As I pull into the driveway for one of my prodigal visits, my father stands outside on the little slab of cement we call a patio, firing up the gas grill for dinner. He has a beer in his hand and a backup on the picnic table.
I say hello, head inside, and make myself at home, which includes verbally jousting with the little brother and sister I barely know; regaling my mother with stories of my new job, new boss, and new life without the boyfriend; and generally acting the part of the perfect daughter I want to be. Actually, what I really want to be is twelve again and to try to do things right this time, but, of course, I can’t; even if I had a time machine, it wouldn’t have gotten rid of the rituals and compulsions. This is the trouble with always wanting to start over: I don’t know what is wrong in the first place, and so I can’t make things right on the next try. It is a cycle of failure.
After dinner, I talk my mother into heading to the bar down the street to have a few drinks and catch up a bit on each other’s lives. My old watering hole is now a respectable restaurant, and we are able to sit and talk for two or three hours. It is absolutely lovely, visiting with her in this way. And because of my non-eating, after just a couple of glasses of wine, I am blasted.
We return home after midnight to find my father in one of his dark moods, my little brother barricaded up in his attic bedroom, and my little sister cowering in bed, fully clothed, with the covers pulled up to her chin. When my brother hears us come in, he bolts down the attic stairs and turns on me.
“Why do you even bother coming home?” he screams at me through tears. “This happens every time! And then you leave! And we’re stuck here! Why do you even bother?”
Standing there, watching this boy’s heart break before my eyes, I lose it. I’d had just enough to drink to be belligerent and self-righteous; I tell my mom, brother, and sister to get some clothes, and I make them come home with me. I have one child in my car and my mother has one in hers, behind me. We drive three hours on the thruway at two in the morning. I, of course, am drunk.
When I awake the next morning, I am horrified at what I’ve done—not that I’ve kidnapped my family, necessarily, but that I endangered their lives with my drunken anger. But once that self-flagellation evaporates, I am able to do what I’ve wanted to do for years and never had the courage to.
I write my dad a letter, asking him to quit drinking. I tell him that I know how hard it is, and how frightening, and how unfair, because I am an alcoholic as well. But it is time; he is losing his family. It is a heartfelt plea for him to stop from someone who understands. I tell him I have to quit, too, and how hard it is for me.
My mom takes my brother and sister home the next day, and my mom says my dad crumpled up my letter and threw it in the garbage. He quit drinking, though, which was somewhat ironic because I didn’t.
I HAD TAKEN A JOB AT YET ANOTHER, LARGER LAW FIRM.
Already on the decline toward my own inevitable rock bottom, my new boss couldn’t have been better suited for me. He was high-strung, controlling, and somewhat paranoid. He also was very demanding, very scattered, very disorganized, and very manic, thinking nothing of cancelling a ten-attorney deposition that had taken weeks to coordinate and schedule simply because he was feeling overwhelmed. He often reminded me of an alcoholic without the alcohol, and I was the classic codependent counterpart.
Despite all of the drama, he was very kind to me—parental even. The paradox made working for him particularly challenging, and also made it so much easier to starve myself; anxiety thrives on that kind of emotional conflict. This time period was when I first heard the phrase “I’ll show you; I’ll hurt me” to describe how women tend to turn their anger inward. And I did, I did, I did. I starved myself until my upper arms looked like swizzle sticks, and then I starved some more. It was as if working for this man gave me permission to punish myself—as if I needed a reason, and here it was.
People began to comment on my weight loss, and not always positively. But ask any anorexic; when it comes to weight loss, even an insult is a compliment. There simply is no such thing as too thin. Eventually, my firm sent me to an eating disorder clinic where I spent four sessions being essentially ridiculed by a man for being stupid: “You know you’re hurting your body, right? And that this is just a cry for attention?” Maybe he thought he could appeal to the intellectual side of me, the side that got good grades and loved law. But, if that’s the case, then he wasn’t a very good counselor. He just made me angry, and when I get angry—well, we already know what happens: “I’ll show you . . . .”
I started seeing another counselor instead, a young woman who specialized in alcoholism. I went to group therapy twice a week but continued to drink, figuring that, as long as I was getting help for it, I was headed in the right direction. I was hoping that maybe I wouldn’t have to quit at all, that somehow she could teach me to keep it under control, and then maybe I could have the self-medication without the self-hate. I never mentioned the other issues: the hair-pulling and skin-picking and obsessive thoughts about whatever they were about that day; it didn’t occur to me that these issues were anything other than my own personal demons.
The irony was that because of those demons, even if I didn’t self-medicate, I would continue to self-hate.
IT WAS BECOMING MORE AND MORE OBVIOUS TO OTHERS THAT I HAD SOME SERIOUS ISSUES.
As the months wore on at the law firm, I’d developed an unidentifiable skin rash on my legs that mimicked psoriasis, my hair was thinning even where I wasn’t plucking, and I was picking at my face until it bled, sometimes while at my desk.
And while many of us went out for drinks after work with some frequency, my drinking was different. Even if no one else knew it, I knew it. And God, did it make me angry—why I had to feel like an out-of-control freak, judged and dismissed, or worse, judged and taken advantage of for doing the exact same thing that everyone else was doing: having a couple of glasses of wine with friends. And often, like “gaydar,” addicts can recognize each other; another woman at the firm knew my secret as well. She was a paralegal and a recovering alcoholic. She asked me on occasion if I would like to join her at her twelve-step fellowship meeting, to which I would kindly reply, “No, thank you; I’ve got this.” Then I would walk away fuming with an indignity I would never share with her because I didn’t want to make her mad.
The most visible symptom of the downward spiral was still the weight loss, and eventually my boss convinced me—by threatening my job, if I recall correctly—to go to my regular doctor, whom I’d previously seen on several occasions with the imagined brain tumors, cancers, and rare diseases I was always convinced I had. As I waited in the exam room for him, I stepped on the scale and it read 100 pounds. I stepped off and sucked in my gut some more and got back on: ninety-nine pounds. Off again, on again—I was determined to keep it at ninety-nine. That’s how the doctor found me when he returned: stepping off and on the scale.
Finally, at long last, he truly thought something was wrong with me. He gave me a stern talking-to about the dangers of starving myself, a prescription for an anti-anxiety drug called Ativan, and an appointment for the following week. I was no longer crazy, imagining things that were wrong with me; this eating disorder thing really did exist. I vowed then and there to sustain the anorexia because it gave me a tangible, identifiable explanation for some of what was going on in my head.
Also right around that time, I’d been hanging out at a very boutique-y bar where only the coolest people hung. I was getting quite confident with my social butterfly persona: the “fake it till you make it” Maggie. I always arrived after work, professionally attired. I had my first glass of wine to unwind and shake off the day, and then my night started. I usually ended up by myself those nights because the more I drank, the meaner I got—heck, I didn’t even want to go home with me half the time—but there was one man I had a crush on who was starting to pay attention.
He was older, distinguished, and wealthy. He drove a nice car, had a terrific career, and was very handsome; in short, he was everything I wanted in a man. Here was a man who could save me, who could give me my happily ever after. This was it, I told myself; this is where I start over. We flirted for weeks, and finally one night he said, “Come on; let’s get out of here. Let’s go dancing.”
We went to a local hotel restaurant that boasted a popular dance floor. After checking our coats, we danced the night away—and I drank the night away as well. When it came time to leave, I could not for the life of me find my coat check marker, and I vaguely recall making a very big deal about this with the coat check girl. I am nothing if not dramatic—and combative—when I’m loaded. My vague recollection includes a very clear scene. Somehow, eventually, I left with my coat.
This man and I agreed that I would follow him home from the hotel. We each got in our cars, he pulled out, and I pulled out after him. I drove down the highway for many, many miles, swerving and weaving in my drunken stupor, before realizing I had no idea what his car looked like anymore or if I was even still in the same state as him. I gathered enough of my wits together to get home in one piece and spent the rest of the night calling information, trying to find a man whose last name I couldn’t remember.
The next time I saw him, I coolly approached him with the coat check marker I’d eventually found in one of my pockets. “I believe this is yours,” I said, with my best seductive voice.
He simply glared at me for a long moment, said, “Keep it,” and turned his back. I’d never experienced such cruel, deserved, overt rejection, and the embarrassment and humiliation would have been unrecoverable had I not been heading down into an emotional abyss already. The experience served only to hasten the trip.
MY WEEKEND-LONG, TEN-YEAR HIGH SCHOOL REUNION WAS A THING OF BEAUTY.
It took place about a month after the Mr. Perfect fiasco and signaled the beginning of the end of my life as I knew it, although I couldn’t see it at the time. What I saw was a very slender, sexy, successful, single young woman ready to go back and kick some high school ass. I had a T-top Nissan Pulsar, and now, thanks to my doctor, I had downers to mix with the booze. I also had a chip on my shoulder the size of Montana.
What I didn’t have was any self-confidence, but that didn’t stop me. After stopping to visit with my parents and dropping off my overnight bag, I got ready and headed out. I went into that reunion as if I owned the world, and that’s what people saw. My makeup was perfectly applied to hide my facial scars, my eyebrows neatly penciled in. Zooming into the reunion parking lot with the T-top off the car, I made my entrance in a little black dress that clung to my skeletal frame like plastic wrap.
That is what I wanted them to see.
I didn’t want them to see the train wreck that had become my life or to glimpse the truth: that facing the world alone evoked a daily struggle to get out of bed; that I was perpetually looking for someone to love me and make me feel safe, and perpetually failing because what I was looking for could never exist; that I often found that love and safety with married men because they could give me what I needed without asking anything in return; that I had just about run out of hope; and that I was a drunk and I pulled out my own hair and apologized for the rain. I did not want them to see that the harder I fell, the harder I needed to convince people I was on top.
I hung out with my few friends from high school, charmed them with my initial-drink smoothness, and got quietly-but-surely hammered. I flirted with boys that wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school, made up dramatic stories about my current life and career that I knew couldn’t be fact-checked, and eventually managed to get home each night. When it was all over, nursing a hangover and trying desperately to piece the weekend together in my head, I packed my bag and left my hometown. I drove the three hours back to my apartment and cried the whole way.
THANKSGIVINGS WERE A BIG EVENT IN MY FAMILY, BIGGER EVEN THAN CHRISTMAS.
Everyone came home for them if it was humanly possible; that was just how it was done. We gathered at various relatives’ houses until we became too big to do so. Then we rented a cabin in the woods—a barn almost—on which we’d descend each year until, with marriages and kids, we no longer fit there either. The gathering then moved to a VFW, which had the added convenience of a stocked bar. We all tried our best to make it each year because we rarely saw our relatives anymore except for this one time of year. And I, at least, needed to show how much I’d grown or how successful I’d become or how happy I was. My Uncle Andy had always come home, too, and that was always the biggest thrill; Thanksgivings lost a certain amount of appeal after his passing.
In my head, I loved those Thanksgivings. In reality, they usually reverted to a scream-fest between my father and me, both of us inevitably spending the day slowly getting drunk. The occasions when he and I were wasted at the same time, in the same place, were few and far between, so we took advantage of these opportunities. I would lambaste him with every single thing he’d ever said and done to hurt me, and he’d do his best to ignore me, which would make me angrier still. From the time I was old enough to drive, which was also when I began to pick up, I ended these annual debates by driving away, drunk and angry, down two-lane country roads, and often in the snow.
The year of my high school reunion, with the pressure of my weight issues and anxiety-fueled drinking, I didn’t want to go home for Thanksgiving. I’d never missed one, no matter what was going on in my life, but this year I guess I wasn’t interested in being the show. It wasn’t even lack of interest, really; I simply didn’t have the energy. Trying to be someone I was not for the benefit of others was taking its toll; I was about as far down in the pit as I’d ever been, and, for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like crawling out.
My brothers in Boston would pick me up on their way home for holidays, and, as was our custom, they usually arrived at my place on the day before Thanksgiving. The evening before that, on Tuesday, I called my doctor’s office to talk to my favorite nurse—the one who was trying to convince me that I didn’t actually look good at ninety-nine pounds—and asked her about the anxiety medicine they’d put me on several months earlier.
Specifically, I asked what would happen if I swallowed the whole bottle.
The nurse asked me innumerable and often unrelated questions, which, I’m sure in hindsight, she was trained to do; within ten minutes, there was a knock on my door. I politely said, “Can you hang on? Someone’s at the door.” I opened it up and two uniformed police officers stepped in. One took the phone from my hand and told the nurse, “We’ve got her. We’ll take it from here.”
I silently cursed the nurse and made a mental note not to confide in her anymore.
One of them, who I decided was “Bad Cop,” confiscated my bottle of pills; the other, who turned out to be “Worse Cop,” just glared at me for several minutes until an ambulance arrived, whisking me away to a nearby hospital. I tried repeatedly to explain and convince everybody that I had simply been asking out of curiosity, and that I wasn’t going to kill myself. They just nodded.
Once at the hospital, I repeatedly demanded my one phone call. “You’re not under arrest,” Bad Cop said. Clearly annoyed with me, he finally gave me a quarter for the pay phone and let me call my lawyer friend. His wife answered the phone, and sounded surprisingly calm for having received a 1:00 a.m. call from a crying woman asking for her husband. My friend, of course, had already told her about me, and I imagined her only surprise was how long it took for the phone call to come.
“Hi. Can you come and get me? I’m at the hospital,” I told him. I was trying to sound both casual and brave—as brave as I could in a gown with my butt hanging out while crammed into a phone booth that I’m reasonably sure needed to be tested by the Centers for Disease Control. “There’s been a big misunderstanding and I’d like to go home now.”
My friend asked to speak to one of the cops, both of whom were hovering around the phone booth; I opened the door and handed the phone to Worse Cop, who was the closest. I only heard his end of the conversation and decided that I must have been the absolute worst thing he has ever seen in his career.
“Who’s this?” he said, curtly. I couldn’t hear the answer.
“What’s your relationship to her?” he demanded. Again, I couldn’t hear the answer.
“Look, your ‘client’ threatened to kill herself,” he said. “She’s not in police custody—she’s in medical custody.”
Yikes, I thought. I did? I thought I was just inquiring as to the physical ramification of ingesting more than the prescribed dosage of an anti-anxiety medication because maybe I was feeling a little anxious. As I listened to the one-sided conversation, I began to question my own motives. Was I trying to die? Was that what I was feeling when I made that phone call to the nurse? After all of these years, had I finally gotten to the point where suicide became a viable option?
And I knew the answer there was a resounding yes. And what kicked in next was pure panic.
“I’m sorry,” I said, to the police, the orderly, anyone in the vicinity. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
While this litany of apologies continued in my head, my body was being transported to the state psychiatric facility down the street. The police told my lawyer friend he could pick me up there; I found out later he had to wait three hours before they would let him see me. In those three hours, I was evaluated by a bevy of psychiatrists and their students, telling each one that I was fine—really; I had merely been curious; I won’t do it again, swear to God; and I really have to go now because my brothers will be at my apartment soon.
When at last I was released early the next morning, the attending physician pushed my wheelchair to the front door and offered a final piece of advice that I will cherish to this day: “Next time you do it, do it right.” I couldn’t understand why he was so angry with me. I said I was sorry.
When I finally made it back to my apartment, my brothers were waiting for me; my lawyer friend had left a semi-explanatory note for them on my apartment door while I was at the hospital. I was a physical wreck, having been verbally and emotionally battered much of the night with no sleep, but was quite shocked to see what an emotional wreck my oldest brother was. He was devastated.
I joined them on the sofa as my younger brother fetched me a cup of coffee. We sat in silence for several minutes, no one really knowing where to begin. Finally, my oldest brother asked, “What happened?” And, at last, I found the truth.
“I just didn’t want to be here anymore,” I said. “I just felt . . . done. That’s all.”
They mulled that over for a time, the two of them, not knowing what the heck to say, all of us pondering the shared portion of our lives from which I alone, I thought, did not emerge unscathed. When I next looked into the face of my oldest brother, I saw an anguish that nearly brought me to tears.
“Mag,” he said, through his own tears, “Why?”
He was asking as if he honestly didn’t know, and it was then I realized that maybe he was not unscathed after all. He’d obviously put at least some of it away in mental storage, judging by this question. He had no idea of the depths of my challenges, probably because I never once told him about them. They were shameful because they were secret—or was it the other way around? All he knew about was my alcoholism, and that was old news; he’d gone from listening to my dad’s drunken nightly rants to listening to mine. It was life as we knew it. He didn’t know the rest because nobody knew the rest.
“I’m just tired,” I said. “Maybe I just didn’t want to go home this time.” It seemed as though it was only then that he remembered Thanksgiving was the following day, and some sort of understanding began to dawn on him.
Home.
Drinking.
Shouting.
Crying.
Leaving.
I mean, that’s what it was all about, right?
THANKSGIVING THAT YEAR WAS CLOUDIER THAN MOST.
We decided we should still go and try to pretend everything was normal and that I hadn’t just spent the night in a mental hospital. We all looked like hell but blamed it on the long trip and a poor sleep. I didn’t celebrate the holiday with my usual mixed drinks, which probably was a stronger clue than anything that all was not well. No one, however, asked what was wrong because no one really wanted to know; we didn’t get involved in each other’s issues. I got through the holiday, and my brothers brought me back to my apartment the next day.
I was about as down as a person can be without actually being prone. I zombied through work with no recollection of what I was doing. Christmas was just ahead, my uncontested favorite time of year, and I don’t even remember if I got a tree. The holiday came and went, and three days after Christmas I went to a Friday happy hour at a downtown bar. I remember drinking a couple of glasses of wine, which really wasn’t a lot. Then again, I probably hadn’t eaten in a few days.
I left downtown and headed for my usual bar, and, as I veered toward the off-ramp from one highway to another, I hit a patch of ice and missed the curve. My car—my precious little Nissan Pulsar—slammed head-on into a cement divider, completely smashing in the front end. The hood flew up and the car bounced back; I sat there, momentarily stunned, amazed, and slightly pissed off that I was alive. I hadn’t meant to hit the divider, I’m reasonably sure, but, heck, as long as I had . . . oh, well. I put my car in reverse, backed out onto the highway, pulled back into traffic, edged over into the breakdown lane on the right, and continued heading for my bar.
Within minutes, I was pulled over. The cop approached my car, shone a flashlight in my window, and said, “What the hell happened here?”
Although I tried to sound as coherent and business-like as I thought I looked, the totaled car I was driving was a dead giveaway. “Well, officer . . . well, I guess I missed a curve back there,” I said. He told me to step out of the car and asked if I’d been drinking. I admitted to the two glasses of wine but said that I’d driven before having had much more alcohol and never hit anything, so that couldn’t have been the problem; black ice was way more likely.
He examined the damage, called a tow truck, and asked where I wanted it towed. I probably answered a little too quickly—“Oh, take it to JB Auto; that’s where it’s always been fixed before!”—but I could tell by the way he was wrapping up the entire event that he was not going to ticket me, anyway. I sat in the back of the police car watching the tow truck pull away with my baby, and the cop said he would drive me home.
“Thank you,” I said. “But I was on my way to my bar . . . can you drop me there?”
He looked at me, shook his head in disbelief, and started driving.
On the way, he said, “You know, I’m not going to arrest you for this, even though I should. I think you probably screwed up your life enough tonight, and I don’t want to make it worse. But you shouldn’t drink.”
I thought about what he said, and answered, “You know, you’re absolutely right. Hey! Can I do that breathalyzer thing, just for kicks?” He shook his head again and handed the device to me in the back seat. I blew almost twice the legal limit. Hmm . . . , I thought. I guess I’m a little wasted after all.
True to his word, the cop didn’t arrest me for driving while intoxicated. He dropped me at the bar, and I went in and proceeded to drink myself into oblivion in the unconscious hope that I simply wouldn’t remember the night.
When I woke up the next morning and pieced the previous evening together like a patchwork quilt, I knew I’d just defined and then hit “rock bottom.” I called the paralegal from my law firm who’d been offering for years to take me to her fellowship meeting and asked her to pick me up. I never drank again. I was almost twenty-nine.