"My fourth grader smart-asses his way through his homework," I say. "This week, he had to write a paragraph from the prompt, 'My friend and I have so much in common,' and his first line was, 'We both still have our lives.'"

My therapist smiles, sitting across from me in her armchair. I cross my legs in my usual spot on the tweed love seat in the flesh-colored room that is her home office.

"On the way home from school today, he said to me, 'Mom, when you use your turn signal, all I hear in my head is vodka vodka vodka.'"

"What I'm wondering," the therapist says, looking down at her notes. "Is if maybe it's easier for you to talk about your son rather than talking about your own life."
   
My son is my life, I could say, but that's a little heavy-handed.
   
"Maybe," I say. "But doesn't it sound like that? Vodka? He has unusual word associations. He tells me whenever he says his teacher's name, Mrs. Parillo, he thinks about shrimp."
   
"Last week, you talked about breaking your jaw in your addiction. I wonder how hard that must have been for you," she says. "I imagine it was painful and somewhat disfiguring. Can you say more about that time?"
   
"It wasn't terribly painful. I kept discovering new things I couldn't do. Like blow out a candle. Or lick a stamp." I don't say that as soon as I was discharged from the hospital, I was back in the bars, sipping liquid Percocet between vodka tonics. "I lost a lot of weight, obviously, and I felt very fragile," I say. "I was dating this artist named James."
   
I had a few different boyfriends at the time, a collection to meet my needs. I was afraid of being sober or alone. I don't say that out loud because I don't like what it says about me.
   
"One night, we went to a bar in Wicker Park," I say. "These guys came in, one of them getting loud. The bartender pulls out a bat and holds it up and James gets to his feet so quickly, he knocks his bar stool over. A chair flies over the bar and the bartender comes scrambling over the top, knocking my drink to the floor."
   
My therapist holds her pen perched over the pad on her lap.
   
"And I had no way to get to the front door, not with all these men starting to fight. So I crawled down the length of the bar on my hands and knees, like Jackie Kennedy on the back of the limo."
   
The therapist laughs.
   
"I'm wondering if you feel like you have to entertain me," she says.
   
"I don't think I'm trying to entertain you," I say. "Do I seem like I am?"
   
"Do you feel like you are?" she says.
   
"What?" I say.
   
"Pardon?" she says.
   
"Oh, wait, I think I did feel disfigured at one point," I tell her. "It was the first week after I'd broken it."
   
"Broken..."
   
"My jaw," I say. "This restaurant owner I was seeing picked me up in his convertible to get a drink."
   
"Were you just out of the hospital at that point?"
   
"This was maybe two days after I got out," I say. "We were on Michigan Avenue and it was a sunny day. We drove down Oak Street, through the Gold Coast. All of these beautiful women were walking down the sidewalk in summer dresses and high heels, their hands full of shopping bags. I leaned against the passenger door to look in the side mirror and I looked deformed. It was the first moment I'd realized how fucked up I was. The whole side of my face was navy blue and purple and yellow with bruising and it was huge, like a tumor."
   
I laugh and she looks at me.
   
I haven't had a drink in twenty years. I thought a therapist would beam at me, congratulate me, eyes shining with admiration. Look at you, I'd imagined her saying.
   
"And what happened then?"
   
"I told him to take me home."
   
And then I never saw him again, never answered his calls after that. I couldn't stand the idea that he'd seen me like that, that he knew me at my worst.
   
"We have to stop," the therapist says.
   
She walks me to the front door and closes it behind me when I step outside.
   
A warm spell has melted most of the snow on the sidewalk. On my way to my car, I see the house across the street, lit up and open, enormous windows like movie screens. A girl upstairs plays her flute. A man sits in the library, briefcase and laptop hinged open like clam shells. Imagine living somewhere so safe, you don't even feel the need to close your blinds to hide your luck.
   
In the kitchen, a boy sits at a table with his homework. He smoothes and folds his paper, closes his books, places his pencil in a shiny case. A woman moves from counter to stove, busy, smiling in the golden light. She seems to say: Watch me feed my family with this whole, lemon-adorned chicken. See his homework finished and neatly put away. Look at the books in rows. My stilettos never hurt my feet. My jewelry is insured. My car is serviced regularly. My liquor bottles are expensive and dusty from neglect. They line shelves as a decoration. I only keep them for certain guests, for emergencies, for people who can't say they live here.

Cindy House has had stuff in The Rumpus and others. She opened for David Sedaris in two cities earlier this year.

"Vodka Vodka Vodka" is a Finalist for the 2019 Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Read CH's postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Michelle Robinson.





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