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It seems like it should be easy to spill out colorful tales about what life was like with my alcoholic family members, but the truth is, there was so much, and it went on for so long, that it’s hard to pick out individual events. When things happen often enough for a long enough time, they cease to be stories and become simply life, simply the way of things, and it’s hard to find a story in that. Or maybe it’s more like this: when you’ve spent your life trying to pretend certain things never happened, it becomes difficult to pick out the details of exactly what did happen.

What I remember most clearly about being with my dad and his wife was the overpowering sense of dread. It was a feeling that should come out of the gut—that’s what people always say, “I have a gut feeling”—but for me, it hovered somewhere above me, and as my dad and his wife got more and more out of control, it would unfurl around me like a curtain or a cloud. Sometimes it traveled into my gut, but I tried not to let it get that far. I remember that feeling more than any particular episode: the feeling of What’s going to happen this time? What will my stepmother do this time? What will set her off? I was seven years old when my father married his third wife, and until the day she died, she never lost that ability to instill heart-stopping panic in me. I was probably in my twenties by the time I learned the term hypervigilance, a skill I had mastered before I reached adolescence. It was actually a little game my dad and I used to play; each time I’d come to their house for a weekend visit, he’d take me through and ask me what was different—a new knick-knack somewhere, a few pieces of furniture rearranged, that sort of thing. He was always impressed by the way I noticed the tiniest change in any detail of their house. It had nothing to do with the decorating, and everything to do with being preternaturally attuned to everything that happened there, always on watch for the earliest signs of trouble blowing in.

That was the way of life at my dad’s house: watching, and waiting. My stepmother was an angry drunk, and the person she got angriest at was me. At seven years old, I became the target for her keenest resentments, most of which were directed at my mother. My stepmother didn’t cook, so we ate in restaurants almost every night. The restaurants always had bars, and there were always Manhattans for my father and vodka martinis for my stepmother. At lunch, there were Bloody Marys. They would drink, and we would talk, and somewhere along the line my stepmother would get mad. She would get louder, and angrier, and people would stare, and sometimes she would get up and shout in the middle of the restaurant—about me, about my dad, my sisters, her daughter, whatever was on her mind. She knew all my most sensitive buttons. “Your father knows you don’t love him,” she would say, to a second-grade child who already believed that all of her father’s unhappiness and the failure of her parents’ marriage rested on her shoulders. “All you care about is what he can buy you!” she’d scream, as though she hadn’t filled her own walk-in closet with more shoes than most people own in a lifetime. She’d hurl accusations at my mother, and insults at my sisters, none of whom would be there to defend themselves. Rarely would my dad intervene in these scenes; if he did, she’d turn her fury on him, despite the fact that she clearly believed herself to be his only defender. She’d call him spineless, a coward, and he was those things, but more than anything he was an alcoholic like her. He was never one to rock the boat, and two failed marriages had apparently left him unwilling to take any chances. His strategy was conciliation, so instead of telling his wife to shut up, he’d ask me never to mention my mother when I came to visit. It was clear where his loyalty lay.

Whenever my stepmother had a particularly ugly blow-up, my dad would come find me later and give me some sort of explanation. Sometimes she’d be passed out when he came to talk to me, other times she’d still be wide-awake, throwing in her drunken commentary from another room. The explanation usually involved a brief recap of all the troubles my stepmother had endured in her life, edited so as to make it appropriate for my age—her teenage pregnancy, her abusive first husband, her dead second husband. The problem was that the details of this story changed with every telling, so it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I got the story straight. This information was apparently intended to help me understand why my father’s wife behaved the way she did toward a helpless child, but it did very little to soften what became, by my adolescence, a seething hatred.

Over those first ten years or so of my dad’s third marriage, when things were the worst between his wife and me, what stands out is just how much everything stayed the same. Every dinner out, every weekend on the boat, every visit to their house was marked by the same patterns of increasing tension, explosion, and relative peace. Very little changed, except for one night out at the yacht club, when it was my dad’s turn to blow up. It is one of my clearest memories from childhood. But that is a story for another time.

Vikki

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under You Are Not Alone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.