Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

my Harp as soon I walked in the door. I had arrived.
Lindsay and I drank together, and we drank a lot. But I was the one with the bruises and bumps. I
had a habit of slipping off sidewalk curbs while we stood there at the end of the night.
“I don’t get it,” I told Anna, on one of our regular phone dates. “He drinks as much as I do.”
“He’s a foot taller than you!” she said.
I still confided in Anna, but with more line-editing now. I told her enough to maintain our
closeness but not enough to cause worry. The troubled drinker’s sleight of hand—dividing your
confessions among close friends but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.
Anna might not have been worried, but I was. Lindsay and I worked on paper, but I couldn’t lose
the nagging suspicion we were missing an essential spark. I wanted more, but I also thought maybe I
was being unrealistic. What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s
impossible to please?
Lindsay would leave for his office job at 8:30 in the morning, a full two hours before me, and I
would walk him to the door and then climb back under the covers, feeling toxic and pointless again.
His big orange tabby would hop up on the bed and curl up on my stomach, and I fucking loved that
cat. Somehow, he made me feel forgiven.
I stopped calling the cat by his given name, a small act of rebellion that spoke to a much greater
ambivalence. But the cat had been named for a status car, which was clearly a mistake, so I tried out
new names, changing them each season until one finally took. Bubba. A proper name for a big orange
tabby.
I guess we’re stuck here, I’d say to Bubba as he curled up on my belly, although I knew it was
only true for one of us. I felt stuck, though. Stuck in a life that was easy and indulgent and yet I could
not get enough in my mouth.
If I had to guess the moment I knew Lindsay and I were in trouble, I would point to the night I
stood up in the bathtub and he looked the other way. We used to slosh around after midnight in that
claw-foot tub, naked and shameless, with our glasses chattering on the tile floor. But then one time I
stood up, water rushing down my naked body, and he averted his eyes. He looked embarrassed for
me. A betrayal contained in the tiniest flicker of a movement.
“Do you think I’ve gained weight?” I asked a few days later, with enough wine in my system to
feel brave.
What could he possibly say: that I had not? He was an MBA who brought a protractor to every
argument. He knew as well as I did my skirts didn’t fit anymore. But I wanted him to tell me
otherwise. To lie, to be oblivious, to convince me I looked beautiful anyway. “I think you’ve gained
weight, yes. Ten, maybe fifteen pounds.”
“Ten,” I spit back. We both knew it was 20.
He never asked me to quit drinking. He asked me to drink like a normal person. To moderate. To
maintain. And I began a series of shell games to get back to the way we were. Atkins Diet. South
Beach Diet. If I could lose weight, he would look at me with those besotted eyes again. But the less I
ate, the more I fell. I bashed my knee so badly I had to visit an orthopedic physician. I started
enlisting Lindsay’s help to keep me in check. Save me from myself.
“Don’t let me have more than three drinks,” I said as I got ready one night.
He put his hands on my shoulders. “If I see you with a fourth, I will karate-kick it out of your
hands.”