The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

  After we had finished dessert and the bulk of the dishes was done, everybody sat around the fireplace while Tess tuned her guitar. I was finally allowed to let Bonnie inside, and when I took her into the kitchen to feed her, I just topped up my drink a little. That was it. I wasn’t going to have another drop. I had to drive home. Scott wandered in just as I was squeezing in a little lemon.

  “Good old Bonnie,” he said. “And how are your little familiars?”

  Scott had always called our family’s dogs my “familiars.” It was part of his running joke about my witchiness—this allusion to my pets as my familiar spirits. We had a dog when the girls were little, a handsome husky mix named Luca, who used to urinate on Scott’s most cherished belongings and chew up only Scott’s shoes and belts. Scott often angrily alleged that the dog was doing my bidding, which delighted me.

  “Babs and Molly aren’t familiars. They’re nothing like Luca. He looked like me; he even acted like me.”

  “Now you’re being too hard on yourself,” Scott said.

  “What do you mean? Luca was a great dog. Loyal, stoic, smart…”

  “Mean, vindictive, and untrained is how I recall him,” Scott laughed.

  “See? Just like me. The pair I have now are no familiars of mine. Well, maybe Babs is. A little bit.”

  “Babs is that nasty little biter, right? I think you’re really more like the other. The sweet, smiling one. You just don’t like people to know it.”

  “NO. I’m nothing like that Molly with her desperate neediness.” I laughed.

  Scott asked me to do the trick with Bonnie that I used to do at parties. I can get dogs to obey simple commands without using my voice or obvious hand gestures. I don’t have to know the dog to do this; I just get the dog’s attention with a piece of food and then they listen to me. I grabbed a piece of turkey from the sink and called Bonnie over to me and then I moved the hand with the turkey up a few inches. The dog sat. I waited until she moved her eyes from the turkey to my face and then I stared back at her and exhaled slowly, leaning in toward the dog ever so slightly. There was a pause and then Bonnie lowered herself into a “down” position. I tossed her the turkey.

  “MOM? DAD?” Emily called from the living room. “What are you doing?’

  “Nothing, honey. Mommy’s just bewitching the dog,” Scott replied, laughing, and I shoved him as I followed him into the living room.

  A few minutes later, I was bouncing Grady up and down on my knees and singing:

  Trot, trot to Boston

  Trot, trot to Lynn

  Watch out, little boy,

  That you don’t … fall … in.

  At the beginning of the last line, Grady always gets worked up and starts to squeal with excitement because after the words fall in, I always open my knees and his little bottom swoops down between them for a moment, and he feels as if I might drop him onto the floor. But then I bounce him back onto my lap with my hands. Grady has always loved this; he always laughs and cries out for more. The girls had always loved this game, too.

  Scott finally got the guitar tuned. The Watsons were sipping their coffee and finishing off their pie. Scott was a great impersonator and he sounded best when he sang a song exactly like the original singer. For example, that night he started with “Sweet Lorraine,” and he sang it just like Nat King Cole. Imagine “Sweet Lorraine” with a guitar. You’d be surprised how nice that can sound, the way Scott plays it. Then he cajoled me into singing one song with him.

  “Just one,” I said, relenting. We sang a very slow version of “Sea of Love,” which we used to sing in our coffeehouse days. We had developed a sort of haunting, mournful version of the song. We hadn’t sung it in years. This time when we were finished, there were tears in my eyes, and Scott leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Then it was time for Grady to go to bed.

  “I’ll take him up,” said Nancy.

  Grady was sitting on my lap, so I stood up, holding him, and said, “Don’t be silly, Nancy. You’ve been doing everything tonight. Just relax. Let me take him.”

  It seemed that everybody was a little taken aback by what I had just said, and it occurred to me that I might have said it a little too loudly.

  “It’s just that I know his whole routine and everything,” said Nancy.

  “Well,” I replied, laughing indignantly, “I put him to bed every Friday night.”

  “I’M PUTTING GRADY TO BED!” Michael said.

  Nancy and I both laughed then. We all did. Really, we were acting like a couple of old nanny goats, so I handed Grady over. First I snuggled with him a little. I buried my face in the fleshy curve of his neck and tickled him with kisses. He giggled hysterically and I did it again. Then I did it again.

  “Okay, Mom,” Tess said, looking at me carefully. “I don’t want to get him all worked up before bedtime.”

  “Al-righty,” I said, handing him off to Michael. Michael is a great, great father. I often forgot that, so I reached my arms around Michael and Grady and said, “I have to leave, so if you’re not back downstairs before I go, good night, my dear boys, and thank you, Michael, for a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving.” I hugged them both again.

  “You’re very welcome, Hildy,” Michael said.

  “You’re a wonderful, wonderful father! I hope you know that.” I couldn’t resist, I gave them both another little hug.

  “Wow, thanks, Hildy. Say ‘nighty-night’ to Gammy,” he said to Grady.

  “Ny-ny,” said Grady.

  Michael took Grady upstairs and Bill and Nancy and I got our coats. I hugged the girls, my sweet, sweet girls, and told them how much I loved them. They stammered their loving responses. Then I hugged Nancy and Bill. Honestly, despite their dullness and their tendency to claim Grady as their own personal grandchild, you have to love Nancy and Bill Watson. They really are the salt of the earth. You really can’t find a more easygoing guy than Bill Watson. And Nancy always means well. Tess is lucky to have such wonderful in-laws. I told them so.

  Scott walked me out to my car and opened the door for me. “That was so great,” he said, “being together. Being a family again.”

  “It was,” I gushed, hugging him. We kissed. It was a real kiss, on the lips, and afterward I said, “Why did you have to end up being so fucking gay?”

  This made Scott laugh, and I climbed into my car and backed out of the driveway very slowly—I knew I had had a tiny bit to drink; you can never be too careful—and headed for home.

  * * *

  It took me a good forty-five minutes to drive home. I drove slowly. But I was in such a cheerful mood. Tonight had confirmed for me something that I had thought for some time. I was better company when I drank. The girls thought my drinking was harmful. Well, tonight I had proven that it was the opposite. It was helpful. Everybody had a better time when I drank. The girls and Scott and I hadn’t laughed like that in ages. If my drinking was so mortifying to the girls, I would just do what I had done tonight. Just quietly have a little bit. Just to take the edge off.

  When you drive into Wendover, you can head into the Crossing and then take Pig Rock Lane down to River Road, where I live, or you can drive up over the rise and take the long way around. I decided I would drive up over the rise. I was a little curious to see what kind of a crowd Rebecca had for Thanksgiving. When I drove past her house, I saw five or six cars in the driveway. I drove on past. Coming down the rise, I passed Frankie’s place. He had a fire going; I could see smoke spiraling up out of his chimney in the moonlight. There was a light on in one of the downstairs rooms. There was just his truck in the driveway. I wondered whom, if anybody, he might have had Thanksgiving dinner with. I admit it—I had the urge to pull in, to knock on his door. But I drove on past. This is something I learned in rehab: Avoid jackpots.

  At Hazelden, people talked a lot about all the “jackpots” they’d had during their drinking careers. They’d tell their drinking story, their “drunk-a-log,” and say something like “I was doing well, had a gr
eat job, great kids. I’d go two or three months, just drinking socially. And then I’d hit another jackpot.”

  A jackpot was a DUI arrest, or a drunken public scene. Getting fired for being drunk on the job. For a woman, it was often waking up in a strange place with a strange person. One woman I met at Hazelden went to a bar to drown her sorrows over a lost relationship, and when she came out of her blackout, she was in a resort in the Bahamas with a very nice man, who was, nonetheless, married. These were funny stories, now. Everybody laughed, even the people telling the stories, because they saw that they weren’t the bad/crazy person they thought they were. They had a disease. It was called alcoholism. There was a solution. It was called Alcoholics Anonymous, and it usually included a “higher power.”

  God.

  Everybody was supposed to tell their stories, starting from their earliest drinking experiences to how they ended up at Hazelden. When it was my turn, one evening in “group,” about a week into my stay, I started my story as many of the others had. I told about how, from the time I had that very first beer, up on North Beach with a bunch of high school kids, I liked the way alcohol made me feel. I talked about how it helped me with my shyness when I got to college. How I believed I was prettier, funnier, smarter, and really much nicer when I drank. Everybody was nodding as I shared this. They were “identifying.” Alcohol had had the same effect on them in the beginning. Then they all sat back and waited for me to begin telling about how it all went wrong. They wanted to hear about my jackpots. I continued to talk about all the good times. The coffeehouses we played in, Scott and me, and how alcohol soothed my stage jitters and made me sing better. I explained that my pregnancies were good for me. I cut way back. Quit cigarettes and marijuana and never started again. Then, over the years, how I just loved my drink or two at the end of the day. Loved the way drinks loosened me up at parties, especially after Scott had left and I felt so lost at sea.

  “Most of all,” I summed up, “I miss having drinks with people I love. It makes me love them all the more.”

  Then I was finished. Usually people gave a rousing round of applause after one of these “drunk-a-logs,” but when I was finished, there was a pause, then a polite clapping of the hands belonging to my roommate and a new woman who was in her very first group meeting.

  Celia, the counselor and leader of the group, cleared her throat. Then she said, “I get the feeling you left something out of your story, Hildy.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I thought hard. “Well, I’ve been drinking for years, you can’t expect me to remember everything that happened.” This made people laugh, which pleased me.

  “Didn’t you get arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol?”

  “Well, yes. But the truth is, I never would have been arrested if I hadn’t accidentally rear-ended a state trooper.”

  Now the group roared with laughter. It was funny. I laughed, too.

  Celia said, “I think you should read chapter five in the Big Book, Hildy. It’s about being honest. The first step in being honest, in overcoming our disease of alcoholism, is to admit that we are powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.”

  “I grossed seven million dollars in real-estate sales last year alone. I have raised two wonderful daughters. My life didn’t become unmanageable until I came here.…”

  Why didn’t anybody get this?

  A guy I liked in the group, a very funny black guy named Raymond, said, “I don’t get why you did come here, Hildy.”

  I had to admit then that my daughters had accused me of being an alcoholic. That they’d had an intervention. I always stumbled over that word, always almost said inquisition instead of intervention. After that, everybody in the group tried to help me work on my denial. If you want to get out at the end of the twenty-eight days, it’s best to stop the denial talk and share some war stories. I’d had a few jackpots. I woke up in the wrong place once or twice in college. There was the DUI, as well as some blurry business lunches, various drunken monologues that I had delivered at dinner parties. And then there was the thing with Frankie Getchell. But I kept that to myself.

  It was years before I went to Hazelden when I had my Frankie Getchell jackpot. First, I must explain that this was when my marriage to Scott was at its most desolate. We hadn’t had sex in six years. He claimed that he had a “low libido.” Amazingly, I believed him. Well, I partially believed him and partially felt that I had become so unappealing that he just wasn’t interested in having sex with me anymore. I believed there was something wrong with me. So I was at Mamie and Boatie’s annual Christmas party. They usually have at least a hundred people there and it’s always a great party. One year, Mamie put a pair of antlers on her daughter Lexie’s Shetland pony and brought him into the party. Mamie ended up getting kicked in the thigh, the pony was so startled by the crowd, and then it broke loose and galloped into the kitchen, smashing plates and scaring the catering staff half out of their minds.

  Anyway, that year there was a big snowstorm the night of the party. I had had an awful lot to drink. Scott wasn’t with me. He was in New York, “antiquing.” I was to find out later what “antiquing” can do for the libido of certain people. So the party was winding down, and when I got in my car, it was stuck on a patch of ice in their long driveway. Everybody else had left and my car was blocking the garage in such a way that neither Mamie nor Boatie could get a car out. Boatie called Frankie, knowing he’d have guys out plowing, to see if one of them could give me a ride home. They had begged me to stay, but I still had the girls living at home and didn’t want them to wake up in the morning and not find me there.

  So the plow arrived and I hugged Mamie and Boatie good-bye, then slid out across the ice to the truck. The driver had jumped down to help me climb into the passenger side, and I saw it was Frankie. Frankie Getchell. I was wearing a clingy black dress and high heels—I was in far better shape then—and he really had to help me negotiate the climb into the big filthy cab of his truck. Then he climbed back into the driver’s seat.

  “Hey, Hildy,” he said, putting the truck in reverse.

  “Hey, Frankie. I didn’t think you’d be coming.… I thought it’d be one of your … guys.”

  “Nope. Me.”

  We drove through the blizzard. You couldn’t see the road. The wind blew the snow in great swirls at our windshield and it felt like we were flying through space, being pulled silently into a swirling vortex of stars. I told Frank that if he squinted, like I was doing, it would seem like we were in a rocket ship, with stars and tiny planets spinning past us. Frankie chuckled, and I looked at him to see if he was squinting, as I had suggested. I saw then not the Frankie who had grown paunchy and bald, who had an unexplained limp and a thinning ponytail, whose car smelled of garbage. I saw the Frankie who’d held me so tight those hot, slippery, salty nights on all those other people’s yachts years ago.

  “More,” I’d sometimes whisper to him. “More.” Frankie always made me feel like there would always be enough for me. But now I was in a marriage that was a sexual wasteland. My husband was a good friend and good father, but now I wanted a good fuck. I told all this to Frankie, in more or less those words. He was looking at me and smiling and shaking his head. It’s all a blur, a shameful blur (where are blackouts when you need them?), but I do remember him turning a little red in the face.

  “Let’s just stop at your house, Frankie, just for, you know … just for a few minutes.” I was wearing sheer Donna Karan black hose and I had kicked off my shoes and was rubbing my toe up his leg.

  Frankie actually did stop in front of his driveway, and he said, “Really, Hildy?”

  “Yes,” I said, and then I burst into tears.

  “Okay, that does it. I’m taking you home.”

  “You think I’m disgusting, don’t you?” I sobbed.

  “Nah, Hildy, you’re just hammered. Go to bed and sleep it off. You’ll feel different tomorrow.”

  Of course, I woke up the next
day feeling COMPLETELY different and wildly humiliated. It was one of those mornings when I woke up gripped with the paralyzing terror, the agonizing realization that my drinking was out of control. It wasn’t the first time I woke up feeling that way. I often awoke that way before Hazelden.

  I never wake up that way now, because, as I said, I’ve learned not to set myself up for jackpots. I’ve sorted it all out. I drink moderately enough that I can see a jackpot and avoid it.

  So I drove right past Frankie Getchell’s that night and climbed into bed with Molly and Babs, my sweet girls, my sweet, sweet bitches, and fell right to sleep, just full of Thanksgiving.

  twelve

  “Rebecca McAllister called three times already this morning,” said my receptionist, Kendall, when I walked into my office on Monday morning.

  “It’s nine-fifteen,” I said. “She’s already called three times?”

  “Yeah, she left two messages on the machine. And then she just called a few minutes ago.”

  I went into my office and dialed Rebecca’s number. She picked up after the first ring.

  “Hildy?” Rebecca said. She was giddy and out of breath.

  “Hi, Rebecca. What’s up?”

  “Oh. Nothing. How’re you feeling?”

  “Fine…”

  Rebecca laughed. “I was a little worried about you last night.”

  Last night?

  “Oh?” I said.

  “I was really into the idea of you coming over when you called, but I was glad that you decided not to. We waited up, you know, Brian and I.”

  “Oh yeah, well, I ended up going to bed.”

  This is what you do. This is what blackout drinkers do.

  Until Hazelden, I thought everyone who drank had blackouts. I had had them ever since I started drinking in high school. I would have no recollection of even attending a party, which, I would learn the next day, I had been the life of. “I didn’t even know you were drunk,” my friends would often say when I told them I had no memory of seeing them. I came to think of myself, during those times, as operating under the control of some kind of charming, devil-may-care automatic pilot. I would be at a party, or a bar, or a restaurant, having a few drinks and a pleasant conversation, and then it would be the next day. Only later would I learn that I had driven a group to the beach for a skinny-dip, or convinced everyone to dance on the bar, or even seduced somebody I barely knew.