Drink_The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

by Ann Dowsett Johnston

  Claire perks up. “Ketel One? That your brand? Me, too.”

  “Change the subject,” says Jane.

  Claire looks put out. “Hey, Ann, do you know why your arrival was delayed by a week?”

  “Be quiet,” says Jane.

  “The guy in the room next to yours offed himself,” says Claire. “Hanged himself from the bedpost.”

  “That’s not possible,” says Jonathan.

  “Well, I don’t know if that part’s true. But he hanged himself all right.” Claire sucks her teeth for a moment. “Said at lunch that he couldn’t imagine living without drinking. I guess he was telling the truth.”

  “That’s enough, Claire,” says Jane.

  “I’m just saying,” says Claire, pouting at the menu.

  After dinner, there are urine tests, and then two options: bed or watching Law & Order reruns with Charlotte. Charlotte is a self-confessed “frequent seeker of sobriety”—this is her sixth attempt at rehab—and she has established solid control of the remote. Her home group, as she’s fond of repeating, is the “Church of the Heavenly Dressed” in Manhattan. Charlotte misses her dogs. She carries photos of them in her purse: they’re with her housekeeper. Charlotte loathes Claire. The feeling is mutual.

  “Ann, let’s play Scrabble.” Claire is holding the board like a shield against her chest. I choose bed.

  On Sunday we are given two choices: a trip to the mall or a visit to the crafts room. I choose the crafts room, which doubles as a gym, stacks of old magazines lining the wall beside a treadmill and yoga mats. Jane decides to join me. So does Claire, who marches ahead.

  We gather construction paper, markers, blunt-nosed scissors, and a pile of magazines. My project: finishing a collage of what I value in my life for Monday morning. I have spent three decades in the magazine business, and this is what it’s come to.

  “I want that Vanity Fair,” says Claire. “I saw it first.”

  “No, you didn’t, Claire,” says Jane.

  “I’m getting on the treadmill,” says Claire. “I’m going home fit. And you know what? You can all fuck yourselves.”

  I pick up a copy of O: The Oprah Magazine and find a picture of the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön—“One of the wisest women living in the world!” Her face calms me. I decide to cut her out. Carefully, I snip around her youthful blond-bobbed head and choose a place for her in the left corner of my collage.

  The crafts room is quiet. I leaf through the magazines until I find a double-paged spread of blue water. For just a moment, I let myself imagine it’s early morning at the houseboat. The water is lapping by the window, and Jake is beside me, naked, his arms wrapped tightly around me. The otters have come back. They’re raiding the minnow bucket. I can hear them splashing.

  Now I hear the treadmill.

  I change the tape. As I reach for the glue stick, I try to think about my son’s face and his deep voice. This is what I do at the dentist’s, just when the needle is going in.

  Most of all, I try not to think of the last awful months. Leaving my work at McGill, leaving Montreal. Crash-landing back home in Toronto, an empty future looming before me. Getting drunk at my cousin’s wake. (How did I get home?) Passing out at the Royal Ontario Museum, in my Hugo Boss dress. Nicholas confronting me about going to rehab. “You’re slurring. This is obscene.” Jake, awake in the night, worried. Staring at the ceiling. Gillian pouring tea for me and telling me I had to do something. Taking her bracelet off her own arm and handing it to me: my sobriety bracelet, emblazoned with “Never, never, never give up.” Churchill’s words, for battle.

  I am doing battle. I am battling for consciousness. I want to go to bed sober. I want to remember my dreams. I want to know myself without alcohol.

  Here I have a yellow room with wide pine floors, three Oriental rugs, a beautiful desk by a large window, and my own bathroom. Here I have privacy, and time to heal from my so-called progressive disease. Except it doesn’t feel like a disease. I am one month sober, and I feel normal.

  Everyone else here has had to detox before arriving. They read the New York Times in the morning, and discuss the collapse of Bear Stearns, sharing names of mutual friends working on Wall Street.

  I know they are in more trouble than I am. Have I taken a sledgehammer to a flea? Perhaps. Maybe I could have just stayed home and gone to meetings? Too risky. I am determined to catch this thing before it lands me where my mother ended up. Still, I try not to think about how much the experience is costing me.

  This is where my mind goes, as I cut and paste. I find a picture of bonefish in the blue Bahamian water, and I scissor around it. Kindergarten for the newly sober. It’s Sunday afternoon, in rehab.

  Massachusetts, Winter of 2008

  I wake every morning in my yellow room, centered and happy: three weeks in and the snake of addiction is starting to retreat. I can feel it happening. I draw it constantly in our craft sessions: a snake slithering down one shoulder, a bird lighting on the other. I put this image in the middle of the collage, the one with Pema Chödrön’s beaming face.

  How will I keep the snake away? How will I do this on my own?

  Yesterday’s message from the group director: “It is inappropriate for you to have a lot of confidence when you leave here. Just decide that you will not drink. Put this on your fridge: ‘Having confidence and having resolve are not the same thing.’ The biggest temptation will be to check out, to numb. That is the worst place to go. Don’t spend a lot of time shopping for a program: choose an approach. This is chronic. You have to talk about it.”

  Privately, he said to me: “I think your commitment to sobriety is pretty unshakable.”

  I am not so certain. I haven’t run the gauntlet of summer evenings at the houseboat, of dinners out, of New Year’s Eve. Of airplanes, of the Bahamas.

  Our session with the good doctor from Harvard was different, as it always is. He speaks to us on a different plane. Yesterday, he quoted Henry van Dyke: “For love is but the heart’s immortal thirst / to be completely known and all forgiven.” To be completely known, and all forgiven: this is what we all wish for. The woman whose husband had her arrested in her nightie, the man who disappeared into a vodka bottle when he lost his son to suicide. We all want to start fresh. I want to start afresh, but right now I am in a holding tank: a beautiful, expensive holding tank south of the border.

  Nicholas has come to visit me, and spent some time lying on the white coverlet in my bedroom, confiding to me about his life. A breakup, a new relationship. Back to normal: we are side by side, lying in the late afternoon sun, talking about what will come next for him at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is happy I am here, this boy who once turned to me for an answer to this question: “What hurts more: porcupine quills up the nose or having a baby?” And this one: “Do monkeys get periods?” This boy, who once believed he had found pirate’s gold when he found spray-painted shells I had buried in the sand, believes I can stay sober. He has left, confident that I will keep to my course. I know it’s a crapshoot.

  I press play on Bach’s “Sleepers, Awake,” my daily ritual, and move to the window to check out the cars in the parking lot. Good: Terry’s ancient blue BMW is there, snug close to the building. This means I will learn something today. The Buddhist assistant Terry, who says God is in the space between the in and the out breath, and the good doctor from Harvard: these are the two who teach me, here in rehab. These two speak to my hungry soul.

  In the little library, I have found a copy of Stephanie Covington’s book A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps. “In the process of defining our own spirituality, we may find that the spiritual language of the Steps reflects traditional Christian religious images and practices. Recovering women often struggle with the masculine language in the program and choose to substitute ideas and language that include feminine power. . . . Translating the language and cultural experience of the Twelve Steps for ourselves is an important aspect of recovery.” Amen, I say.


  Terry, the good doctor, Covington. Beside my bed: Pema Chödrön, Bhante Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English, Jonathan Diamond’s Narrative Means to Sober Ends, Lisa Najavits’s Seeking Safety, fresh diaries for more writing. I am beginning to piece together my crazy quilt of recovery, to make it my own. Bit by bit, I am emerging from the dark. In my diary, Marion Woodman’s words: “Healing depends on listening with the inner ear—stopping the incessant blather, and listening. Fear keeps us chattering—fear that wells up from the past, fear of blurting out what we really fear, fear of future repercussions. It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.”

  The Houseboat, Summer of 2009

  In my peer support group, they warn you that you’ll meet people who are not the same as yourself. You never drank in the morning. You never crashed your car. You never even drove drunk. You never hid booze at the office. Endless “nevers.”

  You’ll say these things, and you’ll be right. And you’ll leave.

  Look for the similarities, they tell you. Don’t quarrel with the details. Stay safely in the middle.

  But where is the middle? In the city, an older gentleman and I share a sobriety date: November 3, 2008. That’s about it. He had twenty years of sobriety when I first showed up, but he decided he could handle a drink. He lost everything, including several teeth. At first, I avoided looking at him. I found him too frightening. That changed when we began stacking chairs together. I try to keep an open mind: everyone has something to teach me.

  Still, nothing has prepared me for the cellar of the Bethesda Lutheran church in downtown Kenora, Ontario. Jake drops me off, promising to return on time. I walk down the black metal steps, and find my way past the furnace room. I stir some Coffee-mate in a styrofoam cup, and try to ignore the small insects scurrying by my feet.

  For more than forty-five minutes, the meeting is relentlessly grim. Finally, Ray has the floor. “It was the goldfish—the goldfish saved me,” he begins. The small crowd is solemn. He continues: “I know, you’ve all heard about my goldfish. But that was all I had, after my wife and the kids left. And I was down on my knees, praying to be saved. Four days, I forgot to feed those goldfish. All of a sudden, I remembered them. So I got up off my knees and I fed them.”

  Ray looks as if he might cry. Instead, he beams. The others nod. “And of course, they all swam to the surface, because they were hungry.” Everyone nods again. The whole room shares in his victory. Ray’s done a good job, infusing this sad little evening with some drama. “Yep, they just did what goldfish do. They swam to the surface. And you know? I knew it was a sign.”

  This is what sobriety feels like. You swim to the surface, you feed yourself and your pets, and you consider it a major victory to be able to remember all this.

  You brush your teeth before bed. You wash your face, without fail. You put on your pajamas, and you tuck yourself in.

  There is no wine at your side. There is no wine in the fridge. There is tea, and maybe an orange, or a ginger cookie. Your dog body, the one you have dragged through misery and shame and grief, comes to expect the quiet. It looks over at you and begins to trust that you will feed it, and water it. “Let’s rest,” you say. You scratch its head. It walks up the stairs, climbs into bed. It wants no surprises. Welcome to the Holiday Inn of new sobriety.

  “Can you move the covers, baby? I feel like Charles Atlas trying to get the truck off his chest.” This is Jake, making me laugh in bed. I move the heavy Hudson Bay blankets, blow out the candle, and together, we look at the stars through the high window overhead. We sleep the sleep of the untroubled.

  Mornings do not taunt me the way they used to, wagging a finger, cornering me with evidence. Mornings are sweet, benign, like dimwitted aunts. They meander without transgression, move slowly without lurching. They say grace, and smile.

  Lunchtime is not much different. There are no Bloody Caesars, fringed with salt, calling my name. No jaunty little heels of Pinot Grigio nestled in the fridge by the Louisiana Hot Sauce. Just Fresca. “You know, I think I’ll have a Fresca,” I say, as if it were a meaningful choice. And it is. Jake says he’ll have cranberry, cut with water, thanks. Another meal passes, liquor-free, as innocent as a child’s birthday party, and just about as sweet.

  At the cocktail hour, I lay out fine cheese and crackers, homemade guacamole and chips. Oral distractions. I read to him, a chapter each night from Charlotte’s Web. “I can’t believe no one read to you when you were kids.” “There were seven of us. Why don’t we read some more?” We sit beside one another on the driftwood bench, listening to E. B. White’s words: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” Jake rubs my back. Life is beyond good.

  Still, there are moments that are unpredictable. I reach for some ice at the Gardners’ cottage, and a bottle of Tanqueray, chilling for cocktails, tumbles out, kamikaze-like, into my hands.

  The first summer, before I managed some decent sobriety, alcohol kept jumping out of cupboards and into my line of vision. Everywhere I turned, it found me. On billboards, on the pages of magazines. I felt hunted. And just when I was certain I had locked the front door, and battened down every hatch, it snuck in the back, tiptoeing in, under the guise of “grief.” A sudden death, a canoeing accident, a freak drowning, and poof, a drink appeared in my hand, seemingly without warning.

  It’s important to know this: your alcoholism is good at disguises. It will sneak in when you’re not looking, made up as the Party Girl. You’ll find a red drink ticket on a bathroom floor and actually pick it up, head to the bar, use it. Like a teenager, a thief.

  That’s what I’ve had to learn: your addiction will find a trapdoor—any damn trapdoor. That first August, it came in the guise of “saving the relationship.” As in, if I just buy this little traveling six-pack of Beringer White Zinfandel, and quaff those little plastic bottles bold-facedly as the two of us cruise down the highway, we will be as happy as clams. Jokingly, I call it my Celtic Blood Disorder, but it’s more serious than that. I used to say: “I was overserved.” “You weren’t overserved,” Jake would say. And he was right. I was complicit in the whole affair: a sin of commission.

  Had I known what last winter was to bring—or even the fall—I would have slipped into the water with stones in my shoes, and never dreamed of seeing summer again. That first true winter of sobriety was bracing: a rigorous marathon of determined effort. And before I made my final peace with quitting, there was a major death, a suicidal patch, and a terrific binge that reduced me to my knees. No, this is not for the faint of heart.

  Toronto, Winter of 2009

  Coming on Christmas and Paul Quarrington—the novelist and musician, one of Jake’s best friends—is dying of lung cancer. He has just performed a wonderful solo gig, and now we’re sitting at Proof the Vodka Bar on Bloor Street. All the others are drinking liquor. I just want some San Pellegrino. There is the softest look on Paul’s face when he places my order. I am grateful, and totally raw: Jake is talking of moving to the West Coast. Things are heading in the wrong direction: what once felt so solid is evaporating at a reckless pace.

  Toronto, March of 2010

  I am having coffee with my friend Ted, who is only a few months sober. He has just broken up with his beautiful wife, and he’s devastated. They have small children. “Maybe you’ll get back together?” I say. “No,” says Ted. “She won’t forgive me for lying to her about drinking. Besides, you know what they say: You can’t wake someone who’s only pretending to be asleep.”

  I tell Ted of Jake’s plans to move to Vancouver. He says: “This is not good. You know that, right?”

  I am silent, but in the pit of my stomach, I know it’s true. There have been some bitter quarrels on a trip to Mexico. In fact, we have had two of the worst fights of our relationship in recent months. I can feel the rumbling of an earthquake, and I don’t know how to stop it. I want to live together, b
adly. I am tired of the long-distance arrangement.

  It’s an Updike sort of conundrum we’re stuck in: an all-too-modern love riddle with no easy answer. Ann loves Jake; they each have a child, with ex-spouses in different cities, cities where they each have roots. Where should they settle?

  Ann knows it will not be her city, Toronto—Toronto is not right for Jake. Jake proposes a commute: every two weeks, from Toronto to a third city, Vancouver. Ann is frightened: she knows this is untenable. What they do not say: Ann should move to Jake’s city, Winnipeg. Ann is terrified to bring this up. She fears it is not what Jake wants to hear. She wants to be near him, always. Ann is at a total loss. Stalemate.

  Toronto, April 2010

  On my fiftieth birthday, Jake gave me a beautiful photo album with our history in it, with Christopher Marlowe’s words inscribed in the front: “Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove.”

  We draw diagrams on napkins, trying to work out what will happen. Meanwhile, my heart is breaking. I wear our engagement ring, but I do not hear the words I want to hear: “Come live with me.” I am certain I am his love.

  Yesterday, I drove Jake to work and recited the one prayer I remain faithful to:

  I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,

  For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

  For love would be love of the wrong thing. . . .

  I turned my head at a stoplight, and there were tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked.

  “I love you, baby. You have such a beautiful soul.”

  Toronto, Winter of 2011

  No one warns you about this, but it’s true: when you are stone-cold sober, the past will start sneaking up on you. All that you have drowned with alcohol will swim to the surface. Depression returns, with its old familiar face. Old anxieties appear. It’s deeply dispiriting, and it confounded me daily. Jungian Marion Woodman wrote, in Addiction to Perfection: “One of the greatest difficulties in dealing with food addicts, as with alcoholics, is helping them to overcome their sense of despair when they lose the high associated with these addictions.”