After sixty days, most of the women who’d been there when I arrived had gone. Mary had left early, after her husband developed a bladder infection and her kids couldn’t manage it—and him—without her. Aubrey’s insurance had cut her off after twenty-eight days. When her parents and her boyfriend all declined to come get her, Meadowcrest had gotten her a bus ticket back to Center City. Lena and Marissa and Shannon had all gone and been replaced by a fresh crop of Ashleys and Brittanys and Ambers and Caitlyns. Addicts, it seemed, were a renewable resource. The world made more of us every day.
By nine o’clock on my discharge day, I was standing in the reception room with my bags neatly packed. By noon, I was in a meeting in a church on Pine Street. Hi, my name is Allison, and I’m an addict. Hi, Allison, welcome, the room chorused back. At three, I was in Bernice’s office in Cherry Hill. Technically, it was an intake evaluation, during which she’d determine whether I was an appropriate addition to her intensive outpatient group, the just-out-of-rehab folks whose therapists had determined they were ready to live in the world again. “One thing we gon’ do right this minute,” she’d said, and spun her big push-button telephone around on her desk until it faced me. While she watched, I called every one of my doctors who’d ever prescribed me anything stronger than an aspirin, and told them what had happened and where I’d been.
Some of them had been brusque and businesslike about it. Dr. Andi had practically been in tears. “Oh, God, Allison. Was this my fault? Was this going on and I didn’t see it?”
“Don’t blame yourself,” I told her as Bernice listened on speakerphone. “I was playing you. I was good at it, too. Just . . . if I ever call you in the middle of the night and tell you I’m in agony . . .”
“Nothing!” said Dr. Andi, laughing. “Not even a hot water bottle!”
“Now go and do the next right thing,” Bernice told me. I’d left her office feeling rattled and dazed. No more pills. Not unless I went back online or I found new doctors, convinced them I was in trouble, got them to give me what I needed . . . I shook my head, raised my shoulders, and quickened my pace along the street. No more. That part of my life was over. I had a daughter who needed me, I had a life to live, and I was determined to be clearheaded for all of it.
My determination lasted exactly twenty-three days. Looking back, I was trying to do too much, too fast, to have it all be normal again. Then, at ten o’clock one night, after a day of outpatient therapy and meetings and Monopoly with Ellie, I found myself thinking, Would just one glass of wine be so bad? Just a glass of red, like a million other women were probably sipping at that very moment, a little something to ease me, to calm me, to send me off to sleep?
I had the glass in one hand and the bottle—leftover Manischewitz from some Passover seder—in the other. Even though I’d never been a drinker, I could taste the kosher wine, sweet as syrup on my tongue, warming me, calming me as it went down.
I don’t know where I found the strength—if that’s what it was—to put down the bottle and pick up what people in meetings called the thousand-pound telephone. I called Sheila, a big, tall home health aide from my IOP group who’d been addicted to crack and who called me, and all the other women in the group who were under the age of fifty, baby girl. “SheilaIwanttodrink,” I blurted before I’d even said “hello,” or my name.
“Who this?” she asked, laughing. “Which white girl calling me ’bout wanting a drank?” Drank was how she said it, and the delicious silliness of it made me laugh.
“It’s Allison. The Jewish one.”
“Ooh, Allison, with that pretty little baby, callin’ me ’bout wanting to drink. You’re not even a drinker, right?”
“No,” I said. “Pills. But you can’t buy them on the corner.”
“Not in your neighborhood, I guess,” she said, and cackled. “So what you want,” she said, suddenly serious, “that glass of wine or your baby? Because you know it is never just one glass of wine. Not for us. And you know where it ends, right?”
“I know,” I said. I was gripping the phone tight, tight, tight. Tears were coursing down my cheeks. They’d told us that in rehab, and in group: we had given up the right to drink or take drugs like normal people. No Champagne toasts at weddings, no Vicodin after we had our teeth pulled. And what did we get in return for that sacrifice? Our lives back. Not just returned, but improved. Bernice closed every session with the Promises: “If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word ‘serenity’ and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”