Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife

by Brenda Wilhelmson

  I took Van’s crib upstairs to their bedroom and set it up while Charlie got a drink and took Van to the basement where other little kids were playing. I made my way to the kitchen and scanned it for the LaCroix cooler.

  “It’s outside, Brenda,” Joel said as he shook martinis.

  I grabbed a bottle of water and came back into the kitchen to get a wineglass. I’d taken up drinking Pellegrino with a slice of lemon in a wineglass at home because I liked my stemware almost as much as I liked my wine. Kelly was handing out the last wineglass to another guest. “I just found this chardonnay,” Kelly was saying as she poured wine into the woman’s glass. “You’ll love it!” I turned away and walked downstairs to look for Max and Van.

  Kelly had set up a craft table in the basement, and Max and a bunch of kids were standing around it decorating cigar boxes with glue, glitter, buttons, and seashells. Van was sitting on the floor playing with toy cars. Joan, one of Kelly’s old high school friends, was standing off to the side watching her son and daughter glue feathers on their boxes. I sidled up next to her.

  “You’re not drinking,” Joan said, nodding at my bottle.

  “I’m taking a break,” I said. “I was drinking every day.”

  A worried look crossed her face. “I drink every day,” Joan said. She leaned over and whispered, “I’ve been thinking about giving up pot. I don’t want the kids to find out I smoke.”

  “I hear you,” I said, giving her a knowing smile.

  I went upstairs and immediately ran into Kelly’s close friend, Nosey Rosy. “So, you’re not drinking,” she said loudly.

  “Why?”

  Thanks Kelly, I thought to myself. I spied Candy, who is not a big drinker, excused myself, and walked away from Nosey Rosy. Candy looked at my LaCroix and said, “You’re not having a martini with Bill?” Candy’s husband, Bill, made a mean martini. I shrugged and excused myself to put Van to bed. I went back downstairs, got Van, and took him up to Kelly and Joel’s bedroom. After I tucked him in, I went out to the deck where the nonalcoholic beverages were and lit up a cigarette. Joel was out there stoking a fire pit. He lit a cigarette, too, and we smoked together.

  “I’m thinking about having a martini,” I told him.

  “Nah, don’t,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said. We finished our cigarettes and reentered the house.

  “Someone’s kid is crying upstairs,” a guy shouted.

  I jogged upstairs and saw the door to Kelly and Joel’s bedroom had been flung open. Van was standing up in his crib screaming. I lifted him out and hugged him. Van stopped crying. He rubbed his eyes with his fists and nestled his head into the crook of my neck. I held him for a long time. It felt so good. I kissed Van and tucked him back into his crib. I tiptoed out of the room and shut the door. A group of kids, Max included, was racing through the hallway, running into various bedrooms and slamming the doors shut. A bedroom door flew open and a pack of kids ran past me into another bedroom and slammed that door shut. I opened the door and scanned their faces. Most were ignoring me. “All of you stay out of Kelly and Joel’s bedroom,” I announced. I zeroed in on Max. “Make sure,” I told him, wagging my finger, “that these kids don’t go into Kelly and Joel’s room because Van’s sleeping in there.” Max nodded. I went downstairs. A few minutes later, Van was screaming again. I repeated the drill and put Van down for a third time. A short while later, Van was screaming again. I packed up his crib, thanked Kelly and Joel, and told Max we’d pick him up in the morning. Charlie and Van and I left. We got home and I put Van to bed and went to bed myself. Fuck New Year’s Eve.

  [Saturday, January 4]

  Every winter my friend Emily (the one I had one Cosmo and a glass of wine with at Wildfire) and her sister, Anne, throw a retreat weekend at their parents’ house in Door County, Wisconsin. The house, which could double as a modern art museum, has floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook Green Bay. Emily and Anne each invite three or four of their friends and the criteria for being invited is you cook well, appreciate good wine, and can enhance the weekend in some way.

  Last year, we all read The Intuitionist before showing up and one of the women facilitated a book discussion. Another woman who sang like an opera singer led a sing-along. Another friend masterminded a literary game of charades. I led a yoga practice.

  Emily emailed me and invited me to this year’s retreat. It’s January seventeenth through the twentieth. I emailed Emily that I’d be there, but I don’t know. I don’t think I can go and not drink. Maybe I’ll take a little drink break and quit again after the retreat. When I asked Charlie what he thought of this idea, he said, “I’m not going to tell you what to do. That’s your decision.” But his downturned mouth was disapproving.

  I decided to go to a meeting and see how I felt afterward. A young guy, maybe twenty, twenty-one, spoke after I mentioned I was thinking about going to the retreat and taking a sobriety break. He had just been to Cancun with a bunch of his friends.

  “Everyone told me I shouldn’t go,” he said glumly, looking down at the table. “I had more than a month of sobriety. But I went. I drank a ton. I had a lot of fun, but now I’m starting all over again—making another stab at it.”

  A handsome, professional, together-looking man in his fifties grabbed my arm after the meeting.

  “I think you know it would be a bad idea to go,” Brent said.

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I know.”

  “Door County will be there next year,” he said. “Then you can go and drinking won’t bother you.” He waved at a woman who was about to leave and motioned her over. “Hey, do you know Kat?” Kat walked over and gave Brent a hug. “You ever been to Marytown before?” Brent asked me.

  “No.”

  “Oh, it’s wonderful,” Kat said. “It’s a beautiful Catholic church that’s open twenty-four/seven. There’s a continuous prayer chain. You can walk in anytime and someone will be praying.”

  “I feel a real spiritual connection there,” Brent said. “You guys doing anything? You want to go?”

  Kat looked at her watch. It was almost ten o’clock. “Yeah, I can go,” she said.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  We drove there separately and walked into the church together. About twenty or thirty people were there praying in the pews. Kat noticed a guy from the program standing by a side door and led us over to him. She introduced us to Sam, who is new to recovery. A scowling priest swept over and whisked us down a hallway.

  “You can continue your conversation here,” he said and left.

  Brent led us to a meeting room down the hallway. We sat down and Sam told us he is a flight attendant and he’d gone to work drunk, gotten into an argument with another flight attendant, threatened to beat him up, and gotten into a heaping mess of trouble. The airline sent him to treatment and he was now going to meetings to save his job.

  “I go home after work and have Perrier in a wineglass,” he said. “It makes me not miss my wine so much.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” Kat said. “That’s a huge trigger. That wineglass will get you drinking again.”

  I was glad I hadn’t commiserated with Sam. I was about to share that that is exactly what I do.

  “Brenda was thinking about going on a retreat,” Brent said, changing the subject. He told Kat and Sam what I’d said during our discussion group. “There was a guy there who went to Cancun after one month of sobriety and blew it,” he added. “He was pretty down-and-out, wasn’t he Brenda?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But he also said he had a lot of fun.”

  [Sunday, January 5]

  I keep hearing Brent say, “Door County will be there next year.” The retreat is scheduled over Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and Max will be off school. Maybe I should do a ski trip with him instead. It would be a good opportunity for Max and me to hang out like we used to before Van was born. I told Charlie I was thinking about going skiing with Max in lieu of the retr
eat. He was all for it. I emailed Emily that I’d forgotten I’d promised to take Max skiing and canceled.

  [Tuesday, January 7]

  I went to a meeting that totally pissed me off. Everybody sat at a conference table with a recovery book and a middle-aged guy sitting at the head of the table, the guy who was about to chair the meeting, was talking to a woman who mentioned her sister’s birthday was yesterday.

  “Did you spank her?” the chairman asked.

  “No,” the woman replied and giggled.

  “Did her husband? Did you take pictures?”

  Finally the guy noticed it was time to start the meeting.

  “We’ll be taking turns reading Step Four of the Twelve Steps: ‘Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.’ In this meeting you can interrupt at any time by saying, ‘stop,’ and say what’s on your mind.”

  The woman sitting across the table from me started reading. When she finished the first paragraph she passed and the man sitting next to her began to read the second paragraph. When he finished reading a part that said, “Our desires for sex, for material and emotional security, and for an important place in society often tyrannize us,” the chairman yelled, “Stop.”

  “Yeah,” the chairman said. “Your life can be screwed up if you obsess about anything, like sex. If all you think about is sex, and that’s all you want to do all the time, other parts of your life will suffer.”

  The man finished reading the second paragraph and the guy sitting next to him started reading the third. “We want to find exactly how, when, and where our natural desires have warped us,” he read. “We wish to look squarely at the unhappiness this has caused others and ourselves.”

  “Stop,” shouted the chairman. “I know a sex addict. Yeah. All he wants is sex. Can’t get enough of it. As soon as he finishes having sex he’s thinking about how he can get it again. He’s zipping up his pants and planning for the next time. His wife is like, ‘Isn’t three times a day enough? We just did it.’ Yeah. There are people out there like that who’re totally obsessed with sex.”

  I felt like slamming my book down and leaving, but didn’t. I’d heard people in meetings say they treat other people in meetings who try their patience as an exercise in developing tolerance and patience. Since I desperately need to develop tolerance and patience, I decided to stick it out. The reading continued and we got to a part that read, “Our present anxieties and troubles, we cry, are caused by the behavior of other people—people who really need a moral inventory,” and the chairman yelled, “Stop!” again.

  “Have you ever thought, Yeah, I’m going to that meeting because so-and-so will be there?” he asked. “And you make comments to impress her. And you offer to drive her to meetings because she lost her driver’s license and she takes you up on it. And you drive her here and there, and you go out with her and the group for coffee afterward, and she talks to everyone but you, and you’re thinking, The bitch is just using me for rides!?”

  I wanted a martini, bad.

  [Wednesday, January 8]

  I went to a meditation meeting that was weird. About sixteen of us met in a conference room and broke up into smaller groups that met in little sitting rooms. My group consisted of me and three guys. We sat on a couch and some chairs. One of the guys dimmed the lights. The woman running the meeting started playing an audiotape that got piped into each of the rooms. The tapes reminded me of the old Saturday Night Live skit “Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley.” “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.” Two fifteen-minute tapes were played. Both were soothing and disturbingly pleasant.

  When the tapes finished, our group took turns commenting on what we got out of them. Turns out I was the only one who’d been to more than two meetings.

  “How do we end this meeting?” a middle-aged guy asked. “Do we just leave?”

  “Every meeting I’ve been to so far has closed with the Lord’s Prayer,” I said. “We stand in a circle, hold hands, and recite it.”

  Our group stood in a circle, held hands, and recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Then what usually happens is everyone says, ‘Keep coming back; it works if you work it sober,’” I said. “Then it’s done.”

  A crusty old guy who looked like Allen Ginsberg fidgeted and cleared his throat. “I don’t like that gung-ho, rah-rah stuff. I don’t go in for that sort of group cheerleading kind of thing.” He glanced at us through thick horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes were focused in different directions.

  “Well, that’s just what they do,” I said.

  “Yeah, well I don’t go for that stuff,” he said gruffly.

  A young guy said, “Oh, well, if that’s what they do, it’s kind of nice.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t go in for that,” Ginsberg growled.

  I looked at the young guy and shrugged. He looked at me and shrugged. The four of us looked at each other for a moment and we left.

  [Sunday, January 12]

  I’m being excluded now that I don’t drink, and I’m hurt and angry. My family went out to lunch with Liv and Reed and Kelly and Joel yesterday after our kids’ soccer game. Max plays on the same team as Kelly and Joel’s son, Ryan, and Liv and Reed’s son, Seth. Max and Ryan have been friends since preschool, that’s how Kelly and I connected, and Max and Seth attend the same grade school, which is how Liv and I got to be friends. I threw the first bacchanal dinner party and introduced Kelly, Liv, Wendy, and Viola; they and their spouses liked each other. So yesterday, after lunch, Seth came over to play with Max and pretty soon the two were asking if Seth could sleep over. Reed answered the phone when I called. He began hemming and hawing when I offered to have Seth sleep over.

  “Uh, Liv and I are going out to dinner tonight and we don’t want Pete (Seth’s older brother) to be alone,” he said. “So I’ll pick up Seth.”

  This morning, when I took Max to soccer practice, Joel was sitting in the stands hunched over with one elbow on his knee propping up his head with his hand. I sat down next to him.

  “You look like you’re hurting,” I said.

  “I’m hung over,” Joel said. “Kelly and I went to Gabriel’s last night and drank way too much.”

  “Just the two of you tied one on?”

  Joel opened his mouth and shut it. After a pregnant pause he said, “Uh, no. We went out with Liv and Reed. Can you believe they’d never been there?”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling like I’d been punched. Joel had probably taken Ryan to Liv and Reed’s last night and Pete probably babysat. More than likely, Ryan slept at Liv and Reed’s and Joel had picked the boys up and brought them to soccer this morning.

  I thought back to soccer practice last week when Reed and I were sitting together and Reed asked me how the not drinking thing was going. I told him fine and he said, “You know, some people wouldn’t want to go out with a person who doesn’t drink.”

  “Fuck ’em,” I said.

  [Monday, January 20]

  Max and I got home after skiing Granite Peak in Wausau, Wisconsin, this weekend, which was the weekend Emily had her retreat. Max and I drove to Wausau on Friday, and I rented skis for Max. We wanted to be ready to hit the slopes first thing Saturday morning. As we were pulling on our long johns Saturday morning, it became apparent I’d forgotten to pack Max’s ski pants, so we killed half the morning shopping for a pair. It was a blessing in disguise. By the time we hit the chairlift, the temperature had warmed to a balmy fifteen degrees. It was frigid, but it was sunny and windless, and Max and I had the place to ourselves. We got in a lot of runs in a short period of time and hit the hot tub at the hotel before going to dinner. All in all, we had a great day. Sunday, however, was overcast, windy, and hit a high of ten degrees. Max and I got on the chairlift and cryonic winds blasted through our ski wear. We skied two or three runs, hit the lodge, repeated this three more times, and left. We bought sub sandwiches, brought them back to our hotel room, and watched movies. I’m glad I spent the
weekend with Max and bailed on the retreat, but I can’t say drinking didn’t cross my mind.

  My mother grew up in Wausau. She was number eleven in a family of twelve children who grew up on a dairy farm. My family spent a lot of time in Wausau when I was a kid. We’d get in the car, drive the four-and-a-half, five hours it took to get there, check into the Holiday Inn, and go to my Aunt Theresa’s house. Five minutes later, my cousin Tami, who lived down the road from my aunt, would walk in. Tami and I would ditch my sister Paula, and Tami’s little brother Scott, and hide in her grandmother’s barn or hike in the woods to smoke Kool cigarettes. Once in a while we’d drink warm beer we’d pinch from her dad’s case of Old Style.

  As we got older, Tami and I always seemed to pick up where we left off, even though years passed between visits. My family drove up for a family reunion when Tami and I were in our mid-twenties, and she and I went to some hole-in-the-wall tavern and pounded shots of Jägermeister and beer. A jar of homemade pickled eggs sat on the bar and I ordered one.

  “You’re going to eat that?” Tami asked making a face.

  I took a bite. “It’s actually pretty good,” I said and popped the rest into my mouth. I thought of Pickled Pete, a cadaver from an anatomy/physiology class I took in college.

  “I want to be cremated when I die,” I said. “I can’t stand the way our family stuffs our dead relatives and displays them, takes pictures of them. My mom’s got lots of dead snapshots in her photo album. How sick is that?”

  Tami nodded and said she wanted to be cremated, too.

  “Look at my lifeline,” I said, showing Tami my palm. I’d recently been to a palmist. “It’s pretty short, but if you look closely, there’s a crease that kind of connects it with this one running down my palm. A friend of mine told me it doesn’t count, but I say it does. Let’s see yours.” I took Tami’s left hand in mine and stared at it. “Shit. Yours is way shorter than mine!”

  The next time I went to Wausau was for Tami’s funeral. She and I were both thirty. Tami had been killed in a car accident. Her neck had snapped. I walked into her wake and saw Tami lying in a coffin against a far wall. Her face was caked with makeup. Her hair was teased like an old lady’s. Someone was snapping pictures.