1972, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

By Lawrence Kessenich

I was 22, a naïve English major wending my way through college in six years while supporting myself with part-time work. Carol was 28, divorced, with two small children, and back at school part-time to finish her degree. She was tall, pretty, shapely and, though she seemed a bit shy, flirtatious.

We were in the same Contemporary English Lit section, and we found each other quickly. She invited me over to her house, just a few blocks from the campus, for coffee, where we had a great talk about life and literature while flirting unabashedly.

Soon after, I asked her out for a drink. She found a babysitter, and we spent a long evening at a local bar getting to know each other better. She matched me beer for beer, so it was clear that she enjoyed the opportunity to get away from the kids and be an adult.

She had two boys, Jason and Jimmy, and they were apparently a handful for her. I’d only met them once, and since I’d grown up with six brothers, they hadn’t seemed any more rambunctious than normal to me. But she was a single mother, so that she had a different perspective.

Carol and I started seeing each other regularly. We often went back to her house to make love after class. I met some of her friends and liked them, and she met some of mine and enjoyed them, too. Several of her friends were social workers, so they were thoughtful, serious people. But they also knew how to let down and have a good time. I was hanging out with a lot of theatre students at that time, and they loved to party.

Carol fit right in. At the first theatre party I took her to, she ended up dancing on the coffee table in my friend’s living room, strongly encouraged by the assembled multitude. I was a little embarrassed, but figured, what the hell, the woman doesn’t get out much.

We saw each other through October and into November. Carol’s birthday was in mid-November, so I was trying to figure out how to celebrate it when her good friend, Tim, called to say that they were planning a surprise party for her and I was invited. I’d always found Tim a little prickly, but I knew he did tough work as a drug and alcohol counselor, as did his wife, Ann, so I cut him some slack. After telling me about the party, he asked me how things were going with Carol and me.

“Good,” I said. “We enjoy each other. The only thing that bothers me a little is that we don’t spend much time together with Jason and Jimmy, but I guess that’s because she’s using me to get away from being a single mom.”

“Carol does like to escape from things. That’s part of her problem.”

“What do you mean, her problem?”

“Well, you know she’s an alcoholic, don’t you?”

I have received few pieces of information in my life that have shocked me as much as that one did.

“I noticed that she drank a little too much, sometimes, but I had no idea she was….” I found it hard to even say the word in association with Carol.

“Well, I don’t suppose she would have told you.”

“How bad is it?”

“She’s been in and out of rehab several times, and she’s always in danger of having to go back. She hides bottles of liquor all over the house.”

I was incredulous. “I can’t believe I’ve never seen them.”

“You weren’t looking for them. Besides, alcoholics are very good at hiding their stash.”

“How does all this affect the kids?”

“They’ve been pretty screwed up by it, frankly – which might be one of the reasons she keeps them away from you. Jason once smeared his own feces on the bedroom wall. Quite an eloquent cry for help, don’t you think?”

My brain couldn’t take in much more information like that. It was as if the reality I’d been living had been suddenly turned upside down – or, more accurately, inside out – as if the woman I’d supposedly been intimate with for two months had suddenly been replaced by someone I didn’t know at all.

“It’s going to take me some time to process this, Tim. I know you’re telling me the truth, but it’s hard to fit that truth into the relationship I’ve been having with Carol.”

“Take it easy on yourself. Being in a relationship with an alcoholic is really tough. You don’t know which end is up, sometimes.”

After the call was over, I sat at the desk in my bedroom and stared out the window at the bare trees. I had no idea how I was going to face Carol the next time I saw her without giving away what I knew. And I didn’t want to let on, because it was clear that she didn’t want me to know about it.

The next night, I dragged myself over to her house for supper and found that she had shipped the kids off to her babysitter’s house. She was excited that we had the whole night, and the whole house, to ourselves. She had already been drinking wine, and she had that lascivious gleam in her eye that told me I was in for some great sex if I wanted it. Unfortunately, in my frame of mind, sex was the last thing on my mind.

Carol saw this immediately, of course. And from that point on, throughout dinner and the movie we watched on TV and as we sat on the sofa making out afterward, she kept hounding me to tell her what was on my mind. I held her off for as long as I could, but she was not to be denied. So, finally, I spilled the beans.

Her reaction was the second biggest surprise of my life. I expected regret, remorse, maybe even shame. Instead, she denied it, utterly and completely. She claimed that Tim didn’t like her and was out to get her. I said that I found that hard to believe.

“So, you believe Tim, who you hardly know, instead of me, when I’ve been your friend and lover for two months?”

“He’s a drug and alcohol counselor, Carol. You told me that yourself. Why would he lie about something like this?”

“I don’t know. But he is lying. I am not an alcoholic, Larry. Don’t you think you’d know it by now, if I was?”

“You do drink a lot when we’re out.”

“Drink a lot? Of course I do! I’m a single mom. I’ve got two little kids. Do think it’s easy raising two boys on your own? Do you?”

“No.”

“You’re damn right it’s not. So, when I get a chance to let down, I let down. Is that a crime?”

“Of course not.”

“But apparently it makes me an alcoholic.”

“It’s not just that. Tim says you have bottles hidden around the house.”

“What? This is incredible! Don’t you think you would have found them if I had bottles hidden around here?”

“Tim says alcoholics are good at hiding them.”

“Tim says, Tim says! I don’t give a damn what Tim says! What do you say, Larry? Do you believe I’m an alcoholic?”

“I don’t think Tim would make up something like that.”

“You hardly know him! I can’t believe you’d take his word over mine!”

We went around and around like this for, literally, hours. She was relentless in her attempts to convince me that she was not an alcoholic. When she finally realized that she was not going to be able to convince me that Tim was lying, it was 2 a.m. But she was far from done. She went into the other room and returned with her purse in hand, her coat on, and my coat in her other hand.

“Come on,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going over to Tim and Ann’s house. If you won’t believe me, they’ll have to tell you themselves that I’m not an alcoholic.”

I felt as if Alice in Wonderland had just invited me down the rabbit hole. I had no desire to follow her.

“It’s the middle of the night, Carol. We can’t get them out of bed for this.”

“That’s exactly what we’re going do to! We’re going to get them out of bed and they’re going to tell you that I am not an alcoholic!”

She was practically hysterical. I was afraid of what she would do to herself if I didn’t go along with her. So, much to my amazement and chagrin, I found myself on the way to the apartment of two people I hardly knew in the middle of the night.

The amazing thing about Carol’s performance was that it was beginning to convince me a little. I had to wonder why anyone would go to such lengths to prove she was telling the truth if she was not telling the truth, why she would be willing to confront the very person who had characterized her as an alcoholic if she didn’t believe that, in the end, he would tell me that she was not an alcoholic. But how could he possibly tell me that when he’d told me all those other things? My mind simply could not comprehend what was going on.

Carol and I barely spoke on the way over, and when we reached Tim and Ann’s apartment building, I tried once more to convince Carol not to wake them up. But she was adamant. When we got inside the vestibule, she leaned on their buzzer as if she was going to push it through the wall. After a long time, Tim’s voice finally came over the intercom.

“Who the hell is this?”

“It’s me, Tim. I’ve got Larry with me. We need to talk to you right away.”

“It’s the middle of the night, Carol. Go home. Let us go back to sleep. And let Larry go home.”

“I will not let you go back to sleep until you tell Larry that I’m not an alcoholic! I’ll ring this buzzer all night if I have to!”

“All right, Carol. All right. Calm down. I’ll buzz you in.”

Tim, wearing his bathrobe, let us in. Ann was already in the living room, similarly clad. I felt like a complete idiot. I couldn’t believe how far Carol was pushing this. Again, I started to wonder if she was telling the truth, that for some reason Tim and Ann had it in for her.

Tim and Ann sat on the sofa, Carol and I in the two armchairs across from them. Carol led off.

“Tim, Larry tells me that you told him I’m an alcoholic. Why would you say something like that?”

“Because you are an alcoholic, Carol. It’s that simple. I know it and you know it. I thought Larry ought to know it, since you clearly weren’t telling him.”

Seeing immediately that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with Tim, she turned to Ann. “You know I’m not an alcoholic, Ann. Will you please tell Larry that?”

“I can’t do that, Carol. I know you’re an alcoholic, too. We took you to rehab the last time. We helped take care of the boys while you were there. We picked you up.”

“Why would you say something like that with my boyfriend in the room? Why do you want to make me look bad in front of him?”

The tone of wronged innocence in Carol’s voice was extraordinary. It was very hard to hear it and not believe that she was telling the truth – even though I was sitting across from two professional drug and alcohol counselors who seemed to have her best interests in mind. I felt as if I’d entered the Twilight Zone, where reality gets all strange and twisted and hard to recognize. I simply found it hard to believe that someone could be in a state of denial as deep as Carol’s.

Until that night, I’d never realized that it was even possible to exist in a state of denial that deep. But after watching Carol spend the next hour begging and pleading with Tim and Carol to rescind what they’d said about her, I began to see just how deep denial can be.

Needless to say, Carol and I were finished after that night. I couldn’t face her and she couldn’t face me. She dropped out of the English class, and I only saw her one other time, a year later, when we walked past each other on campus. Neither of us stopped. Neither of us even acknowledged the other’s presence. It was too painful.

Lawrence Kessenich writes fiction, essays and poetry. He will read an essay about his relationship with his father on NPR’s “This I Believe” radio program this year. He was once an editor at Houghton Mifflin Company, where he worked with two Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award-winning novelists as well as many other fiction and nonfiction writers. He has two grown children and lives in Watertown, a near suburb of Boston, with his wife of 25 years, making his living as a marketing writer.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Email This Post

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