Drunk Mom Read Free Page A

from event to event when you’re full of life in your twenties. It’s easy to drink in your room before you go out to flit—the people you keep around you in your twenties are new to it all. They are new to friends drinking in their rooms or friends in Emergency because of alcohol poisoning. And they are flitters as well; we all flit, trying to catch up with each other and outflit each other too.
    The ones who drink a little harder can even make fun of themselves with typical youthful bravado. I remember sitting with a heavy-drinking friend and joking that once we reached twenty-five, we’d definitely have to go to Alcoholics Anonymous because this was just ridiculous, how drunk we were getting all the time.
    She stumbled home, and I opened a third bottle of wine and wrote about that in my journal, or tried to write. Mostly I just scribbled.
Go to AA when you 25 stupid bitch
.
    I went to AA when I was twenty-seven. At that point, I had lost another relationship and a job that I’d got freshly out of grad school. My roommates were planning to kick me out. As they say in AA, “AA was the last house on the street.” There were no other options.
    I stayed in AA for three and a half years. I stayed sober.
    But now I’m not.
    I’ve relapsed.
    I don’t know why. Or I know why and I don’t have the time to go over it right now. Or there are too many whys to consider. Or who really cares why?
    The point is, I really, really need a drink.
    When I walk into a liquor store—against my will, not because I want to, I promise, I swear—I know that I own my two feet but I don’t, really; they’re no longer mine. And as soon as I’m inside the store—with its golden colours and lights, like one big liquid carnival—I know that no power in this world can make me leave before I’ve got something.
    Yes, there’s a thought buried somewhere deep under a pile of much more urging, loud thoughts, that says I can leave, I don’t have to do this … but this little thought is so weak, it will never overpower everything else that’s going on inside me.
    I don’t blame you for hating me for not wanting to stop. For relapsing and not wanting to stop.
    It happened because my best friend fell in love.
    Or because I felt old.
    Or it happened because I was far away from home.
    It just happened.
    Because I wanted a drink. Because the wanting was stronger than me.
    It was at my best friend’s bachelorette. It was vodka and soda. I don’t know how it ended up in my hand. Or rather, I do know: the bartender asked me—as they always do
—Just
soda? and just like that I changed my mind.
    No,
vodka
and soda, I said.
    I drank it like it was just soda. I looked around. No one paid any attention. No one would anyway. People drink all the time.
    I was downstairs. I was the non-drinker sent to get drinks for all the bachelorette women upstairs. The bar was red and velvet and gold. It was fall, my birth month, my birthplace. Warsaw. Another one, please, I said to the bartender then.
    What did he know?
    Double, actually.
    I didn’t get sloppy that night, no blackouts. But at one point that night, in another place, a high-end Malibu Barbie–infested club, I snatched someone’s drink and drained the bottle in one practised gulp. It was the gulp that was familiar. Too familiar.
    In less than two hours I annihilated three and a half years of sobriety and caught up to right where I left off.
    Two days later, my best friend’s wedding started with a couple of shots of vodka and a bunch of Ativans. Kneeling in church behind her giant puffy dress, I felt laughter coming on, possibly caused by the theatricality of the ceremony, possibly by vodka and Ativan arm-wrestling inmy brain. I managed to swallow my giggles, turn them into a cough. I coughed a lot through that very serious hour in church.
    Outside afterwards, I had trouble pinning my best friend’s veil to the back of her head as she received guests and flowers.
    The wind was really strong