Pierrette Rouleau Stukes
Swimming
I inhaled gasoline fumes. I was ten. I have no idea how I knew that breathing vapors
would get you high, your mind thick, silly, forgetting. Sneaking along the nighttime
edges of 1960s starter homes lined up on stark Bermuda lawns, I would feel for the
greasy, metal surfaces of push mowers in sheds, unscrew the caps and breathe.
Insider’s joke: The trapeze artist grips the bar in his mouth over empty space, no net.
Alcoholics let go on purpose. They drop willingly into forgetting oblivion.
I don’t remember my first meeting.
But I recall sitting with a pudgy, sixty-something woman in cotton jeans at a diner
afterwards.
Diners look the same on the outside: sticky booths, griddle cooks, single patrons
eating, smoking, staring off into memories. Ellie and I hunched over stained Formica,
drinking coffee and pushing stale apple pie around on our plates. We looked like a
grandmother and her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter.
“I missed a dance routine at a national competition. I was passed out in my hotel
room in my tutu.”
“That’s alcoholism.”
“I stole cheap wine from the A & P behind my parents’ house.”
“That’s alcoholism.”
“Lost jobs. Quit high school. Kicked out of bars. Relationships sucked dry.”
“That’s alcoholism.”
“When I was fifteen, a friend I drank with committed suicide. She got her dad’s gun.
Shot herself in the park beside her house, her mother probably sewing or baking.
Oblivious.”