You Never Can Tell

I thought he might be having a stroke when I came home to find him slurring his words. After he stumbled and face planted onto our particle board coffee table, I begged him to get into the car so I could take him to the emergency room.

The nurse looked at me with pity in her eyes as she told me that his blood alcohol content was .3. I wonder how I must have appeared to her: a naive, young newlywed with her drunk husband on a Tuesday evening. I wonder if she felt sorry for me.

A few weeks prior, as I was getting ready on the morning of my wedding, someone asked me when I knew Joe was the one. I thought for a moment, then responded. “Today, I knew today.”

I have never been certain of anything in my life. Is it a universal human experience to second guess every decision? Only in hindsight have I ever been able to say with confidence whether a choice was right or wrong.

That day, I stood at the top of the aisle holding my father’s arm and looked around. White curtains hung from the wooden beams on either side of the outdoor chapel. A candle flickered on the front row in memory of my mother. I looked at Joe, handsome in his gray pants and suspenders, white shirt, blue tie, and flip flops. He beamed with joy, waved at friends and family in the audience and said something that I couldn’t hear, evoking laughter from those in the front rows. I pushed down the nagging doubts as I walked toward him.

We washed each other’s feet during the ceremony – a callback to the story in the Bible when Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. It was a symbol of what we desired for our marriage: to take care of each other. After my mother died, I realized how fragile life was. I witnessed the vulnerability of the body as I watched hers deteriorate from cancer, and it terrified me. Since then, I’d grappled with the “why” of it all. Why are we here? Why does any of this matter? And all I could come up with – the only thing I could figure that really matters – is that we’re supposed to take care of each other. That’s all I wanted – to take care of the people I loved, and be taken care of in return.

Joe and I didn’t live together until after our wedding. And so, though I knew he liked to drink – our entire friend group frequented bars on the weekends – I wasn’t witness to the extent of his drinking. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. But after the emergency room visit, I began to see the evidence everywhere: The 18-pack of PBR that appeared in our fridge every couple of days, the hidden bottles under the sink, behind the toilet, in the closet, and in the car. And so began a cycle of lies. When I suspected that he had been drinking, either because he was acting weird, or because I found evidence, I confronted him. He would deny it, and attempt to explain away his behavior. Common explanations included, “I was with a buddy, and he was drinking, not me,” or “that’s an old bottle,” or “that breathalyzer is broken,” or my personal favorite, “I think I have a condition where my body creates its own yeast in my digestive tract, which makes my breath smell like beer.” Fun fact: this is a real thing. It’s called Auto-Brewery Syndrome. Less fun fact: Joe did not have it.

Sometimes I would believe him. Sometimes I wouldn’t. I was constantly being gaslit as he worked to convince me that reality was not true. Desperate to find evidence that would justify my suspicions, I would wait until he was out of the house or asleep, and then I would hunt. I found hidden alcohol in all sorts of places: a golf bag, a suitcase under the bed, behind the toilet in the guest room, under the bathroom sink, in his car, in a storage container. I looked and felt insane digging through the garbage to find the proof I needed to believe what I was seeing. I was a racoon with dirty paws and dark circles under my eyes.

He started getting better at hiding it. And I started to get tired of looking for it. His lies were relentless and catching. So catching, that I even started lying to myself. I told myself, I’m too suspicious, I should trust him more, or he’s probably just really tired from a hard day, or maybe the breathalyzer really is broken? And honestly, the appeal of Joe was his unpredictable, boisterous personality, so whether he was being himself or whether he was drunk, it was hard to tell.

Our first dance at our wedding was the one from Pulp Fiction, to the song “You Never Can Tell” by Chuck Berry. For weeks we’d practiced the choreography in my tiny apartment, laughing hysterically as we memorized the moves by rewinding the movie over and over. Our performance was comically bad.

After our wedding, we drove nine hours to St. Augustine, Florida for our honeymoon. When we finally arrived at our rented condo, Joe dropped a handle of Captain Morgan’s and it shattered on the tile kitchen floor.

“Noooooo!” he cried. He fell to his knees and started licking it off the floor.

I laughed. “Oh well, we still have a case of beer and a bottle of vodka to drink,” I said.

“I’m going to the store for a new bottle,” he said.

“Seriously?” I called after him as he headed out the door.

The following day we were lounging on the screened porch having coffee when Joe got a phone call from his employer. He stepped inside the condo for the conversation and I watched as his demeanor began to change. After a few minutes he came back out to the porch.

“He fired me,” Joe said.

“What? Why?”

“He wanted someone with weekend availability,” he said.

“But, you told him you can work weekends, right?”

Joe ignored the question and went inside to pour a drink, leaving me to wonder whether he was telling the truth.

***

Joe was an annoying drunk, and I spent countless evenings hoping he would fall asleep early so I could get a few minutes of peace for myself at the end of the day. One night I woke up to find him peeing in the corner of our carpeted bedroom. “I couldn’t find the bathroom in the dark,” he said when I  questioned him.

One might wonder how on earth I could be so stupid. How could I believe his crazy lies above the clear evidence in front of me? And why did I stay?

I believed him because I wanted to believe him. If I didn’t believe him, that would mean I was married to a lying alcoholic. And if I was married to a lying alcoholic, what did that say about me, about my choice to marry him? Believing him was an act of self preservation because the truth was too painful to face.

And so I stayed. After all, I loved him. And we were married. And marriage was about sacrifice, right? At least, that’s what I had been taught. So I drew from the example of the deepest love I’d ever known – the love whose loss just a few years prior still left a gaping, aching hole in my heart that I was desperate to fill. I became his mother.

I began supervising his every move – making to-do lists for him and tracking his progress. I made all his doctors appointments and each month made sure his prescriptions were filled and organized into the daily medicine box. I knew his Social Security number better than my own. And of course, I managed his calendar too. By now, his friends knew to reach out to me if they needed to get an event on the calendar. It became a running joke, and they all laughed about how funny it was that a grown man couldn’t manage his own calendar. “Thank God for Sara, he’d be a disaster without her.”

My job at a tiny nonprofit didn’t pay enough to support both of us, and he couldn’t hold down a job. So I started applying for positions on his behalf. I could do that because I was the one that created his new, professional email address. After all, Mr._Sweet_Tater@hotmail.com didn’t exactly exude professionalism. I pinched pennies and picked up side gigs and sold things on the internet and prayed every day that we would have enough money to make it to the end of the month. I wanted him to take an interest in our finances so he could understand how we were struggling, but the one time I tried to get him to look at my color-coded budget spreadsheet he fell asleep at the kitchen table. Joe’s financial contribution included loading up his cart at Walmart to see how much he could get away with stealing in the self checkout line. I loathed the ethics of this practice, but always appreciated the hefty grocery haul he brought home.

We went to church most Sunday mornings. We smiled and chit-chatted with the other young couples, never revealing what was really going on at home. I felt pangs of jealousy toward these couples – the employed husbands and supportive, smiley wives with pregnant bellies or toddlers in tow. Why couldn’t we be more like them? I tried to muster hope as the worship band sang emotional songs about a loving God. But I was deep in grief.

I wrote in my prayer journal daily – earnest pleas for Joe’s sobriety, and for the strength to love my husband the way I was supposed to, according to everything I’d been taught in church. I prayed for our finances and that I would have compassion on him. I prayed and prayed and slowly went insane as he lied to me over and over and I began to micromanage and control every aspect of both of our lives and it’s a miracle I didn’t have an absolute breakdown. I was miserable, and I thought it was my fault.

For years I had been steeped in the teachings of evangelical Christianity that told me that I wasn’t equipped to lead in the same way a man was, and that a Godly marriage meant that my husband should be the leader of our household. From reading Elisabeth Elliott’s “Passion and Purity” in highschool to the copy of Emmerson Eggrich’s “Love and Respect” recently gifted to me by someone from church, the message was clear: for a marriage to thrive a man must feel respected and a woman must feel loved.

One day I saw an ad on the internet for a woman’s life coaching service that promised to save my marriage by teaching me how to be a more Godly, encouraging wife. I was desperate, so I signed up for a free phone consultation. On the day of my appointment, I sat down in the closet of our bedroom so that Joe wouldn’t hear me. I shared our story about the drinking and my incessant micromanaging and I told her how tired I was and how I just couldn’t do it anymore. The woman on the phone was compassionate and kind and told me that she thought she could help me. Her $900, eight-week course was proven to help women just like me. My heart sank. We didn’t have $9 to spare, much less $900.

“I can’t afford that,” I told her. “I understand, it is an investment. Please reach out in the future if your circumstances change. Take care,” she said.

Take care. Take care of you. Take care of us. But who would take care of me?

I emerged from the closet and sat on our bed, next to a basket of laundry. I began folding – still surprised by the novelty of seeing his boxer briefs and socks mixed in with my cotton panties and bras.

On the first night of our honeymoon, I had presented Joe with The Dessert Book. It was a playful gift from the lingerie shower my girlfriends had thrown before the wedding. Each piece of lingerie I’d unwrapped was named after a dessert—the white negligee was “The Wedding Cake,” and the teal thong and bra set, “The Key Lime Pie.” My friends had written each name on a notecard and strung them together into a little homemade book.

“Pick out a dessert for tonight,” I’d said. He chose The Wedding Cake. When I came out from the bathroom wearing it, his eyes widened and his jaw dropped.

“You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” he said, grabbing me around the waist and pulling me onto the bed.

Now, dressed in sweatpants and an old t-shirt, I bore little resemblance to the radiant bride I’d been only months before. The shimmer of new beginnings had dulled into a quiet ache. I felt hopeless, exhausted, and disenchanted. My love for him, and the commitment I made to him, held me fast, not as a comfort, but as a tether I couldn’t loosen.

I walked into the living room where Joe was sitting on the couch.

“I made cookies,” he said, gesturing to the table. “Want to watch Pulp Fiction?”

I poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed a cookie, and sat down next to him on the couch. He put his arm around me, and pushed play to start the movie.

No, forget it, it’s too risky. I’m through doin’ that shit.

You always say that, the same thing every time: never again, I’m through, too dangerous.

I know that’s what I always say. I’m always right too, but –

–But you forget about it in a day or two –

– Yeah well, the days of me forgettin’ are over and the days of me rememberin’ have just begun.