Beneath the Surface(29)

Sheryl flicked through some channels. She should have accepted the dinner invitation at Aimee’s, her former boss and now her colleague, but when she’d been invited, Sheryl had still been under the wrong impression she and Kristin would celebrate their anniversary together. It was a little late to call Aimee now. Perhaps she should go to a bar, on her own. Not in this neighbourhood, though, which was always teeming with students. She’d need to take a taxi. It was too much of a hassle. Sheryl didn’t even want to go out, even though she didn’t want to stay at home either. She couldn’t decide. It was this exact sort of restlessness that drove her insane, that drove her to pace to the fridge and look at what it offered.

Sheryl pushed the door shut, applying pressure with her arms, as though it could possibly make a difference when she tried to open it again later. But this was the stage she hated. That sliver of time between still being fully present and giving in. Was this what it felt like to her father? Did he have to make daily, conscious decisions on whether he was choosing his daughter or the bottle? No, there was no excuse for what her father had done. Some days, Sheryl had to actively remind herself that he was still alive; that he, somehow, managed to take care of himself in a way that kept his heart beating. And for what?

She berated herself instantly for that question. But it was exactly to block out questions like this that very soon, within a few seconds, she already knew, she would remove her hands from the refrigerator door, open it, and take out a bottle of wine. She was the daughter of a woman who had committed suicide and a man who was a drunk. The depressive gene and the alcoholic one combined in one person, if such a thing existed. Hadn’t she already proved enough? She would be forty soon. An age her mother had never reached. Hadn’t she already beat all the odds? Research was a big part of Sheryl’s job, yet there were certain things she couldn’t even bring herself to look up online, not even after all these years. Could you inherit the inclination to become depressed? Did alcoholism run in families? She didn’t want to know because she was afraid of the answer. Because it stared right back at her when she opened a bottle of wine, poured its contents into a glass. She didn’t need scientific backup for that.

It wasn’t as if she drank a lot. Just one or two glasses. Just enough to feel that mild buzz, to take the edge off everything she missed. Removing the cork from a bottle of wine had come to feel like a relief. Like the opposite of giving up.

It had started innocently enough, on a night when Kristin had been home. Kristin didn’t have the habit of drinking at home, unless she was feeling really stressed. That day Sterling Wines had lost a client and Kristin felt responsible, the way she always did. She’d come home, walked straight to the fridge, and poured herself a big glass of wine. She’d drunk it quite swiftly, then poured herself another, and it was as though Sheryl could witness the change inside of her just by looking at her face. Her features relaxed, her shoulders unhunched, the tightness of her lips loosened into a small smile.

Sheryl had had a difficult conversation with one of her TAs, one she had misjudged and shouldn’t have given the job in the first place, and she had not managed to circumvent all the usual reasons that stopped her from drinking. She just wanted her own lips to draw into a little smile. Wanted the tension to drain from her muscles just a bit. She wanted to experience what Kristin was experiencing. And while she had, it hadn’t been a big aha moment. Sheryl had partaken in small amounts of alcohol before. She knew how it would make her feel, and it had been a conscious decision to seek out that very sensation at that very moment. She was in control. But then the arguments had begun and it had all been a matter of timing.

Their first fight about Kristin’s schedule had mainly taken place inside Sheryl’s head because she hadn’t wanted to say all the things she felt roar inside of her out loud to Kristin. She wanted to be supportive. But by holding most of it in, and giving Kristin the impression that everything would work itself out, she had gone against her very nature. Or at least against her much-honed instinct of talking about everything until there was nothing left to say. She’d poured herself a glass of wine. But that first time of drinking on her own, it hadn’t been relief washing over her. It had been a blend of guilt and euphoria, most of the guilt washing away as she drank more, making everything, not just how she felt about Kristin and her work situation, more bearable.

But before she drank, there was always a seal of tension to be broken. Because of her history. Because of how her father had ended up and how Sheryl had, from a young age, witnessed how it could destroy people. Then the rationalizing had begun. She wasn’t a widow. She had Kristin, with whom she was, thus far, in a loving, committed relationship. She had her shit together. And it was only one glass—nothing compared to the amounts of strong liquor her father could put away in one sitting. Unlike her father, Sheryl was very much in control. And it wasn’t as if she had any children who could lose respect for her because she had a glass of wine.