy madras bathrobe. He laid out a large cast-iron skillet, sometimes butter, a little schmaltz (chicken fat), eggs, milk, and matzo in its bright orange-and-green Passover box. He broke up the hard, flat crackers, dipped them first in milk then egg, set the fat sizzling and laid the matzo down to fry. It softened, he salted, slid the pieces onto four plastic breakfast plates. Matzo brei was heaven, not hardship, when soaked with Aunt Jemima’s syrup.