After the Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

disappeared into the bedroom and collapsed in a drunken stupor. I was outraged—a wild woman! Diary of a Mad Housewife had nothing on me. I wound up out in the backyard, heaving his half-filled booze bottles against the side of the house. Then, realizing how dangerous it was for him to be there when I was that crazy, I went into the house and called a doctor.
    Admittedly, I’m the one who could have used locking up at that point. My husband was harmlessly passed out; I was the one on a rampage, but if I went to the hospital, who would care for the children? Not my husband—he was too drunk. And not the boarder, either. The olive oil ruse had worked. Scared to death, she was packing to leave. So I did the only sensible thing. After convincing a doctor to admit my husband to a mental health facility, I woke him and persuaded him to take a shower that was four days overdue. Then, like someone taking an old dog to the vet to be put down, I coaxed him into going for a ride and delivered him to the hospital.
BREAKAGE
    The bottle shattered as it hit the wall.
    I stood with arm upraised and knew
    That I had smashed it.
    It could as easily have been his head.
    The anger raged around me like a roaring flood,
    Filling my heart with murderous intent.
    I wanted victims and it wasn’t hard
    To flush them from their hidden lairs.
    I broke the bottles one by one with cool deliberation.
    By the very act of breaking them
    I certified their victory.
    I took him to the doctor then,
    Not because he needed it.
    I did.

Dirge
    One further note about denial. I had always heard that alcoholics hide their drinks. Because my husband kept his bottle of vodka right there on the kitchen counter, I deluded myself into believing the situation was less serious than it really was. (It turned out there were a lot of other bottles hidden around the house, and I had only just started discovering them.)
    I kept minimizing how critical things were even after he went into DTs in late 1972, days after our daughter was born. At the time, we spent five days without sleeping because he was convinced that there were bugs crawling all over him and there were spies with complicated, high-tech listening devices hearing everything we said via a secret listening post down by the charco, a watering hole, a mile away. Even though he spent one whole afternoon playing chess with and talking to an opponent I couldn’t hear or see, I stuck it out because I thought he was really quitting. When he started drinking again, three weeks later, my hopes were crushed. The problem is, all of that happened seven years before that April afternoon when I broke the bottles.
    What finally pushed me over the edge? A number of things. Yes, there was the olive oil, but there was also the time my husband showed up at my six-year-old son’s T-ball game so drunk at five o’clock in the afternoon that when the game was over he had to crawl from the bleachers to the car on his hands and knees. I was there with my children, with my children’s friends, and with my children’s friends’ parents. And there was my husband, crawling like a baby on all fours.
    In cartoons, when a character has a sudden epiphany, a lightbulb magically appears over his head. That afternoon the lightbulb came on for me. From then on nothing was ever the same. The roller coaster had inched its way to the top of the grade and then, for even longer, had clung there, poised on the pinnacle. Now it was ready to plunge to the bottom.
    In the early eighties, getting a divorce was the last thing I wanted to do, but I knew it was what I had to do in order to save myself and to save my children.
DIRGE
    I live a life of unrequited loss,
    Of loss undignified and unfulfilled.
    I bear the burden of a private pain
    And crave the comfort of a public grief.
    But yet I have no heart to walk away.
    My pride could not endure such crass defeat.
    I cling instead to pain—I know it well—
    And to a