Under the Influence (4 page)

Six months after Dwight and I started spending time together, I found out I was pregnant. The idea of becoming a mother—having someone who would always be there, a family member of my own to bring to those wonderful dinners with the extended McCabe family in Sacramento, a child whose growth could now be measured alongside that of all the others on the kitchen molding—was the best thing I could have dreamed of. I did not give thought to the fact that, as had been true of so many significant events in my life, this one was not a choice I made, but something I allowed to happen.

The first time I ever saw my husband lose his temper, I was eight months pregnant. I had quit my job by this time. We were on the freeway, headed to his cousin's wedding in Los Angeles, and the car behind us had tapped our bumper. Dwight's face darkened then, and for a moment he just sat there, but I knew something was coming. He got out of our car and started screaming at the other driver, calling her an idiot and kicking the side door of her car. Who was this man I'd married?

I started to recognize a pattern. If Dwight was tired, or stressed—as he often was—he'd take it out on whoever happened to be around. Usually this was me. It might be nothing more than the discovery that I'd
broken his 49ers beer stein or I hadn't remembered to buy peanut butter. Once he was set off, Dwight was like a drunk, without the liquor part.

But we had a baby. I decided that was enough. After Ollie was born, five months after our little Sacramento wedding, attended almost exclusively by Dwight's relatives, I believed there was nothing more I would ask for out of life than to be the mother to this child, to be part of this family. My mother-in-law had written my birthdate in a book she kept (“because you're a McCabe now,” she told me). There was a place on the page to record things like dress size, favorite color—for future present-giving, presumably. I made sure to write down her birthday, too, and called her Mom, which wasn't difficult, not having called anybody else that before, including the woman who'd given birth to me.

By the time Ollie was six months old, Dwight had gotten a promotion at his firm, and not having had any kind of career before the baby, I was happy staying home—taking endless photographs of our son from every conceivable angle, engaged in every one of our small set of routines. (The walk. The bath. Playtime on the floor. Diaper change. Another walk. Another diaper change. Another playtime.) The ordinariness of my life now actually thrilled me. It wasn't that interesting to anyone else, probably, but I discovered I was really good at something, which was being my son's mother.

By this point, I had learned how to steer clear of my husband's temper, or shut it out with a glass of wine. And in an odd way, the times when Dwight wasn't angry were even more disturbing than the times he yelled, because at least when he was angry, the emotions he expressed felt real. It was his easygoing salesman's manner that left me feeling most alone. I'd hear him on the phone with one of his clients, or even one of his brothers in Sacramento, and realize with a chill that his tone of voice never changed. Even as he was delivering the news that a couple had been turned down for a loan, he adopted the identical upbeat tone. (“We'll find you another package,” he'd say. “It's all good.”) He was no different with me. Or with his parents. Even with our son.

I was printing photographs I'd taken at a family gathering when it struck me that in every image my husband wore an identical expression. When he came home from work, everything he said to me sounded like something he'd heard on television. My marriage had started to feel hollow. I didn't really know the man I was married to. He certainly didn't know me. I doubt he wanted to.

But I had fallen in love with our son. I couldn't imagine being away from him.

Maybe it was that having Ollie revealed to me—for the first time, I think—what real love felt like. It came to me that what I had fallen in love with wasn't really this man, but the picture of the life that being with him made possible, and that made me as responsible as Dwight was for the failure of our marriage. We probably didn't have much in common, if anything, when you got down to it. I was just good at making pictures. Inside the frame of my viewfinder. In life.

I was thirty-four—our son age two—when Dwight came home from work one day to say he had some news to deliver. He'd fallen in love with a woman he met at his brokerage firm. He felt badly about this, he said, but he and Cheri were soul mates. Even as he delivered this information, there was a bland predictability to his delivery: like a TV anchorman reporting on an earthquake somewhere, or the weather person predicting rain for an upcoming holiday weekend. “I wish it could have been different,” he said to me, “but it is what it is. Life's funny that way.”

As swiftly as Dwight had entered my life, he departed from it. His exit, whose warning signals I had missed, had evidently been in the works for a while, because he had moved out by that weekend.

By the time Dwight left, I had no illusions about our marriage anymore. The greater shock, probably, was discovering the effect of Dwight's change of heart on my relationship with his family. My family, too, as I had started to see them. Only it turned out they weren't. And most of all, the shock at realizing how easily I could be fooled, how poor my instincts were for spotting a fraud.

When I first learned the news, I actually called up Dwight's mother, imagining that she might convince her son to give our marriage another try. For Ollie's sake, at least. Short of that, she would comfort me.

“I hate to say this, Helen,” my mother-in-law told me. “But we've all seen this coming for a while now. You can't leave your hubby feeling like an also-ran and then expect him not to notice if someone comes along and starts treating him like he's special again. No wonder he was getting short-tempered.”

There were no more invitations to holiday dinners. Ollie paid visits to the relatives, but only with his father now, never with me.

My mother, Kay, was remarried by this point—living in Florida with a man named Freddie, who generally poured his first cocktail around 11:00
A.M.
and kept going, which probably made her feel better about her own affection for gin and tonics. In the early years after Ollie was born, I'd chosen to spend Christmas with my husband's family rather than subjecting ourselves to the inevitable drunken nights and hangovers, but after Dwight left I made the trip to Daytona Beach to spend the holiday with her, out of some thin hope that maybe we'd pull off some kind of family closeness that had eluded us all those years. I even brought a bunch of my photographs along, hoping Kay might take an interest. She flipped through the images in my portfolio as if she were at the beauty parlor, reading an issue of
People
magazine. With less interest, probably. My son, who had always begged for a dog of his own, spent most of his time playing with my mother's shih tzu.

Two days into our visit, I returned to the condo after a trip to the store to find Kay, well into her third or fourth drink, from the looks of things, watching a video of a Quentin Tarantino movie, my son propped up on the sofa next to her, clutching his blanket.

When I told her this wasn't the kind of stuff I wanted Ollie to be seeing, she said, “You know where the door is.”

M
aybe there was a family legacy here. If so, it was not a good one.

I had learned long ago that alcohol could help me feel relaxed and offer a certain short-lived comfort in a moment where little real comfort existed. But it was not until the long, chilly winter after my husband told me about Cheri and moved out that I got into my more serious drinking.

I always waited until Ollie went to bed, and in the beginning I only let myself have one glass. I didn't get drunk, but I liked how the wine took the edge off my day, the slightly fuzzy way things looked if I'd sipped a little cabernet. I felt looser, less anxious, and if the alcohol failed to take away the sadness, it made the feeling blurrier, the pain more of a dull ache than a sharp stab. This left me inclined to pour a second glass, and after I'd had a second glass, pouring a third was easy. Some nights I finished the entire bottle.

Often now I fell asleep on the couch with the glass on the floor beside me. When I got up, I'd have a headache, though I learned to avoid those by taking a Tylenol the night before.

I didn't drink during the day. Never when Ollie was awake. Unlike my mother, I was going to make sure my son had no doubt he was the most important thing in my life, and more than anything, I wanted him to feel he was safe with me.

With just the two of us there, it felt okay to eat our dinners on a tray table watching movies—not just Disney and cartoons, but Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, whom he loved—or on the floor with a picnic blanket. Our dining room table was covered with art supplies and science experiments, and there were piles of library books around, and costumes we made from stuff we found at the Goodwill. Sometimes we went on photography missions—not to the usual places like the zoo or the beach, but a junkyard or a skate park or a plant nursery or his favorite, the pet store, to check out the puppies and pick which one we'd choose if they allowed dogs at our apartment complex. On weekends we cooked together—pasta or tacos, homemade pizza. But if we felt like it we might just make a big bowl of popcorn with butter and call that dinner. We'd curl up on my bed with blankets while I read to him—fantasy mostly, or our book of Shel Silverstein poems—and if he fell asleep, I'd let him stay there.

At first I only drank on the bad nights—if Kay had called up for one of her rare check-ins from Florida, or if my car had broken down and the bill wiped out my savings account. The night I learned the news (conveyed by our son) that his dad's wife, Cheri, was having a baby (and later, when the news came of her birth) I could feel that bottle calling to me.

I waited until I'd read Ollie his book and turned off the light. Then I took my bottle down from the top shelf of the cupboard. Peeling off the foil, turning the corkscrew, I could already feel the warm, comforting fog that first glass would produce in me. In the absence of an actual man in my life, the wine served almost like a companion.

Ollie was a few months shy of his fifth birthday when the big trouble happened. It was one of those nights—increasingly common now—that I'd polished off a whole bottle. I was half asleep on the couch, but one sound I never missed was my son's voice. He was calling out to me.

Ollie lay in bed holding his right side and groaning. Wine or no wine, I knew the story with an inflamed appendix. You had to get it
out. I carried Ollie to the car and laid him in the seat next to me with a blanket. Buckled him in.

We were just a few minutes from the hospital when I saw the blue light flashing. My first thought: I'd been speeding. Once the policeman saw Ollie and heard where we were headed, he'd understand.

But the policeman wanted me to get out of the car.

“Let me see you walk a straight line,” he said.

“I have to get my son to the hospital,” I told him. “He's got appendicitis.”

“You aren't driving this kid anywhere,” he said. “If your boy's sick, I'm calling an ambulance.”

He had me count backward from one hundred. He held a finger in front of my face and asked me to follow its movement back and forth with just my eyes. From the front seat, I could hear Ollie calling to me and moaning.

The ambulance pulled up a couple of minutes later. By this point the police officer had put me in handcuffs. As awful as this felt, worse was knowing my son was in pain and I couldn't be with him. Even hurting as he was, Ollie had seen the policeman snap the cuffs on my wrists.

Ollie knew about police from the movies, mostly, where the people they caught had usually done something terrible. “My mom's not a bad guy,” he said. Sick as he was, and holding his belly, he was crying louder now, not only from the pain. The last thing I saw as they pushed me in the backseat of the police cruiser was Ollie lying flat on the stretcher as they slid it into the back of the ambulance and closed the doors. On the way to the station, the police officer asked for the phone number of my son's father.

So it was Dwight who was there for the surgery, and afterward, when our son woke up. His mother, my former mother-in-law, called me later. “I thank God he was looking out for Oliver, Helen,” she said. “Because clearly, you weren't.”

Four days later—with Ollie home again, while I was waiting for the suspension of my license to go into effect—I received the letter from a
lawyer reporting my ex-husband's intention to file for full custody of our son. “Evidence of unfit motherhood,” said the complaint.

A guardian
ad litem
was appointed to investigate—which meant Ollie had to be interviewed multiple times. As little as I could afford it, I hired a lawyer—a move that put me more than thirty thousand dollars in debt. I bought a suit for the day we went to court—the most conservative outfit I could find at the consignment store. Dwight arrived with my former in-laws and half a dozen other relatives whose charades teams I once played on, along with Cheri, heavily pregnant by this time. Greeting me outside the courtroom, my lawyer said he was optimistic. Since this was my first offense, the judge should allow Ollie to continue living with me, with weekend visits to his father.

The courtroom was hot that day. I could feel the sweat beading up under the jacket of my suit, the panty hose cutting into my waist. I'd purchased the wrong size because I hadn't bought a pair in years. Each of the lawyers spoke, though I was finding it hard to focus. I tried to pretend I was a courtroom photographer, imagined I was in this room to take pictures of these characters, as if it were just a job that brought me here and not my whole life as a parent that hung in the balance.

The guardian
ad litem
spoke first. In the report she presented to the court, she said it appeared to her that though my ex-husband expressed his desire to raise Ollie, she had the strong impression that it was actually his parents, more than he, who were pushing for custody. Oliver indicated that his father yelled at him a lot, and his stepmother apparently let him play video games all day when his dad was playing golf. Oliver's primary attachment was most definitely his bond with me, the guardian said. She went on to testify that if I made the commitment to attend regular AA meetings and counseling she had no doubt I could be a responsible parent. Her recommendation was that our son remain with me as the primary custodial parent, with regular visitation granted to Oliver's father.

Then it was time for the judge to speak, and from the moment he began I knew I was in trouble.

“It may be true that the mother has good intentions to do right by her son,” he said. “I can only hope that she does. But she has already made it abundantly clear by her actions to date that she is sufficiently controlled by her addiction to alcohol as to remain incapable of acting on her good intentions. She placed her son's life in jeopardy. And not just the life of her son, but that of any citizen out on the roads.”

He launched into a speech about drunk drivers then, complete with statistics. Though I was cold sober, of course—I hadn't had a drink since the night of my arrest—the room seemed to be spinning.

“I will step outside my traditional judicial role in this matter,” the judge said, looking directly at me, “to convey a personal story here. Four years ago my wife of thirty-four years was killed by a drunk driver.”

I looked at my lawyer. Wasn't this a moment when he was supposed to stand up and object? Evidently not.

“I considered long and hard,” the judge continued, “whether my own personal loss required me to recuse myself from this case, but ultimately concluded just the opposite. My experience of the consequences of vehicular homicide, and the fact that the mother facing the court today could easily have taken a life, or even several lives, the night she got behind the wheel under the influence, serves to inform me as to where prudent judgment and justice may be found in a case such as this one.”

There was more, but I had trouble taking it all in. Only the final words.

“I cannot allow a mother who places her son's life at risk to remain his custodial parent, and therefore award full custody to the father and his new wife, who have shown the ability to provide what the mother has not: a safe and stable home for their son.”

I could feel the walls of the courtroom pressing in around me then, and my lungs struggling for breath. My lawyer touched my shoulder. Somewhere on the other side of the courtroom, I heard a familiar voice saying “Praise the Lord” and realized it was my former mother-in-law.
Neither she nor any of the other members of Dwight's family present that day spoke to me as we left the courtroom. That day or ever again.

I was granted weekend visitation, conditional on my ex-husband's approval. No driving. No overnights. Parenting classes were required. Also therapy. For me and for my son, who had experienced the trauma of living with an alcoholic parent.

When the judge was done speaking and the proceedings adjourned, I laid my head on the table. I didn't want to look up, to see the small, tight smile of my ex-husband's current wife, Cheri, as she sat there like a madonna, with her hands circling her belly, or the look of regret on the face of my lawyer, which may have had less to do with concern for me than the realization that it might be a while before he collected his fee.

I had already lost my driver's license; it was suspended for eighteen months. This meant I also lost my job. The only way I could get to Walnut Creek to see Ollie would be if I rode the bus and BART—as well as a taxi—or found someone to drive me.

At AA—where I attended meetings regularly, thanks to the kindness of my fellow AA members, who picked me up to bring me there—I learned plenty about the struggle most people have who've depended on alcohol to get them through the nights, or the days. For me, the decision to quit, and the ability to hold to it, came with stunning swiftness. Giving up wine was nothing compared to the other loss, the real one. My son.