A LOT OF PEOPLE have asked me to tell the story of how Miss Crystal stopped drinking. It seems a number of other ones think it would be a good idea for them too. Miss Crystal is the lady I work for. I take care of the house and nurse Crystal Anne. I have nursed her since she was born and I have been with Miss Crystal ever since she married Mr. Manny and moved to New Orleans from Jackson, Mississippi, where her family is. She has a son from her former marriage and that has complicated things.
So we have all been here in the house on Story Street for six years. It seems longer. It seems like so many things could not have happened in so short a time. I have noticed time seems to pass in different ways at different times. Eighteen years since I graduated down at Boutte and that seems like a million years. Two years since Miss Crystal quit drinking and that seems like yesterday.
The reason she had to quit to begin with is that she is able to drink all night if she wants to. Every member of her family is the same way, especially the men. The men of Miss Crystal’s family are not like men in New Orleans. They are more like men from a while ago.
Well, to begin with, Miss Crystal’s decision not to take a drink was not some sudden decision, like you see on television or like that. No, it was a long time coming. Several incidents led up to it. First, her closest friend told her she thought it was time for her to stop. They were out running on the Tulane track. It was Miss Sister Laughlin that said it. She is Miss Crystal’s oldest friend except for Miss Lydia who is out in California living on vegetables. She has become quite thin. Miss Sister stopped Miss Crystal dead on the track and told her she had been drinking too much and it was not good for Crystal Anne to have a mother that was that way. Miss Sister couldn’t have said it at a better time. It was only a few weeks after the incident in the French Quarter when Miss Crystal and Mr. Deveraux were locked in the bordello trying to stop the child abuse ring. Mr. Manny had had to come and get them out and was so mad about it he had moved to Mandeville for good. That story was all over town so I guess Miss Sister had heard it.
Miss Crystal came home from the track very low. She stayed inside all day without combing her hair. Finally she decided she must quit taking a drink if it was the last thing she would ever do. “How can I do it, Traceleen?” she said. “I cannot join the AA. They are not my type of people.”
“They might turn out to be nice,” I said. “Judge Wiggins, that I used to work for, joined them. He is a very nice man.”
“No, I went there once,” she said. “They are so sad and try to cover it up with jokes and drink this goddamn coffee all the time instead of whiskey. No, I will do it cold turkey. I will do it on my own.”
“Call Miss Sister and get her to come over and help you,” I said. “She’s the one that brought it up.” So Miss Sister comes over and they sit in the kitchen drinking coffee and are real serious and Miss Sister calls her brother that is a psychiatrist. We were acquainted with him already. We took Crystal Anne to him once when she was acting crazy and would not wear shoes. I thought he was a very nice man and sensible. He said to let her keep them off until she stumped her toe and so we did.
So Miss Sister calls her brother and the upshot of it is he makes Miss Crystal an appointment and she puts on this light green dress with white flowers on it and goes over to find out how to quit. When she comes back she has this tape. She is supposed to lie down on the den floor with a pillow under her head and listen to it each morning and each night and it will put messages in her brain. Alcohol is your enemy. It is bad for your body and bad for your mind. Alcohol will kill you. Like that.
So Miss Crystal comes home and throws all the whiskey in the house down the sink, even Mr. Manny’s wine that he orders from France, and then she goes in the den and lies down on the floor and listens to her tape.
Then about ten days go by. It is raining a lot and that didn’t help. Miss Crystal, she don’t let it get her down however and starts cleaning up the house, cleaning out all the closets and the basement and the attic and Crystal Anne’s room. I was standing by all I could and even made an excuse to come in on Sunday so as to help her get through the weekend.
Saturday goes by and it is a long day. Miss Crystal, she is used to getting dressed up on Saturday afternoon and having people over. Now what is she supposed to do? The sun was shining. It might have been better if it had not been. By five o’clock she was pacing the floors. “Go to the park,” I advised her. “Take Crystal Anne and push her on the swings. I will be here making you a caramel cake. When you get back there will be a cake with icing an inch thick.” That cheered her up. I have never seen Miss Crystal turn down sugar. So she went out to the park and played with her daughter and came home and ate the cake and we made it until Sunday. I let myself in on Sunday morning about nine o’clock. I’d been up since dawn wondering what I’d find when I got there.
She was sitting in her robe reading a book, happy as she could be not to have a hangover. “What are you reading?” I said. “A story about a Kool-Aid wino,” she said. She was laughing. “This crazy man out in California wrote it. It’s about a little boy who is hooked on grape Kool-Aid. It could be me.”
Then Sunday went by and I thought we were out of the woods when who should show up but Mr. Manny. He comes by pretending to need some shirts but as soon as he has a stack of them in his arms he turns around and demands to know why Miss Crystal has let Crystal Anne quit school. She is dressed by then, in some plaid wool walking shorts and one of his open-neck casual shirts. He have so few things. It never fails to make him mad when Miss Crystal and King just borrow anything they like of his without even asking. “Is that my shirt?” he says. Then, “I can’t believe you let Crystal Anne quit school. Children can’t just quit school.”
“She is only three years old,” Miss Crystal says. “Three-year-old children do not need to go to school.”
“She’ll never get in Newman if you let her get behind. She has to go somewhere, Crystal. I don’t care where it is but she has to start back tomorrow. Tomorrow, do you understand?”
“She said a fat girl was trying to drown her. I don’t know if I’ll even get her to put her head under in the tub again. She’ll probably never learn to swim.”
“You are crazy, Crystal. Do you know that? And my daughter is going back to school. She can’t sit in that tent all her life. There’s a big world out there and my child is going to be prepared to meet it.” They are facing each other in the hall now. Just like old times. Crystal Anne, she is eating it up, standing in the doorway of the den where she’s been watching TV in her tent. I am tired of that tent myself to tell the truth. Can’t even get in the den to vacuum.
So Mr. Manny has come over and started this ruckus and they fight it out for about fifteen minutes, calling each other Lawyer and Whore and White Liberal Bullshit and Crazy and Mother’s Boy and Drunkard and Alcoholic and like that. Then Mr. Manny, he go get Crystal Anne and hug her and tell her not to worry he is going to get a court order and take her across the lake where she can live a normal life and go to school. As soon as he is out the door Miss Crystal she walk across the kitchen and call the airport and order a private plane. Then she pour herself a drink. I don’t say a word. It is not me she has to answer to. Besides, it does not do the slightest bit of good to tell someone not to drink if they have set their mind to it. Pray is the best thing to do under those circumstances. Hide the car keys and pray.
Anyway, then she pack a bag for herself and Crystal Anne and say she is going to do what she should have done weeks ago, go up to Vail, Colorado, and get King. He is working in a ski village up there since he left school. This has not been an easy house to work for. We have shed our tears. I’ve told you that before.
So Miss Crystal pack their bags and dress Crystal Anne in a new white velvet dress and off they go. No sooner are they out the door than Mr. Manny call up and want to talk to her. He seem more reasonable than when he left, talking very sweet and polite.
“Traceleen, go find my wife and tell her I’m on the phone and would she pick up the receiver and talk to me.” Like that, controlled I guess you’d call it.
“They’re gone,” I said. She had not told me not to tell. “She has got a plane to take her to see King. She has had a drink, Mr. Manny. I guess I should tell you that. To tell the truth she has had several.” I felt bad about taking sides like that, nobody in the world could love anybody more than I love Miss Crystal but there comes a time when you must do what’s right even if it could be misunderstood. “Thank you,” Mr. Manny said. We hung up and I sat down at the table and put my head in my hands. I was trying to pray but no prayers came. It is too confusing to be alive sometimes, sometimes there are things that make me wish we were all back in Boutte sitting on my auntee’s porch without a car. Why couldn’t Mr. Manny and Miss Crystal just fall in love again and spruce up the bedroom and have Miss Sister over making bread and playing practical jokes on their cousins like they used to do when we were first setting up housekeeping? What has gone wrong around here that no one can love anyone anymore?
Then Mr. Manny is there and begging me to go with him and we get in his car and go out to the private airport. We got there just as they were taking off. A Queenaire, that’s what she hired to take them to Colorado. Mr. Manny, he hired us a smaller plane, with just one engine, and the two of us got into it behind the pilot and we are chasing them through the skies. Our pilot has got Miss Crystal’s pilot on the radio, trying to make him turn back on the grounds that Miss Crystal is drinking and unfit to charter an airplane. Miss Crystal’s pilot, he won’t do it, he says only the pilot must be sober. About that time I have remembered how to pray. I do not like the looks of the sky around us, there is lightning going off in all directions. I had never known what lightning looked like before that day. From down below you only see a very small part of what is going on in the clouds. I would have to draw it to describe it to you. I know airplanes with only one motor should not be up in that kind of weather. “Turn around,” I said. “We have got no business flying into that lightning.” About that time a big bolt of it went off out the window, a whole network of lightning streaks like a spiderweb or the veins on old people’s hands. I thought I would throw up or start to scream. Mr. Manny he put his hand on my knee and squeeze it. Then he talks on the radio some more, then he confers with the pilot and we begin to turn around. Miss Crystal’s voice is on the radio again and I hear Mr. Manny promise her that if she will turn around too and come back home he will go get King himself and anything else she wants him to do, even quit his job. The radio is crackling and crackling. These big lightning clouds are almost touching the wings of the plane. It is the most terrible time I have ever had with the Weisses and even beats the day Miss Crystal threw the television set out the window during the Vietnam war. It is so terrible and the sky is so full of every kind of thing and so many colors I could not describe what they looked like, there is no paint or name for them.
Then I see the Queenaire turning around beside us and we fly back to the New Orleans airport. I thought I must have been gone a year. Mark had a fit when I got home and told him what had happened. He told me never to let him know the details unless I wanted somebody killed.
Part two. Now it is the next morning and Miss Crystal is more determined than ever to quit drinking. It has cost her twelve hundred dollars for that airplane ride. It is getting too expensive to drink and besides, King will be coming home and she will need her wits about her if we are to get him back into a school and off of dope and everything. I wish Miss Crystal had some God she could hold on to in times like these. But no, she prefers to go it alone. So we got Crystal Anne fixed up with Adelaide Simmons to play with and Miss Crystal gets dressed and goes back to the drinking doctor. She is gone half the day. It turned out she was having to have blood tests made.
So this time she come home with these white pills that do something to your blood. If you drink when you have them inside your bloodstream you will become violently ill and think you are going to die. It is called the aversion theory of stopping drinking. Miss Crystal, she thinks it is perfectly suited to her personality as it lets you decide ahead of time whether you are going to drink and not at a party when you are not as likely to hate yourself for doing it.
I wish they could get something like that for the ones that like to eat. Anyway, we have got to wait three days for her to take a pill. You must wait until the slightest trace of alcohol has gone from your blood. So three days go by and meanwhile we are moving furniture. Mr. Manny had decided to move back in. They have made a truce. He is only moving into the guest room though. Not into the bedroom. He said they have had so many fights in there, including the time King tore the bedpost off the bed, that he is never sleeping there again. Besides, I think he suspects Miss Crystal has been sleeping there with Mr. Alan while he was across the lake. Of course, he is the one that left so he can’t throw stones.
So we are moving a king-size bed into the guest room and Mr. Manny’s big mahogany wardrobe that he takes everywhere he go. He has moved it five times since I have worked for the Weisses, once to Mandeville and once to an apartment on Exposition Boulevard and once down to the Pontalba for the summer. Every time there is a flare-up in this relationship I end up with my back out from moving furniture. I have learned my lesson by now though and have Mark’s cousin, Singleton, over to do the heavy work.
So everything is going along fine for several weeks. Miss Crystal, she takes her big white pills and is writing an article for the Times-Picayune about how to stop drinking. She had been a reporter when she was young. I think I have told you that. Crystal Anne is in school every morning at Saint James where they do not have a pool. King is home and has a job working for a man that makes Mardi Gras floats. It is in this warehouse down on Tchoupitoulas and Miss Crystal goes down every day and takes him his lunch. It is beginning to seem like an army camp around our house, everybody on time and doing what they should.
There is this one float King was especially interested in that has the king of the sea surrounded by mermaids and oysters and shrimp and holding a shrimp boat in his hand. He drew it for me on a tablet, then made me come down on my way home from work and take a look in person. He looked smaller than sixteen, in that big old warehouse with them grown men he works with. I do not understand that boy although I love him and could look at him all day, he is so beautiful and golden. Poor Miss Crystal. She has been in for it since the day she had him when she was only eighteen. That’s too young to be a mother for someone as high-strung as she is.
Anyway, she is taking her white pills and the children are coming along and Mr. Manny, he is just like always. He gets up early and puts on his brown suit and goes downtown to make the money. He is trying to be cheerful but I know he is just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Also, I wish Miss Crystal would break down and go sleep in the guest room. I think it is her place to give in on that and I was on the point of telling her so. Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny love each other. If they did not have a strong love they could never have overcome their families and made a mixed marriage. Still, love dies. We must admit that. The problem with Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny is they are too smart for each other and love excitement and love to argue. Sometimes I think it is best if very smart people do not marry each other. There is not enough room in one marriage for so many opinions.
So the winter is going by at our house and it looks like Miss Crystal is going to make her thirty-fifth birthday and maybe even Mardi Gras without a drink. That is her goal. At that time she could tell you to the day how long it had been since she took a drink. She talked about it quite a bit, muttering to herself. Also, she had been finding out about those pills. Antabuse, that is what they are called. It seems that what they do is more complicated than we thought at first. Miss Crystal found this article in a medical magazine that says they might change the middle of your brain where the messages go through from one side to the other and keep the left working with the right. Miss Crystal is very particular about her brain. She was an exceptional student when she was in school and studied philosophy and the Greek language.
Anyway, back to those pills. Miss Crystal had become very worried over this article she read. Also there was an incident at a party she went to. Someone served her a dessert with sherry in it and she became very red in the face and had to leave the table. She was quite frightened by that and had been half afraid to swallow one since. She had been doing so well with not drinking and gotten all the way through Christmas and was enjoying not having any hangovers so she decided to throw the pills away and go back to the tape. Here is how complicated the pills became. We couldn’t decide how to throw them away. If we flushed them down the toilet they might get back into the water supply and kill someone down the line. Anything can happen with chemicals. It seems to me that people should be very careful about making anything they cannot get rid of. Finally, we just crushed them up and put them in the attic marked poison, in a sealed can up high where no child could find them. I suppose they are still up there. I should check and see.
Part three. We had come down to the weekend of February 10. Miss Crystal is almost finished with her article for the newspaper and about to turn it in. She was worried about whether they would print it or not as she had not written anything for a long time and she thought she might have lost her touch. I thought it was very good, the part she let me read, but with too many big words. I like writing to stay simple myself, be more like talking so the reader doesn’t get the idea they are being preached at. Anyway, Miss Crystal is on a diet on top of quitting drinking and she is nervous and can’t sit still. She keep going out to the park and running around the lagoon. Every time she go out there she keeps running into this girl that has this disease that makes her think she is fat even though she is thin as a rail. She is married to this lawyer Miss Crystal knows and she has this six-month-old baby boy she pushes around the park all day while she runs. She is driving everyone that sees her crazy. Miss Crystal wants to get some exercise but every time she goes to the park there is this crazy girl pushing this baby and it makes her ask herself, Am I Crazy Too? Why would someone stop doing everything they like? Maybe I am as crazy as that girl, here I am, almost thirty-five years old and married to a rich man and I cannot even have a drink or a tuna fish sandwich. That is the type thing she would ask herself when she came home from exercising in the park. She had me doing it, wondering what I was giving up, not letting myself do. I am still thinking about that. Who is telling that girl she is fat? Why is she listening to what she hears?
So Miss Crystal is on this diet and she is depressed from being hungry and not being able to decide whether being on a diet is a good idea or something other people have put in her head. She is torn down the middle on that issue. Finally, she comes in the kitchen, it is two o’clock in the afternoon on February 10, I’ll remember that day, and she starts making a lemon meringue pie, which is King’s favorite. The next thing I know she has me getting out the freezer and Crystal Anne is sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor turning the crank on homemade chocolate ice cream and I am beating up a pound cake. Butter and eggs and sugar and flour and vanilla flavoring and on Miss Crystal’s counter there is lemon and evaporated milk and lemon rind and crushed-up graham crackers. I don’t know what all. It was spring in that kitchen. I felt like we had gotten somewhere, made some sort of opening. Begun to see the light. That sort of sentiment was in my head.
Life is not that simple. God has made it harder than that. Sometimes I get very mad at Him and think He is not a good judge of things.
Just about the time we are getting the kitchen straightened up and powdered sugar sprinkled on the cake Miss Crystal turns on the radio and this song comes on. A song she used to listen to with Mr. Alan last year when they were having their love affair. She stand very still, her meringue knife in her hand. “Oh, you came here with my best friend, Jim, and here I am, trying to steal you away from him. Oh, if I don’t do it, you know somebody else will, if I don’t do it, you know somebody else will.”
It is a funny song to have for a love song. I remember Mr. Alan standing in this very kitchen dancing and singing along to it, making shrimp creole and being in love with her. That was when she split up with Mr. Manny the first time.
Miss Crystal listened to the whole song without saying a word. Then she reach up in a cabinet and take down a bottle of whiskey and pour herself a drink. “I am going to die when all this is over,” she said. “And I have not had my share of the stuff I wanted. I am tired of being hungry. To hell with it. I’m starving to death for everything I need.” She drank the glass of whiskey and poured herself another one. I did not say a word. I looked at the clock. It was four-thirty. What would the evening bring?
Part four. What happened next I had to piece together from reports. As soon as we cleaned up the kitchen I left. I was not staying around. I put on my things and went on home. “Stop worrying about that woman,” Mark said to me. “She can take care of herself.” But how was I to stop? If you are with someone you begin to love them, you hear their joys and sorrows, you share your heart. That is what it means to be a human being. There is no escaping this. Ever since the first day I went to work for her I have loved Miss Crystal as if she was my sister or my child. I have spread out my love around her like a net and I catch whatever I have to catch. That is my decision and the job I have picked out for myself and if Wentriss wants to call me a slave that is because she does not know what she is talking about. Miss Crystal always pays me back. She would go to battle for me. We know these things. We are not as dumb as we seem.
Anyway, back to the night of February 10. I was put out with her that night. She was going to ruin all our good work and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her. The Lord’s will be done, I suppose I was saying something like that. That is the will of the Lord. I still think I was right to go on home. Of course, if it had turned out differently I would be feeling like it was my fault. That is also how we are, something we cannot change or do anything about.
The night of February 10. Miss Crystal kept on drinking and cooking and called up a number of her friends and ordered champagne. Mr. Manny was in Chicago for the night. Then everyone came over and ate and drank and talked but it did not last too long. Miss Crystal’s heart wasn’t in it and besides it had been so long since she had a drink she couldn’t hold up like she used to. King had come home and grabbed his chance and gone off to play the machines at The Mushroom Cloud. Miss Crystal sent her friends home about nine and fell out on the sofa, just passed right out leaving Crystal Anne alone.
Crystal Anne was being real quiet, taking things in and out of her tent. Dishes of ice cream we found later and half the cake and a champagne bottle. All her dolls and her spacemen and Luke Skywalker and Pilot Barbie. I was the one that cleaned up the tent, what was left of the tent.
It had turned off chilly when the sun went down. None of the ones at the party had turned the heat on and Miss Crystal was asleep so Crystal Anne decided to build herself a campfire. She knew just how to do it. She had watched King do it at the beach. She carried some newspapers out of the kitchen and arranged them on the den rug right in front of her tent. Between the tent and the TV. Then she got some blocks and Tinkertoys and put them on. Then she went into the living room and got some of Mr. Manny’s fat pine kindling he orders from Maine and she arrange it just so. Then she go get all her stuffed dolls and toys and set them up around the edge in a circle and then she took a cigarette lighter she found somewhere and set it on fire. The fire was between where she must have been and the door to the sun room. She was trying to jump from the sofa arm through the door when Miss Crystal woke up and heard her screaming. “Stay there,” Miss Crystal says she remember yelling it over and over. “Go in the bathroom. Go in the bathroom, Crystal Anne. If you don’t go in the bathroom I will kill you.” Miss Crystal bust on through the fire and grab her up and run into the bathroom with her and out the back door onto the porch and there is no way down that way but the hanging ladder King got in New York at a fancy toy store. It has been there for years. Miss Crystal didn’t know whether to risk it or just throw Crystal Anne off the balcony or try to make it down the hall. From the bedroom door it did not look like the hall was burning yet. She made the best decision that she could. She put Crystal Anne on her back and climbed down with that baby hanging on to her, clawing her face and pulling at her hair but hanging on like a little monkey, as Miss Crystal always described it later. “Arboreal we were, arboreal we are.” That’s how she puts it. It means we used to live in trees if you go along with that theory.
So finally they have made it to the ground on that rope ladder that’s been hanging there five years in the sun and rain and then Miss Crystal breaks into a downstairs window to see if King is in his room but he is not there. Then, finally, she calls the fire department and they come and ruin all the upholstery and drapes in the upstairs not to mention the carpets. We were living in the Pontchartrain Hotel for several months after that. It was quite a mess.
That was the end of Miss Crystal’s drinking. I wish the story could be of more use to other people. It seems it takes something like a fire or falling down a flight of stairs or getting torn up in a drunk driving accident to separate people from their desire to have a drink with one another.
Of the things Miss Crystal tried the one I would recommend the most is that tape she had. It had some very nice things on it beside the ones dealing with alcohol. Your Body Is Your Temple, that is the one I liked. Whatever you put into it, the next day that is what you will be made out of. What would you rather look like in the end, a bottle of whiskey or a stalk of celery or a dish of chocolate ice cream? That’s the question I’m asking myself right now. As soon as I finish ironing this shirt I am going to make today’s choice. Today it will be one thing. Tomorrow it might be something else.