Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife Read online

  Lou clapped Charlie on the back and led him from a snarling bobcat to a stately buck. Vicky grabbed my arm. “Do you know what it’s like to have to vacuum and dust down here? It’s a nightmare.”

  The four of us padded across the expensive carpet to the bar. Five muscle men in tight-fitting shirts were sitting there with their pretty women. Lou introduced us and poured us stiff drinks. The men continued talking about their BMWs and Mercedes. Lou slapped one on the back and laughed. “Alex here’s got a house in Barrington the size of an airplane hangar. Better watch it, mafioso.”

  Alex smiled sheepishly. He turned his doughy face to his blond glamour girl, and she shot him a cold smile.

  Charlie and I drank heavily. We rang in the New Year and quickly left.

  Spring approached, and by that time Mike and I’d been partying for almost a year. Charlie finally reached his limit.

  “This is not what I want,” he blurted one night after Mike left. “I don’t want to come home to a tanked wife. Your cousin is here all the time.” Charlie flicked his hand disgustedly at the door. “You have to do something.”

  I could see Charlie’s point, but what a buzz kill. I’d already had my backyard epiphany. My hangovers were getting hellish, so I nodded in agreement. When Mike called the next afternoon, I told him about my conversation with Charlie and suggested cutting our happy hours down to once or twice a week. Mike wasn’t thrilled, but what could he do?

  I began drinking in moderation by myself. When Mike showed up, we hit the booze hard. One morning, after Mike had been over, I woke up feeling like I’d done serious damage to myself. Every molecule in my body was vibrating, and it felt like someone had split my skull with an ax. I couldn’t think. Charlie’s friend, Sean, had recently gone to a posh rehab out west and sobered up with an aging rock star. He went to meetings, took up running, and looked great. Jim, another alcoholic high school buddy of Charlie’s, had been sober ten years. I didn’t want to spend money on rehab or tell my insurance company I was an alcoholic, so I picked up the Yellow Pages, sat down at my kitchen island, and dialed a number for recovery meetings. A woman answered and I began blubbering.

  “Ma’am,” the woman said. “Ma’am, this is the answering service. If you just give me your name and number, I’ll have someone call you back.”

  I choked out my phone number and hung up. Ten minutes later, the phone rang.

  “Hi, this is Maggie—from the recovery program,” a woman said. I started crying again. “Did you call the program?”

  “Yes,” I croaked.

  “Do you think you might have a drinking problem?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you want, I could tell you a little about myself.”

  “Okay.”

  “My husband died and I was left with four small children,” Maggie began. “This was a number of years ago. I felt very sorry for myself, very, very sorry for myself for having to raise four children on my own. That’s when I started drinking.”

  “You had good reason,” I sniffed.

  “I didn’t know how I was going to raise those kids,” Maggie continued. “I didn’t want to think about it, so I started drinking as soon as I woke up and kept it up until I went to bed. I wasn’t cooking, wasn’t cleaning. The kids were taking care of themselves. My oldest son was getting everybody off to school. He hated me. Then somebody, I think it was a neighbor, called the Department of Children and Family Services.”

  I stopped connecting with Maggie and thought, Rotten mother. Loser.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” went Maggie. “That was twenty years ago and I’ve been sober since.”

  “I don’t drink during the day,” I told Maggie. “And my drinking doesn’t interfere with my work or being a good mother. So, I don’t know.”

  “There’s a meeting tonight at the United Methodist Church,” Maggie said. “I could meet you there.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said. I wrote down directions and hung up. “Shit!” I said and sat at my kitchen counter staring off into space. I called my father at work. He answered the phone and I began blubbering again.

  “I called a recovery program.”

  “You did what? Well. Good for you.”

  One of my dad’s nicknames for me was Bernice. Bernice was my fall-off-the-barstool alcoholic aunt. I called my dad Norman. Norman was Bernice’s mean-as-a-snake alcoholic husband. My dad and I partied a lot together. When I was twenty, I quit college for a year to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and went to work for my dad thinking I’d, perhaps, take over his printing company. I packed up my stuff at Northern Illinois University and moved back into my parents’ house near Chicago. Every morning my dad and I would get into his car, pick up his friend Jack, who worked in the same building, and drive downtown. At the end of the day, we’d hop back in the car and stop for happy hour at a rib joint named Bones. We’d hook up with one or two of my dad’s customers or suppliers, and my dad and his buddies would down manhattans like kids drinking Kool-Aid. I’d drink Heineken and do my best to keep up. Holding your liquor was a badge of honor with these guys. Thank God there was a large buffet table of hors d’oeuvres.

  “If you’re gonna drink, you gotta eat,” my father told me. “Your grandfather always said that. You gotta lay a foundation. The skinny drunks who don’t eat, the booze kills ’em.”

  My grandfather died of a stroke when I was twenty. One day he fell in the bathroom and my grandmother couldn’t get him up. An ambulance whisked him to Illinois Masonic Hospital in a coma-like state. My grandfather, hooked up to a ventilator for the next several days, swatted at invisible spiders and rats in delirium tremens. A week or so later, he died.

  My father handed me a cocktail rye he’d smeared with chopped liver. He popped one into his mouth and said, “One more drink and we’ll go.”

  My friend Ecklund, whom I’d been partying with since high school, called me one post-happy-hour evening and started yelling at me. “What the hell, Brenda?” he ranted. “The last few times I’ve called you, you’ve been wasted by six thirty!”

  I was hung over all the time. One morning, as we drove to work, my father had to stop the car three times so I could vomit on the side of the road.

  “You drank too much yesterday,” he said sternly.

  “I’ve got a little bug,” I said, wiping my lips. “I’ll be fine.”

  After a year, I enrolled at Roosevelt University’s School of Journalism in Chicago. I moved into an apartment with my friend Audrey, waited tables part time, and, for the most part, saved getting loaded for the weekends.

  At that moment, on the phone with my dad, I told him, “I don’t think I have the guts to meet Maggie and go to that meeting tonight.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “You’d go with me?”

  “Probably wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “I don’t need it, but I’ll go with you.”

  My dad picked me up and parked his car by the side door of the church. A woman with graying hair was standing next to it, smoking.

  “Are you Brenda?” she asked as my dad and I walked up.

  I introduced my father to Maggie and the three of us walked downstairs to a lounge area where roughly fifteen people were seated in a circle. All of the dilapidated chairs were occupied. Someone got us metal folding chairs, and my father and I sat next to each other. Maggie took a chair directly opposite us. A thin, older woman with reading glasses perched at the end of her beaky nose rang a bell. “Is this anyone’s first time at a meeting?” she asked. My father and I raised our hands. “Welcome,” she said, and everyone clapped. People took turns reading out of a recovery book, and the chairwoman announced that the members were going to take turns telling their addiction stories for the benefit of my dad and me. The first woman to speak had burned down her house in a drunken stupor. The man sitting next to her had gone to prison for vehicular homicide while driving drunk. A guy sitting a little further down went on benders and regularly woke up in a pool of his own urine.


  “Hi, I’m Jerry,” my dad said. “I probably drink too much, but I run a successful business and my drinking doesn’t interfere with my work.” He patted my knee. “I’m here for my daughter.”

  “Hi,” I said nervously. “I’m Brenda. I’ve been drinking too much. That’s why I’m here. But I’m just going to listen tonight.” Maggie had told me I could say that if I didn’t want to speak.

  After the meeting I thanked Maggie, and she asked me to meet her at another meeting the following night. Feeling cornered, I agreed. My dad and I walked to the car, and once inside, he patted me on the back and said, “You’re on your own. These people are Skid Row.”

  I met Maggie in the basement of a Catholic church the next night. “You should get a sponsor,” she told me afterward. “A sponsor is someone who helps you stay sober. I can be your temporary sponsor if you want, but take your time and pick someone, a woman you connect with.”

  I didn’t pick anyone. I went to one meeting a week and drank substantially less for the next two months. Things were working out, I thought, then one night, while I was filling my Styrofoam cup with coffee at a meeting, someone tapped me on the back and asked, “Do you have a sponsor yet?” It was Pam, an attractive woman with long brown hair and perfect teeth.

  “No,” I answered.

  “I’ll be your sponsor.”

  “Okay.”

  Pam was a stay-at-home mom. She was two years younger than me and her daughter was two years older than Max. They lived with Pam’s parents. Pam and her mother got along like two tomcats in a duffle bag. I called Pam every day—because she insisted—and her mother usually answered the phone. “Pam!” she’d scream. “Pam! Pick up the phone!” She’d chuck the receiver, clunk, clunk, clunk, onto the kitchen table, and I’d hear footsteps, arguing, more footsteps, then Pam would answer. Pam’s mother would continue talking to her in the background while Pam tried to talk to me until Pam would scream, “You know I’m on the damned phone! Shut it!”

  Pam moved in with her parents after her husband died. The night Pam’s husband, Vito, died, he’d been out drinking, pulled his car into the garage of their town home, shut the garage door with the remote control, and passed out with the car running. When Pam went to get her car out of the garage the next morning, she found Vito slumped over his steering wheel.

  Pam and I began working out together. We went out to lunch. We took our kids to the park. And I quit drinking. But each meeting I went to confirmed my belief that everyone else’s drinking was way worse than mine.

  “My dad bought a Porsche,” a twenty-year-old goombah with slicked-back hair and crotch-hugging jeans laughed. “I got drunk, took the keys, got it up to 110, 120, slowed down to take a corner, and BAM! This tree jumps out in front of me. I was in the hospital all fucked up for weeks.”

  A middle-aged biker with a potbelly leaned back in his chair and scratched his face. “You think that was bad? I totaled my Harley and was in a coma for a month. Got a plate in my head.” He tapped his skull with his fingertips. “Don’t know what the fuck happened I was so fucked up.”

  I cleared my throat when it was my turn. “About a week after I started coming to meetings, I wanted to drink,” I began. “I didn’t have any liquor in the house, but I had half a bottle of cooking sherry. It tasted like shit, but I drank it. How sad is that?”

  “Shit,” the guy sitting next to me said, adjusting the strap on his eye patch. “I loved cooking sherry. Drank it all the time at my sister’s ’cause she’d hide the booze whenever I came over.”

  I started going to a women’s meeting on Saturday mornings to see if I’d fit in better there. The meeting was more cerebral, and the women talked about their feelings a lot. I noticed a blonde named Kim who was well dressed and appeared to be normal. She was my age, a mom, and she seemed to have her head screwed on right. Then Kim told her story. She said she was divorced and that she and her ex-husband, a rich commodities broker, had been heavily into cocaine. Their wedding had been a coke fest, and their expensive apartment had become a flophouse for line-snorting friends. Then along came a baby.

  “I can still see her toddling around the apartment, her diaper dangling between her knees because I was too busy snorting coke to change her,” Kim said.

  Piece of shit, I thought angrily. I did not want to get to know Kim.

  Other women at the meeting started to irritate me, too, like The Crier. The Crier was a lesbian who’d purchased a two-flat with her girlfriend, then her girlfriend dumped her. The Crier lived on the second floor of the building and her ex lived on the first floor with her new girlfriend.

  “I asked them,” The Crier sobbed one morning, “very nicely … to turn down their music … but they wouldn’t. It was late at night. I just laid in bed … and cried … all night.”

  The following week, The Crier blubbered about a fight she and her ex had had over landscaping. A week after that, the tears were streaming because her ex had snickered when she walked past.

  Charlie and Max and I left for my mother-in-law’s summer cottage the following weekend. As we pulled into the Michigan cottage on Friday night, Martha was drinking a vodka martini on her front porch. We brought our bags into the house and Charlie had a martini with Martha while I unpacked. We went out to dinner, and Charlie and Martha drank a bottle of wine while I had club soda. I put Max to bed and read him stories that night while Charlie and Martha had nightcaps on the front porch.

  As usual, the cocktails came out at five the following night. Charlie took his tinkling beverage to the backyard and opened the grill. He grabbed a small bag of charcoal and dumped half of it onto the grate. I walked over as he doused the briquettes with lighter fluid.

  “You know,” I said. “I’m sick of not drinking.”

  Charlie looked at me with raised eyebrows and I began telling him one sad-sack drunkard’s story after another.

  “I’m not like those people,” I said. “I developed a bad drinking pattern and I broke it.”

  Charlie lit the coals. Whoosh. “You want a drink?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie left and came back with a martini for me. It tasted fabulous.

  I stopped going to meetings, and Pam didn’t bother to call me. She’d gotten mad at me before I went to Michigan, and we hadn’t spoken for several days. Pam had taken me to a recovery dinner where there had been a countdown. “Does anyone have twenty-five years of sobriety? Twenty-four years?” and so on. I stood up at the three-month marker and everyone clapped. They did that for everyone. When I sat down, Pam began to grouse about her pot-smoking sister.

  “She really needs a recovery program,” Pam said.

  “Why?” I asked. “I smoke pot once in a while.”

  Pam looked at me shocked, then angry. “You just stood up and said you were three months sober!” she growled and stalked off. That was eight years ago.

  My drinking was under control for a while. I had a glass of wine here, a martini there. Then I began having a bottle of wine one night a week, then two nights a week, then three. I began having martinis before my bottle of wine. Five years after I’d ditched the program, I got pregnant with Van and stopped drinking for the first seven months of my pregnancy. During the last two, I allowed myself two glasses of wine per week. Van nursed for six months and I kept to a ration of three or four glasses of wine per week. But when Van left the breast, I picked up drinking where I’d left off, which meant getting buzzed five or six nights out of the week.

  By this time, we’d moved to a north shore suburb of Chicago for its great school district and charming historic downtown. I made friends with other stay-at-home moms and, to them, my life looked great. They didn’t know that almost every morning, before I got out of bed, I asked myself, “What did we discuss at dinner? Who put Van to bed? What pajamas is he wearing?” to get myself up to speed before I fixed breakfast, drove Max to school, and hit the health club with my head pounding. Van would play in the Kid’s Club while I lifted weights. Then
I’d take Van to play dates, give Art Awareness presentations in Max’s classroom, write newspaper articles, meet friends for lunch, all with my head slowly clearing. But by three o’clock the hangovers were gone, by four o’clock I was helping Max with his homework, and by five o’clock I was shaking a martini.

  The first martini spread “Ahhhh,” through my entire body. The second made me feel comfortably numb. I’d drink the first martini, sometimes the second, before Charlie got home so he wouldn’t know how much I had. When he walked in, I’d shake up a martini for both of us, finish cooking dinner, and uncork a bottle of wine. We’d sit down to dinner, and Charlie and I would finish the bottle. I’d clean up and uncork a second bottle. The next morning, as I pulled milk and eggs out of the refrigerator, I’d check the second bottle’s contents. Typically it was half to three-quarters gone. Then I’d tell myself, “I’m not going to drink today.”

  This morning, since I could barely lift my head off my pillow, Charlie realized he wasn’t going to get lucky and got up and left me alone. I dozed for a while and woke up needing to go to the bathroom. I slowly pushed myself up to sitting. A sharp jabbing pain shot through my tailbone and I limped to the bathroom suffering more intense jabs. I foggily remembered falling while walking with Pat. Maybe I chipped my tailbone. I slowly descended the stairs—my tailbone radiating pain—and poured myself a glass of water in the kitchen before shuffling into the living room. I lowered my butt onto our antique couch, wincing, while Charlie continued to read the newspaper across the coffee table on our corduroy couch. Pieces of broken glass glinted on the floor at my feet. I leaned over and began picking up shards. My head felt like a split cantaloupe. “Someone break a glass?” I asked.

  “You,” Charlie answered peevishly. “Don’t you remember? Maybe not. You could barely stand up.”

  I threw out the glass shards and went back to bed.

  About an hour later, Charlie walked into the bedroom. “You want something to eat?” he asked.