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Nothing Good Can Come from This

Page 3

by Kristi Coulter

You do not have to answer the phone or respond to e-mail. If you do, you do not have to tell the truth to anyone who asks how you are. Not when your truest truth would be this:

  I feel like someone changed the angles of the furniture while I wasn’t looking. I feel like I’ve been dropped in Canada and told to buy a car using only Canadian words. I feel like time is stretching in ways that hurt my lungs and heart.

  You do not have to read good books. You do not have to improve your mind. You could read about Jennifer Aniston, who is either pregnant or not. Imagine being Jennifer Aniston, standing in line to buy an açai bowl and seeing a headline saying you’re pregnant but it still won’t be enough to win back Brad. Think of the dignity it takes to be Jennifer Aniston. No wonder she is so taut. She is holding in the fury of all womankind. You could think of this, but not for long, because you might find yourself forming an army to defend her. And you do not have time for causes.

  You do not have to join Jen’s Army.

  You do not have to meditate.

  You do not have to put lavender oil in your bath and pretend it’s a substitute for four glasses of wine.

  You could sleep. You could go to bed at dusk, in a cool room, with chocolate. You could lie there and remember the month you spent in an Italian village where no one spoke English. It was starkly humbling. You were used to being confident, capable, fluent. Suddenly you were reduced to smiling helplessly and saying “Espresso me please buy?” to elderly shopkeepers who deserved so much better. Remember how you would gather yourself after each heart-pounding transaction, carefully reapplying a muted red lipstick to signify that you were so a sophisticated person. One glass of Brunello wasn’t enough to make you confident, but two glasses made you stupid. There was no right amount of wine to drink, though you experimented tirelessly. Village Italy leveled you, as drinking has now. But the upside to being leveled is that it sets the bar for achievement so low. One day you managed to buy a wedge of pecorino. Riding that victory, the next day you bought sage leaves to fry in olive oil. Vorrei comprare qualche salvia, per favore. It worked! You gave him money; he gave you a bouquet of sage. Afterward, you felt like standing in the piazza and shouting Salvia! with your fists to the sky, an exhausted conquering hero. The next day, you bought chicken breasts. The day after that, you bought chicken breasts and had them filleted. Remember? And then you were elected Special American Vacation Senator. Well. The bar is even lower now.

  You do not have to be good.

  You do not have to regret or repent.

  You do not have to say what you are grateful for.

  You just have to not drink. Tonight.

  You can hate it, as long as you do it.

  You can close your eyes in the summer twilight, chocolate still coating your teeth. Angry and scared. Leveled, so you can rise again.

  Shadow Life

  A year after I got sober, I looked in the mirror and decided I had probably maxed out on the passive beauty benefits of dumping alcohol. My skin glowed, I was ten pounds thinner, and my eyes no longer screamed, For fuck’s sake somebody save me from myself. But the worry lines between my eyebrows were as deep as ever, which seemed particularly unfair given that my actual worry level had been cut in half. This will not stand, I thought, and made an appointment with the best Botox injector in Seattle.

  The day after my shots (by the way, the idea of having toxin-filled needles stuck in your face is way worse than the reality) I left town on a weeklong business trip. Botox takes about five days to set in, and just as promised, I woke on day five to find the sideways commas between my brows dramatically softened. I didn’t look frozen or fake, just less enraged. To make sure I could still look angry when I needed to, I practiced some stern glares in the hotel room mirror and was satisfied that my eyes alone could scare a man to death.

  I returned home to Seattle and waited a few days for John to notice that something had changed. By the third day, I couldn’t wait any longer for the street cred I’d earned by having six shots in my face. “Hey,” I finally asked, “have you noticed I look a little more relaxed these days?”

  John looked up briefly from his newspaper. “You always look like a million bucks, babe.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But don’t I look a little calmer, too?”

  He looked at me more closely. “Yeah. I guess you do, now that you mention it.” I grinned. “Wait a second,” he said. Now I was beaming. “You are so sneaky. Did you go on vacation without me and just say it was a business trip?”

  “No!” I said, appalled. “Oh my God. I got Botox.”

  John burst out laughing and then took a closer look. “Oh, yeah, I see it now,” he said. “Man, they did a good job. You look like you spent a week lying in a hammock.”

  “I can’t believe you thought I would go on a secret vacation,” I said stiffly, knowing even as the words came out that it was absolutely possible. Because keeping secrets is exactly the kind of thing I do. All the time.

  * * *

  Withholding the truth and keeping secrets are two different things. I’ve been doing the former since toddlerhood, because instinctively I knew that the rages and meltdowns going on in my family were things I shouldn’t talk about. But my first big secret came to me when I was seven.

  My father was a stoic, largely silent man. He taught computer science and spent most of his time either at the university or in his home office, with a brief, pained-seeming stop at the dinner table in between. After an hour or two in his office, he would sit in his recliner to read Time magazine and have a bourbon in peace. Sometimes he got that peace. But other nights, the snarled energy that had existed between my mother and me as far back as I could remember would spark into something ugly. If one of us was anxious, it spread to the other. And one of us was always anxious. My stress over, say, a playground snub could provoke an equal reaction in my mother that both justified my worry and added to it; the fear that there were no calm adults around to help me or make me feel better just made me more anxious, which spun my mom up even more. Eventually, my mother’s anxiety would turn into anger at me, which took the shape of tearful yelling or hitting. From these nights I gathered that having kids was a huge mistake you had to cope with every day, and sometimes things just had to boil over.

  My father generally chose not to intervene in these situations, even when they turned violent. But some nights he would get angry at me on his own—or not angry so much as deeply, righteously irritated that the quiet night and quiet life he wanted had been disrupted. He didn’t know how to talk to me like a child, so instead he would ask, “Who do you think you are?” He would repeat it until he got an answer, his voice getting higher and more strained each time. I never knew what to say. I mean, who knows who they are at two years old, or four, or seven? The best I ever came up with was “just a girl” or “a person.” My answer didn’t really matter anyway.

  We were going through this ritual one night when I was in second grade. I was frozen in my usual state, somewhere between indignation and panic, as my dad barked at me from his recliner and my mother cried into her white wine. This time, it was about a TV show I wanted to watch. Or the science fair project I didn’t want to do. I can’t remember. The point is that the voice inside me that usually stayed quiet during these sessions, muzzled by the knowledge that no answer would turn out well for me, suddenly spoke up and said, I’m someone who is going to leave this place someday.

  “Who?” my father demanded. My bullheaded little self was dying to tell him exactly what I’d figured out, but I kept quiet and ended up banished to my room until morning, holding my pee until after my parents had gone to sleep and I could sneak out to the bathroom. When they’d first started locking me in my room, I would cry and beg to be let out, but my mother began putting a cassette recorder outside the door, taping my pleas and threatening to play them back when my friends came over. Now my habit was to sit on the floor hugging my knees, rocking back and forth, mumbling, “I want to go home, I want to go home.” Bu
t that night I felt calm and quiet, having made contact with a secret, important part of myself my parents could never touch. From that night on our family triangle (I always saw it that way, with my sister floating amiably in the middle) gained an extra point, though no one knew it but me.

  That was the beginning of a life where I always kept something back for myself. Sometimes it was out of necessity or convenience. I didn’t tell my friends what my home life was really like, and I didn’t tell my parents where I was really going instead of PSAT prep class. When my high school boyfriends said they loved me, I didn’t let on that I wasn’t even sure what love meant. But mostly it was a desire for self-preservation. A shadow life I developed to tide me over until I was old enough and free enough to build a better real one. I assumed that at some point my shadow and real lives would merge and I’d no longer keep secrets. But then the years flew by, and I guess I forgot about that plan.

  * * *

  Many of my adult secrets are pretty minor. For instance, when I trained for my first half marathon, I didn’t hide the actual training from John or anyone else, but if a friend asked which race I’d signed up for, I’d say, “Oh, I’m not going to run an actual race.” And it was true, at first. I had started the training plan just to see if I could learn to run 13.1 miles. But two months into training, I realized that if I did manage to run that far, I was going to want someone to hand me a goddamn medal at the end. So I found a local race where every participant got a prize and signed up for it and didn’t tell anyone.

  Why? It’s not as if I were doing something insane or even unusual; half the people in Seattle are training for a race, climb, or triathlon at any given time. At first I thought I was protecting myself from being psyched out by doubts or horror stories. But midway through training, I knew that barring injury I would be perfectly capable of covering the distance under my own steam, even if I had to crawl parts of it. I wasn’t afraid of doubt. I was afraid of encouragement. I was afraid people might wish me well and I wouldn’t know what to do with their kindness. So I let them think I was running to nowhere, not toward a goal.

  The one person I did tell was John, a week before race day, because I knew my cover would be blown when I got up and left the house at 5:00 a.m. on a Saturday. We were making dinner and I said, “Hey, since I’ve been doing so much training I thought I’d go ahead and actually run an official half. There’s one in Kirkland next week, so I guess I’ll check it out.” Translation: I registered for the Kirkland Subaru Mother’s Day Half Marathon eight weeks ago, have closely reviewed the course map, and even drove it last week.

  John played it so cool that I suspect he was onto me. “That’s great, honey. Want me to drop you off and pick you up?”

  I made a face. “No need for that. I mean, thank you, though.”

  “Well, can I come meet you at the finish line?”

  “Sure, I guess,” I said. “If you want.” A good concession on my part, because I was thrilled to see him at the race’s end. And also because I was so out of it that when we returned to our cars, I walked straight past mine and tried to get into a Mazda hatchback like the one I’d owned in 1997. It was handy to have a non-delirious person with me to set me straight, though I still can’t believe he let me drive.

  I’ve also played bigger things close to my vest, having learned in childhood that triggering someone else’s anxiety could end badly for me and that the smallest thing could do it. So I’d rather keep a suspicious mole to myself than tell John or a friend and risk them freaking out on me. I also learned as a kid that making irresponsible mistakes, even small ones, wasn’t okay. So when I was pulled over by the cops in my late thirties and ticketed for an expired license plate, I was so ashamed I cried when it was over. At the time, I was working sixty stress-filled hours a week while remodeling our house, raising a puppy, and drinking myself to death. But I hated myself for being the kind of person who forgot to renew her plates, and I assumed John would hate me, too.

  The other teeny thing I kept from John, for a while at least, was giving up my crippling alcohol habit. It stood to reason, considering I’d hidden the habit, too, or at least that I knew the habit was an addiction. John is a hopeless optimist, especially where I’m concerned—convinced at every turn that I am desired and admired by all and destined for success. Early in my decade of serious drinking, I’d sometimes ask if he thought I drank too much. “That’s ridiculous,” he’d say. “You’re just being self-critical.”

  It’s true that I’d taken over my father’s job of habitually searching myself for flaws and weaknesses and wondering who the hell I thought I was and why I might not deserve happiness. It’s also true that I was drinking too much. But that was hard for another drinker—especially a drinker who loved me—to see. John thought I was just looking for new ways to hate myself, and I was all too ready to hear that everything was fine.

  Later I’d ask the same question, and he’d say my drinking was circumstantial. You’re just stressed. We’re on vacation. You had a tough day. It’s your birthday. I never pressed it. I took him at his word, the way I would believe a doctor who told me a funny-looking mole was harmless. Because John was the expert on me, right? He would know if I was changing shape or color, if my edges were blurring. The year before I quit, he finally said the words “drinking problem.” We were in the kitchen and I was half-lit. “I wish I could stop worrying about my drinking,” I said. By then, even when I was drunk I was worried about my drinking. John took me by the shoulders and smiled. “You have a tiny, adorable drinking problem,” he said. “You’ll deal with it when you’re ready.” Just hearing him say the words was a relief. I was an adorable drunk, not a grown woman operating at 40 percent power. My drinking problem was a quirk, not a threat to my life. I rode that persona for eight more months. It let me keep drinking, but it also gave me room to get to know the secret addict inside me.

  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that John was out of town the day I woke up with a hangover and realized I was done. I had a week on my own ahead of me. There would be no one to freak me out with encouragement, to wish me well, or to watch me fail. If I needed to, I could sit on the floor and rock myself calm again, like the small animal I used to be. And I did, a little. But mostly I spent that week doing whatever nondrinking thing made the most sense to me in the moment, even if it would have looked random to someone else: walking around Lake Union after dark, alphabetizing all my books, sorting my lipsticks by color. When John arrived home the next Friday evening, I was on the sofa reading a Gillian Flynn novel, a Moroccan chicken stew cooking on the stove. “Baby!” John said, dropping his bag. “How are you?”

  I stood up and walked into his arms. “I’m great,” I said. “I’m six days sober.”

  * * *

  John quit a few months after I did. It’s been years now since either one of us has had a drink, and we talk about it differently. “Remember when you thought my grotesque, soul-killing addiction was cute?” I say. “Remember when I thought having three beers at lunch on a weekday was something normal people did?” he says. Now, if I’m feeling or thinking something uncomfortable, I’m liable to tell someone about it. Sometimes, anyway. I still keep some things secret. From him, from you. No one needs to know the whole story of who I think I am.

  And then there was the morning of my first Brazilian wax, a longtime idle curiosity I was finally ready to satisfy. I kept that a secret from John partly to surprise him but mostly because I was terrified and knew that the slightest cringe face from him would make me back out. “I’m off for my massage,” I told him on my way out the door.

  “God, I need one of those,” he said. “I wonder if they have any last-minute appointments. Do you have time for me to call?”

  I knew he didn’t have a chance in hell of getting a massage where I was going. It was a waxing-only joint. “I’m already running late,” I said. “But you should get one tomorrow. I’ll make you an appointment!” I beelined out the door and arrived at the shop with my
heart beating sloppily in my chest. Maybe the adrenaline acted as a painkiller, because the whole thing turned out to be bearable, especially once the waxer and I discovered our mutual love of 1990s Britpop. We had an animated conversation about Suede and the Boo Radleys while she held my labia with one hand and ripped the hair off it with the other. Afterward, feeling invincible and only slightly strafed from the waist down, I hugged her and drove off to meet John for lunch at a neighborhood pub. He was already in a booth, typing away on his laptop, when I slid in across from him.

  “Wow, that must have been a good massage. You look seriously relaxed,” he said. I just smiled. “Did you make me an appointment?”

  “No,” I said. “I would have, but I don’t think you want what they have to offer.” He raised an eyebrow. I pushed a bumper sticker from the waxing shop across the table as I slid out of the booth. “I’ll just be in the ladies’ room,” I said, and left him staring at the words “Save a tree. Eat a beaver.” In the bathroom I put on lipstick and checked my hair. I expected the knock to come in thirty seconds. It took forty-five. “Oh, hello there,” I said, unlatching the door as he pushed in. “Hope you’re not mad that I lied.”

  “Nope,” he said. “Keep it up.”

  A Life in Liquids

  TODDLER

  SOUTHERN COMFORT, 1971. While your parents watch 60 Minutes, you sit on the floor and page through Time magazine, stubbing your finger on any page with a bourbon ad: Daddy drink! Your parents find it funny but hide the magazines when your no-dancing, no-drinking Southern Baptist grandparents babysit. Your grandfather still snoops, and one day he confronts your parents by flinging open a kitchen cabinet. What do you call this? he demands. I call it cereal, your father says, because in his indignation your grandfather opened the door next to the one with the liquor.

  TEEN

  HI-C, 1974–1985. You maintain sobriety through eleven years of book reports, choir practices, family fights, and humid Floridian Christmases.

 

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