Swell Zine: Tell Them

"Two grandfathers, my first boyfriend, my second and third women lovers, my baby brother, my best friend. And you." I like it that she makes me think.

Some drunks are subtle. Or else I'm just slow. I never knew that's why Grandpa lost his fingers in the airplane factory accident. He told us kids that a big fish bit them off and we believed him. At a family reunion, thirty years later, a cousin told me that our grandfather drank every day before and during work and that's what happened to his fingers. Chop chop.

When my second woman lover called me from the emergency room, I was stunned when she said it had been an alcoholic blackout and she wanted to go to rehab. I never saw her drink at all. She hid bottles and snuck around. I thought she was a moody poet.

I feel surrounded by them, drunks everywhere I turn in life. For a long time, I was afraid it would sneak up on me, too. When my first woman lover left me, I worried about myself, counted my own bottles weekly in the recycling can. It was so hard to get through each day, forcing myself to work, then walking until darkness came, that I gave myself permission to drink a little as a reward. Made it through one more day. Yippee. Two glasses of wine and some food made laying on the floor in front of the TV alone bearable. Anesthesia wine. Sleeping pill wine.

But I always heard the brakes screeching on that alcohol ride, stopped when I got what I needed. Some people don't have those brakes or hear them.

I know enough about her to answer this way. "It's karmic but I haven't figured out the lesson yet."

What do they all have in common? Why are they in my life? Some hint of an answer glimmers on the edges of my thinking. If I stay really still, maybe I can make it out. It feels like restlessness. It feels like stalled dreams, buried dreams. It feels like staying home, having kids, getting up every day to go to a job. I know restless like I know my own smells. Every time love ends, I move far away.

My best friend cries every time I move farther. She keeps having babies and it makes it impossible for her to follow me, even visit me. I call her late at night and she's always drunk. She sobs into my ear or she tells me long, hilarious stories about her life.

I suck up the essence of her in my ear. I crave contact with her. I don't remember what she was like without the blur of alcohol. It doesn't matter. She knows me deeper than anyone.

This is the longest I have stayed in one place, seven years. No serious lover here until now. I have a store that I open every day and lock up every night. It's a life that I'm trying on. I'm in my own version of recovery.

"I'm getting restless." I try out what that sounds like. "I've been here for a long time now.

I am lying on top of her, talking into her ear. I can't see her face. "Mostly I'm tired in my soul of all the leaving."

"I don't want to be a rest stop for your hard life." She heaves, rolls, vanishes into the night.

We stay away from each other. I cry into the phone to my best friend. "I want her but I feel like I can't have her. I like this life but I feel like I have to go."

Never again is the rhythm I walk to, miles and miles in the night. I knew better than to start up again. Why is love so hard? After all those times love ended, love is not a feeling or an impulse anymore. Love is a decision now: I will unlock this door. I can't be swept away by love like I was in my younger years. This new kind of love is so deliberate. I can easily walk away from her now, let the pain sweep over me for however long it lasts, then be myself again. I know how to do pain recovery. I don't know how to do deliberate love.

"Join the club, big sister." He has three little children who are crazy about him. They shriek with joy when they see him, climb up his legs, hold up their arms to be picked up. He has all this but it's not enough to make him forget his other dream of playing music, of being a man who follows jobs around the country, a man with no responsibilities except to his art. So he drinks every night, keeps his guitar close, and plays it until he falls asleep.

"Should I go now, before it ends, for a change? Can I bear to go through it again?"

He's right. There's a way of being together without really being together, a way of having sex and then going home by yourself, a way of keeping the heart door shut while you visit her.

She sounds very far away. "You're too damaged for me. You've been around the block a few too many times." I know she is trying to hurt me. This can't be true. This can't be what she sees in my eyes, hears in my cries during sex.

My brother is weary but wants to hear more about my life so he can stop thinking about his for a few minutes. "Tell me about her."

"You know, one of those born-again ex-drunks, so happy to be sober they embrace every day with delight. That type."

"Typing everyone. Putting them in boxes for categorization. When I hear you talk about her like that, it makes me wonder how you describe me." He mocks me. "You know, he's one of those used-to-be-a-real-musician, has-been types, pining away for his lost life."

He's right. I want to put her in a box. It makes it easier to dismiss her, diminishes her specialness, her joy.

Every day, I open the store, sell used books, smile at customers, talk intelligently, lock up. Every day, I examine my heart, think of lying on top of her, next to her. Sex feels like love to me. Maybe they're the same thing after all. Another person making you explode with goodness inside. Another person getting so deep in you that you cry because you are grateful. Grateful feels like love to me.

My best friend is tired of philosophical debate with me. "How do I know what love is?" Drinking makes her impatient. "You have to stop protecting yourself. Or go be alone and stop tormenting that poor woman."

"Love doesn't make you happy, no. Accept that fact and move along. There's so much crap people make up about how love is supposed to be, what it's supposed to feel like. Stop listening to anyone else. If love makes you miserable, then it does. It doesn't have to make sense."

I hang up and think about equilibrium, about keeping one foot in front of the other. I can't stay away from her. I keep showing up at her desk in the library, with little presents. Everyone around her beams at us. It's all so obvious to them. She is uncomplicated to my tortured self. She is healed to my scabbiness.

My brother calls, sobbing. He is leaving the three little children who love him more than milk, more than air. He needs to change his life, he says. He will come back later to them, he says. His dream is withering up, he says. Now love will feel like pain and loss to the children, forever. His mind is made up. Their hearts close up. Tell them that love is heaven on earth.

I need to tell her about the children. I need her to help me. I need. Is that it, the missing piece? Naked need. I go to her, stand on her doorstep.

Kathy Anderson is a playwright and fiction writer whose full-length play, Incoming, premieres in April 2007 with Philadelphia Theatre Workshop. She was awarded a fellowship in prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and admitted to The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Photo by Janet Mason