The smell of beer was detectable on her breath from three feet away. There was a slight squint to her eyes and an abrasion between her brows that looked to have scabbed sometime in the last twelve hours. Otherwise she was dressed like the neighbor I had known in passing for the last ten years, and she stood at my door like she had many times before. There had been the Christmas cookie exchanges, and the occasional bit of regional news to be shared, but tonight was different. The darkness of night as the backdrop of this moment felt sinister. She felt sinister.
Apparently I have been naïve in my ideas about alcoholics. I thought the vast majority were the quiet types, who only cause harm secondarily. For instance, the girl across the street from my childhood home had an alcoholic mother and an absent father. The mother was mostly a pleasant woman, who happened to neglect to buy groceries. I recall the crash of her beer bottles colliding with each other in the recycling bin as her iconic sound. My mother fed this woman’s daughter many meals, and that was that.
The majority of the nights in my father-in-law’s adult life were spent quietly slipping into his bedroom, where the lights were turned off and the TV volume on low. He would peacefully nurse a bottle of some Brazilian made sugarcane liquor by the blue glow of stupid American commercials.
But if those peaceful chronic drinkers are the majority, then it has become apparent in the last six months that my neighbor has become the minority.
She Is Not A Peaceful Drinker
This afternoon I walked up her driveway to the sound of glass shards crunching beneath my feet. I was holding my neighbor’s feeble elderly dog that I had found alone in the middle of the street, barely able to walk and panting as though it were wandering the desert. The trickle of broken glass at the bottom of the driveway was thickening into a stream as I made my way closer to the house, and I was growing more hesitant with each step.
A small but very loud stereo was sitting at the top of the driveway with a long extension cord trailing into the open side door to the garage. At full volume it was playing the sort of pop music that makes people in their fifties reminisce about high school. It had been playing for hours, as I had noticed from a distance when tending to the chickens earlier in the day. It was the sort of nonstop music one played while working on a project.
And it certainly looked like she had been working on a project. Within the open garage door you could see a smashed large screen TV, smashed computer screens, and many things smashed beyond recognition. Up the sidewalk to the front porch was a trail of dismembered wooden chairs, and a coffee table crunched in half. Fabric had been tangled around it all, as though she had been annoyed that the fabric was flexible and failed to crush when being pounded on by some tool. A laundry basket full of destroyed clothing was set in the grass.
Overall, it looked as though half the contents of the house had been ruined with a great deal of enthusiasm. I had been hearing the enthusiastic crashing sounds above the music all the way from my property ever since her husband had left for work that morning. Her husband was putting in an eight hour shift, and she was too, in her own way.
I looked at the closed door in front of me and goosebumps rose on my skin. Her silence was very eerie as the radio sang on. Oh here she comes, watch out boy she’ll chew you up, oh here she comes, she’s a man eater… The crashing had stopped, and she was too silent. Something was wrong. Could she have decided to hurt herself? Could she be dead in there, and I would be the one to find her, and have an experience that would haunt me the rest of my life? Selfish self-preservation kicked in. There was no way I was going in there. Besides, maybe she would just come at me with her sledge hammer?
It didn’t matter anyway, because within a few minutes her husband arrived home, saw the damage, and a long stream of expletives began pouring out of him like a hose that had sprung a leak. I made myself scarce, because rage is not one of my favorite emotions.
I don’t understand rage very well. My anger burns like a dry pinecone—a burst of flame that tires itself out soon and is forgotten as ash. For people such as myself that absorb emotions like a sponge, rage is very distressing and makes my body shaky. It rattles me.
And so I was not ecstatic three hours later when…
She Showed Up On My Doorstep
“I need to use your phone. Mine is broken,” she said, and then made an over compensating attempt at being friendly with my daughter, who was peeking out of the space between my leg and the doorframe. Upon being spoken to my daughter jerked out of sight, making it pretty clear she was afraid of her. The beer scent seemed to linger in the air.
And I let her use my cellphone. Silly me. My default setting is to be nice. I know, that’s stupid. Every self-defense instructor will tell you that is how bad things happen to good people. You are supposed to be firm set. You are supposed to set your boundaries without hesitation. You are supposed to choose potentially being a jerk over potentially being a victim. But this wasn’t a man at my door; it was a woman, one I’d vaguely known for ten years. And so I handed her my cellphone.
She smiled and thanked me in that overcompensating way, then proceeded to yell at her husband. She wanted to know where he was and why her teenaged son wouldn’t come home. I stood there grimacing, wondering how that lovely liquid that makes me jovial could have created this monster. Maybe there was something else too? Or maybe she was just insane? Surely just the alcohol couldn’t have inspired her to destroy her own house all the way down to flipping her stove over?
“He hung up on me? Why would he hang up on me? Does your husband hang up on you?” she demanded as I took the phone out of her hand that had fallen to her side. I stared at her awkwardly. What could I say? No, but I don’t destroy our house and deny that I have a serious rage-y drinking problem?
“No,” she answered for me, “your husband doesn’t.” And she stormed off as though I had rubbed in her face that my husband was so much better than the poor belabored man she married that would now have to spend thousands of dollars to put his house back to order.
"Characters," I whispered into the night as I chained the door behind me. I was still rattled from the insane afternoon.
Characters that belong in a book are everywhere—they even knock on my door.
