by Susan Juby
Jerry the Preppy covered up all the holes that my drinking used to cover. His money, his looks, his style, his distant, emotionally unavailable companionship were all that stood between me and what I was beginning to realize was an impossibly black and yawning void of nothingness.
I followed Jerry the Preppy around like a small lost dog. No, make that a small lost dog with a bad case of osteoporosis. I felt like the slightest bump would break something deep inside me. My newly adopted mod style made me a decent accessory for an art student. With his assets, his long-term sobriety, and money and confidence, he was my human life preserver. Of course, I neglected to mention any of this to him.
He would ask me if I was okay.
“Of course,” I’d say, like it was a strange question. That was a lie. I got less and less okay as Jerry showed no signs of developing any sort of lasting attachment, never mind dependency, on me. He kept asking what I planned to do when he was gone. He was nearly finished his degree and would soon be leaving school. I couldn’t believe that his plans didn’t include me. I clung to the idea that my aloof approach would pay off at the last moment. That he would succumb to my withholding strategy any moment. I spent all my time thinking about him and how I could finally get him to develop an unhealthy attachment to me.
One night we were sitting on his very nice couch, and I was listening to him complain about some of the disappointments he was experiencing as he prepared to graduate.
“My prof called it decorative,” he said, staring mournfully at the large painting leaning against the wall in front of us.
I bit back my immediate response, which was to congratulate him. Decorative sounded good to me.
“Mmmm,” I said. I’d been reading up on it and knew that artists needed a lot of nurturing. If you wanted to go out with artists you had to be prepared to listen, to support, to accommodate.
“They all sold though,” he muttered.
Again, I stopped myself from saying how great that was. Obviously, the fact that his paintings had sold during the student show was a big blow. I just wasn’t sure why.
“To corporations,” he said. “That’s what I painted. Art for corporate waiting rooms.”
This was obviously connected to the decorative problem. “Three grand each,” he added.
I inhaled sharply. When I was working full time I made about eight hundred dollars a month. If co-op hadn’t provided food, I would have starved.
He sighed deeply and put his arm around the back of the couch over my shoulders but not touching them.
“So are you going to be okay?” he asked again. It was the fourth or fifth time in as many days.
I gave him a smile meant to show that I was a supportive, nurturing, good-listening, non-dumb-question-asking girlfriend that any artist would be lucky to have. Definitely no way he was going anywhere.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m going to take you to a meeting tonight. I want you to find a sponsor.”
He’d been pushing the sponsor for a while now. I’d ignored him. Who needs a sponsor when you have a boyfriend? Now a financial sponsor I would have been open to. I could have used one of those. A spiritual sponsor, not so much.
We drove to a huge meeting in a part of Toronto I’d never been to before and, as was his way, Jerry melted away from me as soon as we walked though the front door. I realize now that our relationship was frowned upon by many, and he wasn’t comfortable with his role as a thirteenth stepper. But at the time it felt like he was embarrassed by me.
I sat in the first empty seat I saw. I tried to look surreptitiously at the woman next to me and got the impression of nice clothes and careful grooming. Her hair was cut into a neat, light brown wedge, and she had full shiny lips.
“Hello, there,” she said, turning and offering her well-manicured hand.
I said hello. That was enough. I didn’t hear another thing during that meeting because I was thinking about how to ask her to be my sponsor. I would show Jerry. I was an independent young woman. I didn’t need him organizing my recovery. That said, since I’d started dating Jerry, I hadn’t really met anyone else. No women. No men. And certainly no potential sponsors.
When the meeting was over and people began to put their chairs away, I turned to the lady. She smelled nice. She was clean. She’d do.
“Ah, pardon me,” I said.
She smiled. Her eyes sparkled blue behind round spectacles.
“I was just, ah, wondering. I need a, uh, sponsor. I guess. I was just wondering if you’d …”
Her face became grave and she pulled a small, prettily bound pad of paper out of her purse, flipped it open, wrote something down, and handed it to me.
“You call me,” she said. “We’ll talk.”
I could see Jerry eyeing me from across the room. I ignored the mix of emotions that roiled in my stomach.
In the truck he asked about the woman. “Did you ask her?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she say yes?”
I nodded.
“Good,” said Jerry.
“HE’S GONE,” I gasped into the phone.
“I’m sorry, darling, can you remind me of your name?” came the gentle voice.
“My name is Susan. I met you at a meeting last week.”
“Of course. I remember. With the cute boots. Now what’s wrong?”
“He’s gone. He left.”
“That’s terrible …” She hesitated. “Why don’t you tell me what happened. And who he was.”
So I did. I told this strange woman how I’d called Jerry, who had been my boyfriend, although he never called it that, for at least six months, and he’d said that he had to go and answer the door. He didn’t call back. And because I was playing it cool in order to get him to love me, I waited until the following afternoon to call him again. But when I dialed I got a message saying that the number was no longer in service. I tried again, sure that I’d gotten mixed up. Same message. In a state of mounting panic, I’d called one of his friends.
I didn’t want to ask if he knew where Jerry was, because that would have been dependent of me. He saved me by asking if I missed Jerry.
“Well,” I said, unwilling to commit.
“Can you believe the fucking guy moved to Vermont? He’s going to love it there,” said Jerry’s friend and fellow preppy.
I hung up, buckled over, and began hyperventilating.
Sweet Mother of God! He left me! Not just me. He left the whole damned country! It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. What the hell kind of bullshit was this? I never got dumped when I was drinking!
I spent a good hour walking in circles, flapping my hands like a fledgling bird. Then I saw the small piece of note paper with the woman’s name on it. The sponsor lady. I was supposed to call her. I couldn’t for the life of me think of anyone else I could talk to. The only person I’d told anything even remotely personal to since I’d sobered up was Jerry, and now he was gone.
So I called her.
And she listened. And listened. And after I’d gotten most of the story out, she said, “Would you like to go for coffee?”
17
The Sponsor
I MET HER in a coffee shop near her apartment, which was located in an expensive area in downtown Toronto. Even though every nerve I had was vibrating from the shock of being abandoned by Jerry to my own inadequate devices, I noticed right away that she was a miracle of grooming. Every detail was perfect. Her lipstick was shiny precision, her skin alabaster, and I’d never seen an outfit—sweater and slacks—look sleeker and softer. In spite of her perfection, she somehow managed to exude warmth.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “You look wonderful.” She seemed to understand instinctively that the normal social cues weren’t going to work with me. There would be no small talk, no idle chit-chat. She’d either have to guide the conversation or let it die a lingering death at the wobbly iron coffee shop table.
“Are you still looking for a sponsor?” she asked.
I nodded dumbly.
“And you’d still like me to be your sponsor?”
Another nod.
Then she laid out her personal guidelines for sponsorship. It was brilliantly clear and practical. She wanted me to know that I could talk to her and none of what I said would be repeated. She was there to support me with her own experience but wasn’t a professional counsellor. If our relationship wasn’t working for either of us, there would be no hard feelings. If I was unhappy, I should let her know right away.
In addition to being stunned generally, I was stunned at her ability to speak her mind and to be honest and direct. I’d never heard anything like it. I might have been able to function socially if this was how friends always communicated!
After she’d set out the guidelines, she proceeded to unsheathe her cigarettes. They were quite a bit classier than other cigarettes, as was her lighter, which was silver and highly polished. After she lit up, she carefully lined up the package and lighter on the table and breathed out a perfectly formed plume of smoke.
“So, why don’t you tell me about yourself?” she said. Those were the words I’d been waiting to hear all my life.
Out it poured. Jerry, my drinking life, my social life, my work, my drinking, my drinking. My barely functional sober life. My drinking. I went on for perhaps an hour, during which she made only a few noises, of sympathy mostly.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she said. Or “That’s awful.” Her words were beyond soothing.
When I finally wound down, she asked if I’d like another coffee. When we’d each gotten one and had lit fresh cigarettes, she told me a bit about herself.
Her story was fascinating, the way that many alcoholics’ are. She’d had a privileged childhood that included being chauffeured to and from school and live-in servants. This had been followed by a marriage to a much older, very distinguished man, and then a series of losses, both of money and of love, and a drinking problem that flared into a bonfire. She’d gone into recovery and had been sober for three years.
To me, this was astonishing. Three years was an eternity. I’d gone nearly ten months and was having trouble seeing how I was going to make it one more day. Life as a sober person seemed unsupportable. Unsustainable. Or it had until I dumped my entire life story on this remarkably gracious woman.
Walking home after our first coffee date, I was tired in a way I don’t remember being before. I was unburdened. Whatever it was that I’d gotten out in our marathon get-to-know-me session had left me feeling exposed and mildly deranged, but I felt lighter, too.
From then on my new sponsor, Willa, took me on as her pet project. She introduced me to people. Invited me with her to dinner parties with her friends, who were sophisticated professional people in their forties. She talked to me about money. How she’d lost most of hers and how she’d begun to get it back. She answered my phone calls, and we went for walks and had coffee.
I was dependent on Willa but in a totally different way than I had been on Jerry. Leaning on him had destabilized me more. He was the wobbly crutch, always threatening to go out from under me. When the relationship collapsed, so did I. Willa helped me to feel sturdier and more confident that I would soon be walking on my own. When I despaired of things like ever finding any sober friends my own age, she pointed out that there is often a lag time between letting something go and something new filling up the void.
In the meantime, I was mesmerized by her.
First there was the fact she was so clean. Elite surgical units had barnyard standards next to Willa. Everything in Willa’s studio apartment, which was on the fourteenth floor of an exclusive building, was white. Her white bed was made up to look like a couch. Her houseplants had been recently polished. As we chatted, Willa breezed around with a small white handkerchief, which she used to dust anything that caught her eye.
“I love it when things are just so,” she said happily, flicking the kerchief at the lampshade.
So did I. Nothing in my room at the co-op was anywhere as clean as things were at Willa’s, but sometimes when I woke up lately, I’d notice a satisfying orderliness to everything in my sight lines. The sun’s rays filtering through the blinds and latticing my Peruvian patchwork quilt were brighter. The day outside seemed to beckon rather than threaten, as had been the case when I would wake up hung over and paralyzed with thousand-pound remorse.
Willa knew her neatness was extreme. She told me she’d just recently begun using her wastebaskets. “Before that I would go downstairs to the Dumpster to get rid of things.”
“You mean you took the elevator fourteen floors to the basement for every piece of garbage?”
“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. “But now I let the bin get one-quarter full before I take it down.”
She took immense pleasure in eating and cooking and dressing well.
“Oh,” she’d say before she served me something, “you are going to love this! It’s so fabulous!”
Then she’d set down a white china plate of boneless chicken breast, four perfectly steamed spears of asparagus, and a spoonful of rice that held the shape of the serving implement. Sometimes the rice was from a package and then she would exclaim over how marvellous it was.
“This Rice-A-Roni is so wonderful!”
And it was.
From her beautifully blocked sweaters to her carefully applied lipstick, Willa was getting a huge kick out of her life. And she spread that enthusiasm to me.
Every time she saw me she’d say, “Oh my god, you look so adorable!” and then go on to praise my hair or makeup or some item of clothing.
I was, compared to Willa, a schlump, even though I was now a mod and tidier than ever before. But she seemed to see only what was working.
“We’re the same, you and me,” she’d say. “We get it.”
I didn’t know what “it” was, but I loved being in her club.
She took note of my various unhappinesses, mostly related to being broke and being lonely, and did her best to include me in her social life. But she also knew I needed friends my own age.
“Why don’t you go to one of those dances,” she said one afternoon as we were having coffee in Yorkville.
“Dances?”
“There are sober dances specifically for young people in recovery,” she said. “I’ve heard people talk about them at meetings.”
I’d always loved dancing. Like a lot of people with a substance abuse problem, I secretly thought myself an incredible dancer. Like if I’d just had some training, I would have put Madonna to shame. And when I got loaded, I became a maniac on the dance floor. One time when I was drunk dancing at a club that played only seventies stadium rock and R&B, I remember a man turning to me, looking me up and down, and admonishing, “Girl, shake it, don’t break it.”
WHEN THE FOLLOWING Saturday rolled around, I steeled myself to do this supposedly fun thing. I was going to a dance. Alone. Sober.
Willa called to encourage me before I stepped out the door. “You can do this,” she said, like I was preparing for major surgery or heading into battle.
I walked to the subway station to catch the train downtown. I thought about my situation. Nearly a year into my sobriety, I was still as afraid of new social situations as it was possible to be. Walking into a room full of strangers without any sort of buzz to drown out the fear was a prospect that made my knees shake. The idea of standing around in some church basement like the world’s oldest, most socially bankrupt wallflower made my stomach hurt.
Would I be expected to dance alone?
Was I supposed to ask other people to dance?
I’d rather die.
I couldn’t form a clear memory of school dances. If my friends and I went, it was only after we were so thoroughly loaded the events were a blur. I recall people slow-dancing while holding each other’s asses at hockey dances, but those events didn’t really count, seeing as they were more about the drinking than the dancing.
When I got off the
subway, I slowly climbed the stairs to the street. The night smelled like heat and car exhaust. I fought the urge to go home and stay in my room until I was old enough to move into the retirement village for elderly, depressed, sober alcoholics and instead forced myself to walk into the dance, which was held in a basement just off Wellesley Street. I paid my six dollars and slunk inside, sure that this was the most pathetic thing I’d ever done. My whole life had been spent trying not to be as lame as I secretly knew I was. The entire point of my drinking was to hide my social and emotional retardation. And here I was showing up, friendless, and in a state of near panic, at a dance that looked exactly like the kind you’d see at a junior high school, only the people weren’t as cute.
The huge dark room was lightly populated with people. Far too lightly. Quite a few loitered at the edge of a stage set up on the right-hand end of the gym. In the middle of the room, a knot of serious dancers were doing their thing. When I say serious, I mean they were good. They were doing actual moves above and beyond the drunken flail and the hammered hoedown. A couple of them were breakdancing. I slid up against the wall and watched.
The music was all techno and dance. C&C Music Factory exhorted everyone to dance now, and Deee-Lite said groove was in the heart. I’d recently begun to think of myself as alternative, because it seemed better than being a fucking loser, which is how I often felt. Alternative, to me, meant wearing black and listening to punk and indie bands and thrash metal. The Breeders, Nirvana, early Metallica, The Clash, and some hard-core, like DOA and Hüsker Dü. The makers of that music frequently seemed to feel like losers, too. No shame in it. I wasn’t sure how the electronic dance music at the gym fit with my music-for-losers aesthetic, but it made me want to move.
I watched the dancers, and in a minute or so it dawned on me that I was no longer so scared. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see people I vaguely recognized from the young people’s meeting. Some of them seemed to be alone, too. The dim light took away my sense of being exposed, and I was about to sit down on the edge of the stage when a woman sidled up to me.