HALF PAST SIX

KATHRYN HARRISON

I NEVER DRANK AS A TEENAGER, and I drank infrequently in college and graduate school. It wasn’t until I was thirty and had quit my day job to work full-time at home that I began to appreciate the effects of alcohol and discovered I could drink most of my friends under the table. After a night of dissipation, I bounded out of bed bright eyed, bushy tailed, and highly irritating to my hungover friends. A gift, I thought, especially for an introvert who likes going to the occasional party.

Alcohol dissolves my anxiety about meeting people and making conversation. After a couple of martinis, the prospect of socializing goes from a painful test I’m afraid I’m going to fail to something I know I’ll enjoy. Alcohol loosens and sharpens my tongue, fuels ill-advised conversations and the kind of fleeting and delicious flirtations available even to those of us who have been faithfully bonded for a quarter of a century. It dismantles the defensive carapace behind which I tend to hide, not intentionally but as a reflex. A cool, seamless, and apparently indifferent facade, it once inspired a new colleague to refer to me behind my back as the ice queen. He told me so himself when we were laughing over drinks at an office Christmas party. “I wish you could have seen yourself when you walked in for that interview,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re nothing like the way you first appear.”

I had fun at that party—it had an open bar—but I went home chastened. “Yes,” my new husband said, “you can come off that way,” my reserve mistaken for arrogance. We embarked on training me to smile and to offer my hand with what looked like enthusiasm. “It’s not that you’re unfriendly,” he said, “not underneath. I know how much fun you can be. But, sweetheart, how will anyone else know if you don’t look at people’s faces when you meet them and don’t even try to talk to them?”

The lessons, the practicing—they didn’t work. But alcohol—alcohol was an elixir, a potion. Alcohol was the catalyst required for what would become a favorite diversion, providing me the means to collect fodder for party postmortems, which, truth to tell, my husband and I often enjoy more than the parties themselves.

“Come on,” one of us will say in response to the other’s threatening to duck an invitation to the kind of function we attend less as a couple than as separate collectors of impressions to share later, in the cab or over breakfast. “Think about who else is coming. Think about tomorrow.”

If, as when I was pregnant, I don’t allow myself to drink, I avoid situations that make me feel as I did when I was ten or fifteen: awkward, tongue-tied, and looking frantically for an opportunity to bolt. How do they do it? I’d marvel as I watched my children pass through adolescence willing, even eager, to navigate adolescent social gatherings, memories of which retain the ability to make me cringe. Until I had children of my own to observe, I didn’t understand how shy—antisocial—I’d been as a teenager, and I find myself looking back on that girl with a compassion I never felt for her at the time. I don’t know that I saw beyond the image I presented to classmates I never met outside of school: a studious girl who found it easier to talk to teachers than to fellow students, who passed through locker rooms and hallways with her eyes cast down and her face hidden behind her hair. She studied through every weekend, the girl I was, and for many years starved herself as though the goal were to disappear entirely. It was a late epiphany in my case: So this is why there are bars at parties. For me there is no celebration—and nothing to celebrate—without the amalgam of anesthesia and disinhibition that alcohol delivers, and I look for the bar first, even before I scan the crowd for a familiar face. But that’s about my life out in the world, different from my life at home.

It’s been twenty years now that I’ve made a living in the same physical environment in which I sleep and wake, in which I cook and eat and wash dishes and clothes. For all those years, the one reliable means of ending a workday has been alcohol. Although I can’t leave work, alcohol provides me passage not to a different home but to one revealed in a different light and mood. It allows me to leave my working self behind, abandon her in a previous mode of being. Uncorking a bottle of wine means I’ve stopped writing—struggling, striving—to spend time with my family and to catch up on chores I refuse to acknowledge during hours set aside for work. I’ve tried to come up with a substitute—going for a run, say, or to a yoga class, but I’m a mother. I have to be home at the very moment I want to leave. So I pour a glass of wine, preside over homework, assemble dinner, and listen to my younger daughter practice the viola, which sounds better—oh so very much better—to the intoxicated ear.

And there’s my constitution to consider, my overachieving liver. Even when I was a college girl, one drink barely took the edge off. The years went by, I bought bigger wineglasses, and eventually two glasses weren’t enough. Then, suddenly, neither were three, and martinis became something I drank at home rather than the occasional treat out at a restaurant or bar. Was it in 2008 that I began to make sure there was always a bottle of Grey Goose in the freezer? Admittedly—I admitted it—I was firmly in the habit of pouring myself a drink when I came downstairs at five. I didn’t stop to consider if I wanted a drink any more than a commuter would ask herself if she wanted to board the train out of the city and back to the suburbs. More often than not, by dinner I’d had two. The old saw about martinis—that they are like breasts: Two are perfect, a third one too many—didn’t apply to me. I could enjoy being a three-breasted drinker.

I like drinking; I like it a lot. Actually, I love it. I love the way it slows the world down—slows me down—insulating me from life’s endless little aggravations. And with three children, three cats, a dog, a rabbit, and an untidy husband, aggravations are guaranteed, even plentiful. But there was a way to open the refrigerator, note the jar of honey lying on its side, lid unscrewed and contents oozing from one shelf down to the next and finally pooling in that unreachable spot under the vegetable drawer, and not burst into angry tears and mutinous feelings about preparing dinner. A martini in hand, I could contemplate the honey and summon, as I often do, my older daughter’s wry observation at twelve (hands on hips, feet planted, and wearing a supercilious expression I’d be hard-pressed to accept graciously from an adult) that if I’d wanted peace and quiet, maybe I shouldn’t have had three children. The only half-serious recrimination, delivered with my daughter’s impeccable timing, retains the capacity to make me laugh as I did when I heard it the first time.

But even a woman who wanted each of her three children and discovered in them a joy she never anticipated might cry at the thought of hours of her time squandered by spilled honey. Inevitably, children do spill; they break things; they test-drive new Magic Markers on a freshly painted white wall; they stain the Stainmaster carpeting; they succumb, never collectively, but one by one, to the stomach flu. And the only choice a mother has is how she responds to these tribulations. A martini or two casts the necessary spell that allows me to get used to the idea of spending a punitively sticky stint on my knees before an open refrigerator. I’ll wonder how long it takes for raw, no-longer-cold chicken to spoil and decide to put it off until morning and a strong-to-the-point-of-galvanic coffee.

Caffeine is a substance I control with far more attention than I do alcohol, with a respect born of heart palpitations, sweaty palms, and a feeling of suffocation, the very symptoms I’d suffer under the pressure of having to make clever conversation with a stranger. One cup in the morning, and that’s it. “Meet me for coffee” is an invitation I almost always counter with, “Let’s wait until five and meet for a drink.” In our family, the standard response to a long face was, “What’s the matter with you? You look like half past six,” an adage coined by my great-grandfather to describe the disappointment of having come home from work in time for dinner but having missed the cocktail hour.

As the workday winds down, I trend in the opposite direction, wound tighter and tauter. Sitting at my desk, I once clenched my teeth so hard that I broke a molar, and the first thing I do after a first drink is luxuriate in how easily I can move my neck and shoulders. I love the gradual whole-body release of tension that alcohol kindles. Even more, I love how alcohol acts on my mind, granting me passage to latitudes of my psyche I don’t visit when not under its influence.

Unlike the sober, striving me, so fixed on who she’s becoming that she gives her present incarnation the merest flick of disapproving attention, I arrive—after a couple of martinis—at a state of complete, savage honesty, as if looking through a lens turned inward and trained on myself, revealing who I am, not who I want or plan to be. I even do it calmly, without judgment.

That’s why I stopped drinking at the new year, not forever but for a month, which was long enough to get used to living without drinking, long enough to recalibrate my relationship with alcohol and return myself to the thirtysomething version of me, the one with the strictly enforced “no drinking two nights in a row” policy.

I didn’t stop when my husband said it wasn’t okay to drink three glasses of wine or two martinis every night; I didn’t stop when he pointed out that some might judge my behavior that of an alcoholic; nor did I stop when he said that my sharpened wit wasn’t always as funny as it was acerbic.

I stopped after I’d deliberately considered how I depended on alcohol while I was under its influence. Drunk, I asked myself if I was an alcoholic and answered no, I wasn’t. Not yet. But I did drink three times as much as the acceptable norm for women (one drink per day and no more than seven per week, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism). The honest, intoxicated me considered just how much I was relying on ending my day in a state of intoxication and concluded that I might be in danger of becoming one.

It was, as I expected, not only possible to quit but relatively easy—enough that I could do it on my own, from one day to the next, without the support of a group or a therapist. There were evenings when I looked like half past six, but it didn’t hurt that, as I discovered after a week of abstinence, the antidepressants on which I depend are more effective when I don’t drink, infusing me with unfamiliar optimism. Too, while I’m no longer an anorexic, I retain that persona’s steely willpower, as well as her aesthetic preference for lean lines over curves. A middle-aged woman can’t continue to drink as I was, and keep eating, too, without gradually gaining weight, and there was no way I was going to buy jeans in a larger size.

Anorexia continues to save me from alcoholism, as it did in college, when I always chose calorie-free intoxication via drugs over the wicked empty calories of alcohol. Anorexia was something my former analyst called a maladaptation, conceived at a time when I felt angry, frightened, and powerless. Maladaptive or not, I don’t consider all its aspects negative. Anorexia requires self-discipline and the ability to work tirelessly toward a goal; both attributes have served me well over the years. It’s also, in my experience, as much addiction as disease, one I learned to manage the same way a dry drunk controls his or her intake of alcohol. My behavior around food has been forcibly normalized, my anorexic self fettered, as she cannot be destroyed. It took decades, but I learned how to defuse a dangerous practice and salvage its useful elements. To establish good eating habits—to eat—I needed what an alcoholic needs to abstain: willpower. And I relied on motivation I couldn’t always summon on my own behalf, the impetus inspired by the same spillers and breakers and viola screechers whose evening antics drew me toward the vodka in the freezer, cold enough that my hand left its silhouette melted into the frost on its bottle.

After all, I have a son and two daughters. I pray they never know the misery of an eating disorder; I want them to have healthy relationships to alcohol. I can be childishly defiant when my husband makes paternalistic pronouncements, and I didn’t answer when he asked if I wanted to be a mother who modeled drinking every evening as normal behavior. But I heard him, and I thought about what he said, and I stopped.

I’m lucky, I know, because while I missed those glasses of wine and inexpertly mixed martinis, it was possible to walk away from them, just as I can smoke as many cigarettes as I like at a party without wanting one the next day; just as I was lucky when in college I experimented with drugs without getting hooked on them. An accident of brain chemistry, perhaps, or of DNA, like the one that left me vulnerable to anorexia. But a lucky accident—to be insulated and perhaps saved from one addiction by the remnants of another. Otherwise, given a few more years, I might be in a church basement, clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee and introducing myself to my fellow AA members, a social contretemps that for me would be tolerable (and fodder for postmeeting postmortems) only with a martini in my hand.