To me, it sounded like bullshit . . . maybe because I was still clinging, hard, to the notion that my life had been pretty much okay, or that I’d pulled out of my tailspin before things had gotten really bad. I didn’t want better; I just wanted what I’d had before it all got so crazy, before we moved to Haverford, back when it had been the three of us in the row house in Center City. This was a point about which Bernice and I disagreed. “Don’t you quit before the miracle happens,” she would tell me. “I want you to experience everything this program has to offer. There’s a new life out there for you, and it’s better than any life you could ever have imagined. I want you to have that new life.”
“Okay,” I would tell her, and she’d tell me to keep doing the next right thing, and the next right thing, and the next right thing after that, and that “God” stood for Good Orderly Direction and “Fear” stood for Face Everything and Recover. All those silly sayings, those stupid platitudes, the ones I’d scoffed and rolled my eyes at. Now I wrote them down, I memorized them, I printed them out in pretty fonts and stuck them on my computer monitor, on my bathroom mirror, on my refrigerator door, and recited them to myself while I waited in supermarket lines.
In the mornings, before I put on my exercise clothes, I rolled out of bed, onto my knees, and prayed, even though I felt stupid, like an imposter, like someone acting out the idea of prayer instead of actually doing it. Dear God, I would think. After months and months of hearing the phrase “God of our understanding,” of listening to people refer to “my Higher Power, whom I choose to call Goddess,” or “Nature,” I still couldn’t come up with any image of God except the old tried-and-true: an ancient dude with a long white beard and a stern look on his face. Thank you for helping me stay sober another day. Thank you for not letting me hurt Ellie, or myself, or anyone else, while I was using. I’d run down my list, thanking God for central air-conditioning when it was hot out and my space heater when it was cold, for a favorite sweater, a comfortable pair of boots, a peaceful few minutes with my daughter.
I thanked God for my mother, who’d moved into a posh fifty-five-and-over community near Eastwood, near my dad. She’d taken up bridge, and found new friends for golf and tennis, and she came into the city two, sometimes three days a week, to spend afternoons with Ellie and give me time to go to my appointments and my meetings. I thanked God for my dad, who still, sometimes, knew who I was when I brought Ellie to visit him every other week. “Proud of you,” he would tell me, and I wasn’t sure what he thought he was proud of me for. Did he know I’d been in rehab, or why? Did he remember anything about how I’d become an accidental writer? Did he know that I was married and a mom? Or, in his head, was I still eighteen, with my acceptance letter from Franklin & Marshall in my hand, telling him about my big plans for my future?
I thanked God for Janet, who drove to Center City once a week to have lunch with me. I’d regale her with funny stories from my AA and NA meetings. Janet especially liked to hear about Leonard, who’d begin his recitations by thanking God “for keeping me out of the titty bars for another day.” “What happens if he goes back?” she’d asked, and I’d told her how shamefaced Leonard looked when he’d stood up and said, “Well, they got me again!” We’d split a dessert and talk about our kids, our parents, and whether sex addiction was really a thing. “I love you,” she would say, her face solemn, and she’d hug me at the end of every visit. Once, she’d cried, telling me that she thought she should have noticed, should have seen that I was in trouble, should have done something. I told her it was my problem and my job to solve it. “Just be my friend,” I said. “That’s what I need most.” I thanked God that L. McIntyre was, like Dave had insisted, just a friend. “Maybe it could have been something more,” he’d told me over dinner after my third week home. “But what kind of jerk cheats on his wife while she’s in rehab?”
Thank God for Dave, I thought . . . and, last, I would thank God for what was, blasphemous as it sounded, the best development of my new, sober life, a small black-and-white dog named Bingo.
We’d gotten her in September, my first month back from rehab. Ellie and I had driven from Philadelphia down to Baltimore through a gorgeous fall afternoon, the sky a brilliant blue, smelling of leaves and wood smoke and, faintly, of the coming cold. Our first stop had been Target, where we’d bought everything we would need—a leash and harness made of pink nylon, a compromise between the faux-leather and rhinestone rig Ellie had fallen in love with and the plain red I preferred. We had plastic food and water dishes, a carrying crate, a ten-pound sack of dog food, a fluffy round brown-and-pink polka-dotted dog bed, a chewy toy, a squeaky toy, and the Cesar Millan video that Janet, who’d adopted three different rescue dogs, had recommended.