"The Beginning of the End of Something"

EXCERPT FROM A BRIE GROWS IN BROOKLYN

"I’ve been working on an essay about my relationship with alcohol, and the way that alcohol and addiction, which both of our family’s struggle with, plays a role in me and Caleb’s relationship. If I don’t have some of breakthrough, I’ll chuck it. Because I don’t have anything else to write about today, an excerpt of it is below.

When I was 11, we went on a family trip to Ireland. My mother’s two brothers came along with us, as well as my three cousins, Kevin, Danny and Brian. We drove the entire perimeter of the country in rented cars, the men always confusing which side of the road they should be driving on. We had brown bread and Fantas for lunch. We kissed the stones in castles. We listened to the Chieftains on cassette tapes. “Can you believe the Chinese people here have Irish accents?” my father said when we stopped for Chinese food in Dublin. “Don’t be wimps!” he goaded us when we refused to join him for a swim in the icy ocean between the cliffs of Moher, from which he emerged blue with cold. It was the summer, and the weather was mild, but the water was Arctic. The landscape didn’t seem real. On a vista, we paused, and saw five lakes shining like mirrors in a valley of gold.

Wherever we could, we visited our relatives. We brought Mets caps to my great-grandmother’s four brothers, who still lived on the farm where they had grown up — blue hats for the men, and a pink one for the wife of the only one who had ever been married. They were in their 90s. In the hats, my uncles had them stand on one foot and pose for photographs. “Come over here and sit on my lap, child,” they told me. They had lumpy heads shaped like potatoes, and absolutely no teeth. Their hands were worn from working. The electricity only ran in the main room of the house. In the dim light, I could see the cracks in the whitewash. Me and my sister imitated their brogues.

“They’re gay,” my Uncle Michael explained when we asked why none of them had ever married. “They’re scary!” I said.

In their house, and all of the others we visited, there was always a whiskey toast for the men, no matter the time of the day. “To family,” they said, clinking glasses. “To family,” my uncles and my father said when they had their first beer at the pub. I could sense, even as a child, that the trip was the beginning of the end of something.

In Belfast, our car was stopped entering the city. “My license is expired,” my father worried. “Ah, a good Catholic boy,” the soldiers said when they asked him his religion. I remember their machine guns. I remember the graffiti. We ventured into a neighborhood in the center of the war zone to visit Jakki, our Irish foster sister, who came to stay with us every summer. She lived in a row house. Her mother pressed pound notes in our hands. “Thank you being kind to my daughter,” she told us. You shouldn’t have taken it,“ my father scolded us after.

In Sligo, a seaside town with a fantastic ferris wheel, my mother woke us up in the middle of the night, and made us catch an early plane home. When we all returned to New York, my Uncle Michael checked into rehab. “He’s gone to summer camp,” my mother told us. When we visited, my mother left us in the car. I knew what was up. “He’s in rehab,” I told my other siblings.

The rest of the alcoholics in the family got sober soon after. At family parties, rather than serving beer with our take-out Italian food, my aunts served soft drinks. Addiction can have an expiration date when sobriety becomes your normal. To me, recovery from alcoholism seemed like a rite of passage into adulthood.

In seventh grade, my father quit his job on Wall Street. In the mornings, he worked on a book about his life in an office my mom set up for him in one of our guest rooms. In the afternoons, he picked us up from school. At night, he went to a meeting, and then put himself to sleep with Trollope. “Oh, so he’s an autodidact,” a condescending person once said when I told them how my father educated himself. He sent chapters of the book to all of his friends in the Bronx, and it made a few of them so angry that they stopped talking to him. The book was never published. My father had no idea how to get such a thing off the ground. After two years, he returned to a commuter job working at a bank in midtown Manhattan. “I get depressed being at home,” he explained.

I didn’t feel any pressure to drink myself, not when my friends in eighth grade began stealing beers and cigarettes from their parents. Not when people made fun of me in high school for being a dork. “I can’t try it, I have alcoholism in my family,” I told them. I was happy with candy and chicken cutlet sandwiches from the local deli where everyone hung out in high school. So much was forbidden to me that I needed very little to make me happy.

I felt everything so intensely in those days. Every time my boyfriend Rob laid a blanket under the Japanese willow tree in our yard, where we lay naked in the summer from the middle of the night until sunrise, my stomach dropped. When I made a new friend, I prepared questions to ask them in advance in case we ran out of things to talk about.

My sobriety was something my parents closely guarded. “A friend told me that her son doesn’t drink because Brienne doesn’t,” my father announced proudly over the dinner table when I was a senior. “You won’t start drinking, will you?” my mother asked me anxiously when I began college.

I didn’t disappoint them until my junior year, when I was studying abroad in Florence with my best friend Laura. It was the time of my first major depression. I had no words to articulate what I was feeling. After Italian class in the morning, I walked to the center of the city, and distracted myself by seeing English language films in a grand old movie palace. If there was no movie, I walked back up the hill to the house where we were staying with a couple that owned a contemporary art gallery. It was half way between Florence and Fiesole. I watched Rosanna, whom we called “mama,” make dinner in her tiny kitchen in the basement. She taught me how to make a tiramisu with coffee. She taught me how to make arrabbiata. If she wasn’t home, I walked down the street to a little park that overlooked the domed red roofs of Florence. It was better to be outside than inside. I brought a book with me always, but most of the time, I just sat there and cried. My mind raced. I felt desperate. “Ciao,” said the young men who came upon me. “Qual è il tuo numero di telefono?”

It was easier to give them my cell phone number than to protest. I didn’t have the language for it. Those boys drove me out of the park. My phone blinked for hours afterwards. “Your eyes are like the stars,” the boys wrote in Italian. “They are very nice, like they sky, and you are very nice, very beautiful.” All of the girls in my study abroad program got the exact same sort of crap. Word on the street was that American women, and especially the students, were easy. Most of the boys weren’t even Italian — they were Albanian. “Get away from me!!” Laura screamed when they followed her home from school. Laura is 5’10”, and looks like Hilary Rhoda. “Ugh, I hate Italy!” she proclaimed when we lay in our respective beds.

The first few weeks, Laura was so homesick that she could hardly move. Right after dinner, she took a Tylenol PM. I was homesick as well, but my sadness seemed less debilitating in comparison. At night, I sat up and read in my bed. I read 32 books in four months. I made absolutely no friends. By the end of our stay, I was the miserable one. “What are you doing tonight?” I asked Laura a week before the term was over.

“Going out to this club,” she said. American students went to the same two or three places every weekend, where they danced to 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” and made out with other American students. Sometimes, if things really got crazy, they smoked some hashish with the guys who worked at the Diesel store.

“Can I come?” I asked. “Yeah, of course,” she said.

We took a cab. When we arrived, I cornered one of the girls. She was from Long Island. She had frizzy brown hair, and carried a Louis Vuitton baguette. She was overweight. She had a very high opinion of herself. “What should I drink that won’t be disgusting?” I asked her.

She shifted her baguette from the crock of her elbow onto her shoulder. “A whiskey sour,” she suggested.

I drank the whiskey sour. No one cared. It made me dizzy. When I got home, I violently threw up in the bathroom.

I went back to Brown the fall of my senior year a changed woman. The seal was broken. My friends mixed me drinks in red plastic cups. I got crunked, and suddenly parties became fun for me. One night, my friend Sonia, a water polo player, made me a huge gin and tonic in a water bottle. I drank the whole thing. We went to a party at a fraternity house. I lost Sonia. I lost my eyesight. I lay down on the sidewalk outside of the entrance in a pool of vomit. My friend Matt, a 6’11” basketball player, picked me up in his arms, and carried me to my friend Yoni’s car. Yoni drove me home to the house where I was living, and helped me walk up the stairs. I fell asleep with my head in the toilet. The next day, I couldn’t get out of bed. “She’s bulimic,” I could hear my roommate hissing through her wall. My roommate had a pet rabbit, and she never cleaned up after the rabbit when it shit all over her bedroom.

Most of my friends in college were potheads. I smoked weed with them on the roofs, or in bedrooms lined with tapestries and bookshelves. The balance slowly shifted in my twenties. Now, most of my friends are heavy drinkers. You love best what you know, and what I know best are alcoholics."

-Excerpt from A Brie Grows in Brooklyn