On Her Own

Photo by Jacob Spence on Unsplash

“Make it a double,” Dad said to his brother, walking up to the bar in my aunt and uncle’s harvest gold fifties family room. Uncle Hank hesitated ever so slightly, then gave one of his sharp, hearty laughs as he added another shot of bourbon to my father’s glass. My brothers and I were bored in the way we were used to. My cousin Mary was older than I was, an official teenager, so she looked off when I glanced at her. My brothers and I sat around on folding chairs in the way children waited in the fifties, sipping coke, bored but not expecting not to be, while the adults, laughing and nodding yes to refills, got louder and louder. Visiting relatives was not something you could refuse to do.

Before anyone was a teen-ager, all the cousins had run in a pack at Christmas, trailing around the clusters of adults at my grandparents’ huge house. I’d lived in that house but had no memory of it. Right after the war, my grandfather converted a room into an apartment for my parents, my 3-year-old brother and infant me, turning the closet into a mini-kitchen, and did the same for another of his soldier sons. Luckily, my parents scored a house in an Illinois farmland- turned-subdivision that went on the market on a Friday and sold out by Sunday.

When it was time to leave, my father wobbled down the front steps, caught himself, then walked deliberately toward our car. My mother told my father that she would drive. No, he said. They stood in the suburban street, Mom whispering, almost whimpering, a sound that horrified my brothers and me. She refused to get in the car. We ambled around, not even glancing at our parents or at each other, trying to not be part of this, but actually listening carefully not to the words, which we couldn’t hear, but to the tone. No one on TV or on the radio had yet brought up drunk driving. My mother was on her own.

The whisper debate finally ended with Mom picking up my youngest brother, with his crew cut and snap-on tie, and sliding him across the bench front seat. Then, all ice, she deposited herself next to him without a word or a sigh. My other two brothers and I — my father’s family had grown right along with his drinking — slid across the leatherette back seat, this time not complaining about elbows or inches. My father slumped himself behind the wheel, cleared his throat and pulled away very slowly. Make-it-a-double Dad somehow got us home. I don’t remember the drive; I only remember my mother standing in the street, begging my father to do the right thing. It was our job to wait in the middle of nowhere, feeling no fear, feeling nothing, holding off feeling. We were each learning to stay in our own glass silence, walking around on my uncle’s front lawn, pretending to notice the small, tight, gold flowers on its border.

Gail Howard

#alcoholism #childrenofalcoholics