Temperance

I was two weeks from starting house arrest for DUI’s, also pretending to be blonde, when Nick and I officially met. It was Halloween and I was dressed as Marilyn Monroe in her Seven Year Itch white dress. We were at a bar whose name has changed so many times it’s not worth trying to remember what it was called at the time. I was wearing a blonde wig and red high heels, the whole shebang. I had seen Nick around the bars of Downer’s Run, but I had never considered him romantically before that night. That night, the strobe lights cavorted in slow motion in my peripherals when he danced into my line of vision.

My first thought was, “He’ll do… for now.”

I slept with Nick the first time he came over. After two months, he moved in. By then, I had moved out of Aunt Marnie’s for the second time and into my own apartment on the Avenue. I picked Apartment Z because of its proximity to bars. Ten bars within walking distance and I still managed another DUI.

As my second charge, the judge ordered counseling and sixty days of house arrest. It was brought to my attention late, like day fifty-seven, that incarceration doesn’t technically begin until the first full 24-hours of imprisonment. So, for sixty-one days, I wasn’t allowed to leave. I had work release. I could grocery shop. I did leave, but when you’re stuck inside, legally not allowed to leave, house arrest feels entirely different from any self-imposed isolation. It fucks with your head.

Especially when your live-in-boyfriend is hiding full beers in the couch cushions.

Apartment Z was shaped like a crooked letter Z: the hallway connecting the two rooms was one diagonal line. During a nap, a second room appeared. A new room through a new door on my living room wall. How had I lived here for so long and never known this room existed? Why hadn’t the landlord told me I had this room? I was paying good money for it, too, I thought. Then I woke up.

My interpretation: there were new parts of myself I was about to discover.

A year after Nick moved in, we were lying in bed, and I embraced him. He was snoring, obnoxiously drunk, and yet, I loved him almost impossibly. I prayed to the universe to bless us. To please, please, please, take care of us. I could feel energy surrounding us like an ethereal blanket. Love, pure love, is the secret to magic.

Three months later, Nick won a poker tournament for over three-hundred thousand dollars. He proposed to me next to a slot machine. He told me I was the biggest jackpot and went down on one trembling knee.

“Yes.” I said, “Of course, yes.”

The only thing I could think was, “Would you just get off the floor?”

With his winnings, we bought a little house with a little yard. One night, he came back to the house after his shift at the restaurant, his face pink and shiny from the booze. He was cheery and blubbery. Liquor always made him emotional.

He squished me in an embrace and told me that I tricked him.

“I had never planned on loving you. I just planned on moving into your apartment. Using you, until I found something better.”

He shook his head like there was no way I could possibly understand.

He went on, “You got me stuck. I fell for you, hard.”

His bearded face smiled at me, blinking back tears. He genuinely believed he was utterly romantic. A week later, my sister Rebecca delivered me a pregnancy test. I was smoking a blunt while she and I awaited the results.

Rebecca was gentle with me. “It says here, a plus sign, no matter how faint, is a positive test.”

I remember dramatically squishing the burning weed into the ashtray. I texted Nick right away. I swiftly typed, “Hurry home. I have a surprise for you.”

I took a pea from a bag in the freezer and left it on the windowsill and waited.

When Nick arrived, hours later, he was beyond drunk. His cheeks not jolly pink, but red like rouge. The pea had softened to mush.

He walked through the back door straight to the refrigerator.

My heart was pounding. The words had burst from my mouth, “That’s how big our baby is right now.”

I was pointing to the windowsill as the refrigerator door closed.

He cracked a beer in response.

“Whaaat?”

Maybe I should’ve waited until he was sober, though my words seemed to have processed because his face widened.

He bellowed, slurring one long sentence, “We’rehavingababy!”

He kissed me. Hard. An assault of liquor and beer permeating beneath the sweat and grease of working over a fryer with little ventilation. I felt suffocated.

“We have to celebrate! I need cigarettes and I’m going to get us lottery tickets.”

Nick grabbed the keys, even though the gas station was half a block away. After all, he had just walked from the restaurant. He turned for the door.

“Wait, Nick.”

I stumbled over my words. “Hey, you know, over the next nine months, you’re going to have to slow down drinking… Just cut back, I’m not saying stop completely… if I can’t party… it’s going to be harder than house arrest was… watching you drink.”

He turned on his heel and kissed my cheek. “Baby, you knew I was an alcoholic when we met,” as though it were the sweetest sentiment. “You know that’s not ever going to change.”

He left the backdoor open as he strode to the driver’s seat. I listened over my heart as he started the car and left.

For the next twenty minutes I stood by myself in the kitchen. Visualizing my belly growing. Six months pregnant. Eight months. Holding a baby. Chasing a toddler. In every visualization, I saw myself alone.

I saw in my mind, kids playing in the background as I answered the phone. It was the police calling, he was at the station, and needed a ride. The phone rang again, this time to tell me he wrecked the car and was in ICU. There the police were, knocking on the front door in the middle of the night, there to tell me he was dead.

When I discarded the pea, something inside of me changed.

Her nonfiction has been published by Permafrost Magazine, the AROHO Foundation, the Braided Way Magazine, and 3 AM Press. Upcoming by Marrow Magazine and Purple Ink Press Bimbo Feminist Anthology. Her poetry has appeared in the Brief Wilderness, the Ekphrastic Review, and the Classical Poets Society. Find Gina online here.