drunk was simple. It was an accident you caught sight of in the rearview mirror, and the car you saw was your own. The intersection where the accident happened, it was the very one you were approaching. When you turned from the mirror to the road in front of you—BAM! you got hit again. And then, once again, you were looking back at it. She was supposed to be on guard her whole life against alcohol? Who knew.
But it wasn’t an accident. She was making choices, even if she didn’t know it.
She called Becka during his time in the room and said, “You have to come home now and watch your father. It’s your turn, it’s time.” Like he was a baby and not her husband. Like Becka had made the vows and not her. Becka didn’t understand. “Why, do you have plans?” She had no plans. She hadn’t had plans for months. She hadn’t seen a movie, she hadn’t talked to friends, she hadn’t been to the dentist. She wasn’t going outside to collect the mail. Becka got the mail when she came home. Becka was the one who had to drag her by the hair to see Dr. Bagdasarian. Jane kept thinking, when did she become the parent? Becka told her to put the wine down and get in the car. She had called from school to make the appointment. The doctor took one look at Jane and said she was in the dictionary under depressed and wrote her a prescription. She didn’t need a prescription, she needed a life. She needed to start over again with new teeth and fresh underwear. But of course she took the prescription. If it came from a pharmacy and modified behavior, there had to be some merit to it.
But a month went by and she was still calling Becka. “You have to come home. I have to drive.” And Becka said, “Drive?” “Yes, drive.” “Drive where?” Drive where—what sort of question was that? When you’re driving just to drive you don’t know where. You’re just driving. She shrieked that into the phone. If she shrieked, if she called late at night, if she cried, if she made several calls in the same hour, Becka came home and she was able to drive. In the magazines and the newspapers, those people, they had such inner resources. Meeting adversity head-on and all that.
Her first time driving, she made it to Stamford, Connecticut. That wasn’t even an hour away. She thought she’d stop at the Bennigan’s for lunch and then she’d keep driving north. She walked in around lunchtime and the tables in the dining room were full so she took a seat at the bar. She was just going to fuel up before hitting the road again. But she got drunk instead. She was at the bar throughout the day. The daytime bartender switched with the nighttime bartender and she was still there. She finally asked the nighttime bartender to call her a cab. She was drunk and tired and didn’t want to have to walk out to the parking lot. She thought there might be some way to convince someone to carry her. But when the cabbie showed up and the bartender said, “Your cab’s here,” she got off the barstool and grabbed her purse and walked out on her own. She got inside the cab and didn’t know what to say. “How about a hotel?” she finally said. The cabbie drove her to a Holiday Inn and helped her inside. He helped her check in and then he helped her to her room. She woke up around noon not knowing where she was. She woke up, she knew it was a hotel room, but she didn’t know in what city. She walked down to the Denny’s for some coffee and when the coffee started to take effect she remembered the Bennigan’s. She went back to the Holiday Inn and asked for a cab. It was the same cabbie from the night before. She didn’t remember him. He said to her, “Back to the Bennigan’s?” She asked if he ever took a break from driving and he told her that he was doing twenty hours a day so he could pay to pull a tooth.
He drove her back to the Bennigan’s. They drove through the lot but she couldn’t find her car. The cabbie called a friend of his at the municipality and sure enough her car had been towed. Cars weren’t