I was eighteen, a freshman at Rutgers University where my father was a renowned and beloved English professor. Rutgers had recently started to accept women and I was guilted and bribed to apply and attend. Also, my math scores on the SAT were so low it’s possible I was given the sign-your-name credit and nothing more. I was not faced with a plethora of choices but when I said I wanted to go the the University of Wisconsin in Madison where my sister had found paradise and when I visited, we got stoned and ate freshly baked doughnuts at three o’clock in the morning, my mom said it would break my father’s heart. This heart had already been broken by his father’s disappearance, his year in a brutal orphanage and some lousy book sales but I could not bear adding to that heart’s damage. Also, as the daughter of a faculty member my tuition was free.
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I’ve had thirty-eight sober Christmases, this Christmas, goddess willing, will mark thirty-nine. Alcohol has been an element in my life that defined me both in its presence and its absence. My father was a terrible drinker, a black-out, violent drunk who physically abused my mother, and scared me senseless. He was also a periodic so on many occasions a few glasses of wine resulted in normal behavior. But when the bottles mounted and especially when something harder was introduced, there was an atmosphere so toxic in my childhood it’s a miracle I survived. I almost didn’t. And, ironically, my father was one of the most wonderful humans in the world except when he was drunk. And then he was the monster of my nightmares. I would lie awake listening to the shouting and things breaking and my mother screaming and thought he would kill her. I had a recurring nightmare that my mother was dead, in a coffin, and I was being pushed through a crowd of people to tell her good-bye. I told them about this nightmare, but nothing happened.
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