Totality
Aleina Grace Edwards
I drove home from the Easter party with half a canned Aperol spritz in the cup holder. The sun was already dropping toward the ocean ahead of me, and I watched the clouds over the 10. They were huge and humid, like in Texas or Ohio. It was almost dark when I parked in front of my house and downloaded a sobriety app. It’s just called “Days.”
By the time the eclipse came, it had been seven days since I’d had a drink. In Texas, where my family watched, they were in the path of totality—for four minutes, the world inverted. Day turned to night, and the sun became a black blot lit by a ring of fire.
My dad sent photos of himself and friends at his ranch outside Austin. Men in chore jackets and ball caps leaning back in their Adirondacks, faces tipped up. Two buckets of champagne on ice sat on the picnic table. The sky was going dark, and a pitcher of orange juice glowed in the low light.
I went to meetings two days in a row that first week. Wednesday was for double-winners: members of both Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon. It was women-only, in a Spanish-style church a mile from my house. There were handwritten signs on the doors saying we couldn’t use the bathrooms. We formed two rings with our auditorium chairs. The woman sitting in front of me had blue hair, a bike helmet, and a bunch of scallions wrapped in parchment paper under her chair. The speaker wore Chanel
ALEINA GRACE EDWARDS
everything, her double-C earrings moving frantically as she talked about loving your fate.
What are you? people asked me after the meeting, making introductions, because you’re supposed to label yourself to help contain your problem behaviors. If you address the group during an AA meeting, you say, I’m an alcoholic. I didn’t raise my hand when they asked newcomers to introduce themselves; I didn’t share a story. I’d never called anyone an alcoholic before, and I couldn’t start with myself.
It’s hard to say what an alcoholic looks like, feels like. My drinking is about denial, not description. I drink to avoid my body and its inconveniences, to ignore the simple urge to pee and override the persistent, low-grade anxiety I have felt since I was diagnosed with scoliosis as a child—no, before. I had nightmares about earthquakes, fires, break-ins. I peed myself at school and at friends’ houses. I drink to dull the dread, the non-specific certainty that something bad is about to happen. I am reading a book about the relationship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, both known for the way they characterized and captured Los Angeles. Joan is reserved and cool; Eve, br azen and magnetic. Madonna and whore, they were friends and enemies. They were both, apparently, alcoholics.
A woman who sponsored many people at the meeting gave me a welcome gift: a tiny tin of mints, sparkling silver. There is a picture of a unicorn on the lid. Be yourself, it says. Unless you’re a unicorn. Then be a unicorn. The woman is generous and kind and relentlessly devoted to the program; I can’t help but think she’s ridiculous.
I am ridiculous, engulfed by a solipsism focused on the appearance and feeling of my body. I’ve spent many years wishing for a different self, some other shape to occupy. I have wanted out since I was twelve and got my back brace, since I was fifteen and my spine was fused, since I was nineteen, drunk and careless,
violated and violating. There are hundreds of banal reasons why I have starved myself and drugged myself and drunk myself into more blackouts than I can count, why I have confused substances with sexuality and danger with desire. A therapist friend tells me what they say about alcoholism: that it is chronic, progressive, and always fatal.
One month sober, I call my dad and ask if grandpa was an alcoholic. He had some problems with the bottle, my dad says. When he tells me about his own relationship to alcohol, I know he is being honest. He drank every day for a decade, from when I started fourth grade until the middle of my sophomore year of college.
When my father left my mother that winter, I got the news in the morning. That night, I cried into my boyfriend’s suit jacket, my body slumped against his on a party bus headed from Philadelphia to Manhattan, my vodka and Diet Coke sloshing onto his lap. When we got to the bar, I flipped open my wallet; my fake was still at home. I cried some more. The bouncer took pity on me and the boy holding me upright, or wanted the drunk, underage kids off the sidewalk, and let us both in anyway.
I learned to drink to let go, and drink to go away. I discovered gulps of vodka from plastic bottles washed away my reticence, and everything came gushing out. I kissed people’s boyfriends and had sex I didn’t remember. I got on a houseboat with complete strangers. I was hungover at fencing practice, hungover after tournaments. I saw myself from a third person perspective, body bouncing on the strip, or running through the streets in Philadelphia, alone, only a block from my house, but completely lost. I am wearing a black dress from American Apparel; I am wearing an improvised Pikachu costume; I am wearing ripped jeans, knees out, no shoes.
Drinking dissolves. I soften until want fills each crevice and capillary, until it seeps out of my pores and leaks onto other people. I wake up soaking in strangers’ beds. You lack a certain sense of responsibility for yourself, my sports psychologist observed when I was in high school. I was a competitive fencer for over a decade, about as long as my dad was a drunk. What do you want? What are your goals? the psychologist pressed me. I wanted to make the USA world championship team; I wanted to go to the Olympics; I wanted those medals around my neck. I wanted to inhabit the best looking and most functional body, and I wanted to be celebrated for it all, appearance and performance. I wanted to be loved, and I was sure those were the conditions. I wanted what every girl wants, I figured, so I couldn’t claim desire as my own. If I didn’t need anything, I could never lose it.
My roommate invited him. He wasn’t talking to anyone when I went outside, just holding a beer he’d brought. Pacifico, or Corona—something in a bottle. I had a glass of wine. Everyone else around the firepit was drinking La Croix.
He spoke softly, told me about his last job working for a distillery. He did the branding, or maybe something with ops, I forget. I told him I wrote about feminism, bodies, and art. He took my phone number so he could send me an article about his old CEO, who had just been Me Too’d. We had both just gotten out of relationships—I had thought I was going to get married. I’d only been back in L.A. a few months.
That weekend I slurped martinis on a rooftop overlooking the ocean, and I texted him a picture of the moon rising in the still-blue sky. He replied with a picture of the clouds, swollen as if before a storm.
Later he pulled up in an Uber. We went up the coast and through a canyon, the road under us like a snake, hips knocking as the car turned. We were at a party, a house on a cliff. There was
tequila and an infinity pool. It was too dark to distinguish the yard from the ocean below. The entire landscape was a void.
At his apartment, I winced as I stepped out of my jeans and lifted my thong at the hip to show him my sunburn. He murmured his sympathy, and smoothed aloe across my waist. He asked me what I wanted, and I didn’t say anything, just pressed my face into his chest. I asked him what he liked, and he said he needed to think, like he hadn’t considered that in a long time, like he was scared to share. His anxiety seemed sweet. His foot got stuck in the leg of his skinny jeans. He told me he never did this.
We talked about camping in the morning—we already had all the gear, a two-person tent and one of those Jetboil stoves. I imagined us at the edge of some river in the Sierra, the sound of the water replacing the white noise of the AC unit. I would zip our nylon door closed and lay out beside him on a summer-weight sleeping bag, the smell of it faintly plastic from sitting under the sun all day. His bedroom smelled like alcohol, and the sunburn made me shiver. We shifted against each other in the bed, and he apologized for my surgery, running a finger down my scar, a pink line now, one I can barely feel. He apologized for his sharp hips, and I noticed the dip of his chest, the way his stomach collapsed under his ribs, a crater of bone.
When he wants to drink on a Sunday, he says it’s because he has to make up for the rest of the week—he’d been sick. When he tells me he still doesn’t know what he wants with me, I smile, say it’s okay, say I don’t want anything at all. I used to get in trouble for moderate drinking, he says, changing the subject, ordering a bottle of red wine. I can’t decide what to have for dinner, and he asks why I’m so hesitant. The waiter seems to hate us, or him. I go quiet and he takes my hands in his to calm me, and the veins roping under his wrists reassure me; he is solid as Michelangelo marble. I take a deep breath. He goes to refill my glass, but he
misses, and it splashes across the table and into my food. He says he doesn’t mean it, the earlier thing, the uncertainty; he says he isn’t going anywhere.
In my second meeting, people talk about the Jekyll and Hyde dynamic, the fissure through the alcoholic’s psyche. The alcoholic is really two people: one who is good, and one who is bad. One who stays, and one who is never home. A Joan and an Eve. I think of my father, that decade drunk after work; my ex, who had been sent to every kind of meeting before he was twenty-five; and the man after him—a mirror flashed in my face, showing me my need, my denial, my stifling fear. I couldn’t be intimate without drinking, my dad tells me, and I realize I am living in a pattern I hadn’t recognized. I think of the way I feel when I have one strong drink, maybe a whiskey cocktail, how I am already considering the next, how two seems like the Right Amount, but four and I start to feel really good, how I just want to hold someone’s face with both hands, and—that’s when I wake up. I don’t know well what comes after I wrap my fingers around someone’s jawbone, press my mouth to theirs, fumble with my shirt, their pants. I lean in, then go dark.
Self-help books talk about the shadow self, the devil inside us all, that darkness we must confront to become whole and healthy. In her famous essay about watching a total eclipse, Annie Dillard writes about revelation, about fear, about death. That’s what an eclipse feels like to her—a sudden and complete epiphany, and an instant loss. For one minute, as the moon’s shadow passes, everything is gone, she says. She’s despairing—it is all ruined, stained, and soiled. She has seen too far into the future. She is looking at her partner, Gary, “down the wrong end of telescope.” “The sight of him,” she writes, “familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of
death.” He becomes a fever dream, a symptom of delirium, the thin memory from a near-blackout.
I read a NASA article debunking myths about solar eclipses: there’s no increased radiation; your unborn child won’t be harmed; the food you’re cooking won’t be poisoned. Scientifically, nothing bad is about to happen. But spiritual beliefs differ. An eclipse is often inauspicious. In some myths, the moon is a man chasing the sun, a woman, though she eventually wriggles free. Many people around the world agree that the moment of the eclipse is dangerous, that it’s best to stay inside, stay safe. In Hindu mythology, the god Rahu—manifested as the head of a serpent—tries to eat the sun. But without a body to follow, the sun reappears as soon as it passes through Rahu’s throat. An eclipse, according to Vedic astrology, is an accelerant: changes will come, and come quickly. Every bit of advice about the eclipse warned against looking directly at the sun. In L.A., we weren’t even in the path of totality; it was even more risky. The moon covered only the lower half of the sun, scooping out the bottom. Seven days sober, I stood on my porch and looked right at it—I needed to see it for myself, this visible division between light and dark, this bright blackout. For hours after, spots passed like clouds behind my eyes.
There won’t be another event like this one in the U.S. for twenty years. It will be on August 23rd: my ex’s birthday, one day before mine. I will be turning forty-nine; he will be fifty, and I will not know him. I try to call up his face in my mind now, and it is already wrong, like Dillard said, disintegrating and reconstituting, always incomplete. Sometimes I want him still, imagine talking again, but I know better now the paradoxical factors that drive my desire: familiarity and distance, care and cruelty. I am on the other side now; I don’t drink, and I don’t call. I am learning to feel it all, to stay, to wait. In AA, you get another birthday: the next time the moon completely covers the sun, I will be twenty years, four months, and twenty-two days old.