A Million Years with You (22 page)

What I did at first was drink. My children spent most of the day in school, and Steve, still enamored of politics, worked on the national campaigns of various political candidates until he joined the Council for a Livable World, an arms-control organization involved with getting like-minded people elected to the Senate. One of the council's biggest successes was to appear on Nixon's “enemies list,” which brought in a flood of new contributors. Before going to Nigeria we had moved from Manhattan to Cambridge, to a house across town from my parents, but Steve's work took him all around the country. I seldom saw him. I seldom saw anyone except my dogs, because for most of the day I was alone at home, somewhat buzzed but functional throughout the day and getting drunk after my children went to bed.

 

While I was growing up, alcohol was an essential part of everyday life, or it was for my parents' generation—the people who came of age during Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties. My two grandmothers, in contrast, were from the generation that felt the need for Prohibition. They never drank. Everybody else did, though, including my parents and their dozens of friends. Drinks were consumed at cocktail parties, at dinner parties, at weddings, christenings, funerals, and engagement parties, at parties for book publications and other triumphs, at consolation parties for friends who had mishaps, at farewell parties for travelers even if the travelers weren't going very far, and at welcome-home parties when the travelers returned.

There were rules, though. For morning celebrations, the celebrants drank champagne. For noontime celebrations, they drank sherry or vermouth. Before dinner they drank cocktails, during dinner wine, after dinner brandy or cognac, and after that beer or highballs. But a formal celebration was unnecessary; people drank when the sun passed the yardarm and happy hour arrived, in which case there were no rules—they drank whatever they liked best.

Neither my parents nor their legion of friends were alcoholics. Despite the overwhelming number of available beverages, they never overdid the drinking and never got drunk or even very high. They knew a few people who had problems with alcohol, but these people were not considered to be alcoholics because they didn't fit the image. Alcoholics were homeless men—always men—who lived under bridges. Alcoholism was the deepest of disgraces, unthinkable to the degree that my honest, honorable mother and one of her highborn friends responded untruthfully to the questions of a judge during a court trial concerning the mental instability and possible alcoholism of a woman who belonged to their social circle. The woman in question was no longer living, but while she lived she was strange indeed, and had disinherited one of her children, who was contesting her will. But my mom and her friend calmly testified under oath that the woman showed no sign of alcohol misuse or mental confusion.

Hello? I was present at the trial and in my mind was shouting,
Good Lord, Mom, you perjured yourself!
However, I'm sure these ladies had no intention of lying, nor did it occur to them that they were doing so, because a lie is a purposeful misstatement and these ladies were truthful according to their code. A Cambridge lady would never suggest that anything was wrong with another Cambridge lady. A Cambridge lady would not speak against the dead. A Cambridge lady would not acknowledge a friend's dysfunction, at least not to a stranger like the judge, because her friend's troubles were none of his business. So they answered the judge's questions in keeping with their sense of honor. Their faces conveyed their integrity. Their voices conveyed their heartfelt sincerity. Their gracious manner conveyed their respect for the court and the gravity of the occasion. The judge was awed by these Cambridge ladies and found against the plaintiff.

 

When I was in college everybody drank, to the point that my classmates and I had many terrifying rides in cars with some of the drunken guys we dated. Failing to connect the terror to the alcohol, we drank on our own as an afternoon's amusement, when we would leave the dormitory together and head for the local bar. One day a drunken student rode his motorcycle into the bar and zoomed around all the tables. Every woman present fell in love with him, hugely impressed with his daring.

Thus alcohol seemed to be a good thing. We weren't supposed to drink in the dormitories, of course, but sometimes we did. One memorable evening the women in our dorm, which was small, broke every rule the college had. All of us were drinking and smoking, and two boys were in bed with their girlfriends. One was my roommate, so I had to sleep somewhere else. During the night the dorm matron, who lived in another dorm, got wind of the partying and came to see what we were up to, and she was so taken aback by what she found that she decided to pretend she hadn't seen it. No doubt she would have lost her job and most of us would have been expelled.

Aside from things like that, I didn't feel that alcohol was doing me too much harm until I came home from Nigeria. Then I'd get drunk at night and fight with Steve if he was home. One night I yanked off my wedding ring and threw it in the fire. It was gold, and it melted. The next day in a serious mood we went together to a jewelry store, where Steve bought me a new gold ring and put it on my finger. But soon enough we had another fight and that ring too went in the fire. Steve patiently bought me a third ring, but not a gold one this time, just gold-colored.

In spite of all this, I was more or less functional. I had two dogs who had four marvelous pups. Two of these became sled dogs who formed a racing team, thanks to the help of a friend in New Hampshire. I then bought a dog known as an Indian dog—a young, mixed-breed husky who had been the leader of a dog team in a village in northern Canada. She was to be the leader of our team, which raced so successfully with my son as the driver that they won everything that could be won in the regional three-dog races.

Other racers hated to see them coming. My son accumulated a collection of trophies the like of which few can imagine—golden statues of angels with dogs at their sides or golden statues of dogs with angels at their sides—and almost all were first prizes.

The lead dog's name was Coke. I don't know why, except that sled dogs were often named for alcoholic beverages such as Budweiser and Brandy. But perhaps the folks from whom I bought my dog had run out of alcohol-related names, or perhaps, considering the community she came from, Coke was short for cocaine.

I called her Cokie. We loved each other deeply. She knew substantially more than the rest of us about the down side of alcohol, as I learned one evening when I took her to meet my parents. My brother joined us. He'd come from a party where he'd had a drink or two, but not many. Perhaps his breath smelled of alcohol, or perhaps the alcohol sounded slightly in his voice. I remember wondering if he had come from a party, but he certainly wasn't drunk, so I thought nothing of it.

But Cokie, who had never met any of these people before, bristled the moment he entered the room. Every hair on her body stood on end. Her eyes blazed. She bared all of her chattering teeth and trembled so violently that she seemed about to fall. But she didn't run—terror had rooted her. Never before had I seen such terror in anyone, let alone in a dog. I put my arms around her and took her to another room, where she calmed down a little, but she wanted us to go home, so we did.

Terrible things must have happened to those chained-up dogs in that northern Canadian village, but the horrors must have happened at the hands of men. Women who were drinking bothered Cokie not at all. She would sit beside me in the kitchen while I drank my evening highballs and curl up peacefully beside me on the bed when I lay down.

One afternoon when I was resting on my bed, mildly drunk but with Cokie right next to me, my mom appeared in the doorway. She had come, I later learned, to tell me not to drink so much, but she didn't have a chance to say so because Cokie leaped up and stood over me, her hind feet on one side, and her front feet on the other. She bared all her teeth and roared
Go!
My mom stepped into the room and Cokie roared again, snapping her teeth and leaning forward—
Any nearer and I'll bite
, she said—and would have launched herself if my mother had come any closer. I was holding Cokie's collar, of course, but I didn't need to restrain her because my mom got the picture and left. I hated to think what happened to helpless drunken women in that northern Canadian village. But Cokie knew, and whatever it was, she wanted to save me from it.

 

A few months later, the alcohol was making me sick. I was only in my thirties and shouldn't have felt so sick. I went to our doctor, who asked how much I drank. I told him. He asked why I drank. I said I drank because I was always anxious and depressed. I wanted to escape my situation, but to do that there was no way up. The only escape was downward. I'd think of suicide and drink to erase that feeling, I said.

The doctor asked if I knew that alcohol caused such feelings. I hadn't known. He suggested that I stop drinking, so I did, right then in his office, almost miraculously, with no difficulty and no wish to drink again.

A few days later I felt wonderful. Gone were the depression and anxiety. I became happy and stayed that way for many years, despite a few disasters that almost broke my heart but didn't reactivate the depression or the drinking.

Interestingly, before I saw the doctor I had been seeing a psychiatrist. I would go to my appointments drunk—maybe not falling-down drunk but certainly with alcohol on my breath. This the psychiatrist often mentioned, but he didn't connect the alcohol with the depression. Instead, we examined my near-perfect childhood and my uninteresting dreams, none of which shed light on my problems, and when I told this to my doctor he said, “Fire that psychiatrist.”

So I did, and I told him why. This made him angry. He phoned my doctor to blast him for meddling with his patient. But if I had stayed with that psychiatrist, and if not for my doctor, I'd be dead by now, or under a bridge with the proverbial alcoholics.

However, I didn't join Alcoholics Anonymous. I knew nothing about it. I wasn't even sure I was an alcoholic, but what difference did it make if I didn't drink?

 

Many years later, when my children were grown up and married and my dad had died, my mother came to live with me in New Hampshire. She still enjoyed a glass of wine before dinner, and in the distant past when I was drinking less, she and I would have a drink together in the evenings. So I thought it would be nice to share happy hour with her.

I had yet to join Alcoholics Anonymous and had no understanding of addiction. I thought I was a different person than I'd been so long ago. My life was going fairly well, I was healthy and happy, and years earlier I had started to write again. I also had forgotten about depression, so I saw no reason not to drink. Soon I was drinking with my mother every evening before dinner, not realizing where this would take me.

Four months later I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror. I saw a strange-looking woman with uncombed hair wearing a ragged sweatshirt. She was all alone and she was drunk. The house was cold and quiet. Night was coming. The woman in the mirror was me, to be sure, but she didn't seem like me. The real me was a healthy writer with a manuscript to finish. If I couldn't stop drinking, what would happen to the manuscript? I couldn't write when I was drunk. I'd try, but the result was hopeless.

I remembered a woman I'd met who was a prostitute. She used drugs. She couldn't help it, she said. “I need the drugs to whore and I whore so I can buy them. I can't whore when I'm straight,” she said, crying.

I'm as far down as she was
, I told myself.
If I can't be a writer, maybe I could be a whore
. But I looked again at the woman in the mirror. I saw the aging skin, the ragged sweatshirt. It wasn't clear that such a woman could make it as a whore.
Maybe
, I thought,
I'd better stick to writing
.

I looked out the bathroom window and in the distance saw the lights of Beech Hill, a drug and alcohol rehab center in Dublin, a town west of Peterborough. I went downstairs and asked Steve to take me there. We got in the car and we went.

What an experience! I've never had such a good time in my life. I slept for twelve hours and awoke to meet a collection of people as smart as they were funny, brimming with insight, experience, and good advice. Beech Hill had a large glassed-in room—probably a former conservatory—that was known as the Lung and was where the smokers gathered. I didn't smoke when I arrived, but I soon resumed the habit because the funniest, most interesting people were smokers. I loved being with them. Some of them were there because of a relapse, just as I was, but they had been in AA in the meantime and had learned about addiction. Why did they drink or take drugs? For the same reason I did: to erase emotional discomfort. What did they want? The same thing I wanted: to somehow rise up, to feel well and happy. But that didn't happen. Then what? Just as I had done before I looked in the mirror, they sank down and down toward the bottom, the place you find yourself when you no longer can keep doing what you're doing. Some people try to conquer their addictions when they hit bottom, and some succeed. Most of the people at Beech Hill were succeeding. But in the bottom is a trapdoor. If you don't stop drinking or drugging, the trapdoor opens and you fall through. You die from an overdose of drugs or from liver failure or wet brain or some other complication, and if those things don't kill you, you kill yourself. I'd thought of suicide a few times, as had most of the other people. And most of them knew someone who had made that choice.

Why would I discuss this? It's not necessarily a good idea, as alcoholism looms large in the minds of many people. Once a friend asked what writer I liked best, and I said John Cheever. My friend said, “Cheever was an alcoholic.”

I was impressed. Millions of people are alcoholics, but Cheever was unique as a writer. Yet to my friend, his alcoholism was more important than his brilliance. Once you're known to be an alcoholic, that's how many people identify you, which could be a reason not to talk about it.