No, I wasn’t. My father was the one who took me to the ER in the middle of the night when I had the stomach flu and scraped up my vomit from that harvest-gold shag carpeting. He took me to get my ears pierced when I was twelve. He danced with me at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Summer weekend days he and I spent at the beach, with a well-stocked Styrofoam cooler; I’d play in the waves, and he’d look up from his paperback every few sentences to wave and make sure I was okay, to assure me he was there. My mother’s love was high volume, dramatic, always on display, ultimately a self-reflective showcase: Look at my pretty little daughter, see what I have created! But my father’s love was a quiet, stabilizing theme in my life, as sustaining and taken for granted as air to breathe. The special bond between us was part of our family mythology. We were alike in temperament—“You take after your father so much,” I often heard — both of us happy in solitude and silence, and we could sit together for sweet, peaceful hours in the evenings, after a clattery family dinner, just father and daughter together, in the corner of the garage set up for his sculpting “hobby”; I would do homework while he sculpted amazing works of art from wood or clay and, every night, steadily put away a bottle of wine. The most comforting smells of my early childhood were linseed oil on fresh-sanded walnut wood, the earthiness of fresh-turned clay, a whiff of Coppertone mixed with Coors beer from that well-stocked Styrofoam beach cooler, and the juniper berry gin kiss from his nightly after-work martini.
All right, it wasn’t always so peaceful and sweet. The wine, the beer, the martinis did have a positive effect on him, at first; like Sarah, it made him feel better, made all the hassles of life and the stuff at work and whatever else haunted his soul and pricked his tender skin go down just a little more easily. You could see the tension dissipate, the jokes and participation in the world made more effortless. He became a wittier, more charming, more delightful him. But the nightly predinner martini became two or three, the glass of wine at dinner became two, became that Buddha-shaped gallon jug of Almaden. “Incidents” began, at dinner parties at friends’ houses, at my parents’ own epic parties; my father would have “a little too much” and get. . different. Get loud, at first all happy life-of-the-party guy, his joshing notched up a few decibels, but then an anger seeped into every remark, his jokes now edged with something indifferent and mean. He would get so unlike himself, the calm and so-present Daddy-himself I knew, the man who taught me poems and held my hand during scary medical tests. The tension that dissipated after the first drink or two would return but simmer and expand and reform itself into a different shape; later, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, I would see a visual approximation of this when, the Ark finally being opened, a pearly smoke escaped to become beautiful spectral angels swirling around before retransforming into snarling, horrific demons that made the Nazis scream.
I barely remember what came next, though: The tick-ticking rowdiness, the raucousness, the inevitable eruption. But I know it did, just slightly off-screen. I can still feel it in my gut, the body-memory of a clenched stomach. Sometimes the monster you don’t see is scarier than the one you do. Did it happen when I wasn’t present, left at home with a babysitter? Did I, sensing the smoke turn malevolent and dark, learn to strategize myself out of the way, distract myself in my room with TV or a book? What I remember most is the mornings after: Feeling frightened and confused because my father had “taken off” in the car — disappearing to no one knew where, and hopefully not killing himself or anyone else — and asking my mother what happened, when was Daddy coming home? But my mother would be hungover herself, and hysterical, and after this happened several times I’d learned to comfort her: Don’t worry, Mom, he’ll come back, really! And he would, a few days later — after the binge, the bender, the spree at some motel or hotel somewhere, he’d show up back home, quiet and abashed, and everyone would drywall and spackle and paint over the “incident” in exactly the same way as the guy my mother hired to fix the latest fist-holes punched through the walls of our house.
And yet, it just didn’t seem like a big deal. It was the late ’60s, the early ’70s, the era of the sunken living room and Dean Martin getting urbanely sloshed on TV, the ubiquitous wet bar tricked out with the accoutrements of drinking: Every house had a martini shaker, multiple groovy ice buckets, jars of cocktail onions and maraschino cherries and green olives, wooden toothpicks with jewel-colored cellophane-laced tips, the two-foot-tall bottle of chartreuse Galliano and a set of fancy liqueur glasses, cans of tomato juice kept in the mini fridge for weekend hair-of-the-dog Bloody Marys. As Helen points out, everyone got drunk now and then! There was no deception, no subterfuge necessary: Sure, let’s open another bottle, let’s have a nightcap, another round, one for the road! It’s always the five o’clock cocktail hour somewhere! And any violence was again, for me at least, off-screen; my father never laid a hand on anybody, preferred to take out whatever alcohol-fueled rage and frustration he felt on the drywall, or in the solitary shelter-escape of an anonymous motel room, or internalize it into self-loathing and despair. His anger was never directed at me; I don’t remember ever feeling afraid of him. And I wouldn’t be afraid for him for many years yet.
But it was impossible not to breathe in something else, along with his aerated love and juniper-berry breath: For the child of a drunk, there is always, always, Something Bad about to happen, just waiting to erupt. You can never trust the charming, delightful thing, the love that gets showy and loud; it will disappear in an instant, turn ugly and mean, become that lurking monster capable of who knows what kind of terrifying hurt, and you can only hope the quietly authentic love will return with the real person in a few days, sweetened with apology and guilt. But maybe one day the real person will head out the door and will be gone forever. So don’t ever let your guard down. Hold your breath. Keep your stomach clenched. The dancing smoky demons are just waiting to make you scream.
The first time I ever got officially drunk was New Year’s Eve, 1978. I was fourteen years old. My friend Marie came over — our assorted parents and older siblings were out on the town — for our first “adult” New Year’s Eve, left to our own partying devices. The plan: Playing Monopoly and getting officially drunk. I find a bottle of generic whiskey in that bottomless liquor cabinet, and we get to work. Pass Go, collect $200 and gulp of whiskey. Buy a hotel, get a celebratory refill. It tastes as awful as I remember, but I am determined, whiskey is more potent than wine, and by 10 p.m. I am, at last, a girl of golden radiance, a soaring balloon girl, one of the great ones. I am in awe of my own exquisite depths, my multitudes. Now, I get it. This is a blast. By midnight we are crocked, thrilled with ourselves and delighted with our existence on this planet. We are both of us inspired, beautiful creatures; our friendship is the sacrament of angels. We sing, we giggle, we fall out of our chairs. No horses are killed in the making of this fabulous party. No imaginary lines are crossed, no one throws up in a gutter, there are no pink elephants, purple cockroaches, mice, or bats, and I win at Monopoly, buy hotel after hotel after hotel, gulp, gulp, gulp. This is a game I can win. This is a game I want to keep playing. Happy New Year, o life, I love you so very much.