Nonfiction by Ann Bracken
I always count. Drinks, that is. I notice how many times a guy refills his beer glass or how many glasses of wine my friend drinks. I used to count my husband’s beers every night—up to three, he was pretty nice. After that, at around five, he went one of two ways—either he fell asleep on the sofa and snored like a buzz saw or he wanted to have sex. Go figure, especially after so much alcohol.
I counted how many cases of beer I had to buy a week. Why did I have to buy the beer anyway? I wasn’t drinking it. I hated beer, its stickiness, its stale smell in the morning when he didn’t finish a can. I drank wine, but usually only one glass. The two hangovers I’d experienced in college acted as powerful deterrents. And looming over every social occasion, the specter of my mother’s alcohol abuse clung to me like a shroud.
Parties were the worst—when he had too many beers for me to count. I could always tell because he’d come find me, and spit out a barrage of cruel jokes.
One of his favorite lines went like this, “Man, you should see her when she stumbles around the badminton court. She couldn’t hit the birdie if it flew into her racket.”
If we were playing pool, he gave a running commentary of every shot I took. “Whoa, first time you ever picked up a cue, sweetie?” or “If you want to be sure and win, just ask Annie to shoot a round with you.”
He’d get everyone laughing at me and then refuse to leave the party when I’d had enough. He always drove home. I was so numb to his drinking and pot smoking, I never questioned his fitness to drive.
“Sounds like an alcoholic to me,” the counselor said when I described how Randy never appeared drunk even after five or six beers. “High tolerance. That’s a sign.”
I never connected Randy’s drinking and his abusive behavior because he always teased me or made fun of me in front of people. It was just worse when we were at parties and I couldn’t leave when I’d had enough.
After the divorce, I dated a great guy—a lawyer at the EPA who invited me to dinner and a jazz concert. He had a martini before dinner, and I joined him. Then he ordered a glass of wine. I began counting. On our second date, he told me one of his brothers was homeless because he was an alcoholic. “My dad’s an alcoholic, too, but he always kept his job.” I figured his odds for having a problem. Every time we went out, he had a martini or Manhattan before dinner and then some wine. I kept counting.
“Last night, I went to a dinner party with some friends, and I had too much to drink.”
“What does that look like?” I asked.
“Not much. I just get kind of loud and talk a lot. Make stupid jokes.”
Sometimes the danger signals flash early. My stomach lurched as he described his embarrassing behavior, which sounded all too much like Randy’s.
“That’s not going to work for me,” I told him. I added “bad dinner party behavior” to his count.
One night as he measured out gin for his martini, he spilled it on the counter. Before I could give him a paper towel, he bent over and slurped it up. The next morning, I asked him if he’d ever gone to AA. “Yeah, but only because my ex-girlfriend insisted. I’m not really an alcoholic.”
I totaled up his count. “If you want to keep seeing me, you need to stop drinking and go to AA.”
He called me a few days later. “It’s 9PM and I’m having my first glass of wine for the evening.”
When I asked if he’d made a decision, he said, “You’re almost enough to make me stop drinking.”
I was tired of counting.
Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections and a memoir. She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland. She volunteers for the Justice Arts Coalition, exchanging letters with incarcerated people to foster their use of the arts.
