Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [78]
“SO YOU’RE JUST on wine now, is that it? That seems very smart,” my father says when I tell him I’m sober.
“No, Dad. No wine, no—”
“I think that’s a fine idea. Stick to beer.”
“No beer, Dad, nothing—”
“A good beer is just as well. Might even try that myself.”
“YOU SEE I LIKE to have one gin and tonic on summer nights,” Eleanor confides on a warm summer night sitting on her back lawn in Connecticut when I tell her I’m sober. “That’s why I never overdo it. Ever. Because I like to have one drink on summer nights sitting outside.”
“That’s great. But, I’ve already overdone it so I can’t have anything.”
“That’s why I never overdid it.”
“Well, I did.”
“Okay, okay. Do you want a . . . juice box?”
DESPITE WHAT ALL the triumphant recovery movies and books might have you believe, it’s possible to get sober and have nobody really give a shit. So our lives have been ravaged by alcoholism for the last twenty years. What is it that you want me to say?
I HAD COFFEE with Julia around this time and I apologized for the way I had treated her when I was drinking. She said, “Big fucking deal, Jeanne. You’re a total psycho, drunk or sober.”
I NEEDED TO SEE Grandpa (Jed). If we had broken up because I was a lushy mess and he was sober, my mind told me there was now a new equation, math even I could get, a simple fraction: sober/man = sober/woman. I was now, well, pulling my weight in the equation of our love. I went over to his house to announce the good news, the news of my return to him. He made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a coffee and listened.
“This is the best news I’ve gotten in a long time,” he said.
“So, I mean, I thought we could give it another shot—”
“Another what? Another shot? Are you crazy?” He lit a cigarette.
“Now that I’m sober,” I reminded him.
“Listen, I want you to have the happiest life you can possibly have. I want you to have everything you ever wanted”—he gestured with his hands—“over there. Like way over there.”
“You wanted to get married.”
“Yeah, well, that’s before we broke up. I had no idea how happy I was going to be without you. Which is why I’m not mad about all the shit you pulled—the roast beef sandwiches you ate drunk out of your mind in our bed, the time you were drunk and tried to stick that long-stemmed rose up my ass, the cheating, none of it. Because you were the one who ended it and for that I will always owe you.”
“Look, you don’t have to answer now. Maybe you want to take some time to think about what it would be like with me sober now—”
“No. Nope. No way.”
I finished my PB and J and we smoked a cig together and I took a look around at the old luxury SoHo loft and left.
MY MOTHER WASN’T IMPRESSED or amazed and she didn’t want to know how I’d done it or when or what it was like or was it difficult or how did I feel now. She probably thought I was pretending to be sober to get her sober. I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it much.
Being sober is the most important thing to me, and yet I really hate people who blab on and on about being sober and how they did it and why they’re so much better than people who can’t get sober. Alcoholism is horrible and all alcoholics would like to get good and stinky regularly if they could. What people who get sober don’t talk about is that sobriety can be monotonous, can feel like your personality is living in a gated community, that sometimes it’s hard to access fun and wildness because it might be located in the same region of your brain that says, “Have four hundred beers right now and then show someone your butt!” I don’t like feeling so protective of myself. Some sober people