Branches Book

BRANCHES

Sophie Levy

RED WINE

I started hiding the wine bottles four months after dad left. Maybe five. I was younger back then, still in single digits, and I thought if I hid the bottles in drawers and cabinets you never looked in you might forget how badly you craved the bitter taste of the liquid that made you okay enough to get out of bed in the morning. I wanted you to learn to be okay without it. You didn’t find the hidden bottles, my hiding places proved to be successful, but you still got them back because when you loomed over me and grabbed my hands with your trembling ones demanding, pleading that I return them, I looked into your sickeningly desperate eyes and gave each and every one back to you. Because you said you needed them and I was scared for you and wanted you to be good enough to take care of me. I gave them back because I yearned for the presence of a mother; maybe it was selfish. But you didn’t become more of a mom; instead you became less of one. So I invented an idea of the mom you could be, that you should be, but weren’t. I convinced myself that this wasn’t really you, that this liquid poison was transforming you, unfairly and involuntarily, into something you weren’t. I stuck to this idea of a mom that didn’t forget the names of all my friends and tucked me into bed every night and said things like “I love you” without a glass of something in your hand. But you didn’t change. These disappointments became the new normal. You were not this idea of a mother, my mother, defenseless against the liquor that transformed. You wanted it and so it became the principal constant in your life. It got worse. You began drinking clear and foul smelling liquids that seemed far more sinister than your glasses of red wine. After the divorce you invited a stranger into our home who you soon called your new husband, and the two of you drank together on the couch sitting so close to one another, yet I’d never seen such a clear depiction of loneliness. You said you liked him because his name was Jacques and he was French and it reminded you that there was a whole big world out there, a world apart from our house, which you rarely left. I reminded you that the park two blocks away that we used to have picnics in was a whole world of its own, and you said that I was right. We made a plan to go to the park, you, Jacques, and me. But we never made it. When my brothers and sisters left home to go move in with dad I stayed back with you. Even when I heard the stories of the noise and jokes and

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