Lies My Mother Never Told Me (17 page)

We exchanged phone numbers, and promised to get together. We hugged, then went our separate ways.

 

One of the main reasons writing teachers recommend James Joyce's
Dubliners
to students is its epiphanic moments. Nothing is harder to write than those moments of grace, where truth suddenly comes barging in through the darkness and a character is offered a chance to change. I often go back to those moments in Joyce's stories, like the scene at the end of “The Dead” when the self-satisfied, pompous Gabriel realizes he has been misguided his entire life, and has lived with a concept of himself that has nothing to do with the truth. Or the scene at the end of “A Painful Case,” when the morally superior aging gentleman realizes his moral superiority has been nothing but a cover for his fear of life and love, and that it is now too late and he will live out the rest of his days alone.

Hemingway had a different method—which is to simply write the facts surrounding the moment of epiphany, and let the reader fill in the gaps. Most modern readers miss the point, though, if it's not spelled out clearly enough for them.

So what was different about the Monday I decided to give up drinking?

Absolutely nothing. I've been considering that day for years
and still cannot find a reason why, on that particular morning, my deflector shields were so profoundly weakened that the truth was able to slam into me full blast.

 

Sunday evening I was invited to a Super Bowl party at my friend Dave's apartment. Dave was the only close friend from Wesleyan I still had in New York. He was a banker and lived in a one-bedroom penthouse. He was a cultivator and studier of roses, and played classical piano, two traits that had always surprised and inspired me, because Dave had been an ace science student in college, as well as a brawler who never backed down from a good fight. He was the best drinking buddy I'd ever had, because when I was with Dave, no one in his right mind would try to bother me.

I spent that afternoon deciding whether I should go. Last time I had gotten drunk was on January 6, when I had drunk several glasses of cheap red wine and awakened with a massive headache and absolutely no recollection of anything that was said during the evening. Today was January 26, and I had vowed to drink not more than once every twenty-one days. If I didn't wait another day I'd be breaking my vow, and that meant I had a problem.

 

The day before, Dennis and I had had an argument about the unclear state of our relationship. I'd hinted that I thought he was seeing someone else. He dismissed my concerns and cut me off, but I knew he was an excellent liar. I pushed him, saying he had no commitment to me and it was okay, I just wanted him to be honest. He simply refused to discuss it, which made me more suspicious and angry. Instead he said he couldn't commit himself to me because I had a drinking problem and was not facing it. I called him a liar and a zealot, adding for good measure that he was a judgmental son of a bitch who saw an alcoholic everywhere he looked.

He pulled out of a bedside drawer a Twenty Questions pamphlet that urged the person taking the test to seek help if he or she answered
one or more
questions in the affirmative. Dennis sat at the edge of his bed and looked the pamphlet over in silence. I knew what was coming. I was in a fury, but I lay back on his pillows, pretending to be relaxed and perfectly calm and not in the least offended.

“Have you ever felt remorse after drinking?”

“Who wouldn't, with someone like you watching over their shoulder every minute?” I laughed dryly but he didn't even crack a smile.

“Have you ever had a complete loss of memory as a result of drinking?”

“Not anymore.” In truth, the last six months were something of a blackout—or gray-out, more precisely—from the effort of controlling when and how much to drink, but I wasn't going to share this with him, the judgmental bastard. This shit-head knows me too well, that's the problem, I thought. Dennis seemed to be growing annoyed as well. His face and neck had turned a deep shade of red, though he tried to maintain his calm composure.

“There's no such thing as
not anymore
with alcoholism,” he said, attempting to keep his voice equable and calm. “Pickles can't turn back into cucumbers.”

“Pickles? Cucumbers? What the fuck are you talking about? You know what, Dennis? Fuck you.” I stormed out and hadn't spoken to him since, and today was Super Bowl Sunday and Dave's party.

So, feeling lonely and misunderstood, I took a Valium so I would not be tempted to drink, and walked the eleven blocks to Dave's apartment.

Unfortunately for me, the old Wesleyan crowd would not accommodate me by being moderate, and Dave's other best friend, Ethan, now a gastroenterologist, had brought half a case of Veuve
Clicquot champagne to celebrate the occasion. Okay, I thought, what's one glass of Veuve Clicquot? And who in their right mind would turn down free French champagne?

Next thing I knew the game was on, blasting away on the television, the Buffalo Bills against…I have no idea. I remember snow falling over the field and steam rising from the players' mouths, but that could have been my impaired vision.

Ethan and I polished off the six bottles of Veuve Clicquot and then, as he held the last bottle upside down over my glass and the last few drops trickled out, he suggested we switch to white wine, as the two went perfectly well together. He lit up a fat spliff, and at that point, I thought, What's the difference? So I smoked that too and at least a pack of Marlboro Lights. By the time the wine was gone, the game was over and I had no idea who won.

Late the next morning, I woke up shaking and sick. I felt like a burned-out house with the windows broken and the wind howling through. How long could I go on like this? And what were Dennis and I doing back exactly where we'd started almost ten years ago? What the fuck was going on? I tried to think of a good and certain way of killing myself that would not look like suicide. I certainly didn't want anyone to think I'd killed myself. An accident would be much better. How about a bus? I could walk out in front of a bus. But the goddamn New York City buses were so slow. That's all I needed was to wake up a quadriplegic or something. And without health insurance, no less. My ground-floor apartment was so dark it could have been the middle of the night. I was groping my way toward the medicine cabinet when the phone rang. Normally, in my condition, I never would have picked it up, but for some reason, I did. My hand was shaking terribly and I felt I wasn't getting enough air.

“How're you doing, hon?” It was Gianna.

In an unusual burst of honesty, I told her I was having some kind of nervous breakdown. I told her my mother was slowly
drinking herself to death; I told her Dennis was a liar who couldn't even be called a boyfriend because he couldn't commit to a serious relationship and was most certainly seeing someone else; my voice warbled as my throat constricted, and I told her sometimes I wished I had the courage to walk out in front of a bus. I must have sounded horribly hungover, thick with cigarette smoke and alcohol.

“I used to feel that way, too,” Gianna said in a tone devoid of judgment.

“Shit,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

After a moment's silence, she said, “Are you ready, Kaylie?”

I took a deep breath, and before I could consider what I was saying, I blurted out, “Gianna, I've
got
to stop drinking. Help me.”

“I'll pick you up in an hour,” she said, and hung up before I could backpedal. I realized it was almost 11
A.M.,
and I was going to have to really work hard to pull myself together in an hour.

Fifty-five minutes later, bathed, clothed, brushed, I stood two feet from my front door, hand reaching for the knob, suddenly petrified. I had the feeling some other part of me was floating up by the ceiling, watching the scene with cold detachment. That part of me looking down from the ceiling knew that if I walked out the door now, and followed Gianna wherever she would take me, my life as I knew it would be changed forever, and there would be no turning back. The buzzer rang. I opened the door and stepped out into the lighted hallway.

I don't know if my mother ever told this story to anyone other than my father, my cousin Kate, Jamie, and me. She didn't share this one at cocktail or dinner parties.

 

When Tony Mosolino, Gloria's father, died on New Year's Eve in 1947, Gloria was home from Syracuse University for the Christmas holidays. That night she was out dancing at a party at the country club. Her father had recently acquired the second-biggest mansion on the fanciest street in Pottsville, where the heirs to the Yuengling Brewery and the owners of the coal mines lived. The house on Mahantongo Street was done up with no expense spared—Venetian crystal chandeliers on the staircase landings; vases of Napoleonic battles; bronze winged victories from the French Revolution; heavily carved Chinese Colonial desks and side tables; and silver galore. After a sumptuous New Year's Eve feast with the relatives, Tony Mosolino said he had indigestion and sat down in an armchair in the living room. He closed his eyes, and died.

Gloria was phoned at the country club and rushed home. In early childhood, she had lost two siblings to a virulent strain of polio—her eight-year-old sister, Kitty, whom Gloria, at four years old, worshipped and adored; and a two-year-old baby boy, the first Mark. Gloria was not close to Gertrude, her mother.
Gloria even believed that Gertrude hated her and was jealous of Gloria's relationship with her father.

A few days after Tony's funeral, the FBI showed up at the door. Not one agent or two, but a slew of men. Gertrude was upstairs in the master bedroom, and she called frantically to Gloria, who came running. A huge stack of government bonds lay on the bed. Gertrude instructed Gloria to wrap the bonds around her body, under her clothes, as Gertrude was doing herself, sliding them under her girdle.

The FBI agent in charge asked Gertrude where Tony Mosolino's money was hidden. Gertrude said, “What money?” and acted completely stupid, the housewife without a clue as to what her husband was up to when he wasn't home. She batted her eyelids and offered the agent something to drink. He refused and ordered a search of the house. The house and property were turned upside down, top to bottom. The grass was dug up and the garage emptied. No money could be found.

In 1954, when Gloria was a struggling actress in New York City—which Gertrude disapproved of mightily, constantly urging her daughter to return home and marry the nice doctor's son she'd dated in high school—she was up for the part of Marlon Brando's love interest in the movie
On the Waterfront
. Her screen test had gone quite well—better than Eva Marie Saint's, according to Gloria—and Elia Kazan, the director, told Gloria the part was hers,
if
she got her buckteeth fixed.

She took the bus home to Pottsville to ask Gertrude for the money. As she described this scene to me, I imagined it taking place in the elegant front entryway, below the wide, gently curving staircase and Venetian crystal chandelier; however, this would mean that Gloria wouldn't even have bothered to enter the living room before putting forth her request to her mother. Gloria had never been one for small talk.

“I need money to get my teeth fixed,” she told her mother.

“I don't have any money,” Gertrude said flatly.

“What do you mean, you don't have any money? What about all those bonds we wrapped around ourselves when the FBI came looking? That was at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars!”

Gertrude said, “You must have dreamed it. You always had a wild imagination. I don't know what you're talking about.”

Gloria punched Gertrude in the mouth and fled back to New York City. Without the money to get her teeth fixed, she told me, she lost the part to Eva Marie Saint. Gertrude cut her off completely, and Gloria's uncle John Mosolino, cousins Joanie and Kate's father, gave her money every month until she married my father.

Gloria never forgave her mother and saw her fewer than a dozen times over the next forty years.

A
NY RECOVERING ALCOHOLIC WHO HAS
found the way to sobriety can help lead a fellow sufferer toward relief from this hopeless condition, just as Gianna led me. But attempting to explain to someone who has never been exposed to alcoholism how recovery could possibly work seems only slightly less difficult than trying to convince an alcoholic in denial that death, slow or fast, is around the corner. Many courageous thinkers have tried—doctors, therapists, sober alcoholics—and yet, only a person who has experienced grace can understand the mystery of how a destroyed life can be turned around.

In this country, even if we know better, for the most part we still think of alcoholism as a moral weakness. Only recently has the notion that alcoholism is a disease caught on in the social zeitgeist, and most educated people will now at least pay lip service to this concept. And yet, on an unconscious and primal level, the majority of us still feel that having an alcoholic in the family is a
shanda.
This is why the relatives continue to circle the wagons and try to hide the alcoholic's drinking—and protect the family from public scrutiny and judgment.

Medical research has revealed that in about one-tenth of the population, the liver processes alcohol differently, releasing a chemical messenger that creates the craving for another drink; once that second drink is taken, the desire is doubled. But the real
problem of the alcoholic is actually centered in the mind, because we can't remember why it was such a bad idea to pick up that first drink. Once we start, we can't stop; and when we stop, we can't remember why we shouldn't start again. It is a form of mental illness, like a manic-depressive who, after being stabilized on medication for a while, suddenly decides she is fine and no longer needs her pills.

For me, the hardest part of giving up drinking was not
giving up drinking
—but getting my family to accept that I was an
alcoholic,
a terrible word that was still only whispered in my mother's house. My mother and father and their friends used to “go on the wagon” quite often. “Going on the wagon” always implied that they would soon step
off
the wagon, as if this were a necessary, if unpleasant, rest period everyone had to take. But it was only a rest period, not an end to drinking forever. Admitting to my mother that I was an
alcoholic
was saying out loud that I had to stop drinking completely. And that, in the Jones fortress, was considered a fate worse than death.

 

My first few months sober were terrifying, but they were also filled with adventure and fun. I felt as though I were stumbling through a foggy landscape of new and befuddling emotions, but each day, out of the gloom stepped helpers—complete strangers, but also people I had known before in my drinking life, and lost—who appeared out of the mist as if by magic and walked with me for a few paces before disappearing again. I still see their faces and honor them all, whether they stayed sober, or not.

One of the people who walked with me for a while was an unemployed executive assistant exactly my age named Michele. Recently, while they'd been drinking, her husband had held a loaded pistol to her head, which compelled her to run away from him and seek help for her drinking problem. With three weeks sober each, we were very much in the same state of mind. We began spending
Friday evenings watching animated films—
Bambi, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Secret of NIMH
, and my all-time favorite,
101 Dalmatians
. We cried our eyes out at the fantastic bravery of those wonderful dogs. What a metaphor for early sobriety! We bought the most extravagant desserts we could find—Napoleons, sundaes topped with whipped cream, disgustingly rich Ben & Jerry's mixes, and éclairs—oh, éclairs, how I love you still!

While I had trouble recognizing my internal landscape, the world outside by contrast looked sharp and new, and each day felt like an epic adventure. Without the anesthetic, my senses were totally overwhelmed. Acts as simple as choosing a toothpaste in the drugstore baffled me. I had never considered what kind of toothpaste I liked but had always bought whatever toothpaste the man I was with liked. I had no one around to tell me what to do. What did
I
like? I had no idea. I bought a different, tiny tube each time, to try out all of them. I settled on Aim. “Do you know that Aim is an excellent toothpaste?” I would tell people, and they would look at me with mild concern.

When I went to the grocery store, I didn't know what to buy. I felt like I hadn't eaten a normal meal in years and didn't even know what I liked to eat. Had I ever shopped for food on a regular basis? I couldn't remember. It occurred to me as I was walking down the aisles one day that I could eat anything I wanted, because
I
would be the one deciding. And I could plan a few days in advance. What a revelation.

I found out very quickly that I had a passion for fresh-brewed French roast coffee. I went to bed every night with my mouth watering at the thought of that first cup in the morning, creamy with half-and-half. If I met a friend for dinner, as I was getting ready to leave, I would rub my hands together briskly and say, “I'm off to get my coffee ready for tomorrow morning!”

And there was something else to look forward to when I got home: I'd discovered that right before bed, a cup of warmed milk
sprinkled with honey and nutmeg, accompanied by reruns of
Miami Vice,
quieted my overanxious mind and put me tenderly to sleep.

All in all, I felt more hopeful, and more youthful, than I had in years. Every day except Sunday I went to Gilda Marx's bodybuilding class, which kept me not only fit and trim, but also from wanting to jump out the window when the phone rang and it was someone who could, with just one word spoken into my answering machine, stir up all the darkness and terror and self-annihilating impulses from the muddy depths of my being. Emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness would sneak up from behind and hold me paralyzed in their grasp. I remember hearing my mother's voice for the first time on my answering machine; I'd just come home at nightfall from Gilda Marx. Gloria sounded slightly drunk and wanted me to meet her at Elaine's for dinner. Suddenly my skin felt prickly hot, and my breath caught in my throat. I had to sit down. Was this anger? Or fear? I had no idea, but didn't like it. There was no way I could meet my mother for dinner in my raw condition. I could pretend I never got the message…but that would be dishonest. Part of my new way of living was to be rigorously honest. I called Gianna. She told me I most definitely did
not
have to go out to dinner with my mother. She told me something incredible, totally staggering in its simplicity: “
No
is a sentence with a period at the end of it.”

Not with Gloria, it wasn't.

I called my mother, punching in the number with a trembling hand, and told her I couldn't meet her for dinner. She wanted to know why not. I immediately began making up excuses. Too much work. Too tired. Feeling lousy. I realized someone had probably canceled on her, which was why she'd called me so late. None of these excuses appeased her in the least. “You're a pain in the ass, you know that?” she said, and hung up.

I felt sick with guilt, like a thirteen-year-old who's done some
thing wrong, the age I'd been, in fact, when these powerful feelings had first overwhelmed me, and I began to anesthetize them.

 

Dennis, it turned out, was indeed seeing someone else, a coworker of ours from the Writer's Voice, where he was now also teaching a beginning fiction workshop—a position for which I had recommended him. When I saw Dennis coming down the hall with his new girlfriend the poet at his side, I felt my skin was made of glass and everything I was thinking and feeling was visible to him. Going to work was such an ordeal I almost quit.

It was Gianna who told me that going to the North Pole to avoid someone living at the South Pole was not learning to accept things as they are, but continuing to react to circumstances beyond my control. She promised me that if I stayed in the moment, continued to pray and ask for help, and didn't project into the unknown future, things would get better. I had never prayed a day in my life and wasn't about to start praying now, but I didn't tell Gianna this.

“When
's it going to get better?” I asked her belligerently. But she remained calm and serene and asked me if I'd had a drink today. “NO!” I shouted into the phone, outraged at the suggestion.

“Then it's been a good day,” she said simply. When I didn't answer, she added, “You're in the hallway and it feels scary right now but just keep going. There's another door, and you're going to find it. And then the whole world is going to open up to you.”

“Whatever,” I muttered gloomily. But, for the moment, her words had to be enough.

On one of that year's warm March mornings, I walked out of my apartment and saw a tree beginning to bud. I stood there and stared at it for a long time, dumbfounded. The sky above was a deep, ringing blue, and the bright green, almost neon green of the tiny buds stood out sharply against it. I felt as if I'd never before
seen such a miraculous display of life. Is that God's work? I wondered. The next day, the temperature dropped radically and several inches of snow fell, and I went outside to check on the tree. I was worried. What happened to buds when a frost hits so late in the year? I asked a few of my new sober friends—ladies who lunched—but being New Yorkers, they had never pondered the question. For several weeks, I watched the tree, and then one day, seemingly all at once, it burst into white blooms. I stood there and wept like a fool, because I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and I'd lived on that block for almost three years and had never noticed it before.

That same week, sitting on the crosstown bus on the way to teach my writing class, I looked up and saw a poem on a poster in the advertising space above the windows. Part of the Poetry in Motion series, it was by Langston Hughes:

I was engulfed by such a wave of grief that for a few moments I couldn't breathe. I folded in over myself, started to cry. I missed my stop and had to walk three blocks back to the Y.

 

I hadn't seen my mother since I'd stopped drinking, but I went home for Easter weekend. I'd finally admitted to her over the
phone sometime in March that I thought “I might be an alcoholic.” Her response was, “Don't be ridiculous.”

Apparently as soon as we hung up, she called Cecile and said, “Kaylie's joined the Moonies.”

That first evening the dinner table was filled with the usual suspects, her aging buddies from around the neighborhood, assembled for a Friday-night meal. She poured me a glass of red wine, and the prickly smell went right up my nose and into my mouth, making my taste buds spring to life. I took the glass to the sink. Her sixth sense and stress radar were functioning perfectly, and she looked right at me and muttered, “Look at Carry Nation over here.”

I didn't answer. There was a big silence at the table. After an excruciating hour, I went into my room and called Gianna, who was at her house in Sag Harbor for the weekend, and asked if I could stay there that night.

I returned to the living room to tell my mother I was going over to Gianna's. She replied, without a hint of humor, “What, you've gone gay too?”

No one cracked a smile—except for Gianna, who fifteen minutes later was positively howling with laughter.

 

With the extended Memorial Day weekend coming up, I decided that going back out there for another dose was more than I could bear in my fragile state.

James Ivory and Ismail Merchant had optioned
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
the year before, in the spring of 1991, and that option money along with my teaching commitments had so far kept me from having to find a real job. I'd just gotten a check from Merchant Ivory, renewing their option for another year. They had two film projects lined up for production in France before
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries—Jefferson in Paris
and
Surviving Picasso
. It was still uncertain if the film would ever get
made, but along with my check I'd gotten a phone call from Jim Ivory reassuring me that they still intended to go forward with the project, but that it would take some time.

Also, Terrence Malick, the brilliant and famously private film director, had recently announced he was coming out of a twenty-year hiatus to direct his own adaptation of
The Thin Red Line,
my father's second novel in the war trilogy that had started with
From Here to Eternity
. I'd just gotten option money for that project too, and for the first time in years, I was flush. At least I could stop agonizing for a while.

I decided to take a two-week trip to Key West with a neighbor, Jennifer, who wanted to learn to scuba dive. I had heard that Key West was teeming with sober individuals who would be more than happy to reach out to a neophyte like myself.

When I told my mother I wasn't coming out for Memorial Day, she did her silent number, followed by her vague refrain, “I don't care, do what you want,” and hung up on me.

 

I was dismayed to find, when we arrived in Key West and took our first walk, that Duval Street, which leads to Mallory Square and the waterfront, is a gauntlet of open bars with neon signs advertising colorful, half-price happy-hour drinks named after Hemingway characters. It didn't help that Jennifer, who had no idea what I was going through, thought the bars looked like a lot of fun and wanted to stop in. Jimmy Buffet's “Margaritaville” blasted forth from outdoor speakers, and all the people drinking inside looked like there was nothing in the world they'd rather be doing. It occurred to me that the reason there were so many sober people in Key West was that there were so many drunks. I was sorely reminded of the French Quarter in New Orleans and I wanted to go home to New York and my safe, daily routine and support system. I resolved not to pass by this street again, but all the streets in Key West seemed to lead there. I felt alone and
afraid, and guilty for having once again so intensely displeased my mother.