Under the Influence by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online

that, she would comfort me.
    â€œI hate to say this, Helen,” my mother-in-law told me. “But we’ve all seen this coming for a while now. You can’t leave your hubby feeling like an also-ran and then expect him not to notice if someone comes along and starts treating him like he’s special again. No wonder he was getting short-tempered.”
    There were no more invitations to holiday dinners. Ollie paid visits to the relatives, but only with his father now, never with me.
    My mother, Kay, was remarried by this point—living in Florida with a man named Freddie, who generally poured his first cocktail around 11:00 A.M. and kept going, which probably made her feel better about her own affection for gin and tonics. In the early years after Ollie was born, I’d chosen to spend Christmas with my husband’s family rather than subjecting ourselves to the inevitable drunken nights and hangovers, but after Dwight left I made the trip to Daytona Beach to spend the holiday with her, out of some thin hope that maybe we’d pull off some kind of family closeness that had eluded us all those years. I even brought a bunch of my photographs along, hoping Kay might take an interest. She flipped through the images in my portfolio as if she were at the beauty parlor, reading an issue of People magazine. With less interest, probably. My son, who had always begged for a dog of his own, spent most of his time playing with my mother’s shih tzu.
    Two days into our visit, I returned to the condo after a trip to the store to find Kay, well into her third or fourth drink, from the looks of things, watching a video of a Quentin Tarantino movie, my son propped up on the sofa next to her, clutching his blanket.
    When I told her this wasn’t the kind of stuff I wanted Ollie to be seeing, she said, “You know where the door is.”

8.
    M aybe there was a family legacy here. If so, it was not a good one.
    I had learned long ago that alcohol could help me feel relaxed and offer a certain short-lived comfort in a moment where little real comfort existed. But it was not until the long, chilly winter after my husband told me about Cheri and moved out that I got into my more serious drinking.
    I always waited until Ollie went to bed, and in the beginning I only let myself have one glass. I didn’t get drunk, but I liked how the wine took the edge off my day, the slightly fuzzy way things looked if I’d sipped a little cabernet. I felt looser, less anxious, and if the alcohol failed to take away the sadness, it made the feeling blurrier, the pain more of a dull ache than a sharp stab. This left me inclined to pour a second glass, and after I’d had a second glass, pouring a third was easy. Some nights I finished the entire bottle.
    Often now I fell asleep on the couch with the glass on the floor beside me. When I got up, I’d have a headache, though I learned to avoid those by taking a Tylenol the night before.
    I didn’t drink during the day. Never when Ollie was awake. Unlike my mother, I was going to make sure my son had no doubt he was the most important thing in my life, and more than anything, I wanted him to feel he was safe with me.
    With just the two of us there, it felt okay to eat our dinners on a tray table watching movies—not just Disney and cartoons, but Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, whom he loved—or on the floor with a picnic blanket. Our dining room table was covered with art supplies and science experiments, and there were piles of library books around, and costumes we made from stuff we found at the Goodwill. Sometimes we went on photography missions—not to the usual places like the zoo or the beach, but a junkyard or a skate park or a plant nursery or his favorite, the pet store, to check out the puppies and pick which one we’d choose if they allowed dogs at our apartment complex. On weekends we cooked together—pasta or tacos, homemade