Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol. Ann Johnston Dowsett

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СКАЧАТЬ said one prophetic sentence: “I feel like we’ve been studying all winter for final exams, and they’ve finally arrived.”

      He was right: summer tested me in ways I had never imagined, sitting for thirty days in treatment. Days were easy—but for me, days had always been easy. It was the waning of the light, when the magic hour approached: this was when I wanted a drink. Summer meant parties; nights with friends and family; celebrations at sunset. How was I going to handle all this?

      Rehab had prepared me. I was to take a scorched-earth approach to our environment: remove all alcohol, hide all drinking paraphernalia—corkscrews, pretty glasses, ice buckets. I was to make sure my environment was alcohol-free. We asked Jake’s daughter to keep any wine discreet, but we stopped short of all else. It seemed extreme. I was wrong.

      Less than a week into our holiday, a phone call came late in the afternoon. A friend of my son had died tragically: an overturned canoe, a drowning, a search for the body. Jake’s brother had invited us to dinner, and we were on our way there when the news came. I promised to call as soon as we arrived. I placed the call in a small den, with a fridge. My son was distraught. I was distraught, too: he was thousands of miles away, and I felt helpless.

      Without thinking, I reached in the fridge for a drink, and stumbled on something new—or new to me: Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Perfect: a ready-made cocktail. How convenient: vodka premixed with lemonade. I’d like to say I paused, but I didn’t. I downed it quickly, without remorse, like a thief. It brought instant relief. I placed the can in the wastebasket and joined the others for dinner. I didn’t say a word to Jake. I was too scared.

      I snuck the occasional drink that summer: maybe twelve in total, from July to Labor Day, two on my birthday while I sautéed onions. It took the anxiety of new sobriety down a notch, and added a new worry. I knew it didn’t matter that the volume was small: I had blown my sobriety. I had to go back to zero, come fall.

      And by fall, I did. I gave up drinking, and stuck with it. I started going to recovery meetings regularly, and I began a new hobby: I started clipping, in earnest, the news stories that were starting to appear on women and drinking. I bought a bright yellow box and tossed in anything that caught my eye. There was not much to clip, but three stories drew my attention.

      First, New York magazine ran an excellent feature called “Gender Bender,” in December 2008. The deck read: “More women are drinking, and the women who drink are drinking more, in some cases matching their male peers. This is the kind of equality nobody was fighting for.” I was one month sober. For the first time I began to think: I am not alone.

      Then, in July 2009, Diane Schuler made headlines when she drove her minivan the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway, northwest of New York City. Schuler’s vehicle collided with an oncoming SUV and eight people were killed, including Schuler’s five-year-old daughter and three nieces, all under ten. A successful account executive and married mother of two, Schuler died with undigested alcohol in her stomach; her blood alcohol was more than twice the legal limit. Police found a jumbo bottle of Absolut vodka in the crushed metal wreck of her vehicle.

      Schuler’s story was horrific. I clipped it, but it wasn’t the one that hit home the hardest: I never drove when I was drinking.

      No, the story that got under my rib cage was one that ran less than a month later, in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times, under the headline “A Heroine of Cocktail Moms Sobers Up.” Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, author of Naptime Is the New Happy Hour and Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, had quit drinking. The California mother of three—best known for her popular online column “Make Mine a Double: Tales of Twins and Tequila”—had retired her corkscrew. Wilder-Taylor had announced her news on her popular mommy blog, Babyonbored, with this simple statement: “I drink too much. It became a nightly compulsion and I’m outing myself to you … I quit on Friday.”

      What got me was this line: “Whenever her husband questioned her nightly routine, she would retort, ‘I’m fine.’”

      My words exactly. Whenever I had too much to drink, this was my mantra: “I’m fine.” Teetering across pink granite in lake country, late at night: “I’m fine.” Tossing off my high heels, after a gala awards night: “I’m fine.” It was easy to say without slurring, and it was defiant. It never changed.

      Except I wasn’t fine. Not even close. And it was beginning to look like I was not alone. As Wilder-Taylor said, when I finally interviewed her: “Alcohol is glamorized in our society, and it’s everywhere. You’d be surprised how many people are drinking during the day. And then we’re shocked when some mother crashes her car with her kids in it?”

      If my drinking makes me a statistic in a growing trend, it also makes me unremarkable.

      I drank, for the most part, what others drank. In fact, I have no trouble charting the decades between university and 2008, using not my jobs as markers, but the wines we consumed.

      In the beginning, there were those thin Italian Chiantis—cheap, astringent, and gravelly (think unreliable candleholders in walk-up apartments); plus the ubiquitous Germans (think Blue Nun). These were the wines of our university years, when we ate cheese fondue without guilt.

      Of course, there was a brief stint when I—freshly graduated from university—perched for a few months in a flat in Notting Hill with the man who would become my husband. He was at film school; I was trying to become a writer. Our landlord, who played polo on Sundays with Prince Charles, had swish parties to which we were invited. There were fancy film parties, too. I remember these days with a phrase: “Mink coat, no underwear.” Champagne cocktails with Helen Mirren on a Saturday night, followed by dates at Hamburger Heaven, drinking plonk. Upstairs, Veuve Clicquot; downstairs, Szekszardi.

      Back home in Canada, newly employed as interns, we moved to Burgundies: easy-to-parse reds that matured quickly, just like we did. What came next? The 1980s: travel in Europe with my filmmaker husband: fruity rosés at lunch at the Cannes Film Festival; Saint-Émilion at dinner; learning about port and the cheese tray. On my return, the Californians had arrived: Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir.

      The 1990s opened with my separation and a new love affair, toasted with Australian reds, full of gusto, and golden whites. A new century brought new affluence for so many of us, and endless choice. And then? Back to the Italians: my nightly glasses of Pinot Grigio. Full circle, or almost. Where I ended was very different from where I began.

      By the time this decade opened, I had stopped drinking—but I hadn’t stopped watching what was going on. In fact, my bright yellow box was filling up, not just with news stories but with glossy inserts as well. What came next were the girly names: French Rabbit, Girls’ Night Out, Stepping up to the Plate (label sporting a stiletto heel), and yes, MommyJuice. Wines in pretty little purse-size Tetra Paks, in picnic-perfect six-packs, ready to go.

      I have at my desk three different promotional inserts from 2011. Item number one features a come-hither blonde in a sexy gold dress, balancing a martini between polished red nails, painted just a shade darker than the swizzle stick poking through the o in “Classic Cocktails” above her head. Call her Miss February. She’s a Betty Draper lookalike posed on the front of a shiny celebration of the sixties. “You’re swingin’, baby!” it reads. “Do it up right like they did when after-work martinis were de rigueur …”

      For several weeks, Ms. February was the hottest girl in town, her image stuffed into every newspaper, towering tall from storefronts. By March she was toast, supplanted by a lanky brunette in a fuchsia minidress. By April? The cover girl was no girl at all. Instead? An egg: peach-toned, hand-painted, inscribed with the name “Lily.” Martha Stewart picked up where Mad Men left off, and a bottle of СКАЧАТЬ