Oh, joy. Ferdinand was making conversation. I hoped a curt nod would appease him. It did not.
“You court-stipulated?”
I didn’t know what that meant. “Excuse me?” I asked, and then yawned. For the past twenty minutes, I hadn’t been able to stop yawning. My nose was running, and my eyes were watery. Allergies, I figured. Also, I felt like I was jumping out of my skin. My toes wanted to tap; my legs wanted to bounce and kick; my torso wanted to squirm. It was all I could do to hold still.
“Didja get, like, a DUI or something?”
“Oh, no. No, nothing like that.” Were all the people at this meeting here just because a judge told them they had to be?
He gave me a grin. When he smiled I saw that, in spite of the ring in his nose and the spiderweb tattooed on his neck, he was still more boy than man. Not too long ago, he’d been climbing off a school bus every afternoon, and dressing up on Halloween. Someone had kissed him when he’d fallen down, had put silver dollars under his pillow in exchange for his baby teeth, had signed his report cards and attended his parent-teacher conferences, had worried when he’d stayed out late, lying awake in the dark, waiting for the sound of his key in the front door.
An elderly man in a plaid shirt and khaki pants with a large bandage on one cheek took a seat behind the desk and rapped his knuckles on the table. “Welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Tom, and I’m an alcoholic.” At least, that was what I suspected he said. Between the way he mumbled and his thick-as-taffy Philadelphia accent, I caught maybe every third syllable.
“Hi, Tom!” the room chorused, their voices cheery, as if being an alcoholic was something awesome to celebrate.
“This is an open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Anyone who wishes to attend may do so. The only requirement for membership in AA is a desire to stop drinking. I’ve asked a friend to read ‘How It Works.’?”
As Tom’s friend, a rotund white-bearded man who’d introduced himself by saying “I’m Glen, and I don’t drink alcohol,” droned through both sides of a laminated piece of paper—something about half-measures availing us nothing, something else about suggested steps as a program of recovery—I began plotting my escape. Aside from the business-suit woman, who was probably completing a degree in therapy or social work and observing this as part of her coursework, there was no one in the room I could imagine even having a conversation with.
“Many of us exclaimed, ‘What an order! I can’t go through with it,’?” Glen read. I shrugged my purse onto my shoulder. Who talked like that? No one I knew. “Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. We claim spiritual progress, rather than spiritual perfection. Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas. One, That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives.”
Not me, I thought. Except for that little slipup the day before, I was managing my own life just fine. Not to mention my daughter’s life, my husband’s life, and my parents’ lives.
“Two,” Glen continued. “That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.”
Wrong again. I could do this myself. I just hadn’t tried. I would cut back on my own. Eighteen pills today, then sixteen pills tomorrow, and fourteen by the weekend, and ten a day by Monday . . .
“Three: That God could and would if He were sought.” Everyone in the room joined in, chanting those last words: could and would if He were sought. At which point, I realized that I had wandered into a cult. Why hadn’t anyone told me that AA was some strange turn-it-over-to-God deal? I thought it was a self-help thing, where you got together with other drunks and druggies and figured out how to solve your problem. Shows what I knew.
“Any anniversaries?” Tom asked from behind the desk, looking around the room. “Anyone here counting days?”
A young man in a blue sweatshirt and dirty work boots raised his hand. “I’m Greg, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”
“Hi, Greg!” chorused the room.
“Today I got thirty days.”
The room burst into applause. “And,” Greg said on his way up to the front of the room, where Tom gave him a bear hug and what looked like a poker chip, “my parole officer says if I stay clean for ninety and I pass all my piss tests, that bitch has gotta let me see my kid.”
Awesome, I thought, as the room clapped for this charming sentiment. Greg has a kid. Greg has a parole officer. Greg just called his kid’s mother a bitch. Suddenly I needed to leave with an urgency that approached my desperate need for a pill first thing in the morning. I sidled over toward the coffee urn, thinking that I’d stay there until the group’s attention was occupied, then make a break for it. Meanwhile, I pretended to be interested in the dog-eared posters framed behind smeary glass: KEEP IT SIMPLE. ONE DAY AT A TIME. THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD.