Dangerous Families by Matt Bernstein Sycamore

Author:Matt Bernstein Sycamore [Sycamore, Matt Bernstein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies, Social Work, Family & Relationships, Alternative Family, Abuse
ISBN: 9781136572432
Google: MzPgsiQR6OIC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-12T04:43:25+00:00

Drinking

Betsy Andrews

Here, in the Ithaca artists’ colony summer, I am hung over. I am sorry. I am nursing my remorse. Too deep a bottle of Armagnac and so many hours in a straight woman’s bed beyond sobriety, I run far into the late morning, to the country crossroads and back, intending sweat and heat and self-disdain to return me to the lucid world.

They, at first, do not. With the beating of my feet on street, I come to hear the rhythm of the questions in my pulse. “Who is it I’ve cheated on? Who is it I’ve hurt?” Doubled at the driveway’s hot, high summit, I breathe an answer to the gravel. Life is different. I am single. I amaze myself with my answer: “No one.” No one, that is, yet.

In junior high school, I steal bottles from my father’s basement bar: vodka, whiskey, Galliano. Sheri Bierman’s left alone, her parents flown to Florida. We mix orange juice with vodka, whiskey, Galliano. Bad girls, there are six of us. At some point, there are boys. Amy Plant and I are in the bathroom, doing something no one will talk about later. This something, I think, was sex. My mother comes to pick me up. I lie on Sheri Bierman’s rug. “I’m drunk, I’m drunk, I’m drunk,” I scream, ballooning with confession. Come morning, I find myself flat in my bed, sour with orange juice and Galliano, wearing Sheri Bierman’s underpants.

My mother is not really mad at me. I am not really hung over. No one has been hurt yet, but the tropes within my life have come, at thirteen years of age: sex and girls and alcohol; girls and guilt and want.

On a winter day of high school break, Amy Plant, some boy, and I meet at Tady’s Field. I have wine. The boy has pot. Amy Plant has endless appetite. We get high, and we get drunk. The wine bottle, shaped like a fish, is poached from my father’s cellar. Later, at home, the improbable happens: no one is there but my father and me. I climb into my bathtub, his presence beating from the television turned on inside his room. It permeates the tiles. I’m hunching in the water, the prodigal daughter stoned and drunk and discomforted, bared within the walls of this house with my father’s supine body.

At Christmas, my father hands out checks, $500 apiece. He also hands out alcohol. Case and case and case of booze to drink around the tree. My brother and my sisters and my mother, they all flee: for a friend’s house, for the kitchen, for the den to watch TV. My father spikes the eggnog. He spikes it again, and I drink. “Your daddy is a millionaire,” my father slurs. He slurs it again. Dirt-poor trash done well, my father. Dirt-poor rags to riches. It is written in his excess: in his signature on checks, on the labels of his bottles, in his consumption gone awry. It is a myth, of sorts.

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