Booze and Bad Decisions

My youngest daughter was recently home from school for fall break.  She goes to college in New Orleans (as did my older two) and she’s acquired that slightly jaded, sophisticated air that the city seems to impart.  Been there, done that, dude.  This is a city, after all, that boasts drive-through daiquiris, karaoke laundry mats, and over 150 festivals a year, all of them involving copious amounts of alcohol.  Temptations are plentiful.  Local law enforcement tends to sport a relaxed attitude toward alcohol consumption (you can drink in college bars with only a school ID regardless of the legal drinking age of 21) and it’s not illegal to walk the streets carrying a cocktail “to go” cup.  For students who’ve grown up in the Bible Belt or the Midwest or even New York, it’s an eye-opening experience.  You either learn to hold your liquor, or you become a raging alcoholic.

I generalize, of course.  The truth is, even as a frumpy, middle-aged woman, I love New Orleans.  I love the history and the culture, the French joie de vivre, the emphasis on good food, good booze, and good company.  Where else in the country does Happy Hour begin at noon on Friday and extend into the wee hours of the night?  New Orleans gave us jazz but it also gave us the Sazerac, the Hurricane, and the Ramos Gin Fizz. 

Despite their urban sophistication, I’m always apprehensive when one of my college-aged children comes home from New Orleans.  Chattanooga, for all its revitalization, is still primarily a small town.  With small-town police officers who take their roles as defenders of public sobriety seriously.  Cabs are hard to come by after a night of heavy drinking.  The downtown bars close at 2:00 p.m. but the free electric shuttle stops running at 11:00 p.m.

We thought when we moved off Signal Mountain into a two bedroom condo downtown that it would make it easier for everyone.  Easier for our adult children to party with their friends and take a cab home and easier for us to sleep knowing they were only a few short blocks away and could get home safely.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Jordan’s first night home, she walked into a bar where there were literally “only six people I didn’t know.”   A good time was had by all and at 2:00 a.m., the time she had told me she’d be coming home, I woke up.  I won’t go into the angst of being a parent waiting for an adult child to return home after midnight.  Suffice it to say, my father used to wait up for me.  And now I wait up for my children.  It’s crazy, given the fact that in New Orleans they probably don’t get home before 4:00 a.m., but you see, I don’t know about it, so I sleep like a baby.

At 2:00 a.m. the first of many texts arrived.  Don’t worry, I’ll catch a cab.  Followed by, The cab isn’t coming.  I’ve called twice, and then,  I’ve walked to my friend Kelly’s house, and finally, There’s some guy here who says he’ll give me a ride.  The last one caused a frenzy of return texting.  Don’t catch a ride with a stranger!  Where are you?  I’ll come get you!

Twenty minutes later, she was home.  This was at 3:30 a.m. and I’m the first to admit, I don’t do well without my eight hour beauty sleep.  The screeching was long and sustained.  No doubt the neighbors enjoyed every minute of it.  She, for the most part, was fairly sober and handled my display with a blasé smirking that further enraged me.

“Mom, I’m an adult.  You can’t wait up for me anymore.” 

Eventually, I ran out of steam and we both went to bed.  The next morning she awoke, sweet and contrite, and apologized for texting me eight times over a two hour period.  She had thought that by texting me repeatedly, she’d be putting my mind at ease so I could drop back into a peaceful slumber.  Apparently, she had been “overserved” at the bar (said with a giggle), and the decision to text had been a bad one.  She had not caught a ride home with a stranger (I’m not stupid, Mom) and her ride had not been drinking (Seriously, Mom, I’m not stupid), and I really shouldn’t wait up for her anymore because she wasn’t a child.  She was an adult.

I could only look at her and remember my own father sitting in his wing back chair in his robe, his eyes bleary, his hair standing up in outraged peaks around his face while I argued with boozy breath that he shouldn’t wait up for me.  I wasn’t a kid.  I was an adult.

“You won’t know what it’s like until you have a child of your own,” he’d said.

Forty years later, I get it.

Old Maids of the Mist

I recently went to Canada and Niagara Falls with a group of women I’ve been friends with since grade school.  We’ve known each other for forty-five years and managed to keep in touch, which is pretty remarkable when you consider how disparate and scattered our lives have become.  We grew up in the same small college town, went to grade school, junior high, high school, and the first few years of college together.  Three of us left home and went out into the wide world, while two stayed behind and raised families in the same small community where we’d grown up.

A few years ago, after twenty-five years spent raising families and struggling with careers, we reconnected on Facebook.   Since then, we try to get together every year for a girls’ trip.  The amazing thing to me is how, despite our many differences, we’ve managed to remain friends.  As an adult, I have a tendency to gravitate toward women who dress like me, read the same books, watch the same TV shows, have the same social and political beliefs.   The old “birds of a feather, flock together” syndrome.

But other than our shared childhoods and experiences raising families, there’s not a lot my four hometown friends and I have in common.  A former athlete, a cheerleader, a writer, a sorority girl, and a flighty giggler, I’m not certain if we met today we would even be friends.  So what is it about childhood that makes us so much more willing to embrace others different from ourselves?  Do we simply become lazy, or less willing to compromise as we grow older?

It was in sixth grade that I first met Zona.  She and I were both “new girls,” having moved into town from somewhere else.  I was a tomboy and played mostly with the boys on the playground.  She was prissy and was the first girl in sixth grade to shave her legs.  I didn’t dislike Zona; if anything, I felt sorry for her because she was bad at sports.  All the same, I realized that we probably wouldn’t be spending a lot of time together.   

One morning I walked into the girls’ bathroom to find Zona standing at the mirror teasing her hair.  I watched, fascinated, as she deftly moved a long-handled comb through her curls.  We were still standing there when Ruby Mays walked in.  Ruby was six feet tall and had a deep voice and shoulders like a linebacker.  When Ruby asked you for your lunch money, you gave it up.  I was terrified of her and did my best to avoid eye contact, slinking into one of the opened stalls.   Ruby stood in the doorway, watching Zona with an unreadable expression.   Without warning, she stuck out a large, hairy-knuckled hand.

“Hey,” she said.  “Let me borrow your comb.”

Zona stopped teasing her hair.  She tilted her head and stared at Ruby in the mirror as if giving her request careful consideration.  Time seemed to stop.  My bladder sagged.   Give her the comb, I telepathed frantically.  Just give her the goddamned comb.         

 Zona turned around, her expression thoughtful and pleasant.  “Ruby, I hope you don’t mind,” she said.  “But I don’t let anyone use my comb.”

Ruby’s big fist shot out and caught Zona on the chin, and she went down.  She lay on her back, staring up at the fluorescent lights, blinking.   Ruby helped herself to the comb and then tossed it back to Zona as she went out. 

I went over and helped her up.  She seemed genuinely surprised at Ruby’s reaction.  “Why did she do that?” she kept asking.  I stared at her, grinning in appreciation.  I had never seen anyone stand up to Ruby Mays and it occurred to me that despite her shaved legs and prissy ways, Zona had more courage than anyone I knew.  Certainly more courage than me.

Years later in Canada, while arguing with Zona about politics, that scene with Ruby resurfaced.  And it occurred to me that the spark of courage, the knot of stubbornness that I had admired all those years ago in Zona was still there.  Despite our profound, and sometimes violent, differences I could still appreciate that aspect of her personality. 

Forty-five years later, we still have a connection.  And I’m a better person for it.

I'm More Brilliant Than I Look

My fifth novel, The Sisters Montclair, has recently launched and I’ve been visiting a lot of book clubs.  I’m always slightly apprehensive at these face-to-face meetings, because I have the impression that Cathy Holton in Person, is somehow less impressive than Cathy Holton the Writer.  Looking around at the polite faces as I drone on about some event that colored my last novel, I often wonder if I’m on the verge of putting my listeners to sleep.

Flannery O’Connor once complained, when discussing an upcoming television interview, that she was afraid she’d stare blankly at the camera and utter such memorable lines as “Huh?” and “Ah dunno,” to the interviewer’s questions. I know exactly what she meant.  On the page, writers can make themselves sound witty and erudite.  We have the advantage of that most essential tool of good prose; the rewrite.  We can sit in a darkened room for days constructing and reconstructing one line until we get it perfect.  To a reader it may seem that our perfection is innate, a lucky coincidence of fate and natural-born talent, but I can tell you it’s actually the result of a great deal of hard work and determination.  It takes a lot of effort to be funny, or philosophical, or blindingly lyrical.  Any writer who tells you otherwise is bluffing.  There are few geniuses among us.  Most of us are just competent liars with a good work ethic.

At a recent book club meeting, an admiring reader read out several lines she had bookmarked in one of my novels.  

“Did I write that?” I deadpanned.   Much laugher.  (Occasionally, I can be entertaining.)

The truth is, I remember that passage very well.  I must have worked on it for weeks, rewriting, deleting, rewriting, circling back with a frenzied determination that only a true obsessive compulsive could appreciate.  But in the end, I wrote something that was good, something that I can be proud of for years to come.  A passage that makes me appear, to the casual reader at least, like something of a literary genius. 

Now if only I could rewrite my personal appearances. 

Birthday Club

I’m in a birthday club that meets monthly for lunch.  We’ve been doing this for over ten years, long enough to get to know each other pretty well, to be completely free and comfortable around one another.  Which is a beautiful thing.  And much cheaper than therapy.  When we first started getting together our children were younger and we were always harried, barely able to spend an hour without having to jump up to go collect a child or hurry back to work.   Now our lunches can drag on for close to three hours, long enough for our waitress to go off shift and the restaurant to empty and the busboy to stand yawning in a corner.

          We are beautiful, self-assured, completely natural women, meaning there’s not a size two among us.  We’ve lived long enough to be comfortable in our own skins, to accept the sags and wrinkles and wobbly thighs that come with being mature, natural women.  So far, we’ve resisted the siren call of plastic surgery. 

          I tell you all of this because my husband always asks with astonishment, “What do you find to talk about for three hours?”  

          Here’s a sample:

          “I ran into Lucy Dillard.” Eye roll.  “She and Jack are getting ready to go to the Bahamas and she was bragging about having her bikini area waxed so she can wear her new thong.”  (We hate Lucy.)

   “I tried some of that Nair stuff once.  It was so painful, y’all.”

   “Is that the stuff that smells like rotten eggs?”

   “See, if you wear a swim skirt you don’t have to worry about hair.”

   “Not unless it hangs down below the edge of your skirt.”

   Laughter.

   “When Scott and I were going to Mexico on that business trip last year, I went to Target and bought one of those cute little elastic waist skirts that go over your suit.   It was in a zebra print, which for some reason I thought was stylish.  Apparently I was wrong.  Anyway, by the third day the elastic had stretched out so bad one side hung down lower than the other, which made me look kind of like a wounded zebra dragging a leg. Trust me, it was not a good look.  So I just pulled on a pair of shorts and told Scott he better not say a word.”

   “Did y’all hear they’re coming out with a line of Spanx swimsuits?”

   Much excitement here.

   “I tried one on but the problem is it squishes the fat from your waist down over your hips which is not really a good look either.”

   “Kind of like a reverse muffin top?”

   “Exactly.”

   If laughter truly is the best medicine, we should all live to be ninety. 

Last Bus to Crazytown

My husband and I are empty nesters. Our youngest child went off to college in the fall and last winter, anticipating this event, I did what any hormonally imbalanced woman would do.

I went down to the local animal shelter and adopted a rescue puppy.

And this is not just any rescue puppy, mind you. This is a rescue puppy with plenty of emotional baggage. (Think Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) It seems our shy puppy, only three weeks old, had been found huddling with his three siblings under a bush on Christmas Eve after witnessing their stray mother get hit by a car. One of the puppies had already died of exposure. The others were taken in by a loving foster mother who rose every few hours for three weeks to hand-feed these poor orphans.

We named him Yoshi, which means “good” in Japanese.

We were as anxious as any new parents might be to raise this one right. We bought every dog-rearing book we could find. We’d had dogs before when the children were small, Jack Russell “Terrorists”, my husband called them, but we’d been too harried and over-burdened as parents to pay much attention to the dogs.

Yoshi has a group of plush animals, his “babies”, that he sucks every night as he’s falling asleep, as diligently as my children used to suck their thumbs. He rides with us in the car, goes for long walks in the park, sits between us on the sofa at night watching television.

Worrying about his socialization skills, we took him to the dog park. He didn’t do well. He seemed horrified by these strange four-legged creatures that bounded over, intent on ramming their noses up his ass. He sat down abruptly and leaned against my leg, humiliated and confused.

Thinking he might find a better class of playmate, we took him to a local doggy daycare. The woman in charge, who my husband fondly calls “The Commandant,” stuck him alone in a room with a large, overly friendly Doberman. (She raises Dobermans, of course). When Yoshi squealed in fright at the slobbery advances of the Doberman, the Commandant claimed that he was a “fearful dog” totally unsuitable for daycare. “You have no way of telling with these mixed breeds,” she told me. “Why he’s the way he is.”

Did I detect a bias against mixed-breeds? Oh no she did – ant.

I insisted Yoshi be given a week’s trial. As far as I was concerned, he showed more intelligence than any of these over bred, muscle-bound, pedigreed dogs she seemed so proud of. Every morning Yoshi rose and when told he was “going to school”, pranced, tail-wagging with excitement, toward the door. Every day at naptime I picked him up from daycare, hopeful that he’d managed to make a few friends. On Friday, the Commandant crooked her finger and indicated I should follow her into the office. Yoshi was being expelled. He had only made two friends but they were in the little dog class and he was too big to play with them. The big dogs didn’t like him. He wasn’t a team player.

I came home with a lump in my throat, imagining Yoshi friendless on the playground. Sitting by himself at the lunchroom table. Not being invited for slumber parties at the more popular dogs’ houses.

“Never mind,” my husband sniffed. “We both know Yoshi is gifted. He’s too intelligent and sensitive for those other dogs.”

I blew my nose, pouring us both a stiff drink. “Do you think we should adopt again?” I asked . “So he won’t have to be an only dog?”

Marie Antoinette is Alive and Living on the Upper East Side

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a “Housewives” junkie. It’s my dirty little secret.

Having made it through “The Real Housewives of Orange County” (trailer trash on silicone) and “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” (entertaining but fake), I’m hooked, absolutely hooked, on “The Real Housewives of New York City.”

Is it me, or do the Housewives of NYC remind you of being back in high school? First, there’s Alex and her creepy, secretly-gay boyfriend (husband) trying desperately to break into the popular clique. I wanted to like Alex, I really did. She’s from the Midwest and she’s a graphic designer. But then there was the naked-on-the-beach St. Bart’s episode and all the talk about “au pair girls” and knowing the “right people,” not to mention the conversations with her children involving pretentious smatterings of French. And don’t get me started on poor Francois and Johan, those long-haired, French-speaking little darlings destined for a life of school yard bullying. How do you say please don’t kick my ass in French? Really, what are their parents thinking?

And then there’s Ramona, who likes to describe herself as “ladylike” and “classy”, while wearing a tiny bikini and engaging in martini-fueled horseplay around the pool in front of her humiliated thirteen-year-old daughter. Go mom. Ramona’s one of those people who says whatever she wants without any regard for anyone else’s feelings, and then seems genuinely surprised when it all backfires. She’s the girl in high school who tried to make you feel guilty for getting on the pill, who boasted she’d be a virgin when she married, who swore she wasn’t having sex with her boyfriend and later got pregnant her junior year.

Jill reminds me of the girl who grew up in a trailer on the wrong side of town but despite her humble origins, still manages to snag one of the rich boys. She wears her insecurities on her sleeve, only in Jill’s case it’s a Herve Leger sleeve. It gets a little old hearing her brag about spending $8,000 on a Birkin bag or complaining about losing her housekeeper as if it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to her; but then she cries when her daughter leaves for Paris or she mentions that her mother used to hound her about her weight when she was a girl, and I can’t help but feel sorry for her. (Is it just me or is Jill’s mother seriously scary?)

Kelly’s the cheerleader who’s always gotten by on her charm and good looks. But don’t cross her. Behind that pretty facade lies a borderline psychopathic personality. (Think Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction). And really, the fake tan has got to go. (Not that I would ever tell her this, of course, not unless she was safely trussed up, Hannibal Lector style.)

And Bethenny? Well she’s my peeps. If she and I had gone to high school together, we’d have been good, good friends (as we say in the South). Bethenny wields sarcasm like a scalpel (“Cher called. She wants her outfit back.”) Despite her new fake boobs, there’s something real about her. I can imagine us smoking cigarettes in the girls’ bathroom, sharing a bottle of tequila out at the lake, or sneaking out of my window on a Friday night. (Not that I ever did those things, Mom. Really.)

And then there’s the Countess. LuAnn. Who I used to admire for her openness, before I realized that the openness was really just another side of self-conceit. If I had to place LuAnn in high school, I’d describe her as the self-absorbed Homecoming Queen. The night she corrected Bethenny for having introduced her to the limo driver as “LuAnn” instead of “Countess de Lesseps” I knew I was going to have a problem with LuAnn. The whole thing was so very Let-Them-Eat-Cake. This is America, and we don’t give a damn about things like titles, LuAnn, so get over yourself. Seriously.

Which brings me back to the whole addictive quality of the show; the fact that I feel I know each of these women intimately and can like or dislike them accordingly. I’m a guilty voyeur. As Bethenny says, while watching from the sidelines of a tension-filled tennis match, “It’s like watching someone skin an animal alive.”

My husband always groans and leaves the room when he sees the show is on. But later, as I’m climbing into bed, he wants to know what happened on tonight’s episode. The hypocrite.

He’s as bad as Ramona.