Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife

by Brenda Wilhelmson

“Ah,” Bobbie said, nodding, looking a bit taken aback and at a loss for words.

  I still haven’t told anyone besides my sister and parents that I’m in recovery, but I’m becoming less and less concerned about people finding out. I finished my club soda, gave Charlie a kiss, and went up to our room, leaving him behind.

  [Saturday, September 20]

  Charlie and I were married twelve years ago today. The conference over, Charlie and I went sightseeing in the Castle district of Buda. We toured the castle’s eerie labyrinth, walked the oldest streets of Buda, and I threw out tidbits of interest from my guidebook. Charlie feigned interest for a while and, before noon, said he was hungry for lunch.

  “I’m tired,” he said when we’d finished lunch at an outdoor café. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “Fine,” I said, mystified that he’d rather have sex than see Budapest. We can have sex anytime, but we may never get here again. Later, we took a dip in the pool, sat in the sauna, showered, and got dressed for the ballet. We walked to a restaurant a short distance from the Opera House and ordered dinner. When the waiter arrived with our food, he placed a mountain of raw ground beef in front of Charlie.

  “You ordered steak tartar?” I asked, surveying his plate disgustedly.

  “I didn’t know it was raw,” he said.

  I looked at the chalkboard specials menu Charlie had ordered from.

  “It says right there that it’s raw,” I pointed out.

  “Guess I didn’t look at it carefully,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

  “Are you going to eat that, with all the mad cow disease going on in Europe?”

  “I don’t want to send it back,” Charlie snapped. “I hate when people do that.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I ordered it, I’ll eat it,” Charlie said, fidgeting irritably.

  “It’s your brain, but I’ll have to take care of you when it looks like Swiss cheese.”

  Charlie ate a forkful. “It’s actually good,” he said.

  “I’m happy for you.”

  We walked to the Opera House and took our front row seats at the edge of the orchestra pit. An attractive cellist wearing a red bandana on his head kept looking at me, and I liked it. The ballet began. Every expression on the dancers’ faces, the sweat glistening on their bodies, their muscles trembling with exertion, was visible. It was incredible. When we broke for intermission, Charlie and I climbed the stairs to the top floor of the Opera House for refreshments. Champagne in crystal glasses and pastries on china were beautifully displayed for purchase. It put all the ballet intermissions at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago—candy bars, drinks in plastic cups—to shame. Charlie purchased a glass of champagne for himself and a pastry for me, and we walked out onto the rooftop terrace and looked out at the city below. It was fabulous.

  The second half of Onnegan sucked me in and I got lost in it and cried. I looked at Charlie. His head was bobbing and his eyes were fluttering. It was an incredible anniversary, for me anyway. It’s lucky we remembered it.

  Charlie and I usually don’t remember our anniversary until a day or two before it. Two nights ago, during our train ride to the putska, Charlie and I were sitting at a table with Ann Marie and her husband, Lawrence, when I asked Charlie, “Hey, did you remember it’s our anniversary on Saturday?” Ann Marie and I’d been discussing how long we’d been married, and it registered that our anniversary was in two days. It hadn’t occurred to me when I was purchasing ballet tickets that the performance was on our anniversary.

  “Oh, yeah,” Charlie lied. I rolled my eyes at him.

  “Brenda said you’ll be married thirteen years,” Ann Marie commented.

  “No, twelve,” Charlie said.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, flushing. “I got our anniversary mixed up with our dog’s age. We got Sturgis right before we got married, and Sturgis will be thirteen.”

  Ann Marie and Lawrence looked at each other and then at Charlie and me.

  [Sunday, September 21]

  Charlie flew home this morning, but I’m flying home tomorrow because we booked our trips separately. I walked to Buda and spent three hours in the castle’s Hungarian National Art Museum, which I’d planned to visit yesterday with Charlie. I walked to the largest Jewish synagogue in Europe, the second largest in the world. Its massive Moorish exterior was stunning, and behind it was a courtyard full of headstones and feral cats. Many of the headstones were stacked together like books in a bookcase. The headstones belonged to Holocaust victims who’d taken refuge in the synagogue before it was taken over by the Nazis. Behind the courtyard was a metal sculpture of a weeping willow tree, its silver leaves engraved with names of victims. Goosebumps covered my arms.

  I left the synagogue and meandered through gray narrow streets bordered by apartment buildings and headed for a recovery meeting I’d found online before flying to Budapest. Sara had suggested attending one here, and weirdly enough I was actually looking forward to it. It was dusk and the streets were mostly deserted. Occasionally voices floated through open windows, and I dodged mounds of dog shit littering the sidewalks. Eventually, I bumped into the little street I was looking for and began searching doorways for address numbers. I stumbled on a small recessed area tucked back on the street with a couple of buildings on it, and the building set furthest back was the one I was looking for. I opened the door to the dingy gray building and stepped into its grubby entryway. I stood there for a minute or two feeling totally creeped out. I heard muffled voices coming from the floors above and began to ascend the stairs toward the second floor. I couldn’t tell if the building was residential or offices. I walked down a poorly lit hallway and heard voices coming from what appeared to be an office door. I opened it and found three more doors behind that one. I shut the door and stood in the hallway debating whether I should follow the voices or leave. A man in shorts walked up behind me.

  “You here for a meeting?” I asked him.

  “Yes I am,” he said and opened the door I’d just closed. I followed him through it, and we passed through another door. The room we entered was brightly lit and coffee was brewing.

  “Hello,” said a woman with red hair and an Irish accent. She appeared to be about my age. She scanned me thoroughly. “This is a closed meeting,” she said.

  “That’s my kind of meeting,” I said and smiled.

  She looked at me warily and offered me coffee and a seat.

  “How did you find us?” she asked.

  “On the Internet before I left Chicago,” I said. “This is the only English-speaking meeting I found.”

  The woman gave me a big smile and immediately lightened up. She started the meeting. “I came to Budapest because of the booze,” she said. “It’s so cheap here. This is where I hit my bottom.”

  A young Dutch guy spoke next. “I rode my bike here all the way from the Netherlands. Riding through Germany was fucking something. It was like traveling through one long beer ad.”

  A German man sitting next to the Dutch guy started laughing and shaking his head. “I’m here hiding out from my successful alcoholic parents who live in Munich. They want me to come back to the family business, but I don’t know. I don’t want to go back, but I’m unemployed, and things are not going so great for me and my family here.”

  I told the group about all of the glitzy alcohol-studded events I’d been to in the past week. “Booze was pushed on me night after night, but it was oddly easy to pass up. It was incredible really. I still can’t believe it. I don’t know how you guys feel about the God thing, but God was definitely doing for me what I could not do for myself. It was wild.”

  The American I walked in with spoke next. “I’m going back to Arizona, and I’m really worried about how I’m going to handle the cocktail circuit. It hasn’t been easy for me to turn down glasses of wine and cognac.”

  When everyone had a chance to speak, I said, “I have something I’d like to add. I may have given you the wrong impression t
hat not drinking has been a cakewalk for me. I got sober planning to relapse whenever I traveled out of the country. After I booked this trip, I tortured myself for two weeks going back and forth on the ‘should I, shouldn’t I,’ question. The first thing I looked up in the guidebooks was what kind of wine was produced here. Finally, I went to a meeting and admitted what was rocking around in my brain. I don’t know why or how, but as soon as I started talking about what was plaguing me, the urge to drink left me. So if I gave you the false impression that this has been easy, it hasn’t.”

  After the meeting I chit-chatted for a bit with an old Irishman, looked at my watch and told him, “I’ve gotta go. I’m going to an organ concert at St. Anne’s that starts in an hour, and it’s an hour’s walk from here.”

  “Ah, ya better get goin’ then,” he said.

  I shook his hand and bolted. I was walking at a fast clip down the dark streets when I heard a man’s voice shouting from behind, “Hey Chicago, Chicago Brenda.” I stopped and turned. It was Steve, one of the Americans from the meeting. Steve was tall, lean, about forty-five, and ruggedly good looking. He began jogging and caught up with me.

  “Hey, you mind if I walk with you?” he asked. “This isn’t the safest area. You mentioned your hotel, and I live a couple blocks away.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “I’m not going back to the hotel, though. I’m crossing the Chain Bridge to Buda and going to an organ concert at St. Anne’s.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “How come you’re living in Budapest?”

  “I’ve been here two months,” Steve said. “I’m a carpenter. The company I work for is building the new American Embassy. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, though, because my company’s about to lose its contract. There’ve been so many delays and setbacks. A lot of deadlines missed due to poor management. Building materials have to come from the States for security purposes and it’s been a nightmare.”

  “Where’s home when you’re not here?” I asked.

  “I move around a lot,” Steve said. “I lived in Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, but I’m from Indiana. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much of Budapest since I’ve been here.”

  I started blathering on about the highlights I’d seen and what he should check out. When we got to St. Anne’s, a beautiful baroque church, we slid into an antique pew and I told Steve, “Franz Liszt played this organ.”

  The concert was incredible. Steve and I sat with our eyes closed and let the dark, moody organ music reverberate through us as it filled the church. Tears rolled down my cheeks.

  We walked back toward the Chain Bridge, and Steve bumped into an old man he knew from recovery meetings. The old man was with an old woman.

  “Everywhere he goes he runs into someone he knows,” the old woman said about the old man, who turned out to be her brother.

  “My sister and I come here for three weeks every summer,” the old man said. “We come to get goulashed out. Our parents were from Budapest. Hey,” he said elbowing Steve, “you’re not going to let her go back to the States now, are you? Pretty girl like that. No. And none of this handshake business tonight. Gotta be a kiss good-bye.”

  Steve laughed uncomfortably.

  “You can’t leave,” the old man said to me. “Why you gotta go?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve been here a week with my husband and he left this morning. I got an extra day and I ran into Steve at a meeting.”

  The poor old guy, totally embarrassed, fumbled for words and apologized. “You don’t look like someone who’d be at a meeting,” he said. His sister whacked him in the gut, and they ducked into the hotel we were standing in front of. Steve and I walked across the bridge, shook hands, hugged, and said good-bye.

  [Monday, September 22]

  I left Budapest and landed in Munich. My plane from Munich to Montreal was delayed three and a half hours, so when I got to Montreal, there were no more connecting flights to Chicago.

  I’d picked up a Hungarian salami and two tins of expensive goose liver foie gras at the Budapest airport even though I remembered reading in a guidebook that you can’t bring food out of Europe. I’d bought a prized salami at the Central Market and made Charlie pack it in his suitcase before he left because I didn’t want my clothes to reek of it. I was toting my new food purchases in a plastic duty-free bag and while heading for Canadian customs, I began filling out a document declaring what I was bringing in. I began to worry. I’d spent a tidy sum on these delicacies and didn’t want to give them up. What if I quickly stashed the food in my suitcase after I yanked it off the conveyor belt and proceeded through customs pretending I didn’t have anything? What if there were dogs? What trouble would I be in? I decided to declare the food.

  The first customs officer I approached looked at my papers. “What kind of food are you bringing in?” she asked me.

  “Salami,” I said, the duty-free bag with the salami and goose liver pâté hanging from my arm.

  “Oh, you’re not allowed to bring in meat from Europe. Here,” she said, handing me a document about SARS. “Go through there after you get your luggage,” she said and pointed toward a doorway.

  I walked to the luggage conveyor belt debating what I should do. Should I hide the pâté in my luggage? I placed my purse, my carry-on bag, and the duty-free bag of food on the floor and nonchalantly transferred the tins of pâté into my packed carry-on. My luggage snaked toward me. I pulled it off the conveyor belt and lugged my belongings through the door I’d been directed to.

  “You brought a salami?” the customs agent asked. “You can’t bring any meat over.” She handed me a leaflet on foot-and-mouth disease that I stuck into my purse and I began feeling guilty for not checking the box that asked if I’d been to a farm during my visit. We’d been to that ranch for the putska.

  “Do you have anything else?” the agent asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “No other meat or food products?”

  “No,” I lied again. “What are you going to do with my salami?” I asked, directing her attention back to the one piece of food I was admitting to. “It’s a salami that’s considered by many to be the best in the world.” I took it out of the bag and handed it to her.

  “We have to burn it,” she said.

  “Really? No one’s going to take it to a back room and eat it?”

  “We have to burn everything.”

  “What a bummer.”

  “Do you want the bag?” the agent asked, holding up the empty plastic duty-free bag.

  “No,” I said glumly, hoping to convey that she’d taken my only piece of illegal contraband.

  I grabbed my things, walked to a ticket counter, and waited behind two men who were also re-booking flights to Chicago. I complained to the guy in front of me about my customs incident.

  “They don’t burn that stuff,” he said. “I’m sure someone got a nice loaf of bread and they’re eating it now.”

  “Maybe I should have tried to sneak it in,” I said.

  “If they catch you, it’s a $400 fine,” he said.

  “But if I hadn’t declared it, they probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “We have to go through American customs before we get on the plane tomorrow,” the man said. “We’re not done.”

  I began worrying about the pâté again.

  I checked into a hotel near the airport, opened my suitcase, and wedged the triangle-shaped tins of pâté upright against the ends of my suitcase, hoping that when my bag was X-rayed, the tins would appear to be a structural part of the luggage. The paranoid part of me wanted to leave the pâté in the room for the maid. The honest part of me felt guilty about being dishonest. And the thrill-seeking part of me was enjoying the risk. Years ago, I routinely hopped on planes with pot in my purse and never gave it a second thought. Now I was twisted up about a couple tins of goose liver pâté.

  I got into bed feeling tired and edgy. I tried to sleep but co
uldn’t. My mind was reeling. During my years of religious training, I remembered reading that to God, sin is sin. It’s all the same. Smuggling in two tins of foie gras, blowing someone’s head off, it’s all the same. I got up, went to the bathroom, and popped a Vicodin that had been prescribed for Charlie’s hernia. I’d brought a Vicodin in case I had trouble adjusting to the time zone change in Europe. I hadn’t needed it in Budapest, but I was in need of sleep now. I got back into bed and prayed. I had the audacity to ask for his protection as I smuggled the pâté through customs.

  [Tuesday, September 23]

  I successfully smuggled the pâté. I got home and kissed and hugged my kids like crazy. Van said he had fun with Nana and Papa, and Max said he had a good time at Seth’s house.

  “There was a tornado warning while you were gone,” Max said. “It was serious. We had to hide in the crawl space.”

  “That must have been scary,” I said. “Were you scared?”

  “Not that much, but Seth was. You should have seen him.”

  I went over to Liv’s later to thank her for watching Max and give her the gifts I’d bought her in Hungary.

  “Did Max tell you about the tornado warning?” Liv asked. “You should have seen him. Seth was so scared, and Max put his arm around him and kept telling him it was going to be okay. He’s a great kid.”

  [Thursday, September 25]

  I went to a meeting this morning, and Krissy was in bad shape.

  “I haven’t been taking care of my basics, I haven’t taken care of my basics,” she kept saying. “I let myself run out of my medication. Yesterday, I was thinking about steering my car off a bridge. I don’t have money for my medication.”

  After the meeting, I saw Krissy in the parking lot and walked over to her.

  “I’ll help you get your medication,” I said. “How much do you need?”

  “My prescription’s three hundred dollars.”

  I blanched.

  “Uh, I have a couple other options to try in the next couple of days,” Krissy said.

  “If you’re in trouble and need your medicine, I’ll go to the pharmacy with you and get it,” I said and gave her my phone number. We parted ways and I hoped she wouldn’t call.