Drinking Diaries

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE last warm nights of summer when you can see the first hint of red on the leaves and you know that if you haven’t taken your last swim yet, you will soon. Transplanted to Northern California sixteen years earlier, I’d spent three weeks back East, visiting old friends in my home state of New Hampshire, where my adult daughter, Audrey, still lives, on the farm where I used to live, too.

Twenty-two years had passed since I had swum on the pond by our house there and read to my children on the bed I shared with their father. That chapter is closed now. But sometimes when I pass through, as I did that day, old memories catch me up short. I’m transported to the stories of the two families I was part of once—the family I made with the man I used to be married to, and the family in which I grew up, in another small town, not so far from this one.

I remember some good times. But also I remember those dark nights as the marriage was coming undone for the last time, and how—with everyone else in bed—I’d move through the rooms of our small house, laying my body down alongside first one of my sleeping children and then another, in search of sleep that would not come.

Not much of a drinker in those days—and never one to opt for the hard stuff—I took to setting my husband’s Christmas bottle of Johnnie Walker Red on the kitchen counter, pouring myself a shot. Daughter of a beloved but heartbreaking alcoholic father, long dead, I recognized the dormant impulse (“When life is hard, pour a drink”) as part of my legacy. That final winter of my marriage—the year I turned thirty-five—it had surfaced with alarming regularity. And because I wanted my husband to recognize my despair, and pay attention to it, I’d leave the bottle on the counter for him to see in the morning. See what you drove me to do? it was meant to tell him. You’ve even got me drinking now.

The marriage ended. I put away my Johnnie Walker habit, though in the years after, I discovered a fondness for wine—how it tasted and what it did to me, the dulling of the edges, the softening of the harsh aspects of my life, of which there were plenty. Two decades later, I could not name a single night I’d been drunk, but the practice of pouring myself a glass of zinfandel at day’s end, to take the edge off, had become a frequent, then nightly, event. Not just one glass either. Two. Three if life seemed particularly stressful.

Now I was back in New Hampshire, my annual late-summer pilgrimage to see my daughter and my old friends and to swim in natural lakes and ponds, as opposed to the swimming pools of Marin County. It had been a wonderful trip.

That evening—our last together for a while—Audrey and I had been invited to the home of friends who own a cottage on a pond just down the road from our old place. Earlier that afternoon, we’d plunged in the water at the swimming hole we used to go to when she was little, and she’d given me a tomato from her garden. The next morning I’d be turning in my rental car and flying back out West. I was ready to be home, but I also felt the tug of leaving my daughter and a little ragged, too, as I always get from the memories dislodged by my visit back to this place.

So the glass of chianti our hosts poured for me as I stepped through the door of their cottage felt particularly welcome. Having spent the first eighteen years of my life as the daughter of a man who got drunk every night—and got up every morning to pretend it never happened—I recognized a long time ago that though I remain careful to keep my own alcohol consumption in check, the urge to reach for wine is always there when I feel sorrow or worry or simply when I’m tired. That night I was happy—feeling lucky to be with Audrey, to be with these friends, to hear the crickets outside and look out to the pond beyond their screened-in porch—but I was in a state of high emotion, too. For me, a glass of wine—and then another—served as a way of heightening my pleasure in what was feeling good around me. And dulling the rest.

Our friends are Italian American, and they had made eggplant parmigiana, along with spaghetti in a homemade sauce. There was garlic bread and fresh corn on the cob, picked that afternoon. I ate well and reached for seconds.

As for the wine, I couldn’t say how much I drank because every time my glass got a little low, our host topped it off. No tipsiness evident, I could tell my friends a story or take in the details of the spaghetti sauce recipe just fine, and I even rattled off a recipe of my own for our friends. Mostly it seemed the wine had the effect of intensifying the warm glow of what would have been a wonderful evening regardless.

We left the cottage sometime around ten o’clock. My daughter’s boyfriend drove us back to the cabin they share on the very piece of land where Audrey was born and where her father still lives—my old writing cabin. I said goodbye, then took out the keys for my rental car to make the twenty-minute drive to the home of a different friend, where I was staying a few towns over. Audrey had invited me to spend the night on her couch, but knowing I’d be flying out the next day, I wanted to wake up with my suitcases nearby to get my gear organized for the trip.

This stretch of road was more than familiar to me. I used to drive it every day, bringing my three children to school. On one memorable night—winter this time, a good twenty-five years earlier—my son Charlie had dropped a tiny golden sword from his Playmobil pirate ship out the window of our station wagon at just this spot, and because I knew how much that sword meant to him, I had spent the better part of an hour circling this particular stretch of road with my high beams on, trying to locate that sword. Classic adult-child-of-alcoholic behavior there: the compulsion to protect one’s child from loss and grief, not simply because the pain would be hard for him to endure but because the pain would be too hard for his endlessly vigilant and caretaking mother.

I’d found the sword. My high beams had picked up the glint on the dark highway, and I had pulled over. I was very nearly sideswiped by an eighteen-wheeler when I got out of my car and crossed the highway to retrieve it. But that night at least, I’d averted what would have felt like—to me more than to my son, probably—a heartbreak.

Now a different kind of trouble and danger had me in its grip. The speeding ticket was a certainty. But the question the officer had for me when I rolled down my window and handed him my license was, “How much have you had to drink tonight?” And the truth was, I didn’t know.

“Do I have to?” I said. Already, here was a humiliating realization: that I might rely on some unknown legal technicality to get out of a test, based on my uncertainty about whether I could pass it.

I stood by the side of the road, in the light of the police car, with the occasional car whizzing past, and walked a straight line, heel to toe. I stood on one leg, raising my other a few inches off the ground. For the final test, the officer moved his forefinger back and forth in front of my face and asked me to follow it without moving my head. Only my eyes.

When I was done with that one, he shook his head. “I’m placing you under arrest,” he said. “Since you’ve been cooperative up to this point, you can wear the handcuffs in front of you rather than behind.”

A picture came to me then, of a night long before, when—with my mother out of town and my sister off at college—I had been left alone in the care of my father, who’d gone on a bender. It must have been ten o’clock when I arose to knocking on the door and the sight of a police officer.

“Do you know who the driver might be of the vehicle left in the middle of the street?” he asked. It was our family Oldsmobile. Our father must have driven most of the way home before abandoning it. With the motor still running.

In today’s world, my father would have been charged with a DUI. But this was 1966. The officer, hearing the car was ours and that my father was asleep upstairs, had moved the car himself and left it in our driveway, where my father found it the next morning, likely with no memory of what had happened the night before. “Tell your dad to be more careful” was all the officer had said to me. I kept that shameful message to my twelve-year-old self.

Now here I was, by the side of another dark New Hampshire road, with no similar appearance of leniency awaiting me. Now the police officer was opening the car door for me, since my hands were locked together. Now we were heading to the police station in the town where I’d raised my children, back when they and I were young.

The police officer had arranged to have my rental car towed to a local auto repair shop—a place I knew well from a few dozen visits over the years back when I lived in this town and drove old cars, always in need of some repair or another. As for me, I sat with my handcuffs in my lap in the back seat of the cruiser as the police officer drove us along the familiar roads toward town. There was a Red Sox game on the radio. In my chest, I could feel the pounding of my heart.

At the station, they sat me in a room and explained my options. If I refused the Breathalyzer, I’d be automatically detained. If I passed the Breathalyzer, I’d be let off with only the speeding ticket. If I failed, I’d be charged with a DUI and released on bail in the custody of whomever I might find to pick me up. This would be my daughter, no doubt now asleep back at the cabin on our old farm. It was close to midnight by then.

Another fact to absorb: While the legal definition of intoxication stood, nationally, at .08 percent, in New Hampshire the police possessed discretionary power to charge an individual with driving under the influence for an alcohol level at .04 percent and above.

I had no choice now but to submit to the Breathalyzer test. The officer positioned me on a bench for a waiting time of twenty minutes. This was to make sure my test results would not be skewed by the insertion in my mouth of any foreign substance. Evidently people suspected of driving drunk and awaiting the test sometimes surreptitiously pop in a breath mint, and doing so invalidates the test results. If I even touched my mouth during the waiting period, we’d have to restart the twenty-minute wait to take the test.

“I have to keep my eyes on your mouth for twenty minutes to make sure you don’t touch it or insert any mints,” the officer said. He demonstrated how I could scratch my nose, if I needed to, without obstructing the sight lines to my mouth. This involved raising my arm over my head and dropping my hand over the top of my face rather than blocking my lips.

Still unsure how much I’d had to drink, and running through my brain all the ways my life would be altered if I lost my license, I had already considered this very idea. This was how low I had stooped, I reflected, how desperate I felt at the prospect of what a DUI would mean to my life. Not just the inconvenience of losing my license for a period of months or the ongoing expense of high insurance. More so the shame—an emotion I remembered well from childhood, when my greatest terror lay in the prospect of someone (my friends, my teacher, our neighbors) finding out that my father got drunk.

More time passed. I thought about the eggplant parmigiana I’d eaten, grateful I’d taken those second helpings. I imagined the call to my daughter from the police, informing her that her mother was at the station, under arrest. “My daughter is a sound sleeper,” I told the officer. “She might not hear the phone.” Not that her picking it up to receive his call would be good news. Shame again over the prospect of her hearing that her mother had been charged with drunk driving, as my father never had been, though he could have been, a hundred times over.

“We can send an officer out to the house to get her,” he said. I pictured that scene then: Audrey waking to the sound of knocking at the door and coming downstairs to find a man in a police uniform standing there. I know what I’d think.

A few minutes later a printout scrolled from the machine, like a fax: my Breathalyzer score. The officer ripped it from the machine and studied it. I said another prayer. Just let me be okay, and I’ll never let this happen again.

Meaning an officer would drive me to the body shop where my car had been towed, the body shop of our old friend Gene. There’d be a bill for that one, too, of course, along with the $200 speeding ticket. But I knew I was lucky.

I made it back to my friend’s house sometime around 1:00 AM. He’d waited up for me a while, then gone to bed. The next morning I told him the story, making it sound funny more than terrifying.

I turned in my rental car and headed to the airport, where I called Audrey to tell her what had happened. I didn’t want my daughter to make the mistakes I’d made. I wanted to protect her. If I carry the legacy of potential alcohol addiction, so does she.

It was close to midnight when I arrived home in California. At that moment, I took in the full weight of what had happened the night before—how close I’d come to getting charged with a DUI and how much my life would have been changed if I’d gotten one. Not just because I live on a mountain, where every trip to buy groceries or visit the gym requires a car. But more so for the accompanying truth that, thirty years since my father’s death, I had allowed myself to become addicted to the same thing that had killed him: I had to have a drink.

The fact that I had been driving under the legal limit that night offered little reassurance here. What did it matter that I wasn’t drunk if the drinking had loosened my guard and dulled my judgment sufficiently that I was driving fifty-five miles per hour in a zone marked thirty? What if I was simply a poor driver, particularly shaky at night? All the more reason why my drinking that night—any amount—was a bad idea.

My daughter and my friend, hearing the story of my encounter with the police that night, had expressed indignation at the police officer. But I couldn’t feel offended by his behavior—the handcuffs, the humiliating instructions for how to scratch my nose, the long wait during the ball game to hear my test results. If the officer’s placing those handcuffs on me was undertaken in an effort to shake me up, he had accomplished that.

It was almost twenty-four hours later, walking in the door of my house in California after my long journey home, that I took in the full weight of what had happened the night before. Home in my own kitchen at last, I felt a powerful urge to do the thing I always want to do when I’m tired, or lonely, or scared, or simply sad: I wanted to pour myself a drink.