Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (19 page)

Anna called that weekend. “I feel terrible I didn’t text you back,” she said. She had a work crisis and responding slipped her mind. And the longer the hang time, the more she raised the bar for herself on the response, which is how three days passed.

I understood. But I also understood our friendship had become another obligation to her, instead of a reprieve. And because I was holed up on my sad little island, it did not occur to me that she might be on a sad little island, too. Or that the
entire world was full of people on sad little islands: people struggling with their children, people struggling just to have children, people desperate to get married, people desperate to get divorced. Like me, Anna was forging a new identity. “You don’t want to hear about boring mother stuff,” she told me. And actually, I did, but maybe she meant she didn’t want to talk about it.

I began packing up my things and shipping them back to Texas in installments. I painted the walls of my apartment back to their original white. I binged on Marc Maron interviews, five or six in a row, which were like instructional tapes on how to talk to people. Maron had been sober for years. He was open about himself, and in return, his guests would open up about themselves. The discussions that unfolded were riveting, evidence that two people, anywhere, can find common ground. I liked reminding myself what an honest conversation sounded like.

That’s what I wanted. An honest conversation. Not one where my mouth turned into a geyser of random confessions—my bra fits funny, and I once boned that bartender—but a conversation in which those superficial details faded away and we dared to tell the truth about our own suffering. This was the closeness I had always been drinking toward. I drank for other reasons, so many other reasons, but closeness was the richest reward. The part where we locked in on each other, and one person sifted out the contradictions of who they were and how they got there, and the other person just… listened.

I’m not sure when I stopped listening. Somehow it became my duty to entertain the masses. To be
always on
. I stopped being someone who talked
with
their friends and I started talking
at
them. Amusing anecdotes, rants deployed on cue. I wasn’t the only one. We were all out there on our social media stages with clever quips and jazz hands. This was not a cultural moment
that rewarded quiet contemplation. A colleague once described our media job like this: “News happened. Are you pro or con?” Not “News happened—and should we discuss it?” But pick a side. She who judges first wins the Google searches.

Heavy drinkers are also dreadful listeners, because they are consumed with their next fix. They nod, and smile, but an inquisition is unfolding inside.
How much booze is left? Would anyone care if I got another round? What time does the liquor store close?

I was trying to stay quiet for a while. Watching, reading, observing. I forgot what an introvert I could be. I had drowned that shy little girl in so many 12-packs that whenever she emerged, nervous and twitching, I was nearly choked with shame. But long before I became an attention hog who yelled about orgasms, I was a child terrified the teacher would call on me, and I needed to accept both extremes in myself so I might find some middle ground. “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Joan Didion wrote. “Otherwise they turn up unannounced.”

A week before I moved back to Texas, Stephanie and I had dinner. I hadn’t seen her much. She’d spent most of the year in Los Angeles, where her husband was filming a television show and where she was auditioning for roles she didn’t get, and didn’t tell me about, because it was easier that way.

She asked me how I’d been, and I said scared. I asked how she’d been, and she said lonely.

After dinner, we walked through the quaint West Village streets where I came each weekend to shake loose my solitude. She’d had a few hard years, and I hadn’t even noticed it. How is it possible to be good friends with a person and miss so much? But Stephanie had such early career success that, in my mind, it could only continue. Yes, being an actress over 35 was rough, and
yes, rejection sucked, but she was Stephanie. My forever dream girl. Everything always worked out for her.

If you scratch the surface on anyone’s life, you find ache and pain. I don’t care who they are. They can be the Queen of England. (Especially if they are the Queen of England.) I’d been so busy envying Stephanie, trying to compete with her glow, that I stopped
seeing
her. I didn’t notice the times she reached out for me. “I need you back,” she once told me after too many saketinis, and I thought:
Wait. Where the hell did I go?

More than a year had passed since that night. After dinner, I brought her to the bench looking out across the water to New Jersey, and she sat beside me, and we didn’t say much.

“I could not have made it in this city without you,” I said. She waved my words away before the tears had any chance. Stephanie doesn’t like these speeches. “Stop it. We’ll be just as close,” she said, and she was right.

The next week, a year to the day I got sober, I moved back to Dallas, the city where Stephanie and I once sat in a chain restaurant, promising each other we would escape to New York.

I found a crooked little carriage house, with leafy trees all around, where I made French press coffee, just like Stephanie made when I first visited her in New York. I hung the Japanese robe I first saw her wear, and I bought aviator sunglasses like the ones she had. And I smiled at all the many ways she has shown me what I hope to be in this world.

R
IGHT BEFORE MOVING,
I sent out an “I’m coming back!” email to my friends in Dallas. The premise was to ask if anyone had housing tips, but the real intent was to drum up enthusiasm about my return. I waited for the exclamation marks and all-caps
emails to fill my in-box. A handful of people responded. Otherwise, I was greeted by the sound of wind whistling through an empty canyon.

“It’s not like I expected a parade,” I told my mom, which was another way of saying: I was totally expecting a parade, and this blows.

I worried I had screwed up by choosing to return to Dallas. I always figured I’d wind up in Austin, weird and wacky Austin, except every time I visited that town I had a nagging suspicion too many people loved it, and every time I visited Dallas, I had a nagging feeling not enough did.

Dallas had evolved from the place I grew up. More walkable areas and cool coffee shops, fewer cement slabs and soulless redevelopment. I think some part of me wanted to reckon with my past. I grew up in Dallas, so embarrassed for the person I was. Maybe I needed to assure that little girl: Hey, kid, this place isn’t so bad.

I also longed to be close to my family again. My parents had moved out of the ritzy school district and bought a modest and lovely house near the lake, with my mother’s grand piano in the bay window and a backyard filled with shade trees and a handsome dog that didn’t obey. A wisteria vine grew outside the guest bedroom window. My favorite flower, planted where any weary visitor might see it each morning. My brother had moved back to Dallas after living all over the globe—London, Italy, Iraq—and he launched a full-scale campaign to get me home. He whipped out his wallet: What will it take to get you back?

Most of us need to push away from our families at some point, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting them close again. Many people choose alternate families in sobriety. I chose my real one instead.

W
HEN
I
LIVED
in Dallas in my late 20s, my ass was hot-glued to a bar stool. The thing I knew best about my hometown was the drink specials. Now I faced a question that would greet me in any city in the country: What did people
do
, anyway?

On Friday nights, I loaded up on craft projects. Needlepoint. A latch-hook rug of a tabby. A cross-stitch of the cast from
The Breakfast Club
. I was one butter sculpture shy of a state fair submission, and I didn’t care. My hands needed occupation. I needed to do something—instead of sitting around, thinking about the one thing I didn’t get.

When you quit drinking, you are sandbagged by the way alcohol is threaded into our social structure. Drinking is the center of weddings, holidays, birthdays, office parties, funerals, lavish trips to exotic locales. But drinking is also the center of everyday life. “Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.

My old Dallas gang was a group of salty male colleagues who gathered at the bar after work. Not
a
bar, mind you, but
the
bar. “The bar” was a complete sentence. It was both a question and a command. (The bar? The bar. The bar!) I had missed those guys, and I flattered myself they might miss me, too.

“I’d love to hang out sometime,” I emailed one of the guys.

“Totally,” he responded. “You know where to find us.”

Well, shit. I suppose it was wrong to be hurt by this indifference to the script I’d written in my mind—the one where he and I went to lunch and talked about real things that mattered.

Once upon a time, we’d gathered around that long wooden
table and gulped down whatever was being served. We laughed and drank while the sun sank in the sky, and I got a high being the lone female in the foamy man cave. Those guys were all married, but that didn’t matter (to me, at least), and I never quite knew whether we were flirting, or not flirting, and I told myself both stories, as suited my needs.

I wondered if I threatened them now that I was sober. The first person to stop drinking in any group can cast a pall—like the first couple to get divorced, or the first person to lose a parent. I also wondered if they threatened
me
now. I watched their Facebook feeds a bit too carefully, judging them for every babbling 2 am status update, every picture of a whiskey glass hoisted into the lens. How dare they stay on Pleasure Island after I had moved away. I wondered:
How long could they possibly keep this up?
One of them had just won the National Magazine award for profile writing, so apparently the answer was: As long as they wanted.

It took a long time to accept that other people’s drinking was not my business. It took a long time to admit I’m the one who left the bar, not the other way around. You can’t move away for six years and come home to find all the furniture in the same place. Those guys had different lives now. New kids, new jobs. Two of them were divorced and dating 25-year-olds, which must have taken up a great deal of texting time.

Sobriety has a way of sorting out your friendships. They begin to fall into two categories: people you feel comfortable being yourself with—and everyone else.

Allison was in the former category. We had met years ago on a garden patio in Brooklyn, where we got drunk and declared ourselves great friends. But months went by between visits. Some friendships are like that. They lack an escape velocity.

She lived in Dallas now, and we met one night at a Mexican
restaurant. She didn’t drink much anymore, a quality I was starting to value in a person. She also looked looser, freer than the striving girl I’d met in New York.

“I love it here,” she said, and I kept waiting for her to circle back and revise that statement. Tell me the real truth. But that was the real truth. She was happy.

“When was the last time we saw each other?” I asked her as we scanned the menu. And then I smacked the table like it was a buzzer. “I know. Your thirty-sixth birthday party.”

“You’re right!” she said. “Oh my God. Do you remember that night?”

Dammit.
How many more times was I going to get torpedoed by this question? It’s like I needed a fill-in-the-blank letter of apology.