Free Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards Page B

leave had come and gone a long time before the night the bottle of Scotch reappeared, so it was too late to pack or plan or do anything but grab a coat and run for the Saab.
    I drove all the way to Boston, four hours straight, right to the house of my friend Barbara, a teacher from the group that used to go to Happy Hour together. Barbaradrank extra-dry martinis and had great legs. Not that she was ugly, but it was her legs people remembered. She used to say it took a lot of gin to fill up those legs.
    Even though I arrived unexpectedly in the middle of the night, we sat at her kitchen counter—Barbara drinking martinis, me drinking white wine—and talked about what a drunken lout my husband was, and no wonder I’d left him. Someone as wonderful as I was deserved better. Then we talked about all the teachers we knew at school and why their lives were sad and dull, what with husbands and babies and dirty diapers, compared to ours, which were full of interesting moments like, for instance, this talk we were having in the middle of the night in her kitchen.
    “We wanago blazes, nodsid aroun withabunge of kirty dids.”
    “Thazo true.”
    We woke up late the next day and faced each other, pale and shaky, across the kitchen counter again. This time she said, “What do you say we don’t drink today?”
    I said all right, never for a moment believing she meant it.
I
certainly didn’t, but that’s what you say when someone casually mentions not drinking. Then she suggested we get the Sunday paper.
    She parked in front of a drugstore and went in to get the paper while I sat in the passenger seat with the sun visor pulled down, shading my eyes behind sunglasses even though it was overcast and almost dark enough to be dusk. I looked at my watch.
It was dusk
. It was six o’clock. We’d slept all day.
    When she came back, she sat in the driver’s seat, riffling through the paper, throwing most of it into the backseat and studying a single page in her lap before she finally looked up and said, “Want to go to church?”
    “Church?” Maybe I had heard her wrong.
    “Not exactly church,” she said. “There’s an AA meeting in the basement of a church right around the corner.”
    My face hurt everywhere my sunglasses touched, and if I moved too fast, the whole world spun so I was careful not to overreact and whip my head around to stare at Barbara. But I was dumbfounded. She might as well have said,
Want to go knock over a mini-mart?
AA? It was too awful, too humiliating.
    Barbara started to cry. “I’m tired of feeling like this,” she said, sniffling into a Kleenex. “Do what you want, but I’m going.”
    I felt like a terrible friend because she had asked me to do something, and I hadn’t said yes, and now she was crying. Last night she’d thrown the front door open and hugged me even though it was midnight and she didn’t know I was coming, and now all she wanted was for me to go someplace with her for an hour. It was the least I could do. Besides, maybe if she went to an AA meeting, she’d realize she should stop drinking gin and switch to drinking wine like me. Then we could just forget about this little episode.
    “Think any interesting men will be there?” I said.
    Later I wouldn’t remember the meeting or whether there had been interesting men. I also didn’t remembercalling my husband to tell him I wasn’t coming back, but the real surprise was that I stopped drinking. Not just because of AA, but because after one night of not drinking, I wanted to see if I could stop for two nights, then three, and so on. It was a game, like learning to hold your breath underwater, something uncomfortable but rewarding. Suddenly you’re swimming the whole length of the pool without coming up for air, and you think it’s amazing until you break your own record and swim two lengths. Then you’re hooked. All you want to know after that is,
How far can I go with this?
    However, it only felt like a game for the first