Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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СКАЧАТЬ notices anything wrong—and besides, she seems “all right.” Yet when we cannot connect what we see or hear to something we have seen or heard before, or when words simply will not do an experience justice—“Trauma mocks language,” says feminist scholar Leigh Gilmore, “and confronts it with its insufficiency”—we literally do not know how to think about it. The unlinkable is unthinkable, and all we can say to ourselves is, “There are no words. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know where to put that.” Where we put moments like these is off in a separate part of the mind. It is the part of the mind where the unformulated is kept apart until it, eventually, begins to feel like a secret.

      ***

      Weekends at Emily’s house began normal enough. On Saturday mornings, she and her brothers lay on the carpet in front of cartoons and ate bowls of Cheerios as long as they could get away with it. Emily’s mother headed out on errands and Emily’s father cracked open a beer and headed out to the yard. A few hours and beer cans later, he would retreat inside and start pouring brown drinks out of a big glass jug. He stirred these drinks with his finger and then sucked his finger clean, as if he did not want to miss a drop.

      When the glass jug came out, Emily’s father put on music in the living room and looked around for a dance partner. As the youngest and the only girl, Emily was always chosen. It made her feel special, the way her dad picked her up and spun her around, at least until he squeezed her wrists too hard or swung her dangerously close to the furniture. When Emily’s father started to draw the curtains and turn out the lights in the middle of the day, Emily’s brothers got squirmy and difficult, almost like they meant to pick fights with their father. This would result in shouting at best, or spanking at worst, so Emily took another approach: She scurried to the piano and played her father’s favorite song, “King of the Road.” Emily could not understand why her brothers never learned to play along.

      If the glass jug went empty, the King of the Road took Emily with him when he drove to the store with the big red circles on its sign. Emily hated these trips because this was the only time she was ever left in a car by herself.

      “Don’t leave me here, Daddy!” Emily pleaded as her father got out of the car in the parking lot. “I’m scared!”

      Then a car door slam.

      Emily crouched down on the plastic mat on the floorboard and kept herself busy, searching under the seats for stray pennies or half-eaten rolls of breath mints. Every so often, she looked up and out of the window, glancing anxiously at the door of the store. Like a dog spotting its owner, she perked up with relief and anticipation when she saw her dad walking her way, clutching a brown paper bag with a glass bottle peeking out. Sometimes Emily’s mother got her alone and asked if her father had stopped by the store with the red circles. Emily knew she was supposed to tell her mother the truth but she also knew she was not supposed to tell her father’s secrets. The red-circle store must be a secret because no one ever talked about what it was or explained why she was left alone in the car outside.

      When Emily’s father brought home a brand-new bottle of the brown stuff, Emily and her brothers were in a bind. If they stayed inside, they risked doing something wrong and being within reach. If they went outside, they risked doing something wrong and being out of reach. Like the time they told their dad they were going to play at the cul-de-sac. On that day, as Emily and her brothers played with the other kids, they forgot all about their dad, and maybe they forgot all about the time, too, until in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek that stretched across several backyards, there was commotion. Some older kids from the neighborhood pedaled frantically toward the game and called out to Emily and her brothers:

      “Your dad is looking for you!”

      “He’s mad!”

      “You’d better go home!”

      “He’s got his belt off!”

      At first, Emily stayed crouched behind the boxwoods where she was hiding, hoping this was either a horribly on-target joke or a ploy to get her out of her hiding spot. Then she crept out from behind the shrubs and saw the fear in the other kids’ eyes, and she and her brothers jumped on their bikes and pedaled standing up toward their house. As Emily strained against the hill up to her house, she heard one of the kids yell, “Your dad’s an alcoholic!”

      That word again.

      When they made it home, Emily and her brothers jumped off their bikes, abandoning them on their sides, wheels spinning, as they ran toward the front door. They were not supposed to leave their bikes out like that but the longer they delayed the worse it would be. When they rushed to their father, he pushed Emily and her brothers up the stairs into their parents’ bedroom. Then they were lying on the bed side by side, screaming as the leather belt cracked down on them hard. Emily had been whipped enough times to be very, very good at avoiding it, but as careful as she tried to be, sometimes she would make a mistake and get the belt anyway. Still, she had not made a mistake that day; her father had. She had told him she was going to the cul-de-sac and he did not remember, and that is what stung the worst. As psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most, and this applies to adults as much as to punish children; it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”

      Emily and her brothers spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the twin beds in the boys’ room, moping about their backsides and about the unreasonableness of it all. They would have liked to have gone back outside with the other kids they heard shrieking in fun, but they were too afraid to anger their father again, and too embarrassed to show their tearstained faces.

      “Is Daddy an alcoholic?” asked Emily.

      “That’s a bad word,” one of her brothers shot back. “You shouldn’t say that.”

      It would be two decades before Emily would piece together in therapy that, yes, her father had been an alcoholic all along. Until that time, she had no real way of understanding why her family was the way it was, or why her shoulders came up around her ears at the sight of a man taking off his belt. Well into adulthood, that jingling, snapping sound made her shiver. So did the sound of liquid pouring, the way it went glub, glub, glub out of a bottle made of glass.

      ***

      One in four children lives with an alcoholic. Alcoholism is the most common illness a child is likely to see a parent suffer from, though most of these children do not know quite what it is they are seeing. Part of the trouble is that it is difficult to recognize an illness if you do not know what the symptoms are. So here is the list, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition—commonly known as the DSM-5. An “alcohol use disorder”—the current medical term for alcoholism—is a pattern of use that meets two or more of the following criteria: often drinking more than was intended; unsuccessful efforts to cut down or quit drinking; spending a great deal of time obtaining, consuming, or recovering from alcohol; a strong desire or urge to drink; drinking that interferes with responsibilities at work or at home; interpersonal problems caused by drinking; giving up other activities to drink; using alcohol in dangerous situations such as driving; drinking continues despite health, occupational, or social problems caused by alcohol; tolerance to alcohol, or a need to drink more and more; withdrawal from alcohol, or physical discomfort when abstaining for long periods. To meet two or three of these criteria is to have a “mild” alcohol use disorder. Having four to five symptoms qualifies as a “moderate” case, and six or more symptoms suggests the disorder is “severe.”

      Drinking and even problem drinking can seem too commonplace to have serious consequences, yet when considering the years of life lost to ill health, disability, or early death, alcoholism СКАЧАТЬ