Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

I knew Lucia worked at a strip club—there were vinyl stilettos and stringy underthings in the closet—but we didn’t talk much about it. We didn’t talk about drugs, either. Sometimes she seemed sober, but more often she seemed lightly inebriated. For all the Twelve Step meetings she’d been to at rehab and in the halfway house, the program hadn’t stuck. She was alienated by talk of God, by the idea of total abstinence.

  Sometimes while I was staying with Lucia, our father drove into the city and Anya came and met us, too, and we went across the street to a small Italian restaurant for veal piccata and bowls of fresh gnocchi. Afterward, we all smoked a joint together in Lucia’s living room and she made us laugh until we cried, doing an outrageously spot-on impersonation of the earnest mustachioed Italian waiter at the restaurant. She had taken a theater class on accents and dialects and could perfectly mimic practically any way of speaking. Watching Lucia make our dad laugh was deeply satisfying, especially when he was stoned and he really cracked up, started coughing from laughing so hard. I beamed and dissociated, watching us all. Occasionally, before bed, after Daddy and Anya were gone, Lucia and I took turns showering and shaving, then slathered on L’Oreal fake-tanning cream from the CVS on the corner and sat around talking while we waited for it to dry. At her place, Anya kept a special schmatte expressly for this purpose, but Lucia was more inclined toward nudity. She fell asleep with BBC News on the radio and twitched and stirred throughout the night, dreaming lavishly, desperately. By morning, she was sleeping so heavily I sometimes panicked trying to wake her up.

  As I had for many years, I felt alternately close to her and miles away. I was so grateful to her for welcoming me, for sharing her home, and for being so nonjudgmental about my schedule, my many plans and obligations, and the term papers I wrote on her living room floor. But I was also wakeful and neurotic, a spy in the house of sisterly love, going through her purse while she showered, unfolding napkins and receipts, looking for clues, planning my reporting to Mommy, all with endless homework to do and a bus to catch. On Thursdays after class, I took the train back downtown to Port Authority, boarded the Philly-bound Greyhound, and rode in the dark back to Randy. I wasn’t sure which direction was home—him, our friends, the rambling punk house where even the floorboards smelled faintly of beer, where we played music in the basement, baked, and threw parties. Or my sister with her stripper heels, Lou Reed on the stereo, half-smoked joints, anchovies and cornichons on crackers for dinner, the Gatorades she drank for cotton-mouth in the middle of the night. Maybe home was Butler Library, where I curled into a reading-room chair under the lemony glow of lamplight, letting my shoes fall to the carpet, and lost myself in Russian history.

  A bus depot at night is always a site of small horrors. By the time the Greyhound pulled into the station on Thursday night and I’d exited and heaved my bag into Randy’s truck, I was depleted, sad, and often confused. My sister didn’t need me there, I’m not sure she even wanted me there, but leaving her alone—abandoning her to herself—left me feeling bereft. I pulled the door closed, kissed Randy hello, and cried. I didn’t understand until later how much my weekly absence and its emotional toll on me were affecting my relationship with him. My punishing schedule seemed to me to be impossible to interrupt, somehow nonnegotiable. The sense that I had to take care of my sister—even though she was doing okay, even though she was the one doing me a favor—was also impossible to shake.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  A few years later, in a different relationship, I canceled plans with my boyfriend when I got a call from my father saying Lucia had been evicted from her apartment and he was going to move her things out, could I come meet him? I brought my new boyfriend with me, and introduced him to my father on Thompson Street. My dad handed me a paper grocery bag full of Lucia’s unopened mail and the two shook hands.

  It’s very nice to meet you, said my boyfriend.

  And you, replied my father.

  I wish it was under better circumstances! I said with a vexed smile. But welcome to the family, I guess! Cleaning out Lucia’s apartment is a pretty accurate introduction.

  I spoke the line so passive-aggressively, but I was genuinely both proud and ashamed of our drop-everything-for-one-another family. In that moment, I wondered why ours couldn’t be more like normal families. Why couldn’t my boyfriend meet my married parents around their wide suburban dining room table, where they would really listen to what he had to say, where they would merrily, wholesomely ask him about his job, about his own family? I wished that my parents would be more traditional, that my sister’s drama would stop encroaching upon my life. That I would feel less called upon. But the craziness enlivened me and exhausted me both.

  In her wildly successful 1985 classic about romantic codependency, Women Who Love Too Much, therapist Robin Norwood writes that women who have grown up in homes with addiction or other dysfunction “where the emotional burdens were too heavy and the responsibilities too great, for these women what feels good and what feels bad have become confused and entangled and finally one and the same.” She goes on to describe the savior complex one female patient has experienced. It may sound healthy to be helpful, she says, but “while to have strength in a crisis is laudable,” codependent women “needed crises in order to function. Without uproar, stress, or a desperate situation to manage, the buried childhood feelings of being emotionally overwhelmed would surface and become too threatening.”

  * * *

  •   •   •

  In the fall of 2001, Lucia moved down to Miami with her new boyfriend, Junior, who was also an addict and sometimes ludicrously high. My mother decided we should visit her. I don’t remember whether she invited me or I offered to go. We billed these things to each other and ourselves as vacations of a sort, even when it was clear that the point could only be to check up on my sister. We went in the winter, just a few months after September 11.

  There was no way my mother or I would get on an airplane. The option was not discussed. We’d taken car trips down to Florida a few times in my childhood to visit my grandmother and her second husband once they became snowbirds, and the route might have been comforting, but we both liked the idea of being brought there, being able to read and look out the window and talk unimpeded throughout the journey without maps or stops for gas, so we opted to take the train. I don’t know what we were thinking—that it would be like a rickety but soulful journey from a nineteenth-century novel? Or something from a mid-century film? Did we think Cary Grant might walk through the train car and sit down to chat? The thirty-hour Amtrak trip began in Newark and felt doomed from the very first lurch out of the dim, domed station. The company in our car, a non-sleeper car because we thought we’d just nap sitting up, was ashen, grim. The bathrooms were disgusting. The snacks we’d packed were long gone by the time we reached Maryland, so we subsisted for the subsequent twenty-four hours on tiny bags of Lay’s potato chips and Diet Pepsi from the concession stand. Somewhere in Georgia, we made an hours-long stop in a desolate rural train station because engineers had to tend to a problem on the track.

  We arrived to find Lucia and Junior living in a motel. A ceiling fan above their queen-sized bed shook the room a bit with its whirring, like a small, constant earthquake. The place was close enough to the beach, but seemed dark, as maybe all interior spaces do when you’re in a blazingly sunlit city. On the ground floor was a Cuban coffee stand where we each got a hot, superstrong café con leche to shake off the train trip. Lucia and Junior appeared tired, faded in the eyes, but tan and skinny. Lu’s hair was bleached and pulled back in a small, high bun. She looked chic and beautiful as an off-duty model with her dark roots, a sprinkle of freckles over her nose and bronzed cheeks. She was clad throughout the trip in various diaphanous micro-garments of unknown provenance. Had she gotten all new clothes here? How could she afford them? I could have simply asked, but there was something intimidating about the way she held h
er secrets. Addicts are like celebrities or politicians in this way—the information they share is carefully controlled and you can never entirely trust it. In going along with whatever story they’d decided to spin about themselves, I always felt a little stupid, and resentful for it. I didn’t appreciate the humiliation.

  Junior had the kind of boisterous Brooklyn impresario energy that was always crackling and making connections. He worked in “nightlife” and had the kind of hustler energy that made “parties” happen at clubs. Maybe they got a cut of the door? We didn’t know what they did for money. I thought Lucia was probably dancing at a strip club but I didn’t want to ask or to say so to my mother and have to weather her reaction. They were living a kind of Studio 54 lifestyle, Lucia waking up after late nights with glitter in her hair and padding downstairs for a Cuban espresso in a stringy sundress and aviator sunglasses. Your sister is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Junior said to me multiple times on that trip, with an earnestness that was also a performance of earnestness. It was disarming, if slightly weird.

  We looked at some art and watched motorcycles rumble along Ocean Drive in South Beach, and ate melting salads at an outdoor café table. We went to the beach and my mom took photos of me and Lucia sitting next to each other, looking as different as ever—me in a black tank top with a long curtain of black hair and red lipstick, her with her short, bleached hair in a baby-yellow baby-T with the sleeves cut off and glassy lip gloss. She’d had her nose done by then and looked enviably small-featured and pretty, less like one of us. One night we went to a rooftop bar—Junior knew the owner—that had beds instead of tables and drank mojitos as we lounged somewhat awkwardly on the flat, wide surface of one.

  How long do you think you’ll stay here? I asked Lucia.

  We can go whenever you want, she shouted back over the dance beats.

  No, I mean here here—Miami, I clarified, pointing at the floor but meaning the city, this whole creepy scene. She still didn’t hear me.

  I don’t know! Whenever! she said again loudly, holding up her hands in a pantomime of flexibility.

  My mother and I stayed in a hotel, where we would collapse at the end of the hot, humid days and put the television on mute and she would voice her concerns about Lucia. She looks a little out of it. And he seems…do you think he’s a little manic? But he was always like that, wasn’t he? Do you think they’re in really bad shape? He does love her.

  I absorbed her worry because I understood her worry—I, too, felt the frequent stab of concern for my sister, a paranoid feeling that was like emotional cramping. I had fully picked up my mother’s habits—listening with extra intensity, looking for a long time into my sister’s eyes to gauge their degree of bloodshot and to see whether they held some excess of pain or fear or regret.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  A few months later, Lucia came home. My mother was so relieved. We drove to pick her up from the airport, me driving, as usual.

  Can’t park here, can’t park here, can’t park here, barked the post-9/11 cops as they shooed us harshly away from the arrivals door. Then Lucia emerged from a door behind us just as I began to drive away and around the entire airport again.

  There she is! my mother shouted, but I was already in a moving lane of traffic. Just pull over!

  I can’t! I said. I have to circle around.

  She’s right there! Just pull over! Pull over right there. Look—there! she said.

  Mom, I’m gonna get in a fucking accident! I said. There’s nowhere to pull over! Jesus, she can wait two minutes for us to go around.

  We circled. I could feel my mother’s alarm, her hackles raising. It was almost comical, her connection to Lucia, the desire to smooth even the most mundane rough edges of her day.

  We had to circle the airport ONE TIME and Mommy got all Not Without My Daughter, I complained to Anya later, when we were all together celebrating Lucia’s return.

  Well, she was right there! my mother interjected. You could have pulled over.

  It has always been like this, maybe because Lucia has always needed my mother most. Her appearance stops everything, redirects all maternal energy. Nothing can compete. It’s still this way. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about—if my mother and I are on the phone and Lucia calls, she has to take it. She announces it with sudden urgency, as though call-waiting is a loud alarm, cutting me off: Lucia’s on the other line I gotta take it but I love you so much I’ll call you back okay call you right back okay love you bye okay bye.

  chapter ten

  Some of the earliest conceptual material for what would become “codependency” came from a German-born psychologist named Karen Horney. In the first half of the twentieth century, the notion that some women had in fact deliberately—if unwittingly—chosen alcoholics to meet their own emotional needs was gaining ground. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Horney challenged Freud when she elaborated a theory of “feminine psychology” that considered social factors in childhood—namely, inequality between girls and boys—to be more important for female development than the lack of a phallus. The compulsive predilection for control that came to be known as codependency was, according to Horney, an attempt to repair old wounds. In an essay titled “The Problem of Feminine Masochism,” Horney argued that women the world over were socialized to overvalue the men in their lives, and that the masochistic tendencies many women exhibit are a result of this conditioning, not of “anatomical sex differences” (“penis envy,” in Freudian terms). In a way, she was saying that codependency and womanhood are one and the same.

  Freud, too, had seen masochism as a distinctly female trait, believing that women are naturally submissive and derive pleasure from self-harm or self-destruction. In a radical revision, Horney argued that Freud’s notion of penis envy was symbolically useful but not actually true. What women long for is men’s power and prestige. In a world where they are expected to serve men’s power to the detriment of their own ambition, their frustration and aggression are turned inward and manifest as masochism.

  But though this thinking may have informed the popular conception of codependency, the influence of psychoanalysis was not over. Codependency (or co-alcoholism) was first defined in the early years of Alcoholics Anonymous, when drunks got sober and still couldn’t fully stitch their lives back together. The whiskey was gone, but the vitriol remained. Even off the sauce, alcoholics lost their jobs, watched their bitter wives peel out of the driveway, done with their shit once and for all. Or they continued to be mired in the same patterns and cycles, the same late-night arguments, the same dynamics with their mothers or children or friends. Alcoholics and their families realized that removing alcohol and “working” a twelve-step program weren’t the only fixes. The disease had permeated the entire family system, and rebuilding what it had destroyed required more than a simple amends.

  Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in Akron, Ohio, in 1935 by an alcoholic named Bill Wilson, known as Bill W., and Dr. Robert Smith, known as Dr. Bob. As early as 1936, while alcoholics did their thing in AA meetings, wives were gathering in adjacent rooms to discuss the traumatic impact of alcoholism in their homes. Family groups appeared around 1939, the same year the AA Big Book was published. It remains the fundamental text for the millions of adherents to the program. Chapter eight, “To Wives,” lays out the codependent plight quite beautifully:

  Our loyalty and the desire that our husbands should hold up their heads and be like other men have begotten all sorts of predicaments. We have been unselfish and self-sacrificing. We have told innumerable lies to protect our pride and our husbands’ reputations. We have prayed, we have begged, we have been patient. We have struck out viciously. We have run away. We have been hysterical. We have been terror-stricken. We have sought sympathy. We have had retaliatory love affairs with other men.

  Our homes have been battle-grounds many an e
vening. In the morning, we have kissed and made up. Our friends have counseled chucking the men, and we have done so with finality, only to be back in a little while hoping, always hoping. Our men have sworn great solemn oaths that they were through drinking forever. We believed them when no one else could or would. Then, in days, weeks, or months, a fresh outburst….

  There was never financial security. Positions were always in jeopardy or gone. An armored car could not have brought the pay envelopes home. The checking account melted like snow in June.

  Sometimes there were other women. How heart-breaking was this discovery; how cruel to be told they understood our men as we did not!

  The bill collectors, the sheriffs, the angry taxi drivers, the policemen, the bums, the pals, and even the ladies they sometimes brought home—our husbands thought we were so inhospitable. “Joy killer, nag, wet blanket”—that’s what they said. Next day they would be themselves again and we would forgive and try to forget.

  Like many passages in the Big Book, this one is a timeless depiction of the yo-yo-ing of codependent love, but it wasn’t written by Bill’s wife, Lois Wilson, the resident expert. Bill W. chose to write it himself, telling a dismayed Lois that he thought the prose should remain consistent throughout the text. It’s presumptuous for a husband to write from the perspective of his wife, of “wives” in the first-person plural, about the unique pain of being lied to or cheated on. (“How heart-breaking was this discovery!” How would he know?) I wonder what Lois did with her displeasure, whether she told a friend or simply washed it with the dishwater down the drain. Another resentment.

  By the late 1940s and early 1950s, an understanding of the particular affliction of the “alcoholic’s wife” had come into focus. An early study from 1943 in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol described the alcoholic’s wife as “basically insecure,” a woman who became resentful and aggressive as she experienced the disappointments associated with her husband’s drinking and she began to use his drinking as a way to “prove him and keep him inadequate.” Another writer cited in historian Lori Rotskoff’s work on gender and alcohol wrote around the same time, “She knocks the props from under him at all turns, seemingly needing to keep him ineffectual so that she feels relatively strong and has external justification for her hostile impulses.” Into the 1950s, psychiatrists with an interest in psychoanalysis continued to develop theories of the “neurotic” alcoholic’s wife. A Texas caseworker named Thelma Whalen wrote of this type of wife in 1953: “Her personality was just as responsible for the making of this marriage as her husband’s was; and in the sordid sequence of marital misery which follows, she is not an innocent bystander.” Whalen even went on to create a typology of codependency, naming four personality types corresponding to alcoholics’ wives: Suffering Susan, Controlling Catherine, Wavering Winnifred, and Punitive Polly.