“It’s not like I expected a parade,” I told my mom, which was another way of saying: I was totally expecting a parade, and this blows.
I worried I had screwed up by choosing to return to Dallas. I always figured I’d wind up in Austin, weird and wacky Austin, except every time I visited that town I had a nagging suspicion too many people loved it, and every time I visited Dallas, I had a nagging feeling not enough did.
Dallas had evolved from the place I grew up. More walkable areas and cool coffee shops, fewer cement slabs and soulless redevelopment. I think some part of me wanted to reckon with my past. I grew up in Dallas, so embarrassed for the person I was. Maybe I needed to assure that little girl: Hey, kid, this place isn’t so bad.
I also longed to be close to my family again. My parents had moved out of the ritzy school district and bought a modest and lovely house near the lake, with my mother’s grand piano in the bay window and a backyard filled with shade trees and a handsome dog that didn’t obey. A wisteria vine grew outside the guest bedroom window. My favorite flower, planted where any weary visitor might see it each morning. My brother had moved back to Dallas after living all over the globe—London, Italy, Iraq—and he launched a full-scale campaign to get me home. He whipped out his wallet: What will it take to get you back?
Most of us need to push away from our families at some point, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting them close again. Many people choose alternate families in sobriety. I chose my real one instead.
WHEN I LIVED in Dallas in my late 20s, my ass was hot-glued to a bar stool. The thing I knew best about my hometown was the drink specials. Now I faced a question that would greet me in any city in the country: What did people do, anyway?
On Friday nights, I loaded up on craft projects. Needlepoint. A latch-hook rug of a tabby. A cross-stitch of the cast from The Breakfast Club. I was one butter sculpture shy of a state fair submission, and I didn’t care. My hands needed occupation. I needed to do something—instead of sitting around, thinking about the one thing I didn’t get.
When you quit drinking, you are sandbagged by the way alcohol is threaded into our social structure. Drinking is the center of weddings, holidays, birthdays, office parties, funerals, lavish trips to exotic locales. But drinking is also the center of everyday life. “Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.
My old Dallas gang was a group of salty male colleagues who gathered at the bar after work. Not a bar, mind you, but the bar. “The bar” was a complete sentence. It was both a question and a command. (The bar? The bar. The bar!) I had missed those guys, and I flattered myself they might miss me, too.
“I’d love to hang out sometime,” I emailed one of the guys.
“Totally,” he responded. “You know where to find us.”
Well, shit. I suppose it was wrong to be hurt by this indifference to the script I’d written in my mind—the one where he and I went to lunch and talked about real things that mattered.
Once upon a time, we’d gathered around that long wooden table and gulped down whatever was being served. We laughed and drank while the sun sank in the sky, and I got a high being the lone female in the foamy man cave. Those guys were all married, but that didn’t matter (to me, at least), and I never quite knew whether we were flirting, or not flirting, and I told myself both stories, as suited my needs.
I wondered if I threatened them now that I was sober. The first person to stop drinking in any group can cast a pall—like the first couple to get divorced, or the first person to lose a parent. I also wondered if they threatened me now. I watched their Facebook feeds a bit too carefully, judging them for every babbling 2 am status update, every picture of a whiskey glass hoisted into the lens. How dare they stay on Pleasure Island after I had moved away. I wondered: How long could they possibly keep this up? One of them had just won the National Magazine award for profile writing, so apparently the answer was: As long as they wanted.
It took a long time to accept that other people’s drinking was not my business. It took a long time to admit I’m the one who left the bar, not the other way around. You can’t move away for six years and come home to find all the furniture in the same place. Those guys had different lives now. New kids, new jobs. Two of them were divorced and dating 25-year-olds, which must have taken up a great deal of texting time.