I followed the boys off the train at Châtelet and changed lines for the Tuileries. Yes, historically, the Tuileries had caused me to feel old and unsexy. But I knew I could buy ice cream there. And anyway, the word “tuileries” was one thing I had always unequivocally loved about Paris. As I approached the steps to the surface, the usual urine smell blended and was overtaken by something sweet. Specifically sweet. I put a name to it just before I reached street level and saw the pink and blue cotton-candy blobs, and then the carousel and Tilt-A-Whirl and ringtoss booth and chestnut cart.
Grieving and unsettled, Kristi Coulter had spent the afternoon reading in Saint-Germain and now found herself at a carnival in the Tuileries. I smiled for the first time in days and then waded in.
This is why I drank, you know. Because I wanted every day to be like that. I wanted every day to feel like a movie montage, or at least to end in an epiphany, or at least to have a clear narrative arc, or at least to make some level of sense. I thought that if I engineered my highs and lows, I could become one of Laurie Colwin’s lovable bumblers: a bit dotty, sure, but also decent, thoughtful, and wiser than they know. I didn’t see that I already was one. I couldn’t see it because, also in Colwin fashion, I was a little clueless about myself. And because somewhere along the way I’d forgotten that just because her people are smart, sophisticated, and surrounded by beautiful things, that doesn’t make them happy. They’re pursuing happiness. By using wine to engineer my life, I was pursuing happiness, too. Just not in a way that was ever going to work.
* * *
Four years later I will be sober and sitting at a scratched café table in my tree-lined neighborhood, the Seattle version of Colwin Land, and I will be in a muddle like you wouldn’t believe: about how I should earn a living, about a married man my married self might be falling in love with, about whether I’ll ever be at peace with how these dark, wet winters dampen my mood. Where’s my daily epiphany? Where is the random sign that will tell me if my aim is true? Where’s the sense?
None of those things will be available—not that day, not on call, no matter how much I want them. And I really do. I want to find the perfectly absorbing job, to accept all weather with stolid good cheer, to have a kitchen full of copper pots and blue roses. I want happiness. But moping in that Seattle café, I will know that at least I’m pursuing happiness in a way that works. Mostly. And I will have figured out that sometimes pursuit just means paying close attention to the story while it emerges in its own damn time.
I didn’t know any of this that day in the Tuileries, but at the time a carnival was enough. I rode the Tilt-A-Whirl and bought some cotton candy that caught the late-afternoon light just so. Someone’s dog nosed me in the crotch, and I laughed and told his mortified owner it was no problem and kissed him on the head, just to kiss in the Tuileries. The next morning, I woke with a wine headache and a sense that I’d still lost something forever. I sat up in bed for a minute, and then I walked to the window and looked at the Paris skyline.
Pretty, I thought.
Deadlifting
“Is life about coming to terms with not living out our childhood dreams?”
All Seattleites get like this by March, our fifth straight sunless month. Has my career peaked already? Does anyone really love me? Can my body still process vitamin D? And Noah, despite growing up in a similarly gloomy European climate, is no exception. We are slumped in side-by-side red armchairs, staring out the coffee shop window at a cop ticketing parked cars, and he wants to know why life feels less boldly colored than his kid self had planned. “It’s not all dashed hopes,” I say. “Have I told you about the time I was a clown in the circus?”
There was this Ringling Brothers essay contest: “Why I Want to Be a Circus Clown.” I told my mother exactly what to write: “When I grow up, I want to be a surgeon at night and a clown in the daytime so I will never have to go to bed and go to sleep. I have thought about this for years.” I was five.
I won the contest and spent a full day as a grease-painted circus professional. Clowning was underwhelming, to be honest. I had no interest in it, despite what I claimed (though it was true that I planned to become a surgeon, for reasons that escape me now). I just wanted to win. And mostly, I wanted to write.
“Obviously, I didn’t become a surgeon,” I say to Noah. “And I didn’t join the circus, though sometimes it feels like I did.” He laughs. We’re co-workers on a secret project whose direction, schedule, and personnel shift dramatically every few months. Half of my closest teammates have quit or been fired since I joined the team a year ago, because, as we now know, clowning is not for everyone. “But I am a writer.”
“So your circus dream came true,” Noah says.
“Yeah. I guess so. Maybe you’re living out a childhood vision, too, and you just don’t know it.” What I’m thinking, but don’t yet know how to say out loud, is Does anyone know what they’re becoming until they’ve become it? I’d been running for three years before I realized I was a runner. I’d been drinking for twenty-five before I knew I was a drunk.
* * *
I was riding in a friend’s car just outside Ann Arbor in my early twenties when an old Jackson Browne song came on the radio. “This is you,” my friend said, throwing me a sidelong glance. I listened for a few minutes and then squinted at him. “Am I the fountain of sorrow, or light? Don’t tell me, I think I know.” He was a prickly man, not big on compliments. And also I spent a lot of time crying in his presence, over work or just quarter-life angst. He never tried to make me stop, just waited serenely until I did.
“Correct,” he said, with his half smile.
“I could be a fucking fountain of light if I wanted to be,” I told him, feet on the dashboard.
“There’s hope for you yet,” he said.
Many years later I understood he’d been trying to say he loved me. I know this because he texted me the song in the middle of the night with the words “I WAS TRYING TO SAY I LOVED YOU.” But I’m not one to rub drunk texts in people’s faces, so I never did tell him that he’d been right. There had been hope for me after all.
* * *
The day after I talk to Noah, I run ten miles. I’d rather not, but the training plan says to do it, and I have long since learned the value of listening to experts. Without distraction, a piercing loneliness can overtake me by mile six of a long run, especially when the weather is this wet and windy. To stave that off, I listen to a podcast featuring two women with decades of sobriety between them. The topic is willpower. “I have none of it. None,” one of the women says, laughing. “But people congratulate me on it, just because I’m sober. They think I’ve been using willpower for twenty years.”
I smile in recognition because people say those things to me, too: “You’re so strong. You’re so focused.” I deadlift a 140-pound barbell ten times a week; that makes me feel strong and focused. Otherwise, it’s more like dreamy and easily distracted. I once dropped everything to research duck anatomy because someone mentioned on Facebook that there’s nothing weirder in nature than a duck’s penis. That led to browsing on Nordstrom.com because that’s what happens almost any time I drop down the rabbit hole, which probably led to a denim purchase and shoes, and so on. This is not the behavior of someone who has exceptional strength and focus, someone you could imagine using her mental powers to, say, make cars fly through the air, or refreeze the polar ice caps, or keep herself from drinking a bottle of Marsanne each day.
It starts to rain as I run another half mile through Montlake, but I’m busy thinking about how silly people are to assume not drinking is so hard. It doesn’t take willpower to avoid the thing that is sure to ruin my life; it just takes a fierce, overriding desire to not ruin my life. In the light of that desire, the necessary behaviors and habits don’t seem like such a big deal. But God knows I didn’t always see it that way. When I first quit, I was sure the rest of my life would be like deadlifting. I’d been working with a trainer for a year, and he had me focused o
n building up my core strength, which meant lifting a heavy weight off the ground slowly, with no help from momentum. Deadlifting requires strength, focus, and ferocity. There’s the deep squat before the weights are even in hand. The moment that the weight comes off the ground and becomes your problem. The tightening in your hips and lats because picking up a hundred and forty pounds requires the sides of your body to suck inward and create a column of power. And then, once you’ve survived the slow drag up to standing, the slower, scarier trip back down, using every tiny shoulder muscle to keep your arms in their sockets, and sitting so deep in your hips that you almost fall over backward, before finally setting the bar down. And then doing it all again. And again. I thought living booze-free would feel just like that, and the prize would be the satisfaction of knowing I could work that hard all day, every day, and survive.
Running up a long hill—seems like all Seattle hills are long ones—makes me feel trapped, and feeling trapped makes me angry. When I get to the top, I put my hands on my knees and gasp for breath, and that’s when the past rushes over me in dark waves. Standing still with my eyes closed, waiting out the urge to pour a drink. Twitching at the phantom-limb sensation of a wineglass stem in my hand. Pretending to listen to a friend when all I could hear in my head was I don’t drink anymore. That first dinner party, plane ride, vacation, fight, Christmas, without anything to make it easier. The shattering tenderness I suddenly felt for the street drunks in Pioneer Square. Those early months were like deadlifting, and what I was hauling up wasn’t just my wine habit but my whole lumpy life. Two lives, really. One belonged to an exhausted, angry, overworked woman who regarded herself with skepticism, at best. The other belonged to the same woman, but newly stripped of the bottle that made the rest tolerable.
“Don’t think of the barbell as a separate thing,” my weight trainer told me once, when I was struggling to lift it. “Just pretend it’s part of your arms, and stand up.” At some point my addiction and what came after had become like that barbell: just a part of my body. I didn’t have to pick them up and tote them around, because I’d made space for them to live within me.
* * *
The dogs greet me in the entry hall with their usual roo-roo-roos. John hears the noise from his third-floor office—it can likely be heard from space—and comes downstairs to say hi. “I realized something!” I say when I hear him on the stairs. “I’m a sober person.”
“Yes,” he says as he makes his way to me, “for several years now.”
“I know, but I forgot. I thought I was just a regular kind of person. But I’m not! I quit drinking.”
John makes it to the lower landing and cocks his head at me. “So, uh, how’s everything going there?”
I’m standing stark naked in a ring of sodden clothes, shivering and mascara streaked, wringing out my hair onto the flagstone tiles of our entry hall. The dogs have each claimed one of my wet socks and are lying by the Christmas cactus, slurping them. My nails are blue—only a little, but even a little is less than ideal.
“It rained,” I say.
“It was a monsoon. I texted you to see if you needed a rescue.”
I check my phone. So he did. The rain had started to seem maliciously aggressive in the last few miles, but it had never occurred to me to stop. We live in water here.
“You’re shaking,” John says. He gets a towel from the laundry room and holds it out to me.
“I’m shaking with accumulated change,” I say.
“Okay, but take the towel anyway.” And I do. Just because your heart is quaking is no reason not to dry your hair.
“So much has happened since I quit,” I say. “I don’t know how anyone changes this much. In retrospect it’s exhausting.”
“Or maybe you’re exhausted because you just ran ten miles in a storm like a lunatic,” John says.
“Yeah,” I say vaguely, but those wet, tough miles already feel far behind me, just as those early sober days did until an hour ago and probably will again soon enough. I’m too woozy to explain that to John right now. Instead, I march my naked body and turbaned head up the stairs to take a hot shower. But on the way I see the bed, and then I’m tucked in it. All the jagged parts of me fall asleep in moments, and when I wake, it’s still light out and the wind is still howling but I smell coffee downstairs.
For months after I quit drinking, my first waking thought was often still How hungover am I today? Sometimes, like now, I still wake up that way. How hungover am I? How hard will I have to work to hide it? I tense for the answer, and then I remember. I’m not hungover. There’s nothing to hide. And I’m only one woman now. My muscles unclench and I lie in bed being her.
Acknowledgments
Two years ago, Daphne Durham read “Girl Skulks into a Room” and saw a book in it. I thought that was crazy talk, and now here I am publicly admitting I was wrong. Daphne, thank you for your persuasion, for your phenomenal eye and ear, and for always knowing when to push me a little further and when to pull me back from the ledge. In addition to making my No. 1 childhood dream come true, you made this book better in every way. I can’t imagine having had a better partner, and that all this comes on top of a decade of friendship is nearly enough to turn me into an optimist.
Thank you also to everyone at MCD/FSG who helped bring this thing into the world: Sean McDonald, Sara Birmingham, Alex Merto, Sarita Varma, Katie Hurley, Naomi Huffman, Jackson Howard, Debra Helfand, Nina Frieman, and Jonathan Lippincott. Thank you to Sarah Burnes of the Gernert Company; I’m so glad we found each other. Thank you to Silvia Killingsworth of The Awl for giving me a space to develop some of the pieces in this book, and to Steph Georgopulos at Medium for being Tweeter Zero of the Enjoli Virus. “I think you might be changing my life,” I told her that day, and it turned out to be true.
Thank you to everyone who provided some combination of companionship, coffee, feedback, love, and healthy distraction along the way, especially Chris Aguirre, Hilary Bailey Burnett, Claire Dederer, Claire Rudy Foster, Mary Ellen Fullhart, David Gellman, the HOME girls, Thomas Mathiesen, Laura McKowen, Richelle Ricard, Holly Glenn Whitaker, and Chris Woodstra. Thank you to Mindy Oliver, the most true-blue human being in the world. Thank you to my co-workers for embracing both the worker and the writer sides of me, and especially to Aaron Nather and Gianna Puerini, who didn’t bat an eye when I said, “Hey, I need to take four months off to finish this thing.” Thank you to Richard Holt for reading me exactly the right poem in act 1. Thank you to Sandra Coffman for reminding me that reality and my lunatic thoughts are not always one and the same. Thank you to my parents for teaching me to read at age two. I love you.
Thank you to Belle Robertson for making the idea of a day without a drink seem not only plausible but appealing. Thank you to everyone I’ve ever met who has heard me say, “No thanks, I don’t drink,” without responding, “Really? Why not?”
Most of all, thank you to John Sindelar, my Big Love, my legal boyfriend. And to Linus and Ella: the most shoe-box-headed, Frito-footed, blissfully addled dogs on earth, whom I love in exactly equal amounts.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristi Coulter holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan. She is a former Ragdale resident and the recipient of a grant from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Marie Claire, Vox, Quartz, and other publications. She lives in Seattle. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Debrief
Mammal, Fish, or Bird
Notes to Self: Rachel’s Wedding
Permission
Shadow Life
A Life in Liquids
Want Not
Do You Have a Drinking Problem?
Going Long
Notes to Self: Neil Finn Concert
Girl Skulks into a Room
Desire Lines
The Barn
How to Be a Moderate Drinker
Pussy Triptych
Useful
Blackberry
Notes to Self: Election Night 2016
Fascination
Elephant Gray
Happy Sometimes
Deadlifting
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
MCD × FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Kristi Coulter
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71708-7
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