Winnie
The only good thing about those years was that in my rare sober moments, I started making up stories I thought my daughter might like.
As it always had, writing felt healing, almost like these stories were slowly but surely filling a deep, empty well inside of me.
They weren’t poetry, technically, but after reading a number of children’s picture books at the local library, I realized that those writers had to do just as much work as a poet, with often fewer words. I liked the challenge of that.
I returned to the magical other worlds from those last poems I’d written, in large part because the real world felt impossible to inhabit, whereas in a world where a little girl could vanquish a dragon by making it a pet (as in my first story), anything was possible.
So I wrote whenever I was sober, usually after school at the local public library, when my hangover was a bit better, and before I headed home with bottles from the local liquor store clinking their promise of oblivion in a paper bag.
I had no idea what to do with these stories, but for a while it didn’t matter.
It was enough to write them and imagine what it might be like to read them to the little girl I liked to picture happily sitting on Miranda’s lap asking for one more book at bedtime, and my sister obliging like the wonderful mother she was.
I woke up on Phoebe’s third birthday, and I thought, This can’t go on.
I’d been drunk for more of the last three years than I’d been sober.
My paltry substitute-teaching pay was no longer enough, I was behind on all my bills, I’d had virtually every STD known to man, and I’d started to feel sick every day until I had my first drink, and even after that I didn’t feel anything close to good.
I needed to stop or I needed to commit to drinking myself to death.
I didn’t want to die.
So I checked myself into a state-run rehab center. It was austere and strict and exactly what I needed.
In August of 1979, I’d been sober for nine months, and I was doing well, all pink clouds.
I’d even sold my first picture book to a New York publisher using the name Phoebe Hart, and I’d become the most popular substitute teacher at the high school in Fort Bragg, where I moved for a fresh start after the rehab.
I was willing to sub for all the subjects, but my favorite, of course, was English, and I was also going to school nights to get my teaching credential.
I had energy and felt excitement for the first time in years.
I was working the steps, had a sponsor, and regularly attended a set of meetings I enjoyed.
The first seven steps had been relatively easy, particularly because my sponsor Julia was a devout atheist. Every time she saw the word “God” in recovery literature, she substituted my conscience “because,” she explained, “the part of me that knows right from wrong is the so-called god of my understanding.” Since she had eighteen years of sobriety, I figured if it could work for her, it could work for me.
I admitted I was powerless over alcohol. Shit, I’d admitted that thousands of times. But it wasn’t until I said it out loud to a room full of understanding strangers that it had any effect.
I was willing to believe that a power greater than my addiction—my conscience, as Julia said—would restore me to sanity.
So I made the decision to turn myself over to my conscience.
I made a list of all my shortcomings. It filled an entire Mead notebook. I worked on it for two months.
I admitted to my conscience and to Julia, and to my fellows in the rooms, all the terrible things I’d done, including leaving my own daughter with my sister.
That last one took me five months of meetings to speak aloud, and after I did, sobbing for the entire meeting, I wanted a drink so badly I actually went to a bar and ordered a Jameson on the rocks and stared at it for what felt like an eternity before leaving it untouched, then driving home and calling Julia.
After that, I thought I was cured. If I could get through that, surely I could get through anything.
I prepared myself for the next step, to ask my conscience to remove those shortcomings, by taking long walks on the coast. Those Pacific waves, that remarkable wildness, were the closest I could ever come to believing in anything outside myself that could save me.
It felt safer to believe that I could save myself…
but if I failed, the infinite ocean and the sky and the horizon could hold me accountable.
Next were the eighth and ninth steps. I bought another notebook and made a list of the people I’d hurt to whom I wanted to make amends.
Miranda was at the top of the list, though I started with the people at the bottom when I made my calls.
Not everyone wanted to hear from me. Heather, a former friend I used to teach with, and whose husband I’d slept with at a drunken holiday party, hung up as soon as she heard my voice.
Doug, who’d had an enormous crush on me and who I’d mercilessly slept with to feel less alone after Lincoln, knowing I could never love him back, listened to me and then told me to fuck myself and hung up.
Walter, who’d hired me as a copywriter for his burgeoning car sales business, and who I repaid by stealing the thousand dollars he kept in an office safe before skipping town, interrupted me and said that nothing I could say would change the past and that he hoped God would forgive me at the pearly gates.
When people point-blank refused to listen, I did what Julia suggested: I took three deep breaths, and wished them well.
“May you be happy, may you be healthy, and may you be at peace.” I said the words aloud, to the dial tone, and really concentrated on every word, like I was a kid on her knees in church.
Others thanked me and said they were pulling for me, and I tried to savor those calls, to really let their words implant themselves inside me. “I’m glad you’re getting the help you need.” “I hoped I’d hear from you someday.” “Thank you.”
Bernard was the best, of course.
While I hadn’t done anything to acutely harm him, like I had many of the others, I had walked away from our friendship when I left San Francisco. I hadn’t written or called. I’d left him hanging, after he’d been so generous and loving to me.
He picked up on the second ring, at eight on a Wednesday night in June.
“Bernard? It’s Winnie,” I said, my pulse glugging nervously in my throat.
“Winnie!” He actually laughed, with what sounded like genuine joy and relief. “Thank goodness you finally called. I’ve been so worried about you.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch. When I left the city, I needed to put as much distance as I could between me and everything about my life there.”
“I completely understand. You went through so much.”
“I’ve been sober for six months.”
“Good for you! Seems like everyone is quitting the shit in one way or another, getting serious at last. Except the musicians. They’ve all moved on to coke.”
I resisted asking if he was talking about Lincoln.
I assumed that he was, and that it was a message that I was better off without him.
I knew better than to ask for more information.
I’d successfully avoided all musical radio, for fear of hearing his voice come over the airwaves. Never had I consumed so much news.
“You must be doing the ninth step, eh?” he asked.
I laughed. “Well, yeah. But what do you know about the steps?”
“There’s been a rash of calls lately. A bunch of us are getting them from people who want to make amends. I don’t believe half of them will stay sober, but I believe you will.”
“Thank you, Bernard. Your confidence means a lot to me.”
“You mean a lot to me, doll.”
“So. Tell me what’s going on with you.”
“I’m directing Twelfth Night at the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival!”
I clapped my hands together. “That is wonderful! Congratulations, Bernard. So well deserved. Are you still copyediting, too?”
“Oh yes, directing isn’t paying any bills yet. But I’ve also done a few shorts around the city that have gotten good reviews. So I’m in it. That’s what’s going well. Tell me about you.”
“I’m writing again,” I said, feeling suddenly shy about it. “Picture books. One of them is even going to be illustrated and published.”
“That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you. Never had you pegged for a kids’ writer, though.”
“Yeah, well…” That morning four years ago hung on the line between us. “I’m not using my real name.”
“What name are you using, so I can buy one for all my procreating friends?”
“Phoebe Hart. The first book will be called The Princess and the Dragon.”
“Princess, dragons, sobriety, oh my!”
We laughed, and then there was a short, awkward silence. How deep was this conversation going to go? Where were we in our friendship?
“So, listen,” he began ominously, “Miranda and I have…been in touch. Not a lot. Just once or twice to check in.”
“You have?” My heart leaped out of my chest. I hadn’t expected this. “What has she said? How is…the baby?”
“Her name is Dawn, and Miranda wants you to know she’s doing great. A happy, healthy little girl who likes to squish grapes with her feet.”
I used to love doing that, too. “Have you seen her?”
“No.”
“So Miranda’s just called you?”
“She…” I could tell he was struggling to decide what to say, and this made my skin prickle with fear.
“I called when Dawn must have been about to turn one, mostly to find out about you, but Joan told me Miranda and Dawn were in France and they hadn’t heard from you, either.
Miranda called when she got back from France, and honestly she sounded amazing.
She and Tom broke up, but she even seemed okay with that. ”
“France?” I asked.
“Oh right, you wouldn’t have known about that. She went as some kind of cover, to put some distance between her and Tom. She was there when Hartley placed at the Judgment of Paris. Did you hear about that?”
“I did,” I said, feeling my heart surge with pride as I had when I read it in the newspaper, which I read daily at the library hoping for clues about Miranda and Phoe…
Dawn. “But it’s too bad about Tom,” I said, though I was secretly relieved he wasn’t helping to raise Dawn.
I’m sure he would have been a fine father, but…
he wasn’t family. Miranda is great at bouncing back, though. Can you tell me anything else?”
Bernard had a pretty detailed outline, and I was surprised at how much Miranda had shared (in the hopes it might get back to me?): how hard it had been to break it off with Tom, but how she knew it was the right thing to give Dawn the stability she needed.
How much Dawn loved the water, and Grandma Joan’s cooking, and how she even spoke English with a French accent, though she wasn’t sure how long that would last. How healing France had been for her, and how she’d picked up photography as a new hobby.
I marveled, and I felt hugely relieved.
“Do you think Miranda would be open to hearing from me?” I asked Bernard.
“I do.” No hesitation.
“Can I see you first?”
“How soon can you get here?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I’m ready for the city yet,” I said. “Can you come to Fort Bragg?”
“Fort Bragg,” he said in mock horror. “Only for you, Winnie. Only for you.”
Feeling his arms around me again was so reassuring. We laughed and cried and hugged again. He didn’t drink or smoke; he didn’t even ask to. We slept late and took long walks and ate lumberjack specials of pancakes and bacon and eggs. I felt completely loved and accepted by him.
“I’m hopelessly in love with an actor,” he told me as we lazed around one afternoon in a park with our faces turned toward the sun with plastic cups of lemonade sweating beside us. “An actor! They’re worse than the musicians.”
“Worse?”
“Well, okay. Maybe just as bad.”
“Tell me about him.”
“His name is Christopher, but he goes by Toby, and he’s bi.
Bi! He’s with a woman right now, and she’s a bigger mess than you ever were, sister.
She’s a very talented actress—singing and dancing, the whole nine.
But when she’s not onstage, she’s got a needle in her arm.
Toby is under the mistaken impression he’s going to save her. ”
“I’m sorry, Bernard.”
“Thankfully, he’ll be in the Berkshires this summer doing other festivals, and I’ll be surrounded by all kinds of gorgeous theater people, so I can’t really complain.”
“I admire your resilience.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it resilience. More like irredeemable horniness.”
I laughed. “Whatever it is, I’m glad it works for you.”
“You sure you don’t want to come back to civilization? You can teach and write there, too.”
“I can’t. At least not yet.”
“Alright,” he said with put-on defeat in his tone. But he knew. He knew I needed to make a fresh start that might mean never returning to the city of the Summer of Love.
Julia and I agreed it wasn’t safe for me to contact Lincoln for an amends. The risks were too great, and anyway the main thing I wanted to apologize for—my infidelity, and lying to him about Dawn’s parentage—he didn’t even know about.
“Instead,” Julia said to me over root beers in the tidy little apartment she shared with her grown son, “try a concept we call a living amends. You can send well wishes to him in a kind of meditation, like you’ve done with the people who have hung up on you.
Try doing it every morning for a month. And promise yourself that you will live by the lessons that relationship taught you. ”
“You mean don’t cheat on your boyfriend and get knocked up?”
Julia raised an eyebrow. “You know you weren’t the only one doing damage in that relationship, right?”
I nodded. “I do, but…Doesn’t the fact that he fucked up, too, mean we’re even?”
“Not if you want to stay sober long term. You need to clean your side of the street.”
“And ignore his side?”
“Forgive him.”
“How do I even do that?”
“Try the meditation.”
I tried.
Oh, I tried.
But missing him would well up in me again and I’d feel like I was drowning.
I’d wonder how he was, and if he thought of me as often as I thought of him, and then I’d get so wrapped up in a fantasy of calling him, or running into him, and falling back into bed and love, that I’d have to go to a meeting right away to avoid doing something I regretted.
It seemed safer to think more about Dawn and Miranda.
I rehearsed many approaches to my sister with both Bernard and Julia until I was finally ready to try.