Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife (34 page)

While Eliza was in the bathtub, I poured Max a bowl of cereal.

“Aren’t you going to eat with me?” he asked.

“I’m going to take Eliza and Van out to breakfast,” I said.

“I wish I could go out to breakfast.”

“I wish you could, too, but you don’t have time.”

I pulled up in front of the school to let Max out. Fay was dropping off Walter and staring through my windshield at Eliza. I waved to her and smiled. Fay waved and shot me a look that said who-the-hell-is-that? I drove off. I checked my rearview mirror and saw Fay watching my car. I turned down a side street and stopped at a stoplight. Seconds later, Fay pulled up next to me and rolled down her window.

“Where’re you off to?” she asked.

“Elly’s.”

“I’m off to get tires,” Fay said, trying hard not to obviously stare at Eliza.

The light changed and we both pulled away.

I drove Eliza to the bank after we had breakfast, where she attempted to straighten out her pilfered checking account. Then we went to the DMV so she could replace her stolen state ID. Eliza’s sponsor met us at the DMV and took Eliza from there.

It actually felt good driving Eliza around and helping her out. Aside from stashing my purse in my bedroom, I’d been completely at ease with her staying at my house. I also enjoyed freaking out Fay.

[Tuesday, November 25]

I went to a meeting, and Tracy, who is Deidre’s sponsor, told us Deidre is under house arrest until the middle of January. Deidre is wearing an ankle bracelet, and the authorities electronically imprinted her voice. About every forty-five minutes, the department of corrections calls Deidre. If she’s not there, she’s screwed. If her voice is impaired by alcohol, their computer will pick it up.

“A small group of us has been going over to Deidre’s to have a meeting, and she keeps saying how much she wants to drink!” Wisconsin Whitley told me after the meeting. “I can’t believe it. After everything that’s happened to her and could happen to her, I can’t believe it!”

[Wednesday, November 26]

I went to my father’s doctor appointment with the pulmonary specialist, Dr. Whistler. Whistler’s pretty sure the prostate cancer metastasized to my dad’s lungs.

“My cancer doctor is Dr. Barren,” my father told Whistler. “You know him?”

Whistler looked my dad square in the eye and said, “You should see the guys downtown.”

“Who would you send him to?” I asked Whistler.

“Kevin McCreevy, he’s a urologist, and an oncologist by the name of Steve Newhart.”

My father’s sister, Diane, who’s a nurse in California, had suggested my dad see Newhart. One of Diane’s friends had been treated by Newhart before she died of cancer, and she loved him.

“I’m going to Florida to go fishing on Friday,” my dad said. “Is that okay?”

Whistler looked at my dad with a mixture of amusement and incredulity. “Yeah,” he answered. “But get to the doctor when you get back.”

“Is this something I have to take care of right away?” my dad asked. “How soon do I have to do this when I get back?”

“As soon as possible,” Whistler laughed. “I talked to Dr. Chevron, your former doctor, and he said you weren’t being very aggressive. Take care of this. This is advanced.”

All along my parents had been telling me Chevron didn’t want to do anything. He was the one doctor I hadn’t met. Now I began to see the real picture. “Is this something I have to do right now?” I could hear my father asking Chevron. “I feel great. Couldn’t I start this later?” I pictured Chevron nodding and going along with my father’s wishes. To Svengali’s credit, he’d insisted my dad start hormone therapy and get X-rayed.

We walked out of the examining room, and my dad ducked into the bathroom.

“How are you doing?” I asked my mother. Her mouth was set in a tight, thin line. She shrugged. “This is bad,” I said. My mom nodded.

My dad popped out of the bathroom and asked me to come to their house.

“Okay,” I told him. I got in my car and cried.

My parents and I sat at their kitchen table.

“I’m going to leave you and Paula all my money because I know as soon as I’m gone your mother is going to marry John-John from church,” my father joked. John-John is a pathetic gossiping bachelor.

“I don’t think Mom wants to saddle herself with another man,” I joked back.

“I wouldn’t,” my mom said.

We all laughed.

“Make an appointment with those doctors Whistler recommended,” I said.

“I don’t know if I want to go downtown,” my father said.

“Did you hear what Whistler said?” I shouted. “You told him you were seeing Barren and he looked you straight in the eye and said, ‘See the guys downtown.’”

“Well, this whole thing makes me want to say fuck it and do this,” my dad said, putting two fingers to his lips and pretending to smoke.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” my mother said angrily. “You’re not going to start smoking again. I’m not putting up with it. I’m not going to smell it on you and your clothes. I’m not going to stand for it.”

“See what I have to put up with?” my dad said to me.

I hung out at my parents’ house for five hours. My dad and I reminisced about how he and I used to get on his motorcycle and go horseback riding on the weekends. He reminded me about the time he and his father rescued me from a rain-drenched Seventh-Day Adventist youth campout, and how the three of us sat at a bar—me drinking orange juice and eating cheese and crackers—before driving back home. My dad talked about his childhood and said that at the age of three, he’d tied ropes around his tricycle wheels so he could ride it in the snow.

My dad got a faraway look in his eye and grinned. “Adolph and I had a lot of fun, too,” he snickered.

I met Adolph once when I was a kid. Adolph was old enough to be my father’s father. When my dad was a child, Adolph had taken him under his larcenous wing because my father’s dad was a barfly.

“He taught me how to steal,” my dad chuckled. “I used to have a saying, ‘If I can touch it, I can own it.’”

“What are you talking about?” my mother asked, walking into the room and catching the tail end of our conversation.

“Adolph,” my father answered.

“That degenerate,” my mother said, a look of disgust sweeping onto her face.

My father snickered and winked at me.

[Thursday, November 27 (Thanksgiving)]

As of today, I haven’t had a drink in eleven months. That was my first thought this morning. My second thought was of my father wasting away, curled up in a hospital bed, dying of cancer just like Martha. I cried off and on all morning, during which time I called Paula and told her about dad’s lung diagnosis. We cried together.

“How did Mom and Dad take the news?” Paula asked.

“You know Mom,” I said. “She doesn’t give much away. But not good. She had a very pinched expression.”

“What about Dad?”

“Last night, when I was at their house, he kept getting phone calls from his fishing buddies, the ones he’s going to Florida with. He told them, ‘I got some bad news…. Yep, cancer’s on my lungs…. But I feel great…. Yep, I’m drinking a cocktail right now…. I’m gonna beat this damned thing and I’m going fishing and I’m not going to think about it…. That’s right…. Fucking A.’ But he got teary a couple of times last night. He’s worried he won’t get to see his grandsons grow up.”

Paula and I wished each other a happy Thanksgiving. My parents are going to Paula’s house for dinner. Charlie and the kids and I are going to Charlie’s sister, Liz’s. I called my mom.

“I can’t believe your father’s thinking of smoking again,” was the first thing she said. “How stupid!”

“He’s dying,” I said. “It might not make that much of a difference.”

“Yeah,” she said flatly, “but still.”

“He may not be around much longer,” I said. “You realize that, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s hard,” my mom said. “And the doctors don’t know what they’re talking about. Look at Barbara, your father’s cousin. They gave her three months and that was a year ago. The guy who invented this Flor Essence supplement I’m giving your father had lung cancer and he cured himself with it. And look at Lance Armstrong.”

I got off the phone feeling completely alone with the ugly reality of my father’s prognosis. I made myself some tea and longingly looked at the huge martini glasses on the shelf above my teacups.

Later, at Liz’s apartment, I looked at her wine but didn’t give much thought to drinking.

Liz’s daughter, Amber, was at dinner. I’ve always had a special spot for Amber, but I haven’t seen her in five or six years. The last time was at Max’s fifth birthday party. Amber came with her baby daughter, Kiara, and since then, Amber, a drug addict, has had several stints in jail and prison, mostly for stealing credit cards and writing bad checks. Liz has custody of Kiara.

Amber looks like a white girl trying to be black. Her curly long hair is plaited and stuck to her forehead. Her language is mildly peppered with ghetto.

“She actually sounds pretty normal tonight,” Liz told me.

“You should hear how she talks sometimes. You’d swear she was a gangsta.”

Kiara’s father, who is in prison, is African American. The father of Amber’s new four-month-old, twenty-two-pound sumo baby, Angel, is a different imprisoned African American. As Amber cooed over fat little Angel, Kiara unhappily watched.

Kiara is having identity issues, Liz said. She’s upset about being the only dark-skinned member in her household. Noah, Liz’s son and Kiara’s uncle, lives with them, and sometimes Kiara says she’s white and sometimes she says she’s black. She’s also not sure if she should call Liz Grandma or Mom.

I remember Amber at the age of ten singing “Satin Doll” one Christmas. Martha taught her the song and she got up in front of everyone and sang it beautifully. She was a gorgeous, smart little girl. Fucking drugs.

[Saturday, November 29]

I went to a meeting tonight and the woman who spoke said, “Instead of half listening to people and formulating an answer while they’re talking, I give people my full attention now and don’t always have a pat answer.”

I’m always half listening to people and coming up with what I think is great advice, and I think most of the time people just want someone to listen.

A bunch of people from the meeting went to dinner at Jimmy’s Char House afterward and Playboy Pete asked me to join them. “You should be a jeans model,” he said as I turned to sit at the table. “Turn around again, come on.” I rolled my eyes at Brent, who was sitting next to me, and we shook our heads.

Women either find Playboy Pete offensive or a harmless hoot. I’m in the latter camp. Playboy Pete and his stupid jokes somehow make me feel normal again, like I’m not hanging out with a bunch of alcoholics. He reminds me of my dad’s old cronies and he makes me laugh.

[Monday, December 1]

I made appointments for my dad with the urologist and oncologist that his pulmonary doctor recommended. My dad gets back from Florida on Thursday, and on Friday he’s seeing Svengali.

I called my mom and told her about the appointments. “You need to get the slides of Dad’s prostate biopsy and take them to these doctors,” I told her.

My mother groaned. “I suppose,” she sighed disgustedly.

I went to the grocery store and bought ingredients for a Christmas cookie exchange I’m going to tomorrow, but I was too depressed to make the cookies. I called Fiona instead and told her what was going on with my dad.

“Have you told Fay what’s going on?” Fiona asked.

“No,” I said, feeling irritated because Fay rarely asked about my father, and when she did, she didn’t listen. She tends to be absorbed in her own little world and prattles endlessly about her children. “Fay is kind of hard to talk to sometimes.”

“Well, Fay’s got a lot going on, too,” Fiona said. “Ron lost his job and they’re all freaked.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. He was let go right before Thanksgiving.”

[Tuesday, December 2]

I made nine dozen butter pecan cookies and took them to Tracy’s house. My expectations were low because I didn’t think a bunch of recovering addicts would bring anything good, but it was one of the best cookie exchanges I’ve been to. Tracy served a delicious turkey tetrazzini, and we had a goofy white elephant grab bag.

Iris, a woman I’ve seen at a few of the Tuesday night meetings, and I started talking. I’m not sure how we got on the subject, but Iris began telling me about her brother’s suspicious death back in 1963. Iris said that after her mother died, her widower father had had a hard time raising the kids, and Iris’s brother, Joe, a troubled teen, was kicked out of Catholic school, then public school, and finally sent to a Catholic ranch for wayward boys on the Montana/Wyoming border. Joe was there three months before he turned up dead.

School officials told Iris’s family that Joe was mending fences when the truck he was riding in flipped over, killing him. The story bothered Iris. She had repetitive dreams about her brother lying on a slab in the morgue.

“I had one of those dreams on the anniversary of Joe’s death,” Iris said. “He was lying on the slab and opened his eyes. I asked him, ‘How did you die?’ and he said, ‘The God-damned faggot did it.’

“I started digging around,” Iris said. “There was no accident report and no fatal truck accident reported in the newspapers. I spent months trying to track down my brother’s death certificate. I was told it had been filed in a different county than the county the school was in. I called the funeral home where his body had been prepared and convinced the funeral director to send me the certificate, which turned out not to be a certificate at all. It was nothing but a slip of paper saying who the deceased was, with no other information. There was no coroner’s report, no time of death, no accident report.

“The priest who ran the ranch is dead now,” Iris said. “Died in a plane crash. One of the promotional points for the ranch was that it had an airstrip and the boys could learn to fly a plane. The priest would take boys on weekend trips and fly them in the plane to conventions to raise money for the ranch. God knows what happened to those boys during those trips. Alumni of the ranch have come forward and filed lawsuits against the ranch for sexual abuse, which the ranch has quietly settled.