Patti Dean
Improvisation
The film rolls. The sprockets engage. The actors spool through their paces. Hired to run through another night of the same old thing. Same old behaviors taking the place of an inventive screenwriter who would have tossed in a bomb, percolated a hot affair on the sidelines, invented a disease of the month, spun a web of greed and money lost and found.
No, this is the rigid ice age story of a mother who drinks and the family that survives as they accommodate her behind nice-house closed doors. The loyal husband lays down the law: When Mommy comes home, stay out of her way and for God’s Sake don’t say anything to upset her.
When Mommy enters the house from her 9 to 5 job, husband is always in the kitchen making dinner. Dinner must be prompt or Mommy will be upset. Children are busy doing homework or quietly playing computer games. Eyes on books and screens.
I am that mother.
I am that mother despite the best of intentions. Today I Won’t Drink. Today I won’t put vodka in my morning espresso. Today I won’t snack on as much sugar as I can so that I can get through the day without a high. Today I won’t sneak across the street from my public library job and buy the biggest, cheapest bottle of wine and sneak drinks down in the staff room. Today I won’t pull into the alley a block way from my home and twist myself into a pretzel lying across the gear shift so I can guzzle from the bottle without being seen.
I inch my car toward the house as the impact of all that booze hits the brain. A block away from home is not drunk driving.
When I throw open the door of my house, I am a rocket ship that has no trajectory other than impact and crash and burn. Everyone.
This happens day after day after day. For years.
Until today. When my 15-year-old daughter throws down the script.
She ignores the system that works because I burn myself out quickly and pass out. Hopefully in bed. Instead, she decides to argue with me. I am telling a garbled story. She isn’t paying attention. I accuse her of being aloof, cold, refusing to be a part of the family. I say she is selfish and doesn’t know how to love.
She slams her calculus book on the floor. She goes to the door.
She says she is leaving. She says, “Fuck you!”
I rage.
“How dare you! You phony! If you walk through that door I will call the police and report you as a runaway!”
I have played my trump card: the police.
Her hand is on the door knob.
“Go ahead. I don’t care anymore.”
The dicing and slicing of vegetables ceases in the kitchen. The blip blip of a video game escapes necessary attention.
The high stakes of an improvisation split the air.
“If you leave, it’s Juvie Hall for you.”
She says: “I’m not the problem. You are.”
The burn of the brand sears my brain, my solar plexus, my stomach, my heart. The fire of that statement is so powerful; I am stopped in my speech. My speech that I ride on the riverbed of alcohol until I pass out every night dries up.
She stands at the door, hand ready to twist the knob. Ready to bolt. In that moment I know that she has told me something so true. I also know that there is a love in that truth because she hasn’t opened the door.
“You’re right.”
We are both shocked.
My youngest daughter is frozen at the keyboard. Game over for her.
My husband is frozen at the kitchen door, stir fry sizzling to a crisp in the wok.
I don’t hug my soothsayer. I don’t break down and cry. I don’t apologize to the family. I climb wobbly stairs to the bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed. Voices murmur downstairs. My life enfolds me in a cloak of drunk, sober, awake, and solitary. I don’t leave the room. I must sit here. I must feel the moment. I must think. I must.
Family knocks on the door and asks if I am OK. I say Yes. When my daughters come in to say goodnight, I give them hugs. I am still frozen in time with this moment. Frozen because I have to be. They are brave to want hugs.
My husband sleeps downstairs that night.
I can’t sleep.
I log on to the computer at 2 a.m, moving through air as thick as pudding. I Google “AA Seattle.” There is a list of meetings. So many. I wouldn’t know where to begin.I work. I’m a Mom. A Wife. When can I go?
I see a meeting that starts this morning at 7 a.m. I will go to that one. I have to go to a meeting. I am afraid. I am a mother who drinks. I’ll get thrown out. Women aren’t supposed to drink. Women with children, for sure. I’ll be the only woman there. Surely.
I must go. I count the minutes until 6:30.
Before I leave I wake my daughter. I make her breakfast and make myself an espresso. Sans vodka.
“Where are you going?”
“I am going to tell you. I am going to tell you because of what you did. I must tell you – because it took immense bravery to do what you did. I am going to tell you. But I also have to tell you – it may not mean anything. It may make no difference. This may be nothing. This may be like all the other times I’ve cried and pleaded and told everyone I was going to change. I am going to an AA meeting.”
We don’t fall into a puddle of crying and I’m sorry and I’m so proud of you. We reach another deep level of fear. And disbelief. This will be another thing tried – and failed. But it is the next step in finding a way. In writing a new script.
We hug each other lightly. It is too scary to put anything else into that hug.
I drive to that meeting which meets seven days a week at 7 a.m. I drive there with a heart thudding in fear all the way.
For the next two years I go to that meeting every day without fail – every day of the week. I meet other women who are also Wives. Who are also Mothers.
At one year, my now sixteen-year-old daughter watches me receive my One Year Sobriety Coin. She now lives in New York City studying to be an actress. The lines she says now – the scenarios that she studies now – are of her own choosing.
The pain of the kind of marriage that we had, and then tried to have afterwards, was too much for my husband and I. We divorced two years ago.
As of today, I am six years sober. One day at a time.
This past birthday, my youngest daughter watched me get my coin. She says that she is tired of the endless story about how her sister saved me. She says that she is ready to hear the ones about how she has healed from that day on. She is right.
As for my own healing, when I stopped drinking my creativity came back. I’ve written plays, anthology submissions, and am now working on a film script for an independent film company. Yes, the film is about changing and finding out who you really are.
Life imitating Art.
Patti Dean is a rock band singer, former stand-up comic and comedy writer for nationally known comics, and actress off Broadway. She has produced and written various cabarets and plays performed in Seattle, Baltimore, and New York. She was published in the anthology Love and Sacrifice and the menstruation anthology Women. Period.
