Double Double (7 page)

Why stop? My health was in no immediate danger; drinking wasn't affecting my writing output. So why stop? Because I couldn't. And if I couldn't, something other than my own dimwittedness was in complete control of me. Thus, my inability to stop began to outweigh the pleasure of drinking.

Which is not to say that drinking was ever an unvarnished pleasure. The first drink was the comforting balm that would have
lulled Odysseus if he'd hung around in the land of the lotus-eaters; he knew he would never get back to Ithaca.

The next couple of drinks had me spiraling upward. Every problem solvable, everyone approachable, every book writable. That would be half the evening. After that, the other half, a downward spiral. You've heard it a hundred times: Alcohol is ultimately a depressant. But there was something positive even about the depression: insight. Insights in this swamplike thinking would be awfully insightful. Feelings would be honest, searing.

Or at least that's the way it felt.

Even if all of the insight and honesty were real, I'd wake up in the morning and be the same old me with the same old problems. All of that expansive thinking was as airy and fluttery as a hummingbird's wing. Not that I couldn't remember it, but it meant nothing.

I wasn't the smartest girl in the room after all.

 • • • 

How do you stop? There are several routes.

You can join A.A.; you can go to a clinic; you can see a psychiatrist; you can align yourself with the group that believes you can control drinking through “management.”

The first two work; the second two usually don't.

It's simple why the first two work: They tell you to stop drinking. Period. Stop, and
then
we'll talk about it.

Stop.

You can choose to see a psychiatrist for reasons other than drinking. I had my coat pockets full of psychiatrists, the last one for over fifteen years. Alcoholism was only one of the topics, and it ran out rather quickly, since he didn't think I was an alcoholic.
(No one did except me. And the director of my clinic.) There's the hope that you might uncover the reasons why you drink. But it won't help much even if you do.

People seem to think if you've identified a problem, you've licked it. You've seen the light; you've had an “Aha!” moment. That might happen, but you haven't licked it. After all, why should the problem be solved simply because you've identified it? You can understand why you do something, but that doesn't take away your need to do it. It's the need you're hung up on.

You don't stop drinking by analyzing;

You don't stop drinking by understanding why you do it;

You don't stop by thinking about it or “reasonably” deciding to cut back;

You stop by stopping.

This is bad news. It's hard to think you can't somehow nibble around the edges of the problem, maybe suck on the lemon twist or the olive; that maybe you can cut this quitting into workable parts.

There are no workable parts. You might think the twelve steps are workable parts. But they're meant to strip you of your ego, your old self; they don't strip the glass from your hand. The only requirement for membership in A.A. is the desire to stop drinking, not the stopping itself. If the glass falls to the floor, that's a by-product.

There is an advantage in accepting this: It lets you off the hook for searching out some plan or trick to get you to stop, that will convince you to stop, that will talk you into stopping. There is no trick.

That old ace in the hole is, simply, stop.

I
never knew the strength of alcohol's embrace until, midway through my childhood, Mrs. D. came along. My mother had inherited a summer hotel from her father, and Mrs. D. helped her run it.

Although my family had produced all kinds of sots, neither my mother nor my father was a drinker. But along came the business partner, Mrs. D. (which is what we called her), and boy, could she drink. And she did it in style: always dressed for cocktail hour, always primped and powdered. Every evening at five, I could hear her approach across the cavernous dining room, announced by the rattle of ice cubes in a pitcher and glasses on a tray.

When I was in my early twenties, that came to be a sound as welcome as the theme of
The Twilight Zone
—which was where we wound up, back in the office behind the front desk. We always sat there in case a potential guest should require lodging.

The back office was a narrow little room that housed a rolltop desk and swivel chair, where Mrs. D. sat; a black safe; and the bentwood chair I used. If a third party should join us, he or she sat on the windowsill. My mother would sometimes stop by and share a cigarette and some laughs, but not for long, since my mother actually worked.

There was another side to Mrs. D.: her inexplicable anger, usually directed at me. We'd pass each other walking through the dining room, and the air would crackle. One reason I hung out back there was to short-circuit the fury Mrs. D. felt much of the time, something that might erupt at any time except within the confines of the back office during cocktail hour. Get us in the back office with our old pals, Jim Beam and Gordon, and we could slip right back into being old pals. Even as an adult, I felt that frisson of fear when I would pass her on the steps or in the dining room.

Knowing this about alcoholism, knowing anything about it, would have saved me a lot of adolescent misery. I knew nothing because the word “alcoholic” wasn't invoked to explain why someone was slobbering drunk; that was just “drinking too much.” One of the hotel guests falling down the stairs? “He drinks too much,
tch tch.
” Another guest yelling in the dining room? “She really should cut back on the cocktail hour.” Laughter. The concept of alcoholism wasn't discussed. I have an idea that the word was as toxic as “cancer”—a word spoken in hushed tones, if at all. Alcoholism wasn't on the table. Thus did we avoid staring it in the face; thus did we circumvent the awful mystery of addiction.

Mrs. D. did not have to be in the depressive stage of her drinking to go into one of her frozen rages; they could happen at any time. Alcoholic feelings persist even when one isn't drinking. We say, “Thank God she's sober today.” But she isn't; an alcoholic is never
sober in the sense that feelings disappear when the actual drinking stops. Mrs. D. was always in the grip of alcohol, whether or not she had a drink in her hand. And the rage was usually directed at me for some infraction of her vague and shifting rules. Sometimes I knew what I'd done, but more often, nothing was clear, I had to bet on what had caused her anger. I usually lost. She would not speak; she would not say what was wrong beyond the occasional “You know what,” if I asked her what I did. So it was like trying to second-guess a blackjack dealer.

Since Mrs. D. was furnishing a good deal of money to keep the hotel above water, my mother wanted to avoid an uproar, a sudden packing of bags and leave-taking (a thing always threatened and once acted upon, so the threats were not idle). My mother's response to me over Mrs. D.'s massive unreason was “Just apologize.” “Apologize for what? I don't know what I've done!” “It doesn't matter. Apologize.” She was speaking to an extremely unapologetic person. I had to stand up for myself; nobody was watching my back. I tried to sit with my chair against the wall in case Mrs. D. walked into the room.

Yet she would do things for me that seemed a complete reversal. She bought her clothes at a pricey boutique (before that became such a nifty little word). One day she left a large box in my room. Boxes of high-end merchandise always have a luster and satiny feel that the cheap boxes don't. From this one I pulled a truly beautiful dress that went to the floor. It was much too old for me, which was part of its charm. It was a blue-gray linen, very plain, unadorned except for some white beadwork around the square neck. I think its elegance came from its simplicity. It would be in style today. The more I think of that dress, the more I wish I had it now.

(Where do these things go? We wind up with a storeroom's worth of things we've accumulated over the years that we don't want, yet the things we prized somehow got away from us.)

Still, there was that anger, a boiling cauldron, taking very little inducement to overflow. Very little to anyone else, enormous to her, because in her state of drunkenness, things were incalculable. Eventually, the reason for the anger would come out, and it would be a strange brew she had stirred up, eye of newt, toe of frog, bits and pieces mixed from her distorted notion of what had happened or was happening. She might have begun with something resembling reality and then reinvented it by cooking it too long in the cauldron, by thinking and thinking about it. We can all turn a neutral and passive act into one bristling with implications and then go to work on the implications until we have worked out a whole little world.

With her, the entire machinery of alcoholism was at work. I recall once when she was in bed, sick but not too sick to enjoy cocktail hour (alcoholics are rarely that sick). My brother and his wife brought her a calla lily in a pot as a get-well present. She pointed a finger at them, accusing them of mocking her husband's death thirty years before, when lilies had flowered at the altar and been laid on his casket. (In the several years she had been at the hotel, I had never heard her mention her husband.) It was a charge so far-fetched, only a paranoid would love it.

The overthinking of an incident, an imagined slight, perhaps, or an old conversation or chance comment invests it with a peculiar power. The bed, the pointing finger, the white lily made a scene out of a Poe short story; it was certainly Poe-esque in its paranoia. The “It” of alcoholism—call it the wolf, the devil, or one
of Macbeth's witches rising up within—you project on whoever is offered. In this case, it was my brother. He was the devil come to mock her dead husband.

 • • • 

And yet there were the back-office cocktail hours where Mrs. D. and I were thick as thieves. There was something larcenous about it, stealing time from the hotel business. Why should a couple of hooligans be hanging around drinking in the office when my mother was breaking her back in the kitchen?

It was more fun, wasn't it? We had more laughs in the back office than out in the kitchen, watching the intricate construction of a meringue crust filled with a cloud's worth of lemon chiffon, or listening to the sizzle of hot oil in a pan into which quarters of chicken dusted in pistachio were dropped and prodded with the tines of a long fork.

In the back office, the edibles were tiny pretzels and cheese crackers. The sliver of lemon peel, the half-capful of vermouth, the Gordon's or Smirnoff as cold as an iceberg. Jokes, quips, laughs. Drinks.

Occasionally, Mrs. D.'s daughter, M.J., would join us and take the windowsill seat (as there wasn't room for another chair). M.J. was taller, older, and blonder; I was smarter. I think one problem was that Mrs. D. liked me more perhaps than she liked her own daughter (it was my misfortune not to recognize it). We looked enough alike that people in town started calling me M.J., although I had lived there most of my life and M.J. had come on the scene only four or five years earlier. My life felt taken over.

In the cocktail hour, grudges were forgotten; injustices justified; wounds, if not healed, cauterized by Jack Daniel's or Gordon's gin.

Sometimes we would repair to the “family table” in the dining room, where my mother would join us without her apron and with a cup of coffee. These were rare occasions. Usually, I stayed behind the desk while Mrs. D. had dinner. Someone had to man the desk.

Afterward, I would go to the kitchen to eat. I
never
missed meals. I always had dinner, no matter how late. No, I wouldn't have missed it for the world or for a drink. The food was too good.

 • • • 

My mother was a divine cook.

“Anyone who can read can cook,” she would say as she was combing
The Joy of Cooking
for a recipe that she would add to or subtract from to suit her own taste (this immediately cast doubt on her theory).

What her cooking alchemy took must be akin to something the writer does with words, adding and subtracting intuitively. A word feels right or doesn't. You might use a recipe of Julia Child's, but it will not turn out like Julia Child's, because you are not Julia Child. It might be as good; it might be better. Something is lost in translation. There is some intuitive understanding of the way food works.

My mother made the best Roquefort-cheese salad dressing in the world. The requirements were simple: Roquefort (or other blue cheese) and olive oil. A simple recipe, a monumental amount of patience. I would watch her add the oil to the cheese drop by
drop in an electric mixer. Too much oil and the whole thing would curdle. The key ingredient was patience. Drop by drop. I tried to make it and never succeeded. I was too impatient.

Head chef, chef de cuisine, sous chef, chef de parti: She was all of them. And not only at the hotel; we acquired a large brick pillared house in town that we turned into an inn. She did the cooking there, too. Many nights would have her driving back and forth.

On top of all of this cooking, she would make slipcovers for the armchairs in the lobby of the hotel, upholster furniture, make me an evening gown.

When I think of this now, I'm staggered by the excess of talent she demonstrated. Was this woman ever appreciated? By her father, the one with the intractable wife? By this stepmother, who spent her days on a wicker chaise longue, invalided out of performing any duty? (My mother was doing a lot of the cooking even when she was a teenager.) By me? No. Nor by my brother. Did Mrs. D. appreciate her? I don't see how she could have, given her volatile nature.

The one time I recall the word being used was when my mother said, “If I had the time, I'd be an alcoholic.” Most alcoholics would chortle at this, knowing that one can always find the time for a drink. Always. I thought this amusing in its naïveté. Now I'm not so sure there wasn't a lot of truth in what she said: Work, especially such all-encompassing work, can keep you sober.