Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [36]
Emmie leads me into the church-basement rec room as if I were a two-year-old being taken to my first day at play group. The room is intensely smoky and intensely friendly. People sit on folding chairs or stand near the lone table, drinking coffee, chain-smoking, eating cookies, hugging each other, talking among themselves. My first impulse is to bolt. What the hell am I doing here?
My plumber nods his head and says, “Welcome.” I’m too flustered to respond. Neither Miss Manners nor her opposite, my mother, taught me what to say when your plumber greets you at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Emmie takes me to the coffee urn, makes me coffee with lots of milk and sugar, leads me to a chair near the front of the room.
“How did you know this meeting was here? You’re not even from Connecticut.”
“There’s a meeting book.”
“You’re so fucking efficient,” I say.
She looks at me and smiles. Gently. “I was absolutely terrified the first time I came. We all are.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Nothing.”
“You know that’s the hardest thing in the world for me to do.”
“That’s why I brought you here. If you hate it, you don’t have to come back.”
“Ever?”
Emmie laughs.
On the walls of the rec room are signs lettered on little oak-tag panels. “EGO = Easing God Out.” “First Things First.” “Think.” (That one is upside down.) “Easy Does It.” Platitudes. Don’t these people speak English? There are also two enormous scrolls. One is headed “The Twelve Steps.” The other is headed “The Twelve Traditions.” The first line of the twelve steps reads: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” I read no further.
“What are the steps to?” I ask Emmie.
“Your own mountain,” she says. “Whatever you call it.”
“Mount Leila,” I say.
“Is that a noun or a verb?”
“A verb,” I say flippantly, to cover my terror.
I hate the jargon. I want desperately to leave.
“I don’t belong here,” I say to Emmie.
“Try editing the first step: ‘I discovered that I was powerless over Dart, that my life had become unmanageable. ’ Then listen and see if you like what you hear.”
I look up at the first step, substituting “Dart” for “alcohol.” My life is nothing if not unmanageable. My life is . . . I begin to cry. Nobody seems to notice, except for one woman who comes over and hugs me. “You’re in the right place,” she says, and gives me her phone number on a little slip of yellow paper. Having entered a world in which kindness seems the rule, not the exception, I want to leave.
The meeting begins.
After someone makes announcements and reads a preamble full of words like “strength,” “hope,” “fellowship,” and “sobriety,” a woman introduced as Fleur from Boston, gets up and begins to speak.
I decide that Fleur-from-Boston, a small, frightened-looking soul in her mid-forties, would be perfectly cast as Blanche DuBois in an amateur production of Streetcar. She has wispy brownish hair, a faraway gaze in her greenish eyes, and a birdlike scrawniness that seems almost brittle. Her wrists are so frail, you feel that a mere touch could snap them.
“It is said,” she begins, in a strong Back Bay accent, “that alcoholics deform the lives of the people around them. I never fell in love with a man who wasn’t an alcoholic, and I seldom drank except in connection with the men in my life. They drank, so I drank. I drank not to drink, you see, but for love.”
The last thing I want to hear is the story of a woman who gets free from love. I am terrified—not that the program will fail me but that it might possibly succeed. I hate all the mellowness and security