Had I known? On some level, I must have at least guessed. All those afternoon naps in her bedroom with the shades drawn . . . and yet she’d emerge every morning in her tennis whites or her golf clothes to drink a little glass of orange juice (wheatgrass juice in the 1990s) and go off to her game. There was that ever-present tumbler full of wine and seltzer . . . but I never saw her take a sip of anything stronger. She smoked, but so did plenty of moms back then. She didn’t drive, but that didn’t seem worse than other parents’ idiosyncracies: Dorothy Feld’s mother had weighed three hundred pounds until she got her stomach stapled; Kurt Dessange’s dad wore a toupee that looked like it was made out of spray-painted pine needles.
“All those years,” I said out loud. Years of lying, years of hiding. Years of her knowing she wasn’t living right, that she wasn’t the mother or the wife she could have been. Years of loneliness, because those kinds of secrets you couldn’t tell, not to your own mother or sister or your very best girlfriend. I don’t love my husband. I’m having an affair. Sometimes I can’t stand my children. I could imagine saying these things, but I’m a secret alcoholic? I drove drunk with my daughter in the car? I want to stop and can’t? Who could tell another soul things like that? Who would react with anything other than horror?
You’re only as sick as your secrets. Another little slogan I’d picked up. Not to mention that whole fearless and searching moral inventory, where you’d list all your faults and then tell someone else exactly what you’d done wrong. “That sounds horrible,” I’d told Wanda at the desk, after she’d finished her whispered recap of the previous night’s Bachelor episode. “No, no,” she’d said, with a kind of crazy glow in her eye, “it’s the most liberating thing you can imagine! It makes you free!”
“Free,” I croaked. My mom had never been free. She’d lived her whole life under the yoke of her secrets, with a man who probably desperately wanted her to get better but didn’t know how to fix her, or how to help. So what were my chances? Where did that leave me? Was it possible that I wasn’t really an addict, that I could take pills, just more carefully than I’d taken them before? Or was it like everyone in here said, that the only path the pills would put me on would end in jails, institutions, and death? Half-measures availed us nothing, said The Big Book. We stood at the turning point. Well, here I was. Which way would I turn?
One afternoon on our honeymoon in Mexico, Dave and I had gone fishing. It had been one of those perfect days: not too hot, with a crisp breeze, the sun glinting off the waves’ surfaces, and the fish shoving one another out of the way for the privilege of swallowing our hooks. We’d caught half a dozen striped bass in just four hours on the water. Then, while we’d sat back (with beers, I remembered, and the tortas I’d bought in a little panadería on the street), the mate had set up a table and two twenty-gallon buckets of water near the back of the boat and expertly gutted each fish, stroking the blade down the center of their bellies and deftly sliding out their guts. I felt like that now, like someone had sliced me open and dumped out my insides, then stitched me back together and set me on my feet.
“So how’d it go?” Lena asked at lunch, which was manicotti, limp noodles and rubbery cheese in a meat sauce that made you sorry for the cows that had given up their lives to enter the food chain. Just the smell turned my stomach. I’d made myself a cup of tea and sat, shivering, in my customary spot between Aubrey and Mary.
“Are you all right?” asked Shannon.
“Clearly, she isn’t,” said Mary. “Just look at the poor girl!” She squeezed my shoulders. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
“What did they say?” asked Aubrey. “Were you, like, molested by an uncle or something?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Mary.
“Well, it happens,” I heard Aubrey reply.
“Not that,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own. “It turns out that my mother’s an alcoholic.” I took a breath. “It explains a lot.”
“You didn’t know?” asked Lena.
“I feel pretty stupid,” I admitted.
“Hey,” said Lena, “addicts lie.”
I nodded, wondering what that said about my mother, and what it said about me. She’d lied, but I’d never noticed, never tried to figure it out. I thought of that day I’d gotten lost in Avalon when I was little, how the streets and the store and the sidewalks and the sand had all looked different, completely different, like they belonged in a world I couldn’t even imagine, and how the walls between this world and that one were so thin. One slip, one misplaced foot, one secret out in the open and you’d go crashing through the boundaries and find yourself in that other, unimagined world where everything was different, where everything was wrong. I made myself drink my tea, and a glass of water, and follow the group out onto the Meadowcrest lawn, where we sat in a circle and listened to a man with a flowing gray beard and a woman young enough to be his daughter who was probably his girlfriend bang on African drums and tell us that music had the power to heal. Eventually, I opened my notebook again, flipping through pages of jokes and songs that would get me to my daughter. Eyes on the prize, I told myself, and bent my head and began to write.