Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife

by Brenda Wilhelmson

  “I can’t reach either of them on their phones,” Randy said and frowned. “Tell the program director about this. Please.”

  “We’re not going?” Van asked sadly.

  “We’re going,” I told him. I looked at Randy. “You can bet I’ll be talking to the program director about this.”

  The kids and I drove to the farm and pulled into the lot just as Van’s friends were climbing off the bus. Linda, the newly appointed assistant program director, rushed toward us.

  “I’m so sorry,” Linda said. “I told them to stop the bus. I was sitting all the way in the back with the kids, but they wouldn’t stop the bus. I’m so sorry. I should have gotten up and made them stop. I should have done that. I’m so sorry.”

  I began picturing what happened. Casey and Isabel hated Linda because Casey wanted Linda’s assistant director job. Surly, condescending, short-tempered Casey didn’t get it. I visualized Linda yelling, “Stop the bus!” while Casey and Isabel smirked at each other and told the bus driver to keep going. As Linda apologized, I began staring daggers at Isabel and Casey. Neither would look at me.

  Our group made our way to the cow-milking shelter. Marie, another mom who was chaperoning, grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.

  “I just have to tell you,” Marie said, “Isabel and Casey purposely left you. I got to school a few minutes before you did. I didn’t know about the time change either. My son and I got on the bus in the nick of time, and the kids started yelling, ‘Van’s here! Van’s here!’ and Isabel and Casey told the bus driver to leave.”

  I glared at Isabel and Casey throughout the day. They both looked really uncomfortable. Not once did they glance my way.

  As the kids and I were driving home, I remembered Eve and I were supposed to play tennis. I was never going to make it. I fished around in my purse for my meeting directory, dug it out, flipped it over, and scanned the list of phone numbers I’d written on the back.

  “Call before you drink …” Max read out loud as he looked at the heading on the back of my directory. “Why is that on there, over these numbers? Drinking wasn’t a problem for you.”

  “It’s just something the No Alcohol Club gives everyone,” I told Max, feeling prickly heat on my neck and face. “It doesn’t mean anything.” I called Eve and left a message. I started thinking, You know, maybe Max is right. Maybe I don’t have a drinking problem.

  When we got home, Eve had left a message on my answering machine saying she wanted to meet me at a meeting.

  I arrived at the meeting and sat next to Cece, a woman about my age. I told her what Max had said about my not having a drinking problem in the car.

  “Wow,” Cece said. “Isn’t that great he wasn’t affected, that he didn’t notice? My daughter knows. She knows I have a drinking problem.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It didn’t occur to me to be grateful. You know where my mind went? ‘Maybe I’m not an alcoholic.’”

  “Typical,” Cece laughed.

  After the meeting, Eve and I went to Liv and Wendy’s jewelry party. It was actually fun. Eve left an hour before I did and as I was getting ready to go, Kelly asked, “Why doesn’t Max come over tomorrow and play with Ryan?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good. And why don’t you come for lunch?”

  “Yeah, okay, thanks.”

  [Friday, June 20]

  Sara came over this morning to go over the First Step questionnaire she’d given me to complete. One of the questions was, “As you have been working on this booklet, you have probably had some strong feelings. What are some of the feelings you are having?” I wrote, “Surprised at how bad I sound on paper.”

  The booklet had a section titled, “Dangerous Behavior,” where I was supposed to list dangerous deeds I’d carried out under the influence. I listed, “Goading my boyfriend to speed down hairpin turns on Lookout Mountain, which caused us to flip the car and almost die.”

  My boyfriend, Trey, and I were freshmen at Southern College in Tennessee. We’d been hiking and smoking hash all day, and I’d gotten into Trey’s car, rolled down my window, cranked up the volume on his stereo, and told Trey to drive faster. He accelerated. I filled my hash pipe, took a hit, passed it to him, and shouted, “Faster!” Trey obeyed. I don’t know why I did it, but I kept egging him on until Trey took a corner way too fast and rolled his Honda Accord almost off the mountain. The car flipped onto the passenger side, rolled onto the roof, teetered there on the edge of the mountain, and fell back onto the passenger’s side. If it had rolled over on the driver’s side, we’d have dropped off the side of the mountain.

  When the car dropped back onto the passenger side, it pinned my right hand between the top of the window frame and the asphalt. My head smacked the road pretty hard, too. My hand hurt like hell and I started moaning, “My hand, my hand.” Trey climbed out of the driver’s side window like it was a submarine hatch, walked behind the roof of the car, squatted down, wiggled his fingers under the window frame, yanked it up a little, and I pulled my hand free. I don’t remember getting out of the vehicle, but I do remember sitting on the edge of the road next to Trey as a pickup truck pulled over.

  “Ya’ll all right?” the driver asked.

  “I think so,” Trey answered.

  “Hop in back,” the driver said. “I’ll gitchya to a hospital.”

  I vaguely remember the emergency room and being told to watch for signs of concussion. And I don’t know how Trey and I got back to school.

  I hated that school. My parents had taken me to Southern College, an Adventist college, the fall of my freshman year. We drove there towing a U-Haul crammed full of my stuff. I sat in the back seat with my sister, occasionally unzipping my purse and looking at the gooey, fragrant brick of hash I was bringing. I knew I was going to need it.

  My high school friends were all going to state universities and an Adventist college was the only away-from-home school my mother would send me to. My friends wrote me letters detailing the great parties they were going to while I was incarcerated in an Adventist prison. Sunday through Thursday night, I was on lockdown in the women’s dorm at ten thirty. On Friday night, the Sabbath, I had to attend a mandatory church service before lockdown at ten. On Saturday, I had to go to church again, but was allowed to go out on the town after sundown until a whopping midnight. However, I couldn’t go anywhere near a nightclub. School employees combed the parking lots of local nightclubs on Saturday nights looking for Southern College parking stickers. The cars they found were reported, and the students who owned them got in big trouble.

  I sniffed out other malcontents like me, and Trey was one of them. Trey’s parents sent him to Southern College hoping their wayward son would straighten out and find God. The poor guy didn’t stand a chance after he met me. I had several run-ins with the dean, and the dean and I came to an understanding: He would let me collect my credits, and I would leave at the end of the semester. Near the end of the semester, I dumped Trey. While we were going out, I had extolled the virtues of dropping acid, and Trey, in a misguided attempt to win me back, began sucking on hits of acid like breath mints. Trey left at the end of the semester, too, in bad shape.

  I scanned my dangerous-behavior list. There was the time I lit my hair on fire after dragging my long, permed ’80s locks through a candle I was using as a cigarette lighter during an office Christmas party. I showed up at the newspaper I was working at the next day nursing a wicked hangover. Co-workers who’d arrived at the party after I’d left—my friend, Petra, had driven me to her house to sleep it off after she’d clapped her hands to my head and put out my hair—were disappointed that I wasn’t bald and scarred. Petra had gotten to me quick, and I looked like I did most mornings.

  Further down the list were the numerous cars I’d sideswiped while I was drunk, the strange men I’d met in bars and left with to do drugs (thank God I was never raped), and the time my boyfriend, Jean-Pierre, and I were tripping on mushrooms and having sex while speeding down La
ke Shore Drive.

  “What problems have you tried to fix with drugs?” the questionnaire asked. I wrote: Feeling edgy. Feeling overwhelmed. Feeling angry. Feeling sad. Feeling inadequate.

  Sara nodded as we went over my questionnaire. “Okay, Step Two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” she said. “A lot of people skim right over the ‘can restore us to sanity’ part. Focus on that before you move onto Step Three.”

  I wasn’t insane. I didn’t need to be restored to sanity. But as I looked over my questionnaire, it appeared I was insane.

  “Max told me drinking wasn’t a problem of mine,” I told Sara.

  “Oh sure,” Sara laughed. “Max knows best.”

  “Max made another drinking comment just this morning,” I continued. “We were talking about my grandmother being ninety-four when she died, and Max said, ‘The oldest person living is 122, and she starts every day with a shot of whiskey in her tea. I guess her alcoholic thing is working for her.’”

  Sara snorted.

  “Hey,” I said, changing the subject. “I think I’ve gotten Kelly out of my head. I think I’m done. Sorry for boring you with her for so long.”

  “It wasn’t boring,” Sara said. “Having friend issues is totally normal for people who have friends left when they get sober. You need to talk about it to let it go. I didn’t have any friends left when I got sober. It had gotten embarrassing.”

  Max slid open the sliding glass door and walked out onto the deck where Sara and I were sitting. He handed me the phone. “It’s Kelly,” he said. I felt my face flush.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Hey,” she said. “Are we still on for lunch today?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Twelve thirty?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, see ya then.”

  “See ya.”

  I hung up and put the phone on the table. “That was Kelly,” I said sheepishly. “Max is going over there to play later.”

  Sara nodded. I couldn’t read her therapist face.

  Ryan and Seth were running around outside Kelly’s house when we got there. Ryan had slept at Seth’s the night before, and Kelly had invited Seth over to play.

  “I made shrimp rolls,” Kelly said, walking me out to her patio. The boys ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chicken nuggets at one end of the patio while Kelly and I ate shrimp rolls.

  “Liv and Reed were up at our beach house,” Kelly mentioned. “Liv was so overly cautious and paranoid about the kids having fun.”

  “Oh?” I said. Liv had recently told me that Kelly and Joel were letting the kids light fires and shoot BB guns unsupervised until she and Reed put a stop to it.

  “Remember when Max put on his ‘bulletproof’ vest and had Ryan shoot him with his BB gun?” Kelly asked with a laugh. “I told Liv, ‘If you’re going to have issues with Seth shooting BB guns, you better watch out when Seth goes up to Wisconsin this summer with Max.’”

  “What?” I said, not believing my ears. “Ryan never shot at Max. Do you think I would let your kid use mine as a target? I was sitting in the backyard with Max and Ryan the whole time they were shooting.”

  “Remember? He had on his SWAT team vest and …” Kelly started.

  “And his SWAT helmet and goggles,” I finished. “Max put them on because of ricocheting BBs. He and your son were shooting at Hot Wheels cars they’d lined up on the roof of the plastic Little Tikes car Max used to drive around the yard when he was a toddler. The BBs were ricocheting off of the plastic car and a couple hit him, so Max put on his SWAT gear.”

  “Well, Ryan said he was shooting at Max.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Kelly, a notorious story embellisher, stared off into space, apparently trying to sift fact from fiction.

  “Mom, will you get Van out of here?” Max shouted. “I want to play with my friends, not him.”

  “Yeah, we’re leaving,” I shouted back and carried my plate and glass to the kitchen. I grabbed Van and Kelly walked us back to the car.

  “You know,” Kelly began, “I’m spending way too much time with peripheral people—my kids’ friends’ mothers. I hardly get to see my real friends anymore. I was just asking Joel, ‘What is it? Everyone from playgroup goes out to lunch, breakfast, to the movies, but no one calls me. It’s like they don’t like me.’ The only time I see anyone from the old playgroup is at book club—and at the last book club Tina was going on and on about her kids and it was driving me nuts. And Rosy, I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin sitting next to her.”

  “Really?” I said, remembering how chummy Kelly and Rosy were and how agitated I was sitting next to Kelly.

  Kelly nodded and grimaced. “It’s like Rosy’s mad at me but won’t tell me why. She’s a grudge-holder. So whatever it is she’s mad about she’s not going to let it go.”

  “Why don’t you ask her what’s bothering her?” I asked, feeling like I was in a Dali painting.

  “No,” Kelly said. “I asked her one time and she said, ‘You just irritate me. It’s just you. It’s just you being you.’”

  I wanted to kiss Rosy.

  “I will never forget that,” Kelly said, tearing up. “I can still hear it. I’ll never forget it. Another time, when Rosy and I were at my beach house for the weekend, she commented on how quiet it was and I told her how nice it was to spend time up there by myself. She told me, ‘Maybe you should spend more time by yourself and reevaluate your life and your priorities.’”

  “Wow,” I said, admiring Rosy.

  “You know what it is?” Kelly asked. “She treats me like shit, like her family. She treats her father like shit, her mother like shit, her sister like shit, and I got too close. You know what else? Rosy will ask me, ‘Have you seen Fiona lately? No? I just saw her the other day. How about Karen? No? It was so great getting together with her for lunch. When’s the last time you talked to Brenda? I just talked to her yesterday.’ She tries to hurt my feelings, rub it in.”

  “Really,” I said, wishing I had the guts to say, “Maybe the flaws you see in Rosy are your own.”

  Kelly shook her head and wiped her eyes. “I think about this stuff all the time and it’s making me sick,” she said.

  “I know what that’s like,” I said.

  “Mom!” Van called from the car seat where I’d buckled him in.

  “I gotta go,” I said, nodding toward Van. “Hang in there Kelly, and thanks for lunch.”

  I don’t know how many times I’d heard someone in a meeting say, “It’s not about you,” and it finally clicked. The crap with Kelly wasn’t about me, it was about Kelly.

  Van and I got home and the phone rang. It was Linda, the assistant director of Van’s preschool. She wants me to write down my field trip experience and send it to the director. Linda confided that the preschool wants Isabel and Casey gone, and a letter from me would help. I told Linda I’d write the letter and hung up, but I have mixed feelings. I don’t want to be the cause of Isabel and Casey losing their jobs, however much I think they deserve it.

  [Saturday, June 21]

  I played tennis with Eve this morning. I’d been looking forward to getting serve pointers from her, but Eve was horrible. She couldn’t return a ball to save her life. She also wanted to sit down after every few strokes and drink iced tea and smoke.

  While we were on one of our many tea breaks, Eve told me she was an art major, a nurse, a pharmaceutical rep, and an interior designer. “Mel and I are closing on a lake house in Antioch,” she said. “You want to drive out and see it?”

  “I should go home,” I told her. “Charlie wants to go bike riding at one thirty. I need to watch the kids.”

  “Oh, we’ll be back in time,” she said. “I’ve got to show it to you. It’s a cute little place on the lake. Come on. It’s a beautiful day. We’ll get a tan while we’re driving.”

  “If you’re sure we’ll be back
by one thirty.”

  Eve and I hopped into her yellow convertible. I figured her for a fast driver, but Eve was one of the slowest drivers I’ve ever had the displeasure to ride with. Cars honked at us every few minutes but Eve seemed oblivious.

  “Let’s stop at Darcy’s,” Eve suggested. Moments later, we pulled into Darcy’s driveway. We were at Darcy’s for more than an hour.

  “I’ve got to be home at one thirty,” I reminded Eve.

  “Oh, then we should go,” Eve said.

  We got on the road and after a long slow drive, parked behind a house. We walked inside. The house needed a lot of work and the owner was inside painting.

  “I’m having second thoughts about renting it,” he told Eve. “My family and I enjoy it too much on the weekends.” I looked out the front window at the lake and private pier.

  Eve laughed. “I’m going to show my friend around.”

  Eve and I walked out on the pier. “I thought you said you were buying the place,” I said.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “You said you and Mel were closing on it.”

  “I never said that.”

  I stared at her but didn’t press it. I looked at my watch. “It’s two o’clock, Eve. I wanted to be home at one thirty. I need to go.”

  I had already called Charlie and given him a heads-up. When Eve finally dropped me off, it was three o’clock. As I got out of the car, I told Eve, “Charlie’s going to be pissed.”

  “He’ll get over it,” she said and took off with a wave of her hand.

  [Sunday, June 22]

  Charlie, Max, and I went fishing on my father’s boat. I grabbed my father and hugged him the second I boarded. Two days ago, a radiologist told my dad, in a roundabout way, that he had terminal cancer. My dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer early this spring and had surgery to remove his prostate. There was evidence he still had cancer because he still had a PSA count and he began radiation, but two days ago, his PSA count was higher than ever and his radiologist told him, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do for you.”