DO YOU DRINK ALONE? by Linda Legters
I’ve had six boyfriends and two abortions. One live birth. That’s what the birth certificate says, live birth. He’s no secret, my thirteen-year-old son, but almost everything else about me is. Even innocuous things like the fact that my mother nurtured long rows of rose bushes, and never, ever cut a bloom to bring inside the house, while my father grew corn, lots of it, in our suburban backyard; from July to March, we ate corn.
And less innocuous things, like the fact I have a brother I haven’t heard from since he left home at sixteen.
Or that I’m not married to the man the other moms call my husband.
Online, I fill out quizzes and personality tests having to do with depression and addiction. The second or third question is always this: Do you drink alone?
Sometimes I say “yes,” sometimes “no,” sometimes “once in awhile.” I never answer “several times a week.”
What other definitions?
I’ve been a nude drawing class model and a tollbooth collector.
I only swim in shallow water.
Our dog, Red Dog, has a vicious streak. If the other moms knew, they would say “get rid of him,” as if they, unlike me, controlled their lives.
When I was a little girl, my aunt cut the head off a live chicken for dinner; it ran over the toe of my sneaker.
Sprouted potato eyes remind me of spiders and dark basements.
I used to have $196,328 in a bank account.
Last week, out walking Red Dog, I saw a dead cat splayed over a rock as though it had been sacrificed.
I’ve had sex on a train, in the executive bathroom of an investment firm, with another mom’s husband, with a man twenty years younger than I am. But never with the man the other moms call my husband.
I’ve bought marijuana.
After my brother left, my mother allowed the rose bushes to fend for themselves. Their big lush blooms turned small and wild, and their stalks filled with small, close thorns more numerous than blossoms.
I am computer literate. I am wireless. There’s no reason for these to be secrets, but no one ever asks.
The man the other moms think is my husband has a very good sense of humor but no penis. When I met him, he was damaged, so I took him in.
My bank account – not the one with a hundred and ninety-six thousand dollars, the one I have now – once got down to four dollars and three cents.
We never found out where my brother went. Or even why he left.
I don’t like corn, never did, especially not the sweet, creamed corn my mother “put up” for us to eat in March, two months before my father would “put in” more. Those tall stalks with layers of sharp leaves would slice my arms when I walked through them looking for ears to husk, ears that weren’t too badly burrowed through by worms that leave brown holes between kernels turned to mush.
Before my son’s father died, he told me he wanted to be cremated so that his ashes could be tossed in the ocean near where we lived. When he was sick, he whispered the part about the ocean to me, but never wrote it down. So only I knew. His mother wanted his ashes buried in the family plot, far inland, and near where she lived. “He knew we had a place for him.”
“He might have known it,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean he wanted to end up there.”
She burst into tears, so I never talked about it again.
I had one miscarriage before my live birth, and one after.
The roses you buy now grow up in hot houses and don’t smell like they have ever been alive. I wish just once I had put my nose up to one of my mother’s to see what it smelled like.
I picked my husband’s ashes up from the funeral home myself. I told everyone I wanted to spend a few more minutes with him. I didn’t know how firmly the top of the urn would be on, so I had visions of him tipping over in the front seat and spilling. My mother-in-law had picked out the urn, or box, really, all mahogany and sturdy and meant to last quite awhile before turning to dust. I took the box to a cliff overlooking the ocean near where we lived, opened it – the cover came off with a pop, as if letting out his last breath – and into the ocean tossed about half the ashes, as close as I could tell. I should have brought a measuring cup, handfuls of the strangely moist, strangely lively material, full of small chips, bone, I assumed, his skull, I imagined. The wind caught my part of his remains and carried them off. He would have liked watching the film of ash drift down until settling on the ocean top. There they bobbed and floated. I left before he was out of sight. I thought he might want to make this last part of his journey alone.
With dignity and a great show of reverence, I handed the urn to my mother-in-law, but she refused to touch it, and had an attendant bury it in the plot next to the man who had fathered my son’s father, under prayers and her friend singing Amazing Grace. So my husband ended up split in half, much as he had been in life, divided.
I’m awake nights wondering which parts ended up in the ocean, and which parts in the ground far inland. A leg in each? An arm? And the pancreas that brought him down. Where’s that?
I sometimes dream of corn silk, of milky strands stuck to my fingers, my shirt, pressed under my knees on the old newspapers, of my brother working beside me.
My son knows the man other women call my husband is not his father and he knows we are not married but he doesn’t tell anyone because, as he says, it’s nobody’s business and knowing or not knowing doesn’t change anything for us, only for them.
I do drink alone. Often.
Linda Legters’ short stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Other Voices, High Plains Literary Review, and Lullwater Review.