Free Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife by Brenda Wilhelmson Page A

Sean looked at me. “Are you not drinking again?” he asked.
    Sean is the friend of Charlie’s who went to rehab and met a rock star there years ago. I’d called him when I decided to get sober the first time. Sean has been on and off the wagon since. The last time I saw Sean, he’d been sober six months, ran every day, and looked great. However, he was drinking tonight.
    “Yeah,” I said and told Sean about the Mary and Pat bacchanal weekend that “pushed me over the edge.”
    Marcy, who’d been listening, said, “I’ve heard lots of stories about Mary and Pat showing up for dinner parties with their baby and drinking into the wee hours. I hope nothing bad happens to them.”
    “Keeping up with them got me to quit,” I said, feeling guilty for blaming them.
    “There was more leading up to it than that, right?” Sean asked.
    My face felt hot. “Yeah,” I said, completely ashamed.
    “Well I’m proud of you,” Sean said. “I need to get back in a recovery program. I’m gonna do it soon.”
    [Friday, February 14]
    Charlie and I went to Café Pyrenees for dinner with Liv and Reed. There is an extensive wine list there, and I was trying hard to ignore it and be the best company ever. I’m sick of all this effort.
    Charlie and I went home and had sex afterward. I told Charlie it was the last time he was getting sex when he was drunk. It sucks having some drunk ass pounding away on top of you.
    [Saturday, February 15]
    I took Van to see
Blue’s Clues Live
at the Rosemont Theater with my sister and her two boys, Zach and Riley.
Blue’s Clues
is Van’s favorite show. I expected Van to jump and dance excitedly with his cousins, but when the curtain opened, he sat like a statue, mesmerized, never taking his eyes off the show. It was the cutest thing. We all went to lunch afterward and Van talked about the show incessantly. It was the best eighty dollars I’d spent in a long time.
    [Monday, February 17]
    I play scenes over and over in my head of things I’d like to say to my mother but know I never will. I have these fantasy conversations while I’m in the shower, driving, working around the house. No matter how they start out, I inevitably get on my high horse and deflate her rigid religious beliefs. I point out how her ignorant piety damaged me and prove myself to be more enlightened spiritually than she is. What a head case I am.
    This morning, however, I was having a fantasy conversation in my head with my friend Fay. Fay recently made a crack about a cokehead mom who lives in a dilapidated two-flat at the end of her street—a building everyone in our neighborhood wants razed. The woman has a little boy who runs around the neighborhood, and the principal of our elementary school often picks him up and takes him to school.
    “Just look where she lives,” Fay commented. “If you can’t get it together and have a house by the time you’re our age … blah, blah, blah.”
    What the hell does having a house have to do with anything? What would Fay have if she were on her own supporting her kids? What if she had a deadbeat husband? What if her parents were poor? What if she grew up without a good education and positive role models?
    Fay rambled on and on about this poor sad sack of a woman at book club. Then the conversation segued into everyone’s home improvements.
    Kelly was turning her basement into a plush rec room, just like her neighbor’s. She’d recently ripped out her deck to install a different shaped one. She’d also just remodeled her kitchen.
    “I just couldn’t live with that dark cabinetry,” she lamented.
    Tina mentioned that another book club friend of ours was moving back to town. Shelly’s husband’s temporary transfer was up and Tina had been talking to her about buying a new McMansion.
    “Ted and I have been looking for a new house,” Tina said. “Wouldn’t it be fun if Shelly and I were neighbors?”
    I thought back to a conversation I recently had with Max about buying