It was one of those many times when I let myself believe she was going to stop. That she had stopped and wasn’t going to drink any more.
This was years ago…maybe twenty? Wow. Time sure does fly.
Anyway, Dad had a meeting or something to go to – something important, and so I said I’d stay at the house while he was out.
Mom was, apparently, feeling weak after the latest binge. I was there mainly so Dad wouldn’t feel worried or guilty while he was gone.
Yes, the alcoholic is the sun, and we are all little planets revolving around her.
Anyway, I’d picked up a couple of tv dinners for us to have.
When we were little, tv dinners were a huge treat – usually reserved for when my parents were going out and a babysitter was coming. Rare. Most of the time my mom cooked, and she was a wonderful cook, so that was no hardship either.
But it made tv dinners – in those multi-compartment foil plates – really special.
I’d picked up fried chicken dinners. Probably Swanson’s. I’m sure the fried chicken came with mashed potatoes, corn, and some sort of gluey dessert in the fourth compartment.
I put them in the oven and mom and I went into the living room to watch Jeopardy or something.
On the surface, it seemed like a nice, quiet, peaceful night at home. A return to the way things “used” to be. I set that in quotes, because who knows how it really used to be. What was real, what was fake? What was hidden behind smiles?
At some point Mom got up either to go to the bathroom or to see how the chicken was doing.
And either something told me to get up and go into the kitchen, or I decided to peek at dinner (maybe she hadn’t said she was going to…) – I don’t remember. For whatever reason, I went into the kitchen. To the oven. I looked inside, or checked the timer to see how much longer our sodium-laden poultry dinner had to bake.
And then I turned, and over at the other end of the kitchen, where it used to be part of the big front glassed-in porch, I saw my mother.
She was wearing her pink, terrycloth bathrobe, so she really stood out against the dark paneling behind her.
And she was drinking from a bottle of vodka. She’d had it hidden over there somewhere. She saw me. Put the cap back on the bottle, and tucked it back into her hiding spot.
She looked…defiant.
I don’t remember what I said, but my next memory of that night was the two of us at the kitchen table. I’m sure I was still trying to find the root of the problem so I could save her from herself. If she’d only open up…that’s what I used to think.
And remember the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Luke says to Yoda “I’m not afraid!” and the camera zooms in on Yoda’s eyes, and he says, “You will be…you WILL be…”
Now, I know Yoda was a puppet. But he was a really GOOD puppet, and those eyes were scary and way different from the cute, cuddly Yoda Luke first encountered when he landed on Dagoba.
My Mom’s eyes did that. That change. There was no warmth, nothing maternal.
Her eyes are green, but they looked amber then. Cold, reptilian. Snake-like. I remember them boring into mine, as she told me in some way that she couldn’t tell me, or wouldn’t tell me, what she was keeping inside.
It was mean.
It was manipulative and mean. That look.
It was protective. She had no intention of sharing anything.
She just wanted me to shut up about the drinking.
I don’t remember the rest of the night.
I remember, though, that the fried chicken was too salty and didn’t taste nearly as wonderful as I remembered it.
