The End of the World as We Know It Read Free Page A

rest. I had thought the rage and the hatred that Southern men can feel for their fathers, a rage and hatred so old and terrible they can’t be described,I had thought it would all be lifted from me and I would feel free.
    It wasn’t. Not for a day. Not for a goddamned hour.
II
    My mother had varices, which is what happens to you when you drink so much your liver can’t process the liquor anymore. The blood backs up and begins to seep through the tiny capillaries in your throat, and then down into your stomach, where it causes pernicious anemia. If you have it once, they can cure it, or stop it or whatever, but it means if you ever drink again, you’re pretty much going to die.
    I carried her in my arms, against her will, out of the hospital, and laid her in the back of my father’s car, and took her to a drying out place, but they wouldn’t take her because she was too ill. When we sat in the office, she couldn’t even sign her own name. They sent her to the hospital at the University of Virginia, and she was there for six weeks before she was even well enough to go to rehab. She stayed for months in rehab, longer than anybody I’ve ever known, and when she got out she said to me one day, “My life will never be wonderful again.”
    I understand what she meant. I still think of drinking with a light and a sweetness that in no way resemble the actual circumstances of those days. Except for a few occasions, it was just being rode hard and put away wet, and I wept at my own behavior almost every night. I lost a decade of my life, just lost it, the way you might lose an umbrella on the bus.
    My mother tried to stay sober, I guess. I mean she knew her medical condition, even if she didn’t understand it, and she’d been in rehab three months and she had heard the lesson over and over and over, but she thought nice people didn’t go to AA meetings and my father kept drinking and it was a hopeless cause. She was an elegant and intelligent woman and she hated her life. I don’t know why. She was always unhappy, and nothing would mollify her. No amount of love or tenderness or extravagant gifts. Even getting things she’d always wanted, like the house she lived in, didn’t change anything. I’m the same way.
    One night I was putting dishes away in a china cupboard, low to the floor, and she leaned over me and whispered, “I can smell liquor on your breath.” It was venomous.
    Hopeless. She began drinking iced tea or Sprite with vodka in it. She began hiding liquor bottles in her sewing basket. She began hiding liquor bottles in her clothes drawers. She set fire to her mattress. I guess her life was wonderful again.
    I took her out for a drive in the car. It was a summer evening, early summer, when it’s soft and not too hot and the mountains are still crisp and blue in the distance. I stopped the car on the side of a country road and I turned to her and spoke. “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “We all know what you’re doing. And I want you to know it’s going to be long and excruciating and I want you to know that none of us has done anything to deserve what you’re about to do.”
    â€œI’ll stop drinking,” she said. “I’ll stop drinking for you.”
    â€œDon’t stop for me,” I said. “Don’t make me responsible. Don’t make me the bad guy.” I started the car and we drove home.
    One time that summer I was down there for a visit, and I wasgoing out for drinks with some friends. I set the table in the kitchen, three mats and napkins and my grandmother’s silver. I told my parents I’d be home at seven, we’d always had dinner at seven-thirty, and we’d have dinner at seven-thirty, like always. I got home at five after seven and they’d already finished their supper.
    It was the only time I ever exploded with rage at my parents. “I bought you a