Free As Good as Dead by Elizabeth Evans Page A

she’d told me back when I was a regular, and she had modeled the way by lifting an invisible helmet onto her head with her surprisingly slim and elegant fingers (their nails always polished in pearly pinks). Conversely, after a student had threatened to “punch out my lights” because I had given him a D, she’d advised, “What you do is, whenever he pops into your mind, you focus a beam of love at the center of his forehead. Just do that, Charlotte. You’ll see. It will help.”
    It had helped. Everything she taught me helped. At one point, I’d almost asked Jacqueline to be my “sponsor,” but then I’d gotten insanely caught up in the pressures of academia. Such was the atmosphere of the university that I’d started to feel—embarrassing to think of this now—as if the world would end should I, after so much work, fail to win my tenure bid. About the same time—as had happened in the past—I’d also grown peevish at the AA meetings. Gritted my teeth if, say, a strapping young man, hair still damp from the shower, shared his joyful story of how, in crowded downtown Phoenix, God had kept a parking space open directly in front of the office building where said strapping young man was scheduled for a job interview. With all that I needed to accomplish, did I have time to listen to such nonsense? No, I did not!
    I’d stopped attending meetings. Stopped calling Jacqueline C.
    Who now raised her hand and said—her childhood in rural Ohio gave her voice a distinctive mix of gravel and twang—“I’m an alcoholic and my name’s Jacqueline, and I want to share a pet theory of mine. Those of you who’ve heard this from me before—I won’t take offense if you step outside while I talk.” She smiled her sweet, pretty-grandma smile around the room, and, here and there, people laughed. “So, my theory is we alcoholics get civilized here, at meetings. Most of us need civilizing. Maybe our parents”—she wagged her manicured fingers in the air—“through no fault of their own, mind you, they couldn’t give us the attention or upbringing we needed. Whatever the reason, we didn’t learn how to have healthy relations with other people, which I’ve come to feel, after sitting in these rooms a whole lot of years, is what most of our problems boil down to. Trouble with other people. The good news is, though, we can change all that by coming here! We learn we’re always welcome here, no matter who we are or what we’ve done, and if we keep coming back on a regular basis, we can learn patience and tolerance and to love ourselves and others. We get civilized and that changes everything.”
    Was that for me? No, it was egotistical to think so. I didn’t know if she even had seen me. It was true, though, that much of what I knew about “healthy relations,” putting aside envy and resentments and having some integrity, I’d learned at AA. And that I probably would have been known more if I hadn’t stopped attending.
    Before the meeting’s closing prayer—I was okay with reciting the Serenity Prayer, which did not promote the belief that everything happened according to God’s plan—the people who had been seated around the central table stood, and they stepped back to enlarge the circle to include those of us who’d sat against the walls. I joined hands with the people on either side of me, but then man on my right released my hand, and I felt someone slip between us.
    Jacqueline C.
    After the prayer ended, the two of us hugged. I apologized for disappearing and asked if I could buy her a cup of coffee. “Sure, honey, sure!” she said.
    As I’d shared my personal inventory with Jacqueline, she knew more about my history than anyone in the world, really. After we carried Styrofoam cups of the clubhouse’s pretty bad coffee to a table in the corner of the lounge, I reviewed the more dramatic highlights (every now and then, she interjected with a soothing, “Oh, you’d be surprised how often I’ve had